After having moderated this forum for a couple years, I decided to step down as mod. With pleasure I have welcomed new members, improved forum titles, helped organize event, created header images and gave a lot of interaction in numerous topics and posts. One of the things I hoped to do was make this a more inclusive and active community involved with the whole range of topics that are important for Fediverse evolution, besides the nitty gritty tech details. I started the #fediversity:fediverse-futures category to talk about a vision of what fedi can be, and in hopes to inspire and encourage people to start implementing new types of federated applications. On the fedi itself and across the web I dropped links to SocialHub whenever there was opportunity to do so.
But I am involved in too many initiatives overall and must make choices where I spend time and attention. Part of my decision to drop the moderation tasks here, is that - with exceptions - there isnāt much interest to build a real SocialHub community. This is likely due to lack of time, and not that people do not care about the mission. We are all tremendously busy, after all. And maintaining fedi apps is a huge effort in itself. It is important to realize that involvement beyond the scope of oneās own project is a win-win situation in the long run, though.
That this place is ājust a forumā doesnāt make it less important and valuable. Thereās a huge archive here of very valuable information. Thereās also an enormous amount of open issues to be tackled. I hope that in due time they will, and done in a way where the fediās future health benefits. On a different forum, for the Social Coding Movement I am involved with, I took notes on some major challenges the Fediverse is faced with.
I still think building broad and inclusive community is very important, and I will continue to be a passionate fedi advocate for that. Just in slightly different way than before. And should SocialHub become healthy and vibrant again, I am again available to help
Thank you for all the great interactions!
(PS. Iāll continue to be a regular member here, of course)
thank you for your service and the warm but destinct tone you brought into this forum. That shall be missed.
You say this forum is drying out ālikely due to lack of timeā but I want to object. All our days have 24 hours alike - it is a matter of priorities what we spend them for.
And if we see, or rather donāt see, any AcivityPub celebrities rock this place (pun intended) that says a lot. There is nobody from the W3C ālivingā standards (e.g. ActivityPub) nor big or honorable implementors like Mastodon, Diaspora or Peertube nor users with numerous followers showing here. It may just not look worth the time, it may just not rock enough. Braggy domain names alone are not enough. Nor is a handful of selfless friendly souls.
There is a long list of discarded cornerstones in expired certificates, run out subdomains or other signs of lack of interest, rooted in the standards. This community mirrors those issues.
I wish you the best luck for your new efforts and am curious if you have a fediverse home where one can follow your public activities?
@aschrijver Iām one of the people who has only been on the periphery here, as someone not super involved in the fediverse and social media in general. But I have appreciated your work here for community; I hope you can keep it up and also stay sane!
Yes, @mro I agree it is also about priorities. But this comes combined with the ability of this community to convince others to set their priorities differently. I often mentioned that participating on SocialHub, while maybe not always directly beneficial, will be a win-win in the longer run.
But to make that obvious, besides good argumentation a whole set of conditions must be in place, that lead to participation here being really worthwhile of the effort people put in. That is unfortunately not the case. While there are many very important discussions on this forum, thereās lack of a concrete and meaningful follow-up. As a result people come to see this as a ājust talkā forum and rather involve themselves with practical work on their own project. (If they have a federated app project going, that is easy. For newcomers in the field it is much harder to onboard themselves. They need to grab the attention of those who went before them, to gain the knowledge they need to get going and study their codebases to reverse-engineer what is undocumented)
This is a bit of a chicken-egg. If the community is not seen as effective, then it is less likely that someone who built some AP extension will document it in a generic way and publish for others. And even having good places to publish to, where others are aware of the work, requires upfront organization and people doing the chores to make those processes run smoothly.
Besides that thereās of course the fact that channels and tools arenāt part of the Fediverse throws an extra barrier for people to sign up and participate. An often-heard criticism of SocialHub is that it is a centralized stand-alone forum software.
Based on those fedi challenges I looked at, I believe thereās plenty handholds to bring improvement, and in ways that take the particular culture and dynamics of fedi and FOSS communities into account. Finding these is part of what Social Coding Movement is about, but on a different scope and level than the SocialHub.
One of these ways is to organize in smaller, closely aligned interest groups, and form so-called Ecosystem Alliances. We are planning a prep meeting for one around forge federation (where āsmallā is relative, as the potential full scope is federated free software development). Doing so provides opportunity to enter new domains and avoid the Protocol Decay when it is every app developer for themself inventing extensions.
Hi @aschrijver was with my mother at the weekend and didnāt read any emails. Itās a pity that the soul of the forum is going, but I can relate and understand that in every respect. Thank you so much for everything you have done here. And Iām sure weāll meet again, wherever.
Iām currently in the process of building up a collection of knowledge for the solidarity construction industry (http://sobawi.org). For now, weāll probably use https://antora.org/ and https://gitlab.com/. Letās see if we can convince the editors. Next we should present the articles as Linked Open Data and organize them with SKOS. A big task. Weāll see if and how http://rdf-pub.org/ can help here. A lot of work! That will take a few years.
And i also have to work for money again, the reserves are running out.
Hey. Sad to see this, but I cannot blame you. When I put my toes into the water here I got them (lightly) bitten for trying to help the community here communicate to an audience Iāve been working with professionally since the early 1990s, It wasnāt very encouraging, so I spent my attention elsewhere. But I wish you the best.
Thank you both very much. Know that Iām not leaving, just not moderating Our shared interests and common activities will mean paths will continue to cross. And yes, we have a challenging ecosystem that requires a bit of elephant skin and overcoming frustrations now and then. But that maneuvering is also part of what makes it interesting to engage here as far as Iām concerned
Following @sebastianās response in the related topic, I am tempted to close the house and throw away the keys. If the community feels there is something valuable going on here, then I propose to hand the keys to someone else and resign myself.
Thank you, Melvin I enjoy your posts very much as well.
I think most of the community isnāt yet really aware of this choice. With only the topic titles on ātribeā and āmod stepping downā to go from, that may go by unnoticed very easily.
So I created a separate topic with a poll in it to gauge where peopleās thoughts are in this matter. Maybe you can unpin other topics and pin this one globally. And letās attract attention to it with our toots on the fedi apps.
I enjoy your posts very much as well.