How Can Totentanz Be Improved?

Drop Point
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With so many options for communications available these days (especially within the CORTEXIMPLANT family), I was wondering if y’all had any suggestions for ways to improve the Totentanz experience. Now that it’s been around for a while and there’s a little bit of a core of users, how can we make it better and more engaging? The Discourse software on which this runs is kind of like a self-contained “community in a box” with chat, post, comments, and all sorts of things, and yet it is detached from all the other fediverse-related communities (for now).

So I’d like to know:

  • Is there anything preventing you from using Totentanz more?
  • Is there anything you would like to see available on Totentanz?
  • What would make Totentanz more interesting for you to use on a regular basis?

Any and all suggestions welcome, and will be thoughtfully considered and probably implemented if possible!

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First, something I like that Discourse currently does: emails me about new posts, but doesn’t do so too often!

If not for that, I honestly would forget to check in once in a while, which would be ashame, because a lot of these threads are fun.

The pace of the conversations is also enjoyable. I don’t feel like I am missing out just because I’m not constantly checking in. I can tune in once or twice a week and catch up on everything. The conversations are still going a few days later, which is a nice change from modern social media platforms.

I think the main thing that prevents me from posting more is that I’m just not sure what to say.

The rise of the megacorps seems to have gone from fiction to pretty much reality. But what is there to say about it? There are already many resources out there to find alternatives to Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. Would another list of them really be that useful?

I work on crypto code, but are the gory details of key derivations and compatibility nightmares really of interest to the community here?

I recently started tinkering with unlicensed long range radios (LoRa), but it’s not an actual application, let alone something that could be replicated by others. Right now it’s really just throwing packets around and catching them to understand how it all works (or fails to work, as the case may be).

All these things aren’t cool cyberpunk things, they’re just me working on building things that I want. Private, non-corporate tech that does what I want it to do.

I guess what it boils down to is that I am more into the tech, and while I enjoy the cyberpunk culture, I’m not sure I really fit in (story of my life, take no offense). I’m not sure there’s much to be done about that.

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Thanks for the reply! I can understand what you’re saying also, and I’m guessing that a lot of people would fall into the “I don’t really know what to post” boat. And you’re right, there’s probably not much to be done about that particular quandry, certainly not from a software feature standpoint.

That being said, I submit that there’s really nothing more cyberpunk than “all these things aren’t cool cyberpunk things, they’re just me working on building things that I want. Private, non-corporate tech that does what I want it to do.” I think that is the essence of cyberpunk, my friend. :wink: Could spur someone to start their own journey into LoRa because it sounds interesting and they hadn’t heard anything about it until someone posted about it!

I’m also a big fan of the “spaghetti throwing” technique when posting topics: throw something out there and see what sticks. Since I don’t know everybody here, I have no idea who’s going to be interested in the same things as I am but I’ll never know if I don’t post a topic to see who crawls out of the woodwork to engage with it.

Worst case scenario for me is that Totentanz basically becomes a long-form posting site where I can blather on about some topic for a lot more words than the character limits of a mastodon instance allow in a single post. :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

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Most of the time when I come here, I have the impulse to contribute something to the discussion, and then I lose momentum in the middle of my thoughts. But I guess I just have too much on my plate right now to engage on any more platforms than I already do.
But I’m on a caffeine high right now, so I’ll take the time to respond and say that I’m all good with Totentanz!
I’m content with the content(ha!), and I appreciate the slow but steady development.
It’s exactly the kind of cozy, dark little corner of the interwebs I’d expect to see a irl cyberpunk community develop in.

I’ll be checking in regularly and contributing whenever I have the energy.

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I’m mostly lurking and getting a vibe for everything. I usually don’t have to much to say, as of now it’s a pretty small niche community.

Mostly slow posting, it’s not that bad of a thing more a result of being a small community, I think as time progress and Totentanz gets more of a feel of what it wants to be it will become more active…

I think group projects or something similar might be a interesting idea, zines are always pretty popular. Something that everyone can get involved? idk, just throwing ideas out there.

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