What's the digital equivalent of running into someone at the grocery store?
Closest I can think of is attending the same small-scale zoom event within a niche community
As far as I can tell we've yet to properly design spontaneous run-ins with mutuals on the web
Conversation
Maybe something like this: relaychat.app where the site's visitors can chat in real time. Would be extra so if one carried the same identity throughout the internet.
I remember had mentioned something like this on her blog. There are similar Chrome pgs
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If those identities could "friend/follow" each other and websites had "neighbourhoods" (aka related websites), it would be fun if the layer could show us "nearness" to other people on our friends/followers.
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By "nearness", I meant real time status like "Prakhar is also looking at site B" (if it is a similar website to the one you are visiting).
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This seems like a nice idea. On the other hand, I was thinking of what happens when our browser itself becomes a place to create or join neighbourhoods.
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Actually that would be a lot better as you don't have to depend on the visited website to do anything special. You can journey the web solo or as a group (or part of multiple groups) while updating the virtual morphic fields so everyone "related" gets updated automatically.
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Love that idea of the browser as the 'neighbourhood layer'. IRC chat + multiplayer cursors layered on top of a website which becomes the communal location where you 'run into' folks
Relay chat looks very interesting. Plus a plugin is easier to make than entire browser AFAIK 😅
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Yes, a browser plugin can totally work and would be easier to build than a browser.
Imagine if there's a possibility that anyone can fork trails of web browsing of others and vice-versa, and can even annotate bidirectionally onto it.
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Very keen on that notion - "trails in the forest." Allowing people to go on a walk through the web together.
's point about having a friend/follower system definitely key as well. Need levels of global / local scope the way we have with Twitter.