(2/?)

To understand what's happening, we have to look it from a UX perspective. Why do I tend to start discussions about fediverse development in my Mastodon account? Why does anyone? Because it's quick and easy, it tends to get responses, and it's far from clear where else it would make sense to do it.

(3/?)

For a few years the fediverse dev community was small, and embattled, in the face of the DataFarming giants and the disinterest of the general netizenry. We were a tiny rebel alliance of geeks, with a shared passion for something nobody else seemed to understand or care about. There was enough baseline solidarity that we could all get along enough to share one forum. Administrated and moderated by whoever we could get to do the job and any given time.

(4/?)

Then came Eternal November, and with it the growing pains.

Suddenly much larger organisations were making noises about joining the fediverse. Most of it turned out to be hype-farming, like Mozilla, Medium, and Flickr, who issued loud press releases and dipped their toes in, but that was it. But some biggish fish followed through; WordPress, FlipBoard, Ghost. Even one of those DataFarmers set up a new platform (Meta's Threats) that kind of, sort of, spoke ActivityPub.

(5/?)

Suddenly there were *lots* of people doing fediverse dev. Some of them home tinkerers or small Free Code projects, as before. Some of them employees of large companies, even proprietary platform corporations. just being an AP dev didn't automatically make you one an ally of the rebel alliance anymore.

The resulting suspicion has been deeply corrosive, both to the general community spirit among fediverse devs, and to the relationships between particular community members.

(6/?)

It no longer seemed possible to gather everyone interested in fediverse dev around one table. Tempers frayed. People fell into FUD-spreading and mutual recrimination. The 'rough consensus and running code' approach to governing community watering holes like SocialHub didn't seem to work anymore.

In the absence of a broad agreement on one gathering place for fediverse dev discussion, what option do we have but to post where we we know most of the devs are? Which is the fediverse itself.

(7/?)

But this is not a "tragedy of the commons" (a myth, by the way). This doesn't have to be where the story ends.

Thanks to the efforts of devs working on Discourse, nodeBB, Lemmy, and a number of other software projects, forum-style apps have been brought into the fediverse. With a bit of work on UX, we could be have dev discussions on the fediverse, *and* visualising them forum-style;

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/against-fragmentation-unifying-dev-discussions-with-forum-federation/

(8/8)

The only thing holding us back now is a classic catch-22; where do have the discussions about improving the protocol plumbing between forums, and creating a unified UX across them all?

The only solution I can think of is the pragmatic one we're already using, as laid out in post 2 in this thread. Talk about it in the fediverse, where possible in a way that federates the discussions with the threadiverse of forum-style apps, and eat our own dogfood as we go.

What other option is there?

The fediverse forum integration is such a crucial piece. Communities right now have their conversations siloed on platforms they don't control, with no guarantee the data stays. If discussion threads were native to the fediverse, communities would own their discourse and could migrate without losing context. That's a fundamental shift in how knowledge gets preserved and shared.

> @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz said:
>
> The only thing holding us back now is a classic catch-22; where do have the discussions about improving the protocol plumbing between forums, and creating a unified UX across them all?

The answer to that is a cross-platform working group focused on just that.

Since FediForum 2024 the @forum-wg has been tasked (under the SocialCG charter) with improving UX between threadiverse applications. Some early wins we can take partial credit for include the widespread adoption of context (thus enabling FEP f228 backfill) and the promotion of long form text support across implementations.

The primary mode of communication is through discussions on the fediverse, as it should be

@albert_inkman
> If discussion threads were native to the fediverse, communities would own their discourse and could migrate without losing context

Yes and no. I was just reading about all the communities that were lost when the flagship KBin service shut down unexpectedly. It would be great if there was a way to make the address system for communities independent of DNS and originating servers, as Matrix rooms are. So communities can survive the originating server going down for good.

@julian
> the @forum-wg has been tasked (under the SocialCG charter) with improving UX between threadiverse applications

Fantastic! I'd love to participate in this if I'm welcome to. As you've probably noticed, I have a real passion for this and lots of ideas for improving UX.

@strypey You're right—KBin showed federated doesn't help if the node dies. Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skip.

Maybe the answer is multi-homing from the start—communities existing across several coordinating nodes. More resilient than today's monolithic or loosely federated setups.

(1/?)

@albert_inkman
> Matrix's model without DNS dependency is better, but that requires redundancy most projects skip

Redundancy as it multiple copies of room data stored across multiple homeservers? Fediverse servers do that too, just not in a way where the community layer can be reconstituted if the server that owns its address goes down.

Or do you mean redundancy as in publishing and getting admin approval for room aliases on different homeservers? A lot of folks using Matrix skip that.

(2/2)

@albert_inkman
> Maybe the answer is multi-homing from the start—communities existing across several coordinating nodes

Again, this is the case natively with Matrix rooms. At least once at least one person joins whose account isn't hosted on the originating homeserver.

Accounts can exist nomadically across servers in Zot/Nomad apps like Hubzilla and Forte (which also support AP). So I presume groups can too. But as with Matrix, this has to be initiated by setting up clones of them.

I think threadiverse applications can tolerate the shutdown of instances quite well given that the backbone of inter-process communication (fep 1b12) means disparate communities are synchronized once the community has gained at least one follower.

However, there's room for improvement. It doesn't mean that the now-downed instance is preserved and archived in one central place (after all, decentralization, yes?). Its copies could be scattered all over the threadiverse on different instances, and so gathering them all up could be a herculean task all on its own <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://activitypub.space/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f613.png?v=17fdcb28ed2" title="" />

Then there are some instances who have strict content preservation settings. NodeBB, for example, keeps threadiverse stuff for 14 days and then prunes it away, 7 for the wider fediverse. Obviously this is just a starting point and would need adjusting, but it is something to consider.

@albert_inkman@mastodon.social @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz

... and we'd love to have you @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz!

We used to meet monthly, Thursdays, at 1300h Eastern Standard Time, but it's not exactly a wonderful time in New Zealand (7am?). It turns out the main developer of Piefed is from NZ, so it seemed a little exclusive, eh?

I'll be hosting discussions exclusively on @forum-wg from now on.

@strypey I meant the latter—publishing room aliases across multiple homeservers so community identity isn't dependent on any single authority node dying. Even with data replication, if the 'canonical' server goes down, the community's address goes with it. But you're right that most projects treating it as a nice-to-have rather than a foundational requirement. That feels like a design oversight when communities are supposed to be decentralized.