This is a work in progress.

Building community and setting boundaries

Social media and communications technology can be revolutionary for building distributed communities or strengthening connections between people who are too busy to meet up in person regularly. They can also be draining, terrorizing, overwhelming and alienating. It will never be perfect, but cultivating good habits can help you come out on the positive side. Here are some habits and tools that may help you, followed by specifics about a few tools we use regularly.

Tool tips

Signal

Top stress factors include coming back to a bazillion messages after ignoring your phone for a while, accumulating unread messages and feeling like you have to "catch up" with all of them, and generally getting constant notifications that all have a vague feeling of urgency.

Coping tools

• Mute Notifications
• Disappearing Messages
• "Pinned" Messages
• Boilerplate Messages -
• Group Agreement Copypasta - Similar to boilerplate, create a message that has your group agreements in it that can be easily copied between groups or pinned.

Types of group chats

Many group chats will evolve social norms over time, but articulating them explicitly and being intentional about them can really help give people permission to make boundaries for themselves.

• Alert chat - Low traffic, but most messages are urgent. Avoid extended conversation / take off-thread when needed. For an alert chat, you would probably leave notifications on, and have disappearing messages at a week so that messages expire out when they are no longer relevant.
• Community chat -