Focusing mainly on Question 1, which is the one I really think about:
I think of my communities more in terms of real-life than online. And it's definitely communities, plural: I identify in terms of the collectives that I participate in, which roughly in order of current importance are SCA, Work, Fandom, Scala, LARP. (This list shifts over time, although generally at the granularity of decades. Freemasonry used to be high on this list, but I've largely dropped out, due to Reasons.)
In practice, my most capital-C Community is my extended SCA family, which has emerged over the past ten years. That's strictly local, and has become a crucial lifeline.
The fact that Work is that high on the list is slightly shocking, the first time in my life it's been true, and it says good things about the company that I actually care about the people there a lot. While Rally is getting successful enough that I'm sure it will someday turn horrible, for now it's a remarkably upbeat, idealistic, progressive place to be. As I said in my interview, "It's amazing that you've gotten to over a thousand employees and it still doesn't suck" -- the company cares passionately about culture, in a way that I often see claimed but rarely instituted.
I suspect that my diversity of communities is both a positive and a negative. It leads to me having *many* friends and connections, but they tend to be more tenuous than is entirely healthy. I don't have enough *close* friends -- something I'm starting to try to rectify, but that isn't easy.
My online communities are organized around those real-life ones, and I care less about the medium than the content. I'd probably say that my most important medium at this point is actually Slack -- even not counting work (where I am on Slack *constantly*), I'm deeply involved in 5 Slack groups, and keep an eye on several more. (Plus four Discord groups that I actually pay attention to.)
After that, I *care* most about DW, and am slowly getting back into practice posting more here, but there still isn't as much critical mass here as I would like.
The sad reality is that I interact more on FB, albeit in a constrained way: I only really pay attention to certain Groups that I have set up for email notifications, and only occasionally skim my feed otherwise. And I'm mildly active on Medium and Twitter, but mainly for professional purposes -- Medium in particular I use as a professional publication mechanism, so it isn't really a community, and I use Twitter almost exclusively to link to stuff posted elsewhere.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-02-15 06:12 pm (UTC)I think of my communities more in terms of real-life than online. And it's definitely communities, plural: I identify in terms of the collectives that I participate in, which roughly in order of current importance are SCA, Work, Fandom, Scala, LARP. (This list shifts over time, although generally at the granularity of decades. Freemasonry used to be high on this list, but I've largely dropped out, due to Reasons.)
In practice, my most capital-C Community is my extended SCA family, which has emerged over the past ten years. That's strictly local, and has become a crucial lifeline.
The fact that Work is that high on the list is slightly shocking, the first time in my life it's been true, and it says good things about the company that I actually care about the people there a lot. While Rally is getting successful enough that I'm sure it will someday turn horrible, for now it's a remarkably upbeat, idealistic, progressive place to be. As I said in my interview, "It's amazing that you've gotten to over a thousand employees and it still doesn't suck" -- the company cares passionately about culture, in a way that I often see claimed but rarely instituted.
I suspect that my diversity of communities is both a positive and a negative. It leads to me having *many* friends and connections, but they tend to be more tenuous than is entirely healthy. I don't have enough *close* friends -- something I'm starting to try to rectify, but that isn't easy.
My online communities are organized around those real-life ones, and I care less about the medium than the content. I'd probably say that my most important medium at this point is actually Slack -- even not counting work (where I am on Slack *constantly*), I'm deeply involved in 5 Slack groups, and keep an eye on several more. (Plus four Discord groups that I actually pay attention to.)
After that, I *care* most about DW, and am slowly getting back into practice posting more here, but there still isn't as much critical mass here as I would like.
The sad reality is that I interact more on FB, albeit in a constrained way: I only really pay attention to certain Groups that I have set up for email notifications, and only occasionally skim my feed otherwise. And I'm mildly active on Medium and Twitter, but mainly for professional purposes -- Medium in particular I use as a professional publication mechanism, so it isn't really a community, and I use Twitter almost exclusively to link to stuff posted elsewhere.