Share what you want SocialHub to be

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Share what you want SocialHub to be

Hey guys, Pavilion recently took over some administrative aspects of this forum. I (Angus McLeod) want to use this opportunity to ask everyone what they want this forum to be, to see if we need to tweak anything. Perhaps we don’t! I thought it was worth taking a moment to ask folks. Share your thoughts by responding to this post.

*UPDATE here’s roughly where the discussion is far.

Who are you?

Pavilion is a workers cooperative. I started Pavilion about eight years ago. I do fair bit of open source software development, and also earn my livelihood through Pavilion. Our business is mostly enterprise folks who use Discourse and / or Wordpress. Pavilion was hired by Discourse (the company) to build the Discourse ActivityPub plugin, and I have represented Discourse in the ActivityPub space as part of that project. I don’t work for Discourse (the company), and I don’t earn money from Pavilion beyond what I earn working on projects myself (it’s a cooperative).

What are you asking?

Having taken over responsibility for some aspects of this forum, I want to know if folks have any ideas about how what kind of place this forum should be. They don’t have to be big grand plans. If it’s just something like: “please add this theme component” or “I want to use category x for y” that’s fine. If it’s something more comprehensive, that’s fine too. If you want the Discourse ActivityPub Plugin to do something it’s not doing here, feel free to say that too. I’m also not saying this forum necessarily needs improving or changing. I just want to get a sense of where folks are at in this space :slight_smile:

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I’d love it to be a positive, collaborative space where everyone feels safe to participate.

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There are several remaining issues related to federation:

  • Many topics in the FEP category are still not federated: Fediverse Enhancement Proposals - SocialHub.
  • Outbox is not paginated and returns a huge JSON document. In some cases it doesn’t work at all, returns 502, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/actor/271cb1ad85bf02c266edf53586d04254/outbox
  • Embedded Activity.actor makes Discourse incompatible with many Fediverse services.

Would be also nice to have:

  • An ability to create a post from a remote server by @mentioning a category.
  • Redirect from a post to a corresponding ActivityPub object when Accept header is set to application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
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What do you mean by “everyone”?

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For people to feel safe to participate, getting a functioning and diverse moderation / well-being team in place is an absolute priority. @angus I really see this as a top priority.

Great question.

Not sure what Evan had in mind I think there are a few different aspects to this. To start with I think there’s fairly broad agreement on in principle (although not always in practice):

  • “everybody” includes disabled people (which is why Improving accessibility in the Fediverse is so important!), Black people, Indigenous people, women, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, sex workers, and others who are generally marginalized in society and within the ActivityPub ecosystem.
  • “everybody” doesn’t include harassers, stalkers, white supremacists, terfs and other anti-2SLGBTQIA+ bigots, eugenicists, fascists, etc

Then there are a few open questions, where I don’t think there are any right or wrong answers, it’s really what the people taking SocialHub forward decide they want to focus on (ensuring it’s aligned with Hellekin’s vision)

  • Does “everyone” only include developers? If it’s broader, are non-developers an equal priority or is it developer-centric?
  • Should it be focused primarily or exclusively on ActivityPub, or is it a broader focus that includes other decentralized protocols (and if so which) and/or other aspects of the Fediverse beyond the protocol?
  • Does “everyone” include Meta? Other surveillance-capitalism companies?

A few other questions on the table:

  • Is SocialHub a community or a discussion space?
  • If it’s an aggregator of discussions elsewhere, what discussions get pulled in – and given the current state of the technology, how does that happen? The Are we decentralized yet? thread is delving into some of the complexities there.
  • What domain to host it at?

On the domain, if the goal continues to be to provide a grassroots complement to SWICG, then I think it has to move off a SWICG-provided domain. .eu implies a Europe-centric focus which is an interesting complement to activitypub.space’s Canada-centricity, so presumably that’s okay. activitypub in the domain implies a protocol focus which has both upsides and downsides depending on answers to other questions.

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Spot on @jdp23 :100: a good summary of things.

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A small note: I still have the socialhub.rocks domain for 4 more weeks until it expires, and I’d be happy to transfer it to new admins if they so desire to have it

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This is a really deep question! I did not think it through before posting.

Here’s my best effort: every person interested in ActivityPub, the Fediverse, decentralised social networking protocols, social networks, decentralisation, or related topics (hand waving here), and who agrees to the code of conduct.

That may be aspirational; especially with regard to human languages, it’s hard to provide software and moderation for even 75% of native speakers (~20 languages), and 100% coverage is well nigh impossible.

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I just re-read Welcome to SocialHub for the first time probably since I joined here, and this is the first paragraph:

SocialHub.ActivityPub.Rocks hosts ActivityPub free software developers and enthusiasts to study and share knowledge, specify functionality together, steer the course of ActivityPub W3C Recommendation through code, conversation, consistency, cooperation…

If that’s still valid (sometimes these things evolve over time and don’t get updated), I’d revise my definition!

Every person interested in free software ActivityPub implementations, including developers and non-developers, who agree to the code of conduct.

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Thank you @eprodrom for your thoughtful answers. Indeed, in the first weeks of the SocialHub, we worked hard to figure out who was “everyone” we wanted to see here, and we ended up adding the SocialHub Community Values Policy on top of the W3C CoC because we thought the professional one was insufficient for people who embraced the Fediverse because of the toxicity of commercial platforms, such as the dominant one whose boss famously said about its users: “Dumb fucks, they trust me” and that’s a current sponsor of the SWF.

Flags here are not to censor political content

Flags are not to silence political content, BTW. People have the right to be unhappy about surveillance capitalism, global surveillance, rigged political influence, deceptive patterns, racism, misogyny and all forms of bigotry, labor exploitation, and all other criticism of Mata and its allies in or out of the Fediverse, and to express it freely. You can’t use flags here to silence such opinions, therefore I rejected your flags.

Actually, the more you’re pushing against political content to massage your sponsor, that everyone else is unhappy about[1], the stronger we’ll push back.

That’s for the consistency part. And this is how I understand the SocialHub: political, and engaged for decentralization and against Big Tech.

  1. I must say, as a personal comment, that I’m very disappointed with an effort to “make the Fediverse bigger and better” with the help of Mata or not, because bigger is not a goal, and better is obviously not a common understanding. ↩︎

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You’re welcome! I hope they help.

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Continuing the discussion that started in another thread (Are we decentralized yet? - #20 by angus):

I think that home page should only display local threads in the “Latest” column.

I don’t mind that some threads are pulled from remote servers, but why they are inserted into the “Latest” timeline? Why they increase the “New” counter? If I were interested in those posts, I would follow their authors from my own server. Inserting them in “Latest”, with auto-generated titles like #Meta is adding a new feature to #Threads, allowing users, only adds noise, to the point of making SocialHub completely unusable.

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Welcome to SocialHub?

The discourse today shows the significant challenges ahead, also well summarised above by @jdp23. There are very clear-cut and obvious cases to consider someone in or out a community, but most of the time things are more nuanced. On the fediverse at large the nuance is often missing, and it is up to every fedizen including the developers to bring improvement. On the fediverse we need..

  • A progressive movement that are caretakers for the healthy evolution of the fediverse.
  • Progressive shared objectives on how to make the world a better place, online and offline.
  • Embedded activist causes as our foundation that anchor the direction towards this world.
  • An ‘ideological bandwidth’. A measure of tolerance, part of diversity, to have different opinion.

As for “community”, I mentioned this before, I do not think it is an appropriate concept and form of organization in our particular collaboration environment and audience. Unless a good definition is given, maybe in the form of a community-of-innovation with a two-fold purpose:

  1. Discussion forum on all progressive shared objectives, that support stated activist causes.
  2. Custodianship and evolution of the grassroots standardization process on the same basis.

I would be in favor of a SocialHub that has a welcoming entry sign on the door. I don’t think “we care for our own” feels very welcoming. I would be more in favor of a “we care for people, and the world” vibe, inviting people to come and contribute positively.

Note that not too long ago, besides the W3C Code of Conduct, the W3C have also published the..

..which can be a good input to a SocialHub policy refreshment effort.

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Thanks everyone for their inputs so far! To summarise, as far as I understand, there’s a few things people want to see change (from where we are now):

  1. Some technical issues need addressing. I’ve created an issue tracker wiki for these issues. We can deal with those questions separately. I know though they interrelate with some of the other questions, but just practically speaking it think it will help to have a separate way of tracking that work.
  2. People want SocialHub to be more inclusive. On my reading of what people have shared so far, it seems that this includes:
    1. An updated approach to moderation and well being.
    2. More welcoming to various types of people interested in ActivityPub, perhaps, but not exclusively, non-technical people.

Moderation and Wellbeing

Again, from my reading of what people have shared (so please feel free to correct me), I’m understanding the following are (interrelated) concerns on this front

  1. Comprehensibility, for example what topics show up on the “latest” list.
  2. Organisation of content, i.e. the use of categories and tags.
  3. Moderation of discussions, i.e. the tone set for discussions and how disputes are handled.

Orientation of the Community

While the overall orientation of the community interacts with moderation and wellbeing it is also its own category of sorts, i.e. is this just a community for technical discussion, or is it a community for other discussion too. Some of this, perhaps all of it, may come down to questions of organisation and moderation, i.e. how content is organised and the tone set for discussions, but overall orientation is perhaps also more than the sum of its parts.

Next Steps

Given the above, here are a few initial ideas for next steps on those two fronts:

  1. Appointing a moderator, or moderation team. These people would need to be interested in moderation and well being per se, and seen in the community as representing the values most people want to see reflected in the community. These folks would not be responsible for administering the forum (I’ll be mostly doing that, i.e. fixing technical issues, paying for hosting etc), but they would play a role in moderating it.
  2. Updating the community values policy. The existing policy seems to have been somewhat contentious: 229 people accepted it and 372 people rejected it. I’m not commenting on the policy one way or another, but it does seem we might need a policy that at substantial majority can agree on (whether or not we as individuals agree or disagree with it personally).

These are just some initial ideas. I’m personally going to let those sit for another week, and circle back here on the weekend of September 13-14, both to this topic, and to start working on some of the technical issues gathered in the issue wiki.

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Hi @angus

I think this is a misunderstanding, the policy has been accepted by the community, long time ago. The policy pop up is only here to make sure people read and individually commit to the policy.

This is not true to reality, those 372 people you are mentioning did not reject the policy, they simply did not pronounce themselves I mean they did not click any of the proposed buttons, maybe because they did not come here or did not see the pop up. (it was my case until today for example,) and among those 372 a number (probably important) of them are staged or inactive users.
Do you know how many staged users are on social hub, how many users inactive for lets say the past year?
I think it would be accurate to give the right numbers before triggering back such difficult discussions.
Do you know how many persons effectively rejected the policy (ie: clicked the red button)

I find astonishing that it is always the same idea that bounces back even though presented “only” as an example.

I do not understand how technical discussions can be separated from other discussions.
For example if I say that I think social hub should not be a place to collaborate with Threads or anything related to Meta is this a technical position?
If I back it up by recent moves from Meta to [influence their AI towards extreme right] (Meta hires anti-DEI influencer Robby Starbuck to curb 'political bias' in AI | Mashable), is this a political position?
If I pursue saying that most probably Threads will not be exempted from Meta anti-inclusive AI influence, is this Technical or Political?
Then how is this compatible with the will from social hub to be more inclusive?

Why is it impossible to address those issues with honesty and position ourselves.

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I interpreted this as finding the topical areas to include as a kind of scope and to provide focus. Not that political themes are out the door. The recognition of progressive objectives and activist causes, acknowledges also that “tech is political”. Compare it to a news magazine, you might be..

  • News of the day (light news entertainment + celebrity gossip)
  • Current affairs (deep-dive, background, analysis)
  • How to become a better journalist (instructive, educational, practice in-the-field)

Depending on what type of magazine we are, tech topics would be discussed differently, and there would be a different culture to the community for each of them. I prefer the last approach where e.g. problematic mingling of Meta and Threads serves as the input to constructive solution finding. In that process along the way we would set clearer boundaries to the things we value, and be able to apply them more generically as we face much more than Meta alone on our way towards the future of social networking.

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Yes indeed! You’re right. Thanks for pointing that out.

I just want to be sure we have something a substantial majority of folks here accept, as reading this discussion, and seeing those numbers on the policy, it seemed like there was a sense that was not the case. But maybe you’re right that a policy debate is not what is needed. I’m curious what others think on this too.

This topic is more of a brainstorm than a statement of definite opinion or direction.

I understand where you’re coming from. Speaking in my capacity as a developer I sometimes find my mind is so entirely taken up with trying to solve a technical problem, in “problem solving mode” if you will, that that distinction makes sense to me. But other times, I do have the same thought you’re suggesting, I.e that policy and politics is inseparable from the technical aspects.

Perhaps the distinction lies in how the forum is moderated and how taxonomies are used rather than in overall policy per se?

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This is also how I understand your vision for SocialHub – and I see it as an incredibly important part of SocialHub’s heritage to carry forward.

There’s a huge tension in the fediverse these days between the depoliticized “open social web” framing – which includes Meta and other surveillance capitalists – and more liberatory view of the potential to create an alternative to surveillance capitalism that’s grounded in anti-oppression and community instead of domination and exploitation. Decentralization is a key strategy for countering Big Tech’s power – but can also be the basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism.

Right now though, it’s very challenging for for people and communities who are focusing on the liberatory view to communicate (or even find each other), and there aren’t any spaces where we can work together safely and collaboratively. Hopefully SocialHub Next Generation can help fill this gap!

Of course, in a decentralized world there won’t be only one hub – and as the Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol highlights, we really need to be thinking across protocols and across networks. In the ATmosphere, Blacksky, Northsky with its 2SLGBTQIA+ focus, and Latinsky are all coming it it from a liberatory perspective (even though Bluesky itself most definitely is not). Looking forward, projects like Spritely and Veillid are also relevant. So I think it would be a mistake to restrict the partcipation here and the focus too narrowly to the ActivityPub world.

Right. And in any case, SocialHub’s political focus is a strength so we should be building on this going forward, not trying to take it off the table!

This is another important part of SocialHub’s heritage and I also hope it carries forward. @angus, with the community in flux, it feels to me like a really bad time to reopen this discussion.

Yes, although that’s one aspect to focus on. Participation on SocialHub also needs to be more diverse and equitable – both demographically and in terms of expertise. Right now, for example, if somebody shares a proposed moderation-related FEP here, it doesn’t get any feedback from Black people, women of color, or trans people of color (three of the demographics that are most at risk from bad moderation on the fediverse), so there’s no way to know if the proposal meets their needs; and very few experts in moderation or trust & safety participate here, so there’s not a lot of subject matter expertise either. Change these dynamics will require a more inclusive culture, but that by itself isn’t enough.

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Yes, I agree, this is something I personally feel is important. In my mind this will require proactive outreach, to actively get more people involved. This is one of my thoughts behind having well respected moderators, or to put it another way “community conveners”.

I think the hard part is that many people we want to hear from are just very busy trying to make a living, or just trying live, full stop. Life is hard. Growing the community will require meeting people where they are in their lives.

@jdp23 Do you feel you’re able to be involved in that proactive outreach effort? I think key will be getting folks like me, you, Evan, How, Arnold, everyone on this thread and community, looking outward to bring more people in. The more I think about it, the more I think I agree with Natacha that we don’t need a “mission statement” debate right now, we need more actual outreach.

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