I’m thinking about *hospitality*, and social media.
Every social media site I’ve used (and services more broadly, really) encodes certain notions of hospitality. When you post something, you are inviting certain people into your space, based on the site you’re using and who can see it and the ways they can interact with it or participate.
I think this is a large part of what makes the different services feel different. On G+, there’s a particular “we each have our own tables, but can get up and go over to others’ tables and see what they’re talking about” feeling, but you can control who comes to the tables you set up. Tumblr has a more masquerade-ball feeling, where pseudonymity frees in various ways, but also this dynamic where each person’s comment moves into their own space. Mastodon or Twitter feels less like it’s a space that belongs to you or anyone you’re talking with, but more like you’re in some kind of public forum. Slack, well, you can’t get away from the Slack-creator being the Madame de Rambouillet hosting the _salon_. Maybe a blog is even more like that, but you-as-the-host hold forth more?
I think that if you’re gonna design any kind of social service, you need to think about this element, and design for it. I think that this is part of why some services work for some people more than others do.
I dunno, just a thought. A framework for understanding what tools work for us.