Digital Community 🛖

I read this very inspiring article in Maggie Appleton’s digital garden. I highly reccomend her site, its very pleasing to look at and full of great content.

Anyway, the article touched on the fact that browsing the web is quite a solitary experience. Even if there are others sharing the same digital space as you, there’s usually no way of knowing. She talks about the nice, comfortable feeling of just existing in the same space as others and links to some ways that people are trying to bring this experience to the web.

I tried playhtml, which lets you make collaborative web elements with one line of code, even on static sites like this one. You can see it in action by opening two separate tabs on my session-manifest page and dragging around the campaign awards at the top of the page.

I have some fun ideas for this site, like making a digital tavern that shows all current site users as little tavern characters, giving you the option to chat or just know that there are others sharing the space with you.

With the ongoing loss-of-community in the modern world, ideas like this are important for nurturing the human spirit, and better aligning our rapidly advancing technologies with our monkey brains that keep plodding along at their comfortable evolutionary pace. Building community on the web should by no means replace efforts in the flesh, but they are nice to have on the side.