This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

Some examples:

@peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

@flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

@tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

@remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

Creating links to one's own personal context can help one to both learn and retain new material.

Personalizing ideas using existing memories is a method of brining new knowledge into one's own personal context and making them easier to remember.

link this to: - the pedagogical idea of context shifting as a means of learning - cards about reframing ideas into one's own words when taking notes

There is a solid group of cards around these areas of learning.

Random thought: Personal learning networks put one into a regular milieu of people who are talking and thinking about topics of interest to the learner. Regular discussions with these people helps one's associative memory by tying the ideas into this context of people with relation to the same topic. Humans are exceedingly good at knowing and responding to social relationships and within a personal learning network, these ties help to create context on an interpersonal level, but also provide scaffolding for the ideas and learning that one hopes to do. These features will tend to reinforce each other over time.

On the flip side of the coin there is anecdotal evidence of friends taking courses together because of their personal relationships rather than their interest in the particular topics.

I love that Johannes Klingbiel highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn. While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it's also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: "to build". It's much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It's not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren't custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren't good at these last two things, but are built toward making it easier for a course facilitator to grade material.

We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small "p" to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others' LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

[[Flancian]]'s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it's pieces.

A lot hinges on those mentors. Apparently, they’re not exclusively technical, which might be an important point. The mentoring is a big part of the learning experience, surely. But there’s a certain level of complexity involved when we start discussing mentorships.

Even those who adopt a taylorist model to education may understand that “it takes money to save money”.

Customisation: the “personal” era. What with “personal learning networks” and everything “self-”. Does sound like a major trend. What’s possibly most interesting, though, is the framing. To some of us, the term “individualism” may carry some negative connotations. It could be fairly neutral, in a context like this one, or deemed positive (prefixed with “rugged”), but it’s an interesting choice, here.