Ideating organization structure for the Grassroots Fediverse (wiki)

Community
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Parallel tracks

Proposing organization along two tracks that takes place in parallel:

  • An organic and grassroots evolution of the Fediverse.
  • A formal track related to future standards at the W3C.

The diagram below depicts this idea in more detail:

Organogram showing activitypub.rocks as top-level portal and two branches below, one for grassroots fedi, the other for formal steering body
Organogram showing activitypub.rocks as top-level portal and two branches below, one for grassroots fedi, the other for formal steering body924×612 41.4 KB

Given these tracks anyone involved in the developer ecosystem should find a place where they feel their contributions add most value.

The Grassroots Fediverse

What we have…

ActivityPub Rocks website

A landing page to introduce people to AS/AP having great SEO.

Proposed TODO’s:

  • Approach @cwebber with ideas re:activitypub.rocks (done: mail by @aschrijver)
  • Bring website under Fediverse codeberg org account? Collab with @cwebber
  • Redesign the website, keep it up-to-date (editor team, volunteer @trwnh?)

SocialHub Community

This very forum with a rich archive of insights and things to be processed. With 687 members on March 2023.

Proposed TODO’s:

  • Seeking new forum admins (led by @how, see this topic)
  • Improve the Community Governance
  • Elect / organize a Wellbeing team

Fediverse Codeberg organization

Organization account on a FOSS software forge, to create teams and repositories. Currently here we find:

Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP’s)

FEP’s are currently the only process where shared technical advances are discussed and specs defined. We discuss them in the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals forum category.

W3C Note of the FEP Process

As proposed by @melvincarvalho and supported by @eprodrom and official W3C Note published by the SWICG can make reference to the FEP process hosted on Codeberg and SocialHub.

Proposed TODO’s (please update re:W3C procedure):

  • Write note draft
  • Review/publish

What we might add…

Forked W3C repo’s of ActivityStreams and ActivityPub

For years the W3C repo’s were unmaintained. By (soft-)forking them to Codeberg, we can dedicate to adding updates to the text and also host them on non-Big Tech platform. This may serve multiple purposes:

  1. Might dedicate to thinking about vNext specification drafts, may upstream to W3C later.
  2. Might derive a reduced “ActivityPub: The Good Parts” comprehensive spec.
    • E.g. from framework to constituent parts (see AP critique recently quoted again by @trwnh)
  3. Might make the specification easier to convert into tests, by providing clear labels for requirements, see here.

There may be interest to set this up, e.g. by @helge on a hard-fork side (bullet 2).

Fediverse Development Documentation website

For years we have a messy wiki post Guide for new ActivityPub implementers, that has a lot of good info, but that most people forget to update.

There’s recent initiative to launch a developer documentation site FediDocs by @gabek. Yet it is on Github. Would be best for collaboration to have it under Fediverse codeberg org.

There’s a Github repo where sequence diagrams for message exchange patterns are created (by @boyter). This would be very useful to be under one single documentation portal.

Then there’s more fragment places where documentation exists. Let’s unify and not reinvent wheels.

Proposed TODO’s:

ActivityPub Test Suites

Test Suite projects should be available under the Fediverse codeberg org account. There’s the official test-suite that needs to be fixed, and the unofficial one by @cjs in Golang that might be forked. Also there’s been talk to having a test suite first of all defined as pure documentation in text and/or Gherkin BDD behaviour tests.

Federated Diversity Foundation

Fedi foundation was created by @aschrijver and previously proposed as a multi-author website to keep track of technology developments on the Fediverse. It has since been made part of social coding movement, but is still available for the original purpose.

Having people share background articles on their apps and FEP’s and such in a portal site, makes it easy for the dev community to follow along AS/AP ecosystem evolution.

Note that the ActivityPub Rocks website is another candidate to fulfill this role. Though it might better serve as a top-level drilldown into the parallel tracks of grassroots evolution and formal development.

Gathering the SplinterVerse?

Here are various initiatives listed that document aspects of the Fediverse developer ecosystem… initiatives that might bundle forces.

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