What are developers doing that could be brought to a forum like SocialHub?
What makes SocialHub specifically not suitable for bringing those topics here?
The existence of any forum implies an opportunity for collaborative participation rather than a mandate. It would be helpful to have explicitly identified examples of discussions that could be brought to a forum, and explicitly identified sentiments of why those discussions weren’t brought to this forum.
So far, the most clearly articulated objection seems to be advocating for bypassing forums in favor of ad-hoc communications or backchannels. Perhaps this is adequate for fixing one-off bugs as compared to creating a topic in that software’s category. Perhaps that bug was filed on a project’s issue tracker instead. But for having sustained conversations over the course of days or weeks or months or even years about meatier topics, I can’t imagine much effectiveness in a scattered diffuse set of posts only living on people’s profiles if you scroll back far enough.
Personally, I bring such conversations here because I don’t want them to be lost to the timeline and I don’t want character limits or a lack of blockquotes to impair my communications. I also know that there is an audience here for ActivityPub-related special interest topics, whereas there is no such expectation for my hangout spot where i go to check in on what some friends are doing. the context matters a lot.
Not being able to contribute financially myself, this is heartwarming to see. Thank you
@how these contributions can be used to renew activitypub.eu for another year, so we do not have that deadline imposed. It is too short-notice to do anything responsible, whether it is continuing or shutdown.
While I have no doubt part of the concern is financial, I get the feeling that the overarching concern is political.. how and PS want to organizationally divest from SH, perhaps.
Sure, but the deadline was hung to that expiry date. Let’s get that off the table, and allow for enough time to properly do things. As I referred to in Step down considerably any next step depends in large part of @how bringing more clarity still and be actively involved.
(Though I would not necessarily describe it as ‘political’)
Sure. I’m not suggesting money will solve the problem as a whole, but @how specifically requested concrete suggestions.
I think that those of us who can, pitching in to cover cost, is a concrete, incremental, feasible step in the right direction. We have to start somewhere.
Hey guys, I’ve been out of touch with ActivityPub stuff for a while as I’ve been quite busy with other work.
I’ll confess I am not across the issues and haven’t read this topic in full, but if hosting is the issue. Pavilion, the consultancy I run can host and administer this forum.
I don’t have a particularly strong opinion one way or the other on where discussions take place, but just thought I’d offer that.
If nothing else it would help me to improve the Discourse ActivityPub plugin’s handling of load issues
That is a fabulous and delightful offer @angus I will update the 🌻 SocialHub Reboot Wiki with that (though I am not sure if I am allowed to add more mentions than are currently in the wiki).
Great questions @trwnh, relevant not to just SocialHub but also to alternatives.
Here’s some examples of some of the conversations happening now or over the last couple of weeks that fit in SocialHub’s scope (as I understand it) and seem relevant to developers (they all relate to limitations and/or potential improvements in the software).
the Dropsitenews report about Meta’s scraping
starter packs and consent (sparked by the Mastodon announcement)
A New Social’s post on crossposting vs bridging that also led to discussion of federation in the client
Fedi clients (sparked by a request from Laurens and a couple of discussions in Fediverse Report)
the Online Services Act / EU and Australia age verification and their implications
the “verify your account” spam/scam
Ghost’s ActivityPub support (including their currently-proprietary client)
In a nutshell:
people who are active on SocialHub don’t bring those topics here when they see them, presumably because they don’t see value in doing so. You mentioned that you personally bring conversations here because you know there’s an audience here for the ActivityPub topics you focus on, but that’s not necessarily true for topics like these. You also cited character limits and a lack of blockquotes but other than vanilla Mastodon most fedi software supports that pretty well, so again that’s not relevant for a lot of people.
people who aren’t active on SocialHub generally have no incentive to bring discussions here
even if people who don’t have accounts here want to bring discussions here, it’s not in general obvious how. I experimented with trying to bring the bridging / crossposting / federation in the client post here. The first dilemma was not knowing what account to tag for a given post; even once I found the list, should it be fediversity, software, or … ? I chose Fediversity, and replied to the thread tagging the category actor … but nothing showed up here. So I started a new thread, tagging the category actor … but once again, nothing showed up here.
Of course these aren’t only challenges for SocialHub. A few of these discussions are on Fediverse and https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse but most aren’t. That said, I do think the specific dynamics of who’s currently active on SocialHub and what they’re interested accentuate the problems. A reboot could offer opportunities to make progress on those, but if it’s being driven by the people who are currently active here I’m not sure how likely that is.
It goes both ways. There are a lot of interesting discussions started here and not elsewhere. It all contributes to the grassroots ecosystem at large and helps evolve the fediverse. The AP dev community has a broad range of opinions, ideologies, values, things they find important. And all across the ecosystem there are various independent initiatives where people can find their peers, and join groups they feel most comfortable to be with. It is a good thing, that. It helps stimulate the overall diversity of the ecosystem, and resilience of the fedi movement as a whole. If there’s sustained custodianship of SocialHub, and a dedicated community team, then SocialHub is viable.
Although a prototype that runs for six years… It looks like these software packages that linger for years on 0.x versions, only to realize fifteen years later, that they’ve been public for so long. Yes, it feels like a failure on the community management side. First, it was hard to keep Fedizens interested since the SocialHub was not part of the Fediverse. Fortunately @pukkamustard came with the Standards > Fediverse Enhancement Proposals and serious developers, interested in building on ActivityPub altogether, stuck around. Then, as it was still not on the Fediver, the SocialHub reached a moment where it was on the brink of demise, and @angus came and made SH a first class Fediverse application. Kudos to him! From this point, I thought it would be easier to gather everyone. But the fact is that maintaining this forum, dealing with trolls, welcoming new Software, all while keeping up with other things do require more people, and this is where we’re at. I certainly hope that people interested in the Fediverse and ActivityPub and who are not yet here, will eventually make it, because they would not move here: the free federated conversation would embrace us all instead; it’s the magic of the Fediverse: you can bridge islands.
You can make a donation to petites singularités specifying “SocialHub” in your wire. The association’s IBAN is indicated at https://ps.lesoiseaux.io/asbl. Thank you for asking.
You know it’s not a matter of money, but a matter of engaging more people: if you burn out, then I burn out, then your burn out, we won’t go anywhere else. We need a dozen people who start organizing on a regular basis. That’s all we need. For some, the financial contribution can do their part, it’s fine. I also don’t want the SocialHub to depend exclusively on p.s.: because of the bus factor, etc.
Yet I see Fediversity as a place to host such conversations. Maybe following lemmy.world’s fediverse category could help? So far I’ve seen that following Fediverse actors require some curation of the titles (but less so once @angus has integrated the ‘content warning’ as a title…).
I’m happy with spending an hour here, an hour there if that can unblock anything.
Well, I think there’s more clarity on your position and you indicated you are happy to stick around if there’s fellow community team to support you and bus factors are addressed. No domain expiry deadlines, so the pressure is off the kettle.
Well I also describe today’s fediverse as a whole as a prototype, and it’s been running for even longer! We’re collectively trying to do something very different, without any obvious predecessors in the online world, so it’s not surprising it’s taking a while to try things out and refine. Specifically with SocialHub, I’d say there have been a couple of prototying states so far
the initial non-federated prototype. Key learnings here include (a) there’s value in having a space not limited to SWICG participants; (b) for FEPs, the current technology worked well enough that the discussions were effective and a team of volunteers emerged to carry it forward; (c) establishing anti-oppressive community guidelines took a lot of work but could in fact be done, and almost everybody was okay with it; (d) not being part of the Fediverse was a huge barrier; and (e) there wasn’t sufficient funding or community willingness to volunteer to take the next steps (as outlined in RIPE NCC Community Fund 2023
So I can certainly see why it feels like a failure on the community management side – and honestly I haven’t seen anything in the discussions so far that will necessarily address these challenges. More positively though, the FEP team provides a proof point that it is possible, and there are certainly people in these discussions saying they want to help. So if the software evolves to handle federation better, the scope is clarified, and the community collectively decides they want to address the equity issues, there are opportunities for progress.
At least in theory that’s the magic! In practice, that’s not yet the reality with today’s software. On the one hand, that’s an opportunity: if SocialHub collectively starts to make progress on the equity issues to the poing that fedi devs and community members collectively decide there’s enough potential value that SocialHub is a project worth focusing on to make the promise real, then it could be a use case that drive evolution of the software – and become a showcase project for what’s possible. On the other hand, we’ve seen so far that won’t just happen on its own, and those “ifs” are doing a lot of work. So we shall see.
Agreed fediversity is a useful category, but when I shared a couple of links there last year nobody was interested in discussing those topics. Oh well, people are interested in what they’re interested in, not much I can do about that … but, given that’s the case why bother to bring other similar discussions here?
Maybe? It’s certainly an interesting challenge from the technical perspective, including getting the posts there into the right category and two-way mapping of replies, moderator actions, and reactions/upvotes. It’s a good example of how SocialHub could be a good use case / showcase. I’d also include piefed as well, as a platform it has a lot more momentum than Lemmy (and also it’s not run by tankies, a definite plus).
You are pointing to a thread where there was a long elaborate discussion with 53 replies. That indicates to me that there is certainly interest. Now, if you are asking why weren’t any follow-up taken, concrete action, etc. That hauls back to my argument based on experience as long-time facilitator here, that people come here just to talk. People can say “community” as much as they want, but with that kind of involvement there’s just forum software and things are no different than in chat channels or microblog: discussion-only, fire and forget.
It’d be lovely if the new community direction would find enough interested people to start other projects or task forces that see people actively collaborating.
"More positively, though, this discussion provides mutilple opportunities for white SocialHub and SWICG leaders and members to very visibly try to do something about anti-Blackness in your spaces … or just as visibly choose not to, and signal to the world that you personally and collectively are so content with being in an anti-Black environment that you won’t even make an effort to change it.
It’ll be interesting to see how you respond!"
Sure. And it would also be lovely if individuals here who say they’re interested in the changing the dynamics took action. @DameO had some specific suggestions in that thread from last year:
"Start online meetings and hope people show up, create polling posts, connect with Blacksky, prominent Black & Brown people on Fedi and encourage notable Fediverse stakeholders to do so as well.
Honestly, it boils down to caring"
In general there are only a handful of people in fedi who actively work on addressing equity challenges, and a lot of places we can put our energy. From my perspective, anti-Blackness is a huge problem in the fediverse as a whole. If a community – or a forum, or a mailing list – that potentially plays a key role has equity problems that aren’t being acknowledged, it’s worth putting the time in to documenting and highlight the problems and assess whether there’s enough energy in the community to try do something about it. So I did! And it resulted in some specific concrete suggestions, so a good use of my time.
But when the well-respected white active participants who set the tone for a community, forum, or mailing list act like they don’t care enough to try to do anything about it, my experience is that putting more energy trying to change things is like pushing water uphill … not the best use of my time.
A reboot creates an opportunity to change those dynamics, and if there were a bunch of people who seemed seriously interested in addressing these issues as part of the reboot it’s quite possible they’d get support once they started having discussions and pulled together a team. That hasn’t happened yet – it’s yet another reason that only having discussions about the reboot here is so limiting: most of the white people involved are so content with being in an anti-Black environment that they haven’t even made an effort to change it in the past, so they’re likely to be content with that in the future. Still, it could happen. Time will tell!
As mentioned in various threads like in Call for Community we have a discussion forum and a do-ocracy. Do-ocracy roughly means “pick up any task and steer it to completion”. Take the initiative and try to get things done. Like I did when I set up a community initiative to collectively built a new activitypub.rocks portal, or launching fedi.foundation as a collaborative publishing site to onboard people to the dev ecosystem. Or earlier when I brought the inactive FEP to Codeberg and looked for people willing to facilitate. With the FEP I was successful, the two portal initiatives were met with disinterest (even though everyone complained about activitypub.rocks needing an update, for years). My commons janitoring a waste of time, unfortunately.
That’s the risk too of taking initiative in a do-ocracy: It boils down to caring, and then you just do it.
You are talking about interest, but at any time you and @DameO might’ve said “we are starting a project, and invite a ton of people here, here is our repo and a task planner”, followed by “can we have dedicated forum space and have moderator privilege?”.
The problem is not a lack of resources or volunteers. This topic alone is full of people offering both.
I agree with @melvincarvalho that a person leaving a project should “step down considerately”. Not destroy the project to save it from their (perceived) political enemies, by refusing to share admin access with other members of the project wanting to continue it, unless those members first comply with some arbitrary list of conditions.
The main barrier to this kind of experiment would be getting access to an export of the full archive of public posts made to SH. I presume admin powers are required to export this. It would be a show of good faith for someone with admin powers to export such an archive, and make it available in a neutral location.
That way, even if this Discourse instance were to vanish in a puff of smoke, we would at least retain access to our public history. Ideally in a form that could be imported into a new forum instance (Discourse or otherwise), if that’s the consensus. But a static archive that keeps existing links alive would be better than nothing.
Are there more volunteers for the community team?