Enter Chat Servers, while chatrooms always coexisted with forums, Chat Servers like Discord took the step of applying the segmentation feature of sub-forums as channels to the chatroom live-load environment. This means that people join a community and immediately are given context for what content is encouraged and where to go to discuss it, but under the implicit understanding that the other members of the community will be responsive to questions here and now, and that they won't get pushback from asking questions that have been asked before. Now with the Threads features, these conversations can be forked off temporarily out of the main channel as ephemeral venues for discussion without cross-talk while still being publicly available unlike a DM. This solved one of the main downsides to the live-load chatrooms for information dense subjectmatter.

Speaking of information-dense subject matter, let's not forget that other online community repository of knowledge and sometimes community the wiki. The wiki went the other direction from the forum, saying let's skip the communication context and go straight to the information exchange, development, and repository. Why bring up the wiki? Well it feeds into something I sense on the horizon.

Looking to fill my own needs, and in a context I know many many people share, I have a special interest group that needs a platform for periodic live interaction, persistent asynchronous conversation, and condensing and cataloging reference information. I have found some tools like Discourse, as well as Node BB, that have chat features built in, but frankly hide them away as secondary options. In navigating the Node BB Community forum itself there was not a chat to be found, what does that say?

What am I getting at? All these community tools are at their root social technologies, the software layer is just an enabler. The technology is the way of thinking about how to communicate, the social norms supported by the infrastructure, and the user interaction sequence to situate, sort, identify, unveil, and interact with other users and the information they share. Is there an integrated social technology that fully bridges the divide between ephemeral and persistent content in a way that the user can fluidly navigate between them? I think there could be, and we are closer than ever.

Think of this, a man named U seeks knowledge of how to solve a problem. U enters the private space of a group of sage scholars, sitting a well stocked library containing many writings on the subjects of their various expertise, an index of these works lies at a desk by the door, the scholars sit at their tables writing or in rooms in oiveky discussion. What should U do? Should he go straight to a scholar and interupt their work to ask about his problem? Should he review the index of the library to see if his problem has been written about before? Now here comes the perfect thing: an asstistant. The assistant does something unexpected, they ask "please begin writing your question, I will provide you information I think may be relevant and also tell you which scholar has written on similar problems and where to find them". Well, that seems simple enough, I writes out his problem and soon has several manuscripts on hand, names of the most relevant scholars, and room numbers where they might be found discussing similar matters.

Is this the ideal fusion of ephemeral and persistent communications? I don't know, but I'd like to find out. Not a chat to that substitutes for a person in conversation, but rather one that notes your intentions and provides direct access to threads, pages, and people who are relevant. Paired with that a text box that can dynamically send both the users writing at any time, and links to the surfaced content, to any of several venues including forum threads, chatrooms, a private notes server, a new public page/wiki, or even a post onto a social platform. One point of entry, many venues, and a dynamic assistant to facilitate search with fewer user interactions to reach the most relevant venue for the purpose of the moment.

What do you think? Could this be where we are heading? And can this be a community platform, or will it inevitably be the way others like Anthropic seem to be steering it with Comet (and Google with Chrome), as a dynamic AI browser? Probably both I'm thinking, but I haven't run into to community platform yet, while the browsers are starting to ramp up quick.

#forums #chat #AI