Call to action. Sketch your vision of the social web

Fediversity
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Various broad-ranging discussions have raged across the fediverse, and here, about all aspects of the future social web in all possible variations and flavours and tailored to any desire. The cacophony of voices, babylonian confusions, repetition, overlap, misinterpretation […] knows no end. Absolutely nothing comes forth other than some individual notes and commits here and there.

Maybe that is all that is possible. Maybe there is nothing else in our commons to be done than that.
And for our bigtalk and dreams we need professionals in their corporations come clean shop.

But maybe something more is possible …

:warning: Important: Participation in initiatives below requires active involvement. Participants are responsible to steer their own feedback through the various stages of the process and delegate chores fairly. Without that commitment there are no guarantees your feedback is honored.

:rainbow: Social web protocol vision, a survey

@helge initiated a feedback collection survey and I helped facilitate it. The goal is to sort out all the voices in our dev ecosystem and among fedizen crowds, and funnel it into a distillation process whereby one or more work groups might form.

:rainbow: Protosocial fellowship and groundwork labs, a proposal

There’s so much chaos in the fedi dev ecosystem, that trying to bring order to it almost makes one akin to a god. Task is impossible for any single human being, and collaborating is also not our strength.

The survey above is intended to be a one-off event, followed by maybe a kick-off of something that follows up. Or a petering out of this attempt to facilitate the community, if there’s no interest.

Yet this should be done on a continual basis, and also there are many other ongoing processes and parallel activity tracks that make this fediverse tick. We need well-oiled and powerful open social tools, with which to co-create our open social stack that can be sustainably maintained and evolved.

There’s docs, procedures, templates, practices and more that any protocol designer or implementer commonly needs. And then also there is the ‘FOSS disconnect’ where full attention is on technical matters, and very little on the whole delivery supply line and externalities in the environment where the social technology or solution is introduced.

That can be way better. Currently fedi is one big experiment where everyone plays, and some want to be more serious. Fedi is part ongoing experiment, playground, diverse culture incubator…

:point_right: The fediverse installed base constitutes a veritable open field laboratory for the commons.

Hence, opening more playground on the social coding forum, I offer another proposal:

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In terms of activation mechanism fun to say that - as I mentioned before - there’s a little ‘toolkit’ I use, and that is to tease, nudge, play. Based on the gentlest tease, a teaseful nudge follows, inviting people to join delightful play. Enfin, the goal is to subsequently help people take pause and reflect, become aware of option, choose the best path, and hopefully join the (multi-player) game. (I personally hope for our game to be analogous to building Civilization II with a Bevy-like or similar open source engine that we build along with it collectively.)

In the diagram of the proposal “Fediverse Open Social Stack” is a tease. Maybe not gentle if it were just dropped into fedi timeline as flamebait, but gentle in the way I hope to explain the intent. The tease is of course meant to trigger people in action. Until now response is but poor, but this hasn’t been spread wide yet, as it first need people to prepare things well.

That may lead to conclusions about the maturity level of the fedi tech stack and esp. grassroots ecosystem. However, if conclusion is we are only pioneering still (and then there is a production-ready mastofedi), that is fine outcome to me personally (holds corporate takeover at bay) and for everyone its good to know where we stand. In which stage of the technology adoption lifecycle are we?