Final Task part 2

I gave my social media the name "wiggly"for several reasons. I wanted something short, pronounceable, and something that wouldn't make you think of anything else. There's a decade old concept for an open-source social media platform that is named Diaspora*, and I think the name's rather unfortunate because it's not neutral enough. I googled "wiggly" and nothing of note came up. wiggly.com has been "coming soon" for the past 10 years so that's out, but wiggly.dog was available and that feels memorable and fun.

One of the core mechanics of the wiggly platform is the weekly cycle of creating, curating and erasing. So like read it -> reddit, weekly -> wiggly. The tilde sign would be used in place of an @ sign to indicate users.

An instance is a group of randomly selected 150 people with tuni e-mail addresses to skew the userbase young and educated, to verify they are actual people and to make the some more local and thus more relevant. For the first 30 000 people, the groups would be all mixed up, but starting from next semester the groups would usually be first year students, just from different campuses and majors.

These groups of 150 would be called instances. You could think of it like a private group on Facebook, or a subreddit.

There's one chatroom for all of the 150 users. Instant messaging is impossible.

Every week, a group of 10 moderators will be chosen from the instance at random. Their mission is to curate content created by the instance users for the newsletter (published at the end of the week), keep the peace and act as support between the users and admins of the whole system, if technical issues come up.

Every user has their own page - like a blog of sorts - where they can post whatever they want. Hashtags are an important part of the site functionality, because the users would in time build their own hashtags for threads that continue from week to week, so everyone can find the people and discussions they want.

Everyone is anonymous every week, their username a random number between 100-999 that changes weekly. You can find a specific users post with searching with the tilde sign, and posts about them with the hashtag. Anyone can use any hashtags they want to mark their posts.

Posts could be tagged to be either meant for public discourse (to be possible included in the newsletter) or for only the instance to see. The moderators would be assumed to respect these hashtags. The chatroom could be used to direct attention to longer posts on the blog.

Every newsletter would have the mod teams chosen content about things that they felt were most relevant to the instance that week. These are all public for everyone, and in their own instances people could and would discuss the things they saw in other groups' newsletters.

Even though everyone has weekly anonymity, the people in the group don't change. Eventually you would probably figure out people in your group - no rules about this would be set, and different instances could form their own culture about it. Maybe some would often meet each other in real life. Maybe some would value their anonymity more highly. Once you've outed yourself, everyone will always know that you are in the group. There is a possibility to request to swap groups with someone though, so no one could ever be certain that someone who was in the group a year ago would still be in it. Swaps would be somehow limited though - maybe one person could leave change a month.

The amount of privacy about separating an online presence from your physical one might feel overboard, but it's mainly a countermeasure to avoid hierarchies, as much as possible. Everyone has the ability to start over every week, and if some week you want to post content that you don't want to tie to yourself, then that's possible.

I'll probably continue this a bit after I get some sleep...