 And welcome to another Reclaim TV Friday stream. We're calling this one Building Community and we're joined by Martin Hoxie today, which is really exciting when we're gonna chat with, well, all four of us are gonna chat about, you know, building community on the web, what we've had success in, maybe what hasn't worked, I suppose. And the tools we liked, we've been enjoying using things like that. But before we get into all that, maybe we can kind of all introduce ourselves. Starting, Martin, if you wanna introduce yourself first. Yeah, Taylor, hi. Thanks for inviting me on to this show. So my name is Martin Hoxie. So I've had a recent-ish change in career. So two years ago, I started working for a Google partner, CDS based in the UK. So, but long before that, I was kind of heavily into new Google workspace products. And that's kind of, some of that was, it was actually kicked off from being part of a Twitter community that kind of changed my whole life around 2009, which eventually led with working with Marin for a long time. So, yeah. Excited to kind of explain a bit more of my journey as part of this show. Yeah, awesome. And also, of course, joined by Amanda and Marin. So thank you all for being here today. So I guess to kind of kick things off, obviously the topic of building community is a big one. I didn't exactly narrow it very much with the title, but I just kind of wanted to start, like, what is, what are you doing right now in terms of like what building community, what's your strategy and where are you building that community right now? For me, it's, you know, two years ago, a lot of it was working with Marin at the Association for Learning Technology. So building the community there or supporting the community there was an aspect of my role. More recently, it has kind of changed. So I've got my own personal interests and I'm just trying to bring as many people as along on that journey as I can. So I've got different things that I do as part of that. So as I mentioned, I work for a Google partner. So I'm, and the products that I'm working with, Google Apps Script and more recently, a no-code platform called AppSheet. Just trying to generate interest, get people talking about sharing experience. So I think in terms of community, it's really loose. It's like, I recognize some of the names in terms of people liking the content that we're producing. People, you know, it's not a formalized walled garden or anything like that, it's very open. So it flows a lot in terms of people coming in now. I suppose in terms of where I'm focusing my efforts, I do a similar kind of show to this in a fortnightly show where we get guests on and try and just talk about products bringing guests. But another thing which is, I think a bit more retro is I run a website called Apps Script Pulse, which is a WordPress blog, which I just curate content. So I find things other people are writing about at Google Apps Script. And just, I don't know if people remember Scoopits. I don't know if Scoopits still exist. So it's just finding other content that people have published, linking back to that, providing a small comment. There's a degree of automation in that in terms of pushing stuff out into LinkedIn. I've kind of given up on Twitter since they killed the API. So in terms of conversation, it's primarily happening around LinkedIn now in terms of people responding to those posts, rather than the WordPress site itself. So it's interesting how that has evolved over time. I don't know if other people have given up on Twitter. Where are the cool kids going these days? Yeah, it's a tricky, it's a big problem. I don't know, maybe even opportunity, depending how you look at it, right? With kind of Twitter's implosion and the API stuff. We've definitely noticed that too, we kind of used to use Twitter as our de facto completely public platform, right? We had other spaces, forum, use Discord, things like that. But I think for us, it's been a lot of, what tools can we use that don't introduce a large amount of extra time to integrate? And because of that, yeah, Twitter's just not one of them anymore for us, or actually. It's a shame, Martin, I remember, many people who are watching us, listening to us, will be aware of your tax explorer tools, and I know everybody on this call will have used that. And many of us in the community who used to rely on that currently to track community building on Twitter, particularly tracking conversations and going beyond the broadcast method of just sharing information. I'm really curious how you think that's changed for you in the last few years, because I remember when you first started the Apps Script Pulse site, and it sounds like it's very much you motoring it, rather than like lots of different people contributing. How is that evolving for you? It's, yeah, I think it's like a continual evolution in terms of, I feel like with the loss of, loss of Twitter, let's say it's the loss of Twitter, it's called something else now anyway. I think personally I felt a bit lost for a while, and it's really interesting you mentioned tags and tags explorer. That tool was actually created, so I could find where I was within the community. So it was basically a network diagram of conversations on Twitter. And I found that really comforting to see my little node floating in space but connected to all these other people. So right now it feels like those connections are more fragmented, people are going off to different platforms. So I think that's part of the reason that I've kind of doubled down on this Apps Script Pulse site. We have a couple of people that do contribute posts as part of that, but yeah, it's mainly me, but I think it's, in terms of shift, it's, you know, I've moved more to, rather than being part of a network to being the candlelight that the moths will flutter around and consume content and somehow use that in terms of their own work, maybe not directly, but it's always nice, you know, we're in a period now where we're going back to events and for me to go to events and for people to recognize what I've done have been consuming that for a long time, but and just come up and say hello. I think it's really nice. And I think it's a real struggle now in terms of going back to that whole idea of establishing where you are within the community. I think it's become harder and it can be quite lonely sometimes. And I think you have to remind yourself that there's a bigger picture to this and in terms of consumption or involvement, it's not always obvious what's going on there. I think that can be quite hard. I don't know if people feel similar to that or have ways to counteract those feelings. Do you feel lonely? Feeling lonely in a big community. I think that's a real challenging thing. Yeah, I think that just from our experience in Reclaim at Tech, there's a bit of an adjustment that needs to be made when you're just kind of like putting content out there and just wondering like, is anybody out there? Is anybody listening, you know? But what I love is the fact that we still do it. And so I do think that it's kind of a shift in mindset as well where our motivation for putting stuff out there is like, I love your metaphor about being a candle that the moss can come to, you know? It is how it feels sometimes. It's like we're putting out what matters to us so that hopefully the right people can find it. And then I think what makes the biggest difference is having a place for people to get in contact and actually get together, which is I think why Discord for us is so important and creating an ecosystem of different platforms and tools that people can join us on because as we saw with Twitter acts like putting all your eggs in one basket, it can kind of blow back up in your face if things aren't sustainable. Yeah, and similarly, as you mentioned, like we are, I think a lot of people are kind of looking in the direction of like, all right, well, what can I take ownership of here and maybe more of this belongs on my website? And then I can, you know, however you manage that, whether it's automated or just simply just copying and pasting links other places, you know, it doesn't have to be complicated, but sort of thinking about where the stuff originates from I think is something people are, which is I think a good result of all this, thinking more about. And I know we are too, like we obviously as a, at Reclaim, we're very interested in the open source stuff that you can host yourself and we use a lot of that, but it's not like we don't use any, you know, we use Discord, we use YouTube, we use StreamYard, but we're talking on right now. So we're trying to really intentionally make the choices, make sense for us and like, you know, combine them with other things we have more control of or just critically look at where it makes sense to to rye on these things and where it doesn't, I think. And we're always rethinking it, you know, there's no perfect answer, but. I think that it's also like a balance between like, you know, I really value having my own domain and like that's how I first, you know, became aware of Reclaim because I was like, really looking to have like a place that I had control over, but like, you know, for a long time I locked down all comments on my side because I was just getting spam and like really nasty spam or fault. And so I thought, okay, you know, I can't be bothered to moderating that. But then in like, you know, it's a really lonely place. Like in my blog, there's like three comments a year, you know, and like Jim commented on something like twice in the same month. And like my blog sent me an alert unusual activity, you know, because it went out two comments in one month. And you know, that like for me, I was like, wow, you know, like it's quite a change. But Steven and Mark in the Discord chat were just talking about like Blue Sky being open now and being, you know, waiting for Blue Sky Federation. And I'm trying so many different networks and I am completely at sea as to where I can have any conversations that I want to have right now. Certainly not in my blog comments, that is for sure, you know, I get to be the only one who perseveres with that Jim, which I totally appreciate. Other than that, it's just, you know, it's very, very different. I don't know if it's my age, but, or, you know, other factors of change, but back in 2009, Twitter was a huge thing for me in terms of making those initial connections. But now even towards, you know, end of my time at Alts, where, you know, curating the alt community on Twitter was part of what I was doing. I was spending less time doing that and I don't know if there was what changed, if it was the quality of the conversation had gone down or my focus was elsewhere. And so now kind of microblogging is not something that really features in my life. It's more into longer form, which is maybe even more retro than retro Twitter. I still live by RSS, so it's great to see Stephen in the chat. So, and it's one of the things in terms of, I mentioned I have a website that's curating content. I'm getting that content from subscribing to RSS feeds. So, and I'm doing one of the applications that you can install on weekly most thing is TT RSS. So that's, I even themed it as Google Reader, which was my go-to tool. When Google killed it, I couldn't live without it. So, and still today, it's like one of my daily rituals is to troll the RSS content that I've got, but it's interesting and I see a general decline in terms of people publishing stuff. And even myself, it's like, I've gone down from probably at my peak, I was doing something like a post a week and now it's maybe a post a quarter. So, there is definitely changes and preferences and kind of wider trends. So, but I always found community and it's that slippery beast and very intangible thing, but it organic. So you kind of just have to go where it goes or it takes you and see what you can do. But, yeah, I gone on the days when, but it was magical moments back then in terms of getting comments on your blog. And a big change in terms of feeling that you were completely alone just writing stuff. I always remember, I was really, there's a academic in UK called Tony Hearst and I was an avid follower of his blog and the first time he commented on one of my posts was like, you know, fist pump. It was amazing that sense. And I think that's something I have to keep reminding myself is letting people know that you value what they're contributing and making that connection to what they're doing. I think is something that is incredibly valuable in terms of spending time doing, but quite often we don't have time to do that. So it's, you know, if you see something you like, let people know that you like it. I wonder, Martin, like we are seeing a lot of people on our channels talking about like newsletters and I wonder whether, you know, like we're like more in the age of the newsletter at the moment. Like I know we've got some flex courses coming up on the ghost like newsletter. And I'm sure Taylor will talk about our own, like, you know, a new ghost newsletter blog, but also like the long form comment is really interesting because that's something that Amanda's been heading up like reaching out to the community to kind of showcase, you know, by-of-case studies and kind of making more effort to kind of celebrate. So yeah, I don't know, Amanda, if you wanna jump in and like talk about that. Yeah, something that we've always wanted to do and we're kind of talking about since I first joined Reclaim in 2022 was this idea of showing off our community to our community. And it goes back to what Martin was talking about of appreciating what other people are doing and taking the time to show it off, I guess. Either giving people that direct feedback or taking the extra step of sharing it back out to the community. And in our case, we did it by reaching out, letting people know like, hey, we're watching, we're paying attention. I think that that is powerful. And then interviewing them, talking to them about what projects they're doing, using, in our case, Reclaim services and then creating something different out of that, something that can be published and then sharing that back with the community. And we recently did that finally set out our kind of launch case study on our new blog site and this was a conversation I had with Suzanne Norman from Simon Fraser University and what her experience has been like using bulk share hosting and how that has supported her overall very much, you know, non-tech related, like non-tech focused but needing tech to help publishing course. So yeah, Taylor threw that right in the discord chat. It was a really fun thing to do and felt really good to share it back out to the community and it's something that we're hoping to do more throughout the year. And it is a longer form thing. It does take a little bit more time. So you can't really send them out quickly but I think it's a labor of love. There's a lot of folks talking to them about newsletters and discord right now. And yeah, I just, it is interesting because I feel like there's more newsletter stuff than I've ever seen but it is maybe 90% basically the same thing as blog posts. It's not, you know, there can be differences obviously. And for me personally, they go right into my RSS reader because yeah, I'm in my RSS reader every day. That's what I'm reading. I don't really want those in my inbox personally but that is somewhat encouraging to me to see too is actually like, it's just funny because you used to hear like, it's like, oh, blogging is gonna completely disrupt journalism and media and in some ways it has, right? But then a lot of those bloggers went to work for media companies and then now there's a big shift to like, all right, well, I've left that company and now I'm doing my own newsletter and you can subscribe to it and pay for it or there's a free version or whatever. And so it does seem like we're on the back on the cycle, right? Like if it's a 20 year trend, that's about right. I'm keen to pick up on this comment that Mark posted about newsletters of being one way communication. And I listen and I find that really interesting because I probably have more people like circle back to me or connect with me in response to a newsletter that like I send out basically a summary of anything I've published in any given month. And like, I have like 18 or 90 subscribers. So this is like a very Bijou niche personal thing. So basically like a friend of family type newsletter. But so many people like come back to me and since I've gone freelance, my own newsletter is probably my main source of generating new business beyond posting anything on like LinkedIn or Instagram or Macedon or, you know, wherever else. And it is very strange. Like I wasn't really expecting it to be a two way thing either. So I am, and I know that when we send out the, you know reclaims monthly roundup with all the gifts, like that's probably where more people then reach out and kind of take action or get in touch than lots of the other stuff. So I'm finding that quite an interesting experience. Like, you know, it isn't a communication. It's not conversation, but it's definitely like not all one way in my experience. I think that's such a great point, Marin. And it really goes to show that there's something to say for like well thought out and like curated and yeah, just a well thought out presentation of content instead of just the constant like micro content and really that I think it's a, I'm not surprised that that's giving you business because you're able to really show a full picture of what you're doing and who you are. And I think people respond to that. And I think that's why people like the reclaim roundup as well, because you really, you get a sense of who we are when you see that roundup and just how goofy and also how busy we are. And you feel the energy from that, at least I do. Well, you make me feel bad. I have a newsletter as well, but it's not, it's basically a push of to work traditionally be like someone has subscribed to my blog for email updates when there's a new post. That's all it is. It's just just content I've published on this app. It's a script pulse website. Each day it will just send out whatever published that day to people. So maybe I need to spend a bit more time creating my newsletter content, being a little less lazy. But I think there was a comment as well in the chat in terms of newsletters have just got ramped up in technical knowledge and ability in terms of the email providers are now putting, it's like, Marin and I were chatting in terms of setting up her domain and it's like, I'm gonna spout out acronyms now. Oh, have you got your DMARC and SPF all set up, right? So you're in that whole world. We're not putting a lot of email right now and I think, but we saw the information that come out about these changes. So I think we're all having a collective side. Yeah, and it's not just the technical things that you're setting up on your blog. The mail providers are looking, if you're sending newsletters looking for things like unsubscribed links, who's it coming from, that kind of thing. So quite quickly, these are, for me, it's like my newsletter, I'm not generating. Everything I do, I don't generate any revenue. It's, I gave up even putting Google ads on my blog. It was just too much pain. But there's a lot of effort that needs to go into these things and there are so many pitfalls and nuances that you need to know about. So I could see why a lot of people would struggle with that. My tip, so on my side, it's a WordPress blog and I think it's mail poet is the plugin I use for that. I don't know, I know there are various other ones but I've been using that one for a couple of years now and I'm quite happy with that. I'm underneath the, I don't need to buy the premium license because I don't have 1,000 people I'm sending it to, which is fine by me. Yeah, the email stuff is, it's tricky. I just put in the Discord, the company Mail Gun, that's like a email API folks can use and they have various plugins and integrations as well. Did a pretty good write up, obviously. I mean, it's very much in their interest to do a good write up on how to make sure some of Gmail and I think soon Yahoo changes mean and it is kind of another thing that makes that self-hosted email hard, as self-hosted email has been near impossible, like completely self-hosted, I mean, really hard for a long time but this is just sort of another, to me it's just sort of another one of those things. But I will say from our perspective, using Mail Gun, which we use for a couple different things, both like most of the transactional email you may receive from Reclaim about your account is done via that, but also we use it for our newsletters. And it's been pretty good, honestly. And it's not been too hard to maintain in terms of those requirements either because they, as long as you follow their best guide, their best, it's not that bad. I wanted to pick up a point actually Amanda made before we went on air that I was just thinking about when we were saying about how do you get away from email and I think that's one of the things I've become more interested in in the last couple of years is kind of synchronous versus asynchronous engagement and I find community now, like building communities has to kind of work more asynchronously as well as synchronously. So I think, you know, like Amanda was saying that more people probably watch the show after it's been aired rather than being live online. I know, we work as a community that's across lots of different times. And it's like for Martin and me it's like the tail end of our Fridays now for Amanda and Taylor, it's like the start of Friday you know, some of the people in the chat in different time zones again. And I find that really interesting like because the ashram can I spit it's quite hard to get sounding anything more than an afterthought. What do you guys think about that? Temporal questions. It's just a big bowl of timing by me stuff. Yeah, I've never really thought of it that way but it's quite interesting. And I think, you know, it maybe relates back to that whole two-way communication or is it one way? I don't know. I could get very philosophical about it and okay, creating temporal moments. I don't know. I'm rambling there. This is an obvious thing to say I suppose but I really think the synchronous versus asynchronous is just a matter of who you're talking like everyone has different preferences and can fit that in to their day or lives easier. And I think that actually has something to do with sort of what we've been trying to do here at Reclaim and that like right now, right? We're on a stream. It is 10 30 Eastern time in whatever time and whatever time zone elsewhere. It's not gonna work for everybody, just won't, right? Like it's for me, I'm in central time. It's 9 30 in the morning. This is my job and I'm here and I'm happy to be here. Other folks are not gonna see this live. It's just kind of how it goes. So we've been trying to think of like how can we do both and not make it two and a half times the amount of work? And because it is content stuff is like that, right? Like if you do two things, doesn't really feel like twice as much work. It feels like more than twice as much work. So we've been trying to think of like how can we do something live because people like to participate live and it's more fun for us as well but also make that valuable and easy to find later. And I think we, you know, we typically get more people watching them after they're out for a couple of days. Yeah. We'd sign, so we, I do a similar sort of YouTube show and when the couple of years ago, we were, you know, it's the live aspect. I think it was a big thing for us to do. But part of it was in terms of just getting people commenting as part of the show and just responding to those comments. But the other thing was production. It's like, if we recorded something, we'd end up spending so long just editing it and then we just use StreamYard due to production live and then- There's the trick that we have for that. Don't edit anything. Well, that's it. With our StreamYard stuff, zero edit. It's like I might trim the intro clip slightly. What we were doing for the last couple of years as well is a lot of what we're doing on YouTube is not very visual. So, and with the tool like StreamYard, you can download the audio. So we take the audio, we put it on SoundCloud and then RSS comes to our rescue again. We're basically re-igrating that audio to every podcast platform that we can find. So it goes out to Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, which is dead, Amazon Music. So it's going out to all these different places and the challenge for us is then we've put it out to all these different places and then if people are commenting on it, we just don't have time to go in or even listening to it. We never go and look at the stats, but it's not a business for us. It's a hobby project. So, but for me, that was, because we really is back to the longer form. Our shows are about 45 minutes, sometimes an hour. And I think that's a really nice, you know, it's not the magic YouTube six minute moment that people want to consume. So I think it's ideal for people like me like to listen to podcasts while they're outside, away from screens. So we come back to RSS. RSS is our savior, pushes out. And I read recently that YouTube is actually, they had a beta of you could provide YouTube with an RSS feed for your podcast and it'll turn it into a YouTube clip. So we're going full circle now. Yeah, I was reading that. That's part of their getting away from Google podcasts is their Google's push has been YouTube is, you know, their tool for listening to podcasts. And to be fair, it's probably been their most popular tool for listening to podcasts for a long time anyway, right? Just people had to manually upload it there. So I haven't tried it, but I was reading about that it can literally ingest the audio files from an RSS feed and publish them as simple videos. I probably just static picture, but yeah. I wonder, I do worry about how many trees I'm killing now. We will, all this content basically ending up on different people, the same content on different people servers. So there we go. I also think it's an interesting kind of question around the open side of things, you know, because I think someone in the Discord chat earlier mentioned around, you know, how newsletters don't really contribute to open, you know, open communities and open practice. And like, you know, obviously you can do lots of things to make things searchable and archivable and so on and so forth. But next week, Martin, we have Alan Levine join us on Wednesday because we're like doing a community chat with him on like open education, open education week. And like, I think Alan's done a lot of like work with, you know, Discord in particular to try and kind of build like a sustainable community. And that is the kind of main question that I've got left on my list that I wanted to ask you about because you've been doing the community thing for like a really long time. And I wondered if you have any kind of thoughts on, you know, other than you just keep on going. Is there like a secret source of kind of, you know, making it happen long-term? Mm, I think it's a hard one. I think you have to, I really like, I think David White has the visitor and resident model in terms of, and I think you just have to accept that people will come in and out of communities. And, you know, if they stop for a spell, that's great. I think as well, the people that moderate communities or, you know, be the candle will come and go as well. So, you know, I still follow, you know, even though I've left alt, I still follow the members mailing list. I lurk on the side, not contributing. So I've definitely become a visitor to that one. So I don't know, I think as long as there's something to interest someone, you know, hopefully there's enough in terms of your effort in, we're all human, we like to be clattered on head, you know, get that feedback back. I think that, you know, keeps you going in terms of, you know, moving forward with something. The thing that kills community is when usually Google kills the product. So within Google Apps Script, we've had a couple of communities which I've been a moderator on. And the sad thing has been that for a long time, there was a really strong community in what was Google Plus and then Google killed the product. So we've moved in to Google Groups which is entirely email based with a very light web interface. So I think, you know, it's quite interesting to think, you know, did the community die or did it just move? We've definitely lost people along the way. So, yeah. Yeah, and it, you know, you mentioned that people come in and out of communities and, but also even just obviously everyone engages in community differently, right? Like I am not a big blog commenter. I mean, I would like to, but it's usually I find myself reading something and my reaction is, that's really cool. I'm not going to type that in a box and hit send. It's not worth reading, right? So I tend to read a lot and comment not very often. And I think there's lots of people like that. There's lots of people who do much more, you know, resident, you know, type stuff, commenting more or even, you know, like writing up their own pieces as responses, things like that. And, you know, it's not visible when people are just reading your stuff. And that's kind of always why, you know, there's a lot of schools of thought around like on things like, you know, Twitter or Mastodon or whatever, you know, name a social media or microblogging thing. And people go like the like button, what's the point of that? You know, it doesn't offer anything. And I don't know that I agree with that personally because I think it offers a certain type of person a way to say like, yeah, I see this and I like it. I don't have anything to say that's interesting at this time, you know. And I think that can even be an on ramp for some folks who are finding a voice in a community too. It's a small thing, but it just keeps popping up for me, right? We have it happen here at Reclaim where we'll months later, we'll get an email from someone who's like, hey, I saw your video on this and it was really interesting, thanks. And I'm like, great. I didn't even know anyone cared about that, you know. So, Marin, emoji reactions. Discuss. We used to have when we all first started working online like in 2017, 18, like we had this big argument about like how, you know, how useful that is. And now it feels so quaint to even like consider it. But at the time it wasn't a done thing at all at least not when our working environment. But I was just thinking like, because we were talking about this platform, I think Steven mentioned called Discourse, which I haven't used at all. And I'm always kind of amazed by a wide variety of different platforms people kind of really identify with. And now I think when more people work remotely or from home all of the time, I think that's really increasing. So some people live their lives in like metamolst or on Slack or in Google workspace. And then you become really like habituated into these environments and the customs around emoji reactions, gifts and et cetera become really normalized. But like I worked with five different, or so companies at any given time and they will have completely different norms. So like depending on who I work with on which day, I have to kind of switch between, this is how you respond here, this is where it's appropriate to send a gift. They have never heard of a gift. They only operate by email that has like, a proper header and photo, like it's completely different. And I feel that a lot with online communities, like particularly ones that I don't really know that well, like always like, I have no real idea of what comes across as polite or appropriate. And like, you know. Maybe people can solve this one for me. I used to use the winking emoji a lot. And then someone said in America, that's you're flirting. So I stopped using the winking emoji. Yeah, I get nervous sometimes about how emoji reactions are interpreted by people because some of it is that kind of specific to like an area, but I find myself defaulting to whatever the, yeah, digital code switching is right, Mark, but is like whatever the alt text is on the emoji. I sometimes that gives you a really important like key to what the emoji is actually doing. Like, cause you may think you know, like I see it like a lot of people, I'm not gonna get into this actually, but there's a lot of different types of emojis. There are tools though, or maybe like Discord and Slack is where I'm using emoji reactions the most. And both of those let you like either hover over or long press to see what the keyword in their like search is. And I agree, I use that too, but there are other tools that don't let you do that. And they drives me crazy. I remember Amanda, when we were both pretty new at Reclaim, we even came up at one point where we're both like, hey, I think we have to recontextualize how we think of the thumbs up emoji as a reaction because to me, a relatively anxious person, thumbs up is like sarcasm, like it comes off as like, cool man, like I don't really care. But we use that Mac OS feature that does those reactions. But apparently I have that enabled still, but we use it at Reclaim and like in Discord, it's comes through too as sort of like 10, four, gotcha. And that I think is how most people perceive it, but that's not how I initially perceive it. You know? Which brings us back to newsletters is in my consumer Gmail, there is now emoji reactions to emails and I'm using that so much more. And then in my work email, which is also Google, that feature isn't there. And it's like, I miss it. And Myron will know, I come from a position where I was completely against emojis. And now I'm like the biggest emoji fanboy is like, give me an emoji, give me it now. I think there's a blog post in that one. Origin to emoji reactions. But I was gonna say like the person in my life who you just emojis the most is my mother. She's in her early eighties and she's an avid textor. And my mother learned how to type on manual typewriters. So, you know, she was like trained as an accountant. So she types very fast. And because a manual typewriter has a carriage return, that's how she texts. So it's like, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Return sent like, so you get like 25 messages in like, you know, very quick succession. But the only emoji that my mom uses to sign off any message whatsoever is a kiss with a heart. And so my mom's, my text exchanges is like pages of, you know, smooching, like the entire text message. Like the other day someone else saw my phone, a friend of mine and she was like, wow, you know, are you having like a real romantic exchange? I'm like, no, that's my mom, you know, and that's her only emoji. And I have tried to teach her that this is not an emoji, but nevermind, you know, it's too late for that. So yeah, so I have to smile so much because every week I have that. I mean, I'm so lucky to have that, but I also think sometimes it just makes me giggle. So. I will spend time just looking at ASCII art for, I don't know if you would come across that, but pre-emoji, this is your old school emoji, but I used to work with a colleague who's Japanese and there's some really nice ASCII art emojis for bowing and things like that. So there are occasions I'll go and find, I don't know it off by heart, I will go and find the ASCII art for bowing or praising someone and use that instead. The algorithms will never understand that. Yeah, once you put that through the sentiment analysis, it doesn't make heads or tails of curly line UTF characters. One thing. Cool. Yeah, I kind of miss ASCII art and I still am of, I still will do the very old school like colon open parenthesis smiley face in texts and stuff because I don't know, that's just sometimes, so. I'm similar in the echoes, do you want this emoji? I'm like, no. No. Yeah, because it's like a very, it's a choice sometimes, you know, it's like, no, don't auto-correct to that slightly smiling face. Just my colon or the parenthesis, like the person I'm sending this to will get the vibe. That is so interesting though, because I think that is exactly the kind of nuance. I think it's so hard to pin down and I think in a community kind of context or building professional sort of friendships and relationships, like those things really matter. And I think that's a really hard thing, like where people often kind of talk about community but they don't walk the walk. And I think in order to say the right things in the right way, you have to put in the time to kind of learn when you say what and how. And I think that's something that we are all doing in different ways is that we spend the time engaging and you're learning the language in the right way. So I think that's a super interesting observation. It's interesting as to how people, you know, going to the typing of emojis, how people make that their own. I think Lorna Campbell is someone, I think people will know very respected in the community. I think all her herds are upside down. So it's the reverse direction. And I've got another friend, Alan Fitzsomburg. He doesn't use the math, he uses this weekly bracket instead. I don't know what that one's called. So it's nice to see people personally, you know, take ownership of that and make it kind of their signature way. And I think, but you know, thinking of community is, you know, recognizing people for in different ways but through the tax form, you know, in terms of what people say or how they react to stuff. I think it's quite interesting. And it helps with that connection. Absolutely. We've got someone at Reclaim who always uses one particular emoji to react to things. And I never feel comfortable using that emoji because it's a little sparkles because I feel like when you see little sparkles, you're like, oh, that's pilot. And I can't use the sparkles because then people are gonna think I'm pilot and I'm not pilot. Yeah, I feel really the emoji reaction stuff, emoji in general, I guess are such an interesting, in some ways, I think microcosm of kind of what we're talking about here in terms of, you know, building community is a big, large, nebulous thing that takes time to change. And it's a cultural thing as much as it is, you know, we're using in our case, you know, tools, technology to do it, but it's not really about that stuff. Emoji is kind of, this is maybe a horrible analogy, but like, emoji is kind of similar for me. Like, you know, what is emoji? It's literally just some characters that we've decided can have images associated with them. And it's existed for actually a long time in some ways but now it's everywhere. And I definitely changed how I feel about using it too. And, you know, one of the things we talk about a lot at Reclaim is with any of the stuff we do with community building is that we have to try and, you know, meet people where they are to some extent, right? And by that, I mean, you know, we do video stuff, we do the roundup for newsletters, but that's available as RSS. You don't have to get it as an email. And we also have a blog, you know, that's for more regular, smaller announcements. And we want to try to do all of it while keeping it to be manageable time-wise for us because it's not like we make any, you know, money from you watching the stream, we're not doing that. This is more about just getting folks to be comfortable in the space and ask questions and, you know, attract new people to use some of our, maybe our host, we hope our hosting services, but really more in general, like the tools that we're excited about, right? Wherever you host them. And it's the hardest part of that has been trying to stick with it and see like, what do people think about this? You know, we've, you know, over time and try to be more regular with the things we're doing. And we're starting to see, I think, some payoff of like folks showing up for these Friday streams to discuss them and people mentioning them in email conversations with us. But it took a while and it's kind of hard to know like if anyone is even, if it resonates with anyone, you know? We won't long till. So I think as well, I think this occurs to me is that I've not thought about for a long time is hashtag communities, which, you know, something like came out of Twitter originally, I guess, I think in terms of history. And I still tag stuff. So on LinkedIn, I still tag stuff, but I'm not, I feel that people are less looking for hashtag communities. But platforms still support it, but I feel people are doing that less. I don't know if that's things you're seeing as well in terms of how people are coming together, whether the hashtag has died or it's still strong. Yeah, I feel like I'm seeing that less and less too. And I think on one hand, I've always chalked it up to just less of the platforms do as good a job, I think as Twitter did, right? Twitter, once they did support it anyway, right? It wasn't always actually like a official thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was, you know, there were Twitter clients that you could follow a specific hashtag. And even eventually the official Twitter stuff kind of let you do that. There are tools like tags that let you explore it. And it kind of comes down to API stuff. I don't know, probably LinkedIn does a decent job of it, but I'm not super, I'm not on LinkedIn all the time. But one thing I do know is that LinkedIn is, you know, pretty much everything you do requires a login. So that kind of, I think dampens some of that for folks. And then you've got other things like, I've been enjoying Mastodon, but by the nature of the technicals and we won't go into it of how Mastodon works, hashtag communities are really hard to get a full sense of what's happening across all of the Fediverse, right? You can't right now really always know of, oh, these are all of the posts that use this across any Mastodon. And since it doesn't really work that way right now, maybe it will work that way someday. Maybe there's other tools or other platforms like maybe Blue Sky can do that. I don't know, but I think honestly, I chalked that largely up to Twitter because I think it did it so well. And now that we have less folks using that, I'm not really there much anymore myself. None of the other platforms do it the same way. And I think that has something to do with it, but it might not be the whole picture. I think- We're dying to know man, where's Silent Sunday? We're nearly out of time. So I'm gonna try and condense that. I don't know that much about Silent Sunday or Silent Sundays, but that is the only hashtag that I currently use. And basically, as far as I can tell, it's people posting on social media without words and you don't post anything else because it's a Silent Sunday. So it kind of encourages you to use social media less. And I usually post a picture of a book I've been on or a cup of tea or something kind of peaceful. And so I have tried this on all the different platforms that I'm on other than LinkedIn. And it's surprisingly, that is the most engagement I get every week with anything I post. So clearly people like being silent on social media. So that is my last contribution. God, this hour has waved hard. I hope the Spammer's don't pick up on that. Could be less silent. Yeah, that's true. Advertise your mindfulness Sunday app. Yeah, well, Mary and you're right, the hour has flown and we really appreciate you, Martin, for joining us and chatting with us today all about community. And I think that we are also really appreciate the folks that are in chat too, who have been keeping conversation going. It's been really interesting to see. So thanks for joining. Thanks so much.