Event Specific Temporary Chat Servers
closing time. you don't have to go home, but you can't stay in this group chat
I have a collection of zombie Slack/Discords/Group Chats; they’re a set of tombs, stale markers of once upon a time exciting conversations.
For instance, there was a discord server called “lets get hot” that sprung out of someone’s idea on twitter to share a bunch of fitness, haircare, etc advice. I am a vain man and I joined. It had a burst of activity that was fun, and then, naturally, people stopped posting and activity dried up. The other day I checked up on it. For a while there was a longtail of people posting in it, some who continued well after the original proposer had left, but for the most part it followed the pattern you’d intuitively expect: a burst of interest followed by people leaving.
This is natural and good - I’m rarely trying to join a community for life. A lot of the time, I’m trying to attend a neat festival in cyberspace for a couple of days and then go about my merry way,.
In essence I want structural design that embraces focal points. If there were ways to create time bound containers for online chats, I’d create a lot more of them and participate more actively while they’re going on. Let me hold a party that eventually ends!
My idea is a chat server specifically for temporary spaces. It would be last by default for 72 hours. If it’s a particularly sweet party and enough people agree you could extend it, but after some period of time everybody is kicked out and the server is deleted. As a parting party gift you’d received an export of the logs from the server - maybe a combination of automation and moderators could turn it into a curated record of the event, a digital garden that could be permanently hosted somewhere.
