Hi there Melvin! There are areas with good activity, and this forum has relatively good engagement at times as well (it goes in waves).
The issue in my opinion is that most stuff that happens is very project-oriented, and most knowledge and insights gleaned remain siloed in these places. There’s progression in apps and some research projects, but little to no progression in the ecosystem as a whole. It never gets easier for newcomers to enter, only more complex, and they need to hack away, dig in other codebases, meet the right people by chance, etc.
Improvements and iteration on the specs, proper documentation, well-known active community to interact with … very little of that. And indeed broadening the community beyond developers, so its members have more diversity in skillsets and backgrounds is important too, imho.
I sometimes feel that the Fediverse and communities within are ‘grassroots movements of individualists’. And on the whole that ‘time is the most precious commodity in this world’ and people just want to spend it on their own things. This is fine, and maybe just the way it is, but it refers to the problem to tackle: How to make it more interesting to participate for the greater good of the Fediverse?
At least for existing federated app developers there’s a clear win-win that is probably overlooked. Some projects like @write.as and @mastodon have their own communities and would immediately benefit from Scaling Up Cooperation. It is a low-hanging fruit.
The kind of involvement that is need is people doing the community work and the chores to bring the community to a higher level, make it more well-known, and expand its member base. It might be beneficial to have something of a ‘Community Team’, so there are always people active and things don’t fall on an individual’s shoulders. There must be “staying power”, we should be in it for the long haul.
And possibly there should be proper incentives for those people to participate: "What’s in it for me?"
The positioning and organization structure of the SocialHub can be improved. I think for once some “centralization” (in scare quotes) is in order, i.e. offer an intuitive structure to discover the best information and easing + encouraging of active participation.