SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?

ActivityPub
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(Originally posted in response to @how’s announced ultimatum wrt the future of SocialHub.)

Unless a community team steps up, SocialHub will cease to be ..

@how is urgently asking members of this community to brainstorm and consider options to keep this community not only alive, but make it thrive as one of the grassroots developer centers that help evolve the fediverse.

In 2019 @how and Petites Singularités graciously took custodianship of SocialHub, and I for one am very thankful for that! :two_hearts: I am sure many in the fediverse developer landscape share that gratitude too.

For people reading this and considering community involvement.. when does P.S. plan to give public announcement / responsible disclosure of SocialHub winding down?

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Two questions.

  1. Why does the forum need to shut down just because an email domain expires?

  2. If petites singularités is indeed stepping down in entirety instead of simply letting an email domain lapse, then do we have any actual volunteers for taking up that financial and administrative burden?

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For clarity, this is my understanding on the de facto choice that lies in front of the community. It does not need to shut down, but @how took the date as end-of-support by P.S.

As for point 2) the answer is “no”, at the current time. And finding volunteers already requires volunteers. This is why I continued on this new topic with the stark title, to draw awareness to the matter, since on the policy discussion thread the urgent call-for-action would surely be missed.

Finally, should no one step up before that date, I consider it to be a matter of custodianship responsibility for P.S. to manage the shutdown in a responsible manner. Similar to how years ago Feneas was discontinued, and gave a couple months advanced notice. In that regard your questions on clarity are also mine and directed at @how.

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Here is another point that requires more clarity @how ..

When a community team steps up and a new party wants to take the custodianship role upon themself, shouldn’t they be fully free to decide on the governance model themself? Instead of demanding these minimal requirements, imho it would be better to be open for any proposals, and negotiation on what constitutes responsible ownership transfer can then happen on that basis. P.S. has the final say, as soon as they are comfortable enough with the proposed arrangement.

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I’m willing to join a new mod team, and help with crowdfunding efforts to cover costs.

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Most developers have already left, so I think shutting the forum down is not a bad idea.

Perhaps it can be hosted in read-only mode for another year or two? That would be nice.

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I believe there are ways to export the forum and turn it into a static html site, which could be hosted permanently to keep the information archive intact and accessible.

Did they leave or is the forum federated? :winking_face_with_tongue: @strypey did step up, and some time ago there was also interest of other people. Let’s see where things go.

Another option is that W3C SocialCG takes over the custodianship role in addition to the activitypub.rocks website, if they are willing.

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Agreed that it’s worth seriously considering shutting it down. I certainly appreciate the work @how has done here (and the role p.s. has played), and I appreciate your work as well … but as @silverpill points out developers rarely participate any more, and the demographics haven’t gotten any more diverse. Of course that could change with the right reboot but just changing the mod team and ownership isn’t likely to be enough.

So the way I’d approach this is by trying to identify the unique roles that a forum like this could fill (either for the ActivityPub fediverse or the broader “Open Social Web”), and then considering what community participation and leadership could lead to that happening. If something emerges that gets a critical mass of people excited and seems feasible, great – then there’s an opportunity for a reboot. If not, then it’s a good time to wrap things up and shift to a read-only archive.

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If they’ve all gone somewhere else, then SH has been replaced. In that case, I would agree it makes sense to convert it onto a read-only archive.

OTOH If they’ve just scattered to the four winds, and there’s no replacement, then this is a collective action problem to be solved. Potentially by a community-driven reboot of SH.

That would make sense, given SH sits under a domain they are now managing. I’d be happy to work with SocialCG on this.

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It seems contentious to claim that “most developers have left” when the forum continues to show activity. In the past month, 44 topics have new posts, the majority of which are not federated topics. Who are these developers, have they really left, and does their leaving justify shutting down the forum? What is the alternative venue or forum for discussing ActivityPub-related topics, community, software, standards, etc? Does such an alternative (if it exists) provide a better experience for discussing these things?

If the answer is “they’re on fedi now”, then this is what I would categorize as “scattered to the four winds, and there’s no replacement”. The value of SocialHub is that it is a gathering place for these discussions, and it allows for those discussions to be long-form. There is a world of difference between a forum thread and a chain of replies in 500 characters or less. This has been previously discussed as well:

The value of this SocialHub forum is in bringing people together to discuss things, and the introduction of federation in its current form has been arguably counterproductive to this end. Quite simply, if the discussions about ActivityPub are spread all over random pockets of microblogging, then this is an inferior experience to a proper forum with an actual social context. You can aggregate a bunch of microblog posts, but that’s not the same – the focus just isn’t there in the same way that a real thread would remain mostly focused on the same topic. Replying to something is not the same as having a directed discussion. Every new reply is a chance for the topic to drift away from where it started, and if all you have is a reply tree, then you can’t recognize these shifts.

What then? Do we converge on the w3c/activitypub issue tracker, or on the SocialCG mailing list? Or is the discussion around ActivityPub dead, and all that’s left to do is have ad-hoc communications between various devs without any sort of coordination or commonplace? Maybe that’s fine for the developers who have supposedly already left, because what’s the point of having conversations when all you’re trying to do is fix a one-off incompatibility between two projects? I don’t think it’s conducive to any sort of broad alignment, though.

At the end of the day, if the financial and organizational sponsor wants to back out, then we can’t really do anything to force them to continue, but I think it’s more worthwhile to consider the reboot rather than the shutdown. We can’t easily fold the scope of this place into the issue tracker, because issue trackers are not general discussion forums. We can’t easily fold the scope of this place into the mailing list, because this place was started to avoid flooding the entire SocialCG with ActivityPub-specific matters. So ideally something ought to occupy this niche.

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Perhaps you can ask Penar from Discourse if they'll sponsor.

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:100:

The various observations @trwnh makes are spot on.

“Scattered to the winds” is also my observation. Anyone noted the new HTTP Signatures proposal to the ActivityPub community? Maybe by coincidence or by having a good ‘following’ collection. Or maybe because I created a cross-reference as a commons janitor. It means now at least there’s archive that it happened, though the content of the discussion may already be gone, link-rotted as happens on microblog timelines.

What does it mean to be federated as a forum? That is what I mused about in the fragmentation discussion, and I formulated a Need:

Support the communication and cocreation of all participants in the ActivityPub ecosystem to help foster healthy growth and evolution of the Fediverse.

Note there is not the word “community” here. It is the vaguest term when it is just dropped casually. What is the “FOSS community” for instance? I claim it doesn’t exist unless you use “community” in most handwavy terms. Long ago as facilitator I came to the conclusion that SocialHub was not a community, but just a discussion forum. And that though that is a shame, that still is valuable. These discussions are in the archives of this forum. :wink:

What should we do?

In order to be able to talk about “community” it has to be well defined what that entails ..

  1. Collect problems that hold the AP dev community back from collaborating and evolve the foundational technologies that the dev ecosystem of the fediverse relies on.

  2. Collect the challenges SocialHub faces to address these problems.

  3. Refine the Need above, breakdown into more granular needs and find other requirements for a prolongation of SocialHub on a healthy trajectory.

  4. Let people and groups thereof, like @strypey before (please boost his call to action), step up and announce themselves

  5. I propose everyone to step up to prepare a Community Plan consisting of ..

    • Wiki post (such that it bumps the list upon edits) with a summary of the plan.
    • Separate discussion topic referenced from the wiki post, to discuss details of the plan.

Objective: Convince @how that responsible custodianship is taken care of, and it is responsible to hand over these tasks to the new community custodians.

Listing some needs and requirements that SocialHub always had, or for a long time already ..

  1. Reach the AP dev community, connect people for focused discussion.
  2. Provide insight in ongoing discussions such that others can chime in in real-time.
  3. Keep record and archive that can be searched, quoted and cross-referenced.
  4. Provide entry point to the ecosystem where newcomers can discover, onboard themselves.
  5. Become native to the fediverse. SocialHub is to be part of the fediverse via federation.
  6. Help guarantee a bottom-up (commons based), open and decentralized ecosystem.
  7. Be a helpful tool to allow the FEP Process to fulfill its custodianship role for FEP’s.

On diversity @jdp23 I would add that point 5 equates to the diversity of the fediverse itself (iff ‘federation-done-well’) and that point 6 acknowledges the need for a decentralized developer environment, where there can be many independent dev hubs furthering AS/AP et al. This notion promotes diversity in itself, and SocialHub in this setup does not take an authoritative position nor gatekeeper position.

The diversity problem + challenges then boil down to 1) the diversity that the microbloggoverse fedi and its moderation processes gives, and 2) how forum federation / threadiverse is able to forge community on top of that (as a well-defined concept) using the fediverse social graph where ecosystem participants and prospects (newcomer onboarding) engage.

And that brings this to a mighty interesting applied research area, on the basis of which alone a SocialHub reboot might be a very worthy undertaking. As mentioned above both @strypey and me in that fragmentation discussion were wondering:

What does it mean when we say that a Discussion forum has become “part of the fediverse”?

If I might give this a shot to formulate a definition ..

Federated discussion forums are like collaborative gardening centers where a group of fedizens gathers together around a theme and fosters a curated garden of relevant information and connections to other groups and people to interact with, have insightful discussions and deepen relationships, and to enrich the collective knowledge base together.

From a more technical perspective you might consider Federated discussion forum software to constitute a collaborative / multi-user ActivityPub client with dedicated management features for content curation, aggregation and moderation.