Chatty Message Gardening

[erlend-sh]

Life of a digital message

Messages are living information artifacts. As content blobs they can morph through many different forms, from ephemeral musings to everlasting tomes of shared understandings.

Let's consider the lifecycle of a message as contained and transferred through digital mediums.

• Thinking mind
  At first there's just a thought. Let's say this one isn't even written down anywhere. It just exists as some vague idea in someone's head.

• Chatty ideation
  Once a message is expressed in a chat room it has taken on its initial form for the purpose of storage & transmission. After some back-and-forth the core of the message will become evident as a recurring topic of discussion.

• Threaded idea composites
  A series of related messages can then be glued together to make a thread. By synthesizing multiple chatty idea fragments into a cohesive micro-thesis, the flow of discussion can be focused towards an end-goal. In the context of a thread, comments are written in response to the opening thesis, as opposed to in a chatty context where you're generally responding to any message immediately preceding yours.

• Article synthesis
  With a draft thesis sufficiently scrutinized and supplemented, a final synthesis brings it all together into a carefully edited article; a fully grown knowledge artifact. And at every stage of our message exchange, each new bit of information feeds back into our collective minds to form new thoughts.

Not every message takes this exact path, but the above is a common example of how community software acts as a seeding ground for ideas to go from noisy information blobs to restful knowledge gardens. For current messaging software, and Matrix in particular, this is the gap that needs filling.

Outward notes, inward notes
Unconscious R&D

Commune concerns itself primarily with the Chat ↔ Thread space that it excels at as a bonfire application, built on top of the Matrix protocol which natively supports both of these messaging primitives. To some extent it shares this space with the ActivityPub protocol, which excels at message distribution.