diaspora/diaspora — Issue #2577: Situations
Author: MrZYX
Created: 2012-01-01 22:49:38+00:00
State: open

Just had an idea I wanted to share and discuss with you.

How about introducing another concept to model your social life: Situations.

Currently we have aspects which let you model your personality by defining it's aspects through your relationships with other persons. While this greatly differentiates who you receive and to who you speak it has one issue to me: it's slow. Slow in the manner that you have to think about every time you do it. In real life however you don't have to think about if you're at home with your family or giving a presentation that is streamed into the internet, you just know it. So lets introduce something new here:

You can define a situation you're in by the people that you can hear and that can hear you. More specifically by the relationship you have to this people. We already have a system that lets you model these. Great, so lets get a level higher. A situation is basically two lists of people, those you can hear and those that can hear you (I'm repeating myself, I know), we need to differentiate that because in the internet, unlike most of the time in real life, these are different people, in most cases the former is a subset of the later. To translate it into diaspora it's two lists of aspects: those who are in your stream and those you post to by default.

Situations should have a name and be sticky till you actively change them. A common real world example could be that you're going to a party. You change to the situation party and from now on, even if you get drunk, only your friends can see the stuff you post, while you can still show your friends on the party the silly stuff your colleges posted. Without thinking about it, which is the point. There's another important property situations should have in my opinion: you can only be one at the same time, if you feel the need to be in two at the same time it's in fact a (completely) different one, just create a new one.

UI wise the implementation should be pretty easy but still prominent and user friendly. For managing them an extra page is good since that part requires some thought and clarity but for changing them a prominent dropdown near all publishers is a possible solution, making it obvious which situation you're currently in and how to change that.

So that's basically the idea just popped in my mind and I wanted to share with you. Could be complete nonsense and/or overhead, but lets discuss that :)