SocialHub federation has been broken for a long time, and shows no sign of being fixed. This is another reason I’m abandoning it for greener pastures. It’s great that @angus is maintaining SH as a historical archive to keep the many links that point here from breaking. But it’s clearly no longer the community centre it once was.
I agree this is far from ideal. As I made pretty clear in my topic last year arguing against forum fragmentation. But I’m not sure that’s exactly what’s happening.
Some dev discussion seems to have moved to ActivityPub.space, which is a nodeBB forum, not a microposting service. Other discussions seems to be happening in communities on Lemmy services, etc. The challenge now is to realise the promise of the “threadiverse”. By figuring out how to use AP federation to weave all these discussions together, so it feels like it’s all happening in a unified space, and all the discussions can be discovered via any of the participating forums.
To head off any potential accusations of impropriety, ActivityPub.Space is simply meeting ActivityPub discussion where it already is — the fediverse. The same people who post on SocialHub continue to post on SocialHub 🙂
In fact, ActivityPub itself heads off the need for tribalism between forum communities. Both Discourse and NodeBB can federate with each other.
NodeBB just has additional tooling that helps soften a bunch of federation's rough edges, plus first-class threadiverse support and discovery features for non-forum content (read: mastodon, et al.)
As for questions about which format is best: it doesn't have to matter. Participate on a forum, participate on a microblog, it shouldn't matter because the conversations should be accessible to both kinds.
Anyone accusing Julian of impropriety over this is living in a dreamworld, where they can dictate to fediverse devs where our discussion “should” happen. Spoilers: they can’t. No one can.
Neither SH stalwarts nor Julian can control the fact that most fediverse discussion abandoned SH long ago, or that some folks seems to be finding ActivityPub.space a more welcoming or convenient portal into the dev discussions (although the interface currently gives my mobile browser a conniption fit, as I reported to him in the verse). Julian offered a tool, some people are choosing to use it. Anyone who is salty at him about that has no idea how technical communities work, or social life in general.
Hear, hear. More of this please. As per the OP, I’m really keen to talk about how we can improve the UX of all this, and make it more easily discoverable to devs, of new AP apps, and the fedi-curious. But my work on this will not be found here, at least not until such time as someone with SH admin powers gets around to fixing the federation functionality,