Glad that this is happening. We, Flarum, are here too.
6 Likes
We just had our first meeting! Here’s the recording
Passcode: z+1*4pUB
I’ll be following up in detail with the group on monday 
5 Likes
@devnull posted meeting notes which spendidly popped up in my Mastodon UI ( 
). There was one part of the notes where I felt I needed to follow-up on, namely:
- FEP has a more asynchronous process for clearing out objections, less cohesion than SocialCG
- Discussions take place on SocialHub
That last bit isn’t entirely accurate. Quoting my toots:
Important note to discussions of the #FEP.
SocialHub merely facilitates the FEP process.
The #SocialHub #ActivityPub dev community is only the default community channel.
Meaning its optional. By no means is it required to discuss there, if you don’t want to. For any FEP a forum topic is created, but you can discuss anywhere else.
Each FEP document in the #codeberg repo gets an accompanying tracking issue that list all the places where discussion takes place.
So if you have a working group at #FediForum or #SocialCG the discussions can take place entirely at these locations to keep everything together. And still posts #FEP’s to gather feedback on them and see folks implement them.
As suggested in the diagram there’s interaction from the #W3C #SocialCG who cherry-pick as needed whenever they see opportunity to further standardize particular artifacts that’re crafted anywhere in the decentralized #ActivityPub developer community.
So cc @eprodrom and @j12t in another plea for a bottom-up standards process that fits a decentralized open ecosystem:
- FediForum and SocialCG and any other devhub have direct access to the FEP process.
- SocialHub is merely facilitating the process itself, only optionally part of the authoring workflow.
- Important goal, no gatekeeping: FEP Process is wholly open and is available for everyone.
If you feel that the FEP process needs to be changed, in order to meet that goal… that’s great. Continual improvement is part of the process itself and any feedback most welcome. 
3 Likes
Now that we have Discourse and Flarum here, we could federate with NodeBB category on Threadiverse WG. If NodeBB joins, then we can have live federated discussions and debugging
1 Like
Yes, I think @devnull is also keen to set this up. What would be the best category on this forum to use?
I guess we can create #fediversity:forasphere for this.
We decided to refer to ourselves the “Threadiverse”. Perhaps we could call the category that? Also, ideally we’ll use Articles instead of Notes. That’s something we’ll need to agree on perhaps.
Also, you may be wondering why many posts in this category are not federated, e.g.
It’s because they are part of topics (like this one) that were started prior to federation being turned on in this category. Publishing “orphaned” replies from a topic does not make much sense. This is one of the differences with publishing Notes in non-threaded environment like Mastodon. I’m thinking of adding a “reason” entry in the ActivityPub status modal you see in the screenshot, something like “Reason: Topic is not published.”.
“Bulk publishing” of existing content will soon (in the next week) be available as rake task. And will be exposed in the admin panel soon after that. That means that you’ll be able to federate the existing topics and posts of a category, i.e. those made prior to ActivityPub being turned on.
“Bulk import” will also be available. This means that, if we have spec alignment, we may be able to import existing topics in a nodebb (or Flarum) category to a category here. That will require the activities for those topics to exist in those services’ outboxes.
“if we have spec alignment” is a caveat to be sure. That is why we have this taskforce
2 Likes
@how @aschrijver would you mind if I setup a sub category under Meeting called “Threadiverse Working Group” with the ActivityPub handle threadiverse-wg@socialhub.activitypub.rocks?
threadiverse-wg@socialhub.activitypub.rocks could then follow threadiverse-working-group@community.nodebb.org and @devnull could set up threadiverse-working-group to follow threadiverse-wg@socialhub.activitypub.rocks.
And if other folks in the working group want to create a similar taxonomy / group on their service, we would all mutually follow each other and work together via our own forums / threaded platforms
2 Likes
By all means. Take free reign to set it up in the way you think works best. 
1 Like
I am very sorry that Threadiverse is the name that sticks. It kind of legitimizes Threads, doesn’t it?
I’m personally not really fussed. I would just say X platform can federate with X platform. For me the name really just has operational utility for the purposes of the working group. What would be a better name considering we want to also include Lemmy / Kbin etc in scope? In any event you could come to the call today where we’ll be proposing the group to SocialWeb CG and object I guess
1 Like
I’m fed up with being the one who keeps going upstream at meetings. I would hope that this kind of considerations would be present in our community, but I’m seriously starting to consider that I may not be part of this community after all. I don’t think I want to keep fighting for this forum and the social ideas it supports, it seems to me the fight is already over.
If we’re talking about making a number of forums/fora, link aggregators, and ‘magazines’ interoperable, I don’t think threads is a good name. Collective publishing, public conversations, social bonds, social knowledge (is it open to ibis.wiki as well?) come to mind.
We’re not evolving in a desert. A company known from the start to despise their users (“They trust me. Dumb fucks.”), that has proven links to NSA PRISM global surveillance program, whose goal is to have the most possible access to human conversations, and feed AI without regard for copyright laws nor consent, that has been repeatedly fined for crossing the line with privacy, censorship, hate speech, political influence, etc. launched their ActivityPub service and called it Threads.
If we are not able as a community to acknowledge our positions and values, I do not see any reason to continue here.
Your contribution is absolutely valued. I’m sorry it seemed I was suggesting otherwise. If it wasn’t for you the Discourse ActivityPub plugin probably would have never existed in the first place. I would just point out that we did have a community call where we discussed the naming question.
“Threadiverse” was voted on by all of those present. If I were to change it unilaterally now I’d be ignoring the input of those who came to our meeting. That is why I invited you to the SocialWebCG meeting as I think that would be perhaps the only way the name might change now, as the group’s name will need to be accepted by the SocialWebCG.
I don’t use Zoom. Never did, never will.
I come from a very different activist background and we don’t take decisions like this: we provide the space and time for everyone to chime in. We created such a space here, and it gave the FEPs. I know the game and played it: be there or be square. This is the game of Silicon Valley, not the game of the grassroots. I know what it costs to play and prefer not to.
Thank you for the invitation though. I always admired and supported your work, I don’t think that will change anytime soon. But I don’t think I can make it to the meeting though. All I have to say about it is written and public. If any of this is of value, then someone can relay it. I don’t think I can keep up with such (fundamental) details emotionally anymore.
1 Like
The SWICG meetings are held on Jitsi.
2 Likes
On this thought, the reason why “Threadiverse” was suggested was because that term was already in use in my corner of the fediverse to refer to Lemmy/kbin, and other link aggregating software.
Until @bumblefudge brought up the potential collision here on SocialHub, I was not even aware that it had any association with Meta.
I personally do not consider “Threadiverse” to have any relation to Threads. I appreciate that others feel otherwise. As @angus has stated, the name is mainly utilitarian and shouldn’t be considered an endorsement.
4 Likes
I feel the same way.
I understand where you’re coming from @how. One thing I think we’ll take from your feedback is that our group should endeavour to include asynchronous contributions to our work as an equal input to synchronous contributions. There will be folks who can’t make video calls for a variety of reasons. That’s the idea behind the category Threadiverse Working Group and its counterparts, e.g. @swicg-threadiverse-wg@community.nodebb.org
I think these things are always a bit less holistic when they start as there are so many questions to answer and everyone is still feeling things out. That is where I (and I think Julian is too) am coming from with the utilitarian approach to naming (which is not intended to be an endorsement of Threads the Meta platform). Using the existing name for Lemmy/Kbin etc seems to remove one issue from the long list of issues to address.
That said, the feedback is heard insofar as we’re going to make sure we canvas our inputs asynchronously as well as synchronously. And, yes I think it’s fair that we consider using jisti instead of zoom for future calls.
2 Likes
OK I give up. 
My current admin intern, when I mentioned the word “threadiverse”, asked: “Oh, did Facebook already make a federated Metaverse?”
Maybe we should consider a disclaimer: No, we are not a Meta venture.
Or sue Meta for using Threads when it was already used by Lemmy and Kbin. Prior art has some power in court.
1 Like
One thing I wanted to also point out is that for a group of developers of ActivityPub software, the fact that we don’t collaborate via ActivityPub enabled software is one low-hanging fruit (excuse the corporate parlance) this WG intends to address.
For example, that @aschrijver had to cross-post the meeting minutes here is something that shouldn’t need to be done.
So @angus started the category for the working group here, and we’ll work as closely as we can to get that two-way sync going ASAP.
3 Likes
As I mentioned upthread, any competent trademark department ought to deny a trademark application of the term “Threads” as it is such a common word.
I’m wondering how much money Meta would need to throw around to force it through.
1 Like