Proposal: New top-level forum section for Domains

Community
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With a host of Hospitality platforms now considering federation, and already a bunch of different application categories being covered by various apps (Microblogging, of course, Blogging, Media platforms, etc.) I would like to propose adding a new top-level forum section “Domains” for this. A subcategory would then be “Domains/Hospitality”.

Though #fediversity:fediverse-futures can be used for general-purpose discussion, these domain subcategories are meant to deep-dive into e.g. specific vocabulary extensions, messaging patterns and all kinds of other interop issues that are specific to apps within that domain.

cc @how

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domains/hospitality seams good to me.

Would these make another domain? Something like reuse or goods sharing

  • books sharing (inventaire.io plans to adopt ActivityPub),
  • food sharing (karrot.world),
  • outdoors gear sharing (hope to be one day),
  • tools sharing (same)
  • baby stuff and kids clothes sharing (same),
  • car sharing,
  • …
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The Hospitality domain is very broad in itself, but that is fine. If splitting up into subdomains is beneficial we can always do that at a later time.

Yes, it would. I was thinking of a more general name of “Resource Sharing”, but strangely enough that is a known term that applies only to Libraries. But some further search from this led me to Collaborative Consumption as maybe an appopriate name:

Collaborative consumption can be defined as the set of resource circulation systems, which enable consumers to both “obtain” and “provide”, temporarily or permanently, valuable resources or services through direct interaction with other consumers or through a mediator.

The Wikipedia page even contains handholds for Domain design, by e.g. defining:

  • Obtainer – The individual who seeks to obtain a resource or service that is provided directly by another consumer (i.e. the provider), or indirectly through the mediation of an organization known as the “mediator”, which may be for-profit (e.g. IKEA’s used furniture sales) or not-for-profit (e.g. The Salvation Army);
  • Provider – The individual who provides a resource or service either directly, to a consumer (i.e. the obtainer), or indirectly, through a “mediator” (for-profit or not-for-profit).

And two sub-domains:

  • Obtainment – entails second-hand purchase, reception of donation, barter, temporary access to resources free or for a compensation (excluding conventional consumption rentals), reconditioned/refurbished consumption, and to a lesser extent, recycled consumption;
  • Provision – involves second-hand sale, donation, barter, provision of temporary access to resources free or in exchange of a compensation, trade in (i.e. with an organization), and to a lesser extent, recycling.

Regarding Hospitality. The Big Tech unicorn booking.com was in the news yesterday in The Netherlands, because - despite having received 100 million Euro’s from government Covid support funds for “struggling companies” and having had a “bad year” themselves, this monopoly player in hotel bookings dealt out 28 million in bonuses to just 3 people in their management team.

Booking.com represents a true shitty parasite in Hospitality, with many prior scandals similar to this one.

It would be a super opportunity to have a federated booking service for small hotels and B2B’s to integrate into their site, at low predictable costs or no cost at all (for instance by having the self-hostable booking integration service take care of federation).

Thanks for pointing to Inventaire. I have reacted to their AP issue and added them to the ActivityPub Application Watchlist.

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I’ve read the wiki description and it sounds very appropriate. I kind of don’t like that the therm itself is asymmetrical in a way that having in the name consumption and not production puts more emphasis on the former. And in case of reciprocity it is not taking that makes it work but rather giving. People are often motivated by paying it forward.

In the hospex community it is sometimes referred to as gift economy in contrast to sharing economy. Yet goods/resources sharing and hospitality exchange seems more balanced then collaborative consumption.

Worth noting, after Gift economy - Wikipedia :

Some authors argue that gift economies build community,[7] while markets harm community relationships.[8]

Exchange is also sometimes criticized by its transactional nature, but alternative options could be to go even more general with resource circulation or generalized exchange.

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Yes, agree with that. I like Generalized Exchange as it focuses on the commonality across solutions offered by those currently interested. Though in its meaning “Social Exchange” is even more general, it may be more relatable to ‘social networking’ to people unfamiliar with the term. Gift economy or Solidarity economy may be too broad and generic, idk. And “Sharing economy” has been hijacked by unicorns where to me it has negative connotation.

(Btw, I found that Hospitality Exchange is mentioned as a specific form of Homestay. Might deserve its own wikipedia page.)

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Both Generalized Exchange and Social Exchange are good, the latter sounds slightly better to me too.

Gift Economy and Solidarity Economy does not include renting or selling things for money, and they can be mixed together in sharing and exchange options. For example inventaire.io makes it possible to give, lend or sell.

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@how @nightpool could you jump in with an opinion on this proposal? This needs admin privilege to create.

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Some other Domains for which we may have dedicated sections, so interest groups can collaborate…

Open Science

With hypercapitalist science getting more corrupted all the time there’s a lot of interest in Open Science, and many proponents are fellow fedizen. There is much opportunity here to create a strong interest group. A group too where participants, given their expertise, are very good at analysing domains, standardizing specs and setting up procedures. All stuff that can help other domains bootstrap faster.

We have the #software:olki project in our community, but in a recent toot thread @rigelk and @cerisara told me that funding has dried up unfortunately. This while with SciFed draft they created a good basis to expand on. Grassroots Review Journals is also interested and already planning AP support (in a RSS-like use case, see Pubfair).

Maybe @VictorVenema and @erik are willing to rally people for this cause, do some advocacy… ?

(Note: I added SciFed to AcitvityPub Developer Resources watchlist and also to delightful-open-science curated list that’ll soon be greatly expanded due to wonderful work of @VictorVenema)

Open Funding

Via @rysiek another toot thread veered into interesting topic of funding free software and open grassroots communities. This domain may be excellent to brainstorm exciting applications. I maintain delightful-funding (huge backlog to process, co-maintainers welcome), and striking is the fragmentation in the landscape.

A project/community asking for donations will not mention more than max. 4 donation options, so they choose the biggest platforms where network effects result in highest ‘yield’. In other words: people naturally flock to the Big Tech dominators, while involved creating FOSS that aims to break their monopolies.

I imagine people setting up federated instances that host their own ‘OpenCollective’-like fund aggregators. The federated software may provide backend integrations to several donation / funding / payment services. Then on Fediverse funding widgets integrate with e.g. your Pleroma / Masto profile, and on PeerTube below a video, or in Mobilizon to finance an Event.

Micropayment

In a different part of the financial services spectrum we can look at Micropayments. Super duper interesting stuff is already planned in the form of @cwebber Spritely Hyptis. We should get an interest group going for this, folks, to among others help Chris realize this great vision sooner!

Another interesting and related discussion in this domain is @richardhroth1’s Is your participation in this exchange worth 2 cents? (PonyUPS and PonyXPS). PonyUPS works best in a small-scale Community context (just like Hyptis), and that leads to the next domain to consider…

Community

On the Fediverse clearly defining concepts of Community is key, and many people are (knowingly or not) involved in building communities (around their apps or instances, for instance). Getting Community right on fedi can be a great boon for so many fedi apps, and help take Fediverse next-level. Fedi culture is rooted in a “Sense of Community”.

This domain has a bunch of subdomains that may require separate interest groups. In the paper A Community Network Ontology for Participatory Collaboration Mapping: Towards Collective Impact by Aldo de Moor of CommunitySense community is depicted as follows:

Depiction of Community model as described in Aldo de Moor's paper

We already have ongoing discussions on several of these subdomains:

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Open Science

With hypercapitalist science getting more corrupted all the time there’s a lot of interest in Open Science, and many proponents are fellow fedizen.

No idea how one would define hypercapitalism, but science is not capitalist. There are no customers, no profits. You do not get paid better for doing better work, in the best case you are rewarded with more scientific freedom. If you want better pay you have to do less science and do more management. Investment does not pay off for capitalists because the return is in the far future and they are in no position to judge it.

Politicians and managers like to talk about competition in science, but as there are no customers, this is mostly about abusing the workers more. Don’t be fooled by their dumb neoliberal rhetoric. That science still works is not because of this fake competition blah blah, but despite it. Because scientists care about science.

Scientific publishing, a parasitic sector, may be called hypercapitalistic, but capitalistic and monopolistic will do.

That being said, “science” would be a good domain. I think I prefer the term “science” over “open science” in this case. “Open Science” is a fashionable term that will go away at some time and it is rather a hodgepodge of ideas about how we could do science better in a digital age. Where we succeed, it will the default way of doing science.

This while with SciFed draft they created a good basis to expand on. Grassroots Review Journals is also interested and already planning AP support (in a RSS-like use case, see Pubfair).

Science is used to fund projects aimed at the common good, without expecting immediate returns. (Officially even without expecting results, it is funded by grants, a grantee promises to work on something, but does not promises to deliver a product.) So funding the Fediverse would be natural for science funders if the Fediverse were the layer below many science tools. Unfortunately, because of the neoliberal fake market talk, it would be mostly project based and thus development and not maintenance.

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Yes, you are right. It is an inaccurate description, typed too fast, too early in the morning. What I meant was the parasitic part of scientific publishing you mention on one hand, and how this directly or indirectly effects the field. The need to publish in ‘reputable’ journals and getting cited, plus how that relates to reputation and obtaining grants. Haven’t experienced myself, and no domain expert either, but I hear 3rd-hand stories that make me cringe, and often read on HN things like Please commit more blatant academic fraud | Hacker News. Makes one biased, which is never good.

Scientific Publishing may be one obvious (sub)domain to specifically focus on.

The broader ‘Science’ (which I agree is better than referring to Open Science) domain would be very ambitious. “Fediverse as the layer below many science tools” is also hugely intriguing and interesting to explore.

Maybe in terms of funding maintenance we can get the neoliberal fake markets at their own game: organize (like unions) collaboratively as ‘services’ that ‘produce’ scientific deliverables, so that there’s an incentive to uphold these services. That’s far off where academic world is familiar, but Fediverse is a good opportunity to bring significant cultural shift. Take open science next-level, maybe :slight_smile:

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The approach by “domain” seems very interesting to bring aboard a more diverse crowd with interests not necessarily matching technical interests, yet be fundamental to how different communities understand and interact with the specification and software (including with software developers).

It seems to me that it would be a useful case for tags. We might have a “domains” tag group and tag topics according to one or more fields. My understanding is that topics may cover or concern or be relevant to more than one domain. Also it would be useful not to spread out too thin in categories, especially as #fediversity is being picked up by more people.

So I would recommend using tags for this purpose.

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That is indeed also an option, and it might work well. One disadvantage of tags is that they are less obvious as a grouping for topics and at the time of creating a new topic it is hard to know which tags exist. On Humane Tech Community I used a lot of tagging, but I hardly use the feature myself, nor do I have the feeling that other members use them a lot either.

Btw, “Domain” may not be the best name for the forum section. “Interest groups” may be better, as it makes clear where people can deep-dive into their own particular exptertise. Most of the stuff being discussed, when it comes to technical elaboration, will boil down to vocabulary definitions and specialized message exchange patterns, and the like. In these there’s not a lot of overlap with things happening elsewhere on the forum.

Also there needn’t be tons of ‘interest groups’ by choosing their names as covering more generic fields, rather than very specific. Subdomains are then natural part of stuff you’ll find in those subcategories. And with that tags can still be used. There may an interest group “Hospitality” and topics tagged “hospitality-exchange” and “hotel-booking” or something like that.

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(Note: this comment and the two below were moved from Hospitality exchange community considers moving to the fediverse ;))

Food Pantries

Just found another candidate for this domain. Who wants to approach them, making an ActivityPub case and invite to SocialHub?

They are at the start of their evolution, not yet building concrete projects. Here’s their product story map so far (with overlapping subdomains to other Hospitality projects):

Food Pantries User Story Product Map
Food Pantries User Story Product Map12954×3220

See also: LibreFoodPantry – a community building FOSS for food pantries | Hacker News (interesting remarks about the tech focus of this community, seemingly losing sight of the domain they are intending to serve)

Update: I added a comment to the project pointing here.

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I wouldn’t consider food banks (non-US name for “food pantries”) as particularly related to hospitality exchange, maybe that fits in a broader real sharing economy (but not the airbnb/uber kind of “sharing economy”) category.

I think “hospitality exchange” is nice level of abstraction to think about on it’s own. Specific enough to build out some common software features, but general enough to allow room for specific details and identities to be expressed by independent nodes in a network.

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You are right on both points. At the time of typing I was having “sharing” in the back of my head, coming from @mariha’s post elsewhere listing a bunch of sharing-related projects. I moved the posts to that discussion thread.

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organize (like unions) collaboratively as ‘services’ that ‘produce’ scientific deliverables, so that there’s an incentive to uphold these services.

Federated Science Tools of the world unite. Not a bad idea.

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@how @aschrijver @nicksellen what about if we started with #hospitality tag so that everyone interested could start to follow and use it, and then see how it works?
Then as there is a need we could create a category or split it into finer grained sub-groups.

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