Complete this sentence:

[aliceice@social.aliceice.de]

@smallcircles @unattributed

What would be an alternative to the word User?

In my dayjob we have Organizations aka "Customers" with groups of "Users" who use our service for their journalistic work.

[drangnon@hachyderm.io]

@smallcircles your question is a cognitive dissonance for me.

Firstly, I've only ever experienced Google+ circles in an environment where the participants are similar to LinkedIn, posting about professional topics and/or corporate syncophacy. They are a good way to seal yourself into an echo chamber/bubble, even within that type of discourse

Secondly, influencer social media always feels more like people pitching their point of view or hot take or maybe just themselves. It's about collecting follower count for credibility. Fedi mostly isn't like that but there are some.

Lastly, I'm in the US, right now with political situation there is necessarily disruption and shouting and points to be made. (Some of them might even be correct!). But it does affect social media experience; it would probably make matters worse to increase the echo chamber effects.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@aliceice @unattributed

When speaking in a general sense, you can substitute with people, person, human. "The user" becomes "the person", and "user-centric" becomes human-centric or people-centric, whatever fits best in context.

More interesting when not just defaulting to saying "user", is asking the question: Whom are we serving with our software? Who is the audience, who are stakeholders and stakeholder groups that have Needs that must be addressed by our solution?

"Joyful creation", the SX formula that envisions cocreation at scale supported by the social web, discerns between Creators and Clients stakeholder groups. If we apply this formula to Software develpment, then creator might be a Dev, but also Tester, Technical writer, etc. People switch stakeholder hats: A dev being client of an upstream project.

In your case you may have Journalists in a News Media domain. And that "Customer" stakeholder name, may indicate a Sales domain. Or may be a stakeholder group, really.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@draNgNon thanks, some very good food for thought.

I think the crucial point is that we do not know and do not offer proper ways to deal with different modes of communication, esp. if the only medium channel constitutes a stream of sticky notes, such as we have here in this #microblogging space.

On the first point, when is something an #EchoChamber vs. a healthy interest area, I think depends how well one is able to cross the 'membranes' of all the various social contexts and information spaces one navigates online, as it were.

There should be a place for 'influencing' to an extent if only to reach your crowd and build community and such. But all in balance and proportion and clear social context preferably. Non-profits and #activist groups want to influence, we may want to be informed.

To the last point. There's urgency to address the dark world situation, and either organize or lose. #SX defines #CALMculture as a way to engage in constructive #activism..

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116159361728695210

[johannab@cosocial.ca]

@smallcircles

Other: loosely-bound meta-network of more tightly-bound community or topical networks.

I *describe my experience* using all kinds of analogies such as the other options in this poll.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@johannab

That is a good, more matter of fact characterization to all the analogies indeed. Thank you.

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@johannab

What I particularly like in your definition, is that it makes clear that "fediverse" by itself indicates a pure technosphere. It enables social communication, and merely facilitates it. What people do on that channel, the way they communicate and how they interact with others then determines the social experience.

SX starts to consider a social experience from the most personal perspective, where a person has individual needs wrt their online participation. Then using the "Pyramid of perspective" this scale up to consider inter-personal relationships, and at the top of the pyramid and at the largest scale we shape the constructs of society together.

(Note that SX is a universal solution development methodology, even though it starts with a focus on social web and software development.)

See also: https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#pyramid-of-perspective

[johannab@cosocial.ca]

@smallcircles

Awesome!

I hope my response didn't come off snarky, as that wasn't how I meant it - at worst I intended to be a bit pedantic. And relatable analogies are *always* at my fingertips when talking to the inexperienced or "non-tech" social network users, for sure.

But *eventually* we need to draw people in to a little more media- and tech-literate understanding.

I'm bookmarking your blog post, thanks - this is a topic in my current academic modules and my hoped-for masters capstone

[smallcircles@social.coop]

@johannab No, not at all snarky. 💕

What is so interesting is to discern between the technical and social, and I think that most people have a very functional-technical perspective of what it means to communicate online, so to say. Consider it merely as extra channels to interact with others, more choice to connect.

But of course our online social network is much more than merely a channel, and we have to 'project our social' somehow over these thin copper and fiberglass wires, while we try to make sense and interpret the social signals that come from other remote places.

I think we underestimate the impact of communicating online, and the narrow 'social bandwidth' that our current networking tools support. Then we translate online situations to how we would behave offline and get wrong expectations, misconceptions, and subequenctly miscommunications.

We are still all youngers online, still all learning the ropes, while we do social networking offline for 1,000's of years already.