Agreed that’s something very political here including your point about being clear that the Fediverse is not aligned with Threads and other centralized surveillance systems. In the broader Fediverse there’s a tension between “Free Fediverse” people who see it primarily as an alternative to surveillance capitalism (and white supremacists, anti-trans bigots and fascists), and “Open Social Web” and “Big Fedi” people who think a bigger network that includes some surveillance capitalism (and white supremacists, anti-trans bigots and fascists) as well as alternatives is a better strategy – and of course a range of opinions in between.
Relatedly, @aschrijver makes an interesting point about the distinction between a community and a loose collective where the focus is on cohesion. In general, not just with SocialHub, I’m not sure how realistic a community for fediverse developers as a whole is; as well as the political questions related to collaborating with surveillance capitalism and fascism-friendly projects, there are also tensions around consent and patterns of anti-trans and anti-Black behavior. There’s also a huge challenge of how to get more diverse participation and a more inclusive environment. Focusing on a subset of fediverse developers is one way around that, but what subset?
Of course these are issues for a looser collective as well but it seems to me they’re bigger barriers to community. In any case, a “reboot” offers opportunities to learn from what’s worked as well as what hasn’t, refocus, and evolve.
In practice though, today it’s not easy to follow and participate in conversations here from other instances. The discussion in Final thoughts re: FediCon 2025 - #14 by jdp232 and later posts in that thread about some of the challenges on how well federation works today.
Of course the software could be improved, and at least in theory “let’s work together to improve the software so we can have good federated discussions about fediverse development” could be a good project for fediverse developers – a classic everybody-eat-your-own-dogfood virtuous cycle. In practice though that hasn’t yet happened all that much, and as @trwnh pointed out on the other thread there are some fediverse-wide issues that get in the way.