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

Are you asking for institutional help from Social.coop or help from individual members of Social.coop?

If you’re requesting institutional help, could you give some examples of the results of the FEP process? As a member of Social.coop, if we’re talking about supporting SocialHub financially, I’d want some examples of the value that SocialHub generates for the fediverse and by extension Social.coop.

In terms of institutional help, I'd be in favor of social.coop using some of its budget for SocialHub costs, as long as we still have "extra".

For FEP examples, you can look here: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep and scroll down for a complete list. Some are smaller enhancements to the ActivityPub spec, some are larger additions of features, my personal favorites being extending ActivityPub with various economic networking features. There is a core team that maintains and moderates the FEP process, and in my experience they do a really good job.

Great question @heybenji, and thanks @Lynn Foster for the clarifications.

Here's a recent example of SH's role in the FEP process. A member of the Mastodon team has come to SH to start a discussion about their plans for federated Quote Posts. They mention working with the GoToSocial team to synchronise their approaches, and their plans to make sure the approach they use is documented as one or more FEPs.

@Benji Mauer

Are you asking for institutional help from Social.coop or help from individual members of Social.coop?

Either would be great. In the short term, we really need a team willing to take over technical admin of the Discourse instance, to keep it from being shut down. You'd have to ask the current admins whether it can continue on the same hosting service, or whether it also needs to be moved to alternative hosting.

Funding to cover hosting expenses for a 6 months to a year, while we figure out a long term solution, would really help.

But from where I'm sitting, the biggest thing holding SH back over the last couple of years is a lack of functional governance. Leading to a drop in participation, and the forum being abandoned by its current hosts. So the biggest contribution social.coop folks could make IMHO is to bring your experience in cooperatively running your Mastodon instance to the running of the SH Discourse instance.

I note

the biggest contribution social.coop folks could make IMHO is to bring your experience in cooperatively running your Mastodon instance to the running of the SH Discourse instance.

Quite a stretch for social. coop. But well in line with the basic aspiration to extend cooperation in the digital sphere via the fediverse. Which individuals are up for this stretch, I wonder?

I would be happy to meet with the team to explore what it would look like to do a cooperative conversion. I wrote a lot of that down here: https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/How_to_Make_the_Fediverse_Your_Own

I do not think running more than one instance is within S.c's capacity.

TWG hat ⛑️:

• Discourse maintenance is "it's complicated". The recommended configuration, of running it on its own server, is very smooth and reliable – but from bitter experience incorporating it into either of our deployment strategies (Ansible, or Co-op Cloud / Docker Swarm) is fairly nightmarish. My guess is that TWG "might" have capacity to take on the existing setup (separate VPS, and regularly clicking the "update" button in the GUI) with our current active membership, in which case this would be more of a finance question – but other TWG members might not be keen to have a third way of hosting things.

• Discourse has decent support for Single Sign On, so if Social.coop adopted Socialhub it would be an interesting opportunity to show off the joys of SSO

Personal / unofficial-CWG-adjacent hat 👒:

• The two threads linked from "SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?" ("SocialHub Community Values Policy" and "Policy Proposal: SocialHub Community Values") seem to have a lot of poisonous anti-politics, anti-community-safety takes.

• My understanding from skimming the threads (combined estimated reading time 35+ minutes 🫠) is that 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.

• On the plus side, social.coop adopting the forum seems like it would automatically apply social.coop's own Code of Conduct which – again, skimming – seems very similar to the "We Care For Our Own" policy. 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.

• However, based on the comments in the above 2 threads about the Community Values Policy, I would expect that at least some existing Socialhub members might be deeply unhappy with Social.coop's Code of Conduct, unhappy with discussing it, and possibly aggressive in saying so.

• This makes me think that it could be a significant emotional and practical challenge for CWG if CWG is tasked with moderating the Socialhub forum. But, it could be a serious safety (and reputational) risk for Social.coop to have a different or absent code of conduct, or different or absent moderation, for a Social.coop-hosted service.

Overall I'm a very cautious +1 on the idea of Social.coop adopting the forum. I think there's a huge potential for:

• Improving Socialhub governance and community safety by bringing them under our (pretty good) code of conduct and moderation

• Giving Social.coop users easier and safer access to the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals process to have more direct input into how the fediverse operates

But if either or both TWG or CWG isn't willing to take on the extra work, then it's a non-starter.

But from where I'm sitting, the biggest thing holding SH back over the last couple of years is a lack of functional governance. Leading to a drop in participation, and the forum being abandoned by its current hosts

I have been facilitator of SocialHub for 5 years, doing lonely unthankful work quite frankly. What @Danyl Strype mentions is not the true problem. I just defined "viable community" as:

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

The problem really was the lack of interest to help get and uphold functional governance. A Tragedy of the Commons thing more like, where devs conveniently used SocialHub opportunistically, but didn't care about it, taking its existence for granted. Any attempts to do more (and there were many) felt like pulling a dead horse.

This is still a big problem. One that ails a chaotic grassroots commons in general. The FOSS culture is such that people care about their own project. They care less about the relationship with their environment where the project's deliverables must find a good landing. In the case of the fediverse the developers involved care (generally speaking) too little about 'tending their garden' together, and looking beyond project scope and realize how dependent they are on having robust foundational technology standards.

In 2022 I have noted down the particular major challenges that I felt the fediverse faced as a whole, based on my experience as community facilitator and technology advocate (doing "weaving in public"). These mostly social issues are still as prevalent today as they were then. They are the reasons why, after yet another attempt to rally people into activity, I decided to finally step down at SocialHub (ungraciously formulated by Danyl as "abandoning" which is indicative of the unthankful nature of doing community work).

I used my time at SocialHub as a learning experience, to acquire new skills and to study the social dynamics in this whole new decentralized social networking landscape with its unique culture. Totally fascinated by it. My activities have since continued to find solutions for the stated challenges, and I initiated Social coding commons and its discussion forum as the place where I do that. A true movement that intends to form an affiliation network of autonomous initiatives in the commons, where I proposed SocialHub to join the network too (but there exists no real community for anyone to decide on that).

Do I think there is a future for SocialHub?

Hell yeah! The need for a good commons based developer portal for the fediverse social web is greater than ever. The fediverse technology base is undergoing anything but healthy evolution at the moment. The problems are well-known and discussed for years.

I am in favor that the new custodians of SocialHub get a free hand in repositioning as they see fit. After all they took on responsibility and commitment. Their motivation to do so is now the new driving force. I outlined a list of many possible directions that may be interesting to explore, and I think Social.coop should define one where there is a win-win in taking on the custodianship role. So that there's intrinsic motivation to make the most of it with active community participants.

There is a core problem of individualism dripping poison in socialhub, but there is also value and the very real space for value in the wider community that brought the forum into being. How can a reboot socialhub become a part of this community path agen is a good and useful question - having stable and accountable infrastructure which social coop might provide would likely help this if it can be done in a nativist cat way.

This is a question of messy balence, so a hard path for the current crew, of both spaces, to walk, fresh ideas are needed to make this very MUCH needed space "native". I support social-coop running the infrastructure.

https://hamishcampbell.com/frictionlessness-is-a-poisoned-fantasy-an-omn-reflection/

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.

I should add to this @Calix that this is currently de facto the situation, simply by a lack of volunteers willing to do the - what I call - "commons janitoring" tasks i.e. the boring chores. In theory SocialHub has a wellbeing procedure that might work quite well and further improved. There's a member-only Well-being category where flagged content and moderation measures can be discussed among the members, and there's a Well-being team that guides this and has certain decision-making privileges. This team is not staff, but should have a majority of regular members.

The governance procedures themself are not an issue. Anything is possible. It is the willingness for people to help enforce the procedures where the sore spot is.