This is the more interesting discussion to me, and where a design-first approach can be very innovative and valuable. This is what I meant above when saying “what is a Forum once it becomes fully federated?”. Adding federation support to any app changes the nature, characteristics, and audience of it in ways that should be well-known and anticipated.
This design focus at ecosystem level is almost entirely missing in fediverse evolution, and with its bottom-up processes the demand is often “I have this app feature, so I need that AP extension to support it”. No matter how high-quality your own app is, for the ecosystem where your foundational technology evolves, this constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern: A software system that lacks a perceivable architecture.
Now the tradeoff of the 3-stage bottom-up standardization process that we need in our decentralized grassroots environment is that we likely should allow this anti-pattern to an extent, as it stimulates bottom-up innovation of the fediverse by freeing devs to experiment with new things. The FEP Process allows for this by being non-normative and completely open to any participant to contribute to. And it has many overlapping mechanisms and good-practices that need to be reconciled later to assure the broad interoperability of the fediverse long-term.
Summarizing you can say that both a bottom-up and a top-down standardization process are needed. They should meet and help realign and reinforce each other, and give direction to the ecosystem as a whole. Bottom up we absorb the technical reality and best-practices, and top-down we craft and chisel an open interoperable fediverse able to support the social experiences that people need.
Tangential. Social coding commons is a movement of people interested in exploring these more social sides of decentralized social networking environments and focuses on building solutions that serve people’s needs: social experiences. For this we explore a methodology called Social experience design (SX) tailored to cocreating Sustainable open social systems (SOSS) with participants withing the commons, in order to deliver and evolve services for the social web. A fediverse that may result from these efforts goes “beyond the app” into app-free computing, towards the vision of a peopleverse. A place where online technology serves our daily lives.
For anyone interested, there is a Social experience design chatroom (social / sociosphere) and a Groundwork labs chatroom (technical / technosphere) to join.