Thus far 2 people have stepped forward. @strypey and @lullis how do you like the idea to outline thoughts, ideas and plans for the reboot of this community in a separate topic? As a means to excite and attract other people.
Great point @trwnh. Here’s a recent example of how SH has been used. @claire, a member of the Mastodon team, came here to consult with devs from other projects about plans for federated Quote Posts in Mastodon, with an eye to documenting their approach through the FEP process (created here). The topic was created in Feb this year and constructive discussion is ongoing 5 months later. To me, this alone demonstrates that SH is useful, and worth saving.
Sounds great. I really like all the aspirations you lay out above, although it does make me realise that SH has a potentially huge brief. So it’s hardly surprising the forum has only realised a fraction of its potential so far.
Oh and I know @jdp23 and I have a tendency to butt heads (most recently on the SocialMusic forum). But they make some fair points in this thread, and ask a good question here;
To me, this is not a ‘one and done’ process. The nature and infrastructure of SH has been negotiated and altered before, and no doubt will be again.
What we’re trying to do right now, under urgency, is to put together a transitional team that can keep the lights on until at least the end of the calendar year. While we figure out more permanent solutions for;
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hosting: both admin work and funding for any upstream costs
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community management: moderation, outreach, conflict resolution, etc
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governance: active stewardship to ensure that both of the above continue to be taken care of. In ways that facilitate the SH mission; being neutral ground for devs to parlay about pan-fediverse concerns
Once we’ve made arrangements to keep SH from blinking out of existence, I’d really like to see us put together a survey to send out to all fediverse devs. Past and present, of servers, clients and other tools. To find out if they’ve used SH, whether they still do, what they consider useful about the way it’s been operated, and what would make it more attractive as a place for them to interact with other devs.
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I generally agree that getting perspectives of other people is a worthwhile endeavour, and it would be valuable to have those interesting discussions end up here in some way if they are relevant to the forum’s focus. We might not all fully agree on what that focus is, but it seems to me that you could loosely draw up the following ingredients:
- FEP discussions (almost every single FEP ends up with a topic here)
- Q&A (new implementers asking for clarification on something)
- Interest gathering (bringing attention to some potential direction)
- Analysis (describing some theoretical or practical problem)
- Meta-discussions (like this one!)
That’s quite a lot of things and generally enough to justify the forum’s continued existence rather than shutting it down. Of course, that doesn’t solve the (potential?) sponsorship issue being posed here that is necessary to answer for that continued existence. But we’ve got a lot of valuable stuff here, and it would be nice to see even more valuable stuff end up here. Failing that, it would be nice for it to end up somewhere in aggregate, rather than being dispersed where it doesn’t get seen by the right people.
Likewise, if this problem is to be considered, then we should have a thread where we lay out what the current problems are and what our collective goals might be.
This can be done, if the goal is to position this forum toward “fediverse devs”. I think I’d personally like to see more than just that, though. Anyone with ideas on how to make things better should be welcome here.
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These are not aspirations for one community, certainly not of SH (though opinions vary here), but ideas for different directions. SocialHub started out in a great position as literally the tool that SocialCG used for communications between the dev community regarding ActivityPub standardization. Then SocialCG went dormant and SH was the only active hub for a time.
From my time and experience as founder of Humane Tech Community I learned that having too large a scope and audience means you can only have a discussion forum run by staff, and not what you can meaningfully call a “community”. At SocialHub I made various calls and put much effort into having people state their level of commitment and interest, and the outcomes were very clear: SH for a long time was just a discussion forum, where devs can conveniently read stuff on their subject of interest, and reply to them. That’s it. No community at all. And in itself this is a perfect raison d’être for SH to exist. But we should be fair about it then, and accept SH for what it really is.
Later on, if anything, the custodianship of the FEP process is the only well-scoped true ‘community-level activity’, and that role might be further established (i.e. the “guarantee open ecosystem” mission and “bottom-up standardization process” vision), if there are folks interested in doing so. Yet here @silverpill - the currently only real active FEP facilitator - does not see merit, and is open to do everything in the codeberg issue tracker of the FEP (which I doubt is a good idea, but that’s a different discussion).
In any case, in follow-up to @trwnh, looking at the Standards > Fediverse Enhancement Proposals category, a decent amount of good discussion takes place on SocialHub. And it is feedback we can still consult and respond to, contrary to all the FEP communication that shifted to the microblog timelines, where that feedback is all lost unless explicitly linked to. This makes the FEP more of a “do whatever you want” thing for any dev to spec just enough features for their own app, without much rigorous scrutiny from the dev community at large wrt improving general interop in the ecosystem.
Generally I’d define viable community as:
A viable community is where enough of its members care enough for its continued existence.
And with that care are committed to step up and help guarantee that existence. Very often this boils down to more or less the 90-9-1 rule, where one percent of members takes that responsibility seriously.
Currently in separate thread(s) and wiki post(s) we can gather what it takes to continue as-is, what problems are that led to current need for a reboot, and what ideas exist for fresh new directions. I’d advise using wiki post to summarize stuff (this thread for example is already 23 posts long and only TLDR’s others). 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.
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Cross-referencing to social.coop discussion on Loomio, where @strypey had the great idea to raise awareness on this topic, and asked if members are interested to help and/or the cooperative to consider taking custodianship. I just added to that discussion myself:
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I agree with this 100%. It would be weird if I didn’t, given that I’m not a software developer, and I helped start the fediversity category specifically to make space for topics outside of coding and protocol plumbing ; ) But I also can’t see much point in a forum where non-devs have high level discussions and come up with lists of expectations, in the absence of the people whose buy-in we need to make any of them a reality, and whose participation can ground those UX discussions in technical reality.
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Yes, the Fediversity channel is where one might ponder if it doesn’t make the audience of the community too broad. Plus stuff does not automatically ‘flow’ into that category from interesting nooks and crannies of the fediverse. It needs more or less people functioning in editor roles to have good frequent content. I used the Fediversity > Fediverse Futures subcategory for a while, along with Fediverse futures on Lemmy, but these also lead to editor role volunteer maintenance overhead. I closed the category.
Another example of something I’d not be maintaining in a repositioned SocialHub is the Software category. At least not as it currently functions, maybe in a different form it has more benefit. It is nice to offer dedicated forum space, but most FOSS projects don’t use it. They prefer to just use their own primary project channels, and I can understand that. Btw, forum federation may become a great solution in this area.
@aschrijver Interesting read over there. Also, regarding the definition of viable community - and subsequently the definition of a "community" itself.
Thanks. Where I should add that “viable” is only the very start of things. Further up the ‘minimum viable community’ scale come “safe”, “healthy” and hopefully one day “vibrant”.
Ah, I answered this on the forum, but your and mine mastodon thread does not show that. I did use the reply button on your post I thought. Hmm.
@smallcircles
> I answered this on the forum, but your and mine mastodon thread does not show that
The federation of replies from SH into Mastodon might take some time. Due either to the generally slow performance of Mastodon, or to the issues you've raised with the impacts of AP federation of the SH Discourse instance;
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/ap-processing-dragging-forum-down/5418/3
@aschrijver I think that is a very strong and sustainable idea, good job! @strypey
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@indieterminacy
> I think that is a very strong and sustainable idea, good job!
Thanks : ) Would be good to have your input on that Loomio thread too.
I guess it has been replaced with Fediverse.
Not seeing merit in what, in keeping the forum?
Not exactly. I still participate in some discussions here, so the forum remains valuable to me, but the quality and quantity of those discussions has been declining for quite some time and I doubt that things can be improved if the forum changes ownership (the opposite seems more likely)
The FEP issue tracker is primarily used for administrative tasks, and I’ve never advocated for doing everything there. I think proposals should be discussed elsewhere (where authors find it convenient).
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SH is, among other things;
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A point of entry for newbies wanting to learn about fediverse development.
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A place for facilitated discussion about pan-fediverse topics, where devs from a range of projects are known to respond.
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A searchable archive of those discussions, so people don’t have to reinvent the wheel
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A place people discuss the pain points in learning about fediverse plumbing, and improving interop, and coming up with things like the FEP process to improve the situation.
As comments here and in the against fragmentation topic have pointed out, that’s …
Not in any way an adequate replacement for what SH provides.
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, it seems obvious to me that having a new admin team who are engaged and accountable would improve things here. I’m curious to know why you think otherwise.
Admittedly I’m only a hobbyist ActivityPub developer, I’ve been toying with a little implementation on nights and weekends for a few months, but I wanted to chime in on the “None of the developers want this, they’ve all moved on” sentiment and say:
As a lurker, I’ve found this forum incredibly useful, and would hate to see it go away.
I know community building is under appreciated, difficult, work. So if you haven’t heard it enough, thank you to those of you involved in making this place run.
I’d pitch in what effort I can to keep it around, but acknowledge that I can’t offer much.
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Thank you @Hanse00, and it is great to hear you get value from SocialHub.
(Generally speaking it matters a lot when people speak out their appreciation for a commons based initiative they benefit from. There’s an imbalance in our fediverse culture I think where people, often from the sidelines, are ready to pounce with unconstructive criticism. Leaving little room where fertile seedling can mature into strong trees. I regularly say it leads to an environment where “we divide ourselves to be conquered”. We need a more forgiving culture, where there is acceptance that not everyone is as perfectly principled and valued yet, and there are shades of grey through which people can be guided gently into the light.)
Great! That is three people on the list already. 
In a community there are many different tasks that can be where you shine, and also take personal interest in. Despite the challenges and sometimes frustrations being discussed above, there is a lot of rewarding and uplifting experiences too, which make it all worth it. And there’s opportunity to learn useful skills that are much in need not just in social impact movements, but anywhere in modern society where we alienate ever further from each other.
I’m mostly interested in the FEP process (I really want my emoji responses), but my current work load (family) prevents me from taking ownership of anything. I can give money though.
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I can help. I’m at @reivers Fedicon.ca in Vancouver today, with a bunch of other AP developers, let’s see whether we can find more people who are interested.
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Hi, I can help with this, as part of a team. I can also help with the crowd funding.
I have alot of experience in sysadmin. I have also run a forum in the past, and wrote the first single sign-on module for OpenID. I was in the WG that created ActivityPub.
I would suggest using namecheap as a registrar. Which allows a team to manage the DNS. And perhaps hetzner or contabo for hosting, depending on the CPU and RAM requirements. Perhaps someone could tell us the spec of the current server?
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