Building consensus in #FOSS communities requires embracing a messy yet practical approach to decision-making. To foster a healthy ecosystem, we can adopt messy democracy, allowing open dialogue and loose consensus, alongside the creation of affinity groups—small, self-organized teams that focus on specific goals but maintain autonomy.
We need to start small with proposals that get community approval, like a few votes or likes, and encourage transparent feedback for objections. This process is grounded in #4opens principles, fostering collaboration and trust without rigid hierarchies. Simple, adaptable, and effective. #KISS
Proposal:
Put a prominent link on top of socialhub to both the #WC3 process and the #SWF foundation
Ask the sites to link back with a prominent link to this site.
Review this decision after 3 months to see who links to who and should we continue to link.
A very simple ruff process, conversation, 5 likes on the post to get a ruff consensus to act.
Anyone (who has been a member of this site for 3 months) can BLOCK in the comments, if 5 likes on the explanation of why they are blocking, then we don’t do it.
BLOCK - I’m not going to elaborate my thoughts about the Foundation here because I’ve discussed them at length in the related thread: SocialWebFoundation - what do people think?.
To me, a prominent SocialHub link to the Foundation home page is as offensive as linking to their X/Twitter account. The Foundation’s misinformation and corporate “bigger and better” focus are unacceptable to me.
Personally, I think the negative side has a stronger case than the positive, but the LINK (bridge) for me is a tool for mediating the negative to actively push a more positive outcome - As just standing aside changes little.
Interesting if we get more negative than positive votes in this, will show a clear fail of our community, with FEAR over TRUST being the dominate path, this would be, both, sad and bad, but might reflect the mess we are in.
I think this is an oversimplification. Personally, I’m not afraid of the Foundation. The intentional misinformation campaign and lack of transparency causes me to be distrustful, but that’s not the same as fear.
If a community encounters an organization with values inconsistent with the community’s values, and the community decides to maintain a distance from that organization, I see that as a clear win for the community.
A positive outcome here could be the Foundation acknowledging that the Social Web is more than just ActivityPub and accurately rebrand itself as an ActivityPub advocacy group. So far, those suggestions have been strongly rejected by at least one of the founders.
The is a chicken and an egg issue here, I have been around this “community” since we stared it, and there have only been fleeting moments that we could actually call this a “community” the rest of the time it’s libertarian cats all the way down.
Communities are not afraid of linking, this is basic, and why I use the trust and fear in the post.
NOTE there is the review part after 3 months to mediate this real fear.
Yep, the #SWF branding feels imperialistic and confusing, but they are likely doing this for what they see are good reasons:
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Both Nostor and Bluesky are native openweb projects and are likely #4opens, but both are problematic from a social and financial reasons. Both come from the same #VC thinking, one from the liberal and the other from the crypto mess.
Am not focusing on criticising them as they are native to the path we share, but am reluctant to link to them as we have a MUCH better reboot going on with #activertypub.
Yes the more, the better but let’s focus please, we don’t want to retreat to the mess we have with chat standards.
So to sum up, I am not saying you’re wrong,
I am saying we need to do better and linking is a step to build this, to actually become the community we would like to be.
I don’t support a link to SWF at this time, but for different reasons than @stevebate. Basically I’m still in the wait-and-see camp.
For one thing, I don’t think we know yet what kind of influence they are going to have. If it turns out to be positive, then at some point we may want to link to them. If it turns out the good intentions of the founders are compromised by the funders (not unusual, which is why we’re all here), then we’ll be glad we didn’t rush into a link that’s bound to be perceived as a kind of endorsement. Even if that’s not our intention.
Second thing. One test of SWF’s intentions is whether they try to support and promote existing community efforts in the space, including SH and FediDevs. So I’d want to see them linking prominently to SH before we even consider linking to them.
EDIT: It’s worth noting that even before the SWF was launched, when @eprodrom was interviewed on Dot Social and asked where people could go to find out about fediverse software development, he listed FediDevs and SocialCG and a few others, but not community projects like SocialHub, fediverse.party or the FEP process.
That’s a valid path if we can get a consensus to take it.
BUT: it’s a path where nobody links to anybody - as the is no incentive for #mainstreaming to link to alternative, none at all, and meany resigns they will find not to link.
If LINKING is going to start to happen agen, and to be the openweb this linking should be core, then it has to come from us the grassroots. What the #mainstreaming do with this in reaction, is a balancing act.
I think we can likely build the good will, if we do this early in a good way, to get two-way linking working which would be a part of the STRONG community building we need, to mediate the fear of this place shutting down.
Just in case the mods and admins missed this post, we are trying to build the community which is currently missing, the consensus process with a bit of good will could be a tool to do this.
If you want this to happen, it might help to explain why its important to have a separate Proposals category, instead of just putting up proposals in the Community category, as you have with this one.
I’m not sure what you make of it, but for me it’s clear that wait and see is a safer and sounder approach than embracing the BDFL top-down approach the SWF is proposing.
Also, if you want more voices, maybe you can propose a poll rather than artificially bump topics to make them prominent in the topic list while your opinion is not served and satisfied.
However, the meaning of “like” is ambiguous with this system if someone BLOCKs the proposal and suggests a counterproposal in one comment. Someone might like the BLOCK but not want to support the counterproposal.
But the key point here is that linking is reinforcement (whether positive or negative), and as I alluded to in an earlier comment, by default it implies an endorsement. It was pretty clear even before you opened this thread that there’s not yet a consensus here to endorse the SWF.
If you can get an in-principle agreement with the SWF (in writing from an official spokesperson) that they will immediately link to SocialHub as prominently as we link to them, then we can discuss 2-way linking. I definitely think that would be worth considering, but will you volunteer to follow up with them to get that agreement, understanding that a link from SH to SWF might still not happen? Even though Evan has already said he doesn’t think it’s necessary?
