Share what you want SocialHub to be

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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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