CJ Eller poses an interesting set of questions about “notifications and whether they are needed all of the time”.
To what degree should we desire that the software notify us that someone’s replied to us, or referenced something we wrote, versus to what degree should we allow either serendipity or having someone personally reach out to us to let us know? I wonder sometimes, just from the personal experience of my own subjective brain, whether immediate and automatic notification carries the risk of falling down a rabbit hole of “needing” to respond.
Is there a middle ground? Could we build mediating software which takes our notifications for us and then gives us, say, a daily or weekly digest? Something somewhat akin to a new Technorati, which accepts and collates our webmentions (or whatever) for us and then we can browse through in a more leisurely, less in-the-moment manner.
It’s the question, again, of friction. How much do we need to know in real-time, and how much can we afford to wait to see?