Important: We need Your Input on the Future of the SocialHub

This is, in itself, a problem that needs tackling. There’s no reason why, in a technological society, programmers of the commons are left aside, while programmers of surveillance and other violent systems are well paid.

As a reminder, I will point to the still ongoing NGI Zero funding scheme that has already brought a lot to the ActivityPub community. This is far from perfect, but it can help people get by and focus on their software while receiving a comfortable income. I wish this scheme would work for community as well : doing more docs, gatherings, specification work…

I also wish, and have been for years, that free software be considered public infrastructure, and financed as such.

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After starting this topic I have withheld from interacting on this thread. Besides lack of time, I really wanted people to vent their own ideas and give feedback first, and many good responses were given thus far.

I am no longer moderator, and will not come to summarize and ping people, suggest ideas…

In dev circles you sometimes here: “Show, Don’t Tell”. It’s a bit passive-aggressive, showing you don’t value communication with others until after they did some lonely work. There’s something it as well. Amusingly it also applies to community building and engaging with peers. And here the talking talks. It is the “Show” part of the quote, as it were :slight_smile:

If one thing became clear in communities as grassroots as the Fediverse and its related SocialHub it is that people must show their own initiative and pick things up. Or nothing will happen. Just-a-forum is the default state, if @how and @nightpool continue to be kind enough and willing to do continue to provide it. Vibrant, active community involves us all. If you want that, but you lurk, you won’t get it.

Since a week I am deeply involved in the solutions-side regarding shenanigans with Gitea Ltd where community seeks alternative options, and there was mention of a DoOcracy there:

DoOcracy

A do-ocracy (also sometimes do-opoly, which is a more obvious pun on “duopoly”) is an organizational structure in which individuals choose roles and tasks for themselves and execute them. Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials.

Now, I don’t know what is best for SocialHub. I’ve spent sweat and tears here, trying. What I do know is that we might just start with a DoOcracy to figure out the best way forward. And let things run from there…

“Show, Don’t Tell” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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YES… for all its problems (and delights) this is a how the fediverse works, so it is a native aproch which is respect.

Though CommunityWiki: Do Ocracy the link is VERY non-historical, sadly like most current web knolage, the ideas do not come from burning man abovusly, they inherited this mind set from What is a Rainbow Gathering? - visionOntv were burning man came from, PS. this still exists and is MUCH bigger than burning man if on purpose much less visible.

Looking back a bit more, these ideas matured in protest grassroots movements over the last hundred years, and likely go back to the digger and before…

Likely the best place we can learn ways to organize and link is this rich social history of lived expirence #OGB

UPDATE:
Rereading this, am imagining not very constructive replys if any, so worthwhile taking the time to say why.

All working alt ideas/work gets consumed by #mainstreaming the history we most often see is this not the original ideas/work. Thus, I keep going on about “lived history” as a path out of this current mess and work on projects such as http://visionon.tv and https://www.historyofresistance.org to highlight what works from the people who actually made things work, not the “consumed” version of history we to often link to online.

UPDATE2
humm this does not come across helpful, it’s truly a mess, what to do, ideas?

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100% agree. But this doesn’t just affect programmers. The ethical tech movement also needs to find ways to fund a living for UX/UI designers, community management, etc. A lot of the funding you mention is only available to fund work on code. Which is a bit like funding a restaurant by only paying the cooks, not the people who design the menus, wait the tables, or do the accounts.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that these funds exists and I encourage everyone in our movements to make use of them. But my feeling is that long term, social enterprises/ platform cooperative models are what we need to provide the missing financial layer to our organizational stack.

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Not only do I agree with you, and I also like the restaurant metaphor because this is the case. At petites singularités we have been ringing the bell since day one for NGI Zero to promote not only code. Hopefully, in the new set of projects running through 2026, we get more of non-code sponsored. Unfortunately we are not the ones to select who gets the funding, and so far the criteria are mostly “technical”, in the most reductive way that one can understand technicity – despite we all know within free software that “technique” is mostly about transmission. So please, when you apply, try putting in some community management and design features so the funders get to choose what matters beyond code.

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By my count there 18 people who voted to revamp and work on org structure. Though I have no special power on this forum and have only been around for a year or so, I volunteer to take an active role in fostering this transition.

Edit: Now that I’ve had a chance to read through all the responses, I can see a range of feelings which include the need for more of a plan, being inclusive of everyone not just programmers, that this future is going to be set by the doers, a need for more practical content, and lastly the funding question came up.

I’ve known for almost two decades now that free software is incredibly valuable and that there’s a disconnect between that value and what’s paid for it. In the last 5 years, I took an increasing interest in social media but just last year wanted to pursue the overlap which brought me to the Fediverse. A couple months after diving in, I realized there’s got to be a right way to do this so I went searching for free software best practices. The journey from there helped me realize that the community not the software is primary. That means that if we want any project to be successful we have to set things up to build a healthy community.

We need a strong mission, the community has to be easy to join but not tribal, we need strong protocols so that we can self-organize, and we need tolerance for all kinds of backgrounds because that diversity helps us do the most good for the most people. There’s a lot more I can share behind this and I feel like I’ve located a good playbook.

From the above I feel like we can grow SocialHub itself to be sustainable, help standards move elsewhere, and start making real progress toward whatever mission we agree on.

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@aschrijver Question about the poll. Does it have an end time? I think if we set one in a while it’ll help to push for more votes and feedback and help to convert this interest into doing.

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It doesn’t and I can also no longer edit the topic post. Above I mentioned DoOcracy and would suggest to approach anyone who responded in favour of reviving SocialHub with ways how they can help with that.

And I suggest also to not stumble on the definition of DoOcracy as @hamishcampbell puts it in historical context. On Discuss Social Coding I described it as just meaning:

“pick up any task you want, and then steer it to completion”.

A new governance structure need to be set up to turn this place from a forum into a healthy community again. The biggest barriers to that before have been: To incentivise current dev community to do more than what’s in their immediate self-interest, and help divide the chores of community work. It is a win-win to their own projects eventually.

Currently the situation has significantly changed. While there is near zero substrate (people and processes to uphold the ecosystem), with the twitter migration and media attention for Mastodon there’s Corporate Interest™. The fediverse is full with ‘The Wolves of Silicon Valley’ as it were. That means:

If corporate interests turn into a Corporate Takeover trend, and there’s no community-driven hub where it is logical to contribute, then corporations will completely take over this activity and wrest control away from the community entirely.

There will be SocialHub(s) somewhere else and new W3C Working Group(s) with the usual corporate leadership driving Fediverse vNext open industry standards.

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Cats… we have really fucked up on this one…

OK, into the wild west did not end well for the Indians, that’s us, how could the Indians have turned round the history of the USA?

I do not have enough historic background to that, but in analogy to SocialHub it might have helped if Indians from the east would’ve convinced as-yet unaffected Indian tribes from the west to engage in the fight early on.

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A lot of bad history in this link United we stand, divided we fall - Wikipedia cats and “governance” of #fediversity we have almost no time left to turn this around.

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#OGB we had the opportunity to code, build and embed in our culture a well understood historical way of horizontal working a year ago What would a fediverse "governance" body look like? when the need for this become obvious from our #EU outreach.

We would now have “voices” to talk to this #mainstreming influx, democratically base and native to our project. We don’t have this.

Cats and #geekproblem #blocking comes to mind.

What #KISS to do now? Ideas?

I’d like to arrange some sort of collab for those who are interested in the vibrant option #3. My preference is to join a chatroom and collect problems that need to be solved to get this off the ground.

One comment I saw on @aschrijver’s Mastodon post brought up the oddity of talking about the fediverse on a non-federated Discourse forum. Others have expressed displeasure at the forum’s reliance on Javascript, so to Do my part I’ll attempt to organize through the fediverse.

Out of the 18 who voted for the progressive option, nine of you have expressed that in text, but I was only able to follow two. If you’re interested, please follow me at @weex@c4.social and send me a DM just stating who you are here and what role you’d like to play.

The w3c social web community group (unlike a working group, does not have membership requirements other than code of conduct) has had its public-swicg@w3.org mailing list re-enabled. public-swicg@w3.org Mail Archives

I’ve always been a bit hesitant to use this discourse forum much because I don’t understand its sustainability model, who has access to the server, how long it will stay up over the decades, etc. Threads like this don’t increase my confidence.

For some reason I don’t know, the w3c mailing list was disabled several years ago, but fortunately it has been re-enabled. W3C isn’t perfect, but its email lists have been running for almost 30 years. Unlike socialhub, they run on a federated protocol (email). I feel more comfortable discussing this stuff there.

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I’m of a very similar mind as @bengo.
Specifically, I’m deeply grateful to @how and @nightpool for providing this forum, as it’s been a crucial community for fediverse devs.
I also worry about the sustainability and permanence of the forum archives, though.
Now that the W3C SocialWeb Community Group’s mailing list is reactivated, I suspect I’ll participate there as a primary conversation thread.
(Though still will keep an eye on socialhub, of course, since I know it’s still important to people.)

@bengo @codenamedmitri your point on the sustainablity of the W3C is certainly valid.

OTOH (and that’s personal) I don’t know any more unwieldy, unintuitive way to dig into an information archive than those mailing lists. They may be handy for folks to discuss points related to ongoing work in editing drafts etc. They may be handy to know they are archived. They are a horror imho to find anything in that archive.

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Ooof, that’s a good point, re those mailing lists having horrid UI. I seriously don’t understand why we haven’t solved this, as an industry.

Btw, (and @how will find this interesting as well), I was approached by the Flarum core developer @luceos@fosstodon.org, and they will be adding federation support to their forum software… :tada:

This is what we have been looking at for Discourse to somehow support (with the Fediverse going mainstream they may revive plans for AP support as well), so that AP Dev community discussions are part of the fedi.

(I pinged Discourse Meta with this news as well).

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One of the problems is that everybody is happy with others taking care of this, but nobody takes the time to think and act about it. This forum was created after the APConf meeting in Prague, as it was proposed and discussed there. Early on I took the responsibility to set it up and keep it up and running on behalf of petites singularités, which is the non-profit I’ve been working with on NGI Zero mentoring and before. This has all been documented elsewhere, and I also called for help and discussing governance several times. I think the community should take care of itself, but there’s no such will nor endeavor so far to provide a sustainable alternative to the current situation, hence the various proposals (including fedi.foundation) and ongoing conversations here and on the Fediverse. This forum is staying as long as there’s no other alternative to keep an living archive and knowledge building space for the community. If there is a decent federated alternative that can enable such degree of knowledge building and long term archival (beyond mailing lists and restricted wikis) it will certainly take precedence over this Discourse instance that refuses to federate – so to speak

I already proposed @rhiaro to integrate a list mirror here, because this is something that Discourse can do and that would consolidate the community to share a single space – hence, also, the will to make #software:discourse federate.

If Flarum can federate, why not. I also see LemmyBB, but in terms of interface, Flarum looks and feels much better. Sorry BB people, I just cannot handle 80% of my screen estate being used for flashing names or signatures.

The intention of this forum has always been to provide a longer term, slower pace, common place for the ActivityPub Special Interest Group to work together and build knowledge for sharing with other protocol, developer and user groups. What works best will be best. The question of whether you engage with it or not is critical, for if you don’t the purpose is not met.

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I think that part of the difficulty of figuring out who’s doing what is the fact that most of this is remote, and while that has it’s advantages, it also has it’s disadvantages. As a result, everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do.

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