POLL: SocialHub Scope and Purpose?

The SocialHub scope and purpose should be limited to that of the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group:

The SocialCG provides space to collaborate and coordinate for implementors who are building on any of the specifications published by the Social Web WG, and related technologies. It is also a place to incubate new proposals which build on or complement the Social Web WG recommendations.

Please note that according to the homepage of the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group SocialHub is the forum of that CG. That is something which needs to be discussed because the Mailing List is now active again and GitHub is also used by the CG. Instead of one place for discussion there are several which do not seem to be coordinated.

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Yes, agree. I do not know the extent to which this mention of the SocialHub indicates an “official W3C relationship”, rather than “here we also discuss”. For me personally these W3C mailing lists never really worked. I minimize email use, but also the UI offered to navigate these mailing lists is a PITA, imho :sweat_smile:

But they do have the ad vantage of being a better archived track record of prior discussions when compared to this forum.

When it comes to picking up a formal standards body there’s more than SWICG meetups alone (see my notes above). Things go even to an extent where we can think of whether work done for a AP v2.0 needs to be under the umbrella of the W3C. It might just as well be under the IETF, which may be even a better fit for a grassroots community of fedizens and FOSS developers to organize their ecosystem.

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The IETF has its place in the world of standards organisations. Healthy communities can live under both umbrellas. But I doubt that the IETF would be preferable to a W3C CG regarding community. So far most people who were or are related to Social Web standards seem to be more related to the W3C. Network effects apply here too. The SWICG has 122 members - most of them not active currently.

The link with W3C is highly relevant. The disjoint nature of SocialHub and SWICG is confusing for newcomers. It would be great to get more on the backstory and even better to understand the nature of the formal relationship.

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The forum software does have the ability to separate discussions by topic, so it can serve as the official forum for the community group, and also as a forum open to the public to discuss ActivityPub.

It comes down to what the admins and moderators want to maintain, because ultimately, if less-technical ActivityPub topics are not discussed here, they will be discussed somewhere.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Working and thinking on “native” aproches to governance

A post was split to a new topic: Clarify relation of SocialHub versus FEP repository

If you want to pursue this it is best to summarize your ideas in a new topic, so that it can be split into more actionable chunks, be they social activities (e.g. people organizing) or socio-technical support you think is needed and that may be turned into FEP’s or larger AP vocab extensions.

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I chose in-between for the requirement to share my vision: Discourse allows to focus on some topics and ignore others, which enables people who want to focus on technical terms to do so, while allowing broader topics at the same time, and thus helping non-technicians to discuss topics relevant to ActivityPub and the Fediverse, without bothering those who wish to focus on the protocols. I think this compromise makes sense because some technicians will be able to talk to both crowds, and therefore close the gap between techies and the rest of us.

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Guess how things are going right now, focus is mostly on the tech sides anyway, so, fine with me :slight_smile:

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it’s an interesting dynamic on this forum over the last few months, lots of “mechanical” tech subjects that have non “native” flows pushed, think most will fall on barrion ground, that is an advantage of grassroots working :slight_smile:

But the is little tech focus on what I would consider “native” needs, leading to the problem of balance and focus. We all agree with the issues of #AP/ #openweb governance that we are in a mess with little movement or focus.

Yes, this might be better than going the full #dotcons path… but kinda only a holding action, what are we going to do :slight_smile:

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I agree with you that there is a need to define structures to address “governance” such as moderation issues. For example, it would be useful to have a way to fight the idea that “blocking stuff” is a silver bullet.

However, I don’t think this can be the place. There are already more discussions happening here than I can process. Adding another complicated topic to the Discourse will make SocialHub less usable. I also think that the technical and social problems of the FediVerse currently don’t have a lot of overlap.

There is just too much ground work left, before one can start on the hard stuff.

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The current lack of grounded thinking about BLOCKING and control is such an ant-social process, when we start to think about groups and trust this can take us back to the more “native” #openweb path.

This is exactly the place we need to talk about wider issues, the #FEP process is a current example, people come in with #geekproblem issues and push these though very small #geekproblem process to arrive at #geekproblem outcomes this is fine if you think we don’t currently have a problem :wink:

http://hamishcampbell.com/2023/02/18/the-solution-to-the-geekproblem-is-to-realize-that-good-societies-are-built-on-trust-not-control/

The fix for this is not obvuse, but narrowing this “governance” place to ONLY the #geekproblem is clearly not going to work :slight_smile:

So let’s add some social thinking where it’s needed and make some effect to explane complex tec issues in a way more normal people can have input into the outcome, it’s all very basic simple stuff that we should be doing anyway.
FUTURE

I think quite the opposite. We have too many problems and need to be selective about which ones to address. I mean I could spend a few hours writing an explainer, what is all wrong with Fixing The Reply Count. I’m just as confident that it would end up being a pretty pointless exercise.

So I focus on what I know I can solve. These are the geek on geek issues like what to name a term in a json object.

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@j12t brought the key questions in this topic for discussion on the SWICG mailing list:

I think a very accurate observation by Johannes is:

My suggestion would be that the primary problem is not so much focus, or lack thereof, but a lack of energy and probably time, on behalf of the people here and on Socialhub, to move things forward.

In particular I think there’s a general unwillingness to make effort beyond one’s own projects and passions, and esp. where time spent in improving the ecosystem is concerned with doing the necessary chores that that involves.

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A lot of great talk here. But I think we’re going to always come back to the same result: there’s no set goal for this forum. And I honestly dont think there needs to be. Having SocialHub as a support forum and archive is great and it does that well.

As evidence shows in past threads about this topic, we can’t force anyone to drive this. If anyone wants to move AP or fediverse forward, that’s likely going to end up being done by the biggest fediverse players (e.g. Mastodon, Plemora, etc). But I do think they should work together and agree with improvements or additions to the AP protocol and perhaps make an open-process around it. Kind of like how browser vendors agree on browser standards.

That’s the best bad outcome we can likely get out of the current mess :slight_smile:

Bad is better than fail, let’s keep trying to do bad better, thus the use of mess metaphor.

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We can only hope to better this forum by getting more people involved in its maintenance. I think we’re slowly getting there.

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I would personally claim, that the current problem of the FediVerse is good projects. I have a general feeling that we will only understand, how to evolve ActivityPub in new directions, once we see people using it.

Problems such as described with offerbot are mentioned on the FediVerse at least once a week (from my subscription to the #ActivtyPub hashtag), so there is interest. We just lack the project. So someone needs to build the “FediVerse Marketplace” and we will see what happens. The needs of this project will be quite different from the microblogging (= Fediverse Town Square) world.

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