Disintermedia

= Disintermedia, like CitizenWeb, is a one geek project consisting mainly of a blog and a bit of documentation.

URL = https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/project-home

Resource base maintained by Danyl Strype, aka 'Strypey', from Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Description

"Disintermedia is an Aotearoa-based project that advocates for a society of free people, living in self-governing communities, united in voluntary networks of economic co-operation across nations, continents, and the world. Disintermedia starts with a simple algorithm; free knowledge, free culture, free people. Unless otherwise labeled, all media on this site are licensed under a CreativeCommons-Attribution-Share-Alike license." (https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/project-home)

Discussion

Danyl Strype [1]:

"What made we decide to join this list is the fact that Autonomo.us is a group of people, some of whom are doing amazing work at the coalface. It strikes me that If I want to help progress towards federated *social* networking, being a one-man-band isn't going to cut it ;)

It's seemed to me for some time that cracking the federated social networking problem will take more than just good software. I think Federated Social Networking will only succeed when the underlying technology become as automatic, reliable, and invisible to users as the machinations of the internet protocols are to users of the web. The current giants (Twitter, Farcebook etc) have succeeded where plenty of other proprietary walled gardens have failed, or just hobbled along with a loyal base of users (eg Ning). This article in PCMag makes some interesting comments on why that might be: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384588,00.asp

Two other pop psychology insights which I think are relevant here. One is that things which explicitly invite people to participate tend to get more participants. I felt welcome to join this list because of Mike's invitation to do so in the '2013 reboot' blog post. The other is that people tend to follow 'behavioural traces', to quote environmental psychologist Niki Harre. Harre cites research that people in a place covered in litter are much more likely to litter themselves than if you put them in a place with no litter. These two things mean that interfaces are really important to whether a free social service succeeds of fails. Interfaces which actively invite people to join, helps them connect with other users they already have some relationship with (even if they are on other services), and shows off what other people are using the service for, are much more likely to attract and retain users."

More Information

Some material from Disintermedia is copied/ported in the P2P Foundation wiki:

• Authoring Platforms‎‎
• CC Music from Aotearoa/ NZ
• Distributed Search Engines
• Free Code Game Engines
• Free Code Graphics Toolkits and Libraries‎
• Free Code Self-Hosting Packages
• Free Culture Timeline
• Open Source Game Operating Systems
• Open Source Virtual Worlds
• Open Game Business Models‎
• Open Source Games‎
• Gaming Literacy‎
• Women Active in Libre Commons