SocialHub: Made by you

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Yeah, this is a huge challenge in general – it’s very difficult to find funding for people-oriented stuff (as opposed to creating tech artifacts). On the one hand SWF could be a funding source, on the other hand that increases concerns about their dominance. So unfortunately I don’t have any great suggestions here. Although … hmm …

Some (although certainly not all) of the people on SWICG probably have some disposable income, maybe partner with them on crowdfunding for the FEPs? Like I say, my impression is that they certainly see the value of an independent group working on the FEPs, so maybe this would be a way for them to help without taking control (which everybody seems to agree would be the wrong direction).

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It stopped moving with the times and now languishes in obscurity. Along with GNU social (apparently not dead), and a number of other projects from the early fediverse, including GNU MediaGoblin. Which was a major project in the AP standardisation process, but AFAIK has never completed any working federation. This seems like a missed oppprtunity.

I’d love to see a group of implementers funded to finish implementating AP in MediaGoblin, and WebTorrent too, so it can fully federate with PeerTube etc. The funding deliverables could also include drafting FEPs for anything they have to add to AP or existing FEPs to make it work. Hopefully by making it easier for existing video software projects to add AP support, more of them would. Growing the network effects of the federated video web.

But I digress…

That’s really good news. We’re lucky to have you both. Can you name the other facilitator yet?

Again, that’s glad tidings. But there may be other people who would love to step up but are too busy, doing stuff they don’t really want to do, but do get paid for. Funded positions (even part time) could give them the freedom to put their living in line with their principles and passions.

As buy-in for the FEP process increases (hopefully) and more people get involved, the workload may increase, and/or become more complicated and time-consuming. It’s good to plan for sucess :wink:

If I was a risk-averse funder, I would be much more likely to give a grant for FEP work if it had a stamp of approval from W3C. What I mean is, if FEP-a4ed: The Fediverse Enhancement Proposal Process was either itself a W3C standard, or referenced in AP 1.1+.

In case I’m still being unclear …

I totally get the logic of this. I’m 110% in support of the independence of the FEP process, from SocialCG and W3C. Which is why I want the declaration of independence that is FEP-a4ed included in the constitution, so to speak. As a formally recognized community-led process for extensions to the AP standard. Does that make sense?

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@how a very first step would be to setup an OpenCollective for SocialHub and allow people to chip in to support things — SocialHub then decides what to put funds towards, whether it’s community, whether it’s FEPs, or hosting costs; you just need to have invoices for each.

Give people a way to support you financially, and some people will surprise you.

(Also, add it as a link in the header or something, so people can find it)

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I must say I do not like the OpenCollective approach of making everything public. This makes more data to harvest from people with ill intentions. At petites singularités, we have several private categories where all members can see the work done, and discuss anything. Both funding and accounting are available to members, so we do enjoy the transparency without the publicity.

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Then make it a patreon, ko-fi or do something direct with stripe — I really don’t care what you choose, but you want something with some degree of openness as to how the funds are being used, and you want some way for people to setup a one-time or recurring donation.

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Currently FEP has 5 facilitators, they are listed in FACILITATORS.md file. @trwnh is also a facilitator now, we’re in the process of onboarding them.

The current workload is ~2-3 pull requests per week, and I don’t expect it to change. FEP is very lightweight, and this is by design.

Not really. Why it needs to be formally recognized by W3C?

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It doesn’t need to be. But I think it would have a few benefits.

First, it’s fair to say that having AP standardised by W3C makes people with no existing relationship to AP implementers more confident to use it. This is often mentioned by newer champions in the tech press as a reason to choose AP over ATProto or Nostr. I think the same would be true of the FEP process, if it was recognised (as it is) as a standard by the same vendor-neutral body, and ideally referenced in the AP spec.

Second, the reason a protocol standard makes new implementers more confident. Which is that in theory, it means it can’t be arbitrarily changed by a dominant vendor, breaking other implementations.

The elephant in the room is that this has not been the practical reality of AP. Arguably because the AP spec provides no protocol for extensions. Formal recognition of the FEP process would fill that gap.

Thirdly, as I said, I think it would make it easier to get risk-averse funders to give grants for FEP work. You may be financially comfortable enough not to be paid for FEP facilitation, but I know that’s very much not the case for @trwnh, for example. I mentioned a few other cases where funding could feed into FEP work, such as making draft FEPs a deliverable of grants for new implementations. Also, getting funding for group projects to federate new types of social media, producing a draft FEP(s) and a number of reference implementations.

Can I reverse the question; why not have it formally recognized by W3C?

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It already is being recognized in this: potential-charters/stage-process.md at 1a527b7af3a9a51c91b45b7eb3db5157840e2483 · swicg/potential-charters · GitHub

@codenamedmitri can explain more.

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FEP is already recognized by Fediverse developers. I don’t think formal recognition by any other organization is necessary, although they can do it as long as FEP process is not affected.

Funding FEP authors is a good idea, because they do a lot of work.

Of course, if someone wants to provide funding to a specific FEP facilitator, no one could stop them, though that would be a strange move. A one-time funding for a specific task might make sense.

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By many, certainly. But others I talk to on the verse have only the vaguest idea what an FEP is or how the process works. Still others don’t even know about FEPs yet, including (hopefully) many future implementers who haven’t entered the space yet.

The FEP process is, IMHO, crucial to the future of the fediverse. I want everyone to know about it and recognize its tremendous value as a hub for peer production of common standards.

Another reason for formal recognition by W3C is that it makes it harder for the likes of Meta to set up their own AP “plug-in” process, as part of an EEE strategy. If the FEP process has the W3C imprimatur, Meta could still set up their own in competition. But they couldn’t claim it has the same normative value in the AP standards space.

I agree 110% with this and I really appreciate you emphasizing its importance.

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@laurens or someone else, wouldn’t it be useful to have a “FEP Primer” to introduce the concept to Fediverse developers who are not (yet) using the SocialHub, including ways to participate from within the Fediverse? We could make it a page here, and report it in the Fediverse Report to give visibility and onboard new ActivityPub developers.

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Great idea! Can I suggest a 3 step project;

  1. An FEP primer, including the role SH and CodeBerg currently play in the FEP process.

  2. Make sure every active category on SH has at least 1 active host (ideally 3 or more), and switch on AP federation for the ones that haven’t yet.

  3. A forum federation primer, that also briefly covers FEP and links back to the first one (for those that missed it).

Imagine people using threadiverse apps, but not AP microblogging apps, realising they can interact with SH threads from their Lemmy or KBin server (if they can, and if not that’s a fourth project).

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Communities and people doesn’t adopt digital technologies—they adopt #KISS tools. People don’t use TCP/IP or HTTP; they browse websites. They don’t think about SMTP or IMAP when sending emails. People don’t think about ActivityPub at all. They interact with intuitive projects that abstract these technical layers away.

One of the toughest challenges working at the grassroots of #DIY tech is creating#FOSS tools while ensuring they align with #4open standards and good #UX. This mostly isn’t only a technical challenge; it’s primarily a social and political one. Unfortunately, it’s been a difficult conversation to have in openweb and #FOSS spaces so far. It’s a large part of the mess we are in, we need to work to compost this mess, the #geekproblem

#SocialHub has often tried to build a bridge for this conversation, and at times it has failed in this. How can we do this better?

https://hamishcampbell.com/communities-adopt-kiss-tools-not-technologies/

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Shall we try and do some grassroots #Diy ruff consensuses on socialhub to get the very basic link to the #SWF added Cats and Codeing, we need balence - #4 by hamishcampbell who is up to create an affinity group to make this to happen:

Use the tools we have on site:

  • a #KISS proposal, to link (try for both ways)

  • very simple ruff process, say conversation, then 10 likes on the post to get a ruff consensus to act.

  • anyone can BLOCK in the comments and if they can get 5 likes on the explanation of why they are blocking, then we don’t do it.

Very simple and very ruff, to start the process into motion, cross fingers for cat herding. Not interested in external tools, any ideas to improve this process on site with the tools and crew we have?

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This is very abstract. It might help if you give some specific examples of decisions you’d use this process to find consensus on.

But in my experience, overly formalised decision-making mostly puts people off. Witness the demise of Indymedia as a formal decision-making layer. While the same people carried on doing mostly the same independent media and software freedom work, just more … independently ; )

IMHO there are more open-ended ways of encouraging participation and cooperation, especially in a decentralised network. Eg gathering in small working groups or institutions (temporary or permanent) to work on specific problems. Then making it as easy as possible for keen people to find and join in on the one(s) that scratch their itch(es).

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Paranoia, distrust, and a focus on control have grown stronger over the past 40 years of #deathcult (#neoliberal) worship. #Neoliberalism thrives on fear, scarcity, and (stupid) individualism, fuelling social fragmentation and deepening divisions, that pushes polarisation. This (invisible) ideology strips away collective balance, pushing the “common sense” a survival-of-the-fittest path where trust erodes as people are pitted against one another. The pursuit of profit and control, combined with the dismantling of social safety nets and public institutions, leaves left people anxious, insecure, and distrustful, thus the current need for control. Ideas please to compost this mess making?

We need to shift the current “balance” on socialhub by pushing #KISS consensus process, the only way in my long expirence to make this work is to try and build very ruff consensus process that are native to the tools on this site.

I am proposing we start a new thread with a simple proposal and “trust” based process:

Proposal:

  • Put a prominent link on top of socialhub to both the #WC3 process and the #SWF foundation

  • Ask the site to link back with a prominent link to this site.

  • Revue this decision after 3 months to see who links to who and should we continue to link.

This is it, the DRAFT process to make this happen is in the post above this.

The advantage in this is that we then have “democratic” buy in - a collective voice and a practical example of herding cats working as a grassroots path which we will fail without - long history of this fail let’s try very hard not to just repeat this history please.

https://hamishcampbell.com/a-practical-path-to-balance-the-current-governance-mess-in-foss/

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@how @nightpool @angus @pfefferle @weex @marnanel can we pin this proposal Proposal - linking to SWF, thanks.

Can we add a category called “proposal”

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It’s interesting, we are seeing a complete #blocking from the tech side of the ESSENTIAL social side of this openweb reboot. And yes massy non engagement is active blocking, this should not be too hard to understand.

We have a problem, for a middle ground view of this Call for Community for a more active view see any of my posts for the last few years.

For an easy path to balance this blocking Proposal - linking to SWF to put your views into action in a native democratic, social, way.

CARROT

UPDATE this kinda behavier is so bad that i dont acturly know what to do about it?

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I’m sorry, as usual, there is too much text to parse and too many contradictory messages in this topic.

I will reply to Proposal - linking to SWF.

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3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Proposal - linking to SWF