Anyone keen on a fediverse conference in 2023/24

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I got a lot out of the ActivityConf online event in 2020, even though the pandemic had already started to affect my capacity to participate in fediverse stuff. As I’ve said elsewhere, I suspect many of us have been busy surviving and adapting in the last 3 years. But with things calming down a bit, and especially with the surge in fediverse use over the last 6 months, it seems like a good time to regroup.

I’d love to make it another online conference, for reasons I gave in the 'verse:

Given the timing, this was held entirely online. Which was actually much cooler than trying to participate remotely in an in-person event. Videos of the talks went online in advance, so we could watch the ones we were interested in beforehand. That meant we spent all of our conference time talking to each other, rather than sitting silently listening to one person speak for an extended period of time (my biggest bugbear with conferences in the age of easily-available web video).

Two FediForum events were held in 2023, and it seems likely more are planned. But there seems to be a consensus in this thread that the goals and format of these are quite different from the kind of event we envision.

The other idea that’s come up in the thread is to do monthly online meetups about the fediverse, modelled on the Open Tech Will Save Us events the matrix community were running until Sept 2022.

Would anyone be interested in attending such an event? Either kind, or both?

Assuming there is some interest, some follow-up implementation questions;

  • Would anyone else be willing to put some time into organising it (edit: I’m keen)?

  • When would be a good time to do it?

  • Shall we use a BBB server again, or are there other online conferencing tools that could work better?

  • Given the massive uptick in mainstream interest, could we get some funding to cover the expenses, and maybe even pay the organisers for some of their work?

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Count me in Strypey. Sounds like a great conference to attend and learn a lot and do a lot of networking with like minded folks.

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BBB is a great way to go. It supports main and breakout rooms, all of which support the same feature sets including videos for playbacks, screen sharing, whiteboard, live chat, etc.

I’ll try to dig up a success story link I have somewhere, I forget her name, but she goes over everything they accomplished and endured having a live conference with live speakers, chat etc. She used primarily a combo of PeerTube with Matrix, which worked well for them and she includes the gotchas, which were mostly just timing factors and a bit of snafu at the beginning of some programs with respect to audio (feedback on her open mic trying to monitor while broadcasts started - she details it).

PeerTube now has excellent livechat too, but it’s still being sussed out for larger audiences so that’s a factor, and it doesn’t have breakout rooms of course. It’s main advantage is that transcoding is pretty fast so presentations are available almost immediately after the broadcast ends - more flexible with less manual manipulation of Playback than with BBB.

BBB can be taken even further depending on the technical level of presenters with imbedding via OBS for events with a much richer experience.

Like I said I’ll try to dig up the link I talked about above, but the timeline shouldn’t be rushed - maybe set the event to two or three months from now (mid June to July?) to allow for adequate advanced planning, resource spinup and testing, dry runs for presenters, lead time for programming, and regular, continuous outreach/marketing, Etc., across the forty four corners of the Fediverse :slightly_smiling_face:

Anchoring and prominent mention of SocialHub here should also IMO be very evident as the source and goto for post conference gatherings too.

Sounds like a great idea, from the official link here of the w3c published recommended standards and workgroups.

FOSS should begat FOSS, depend on FOSS in good dogfooding practices, and use FOSS based document retrieval and archiving systems instead of deprecated, legacy silo tech like gdrive, google docs, Dropbox, or Box, IMHO.

:sailboat:

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Yes, ActivityPub for Administrations also used BBB and it was a good experience, great software.

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I think this is a fantastic plan

  • it would give us space to reboot the fading #EU ActivityPub adoption.

  • clarify the different paths of all the new federation standards, and highlight the #openweb approach as different to the #dotcons and #encryptionst, though building bridges to them is a good outcome, diversity is always healthy.

  • make the FEP more social, so they can have more social buy in.

  • address the obviously bad problems with kings and princes of our feudalistic governance in #FOSS and look at democratic alternative #OGB

  • issues with AP intro operation of our current codebases, most do not play cleanly with each other, thinking of #peerube here, but this likely applies to most.

There are many more, subject…

As well as all the new codeing project doing introductions and the old codeing projects updates on where they are at and where they are going.

I support #BBB as have found the last 2 years of #fahernista and #dotcons video confruncesing to be a failer compared to what we did with BBB and the #EU outreach.

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You’d be thinking of this blog piece by Máirín Duffy, ‘Run an open source-powered virtual conference!’

We’d need at least that long I think, but it will depend how many people step up to help with coordination, and outreach so we get a wide range of participants from across the 'verse and beyond.

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This article is an overly complex path.

With BBB (built in)

You have the groups chat, the individual chat

You have the live edit wiki page with the notes

This covers everything on the surface.

Then you can have an outside chat app for people working on the event to coordinate logistics, we could maybe use the socialhub as a forum instead, this would be more #4opens

IDEA: Am thinking it would be good to get the #EU to sponsor the event, if someone has a contact to make this work without too much Eurocracy.

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Apparently I’m reinventing the wheel. FediForum happened last weekend, and apparently nobody on SocialHub knew about it? They are floating the idea of having another one in Sept/ Oct.

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Interest of developer community is picking up fast, across the fedi and in ways where the usual fragmentation between various initiatives becomes apparent, detracting contributors from each other and discussing things that are also discussed elsewhere over and over. SWICG mailing list activity and FediDocs (now fedidevs.org) and by extension other new initiatives is why I started Ideating organization structure for the Grassroots Fediverse (wiki)

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This was a paid event, they invited us and still asked to pay for a fee for the priviledge of making a presentation. There also wasnt a single familiar name among the organizers, and it looks like it was really all about Mastodon. So it would still make sense to make a real Fediverse conference.

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FediForum, was the #twittermigration organizing an event, this is limited but good, VERY different to an events the #socialhub has been doing.

Would be good to organize an event that bridged this, rather than one side or the other fighting, we are seeing the HORRIBLE mess of the “protocol wars” we don’t want to add to this #fahernista mess.

“Native” is good, and we can do this if we can stop fighting like cats for a time :slight_smile:

20338

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OK, that’s definitely not the kind of event I had in mind :wink: They might be willing to make registration for the next one gratis if we provide the BBB server and help with organization?

Thanks both of you for the context. I’ll talk to the FediForum organizers about their ideas for the next event. If it seems like what they have in mind is totally different from what we’ve been talking about, we can at least make sure the dates don’t clash, so folks have the option of attending both.

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Yes indeed! That’s the one :slightly_smiling_face:

It’s a great read, IMO, especially considering a couple of things:

  • The planning/logistics, and staffing requirements
  • How BBB/Greenlight really shines in contrast to having such an assemblage of moving parts all brought together.

Others have given a positive nod to BBB and it’s capabilities in this thread too. Something of note that the recent NLnet conference availed themselves of was incorporating tmux into the mix for the workshops :+1:

It’s hard to beat PeerTube’s automatic transcoding and VoD capabilities of presentations with livechat too, but there are some issues with many who would be presenters having to spend some time familiarizing themselves with OBS (it takes a bit to dial everything in, green screen, compression and gating on audio, etc.

@nutomic pointed out the timbre of that fediforum event, and a couple of presenters I know were less than complimentary about how it unfolded (there were no schedules - everyone just showed up and then decisions were made “democratically” as to whom would present and in which order).

He left out the (IMO) most glaring indication that, like @hamishcampbell mentioned, the organizers and general feeling was that it was folks from the #November_Rain, not particularly in tune with Fediverse history and culture or available resources in the FOSS community - and required the paying attendees and presenters to install and use privacy disrespecting, closed source proprietary software (a 3rd party skin for zoom) in order to attend.

That speaks volumes as to their previous orientation as subjugated chattel in the world of the Sunnyvale Syndrome

We had one person from Fediverse City at the time who volunteered to install that software and attend, reports back were lackluster, like people trying to figure out what kind of purpose they were trying to achieve or address. It’s s pretty good idea to know what those things are before you actually hold an event.

Fortunately, we’re all fervently committed to dogfooding here, so that’s not going to be an issue, and that is an especially refreshing thought when we’re taking about garnering EU participation - leading by example of using FOSS for delivering FOSS centric topical gatherings.

The occurrence of a sophomoric event like that, obviously completely incongruent with FOSS values and traditional Fediverse philosophy, does however indicate a deeper problem lurking beneath our waters… Outreach!

We’ve been miserably failing on that responsibility (if we’ve even chosen to accept that responsibility). It demonstrated the damage to the ActivityPub and Fediverse community caused by the double edged sword of the mastodon marketing whereby a large chunk of those November Rain folks believe that there’s such a thing as a mastodon network (there is not) and scratch their heads when you say Fediverse.

We can’t blame (well, we can) someone for wanting to, and then successfully marketing their product brand, but when it generates damage in the form of confusion it has caused we can certainly blame ourselves (as that greater community) for not effectively engaging in the kind of outreach that delivers the clarity and understanding that is needed to impart to the general public.

This conference you suggest IS NOT reinventing the wheel - it is exactly what we need at this time. Had we been performing our due diligence in this regard then that fediforum thing would have reached out to us instead of performing as if they (all three people) were in a vacuum.

And you’re right, lolz… Even as I penned that last post I was aware of the timeframe I mentioned as being overly ambitious, I was hesitant to take a good idea and say it would take longer to put together effectively - good catch there :+1:

Well, that’s my 2¢

:sailboat:

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:laughing:

I have some experience in putting on events, having co-directed 3 community-based festivals. I’ve also co-organized a number of activist conferences, including a number of gatherings for Aotearoa Indymedia back in the noughties. Putting one together in less than 3 months would be a challenge for a defined network of people with a clearly-defined reason for meeting.

For something as diffuse and complicated as the fediverse community, it would be impossible to do it well, that quickly. OTOH we don’t want to leave it too long, or we risk the potential benefits of the November Rain turning into catastrophic flooding. Late Oct/ early Nov passes the sniff test for me.

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I’ve got some experience in livestreaming, mostly casual stuff like playing music and chatting, or working on projects building things online and sharing questions in a sort of live how-to, and a lot of history as a service provider.

I used to do things like spin the wheel and give away small increments of crypto ($5 -$10 range to aquatint people with the technology) and semi-monthly server giveaway prizes (usually the servers being deployed online in the streams); so things like PeerTube, BBB, and OBS are quite familiar (OBS itself has good multi-stream capabilities now).

Zero experience here organizing events lolz.

Lemme know what I can do to help, I’ll consider it a privilege to defer to you on all matters with that latter part but can do grunt work as assigned lol.

This can be good and regular, perhaps annual thing.

The concern, I feel, that all of us should be wary of, is akin to what we had years ago with BBScon - it was great, for those who were able to attend (sadly, I did not number among them), but then…

The corporations with deep pockets moved in as sponsors, tried to force their way into monetizing Fidonet, and spectacularly destroyed the harmony of the entire ad-hoc worldwide communications (dare I say, “social”) network that happily hummed along until that point.

If we can self organize without interference by the deprecated silos with their friendly E.E.E. checkbooks, then that in and of itself will be a triumph for DeSoc in general and specifically Fediverse.

I think your time frame is spot on. I’m pretty sure it’s in my profile here, but regardless, the best contact points for me are via Matrix at: @tallship:matrix.org or via XMPP at: tallship@jabber.org (I use OMEMO).

I’ll try and follow this thread too and Arnold @aschrijver can always get ahold of me too.

Willing to do as much or little as needed :slightly_smiling_face:

:sailboat:

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Super.

Im happy to volunteer.

Is it going to be a heterogenous panel selecting entries for one room?

Or are there going to be many tribes being autonomous with parallel rooms?

Or maybe a mixed one with different rooms and tribes with seperate rooms and they all duke it out for the lead room slots?

While Im pleased that there are discussions regarding FOSS tech for the actual event, it may be worth establishing a team for marketing and comms - using federated technologies.

It should be win-win to approach the leads of all these Fediverse technologies, asking them constructive things regarding not only how their tech and communities could be represented but also establish an effective way of communicating to these communities.

And I would really want to see these links and posts interweaving across different tools and instances as a principle.

Similarly different staged boosts to showcase things.

I mean, if a dev team are going to release something cool then this conference could be forwarned and the comms calibrated for the drop - winwin, no?

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I reckon interviewing developers, as well as content based panel discussions may be interesting as an approach to build momentum and develop ideas ahead of time.

Id be happy to interview people regarding their stack(s) and emphasize its pertinence wrt Federated approaches, though Im admittedly too distracted to edit or transcribe beyond uploading.

Id suggest somebody/others with greater stature, experience and restraint to chair multiple person thematic recordings though.

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I don’t really understand the purpose of this comment.

So… do you think we should work together on one event? Or are you saying you don’t want anyone involved in SocialHub to attend your event (because “drama”), in which case we might as well organize our own (with different dates of course)?

To be honest, the patronising tone of your comment here, and similar comments you’ve made on other posts, doesn’t make it seem like a friendly invitation to work together :confused:

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Who is we? You may want to take the time and introduce yourself in #welcome.

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Freedom of association is an important value in the fediverse, so I respect your right to choose who you do and don’t want to work with.

Working in the decentralised tech space means having to be inclusive of all sorts of people, some of whom can be very abrasive and hard to communicate with. It also requires fair but firm moderation of community spaces, so Bad Actors don’t spoil them for everyone else. It’s sometimes tricky to distinguish between comments that are just a bit prickly, and abusive behaviour that needs moderating. It’s always a judgement call, and even the most well-intentioned moderators don’t always get it right.

What’s it called, when is it and how do people register?

Fair enough. Do you have a code of conduct or rules of engagement, or some other document that lays out your terms?

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