I have been thinking a lot about the public service internet (or the notion of a internet which is focused on public value not extraction and surveillance)
Theres a number of things in my head but one of them is about collectively sharing what we mean. When I say we, I literately mean exactly that. I was reminded of this a while ago while looking at my diigo group I setup ages ago. Ultimately its a aggregated list of links from a pool of people.
In practice it didn’t really work because although I did accept a few people, almost no one added any links to the group. In actual fact I’m looking for an fediverse version of diigo because I’m really not getting that much out of it. I did get some spammers but not enough to cause any problems, harm or use much of my time. I could glance at their profile and easily work out their intentions.
Anyway I do think the pooling/aggregation is a good idea within a human scale group.
While listening to tech won’t save us and looking more into the Degrowth movement, I found a number of books by the guest Jason Hickel. I did what I normally do is add them to bookwrym as books of interest. Then thought wonder if there is a category or tag option. I found lists and the ability to change the visibility and contribution options.
So I setup a public list and the ability to carefully add contributors.
Ideally this could be really good and a useful list for me personally listening to a lot of public service related audiobooks. It could also be useful to collate some of the lesser know books and authors. But even better is the ability to share wider what is meant by a public service internet?
Interested in joining the group? Get on bookwrym or setup your own instance and click the button to join the list? Of course if I don’t accept the request (I’m new to this too) just direct message me.
Back to the link sharing, I realised this is what Lemmy is…kinda is. I may take a different route on link sharing and potentially self-host it myself. Once I do I’ll likely just move away from Diigo completely, shutting down the existing groups. Don’t worry I have already gone a export of the links and data.
Looking forward to reading and sharing more.
Little update on Bookwrym
I now have a group which can add to the book list, I’m carefully adding people who are collaborators. If you feel this is also you, contact me.
