Poll: Should SocialHub be scoped to AS/AP or Social Web?

[bumblefudge]

@thisismissem

Having a legal entity behind SocialHub with member representation and such (co-op style) would provide longevity that no one person can provide. We can also do optional membership fees (which give you nothing besides a warm fuzzy feeling) via say OpenCollective to keep operating snd moderating SocialHub sustainable

Administrivia sidenote: the easiest way to establish a legal entity (and skip the “fiscal host” dance required by OpenCollective) is to find a willing “coöp accountant/bookkeeper” in the Netherlands, which is something like the Delaware of the EU when it comes to nonprofits.

[strypey]

@how

Please prove your statements. As far as I know, I proposed to run a Discourse instance during the APConf, I have set it up myself, and I have been running it ever since.

Ok, I’m genuinely confused by this.

Am I the only one who remembers the original SocialHub? The one that both Feneas and @how sought to replace when the domain owners vanished. Leading to Feneas making their one a more general federated social stuff forum, and @how putting this one under activitypub.rocks, to indicate a narrower focus on the protocol the fediverse was converging on.

EDIT: I’m sure I remember having conversations with you at the time about it @how. Mandela Effect?

EDIT#2: To be clear, I’m not saying that this Discourse instance was ever hosted on another domain. But rather that there was a previous Discourse instance called SocialHub that this one replaced, and maybe some theads were even carried over?

[aschrijver]

Before my time. In terms of history, I think @dansup can also put more clarity to the turn of events.

[how]

@strypey

Am I the only one who remembers the original SocialHub? The one that both Feneas and @how sought to replace when the domain owners vanished. Leading to Feneas making their one a more general federated social stuff forum, and @how putting this one under activitypub.rocks, to indicate a narrower focus on the protocol the fediverse was converging on.

Now you are confusing me. I thought FENEAS did not exist when we started here.

[strypey]

@how

. I thought FENEAS did not exist when we started here.

Do you mean Feneas (Federated Networks Association Ry) had already ended by 2019, or that it came into existence after 2019? Either way, definitely not the case.

We have records on this forum of when it wound up at the end of 2021. Because @aschrijver and I were trying to help lifeboats from their sinking Discourse island find dry land here.

I’m not sure exactly when it started, but it appears to have been sometime in mid-2018. I clearly remember them setting up their Discourse instance around the same time this one was set up, for the same reasons (the original SocialHub being moribund). Although the new SH might have beaten them to public launch by a few months.

I remember it clearly because that’s when you @how, @aschrijver and I (and others) started advocating for AP-based forum federation at Discourse HQ. With the goal of federating the SocialHub and Feneas forums, and a few project-specific ones that existed at the time. Here’s @how offering to set up a discussion space on SocialHub.network for forum federation.

From what I remember of the watercooler discussions at the time, Feneas was originally planned as an umbrella body for the Federation of apps running the Diaspora protocol. With the goal of doing things like run a code forge and chat server for use by software projects aligned with the Federation.

But by the time they got the legal entity set up, AP had been published, and the Federation was merging with the fediverse. So they tried to broaden it as an umbrella for community-led development across all federated social networks. I joined sometime in 2019 (I think?), and it’s a tragedy to me that most of the OStatus and Zot branches of the fediverse family didn’t embrace it (despite much encouragement).

People from other protocol networks who were invited to participate didn’t really either. But to be fair, XMPP folks had their own Foundation to run. While Matrix folks did need their own too, as a vendor-neutral steward for their protocol, which would have tied up a lot of their org energy.

But the fediverse, lacking its own legal entity, had the most to gain from an umbrella body inclusive of all federated networks. I was confused that nobody else seemed to agree with this except for @aschrijver, who was trying to erect a new one from scratch (Fedi.Foundation, which was eventually MVP’d down to a blog).

I have to wonder what was keeping @eprodrom busy during all this. Because Feneas was set up to do exactly the same kind of stuff the SWF was set up for, and could have benefited from the kind of organising energy and funding contacts that have gone into standing up SWF. Rather a missed opportunity

[melvincarvalho]

Let me point out that when we made ActivityPub in the working group there were many more ideas than went into the working group specs. Many of the things were social web related, and ActivityPub was largely microblogging related. Alot of the social web items were pushed into the “next version”, but the next version still didnt happen yet.