trails.social (ex-tweetscape)

#project #openknowledge #🌿 #open-source #socialsensemaking #informationmanagement #tool #sensemaking

about

"trails.social offers an alternative to how we navigate and consume information on social media through feeds that are configurable, personalised and encapsulated to our interests, allowing us to tune in and out of them as we desire.

Under the hood, trails indexes social relationships and content to a cross-platform “social knowledge graph” to provide recommendations that a user has full agency over.

Development ceased after Twitter restricted access to its API for third-party clients."

context

a discontinued yet very, very interesting prototype for an alternative twitter feed made by a few folks at roote.

good intro: https://www.roote.co/tweetscape/vision

their design was great, and they had fantastic write-ups on the whole design/development process. all of the articles/videos were hosted on a platform that got acquired by twitter and deactivated soon after though, i couldn't salvage its contents. i contacted the creators and got access to a few pages with the core content, see below.

after their initial design and their development halt due to twitter API changes, they expanded the scope of the project (applying the design specs to more than twitter) and renamed it to trails.social, which i love.

from my understanding, their lead engineers/designers were nick torba and julian fleck. there were a few other people supporting while they were incubated by roote and andre vacha joined after some time as well.

for me, it's a core reference for the design of an omnichannel curation feed.

write-ups:

Conceptual framing – high level design primitives: https://trails-org.notion.site/Conceptual-framing-7a6a972b54d4450ead51fca3ab289de5?pvs=4…
Graph design considerations – concept on how we structured the knowledge graph: https://trails-org.notion.site/Graph-High-level-concepts-887db46247904704ae95c3c494a5ad33?pvs=74…
Graph structure – don't know if that's interesting for you, but this document covers the structure of the graph itself: https://trails-org.notion.site/doc-Graph-rework-0260219f873d45c182d72d6b5c92fb6f?pvs=4…
Andre has a write up* on Notion that aggregates a lot of the conceptual bits and pieces: https://andrepology.notion.site/trails-social-1b666e1d2a1645ffb3eeb225173f5760…
**The document is a bit messy and links to some internal resources that might not be available but feel free to dig around there.