SocialHub developer community: Reorganisation, next steps

[how]

@aschrijver

when does P.S. plan to give public announcement / responsible disclosure of SocialHub winding down?

We are not planning anything. We’ve been announcing that we’d like this community to self-manage for years. We’re now ‘giving an ultimatum’ as a last resort because supporting work does not seem to be taken into account as long as things run.

I’ve read elsewhere that I am “dropping”. This is not the case. But if you’ve been here a long time you must have seen that my participation here has faded away, so I want other people to take over before you’re all left with a down server and nobody to turn it on again.

@trwnh

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

It doesn’t. But notifications and registration confirmations go through the activitypub.eu domain since we could not get access to the activitypub.rocks domain to manage email there. So if there’s now control on activitypub.rocks domain, we could as well move the email there for consistency.

@aschrijver

I consider it to be a matter of custodianship responsibility for P.S. to manage the shutdown in a responsible manner.

We’re not shutting down. We want other people to take over. If other people do not take over, then it means nobody wants to take responsibility for it, then it should die.

@aschrijver

mho it would be better to be open for any proposals

No: there is something very political in the way the SocialHub was organized, that fosters collective work and limits to what is acceptable for a community. If fascists want to take over, or people who do not care about privilege and solidarity, then you’ll be left with a backup and we’ll go away for good. That’s the deal IMO. We don’t work for years to let this community fall into preying hands.

@trwnh

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.

@aschrijver

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.

If fedi devs are scattered to the winds, then they did not realize that the SocialHub has been part of the Fediverse for some time, and they should be reminded.

@aschrijver

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

I’ll be convinced when:

1. I’m not the only one keeping the server up-to-date
2. Teams are active and not just lists of names
3. We’re clear about X, Fakebooz (including threads), and other centralized surveillance systems that the Fediverse is not aligned with them, and strives for other forms of online social relationships not based on domination, nudging nor abuse.

The keys are yours.

@aschrijver

Become native to the fediverse. SocialHub is to be part of the fediverse via federation.

Most of it is part of the Fediverse. The Software category is lacking fediversity because software owners didn’t federate!

@lullis

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

It’s not a hosting issue, and it’s not an individual issue. Handling the hosting from a non-profit organization to an individual would not make sense. But thank you for volunteering.

@strypey

@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.

I hope this answer is clarifying my position. In other words: either there is a community here, and the community is taking the engagement to take care for itself, and we’re good; or there’s no community, and this forum is just a drag on my back, and you can do without, so I can shut it down.

The way the community is taking over, is up to you, but my preference would be as stated so far.

@jdp23

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

We need to federate more, and include the SH groups in the interesting fedi discussions, so that they can be archived here, and not lost in the Fediverse. SH is an archipel, a navigation tool: not a centralizing place. It’s easy to add @fep@socialhub.activitypub.rocks to a federated discussion and have a topic created here that includes the ongoing discussion (and there are more AP actors!)

@aschrijver

A viable community is where enough of its members care enough for its continued existence.

@aschrijver

And it’d be great if @how could assign forum moderator or even forum admin privilege to some people so they are enabled to organize and steer this thing along efficiently.

Oh yes, that would be great.

@aschrijver

Yes, the Fediversity channel is where one might ponder if it doesn’t make the audience of the community too broad.

I’m very surprised to read this. I really do not understand why the audience would be too broad. I mean, really. Why?

@aschrijver

It is nice to offer dedicated forum space, but most FOSS projects don’t use it.

Indeed. With more people invested in it, they would use it, either from here, or from the Fediverse.

@strypey1

that Loomio thread too.

Isn’t Loomio federated? Then why is it not common?

@silverpill

I doubt that things can be improved if the forum changes ownership (the opposite seems more likely)

Can you elaborate on this @silverpill?

@strypey

Given how often PS admins have been incommunicado when thing need fixing or tweaking, and doing facepalm-inducing stuff like threatening to delete most SH accounts

I really do not appreciate your simplification of the situation here @stripey. I find it unfair and quite disrespectful actually. I have been calling for help for years and had to change teams several times over because people actually did not help at all. So putting this on either me or my organization is simply not acceptable.

@melvincarvalho

CPU and RAM requirements. Perhaps someone could tell us the spec of the current server?

It’s super small.

root@socialhub:/var/discourse# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           382M  656K  382M   1% /run
/dev/sda1        38G   23G   14G  64% /
tmpfs           1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/sdb         59G  4.1G   52G   8% /mnt/HC_Volume_26171934
tmpfs           382M     0  382M   0% /run/user/1000
overlay          59G  4.1G   52G   8% /mnt/HC_Volume_26171934/docker/overlay2/f80df69aa53ab6ed8a502f00bcc4a4d7fedf3434041b596480fbf1b54e549cf8/merged

@j12t

For me, the question of “who administers the server” and “who pays the bills” are minor questions that can be solved without much difficulty.

Well, I tried solving these questions collectively since 2019, so I’m very open to concrete steps now

I skipped the last two posts because tl;dr, and had to catch up on the whole discussion at once. Sorry for that. BTW, thank you @aschrijver for standing up again and making this discussion happen.