Bingo. I played with Patchwork for a few days, but found that no matter how many people I followed or posts I tried to respond to, nobody seemed to see what I wrote, or at least, nobody responded back.

So either I was completely uninteresting, or invisible, and I couldn't figure out which to start addressing it.

Maybe I'm expected to bootstrap a group of local friends and get everyone onto SSB and then we can talk using it? But if I already know them, we can just talk on IRC or whatever we already use.

I'm missing something fundamental about how this is supposed to work.