Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Bonfire’s latest trick shows Google+ circles came a decade early

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Bonfire is a decentralized social network application, much like Mastodon. Circles were a way of subdividing your friends or contacts into subcategories, such as 'family', 'work', 'baseball', each with their own permissions. Twitter adopted something similar back in May. The main issue with Circles is that they're a pain to maintain. Who wants to go through their friends list sorting them? "What I'm hoping," says Doug Belshaw, "is that this bridges the gap between social networking as we know it (e.g. Mastodon, Twitter) and group chats (e.g. Signal, Telegram)." I don't think this is it, though I think there is certainly an opportunity for someone somewhere to get online group formation right. I think members need to be more or less self-selected from an eligibility pool, not assigned, and management needs to be fluid and seamless.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 6:11 p.m.

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