Hi Paul, yes the fedi discussion was started from my general worries on the speed of progress, while we are in the midst of a maelstrom of tech developments that are accompanied with many harms of technology. My concern is that we at fediverse overestimate our strength and our ability to stay relevant in the long term.
The organic, grassroots nature of fedi has been our friend and reason for pride, given what has been achieved, but fragmented ad-hoc development is also now holding us back. There are tons of open issues within this community that need be addressed, and also we need to make it easier for others to help the healthy evolution of the Fediverse.
Thanks for your interesting posts! As I tooted you yesterday, it is not a ‘governance’ body per se that is needed, and certainly not a very formal one, rather than possibly a funded foundation to the SocialHub community that takes care of the community empowerment, and doing the chores to encourage collaboration and cooperation, in addition to healthy growth and both internal & external advocacy (having a common voice).
Other than that this “foundation to foster the tech foundation” should be as informal as possible, and fitting with the culture of FOSS and Fediverse folks as much as possible.
(Maybe @hamishcampbell will allow me to change the title of this thread to better reflect this, or we can start a new topic)
The article by Richard D. Bartlett is fantastic and inspiring. Note that I am very interested in Sociocracy 3.0 and possibly to bring this model to fediverse as a vocabulary extension. I also referred to it in Standardizing on a common Community domain as AP extension? (the “Community has no Boundary” paradigm).
Your centralisation concern is very valid, and also - on the development side of things - an issue, where many things are molded and adapted to how Mastodon develops. While they are providing a great Microblogging project, this is only one of the many, many domains + use cases that AS/AP lends itself to interoperability-wise. I created #fediversity:fediverse-futures to give more attention to those, and to also involve more people with different backgrounds and skillsets in the process.