Is it possible to get an archive of my posts here before the shutdown?
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Thank you @dmoonfire @j12t @melvincarvalho for your kind offers of help! 
I put the various offers in a wiki post that anyone can update. I suggest that the community team together with @how will take the lead in elaborating what is needed.
Add your input to 
SocialHub Reboot Wiki
@eprodrom the question is “Reboot or shutdown?” at this point, but I added your request in the wiki, as well as mine to export the forum and host as static website, if it gets to this point.
@strypey I do not know if you have enough rights on the wiki post, to close the topic and then delete notification of that below the wiki post. Doing so ensures that the wiki gets bumped on edits.
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I found it! There’s a button to export your posts on the settings page at the bottom.
Thanks @how and @aschrijver for your work here.
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I talked to a handful of ActivityPub developers about this over the weekend in Vancouver. All of them turned out to be in the “Most developers have already left” category that @silverpill was talking about above. I don’t want to name names – they can stand up for themselves if they want to – but I got a bunch of views on why SocialHub has had little net-benefit for them and what they are working on.
I believe it’s also true to say that while there are developers new to ActivityPub all the time, who want to build and are building stuff, they generally don’t end up as regulars here.
For me, the question of “who administers the server” and “who pays the bills” are minor questions that can be solved without much difficulty. I’d be happy to contribute, too.
However, the real question is: how do we (for some value of “we”) meet the needs of our “customers” (for some value of “customers”), so they value it and engage and come back and contribute. Because if the customers leave, clearly the value isn’t there – and to be frank and consistent with what I heard, I don’t have the impression that this goal is at the top of mind of too many people here. Some other goals appear to be, and is fine, but we should not be surprised at the above consequences.
From my perspective, I want as many developers as possible build as much open social web software as possible, consistent with the values, and to do that, we need to treat potential developers as customers and understand what they want and need, and address that. Ideally, this would include – in an nicely designed integrated whole:
- An ActivityPub landing page for developers (e.g. a revamped activitypub.rocks – in progress)
- Extensive, maintained, consistent reference material and examples (currently all over the place, hard to use as a new developer)
- Places where to ask questions and discuss (e.g. a forum and/or a chat group)
- Online and in-person seminars with “howto” demonstrations or discussions of particular issues
- Development tools (e.g. debugging, testing) – some of this exists, also all over the place in various states
- The ability to easily find developers of other applications to resolve interop problems with specific other applications.
Beyond that, for “advanced” developers, we also need debate of extensions and mechanisms (FEPs and the process around them) to further the state of the art.
I believe this is the time to design such a “developer journey” to get them to great interoperating software as directly as possible, and I’d be quite willing to help with that. It doesn’t make much sense to me to look at the Socialhub forum in isolation and I would not know how to “fix” it in isolation.
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Firstly, Id like to thank PS’ contributions to supporting grounds up and community focused Fediverse related activity in addition to their wider concerns.
While I would have appreciated that they could prioritise SH more (as well as OFFDEM - which they have provided initiative for; financial assistance; and capacity building), I have faith that their future attentions will be beneficial.
Personally, I would have advised against the approach of staking the tree regarding adherence of SH’s Code of Conduct as well as timing notice over the Summer period.
However, the timeframe should be sufficient to establish some course of action (whatever becomes of accord),… it seems an adroit bet from their side.
I consider that SH in many respects has been a little stunted from:
- having a structure emphasizing Discourse (which Ive always felt lackluster as a communications medium – the medium is the message);
- a stunted documentation at activitypub.rocks;
- lack of live communications
- missing events capabilities
From my vantage, its okay that there are multifaceted environments which involve developers; community-leaders; and other stakeholder groups.
However, SH is still an important confluence and a significant entry point for newcomers.
As some may know, Ive been recently interested in the concept of ‘chaordic’ governance, which was how Visa operated – to permit numerous entities to coordinate means of collaboration (both chaotic autonomies and ordered expectations), without eschewing the creative behaviours of legal entities.
I wish I had more focus as a developer or leader to do more to envisage such things but I reckon that through the ‘stone soup’ mechanism of individual and collective interests that there is a possibility to harness FEPs in a documented portal that shines a light on why Fediverse and connected technologies are of such significant to the public space and civic experiences.
As a suggestion, it would be interesting to see how each archetype for a portal could be existent for a subset of Fediverse content-types and provide a ‘circle’ with which one or more instances take responsibility for curation.
I still like the idea of Social Coop becoming an active partner - Ive had a positive experience using their Mastodon service and I trust their cooperative governance.
It should also be possible to emphasize different flavours of community centric initiatives elsewhere - even if it falls into the domain of Associated Press (AP /wink/) republishing.
Concerning events, I understand and greatly appreciate why OFFDEM was desired by PS as an alternative to FOSDEM. Though my time is stretched during that suite of conferences each February, I can attest to the quality of grounds up discussions at AP focused meetings.
Nethertheless, I feel that there is a gap from there not being a SocialHub as a devroom during FOSDEM, with the expertise scattered in other rooms or at other (no doubt constructive and valuable) ‘fringe’ events.
I would propose that SH uses its clout and connections to secure a regular fixture there and consider how it should broadening its involvement in community centric events on other continents.
An interesting angle would be to emphasize in a broader sense the behaviours of FEPs, with live demonstrations of the effects of such considered improvements and panel discussions on the tradeoffs of technical decisions.
Additionally, I understand SH’s roots in Fediverse and AP governance and empowerment.
However, is it not at all possible to broaden the scope towards Smolweb protocols too?
Id like to think there are unexplored community angles in addition to weathering any storms regarding community flow.
Given the grim trajectory of modern browser oligopolies and further enshittification from EEEAI business models it would be a noble service should we manage to encourage the provision of modern Fediverse technologies on non http based modalities.
At my end, Im still lurking here and chatting intermittently on other channels.
I wish I could roll up my sleeves but Im pulled in numerous directions and cant over promise.
You can add me as a background community leader - though you can not expect more than some beligerence should SH deviate too much.
I reckon I could help with trying to plan a devroom at Fosdem, though unlikely as a frontline volunteer on the day (as I volunteer as numerous other events in Brussels that week - hopefully even OFFDEM, and Im expecting to present updates to my other projects at 1 or 2 events).
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Thanks heaps to @lullis and @melvincarvalho for the admin offers. @how said PS want to see 4 admins volunteer before they’re willing to pass the torch, so we need 2 more. @nightpool are you still active on admin duty here? Would you be keen to join a new admin team?
Thanks for asking around @j12t. Your point about the need for a more integrated network of dev spaces and tools is well made. It gels with many of @aschrijver’s sentiments about social coding design, and to some degree with my push for more forum federation
But that’s a much larger issue that needs it’s own topic (or several). SH can’t be part of any integrated effort if it vanishes beneath the waves in September.
Coming back to the sentiment that SH isn’t currently scratching the itch for some devs, there are some insightful examples in @devnull’s topic on FediCon. Including;
A community values watchdog is a useful contribution, for sure, as are many of the ideas offered in your post. Thanks for both 
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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:
-
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.
-
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.”
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ll be convinced when:
- I’m not the only one keeping the server up-to-date
- Teams are active and not just lists of names
- 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.
Most of it is part of the Fediverse. The Software category is lacking fediversity because software owners didn’t federate!
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.
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.
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!)
Oh yes, that would be great.
I’m very surprised to read this. I really do not understand why the audience would be too broad. I mean, really. Why?
Indeed. With more people invested in it, they would use it, either from here, or from the Fediverse.
Isn’t Loomio federated? Then why is it not common?
Can you elaborate on this @silverpill?
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.
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
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.
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Not meant to downplay the efforts to get other (monetary or labor) contributions over the years. Sorry if it came across that way.
My point was that if there is clear value for something, it is usually quite possible for find the resources in the order of magnitude we are talking about here, and in fact I heard several people on the weekend who said they would help – including with money – if there were a plan they could support.
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I am wondering about your position on the social.coop proposal. That would entail a full transfer into new custodianship. Personally I think social.coop is an examplar on how to organize within a commons, and this can be a win-win as SocialHub has different social dynamics than, say, regular FOSS communities. There’s things to learn for them, and many benefits they bring in return.
A post was split to a new topic: Defamation of PS and @how must stop
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.
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Personally I have a few issues with Social.coop:
- It’s based in the USA ;
- It requires an account on OpenCollective for meaningful participation ;
- Its discussions are not self-hosted ;
- Coordination is scattered ;
But it exists and it’s good. They’re probably more interested in hosting Mastodon than Discourse though.
The CoC is certainly OK – I didn’t read it because the link I clicked was 404, but I trust from the discussions there that it must be fine.
I’m wary though that people banned from here are active there.
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Firstly, I’d like to thank @how and others for everything they’ve done, to date. I think it would be nice to ensure some continuity, of the forum, if possible.
Perhaps going forward, we can adopt the following item from the Ubuntu Code of Conduct:
Step down considerately
When somebody leaves or disengages from the project, we ask that they do so in a way that minimises disruption to the project. They should tell people they are leaving and take the proper steps to ensure that others can pick up where they left off.
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That’s because I don’t know anyone who is both interested in running this forum, and is qualified to do that.
First of all, I think it shouldn’t be handed to someone who is not an active forum participant.
But in this thread? Many share a strange patronizing attitude towards developers. Like we’re sheep incapable of self-organizing that must be herded to some website in order to be educated by wise community managers and spoonfed with linked data slop. Thanks but no. This attitude is absolutely the last thing we need on a developer forum.
In theory, the place can be run by developers themselves, but nowadays most of us use our own software, and we can talk to each other directly without SocialHub in the middle, or via other forums and groups.
At this point I am fairly convinced that shutting down the forum and publishing a static archive is the best option.
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The SocialHub is not exactly in the middle: it’s part of the Fediverse. So it would only be normal that discussions relevant to everyone would be archived here, since they would be transmitted here as well.
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But most discussions about fediverse development elsewhere on the fediverse aren’t transmitted to SocialHub as well. There’s a lot that factors into this, including:
- technology limitations. Kudos to the work that @devnull et al are doing on that front, and there’s steady progress, but are there any forum-based spaces that are well-integrated in this way with the broader microblogging fediverse today?
- awareness; some devs don’t know that they can tag communities here to create a thread on SocialHub, others know in principle but (since it requires an extra step they don’t do on most posts) just don’t remember to do it in situations where it would make sense.
- on topics other than FEPs, it’s not clear what the value is – and there are also costs to take into account
One way to look at this is that the initial attempts at SocialHub federation were a prototype that wasn’t as broadly useful as hoped but has succeeded in revealing issues that need to be addressed. In another thread you mentioned that right now SocialHub “feels like a failure” because it hasn’t able to keep a stable and growing and rotating team of responsible people in general, although the FEP team is going well … looking at it as a prototype, though, it’s not a failure: it’s identified a use case that’s a good match for the current state of the prototype, as well as a big challenge to address to extend to other use cases.
In terms of the overall reboot or shutdown question … those aren’t the only two options. Another possibility is to take a hiatus, putting the community into read-only mode for a while; or, narrowing of focus, at least in the short term, for example keeping the FEP discussions going and shifting other stuff into read-only for the time being (if that’s possible in Discourse). Both of these keep open the option of moving SocialHub forward (potentially in a different form). They also create an opportunity to see what alternatives evolve on their own – and the space to come up with proposals and plans for moving forward that identify and address the underlying challenges.
Then again, sometime the takeaway from a prototype – even one with valuable learning – is that this isn’t a direction you see as practical to pursue given the overall constraints. If SocialHub shuts down, people who see value in some or all of what happens here will start up other mechanisms; to the extent that there’s currently a community here, it can migrate. As long as there’s an archive, or the site’s available in read-only mode, history isn’t lost; and everything here is CC-SA-4.0 so new sites can take whatever subset is useful. All of that’s true whether or not you officially pass the torch to somebody else.
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Where are you seeing this? From what I’m seeing, the discussion is not about any of those things, so this is quite the bizarre statement. I also don’t think this is strictly a “developer forum”, as there are several different sections dedicated to software, spec work, interest gathering, and so on – and participation is welcomed by anyone.
If there are “other forums and groups”, then no one is being made broadly aware of them. If the answer is “we can talk to each other directly”, then this is essentially abdicating any sort of collective communication – if you don’t follow a bunch of the people involved, you won’t see the conversations.
As it stands, SocialHub is the most prominent place to go if you want to see discussions about ActivityPub and related topics. I’m not aware of any more prominent venues. This isn’t to say that anyone is being “herded to some website” or that SocialHub must be “in the middle”, but it is generally valuable if the discussions end up being collected somewhere in aggregate, and it is generally convenient if the discussions can be carried out long-form with all the creature comforts of forums and none of the limitations of microblogging. What’s the alternative being posed here? Where do people go for this stuff?
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I also don't think this is strictly a "developer forum", as there are several different sections dedicated to software, spec work, interest gathering, and so on -- and participation is welcomed by anyone.
Fair, there is space for all of these discussions, but considering that of a given set of ActivityPub developers, only a small subset of those developers contribute to SocialHub.
That may be a signal that either the existing space is not suitable for AP implementors, or a new space may be a welcome addition.
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@how Let’s get concrete: I would love to help cover the bill. How can I give you money?
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