This boils down again to “What does it mean to be federated?” and then either take the ad-hoc, app-centric approach, connect to the flow and tap into the fediverse juice and make the best of that over time via whack-a-mole driven development. The other approach, aligning to what @trwnh mentions, is a more designed one, where well-defined use cases drive the development efforts. Contrast the approaches as:
- Connect Discourse software to the fediverse
- Community on the fediverse
With 1) it is entirely unknown what you eventually get, and as becomes clear, until now we got a messy fragmented situation. The Need of the Fedizen audience was implicitly “full decentralization” and explicitly for SocialHub to “be part of the fediverse” and not needing a separate account to be created to participate in the discussions.
But that is but one single Need. What is the full list of Needs? And what other stakeholder types are there beside Fedizen role? Now we are getting towards 2) and what it means for SocialHub to be considered a “community on the fediverse”. And here too should Discourse - product slogan “The online home for your community” - and Pavilion be most interested, as this relates directly to product development.
Here too is big opportunity for the ActivityPub dev community, as it is the path to overcome the Achilles Heel that is the triad of Big ball of mud architecture, Golden (microblog) hammer, and Whack-a-mole driven protocol decay development.