strypey:

silverpill:

Most developers have already left, so I think shutting the forum down is not a bad idea.

If they’ve all gone somewhere else, then SH has been replaced. In that case, I would agree it makes sense to convert it onto a read-only archive.

OTOH If they’ve just scattered to the four winds, and there’s no replacement, then this is a collective action problem to be solved. Potentially by a community-driven reboot of SH.

It seems contentious to claim that "most developers have left" when the forum continues to show activity. In the past month, 44 topics have new posts, the majority of which are not federated topics. Who are these developers, have they really left, and does their leaving justify shutting down the forum? What is the alternative venue or forum for discussing ActivityPub-related topics, community, software, standards, etc? Does such an alternative (if it exists) provide a better experience for discussing these things?

If the answer is "they're on fedi now", then this is what I would categorize as "scattered to the four winds, and there's no replacement". The value of SocialHub is that it is a gathering place for these discussions, and it allows for those discussions to be long-form. There is a world of difference between a forum thread and a chain of replies in 500 characters or less. This has been previously discussed as well:
aschrijver:

silverpill:

Most developers have already left, so I think shutting the forum down is not a bad idea.

Did they leave or is the forum federated?

The value of this SocialHub forum is in bringing people together to discuss things, and the introduction of federation in its current form has been arguably counterproductive to this end. Quite simply, if the discussions about ActivityPub are spread all over random pockets of microblogging, then this is an inferior experience to a proper forum with an actual social context. You can aggregate a bunch of microblog posts, but that's not the same -- the focus just isn't there in the same way that a real thread would remain mostly focused on the same topic. Replying to something is not the same as having a directed discussion. Every new reply is a chance for the topic to drift away from where it started, and if all you have is a reply tree, then you can't recognize these shifts.

What then? Do we converge on the w3c/activitypub issue tracker, or on the SocialCG mailing list? Or is the discussion around ActivityPub dead, and all that's left to do is have ad-hoc communications between various devs without any sort of coordination or commonplace? Maybe that's fine for the developers who have supposedly already left, because what's the point of having conversations when all you're trying to do is fix a one-off incompatibility between two projects? I don't think it's conducive to any sort of broad alignment, though.

At the end of the day, if the financial and organizational sponsor wants to back out, then we can't really do anything to force them to continue, but I think it's more worthwhile to consider the reboot rather than the shutdown. We can't easily fold the scope of this place into the issue tracker, because issue trackers are not general discussion forums. We can't easily fold the scope of this place into the mailing list, because this place was started to avoid flooding the entire SocialCG with ActivityPub-specific matters. So ideally something ought to occupy this niche.

The various observations @trwnh makes are spot on.
trwnh:

Quite simply, if the discussions about ActivityPub are spread all over random pockets of microblogging, then this is an inferior experience to a proper forum with an actual social context.

"Scattered to the winds" is also my observation. Anyone noted the new HTTP Signatures proposal to the ActivityPub community? Maybe by coincidence or by having a good 'following' collection. Or maybe because I created a cross-reference as a commons janitor. It means now at least there's archive that it happened, though the content of the discussion may already be gone, link-rotted as happens on microblog timelines.

What does it mean to be federated as a forum? That is what I mused about in the fragmentation discussion, and I formulated a Need:

Support the communication and cocreation of all participants in the ActivityPub ecosystem to help foster healthy growth and evolution of the Fediverse.

Note there is not the word "community" here. It is the vaguest term when it is just dropped casually. What is the "FOSS community" for instance? I claim it doesn't exist unless you use "community" in most handwavy terms. Long ago as facilitator I came to the conclusion that SocialHub was not a community, but just a discussion forum. And that though that is a shame, that still is valuable. These discussions are in the archives of this forum.

What should we do?

In order to be able to talk about "community" it has to be well defined what that entails ..

1. Collect problems that hold the AP dev community back from collaborating and evolve the foundational technologies that the dev ecosystem of the fediverse relies on.
2. Collect the challenges SocialHub faces to address these problems.
3. Refine the Need above, breakdown into more granular needs and find other requirements for a prolongation of SocialHub on a healthy trajectory.
4. Let people and groups thereof, like @strypey before (please boost his call to action), step up and announce themselves
5. I propose everyone to step up to prepare a Community Plan consisting of ..
   
   • Wiki post (such that it bumps the list upon edits) with a summary of the plan.
   • Separate discussion topic referenced from the wiki post, to discuss details of the plan.

   
   

Objective: Convince @how that responsible custodianship is taken care of, and it is responsible to hand over these tasks to the new community custodians.

---

Listing some needs and requirements that SocialHub always had, or for a long time already ..

1. Reach the AP dev community, connect people for focused discussion.
2. Provide insight in ongoing discussions such that others can chime in in real-time.
3. Keep record and archive that can be searched, quoted and cross-referenced.
4. Provide entry point to the ecosystem where newcomers can discover, onboard themselves.
5. Become native to the fediverse. SocialHub is to be part of the fediverse via federation.
6. Help guarantee a bottom-up (commons based), open and decentralized ecosystem.
7. Be a helpful tool to allow the FEP Process to fulfill its custodianship role for FEP's.

On diversity @jdp23 I would add that point 5 equates to the diversity of the fediverse itself (iff 'federation-done-well') and that point 6 acknowledges the need for a decentralized developer environment, where there can be many independent dev hubs furthering AS/AP et al. This notion promotes diversity in itself, and SocialHub in this setup does not take an authoritative position nor gatekeeper position.

The diversity problem + challenges then boil down to 1) the diversity that the microbloggoverse fedi and its moderation processes gives, and 2) how forum federation / threadiverse is able to forge community on top of that (as a well-defined concept) using the fediverse social graph where ecosystem participants and prospects (newcomer onboarding) engage.

And that brings this to a mighty interesting applied research area, on the basis of which alone a SocialHub reboot might be a very worthy undertaking. As mentioned above both @strypey and me in that fragmentation discussion were wondering:

What does it mean when we say that a Discussion forum has become "part of the fediverse"?

If I might give this a shot to formulate a definition ..

Federated discussion forums are like collaborative gardening centers where a group of fedizens gathers together around a theme and fosters a curated garden of relevant information and connections to other groups and people to interact with, have insightful discussions and deepen relationships, and to enrich the collective knowledge base together.

From a more technical perspective you might consider Federated discussion forum software to constitute a collaborative / multi-user ActivityPub client with dedicated management features for content curation, aggregation and moderation.

Against fragmentation: unifying dev discussions with forum federation

I think the nature of our grassroots ecosystem, where we are still pioneering at protocol level, trying to fill gaps and overcome protocol decay (cope with the ‘reality on-the-wire’) has led to a bit of an upside down approach to software development…

^SocialHub

Strypey

2025-07-27 02:51:16

Anyone up for joining a group call about the future of #SocialHub in the next couple of weeks?

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…

You don’t need to be willing to volunteer for anything other than being on the call. I’m just looking for indications that people still think SH is (or could be) a useful community service, and worth rebooting.

#fediverse #ActivityPub

Anyone keen on a fediverse conference in 2023/24

Another year has passed, and due to those who’ve volunteered being busy with life, we still haven’t managed to put together any online meetups.

^SocialHub

trwnh:

It seems contentious to claim that “most developers have left” when the forum continues to show activity. In the past month, 44 topics have new posts, the majority of which are not federated topics.

Great point @trwnh. Here's a recent example of how SH has been used. @claire, a member of the Mastodon team, came here to consult with devs from other projects about plans for federated Quote Posts in Mastodon, with an eye to documenting their approach through the FEP process (created here). The topic was created in Feb this year and constructive discussion is ongoing 5 months later. To me, this alone demonstrates that SH is useful, and worth saving.
aschrijver:

do you like the idea to outline thoughts, ideas and plans for the reboot of this community in a separate topic?

Sounds great. I really like all the aspirations you lay out above, although it does make me realise that SH has a potentially huge brief. So it's hardly surprising the forum has only realised a fraction of its potential so far.

Oh and I know @jdp23 and I have a tendency to butt heads (most recently on the SocialMusic forum). But they make some fair points in this thread, and ask a good question here;
jdp23:

If you wait until after the new community team is set up, how do you know that you haven’t already replicated the current problems in ways that will be hard or even impossible to fix later?

To me, this is not a 'one and done' process. The nature and infrastructure of SH has been negotiated and altered before, and no doubt will be again.

What we're trying to do right now, under urgency, is to put together a transitional team that can keep the lights on until at least the end of the calendar year. While we figure out more permanent solutions for;

• hosting: both admin work and funding for any upstream costs
• community management: moderation, outreach, conflict resolution, etc
• governance: active stewardship to ensure that both of the above continue to be taken care of. In ways that facilitate the SH mission; being neutral ground for devs to parlay about pan-fediverse concerns

Once we've made arrangements to keep SH from blinking out of existence, I'd really like to see us put together a survey to send out to all fediverse devs. Past and present, of servers, clients and other tools. To find out if they've used SH, whether they still do, what they consider useful about the way it's been operated, and what would make it more attractive as a place for them to interact with other devs.

strypey:

Sounds great. I really like all the aspirations you lay out above, although it does make me realise that SH has a potentially huge brief. So it’s hardly surprising the forum has only realised a fraction of its potential so far.

These are not aspirations for one community, certainly not of SH (though opinions vary here), but ideas for different directions. SocialHub started out in a great position as literally the tool that SocialCG used for communications between the dev community regarding ActivityPub standardization. Then SocialCG went dormant and SH was the only active hub for a time.

From my time and experience as founder of Humane Tech Community I learned that having too large a scope and audience means you can only have a discussion forum run by staff, and not what you can meaningfully call a "community". At SocialHub I made various calls and put much effort into having people state their level of commitment and interest, and the outcomes were very clear: SH for a long time was just a discussion forum, where devs can conveniently read stuff on their subject of interest, and reply to them. That's it. No community at all. And in itself this is a perfect raison d'être for SH to exist. But we should be fair about it then, and accept SH for what it really is.

Later on, if anything, the custodianship of the FEP process is the only well-scoped true 'community-level activity', and that role might be further established (i.e. the "guarantee open ecosystem" mission and "bottom-up standardization process" vision), if there are folks interested in doing so. Yet here @silverpill - the currently only real active FEP facilitator - does not see merit, and is open to do everything in the codeberg issue tracker of the FEP (which I doubt is a good idea, but that's a different discussion).

In any case, in follow-up to @trwnh, looking at the #standards:fep category, a decent amount of good discussion takes place on SocialHub. And it is feedback we can still consult and respond to, contrary to all the FEP communication that shifted to the microblog timelines, where that feedback is all lost unless explicitly linked to. This makes the FEP more of a "do whatever you want" thing for any dev to spec just enough features for their own app, without much rigorous scrutiny from the dev community at large wrt improving general interop in the ecosystem.
trwnh:

That’s quite a lot of things and generally enough to justify the forum’s continued existence rather than shutting it down. Of course, that doesn’t solve the (potential?) sponsorship issue being posed here that is necessary to answer for that continued existence.

Generally I'd define viable community as:

A viable community is where enough of its members care enough for its continued existence.

And with that care are committed to step up and help guarantee that existence. Very often this boils down to more or less the 90-9-1 rule, where one percent of members takes that responsibility seriously.

Currently in separate thread(s) and wiki post(s) we can gather what it takes to continue as-is, what problems are that led to current need for a reboot, and what ideas exist for fresh new directions. I'd advise using wiki post to summarize stuff (this thread for example is already 23 posts long and only TLDR's others). And it'd be great if @how could assign forum moderator or even forum admin privilege to some people so they are enabled to organize and steer this thing along efficiently.

Thank you @Hanse00, and it is great to hear you get value from SocialHub.

(Generally speaking it matters a lot when people speak out their appreciation for a commons based initiative they benefit from. There's an imbalance in our fediverse culture I think where people, often from the sidelines, are ready to pounce with unconstructive criticism. Leaving little room where fertile seedling can mature into strong trees. I regularly say it leads to an environment where "we divide ourselves to be conquered". We need a more forgiving culture, where there is acceptance that not everyone is as perfectly principled and valued yet, and there are shades of grey through which people can be guided gently into the light.)
Hanse00:

I’d pitch in what effort I can to keep it around, but acknowledge that I can’t offer much.

Great! That is three people on the list already.

In a community there are many different tasks that can be where you shine, and also take personal interest in. Despite the challenges and sometimes frustrations being discussed above, there is a lot of rewarding and uplifting experiences too, which make it all worth it. And there's opportunity to learn useful skills that are much in need not just in social impact movements, but anywhere in modern society where we alienate ever further from each other.

Thanks heaps to @lullis and @melvincarvalho for the admin offers. @how said PS want to see 4 admins volunteer before they're willing to pass the torch, so we need 2 more. @nightpool are you still active on admin duty here? Would you be keen to join a new admin team?
j12t:

talked to a handful of ActivityPub developers about this over the weekend in Vancouver. All of them turned out to be in the “Most developers have already left” category

Thanks for asking around @j12t. Your point about the need for a more integrated network of dev spaces and tools is well made. It gels with many of @aschrijver's sentiments about social coding design, and to some degree with my push for more forum federation

But that's a much larger issue that needs it's own topic (or several). SH can't be part of any integrated effort if it vanishes beneath the waves in September.

Coming back to the sentiment that SH isn't currently scratching the itch for some devs, there are some insightful examples in @devnull's topic on FediCon. Including;

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
indieterminacy:

You can add me as a background community leader - though you can not expect more than some beligerence should SH deviate too much.

A community values watchdog is a useful contribution, for sure, as are many of the ideas offered in your post. Thanks for both

Thanks, @j12t and @indieterminacy for your help and feedback!
strypey:

Thanks for asking around @j12t. Your point about the need for a more integrated network of dev spaces and tools is well made. It gels with many of @aschrijver’s sentiments about social coding design, and to some degree with my push for more forum federation

Generally speaking it is easy to come up with lists of things that would be helpful to the dev ecosystem. Much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.

As an example is the need for having comprehensive developer documentation. On SocialHub is still a pinned wiki post with an attempt to crowdsource enough notes for such an artifact. Another example is when @gabek started fedidocs crowdsourcing attempt, and I posted about the need for cohesion in Cohesion of FediDevs with other fediverse initiatives. Fedidocs stalled, migrated orgs, became fedidevs and then stalled again (I think). Why? People don't like to write techdocs in the best of times, and are happy when they have things well in order on their own project. Even less people want to arrange the crowdsourcing process, and editing/publishing chores.

Generally speaking one should not fool oneself talking about "community" when there isn't one. The AP ecosystem is characterized by fiercely independent people who opportunistically come together to talk about subjects of shared interest.

The general tendency in this thread is that SocialHub better offer a broad range of services to become a relevant community again. And I think people underestimate how hard that is, in this environment of individuals.

Positioning advice: Choose between 'community' and 'cohesion'.

My strong advice to any community team stepping up is to first choose between 2 options:

• Wanna be a community? Better cover only a comprehensive niche then, with a well-defined audience and scope. See my list with some quickly brainstormed topics as examples. Then foster community.
• Otherwise best be a loose collective. Fit for a grassroots environment. On any broader scopes + audiences forget "community", it herding cats lost cause. Find ways where people while working on their own initiatives still combine that into a larger, more valuable whole. Then foster cohesion.

Related info:

• socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
• socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…

“Any decentralized [ecosystem] requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”

— Byrne Hobart. The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization

“The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.”

— E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful