PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR DIASPORIC POLITICS #4318642:
If someone feels familiar to you in the way you are trying to build/live a diaspora around, assume you know-someone-who-knows-someone-who-knows them. If you're having an extended conversation with them, try to figure out what that chain is -- share what places you've known fellow-people in, learn and be interested in what places they've known fellow-people in.
(If you find a chain -- success! you won the game and you have a deeper and more meaningful connection with not just that person but with everyone in the chain.
If you don't find an existing connection -- also success! you didn't win, but now you know someone in a network-location of the diaspora you didn't before, and so will have more directions to play the game in with the next fellow-person you meet.)
(If you're Jewish this is called "Jewish Geography". I didn't make up the name. If you're queer I've never heard anyone name it (just do it sometimes -- usually incidentally, not systematically), but if you wanna make the name actually make sense you can try calling it "Queer Network Topology" maybe.)
(... if you're doing it as part of trying to build diasporic politics in the global Hacker community, you HAVE to call it "Hacker Network Topology", I think. Or possibly "Wait do we know anyone in common? Can we play Social-BGP for a bit?")
@alyssa There are probably communities that this wouldn't work in but I think the queer community -- possibly subsets of it? but I think it's worth exploring widely? -- has a lot of potential for this.
(Like, the population-percentage of trans people is approximately the same as the percentage of Jewish peoplev iirc. And probably /less/ clumped physically/socially, but still with solid clumping.)
Like I posted this in response to seeing someone on ny Federated TL talking about how "I was talking with someone as another queer person in the event, and had happened to also move from the US in the past 6 months, and after a bit it turned out that randomly they were friends with someone from my handball team".