SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?

[aschrijver]

(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.

@how

Now there’s a deadline: the activitypub.eu domain that hosts this community’s email service expires on September 10, 2025 [..]

So, either way the change is coming. I’d rather have it come in a structured way.

In 2019 @how and Petites Singularités graciously took custodianship of SocialHub, and I for one am very thankful for that! 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?

[trwnh]

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?

[aschrijver]

@trwnh

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

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.

[aschrijver]

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

@how

So it would require that we (petites singularités) pass on the infrastructure to some formal body that we can ensure will be fostering the trend impulsed so far and not diverge away from it too much. It would then require that at least three system administrators are active on this service (we’re two, but in practice, I’m alone), and that there are more moderators as well.

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.

[strypey]

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

[silverpill]

@aschrijver

make it thrive as one of the grassroots developer centers that help evolve the fediverse.

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.

[aschrijver]

@silverpill

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

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.

@silverpill

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

Did they leave or is the forum federated? @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.

[jdp23]

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.

[strypey]

@silverpill

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

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.

@aschrijver

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

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

[trwnh]

@strypey

@silverpill

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

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.

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:

@aschrijver

@silverpill

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

Did they leave or is the forum federated?

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.

[julian]

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

[aschrijver]

The various observations @trwnh makes are spot on.

@trwnh

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.

“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.

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.

[lullis]

I’d also volunteer to host this server if needed.

[strypey]

@trwnh

That’s what the September deadline was about. Did I misunderstand?

Maybe we’re all misreading, but here’s how I understand the situation. A few days ago, @how posted;

@how

Now there’s a deadline: the activitypub.eu domain that hosts this community’s email service expires on September 10, 2025. I do not intend to renew it unless there is a solid ongoing plan for the community for taking over this infrastructure, including financially.

We’re taking that to mean that petites singularités have chosen this as a cutoff point for any further admin work or financial contributions from them. @how can you please confirm that we’re understanding this correctly, or correct us if we’re not, so we’re all clear on what the situation is.

[aschrijver]

Just asked by toot as well: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/114933409400491690

[jdp23]

Great post, @trwnh

@trwnh

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.

My impression is that they’re on fedi and in chat rooms and very scattered … so I agree that there’s a niche that seems important that isn’t currently being filled (and I also agree about the vallue of longform discussions).

At least from my perspective, SH isn’t currently filling this niche; I see a lot more interesting stuff elsewhere than I do on here (or from here on fedi), and quite a few of the developers I think are doing interesting stuff don’t ever participate here.

Why is that?

Once there’s a good undersatnding of why, then the next step is to ask what can be done differently (in terms of culture, partnership, tech, scope of topics, partnerships, whatever) to make it more appealing.

On both the “why?” and “what to do about it?”, getting the perspectives of people who aren’t currently here seems key.

And @aschrijver

@aschrijver

On diversity @jdp23 I would add that point 5 equates to the diversity of the fediverse itself (iff ‘federation-done-well’)

Hmm, I see point 5 (“Become native to the fediverse. SocialHub is to be part of the fediverse via federation”) more as potentially enabling broader participation – useful, but by itself not necessarily making demographically diverse participation more likely.

[aschrijver]

@jdp23

potentially enabling broader participation – useful, but by itself not necessarily making demographically diverse participation more likely.

Totally. I’m just stating that with perfect integration of SocialHub into the microbloggoverse that the fedi is, we “import” the social dynamics of said microbloggoverse, as it were. With similar limited moderation tools available and where part of the tasks become very similar to those performed instance mods and admins to foster their instance’s community. And having all of the known flaws and diversity issues related to them, which various task forces are working to improve.

[aschrijver]

@jdp23

On both the “why?” and “what to do about it?”, getting the perspectives of people who aren’t currently here seems key.

I agree. But also this is a concern for later, for the new community team to figure out.

[jdp23]

@aschrijver

@jdp23

On both the “why?” and “what to do about it?”, getting the perspectives of people who aren’t currently here seems key.

I agree. But also this is a concern for later, for the new community team to figure out.

If you wait until after the new community team is set up, how do you know that you haven’t already replicated the current problems in ways that will be hard or even impossible to fix later?

[aschrijver]

Any discussion and volunteer efforts to collect that information is welcome of course. But as I see it (interpreting @how’s ultimatum) there’s a stark choice within 4 weeks time of:

• Either a community team steps up with a Community Plan that @how feels comfortable transferring custodianship to, before stepping away from that role with P.S.

• Or there is no viable plan and team, and @how with P.S. is tasked with responsible shutdown.

What is a viable plan, what is a viable community then? Well, again my opinion, but there is no need at all to be broadly interesting, relevant to a large group, or targeting the entire dev ecosystem. A community team may choose any niche area to focus on. It is up to them. Viable in my book means first of all:

• There is a team willing to take the commitment, and @how approves on the (transition) plan.

After that happens then I think it is important that the new team has free reign to do whatever they want to forge healthy community in whatever direction, scope and audience they want to serve/explore. They should be able to revitalize, reposition and foster the community as they think is best. They are now sole custodians of that, the ones making the fresh start. The “Why?” and “What to do about it?” may not be all that relevant against their new direction, the mission and vision of this new team.

I’d personally definitely reposition, and can imagine many different directions that might be interesting for a community to explore..

• “We are W3C SocialCG and want to have a more informal discussion space, while reserving the mailing list to official spec-related comms.”

• “We want to optimize the bottom-up grassroots standardization process, so that the dev ecosystem becomes more empowered to innovate the social web, overcome the inertia.”

• “We want to focus on improving the developer experience for newcomers that is still deplorable to this day. We will dedicate on lowering barriers to entry of the fediverse as much as possible.”

• “We focus on bringing the qualities and benefits of linked data to the forefront, in ways that still appeals to JSON-only crowds. We’ll bridge gaps with other linked data standards.”

• “We focus on becoming a portal that collects feedback from fedizens, whose voices are insufficiently heard, in the developer-oriented release processes of individual apps.”

• “We will focus on collecting all the highly innovative ideas around decentralized networking, and give space for people to think out of the box, be creative and unrestricted by what’s currently possible.”

• “We want to emphasize the ‘social’ in social hub, and give minority group a stronger voice in the developer community. We will actively reach out to developers other than those ‘from the West’ who dominate the scene.”

• “We will focus on the C2S side of the fediverse, which we consider to be the path to future of social networking.”

• “We are interested in the Discourse AP pluging, and want to make Discourse software as native as possible to the fediverse as a community platform.”

• “We think it is currently fine as it is, and will gladly support that from now on.”

• " … [ add your dream community plan here ] … "