Wellbeing, participation, processes and policies

aschrijver · January 16, 2025, 11:11am

SocialHub Policies

Given the Fediverse landscape today I would drop the Community Values Policy and would instead use this Discourse Policies feature in a different manner.

First for a healthy community itself a robust wellbeing track needs to be in place, which SocialHub should re-establish. I am not going into this, but it starts with CoC and builds on that with a whole range of moderation practices and a diverse (culture, ethnicity, skillset) group of people involved in wellbeing procedures.

As @strypey rightfully indicates there are a bunch of impracticalities to using a Policy to reinforce a code of conduct ‘at the forum door’.

At social coding movement instead of a “command” to conduct, there is a “demand” for your participation. A friendlier positioning of things. The movement has adopted guidelines as used by Mozilla and adapted them for its own use:

What is interesting for SocialHub community is that:

The social coding community participation guidelines is adoptable by anyone.
Similar to the Contributor Convenant it is a crowdsourced, versioned and evolving artifact.

So SocialHub can adopt this as-is and contribute to its improvement. Even better, social coding is a movement, not a community. Alignment with its ideas is enough to be part of the movement. So SocialHub, in a new positioning towards its future, might consider itself under social coding umbrella. And if that is the case, can benefit from facilities and services provided by the movement’s other direct participants, which are all otherwise independent party.

This “movement” concept is a first step to ensuring that foundational social web technologies can be “of the people, and by the people” i.e. commons-based and evolving according to the needs of the commons. Not the needs of hypercapitalism that a corporate takeover would entail, for instance.

Now on to those Policies…

General participation guidelines are in place. How about richer collaborative relationships which are of much more value, than what casual discussion may bring? Collaboration is the absolute Achilles Heel of the fediverse.

Collaborating involves relying on each other.

My minumum requirement for “community” is collaboration, not merely discussion. Here’s where policies can define and reinforce the minimum participation guidelines of various different community processes and practices.

Instead of one Guardian Policy gatekeeping the door of this forum, you get many policies targeted to streamline the efficiency of ongoing community activity. To each policy further workflow can be defined and possibly automated, which would be a great thing to have as an ongoing practice to reduce the boring chores that are killing for a volunteer community.

Proposal and votes

I have a proposal that comes in 3 parts that can be separately improved, approved or rejected …

1. Community participation

Adopt https://participate.coding.social community participation guidelines.
- Where necessary help improve this document, so it can serve our whole grassroots movement.
- See: participation guidelines on Codeberg the and discussion topic on social coding forum.

I am in favor of the proposal, because …
I am not in favor of the proposal, because …
I am neutral. I am not in favor and not against.

0 voters

2. SocialHub repositioning

Reposition (conceptually) SocialHub to be under social coding movement umbrella.
- Social coding movement already considers itself liaisoned to SocialHub.
- Social coding movement’s themes are all complementary to SocialHub’s.
- Social coding movement and SocialHub are ‘values & vision’-aligned.
- Social coding movement raison d’être is to do as movement what community can’t do.
- Social coding movement is about social web based co-creation of the social web.

I am in favor of the proposal, because …
I am not in favor of the proposal, because …
I am neutral. I am not in favor and not against.

0 voters

3. Co-created community policies

Co-create “Community Policies” in a collaboration between movement and SocialHub.
- Community policies are building block of sustainable software & standards development.
- Social coding movement collects these for a Patterns & Practices library.
- The movement is interested in the design of the concept, SocialHub for its application.
- “Community Policies” become generally available for other projects and initiatives.

I am in favor of the proposal, because …
I am not in favor of the proposal, because …
I am neutral. I am not in favor and not against.

0 voters

strypey · January 16, 2025, 11:44am

I like the idea of reorienting the SocialHub forum based on the needs of those who are actively using it. As well as those who might start using it, if they felt their needs would be taken into account. Whether or not that involves social coding movement and its documents and processes is up for debate.

Personally I’m a fan of the GNU Kind Communications Guidelines. But I’m not attached to any particular approach. I’ll work within any guidelines or processes as long as they’re decided by consensus (deliberation and voluntary agreement, not necessarily unanimous) of those actively participating.

aschrijver · January 16, 2025, 11:56am

Maybe I should’ve split the poll into multiple ones that apply for the individual parts of the proposal.

Update: I split things in 3 polls now, @strypey

hamishcampbell · January 24, 2025, 11:53am

The motivation of pushing like this is often more of an issue than the text being pushed, this language and process spring from the identity politics movement Google Search and the current hard shifts to the right shows this is likely not helping.

“regardless of:” we need to stop doing these endless lists, it makes no sense and is never ending.

In my thinking, the first step is the subject, the second step is governance, the third step is what we as a “collective” do with these first steps - then the “policing of bad behaver” is a product of the first two steps.

NOT the first step itself.

We have no consensus on the subject of socialhub - as can be seen by the pushing out of political tech and pushing up of “non-political” coding a few years ago in the space, without consensus.
We have no governance to mediate this.

With the current political mess of the #dotcons shifting to the hard right, the politics or more likely the unspoken lack of politics of the fediverse is a question we need to be clear about and likely underlies these issues.

What is this openweb reboot?

aschrijver · January 24, 2025, 3:08pm

Yes, agreed. We need fresh carrots…

I outlined a different approach above and in this topic so I will not repeat that.

But I would like to touch on other points. It is often mentioned here and across the fedi that: “you can’t herd cats” i.e. you can’t project onto and enforce power structures on fiercely autonomously operating individuals and groups of people, hope that they will just listen and obey.

The reason we think we need such power structures is that we want to feel we have a certain measure of control. While that is needed, designing it as a ‘rigid house’ gives these endless discussions where the boundaries, the walls, should be. It is, to refer to @RokeJulianLockhart’s argument as nuanced as morals, ethics and values can get… and then drag in philosophy and all social sciences, etc.

A lot of activism today is based on the idea that a rigig frameworks and - more importantly - a moral test and also willingness sacrifice (sacrifice-based activism) to participation is needed as the pre-condition to participate. And all kinds anti-patterns flow from this in actual practice, where imho activism is more likely to backfire than help. I sent a range of toots out on my account on the subject, like this one I tooted today. Because they are ephemeral I will include it below:

Here btw is some writing I did years ago at Humane Technology on the dynamics around purity spirals. I think these are the winning weapons of fascism today, that just keep on giving and giving:

I might refer to many other posts I created there when the community was still very active (it is dormant now, waiting patiently for either dispersal of value or continuation with sustainable force, i.e. the community is ‘emergent’ under social coding movement umbrella, also emergent):

Quoting Huxley:

“Take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.”

“Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternately humanize the metropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and cooperate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized functions.”

So what are different ways we can walk?

Well, first of all find, take notes and analyse all the gazillion anti-patterns that are brimming wildly on our current fedi. Fedi has social and culture sauce, but things explode into parasociality based on a simple typo. It is paradise for a culture warrior who has ‘special purposes’ for the echo chamber that flocks to their sphere of influence.

I called current fedi doomed for a long time… not doomed as viable social media. But doomed as next-gen commons-based social networking environment that is able to “reimagine social and uphold a peopleverse” that is in turn able to carry a global society. Unless several severe challenges are tackled first.

These challenges I study (as a ‘professional hobbyist’ as it were), interested in the unique social dynamics that exist in grassroots environments. There are several wicked problems to deal with. Yet looking at root causes there’s one overall wicked solution that can solve them all:

Foster emergent collaborative forces and ways to allow them to choreograph strategically.

That’s a different approach than creating a bunker with policy walls, or @hamish approach of creating a one-size-fits-all governance approach, where people should willingly give up control of their pet projects to varying extent. It might well work, but I lack the experience to think how it could.

So what does this “fostering of emergence” mean?

It means attracting good players while repelling bad actors… in natural ways. For good players, and for players one step better, there should be ever increasing synergy and value, low-hanging fruits. Intrinsic motivators to be even better in aligning to what people generally need to live together in harmony. Like the humane harmonious technologies of the open social web. Now we get workable material: What is humane technology, what is a harmonious technology system? All these things I made part of social coding movement (where “feeling” yourself a member is enoug to become a social coder and follow that path further).

I mentioned multiple wicked problems. One is that the FOSS movement is inherently unsustainable, and never in current form able to fend off any kind of serious corporate takeover. I am not going to bikeshed the following point, but imho Meta has taken over strategically. It is now the big spider waiting, biding her time. We are the opposite sex, tiny spiders improving Meta’s web. Thinking ourselves free, while we help build skynet instead. Big Tech is the real benefactor of FOSS imho (no need to discuss, I did that already).

“FOSS” is a totally unworkable concept, only usable to discuss software freedoms from license and legal perspective. Hence I defined SOSS which stands for Sustainable open social software / systems / services. Now SOSS follows the best-practices of the Free software development lifecycle, the FSDL. This make SOSS measurable for its suitable as building block for a Peopleverse.

If Mastodon significantly drops the ball on facilitating Gab by their software, then that is something that can be specifically pointed out in ways that make it better addressable. Projects can be ranked for these kinds of things. And projects - if that ranking happens at SocialHub - can serious egg on their faces, if not publicly shamed, if the ball-dropping continues without serious attempts to improve.

At The Center for Humane Technologies they have a Ledger of Harms (unfortunately a static pamplhet). Alja Isacovic and her husband developed a pledge framework at Responsible Tech Work that social coding movement intents to take inspiration from or adopt and extend. A Hall of Shame might be created for those fediverse projects that go deeply off the virtuous track.

SocialHub can experiment with these attracting and repelling forces to create gravity and convergence around her mission and vision. The social coding movement functions as the ‘value accretion disk’ where best-practices are crowdsourced over time by proactive participation and synergetic mutualistic relationships that are being fostered and strengthened.

PS. I think I will follow up with a topic at social coding movement, because …

Foster emergent collaborative forces and ways to allow them to choreograph strategically.

… can be established by moving from working-in-public to working-in-commons, the wicked solution.

aschrijver · January 30, 2025, 7:11am

Here you see the issue SocialHub has: A poll has been out for 2 weeks, and hurray 4 people voted, 1 the admin of the community and one former moderator. Do we have do-ocracy and can I consider the 3 proposals accepted? Who is the decider on that? Here you clearly see that SocialHub is just a discussion forum, not a community.

Hereby I pronounce the Intent to build liaison to SocialHub as described above.

An Intent only, zero expectations, as the lukewarm interest does not warrant any more commitment.

aschrijver · April 17, 2025, 2:32pm

To bump this thread into attention again, and to cross-link..

I just made a comment on the FEP issue #252 about adding a CODE OF CONDUCT in follow-up to @bumblefudge.

aschrijver · May 12, 2025, 6:58pm

@how calls to reposition are made many times. There mostly aren’t participants that care about SocialHub enough to get involved, besides a very small number of active contributors. I have some time and opportunity the coming 2 months to see if we can give this more hands and feet. I don’t think a whole ask-the-community design by consensus is the way to go, and it should be just those willing to be active, making the changes under do-ocracy. Are you game to explore that with me? I’d like to discuss background first in DM with you and @natacha wrt addressing P.S. interests vs. Social coding commons.

how · May 12, 2025, 7:41pm

I’ll be available for this in June. Very interested in making this community self-sufficient.

aschrijver · May 29, 2025, 12:01pm

Since posting the above we are repositioning and “social coding movement” is now called ..

Social coding commons

(Pasting the text below from matrix chat I had this morning.)

The direction I’ve always been putting Social coding commons on, is the one where major fediverse challenges can be overcome. All of these challenges have in common a root cause of the inability to collaborate at scale in grassroots environments and create sustainable solutions that serve people’s needs and are able to evolve as these needs change over time.

Social experience design

A truly comprehensive SX methodology is emerging from this, which has Peopleverse as a shared (technology) vision. This methodology serves to give people a complete different perspective and mindset to the development of FOSS. SX follows a holistic approach that makes inclusion and diversity very natural characteristics to tender and care for (and not silly culture war ‘divide ourselves to be conquered’ mines that explode in our face). It brings very natural dynamics to how collaboration and cocreation take place, without resulting in trying to get artificial governance models in place that only work in biz environments under hypercapitalism. A doomed approach says Conway’s Law.

Sustainable open social systems

Sustainability-first and at any time are a core principle. SX deals about SOSS, Sustainable open social systems, not ‘FOSS projects’ and ‘FOSS movement’ which are where a) stuff is inherently unsustainable and b) FOSS practitioners by working-in-public are complicit in the dystopic societal trends that mindless technology introductions cause.

SX at its broadest is a complete field in IT. Hence it can facilitate millions of people. It encompasses both UX and DX.

The SX scope is set as follows:

Social networking: Any direct or indirect human interaction between people (so both offline and online).
- Social media: A small subset (domain) of social networking where people publish information to larger audiences.
Social web: All social networking protocols and technologies, plus ecosystems that evolve them.
Fediverse: A category name like web or internet to refer either to the virtual environment people go to, or the social web installed base, depending on context.
- Fedizens: People participating on the fediverse virtual environment.
- Fedi: A subset of the fediverse where a unique culture of cocreation thrives. to be nurtured and fostered.
FOSS: Software that adheres to the four freedoms, by its copyright-based license protections.
- FOSS / Free software movement: Not a direct SX concept! Anyone dabbling in code, and inherently unsustainable for those who want earn a living here.
SOSS: Initiative on a trajectory towards sustainability, creating social networking solutions that serve the diverse needs of all its stakeholders.
FSDL: End-to-end Free software development lifecycle. A SOSS addresses the relevant aspects of its FSDL in order to meet with sustainability criteria.
The commons: All people social networking together within the construct of society (currently imprinting the unsustainable model of “hypercapitalism”). This is the second perspective of SX that considers inter-personal relationships between (groups of) people.
- A commons: Any grassroots environment where people try to form collaborative arrangements.

Hedonic peer production

How does Social coding commons grow? Based on hedonic peer production this goes:

Spontaneously, by gradual emergence, as value accrues and attracts/activates more people.
Leaderless, through intrinsic motivation of people pursuing their own dreams and passions.
Without membership, just via affiliation and value alignment and perception of overlapping interests.
Through proactive participation. A participants sows, nurtures, so they can harvest.
Through service development and exchange aimed at value aggregation and finding synergies.
Supported by social web technologies that make it possible to do all of the above at scale.

Website drafts

Some drafts of new website being created..