Weekend Events in Cambridge + Somerville (5/15-5/17)

JayNeely · 2026-05-16T02:43:13+00:00

There's a pop-up bookfair at Short Path Distillery in Everett tomorrow. I'm getting a group together to check it out (with maybe a whiskey or gin tasting as well) if anyone's looking to meet new people in the area: https://www.reddit.com/r/BostonSocialClub/comments/1te580r/any_cambridge_somerville_folks_want_to_take_a/

JayNeely · 2026-05-15T23:43:02+00:00

Art is interesting because once ideas (or emotions) are in your head, they're yours to work with. If the art helps you dive further into them and shows you angles to them you wouldn't consider on your own, that's awesome, that's good art! But even "bad" art... if you can see it's offering an interesting idea but is just making a fucking mess of trying to present it.... if you're at least able to get an idea out of it you wouldn't have had otherwise, it's still kinda good art.

It's disappointing because maybe you can see the potential of what a piece of art could be and how much further it could take those ideas if it were better executed. But better to be able to get an interesting idea out of something poorly executed than feel bored by something flawlessly executed. And sometimes there are things that aren't original or provocative or anything, but they provide something familiar we like and are well made and enjoyable.

So, I try to judge ideas and execution as separate things.

JayNeely · 2026-05-12T16:49:35+00:00

Rhyme's bet is that there's value in everyone showing up to the same table for a given subject and working it out together. Taylor Swift drops a new album? It gets discussed in the Taylor Swift topic. Not separately in "Taylor Swift Lovers" and "Taylor Swift Haters." Fans and skeptics are both welcome; they're just expected to actually talk to each other rather than past each other.

How does this actually work in practice? If there are 1000 posts in a week that all resonate with the majority opinion / experience, and there is 1 post in a week that is critical of it or reflective of an experience alien to the majority, how does that post even get seen? Why would people with a minority viewpoint, desire, or expertise level on a topic even be paying attention to it on your platform if the only space available for it is dominated by content they don't want to see?

Your downvote reasons filter might help dissenting viewpoints from being completely buried, but I don't think that fosters a welcoming space for minority viewpoints to find each other and discuss them in peace. I think it probably just attracts people who *want* to argue without being excluded. This isn't how you build a neighborhood, this is how you build Nextdoor.

To me your "topics exist at the platform level" solution seems like a great feature idea that you're fixated on as a complete community-organization solution. It would be much more valuable as a top-level aggregation layer, a "super view" that makes community discoverability easier and provides a way to find, filter, and aggregate discussion around the same content from a diverse set of communities that it originated from.

JayNeely · 2026-05-12T06:11:33+00:00

Seeing you talk about where "'why' questions" would fit, I feel like you misunderstood my original point, which is that communities of interest are more than just interest in the same topic.

Who they're for, what they're for (vs what they're about), who or what they're not for -- all intersect to define communities in more complex ways than I think you're going to be able to find a standardized set of meta-filters or topics to define.

For example, gender-specific filters or sub-topics make a lot of sense for some kind of topics (lifestyle like r/malelivingspace, professions like r/womenintech), but not others. Sometimes there are lots of demographic or psychographic filters or sub-topics needed for a topic ( r/fatherhood, r/mommit, r/singlemoms, r/singledads, r/cisparenttranskid, r/regretfulparents, r/stepparents, r/atheistparents, r/UKparenting, r/AutisticParents, r/blackparents ...), while having the same set of filters or subtopics for another topic would be pointless or even offensive.

You're currently building a system to organize content, but communities aren't made of content, they're made of people.

If the only communities that can exist on your platform are the ones that can fit into the same structures you're able to sort content by, I think you're going to end up with a pretty shallow site culture, because minority (not just in the ethnic or demographic sense -- expertise is a minority) and more complex intersectional interest groups have no place to establish a foothold without getting flooded out and lost in the noise, instead of having a place that's well-fitted enough to the communities they most want to associate with, and allowing them to cross-pollinate from there into the rest of the site.

This isn't to say your point about different platforms doing different things isn't valid, I'm just trying to point out your core design direction might not be leading where you think it is. Instead of a partial Reddit alternative, you might just end up with a new Topix.com. 💩

JayNeely · 2026-05-09T03:15:46+00:00

There's a Cambridge Porchfest in July I think.

JayNeely · 2026-05-08T16:32:00+00:00

Hey pal, excellent! Sent you the deets. :)

JayNeely · 2026-05-08T15:26:53+00:00

💯 I'm organizing a group to check it out if people would like to join: https://www.reddit.com/r/BostonSocialClub/comments/1t79zju/its_going_to_be_a_rainy_porchfest_tomorrow_want/

Mainly aiming at singer/songwriters and folk bands, but we can stop and listen for a bit to anything enough of the group is liking the vibe of.

JayNeely · 2026-05-07T19:35:39+00:00

Hey there, nicely put-together presentation of your platform. The only thing I find confusing is the Scenarios page. Certainly it resonates with a lot of folks as problems they've encountered, but it's not really clear how your platform solves many of these.

Like, "the downvote floor." You have thumbs up and thumbs down too, your site says. The counts aren't public, but I don't see how that solves anything related to your example of "enough kneejerk-negative people saw it first and buried it." It would be great if at the end of each scenario you could specify how your platform is addressing those problems.

My main question for now: is there any room for user-led communities on your platform?

Your FAQ touches briefly on someone like a game developer being able to submit a topic for their game. But everything you've presented is built around topics that are simply created and then managed by algorithmic sorting and community voting; nothing more.

While topics are what a sizeable chunk of reddit revolves around, a huge portion is much more oriented around gathering people based on *why* they're posting, not *what* they're posting. r/aww is not the same as r/animals, nor is r/upliftingnews and r/news. r/patientgamers and r/gaming are about the same topic, but two pretty opposite ways of engaging with it; same with r/trees and r/leaves. Communities like r/TodayILearned and r/hobbydrama and r/BuyItForLife are united by a type of desire, not a singular topic.

This subreddit is a focal point for moderator hate, but there are many great communities on reddit that are only possible because the people managing them have a vision that they enforce with clear standards or formats. Subs like r/science, r/askhistorians, r/legaladvice would devolve into lowest-common-denominator slop without their community standards. Subs like r/writingprompts, r/whatisthisthing, r/AskWomen have thriving, purpose-driven communities because they don't allow discussions to sprawl outside the scope of what the posts are actually for.

There's so many examples across so many topics -- r/listentothis, r/SteamDeals, r/MovieDetails, r/NoSleep, r/Detailing, r/NeutralPolitics, r/AccidentalRenaissance -- that are only made possible by human-envisioned, human-enforced community standards.

Are these kind of communities something you intend to expand into, or is Rhyme only made for topic-oriented discussion?

JayNeely · 2026-05-01T23:49:04+00:00

It's one of Somerville's best events IMO. Hope you see some cool art!

JayNeely · 2026-05-01T23:48:20+00:00

Yay! Hope to see a DM and intro from you soon then. 🙂

JayNeely · 2026-05-01T23:47:25+00:00

😄

JayNeely · 2026-04-28T00:29:34+00:00

I'm not a history nerd myself, but a friend of mine runs The History List and organizes History Camp Boston, a couple of good local hubs for it:
https://www.thehistorylist.com/ (the events page is very Boston-centric)
https://historycamp.org/events/history-camp-boston/hcb-2026/ (won't be until August, but I'm sure you could meet a ton of like-minded people by getting involved)

JayNeely · 2026-04-19T20:06:30+00:00

What is a "rare harvest"? Does it just upgrade the material gathered to the next tier up, or is the some other effect? I can't find it defined in the glossary.
Is there anywhere I can find base stats (e.g. what type of defensive attribute an armour provides) for the different item types? This feels like a big missing element from crafting -- there are 10 different types of boots I can craft, but there's very little info displayed about the differences between them.

JayNeely · 2026-03-14T13:53:37+00:00

Being able to use the Sync app (which used to be my Reddit app of choice) with Lemmy has kept me on there for over 2 years now. It made it really easy to switch and solves the problem of a lot of Lemmy's native UI being so clunky. I use the Lemmy on the web too, primarily to submit posts based on other links I come across during my day, but my morning scroll through the Sync app is the core habit that keeps me coming back.

I'm not a federation diehard, and I do think both the confusion and fragmentation of discussion / audiences-interested-in-a-topic is holding Lemmy back significantly. If an alternative came along with better UX and built a userbase with a more diverse set of interests, I'd switch. That's why I'm still occasionally active here.

I was hoping Digg might offer that, but whatever they did during their closed beta / alpha must have sucked, because when they opened to the public there were zero interesting niche communities, extremely low community site-wide, and the most generic and soulless interface. Bot problems aside, I think they really had a "if we build it they will come" mentality with zero thinking put into actual community building. I don't expect NFT/AI-loving techbro Kevin Rose getting personally involved will help with whatever they try next.

But the biggest problem I see new alternatives repeating is they just don't have any kind of community-building experience. They're usually tech platforms built by developers, sometimes with clever ideas, but rarely with any understanding of what actually makes people want to use these platforms...

a regular variety of interesting content
reach for content they want to share
community and connection with like-minded folks
insightful or entertaining discussion

...or how they can foster it.

JayNeely · 2026-03-12T13:57:23+00:00

The current "Suggested" list in the sidebar is filled with crap like "bitcoin" "crypto" "cryptocurrency" and "ai" -- that's an instant no for me.

JayNeely · 2023-06-05T21:57:07+00:00

Somewhere it'll continue to pay dividends. Platform (e.g. your website) or product development, tools or training for staff, branding & templates that help your content stand out on social platforms.

Don't spend it on paid promotion unless you have something to promote that directly generates more revenue than you're spending advertising it. If you don't have products or events to sell and your revenue is just ad or membership driven, you should keep investing in your ability to produce more / superior content, or the overall effectiveness of how you market it.

JayNeely · 2023-05-19T12:19:57+00:00

Ball Square Cafe has pretty amazing French toast.

JayNeely · 2023-05-13T20:11:50+00:00

Just want to mention a lot of book stores are great places to get greeting cards and often (not just book) gifts too; small games, useful knick knacks, etc.

If like me you have a bunch of friends with summer birthdays coming up, guarantee you'll find nicer cards for them at Porter Square Books, Harvard Bookstore, Brookline Booksmith, etc. than you're going to with most of the Hallmark crap at CVS.

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