I don’t have a strong opinion on threadiverse/foraverse question, but this simply doesn’t feel right.
How many of attendees are implementers? I can count 3. Were representatives from leading projects such as Lemmy, kbin and Friendica present at the meeting?
I don’t understand why some random people (most of whom are not even mentioned in the notes) are making decisions. I think workgroup should consist of those who are actually invested in this space, otherwise it’s completely illegitimate.
Thanks for the feedback @silverpill. I’ll make a few observations in response.
These platforms have been represented in this process so far:
Lemmy, i.e. @nutomic, was personally invited to our first meeting, however he sent his apologies and couldn’t make it. He’ll be following along asynchronously. If Frendica want to participate they are absolutely welcome.
The meeting we just had came out of an inclusive and open discussion at a federation conference. The follow ups which led to this organisational call were announced and distributed by multiple people:
The decisions taken at our meeting were largely operational. As Julian mentioned, we needed to select a name so we could propose this group to the W3C SocialWeb Group today. A group has to have a name. We had to decide on one somehow. As with the previous call, you are absolutely welcome to come today and submit your thoughts on the creation of this group
As we’ve mentioned above, going forward the work of the group will be both asynchronous and synchronous, with the asynchronous parts being conducted via federated content across this forum and others.
Why this group should be proposed to W3C? I don’t understand. And why this has to be done in a hurry, without any discussion beforehand?
Sounds like you’re being forced to do that.
Wouldn’t it be better to collaborate informally, develop standards with broad community involvement, and only then making it all official?
I prefer asynchronous communication in text.
I’d like to clarify two things:
The name Threadiverse was coined when Threads was still called Barcelona/P92, specifically to refer to both Lemmy and Kbin. Here is what I wrote in July 2023:
“People have gotten to refer to Lemmy and Kbin as the “threadiverse”, but now that Meta’s new app is called Threads, this name is getting confusing. The landscape is still in flux, but I’m hoping that clarity on naming settles down soon.”
In my writing I observe the fediverse closely, and I have not seen any real effort by the community to start using other names than ‘threadiverse’. The name has been around ever since, and I don’t feel comfortable that people who try to use current naming conventions in the fediverse get flack for supposed issues with the naming convention.
That said, I dont think there is really anyone who is super married to the name of threadiverse, there is tons of space to introduce other naming conventions. Its just that nobody has bothered to do so in the last 9 months. We can still do so, ofcourse, and I think it would help with clarity.
Second point:
There were representatives of:
That leaves out Lemmy (invited, but passed on the invitation) and Kbin.
As an outside observer of the space, I think this is realistically the best that you’re going to get as a representation of the space. Having Lemmy onboard would be nice, but cant do much if they get invited and pass on the invitation.
Thanks @laurens for that context, very helpful, and interesting!
@eprodrom came to our meeting and suggested we come to the SocialWeb meeting which happened to be the following day (it happens once a month). We thought it was a good idea. So we did.
No, not being forced. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m a bit crazy signing up for more meetings, but that’s another issue.
I want to be clear that async collaboration will still absolutely be taking place. In fact it will increase!
This isn’t an alternative to async collaboration. This group is a collecting and focusing mechanism. People are busy. Focus is hard.
The point is not to disempower anyone at all. The point is to focus the relevant minds so we can build a better threadiverse.
@silverpill you’ve helped me in the past and I’m grateful for that. I hope we can continue to help each other build.
Also Friendica, Hubzilla, lotide, streams, Smithereen, Guppe (all have group implementations predating latest Twitter migration wave).
I’ll acknowledge that there were people who did not make the invitation or call. Please understand that if they were excluded it was not intentional.
The intention of the WG is not to upend the existing work done by those groups — quite the opposite — we want to bring together as many existing developers as possible to coordinate on a common path forward.
There may be some concern that there are new names coming on trying to change things. I understand the hesitation. While you’ve been watching Discourse’s progress with AP, NodeBB and Flarum are new to the game. We’re essentially unknown entities!
At this point I don’t think @angus or I even know what the focus of the WG would be past the next month. If there was one thing that was gleaned from the initial FediForum session, it was that there are too many issues that need addressing! We could’ve (and almost did) spend the entire session bringing up issues…
Scott Stolz was part of the initial FediForum session and was aware. I am not certain whether or not he made the calls this week.
Funny enough, so do I. That’s why one of the first things @angus and I are working on is bridging our two forum softwares together via category actors (following FEP-1b14), so you don’t have to join the monthly calls. Since the content is federated, we should be better able to reach the wider fediverse as well.
I dont like the name “Threadiverse” because I dont feel that it describes Lemmy at all. If you ask me Lemmy is a type of forum or a link aggregator. Threads are not a distinguishing feature, even Mastodon has them (with a terrible UI). Ive always thought of Lemmy as part of the general Fediverse, it also federates with many other projects like Peertube, Hubzilla, Friendica or Lotide.
So why dont we use the name Fediverse? Mastodon doesnt have any exclusive rights to the term.
Im also wondering what this working group will do, do you have plans to write FEPs or other standards documents?
SocialCG report to be submitted to the W3C. There’d be drafts and revision, and opportunities for comment.
Optional FEP, depends on needs.
The important thing is everyone who wants a say gets a chance to voice their opinion. Last thing I want to do is declare a “one true way”. Might be compromises are made, but it beats everybody individually reinventing a slightly different wheel and then writing shims to support each other.
I am looking forward to having a report that implementers can use to get started. I’m really glad this task force is starting up.
oops sorry i may have contributed a little to the “forcing” (more like peer pressuring?) of this group to consider the Community Group Report as a deliverable format that might help build common ground and mutual trust so that UX issues around federation-across-UX-assumptions might be documented and improved incrementally and via FEPs and test cases for open, permissionless, fork-friendly test suites. That last bit is kinda my “thing” (hopefully gathered in a CG report later in the year!) so i thought this group might wanna be connected (asynchronously as much as possible!) with my efforts. If u scroll up a bit you can see me dreaming of an “interop profile” of the sort Johannes has been asking us to codesign and crowdsource, with an eye to sharing the work (and averaging out biases peaceably) so that interop and UX work at a high level can be surmountable.
anyways, in these matters, i always encourage people to avoid either/or territorial metaphors-- this group doing some work “in” w3c never precludes and only in very minor cornercases slightly complicates or inhibits the same people doing other work here and in FEPs. if this group wants to call itself a Task Force, cool 
, all they have to do is propose a deliverable and collect input from that w3c repo fairly. If that deliverable were normative, they might have to be a little more careful about IPR opt-in, and some members might sit out that workstream, but that seems unlikely. id certainly advise against it any time soon! ive seen no grounds for anyone to get territorial or accuse anyone else of false claims to speak for others. it all seems pretty opt-in and voluntarist to me so far?
anyways theres enough work to go around, and enough unsettled process questions that we dont need to add more accusing each other of things. the CG modes of working and publishing reports and interfacing with FEPs are all up to the group to define consensually, so if any group or work item in the CG makes you nervous, maybe volunteer a little time to channel these governance concerns into a draft charter for the community group, or a definition of its task force working methods? bengo tried to get a commitment to async decision making ratified almost a year ago and it stalled out for lack for time to finish the editorial process 