Is Social.coop in a position to take over administration of SocialHub.activitypub.rocks?

Thanks @mike_hales, @Nathan Schneider and @hamish campbell for your thoughts, and especially to @Calix for the detailed breakdowns on both technical and community aspects. Also to @Arnold Schrijver for bringing another SocialHubber perspective to the discussion.

A couple of quick clarifications. Firstly, @Calix , if possible, I'd really appreciate links to a couple of examples each of;

poisonous anti-politics [takes]

... and ...

anti-community-safety takes.

Not because I want to relitigate these issues here, I just want to be clear on exactly what sort of things you're referring to when you use those phrases.

This seems like would seriously improve the situation where participating in Fediverse Enhancement Proposals requires operating in a community that effectively has no code of conduct.

A couple of things on that;

1) SocialHub operates under the same CoC as the SocialCG (Social Web Incubator Community Group), which is the W3C CoC. I'm not aware of any (unmoderated) posts on SH that would violate any reasonable CoC, and I would consider it an existential threat to SH's usefulness is there were.

2) The FEP process has its own repo and issues board on CodeBerg, so it's not necessary to participate in SH to participate in FEP work, or vice-versa. Although you might miss some helpful context here and there. Although the FEP repo lacks a formal CoC, the comment above applies in practice AFAIK.

The FEP process began as a project of SH, and most likely would not exist if SH had never existed, so it's an example of what makes SH uniquely useful. FEP is an outgrowth of SH, which emerged from the same pool of devs as SocialCG, and we work loosely under the umbrella of W3C, which is kind of like the UN of the web.

Speaking of which, governing a space like SH is more akin to UN process than to the governance of a single online service. The purpose of SH is to improve the protocol plumbing and UX of the fediverse. In order to achieve that, it's necessary to include technical representatives from a wide range of fediverse projects. This necessarily means including people people with whom we don't always share values or political opinions, beyond a basic agreement to Be Excellent to Each Other while posting on SH, or in related discussions elsewhere.

the "We Care For Our Own" Community Values Policy was never adopted, and that struggles over it were (part of?) the reason for petites singularités to step back.

After PS took over stewardship they tried to impose an ambiguously-worded "Community Values Policy" on the SH community, without prior consultation. A lot of us objected to both the dictatorial process, and the ambiguous wording of the policy. Which would have given them wide latitude to nuke the accounts of anyone with whom they had political (or even personal) disagreements. 6 months ago, PS doubled down on this by threatening to nuke the majority of accounts in the forum, for not accepting their imposed policy as a "fait accompli".

IMHO this is neither good governance of a technical commons, nor good community management.

When I said;

the forum being abandoned by its current hosts

I'm specifically referring to the decision by PS to end their stewardship of a major piece of dev infrastructure, with only a couple of months notice. So unless @Arnold Schrijver counts himself a member of PS (which would be news to me) that comment was not in any way aimed at him.

Secondly, Arnold says;

The problem really was the lack of interest to help get and uphold functional governance.

I don't agree. The problem as I see it was a lack of confidence that volunteering time would result in an improved situation. Certainly all my attempts to get involved and improve things seemed to get bogged down, as did Arnold's, and it was never entirely clear why. But one possible answer can be found in this comment from a Pleroma dev;

Nobody who takes this stuff seriously is going to waste time contributing to a technical community they can be banned from at any time because the wrong people deployed the software. Instead, interoperability discussion will return to backroom discussion and alternative working groups like Litepub. Sorry, but it’s just reality.

This is what appears to have happened to SH, to some degree, mainly due to PS and their heavy-handed and dictatorial style of governance. Their departure is an opportunity to right the ship.

Thank you for the question! I would hope we could take the recurring maintenance tasks if we can complete the initial migration to our infra, maybe [[coop cloud]] by default -- happy to see @Nathan Schneider and @Calix and others already involved!

Pinging this thread to the rest of the TWG to discuss, we'll report back! @Dan Phiffer @Ed Summers edsu et al