Thanks, @j12t and @indieterminacy for your help and feedback! 
Generally speaking it is easy to come up with lists of things that would be helpful to the dev ecosystem. Much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.
As an example is the need for having comprehensive developer documentation. On SocialHub is still a pinned wiki post with an attempt to crowdsource enough notes for such an artifact. Another example is when @gabek started fedidocs crowdsourcing attempt, and I posted about the need for cohesion in Cohesion of FediDevs with other fediverse initiatives. Fedidocs stalled, migrated orgs, became fedidevs and then stalled again (I think). Why? People don’t like to write techdocs in the best of times, and are happy when they have things well in order on their own project. Even less people want to arrange the crowdsourcing process, and editing/publishing chores.
Generally speaking one should not fool oneself talking about “community” when there isn’t one. The AP ecosystem is characterized by fiercely independent people who opportunistically come together to talk about subjects of shared interest.
The general tendency in this thread is that SocialHub better offer a broad range of services to become a relevant community again. And I think people underestimate how hard that is, in this environment of individuals.
Positioning advice: Choose between ‘community’ and ‘cohesion’.
My strong advice to any community team stepping up is to first choose between 2 options:
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Wanna be a community? Better cover only a comprehensive niche then, with a well-defined audience and scope. See my list with some quickly brainstormed topics as examples. Then foster community.
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Otherwise best be a loose collective. Fit for a grassroots environment. On any broader scopes + audiences forget “community”, it herding cats lost cause. Find ways where people while working on their own initiatives still combine that into a larger, more valuable whole. Then foster cohesion.
Related info:
- Ideating organization structure for the Grassroots Fediverse (wiki)
- 3-Stage Standards Process: Guaranteeing an open and decentralized ecosystem
“Any decentralized [ecosystem] requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
“The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.”