Why another tool / social network ?¶
Social networks mould user behavior by peer rejection. They effectively function as variants of Hot or Not or the intellectual equivalent - Genius or Not, which is a false dilemma. Nobody will ever be good enough or hot enough or genius enough for these communities. Users impostor more and more ridiculous behaviors to try and fit in so that they can “look” beautiful and “sound” intellectual and communities encourage ousting behaviors that are increasing looking like primeval stoning rituals, adopted to the digital era. While the initial social networks are open and diverse, after a few iterations of Hot or Not, everyone looks and thinks the same.
Although Plannr can function as a microblog, the features will be drastically limited to a more RSS like behavior. Which means there will be
No Replies and Comments. Some form of private messaging via email could be done in the future.
No Search Engine Indexing. No directory listing of all users.
Only paid users. Payment removes spam.
No retweets. There might be an implementation of webmentions that can work analogous to retweets.
Upto the user to display any metrics
There will be no support for threaded messages but there might be support for argdown.
No recommendation systems.
No Karma. No feed ranking.
A total upper limit of 20,000 users.
The features of Plannr will be inspired by mature tech that seems immune to the divisive nature of social networks to a certain extent,
Email
RSS Readers
Early Blogs, Early twitter. 90s forums
Evernote
IRC / Slack
Why are they immune ? Private first, better moderation and walled gardens.
The following rights will be respected for all users,
Right to be forgotten
Right to privacy
Right to data access
No third-party data sharing. If the development for the project will stop for whatever reason the codebase will be put under the public domain. All decisions will be transparent.
The goal of Plannr is to help individuals and small teams manage projects and communicate updates. I want to make Plannr useful for,
Research Sharing - bookmarks, brainstorming
Status Updates / Project Updates / Project Commit notifications. Twitter interface is good at communicating updates.
Quick note taking
Basic Todo
Help users to follow their projects from start to finish.
Help everyone be on the same page instead of multiple tools.
PIM for individuals like tiddly wiki
Checklist sharing
Integrate calendar like features
There is no team support implemented, you can use a common email address and password sharing as a workaround along with @names. The features for following RSS feeds / notebook are disabled till I get the design and storage right.
https://gizmodo.com/the-simple-unix-command-that-gave-birth-to-social-netwo-5869385
https://wordpress.org/themes/p2/
https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners
https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/
Books¶
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked Paperback by Adam Alter