(Originally posted in response to @how's announced ultimatum wrt the future of SocialHub.)
Unless a community team steps up, SocialHub will cease to be ..
@how is urgently asking members of this community to brainstorm and consider options to keep this community not only alive, but make it thrive as one of the grassroots developer centers that help evolve the fediverse. SocialHub Community Values Policy
Now there’s a deadline: the activitypub.eu domain that hosts this community’s email service expires on September 10, 2025 [..]
So, either way the change is coming. I’d rather have it come in a structured way.
In 2019 @how and Petites Singularités graciously took custodianship of SocialHub, and I for one am very thankful for that! I am sure many in the fediverse developer landscape share that gratitude too.
For people reading this and considering community involvement.. when does P.S. plan to give public announcement / responsible disclosure of SocialHub winding down?
Perhaps it can be hosted in read-only mode for another year or two? That would be nice.
I believe there are ways to export the forum and turn it into a static html site, which could be hosted permanently to keep the information archive intact and accessible. 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? @strypey did step up, and some time ago there was also interest of other people. Let's see where things go.
Another option is that W3C SocialCG takes over the custodianship role in addition to the activitypub.rocks website, if they are willing.
On a recent episode of the Dot Social podcast, John O’Nolan of Ghost said; “For the size of the group [working on federating long form articles], which as you say is not large, man, we are spread across Mastodon DMs sometimes, an email thread other …
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. aschrijver:
Another option is that W3C SocialCG takes over the custodianship role in addition to the activitypub.rocks website, if they are willing.
That would make sense, given SH sits under a domain they are now managing. I'd be happy to work with SocialCG on this.
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.
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.
On a recent episode of the Dot Social podcast, John O’Nolan of Ghost said; “For the size of the group [working on federating long form articles], which as you say is not large, man, we are spread across Mastodon DMs sometimes, an email thread other …
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 ..
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.
Collect the challenges SocialHub faces to address these problems.
Refine the Need above, breakdown into more granular needs and find other requirements for a prolongation of SocialHub on a healthy trajectory.
Let people and groups thereof, like @strypey before (please boost his call to action), step up and announce themselves
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 ..
Reach the AP dev community, connect people for focused discussion.
Provide insight in ongoing discussions such that others can chime in in real-time.
Keep record and archive that can be searched, quoted and cross-referenced.
Provide entry point to the ecosystem where newcomers can discover, onboard themselves.
Become native to the fediverse. SocialHub is to be part of the fediverse via federation.
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.
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.
Any discussion and volunteer efforts to collect that information is welcome of course. But as I see it (interpreting @how's ultimatum) there's a stark choice within 4 weeks time of:
Either a community team steps up with a Community Plan that @how feels comfortable transferring custodianship to, before stepping away from that role with P.S.
Or there is no viable plan and team, and @how with P.S. is tasked with responsible shutdown.
What is a viable plan, what is a viable community then? Well, again my opinion, but there is no need at all to be broadly interesting, relevant to a large group, or targeting the entire dev ecosystem. A community team may choose any niche area to focus on. It is up to them. Viable in my book means first of all:
There is a team willing to take the commitment, and @how approves on the (transition) plan.
After that happens then I think it is important that the new team has free reign to do whatever they want to forge healthy community in whatever direction, scope and audience they want to serve/explore. They should be able to revitalize, reposition and foster the community as they think is best. They are now sole custodians of that, the ones making the fresh start. The "Why?" and "What to do about it?" may not be all that relevant against their new direction, the mission and vision of this new team.
I'd personally definitely reposition, and can imagine many different directions that might be interesting for a community to explore..
"We want to focus on improving the developer experience for newcomers that is still deplorable to this day. We will dedicate on lowering barriers to entry of the fediverse as much as possible."
"We focus on bringing the qualities and benefits of linked data to the forefront, in ways that still appeals to JSON-only crowds. We'll bridge gaps with other linked data standards."
"We focus on becoming a portal that collects feedback from fedizens, whose voices are insufficiently heard, in the developer-oriented release processes of individual apps."
"We will focus on collecting all the highly innovative ideas around decentralized networking, and give space for people to think out of the box, be creative and unrestricted by what's currently possible."
"We want to emphasize the 'social' in social hub, and give minority group a stronger voice in the developer community. We will actively reach out to developers other than those 'from the West' who dominate the scene."
"We will focus on the C2S side of the fediverse, which we consider to be the path to future of social networking."
"We think it is currently fine as it is, and will gladly support that from now on."
" ... [ add your dream community plan here ] ... "
Thus far 2 people have stepped forward. @strypey and @lullis how do you like the idea to outline thoughts, ideas and plans for the reboot of this community in a separate topic? As a means to excite and attract other people.
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.
Hi! As you may be aware, Quote Posts are an often-requested feature for Mastodon, but this is something we are careful to implement properly, offering a proper framework for users to consent to being quoted.
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.
Cross-referencing to social.coop discussion on Loomio, where @strypey had the great idea to raise awareness on this topic, and asked if members are interested to help and/or the cooperative to consider taking custodianship. I just added to that discussion myself:
A Fediverse instance for people interested in cooperative and collective projects. If you are interested in joining our community, please apply at https://join.social.coop/registration-form.html.
> I answered this on the forum, but your and mine mastodon thread does not show that
The federation of replies from SH into Mastodon might take some time. Due either to the generally slow performance of Mastodon, or to the issues you've raised with the impacts of AP federation of the SH Discourse instance;
Admittedly I'm only a hobbyist ActivityPub developer, I've been toying with a little implementation on nights and weekends for a few months, but I wanted to chime in on the "None of the developers want this, they've all moved on" sentiment and say:
As a lurker, I've found this forum incredibly useful, and would hate to see it go away.
I know community building is under appreciated, difficult, work. So if you haven't heard it enough, thank you to those of you involved in making this place run.
I'd pitch in what effort I can to keep it around, but acknowledge that I can't offer much.
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.
I 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 that @silverpill was talking about above. I don't want to name names -- they can stand up for themselves if they want to -- but I got a bunch of views on why SocialHub has had little net-benefit for them and what they are working on.
I believe it's also true to say that while there are developers new to ActivityPub all the time, who want to build and are building stuff, they generally don't end up as regulars here.
For me, the question of "who administers the server" and "who pays the bills" are minor questions that can be solved without much difficulty. I'd be happy to contribute, too.
However, the real question is: how do we (for some value of "we") meet the needs of our "customers" (for some value of "customers"), so they value it and engage and come back and contribute. Because if the customers leave, clearly the value isn't there -- and to be frank and consistent with what I heard, I don't have the impression that this goal is at the top of mind of too many people here. Some other goals appear to be, and is fine, but we should not be surprised at the above consequences.
From my perspective, I want as many developers as possible build as much open social web software as possible, consistent with the values, and to do that, we need to treat potential developers as customers and understand what they want and need, and address that. Ideally, this would include -- in an nicely designed integrated whole:
An ActivityPub landing page for developers (e.g. a revamped activitypub.rocks -- in progress)
Extensive, maintained, consistent reference material and examples (currently all over the place, hard to use as a new developer)
Places where to ask questions and discuss (e.g. a forum and/or a chat group)
Online and in-person seminars with "howto" demonstrations or discussions of particular issues
Development tools (e.g. debugging, testing) -- some of this exists, also all over the place in various states
The ability to easily find developers of other applications to resolve interop problems with specific other applications.
Beyond that, for "advanced" developers, we also need debate of extensions and mechanisms (FEPs and the process around them) to further the state of the art.
I believe this is the time to design such a "developer journey" to get them to great interoperating software as directly as possible, and I'd be quite willing to help with that. It doesn't make much sense to me to look at the Socialhub forum in isolation and I would not know how to "fix" it in isolation.
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;
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.
“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.”
when does P.S. plan to give public announcement / responsible disclosure of SocialHub winding down?
We are not planning anything. We've been announcing that we'd like this community to self-manage for years. We're now 'giving an ultimatum' as a last resort because supporting work does not seem to be taken into account as long as things run.
I've read elsewhere that I am "dropping". This is not the case. But if you've been here a long time you must have seen that my participation here has faded away, so I want other people to take over before you're all left with a down server and nobody to turn it on again. trwnh:
Why does the forum need to shut down just because an email domain expires?
It doesn't. But notifications and registration confirmations go through the activitypub.eu domain since we could not get access to the activitypub.rocks domain to manage email there. So if there's now control on activitypub.rocks domain, we could as well move the email there for consistency. aschrijver:
I consider it to be a matter of custodianship responsibility for P.S. to manage the shutdown in a responsible manner.
We're not shutting down. We want other people to take over. If other people do not take over, then it means nobody wants to take responsibility for it, then it should die. aschrijver:
mho it would be better to be open for any proposals
No: there is something very political in the way the SocialHub was organized, that fosters collective work and limits to what is acceptable for a community. If fascists want to take over, or people who do not care about privilege and solidarity, then you'll be left with a backup and we'll go away for good. That's the deal IMO. We don't work for years to let this community fall into preying hands. trwnh:
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.
aschrijver:
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.
If fedi devs are scattered to the winds, then they did not realize that the SocialHub has been part of the Fediverse for some time, and they should be reminded. aschrijver:
Objective: Convince @how that responsible custodianship is taken care of, and it is responsible to hand over these tasks to the new community custodians.
I'll be convinced when:
I'm not the only one keeping the server up-to-date
We're clear about X, Fakebooz (including threads), and other centralized surveillance systems that the Fediverse is not aligned with them, and strives for other forms of online social relationships not based on domination, nudging nor abuse.
The keys are yours. aschrijver:
Become native to the fediverse. SocialHub is to be part of the fediverse via federation.
Most of it is part of the Fediverse. The #software category is lacking fediversity because software owners didn't federate! lullis:
I’d also volunteer to host this server if needed.
It's not a hosting issue, and it's not an individual issue. Handling the hosting from a non-profit organization to an individual would not make sense. But thank you for volunteering. strypey:
@how can you please confirm that we’re understanding this correctly, or correct us if we’re not, so we’re all clear on what the situation is.
I hope this answer is clarifying my position. In other words: either there is a community here, and the community is taking the engagement to take care for itself, and we're good; or there's no community, and this forum is just a drag on my back, and you can do without, so I can shut it down.
The way the community is taking over, is up to you, but my preference would be as stated so far. jdp23:
On both the “why?” and “what to do about it?”, getting the perspectives of people who aren’t currently here seems key.
We need to federate more, and include the SH groups in the interesting fedi discussions, so that they can be archived here, and not lost in the Fediverse. SH is an archipel, a navigation tool: not a centralizing place. It's easy to add @fep@socialhub.activitypub.rocks to a federated discussion and have a topic created here that includes the ongoing discussion (and there are more AP actors!) aschrijver:
A viable community is where enough of its members care enough for its continued existence.
aschrijver:
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.
Oh yes, that would be great. aschrijver:
Yes, the #fediversity::category channel is where one might ponder if it doesn’t make the audience of the community too broad.
I'm very surprised to read this. I really do not understand why the audience would be too broad. I mean, really. Why? aschrijver:
It is nice to offer dedicated forum space, but most FOSS projects don’t use it.
Indeed. With more people invested in it, they would use it, either from here, or from the Fediverse. strypey1:
that Loomio thread too.
Isn't Loomio federated? Then why is it not common? silverpill:
I doubt that things can be improved if the forum changes ownership (the opposite seems more likely)
Can you elaborate on this @silverpill? strypey:
Given how often PS admins have been incommunicado when thing need fixing or tweaking, and doing facepalm-inducing stuff like threatening to delete most SH accounts
I really do not appreciate your simplification of the situation here @stripey. I find it unfair and quite disrespectful actually. I have been calling for help for years and had to change teams several times over because people actually did not help at all. So putting this on either me or my organization is simply not acceptable. melvincarvalho:
CPU and RAM requirements. Perhaps someone could tell us the spec of the current server?
For me, the question of “who administers the server” and “who pays the bills” are minor questions that can be solved without much difficulty.
Well, I tried solving these questions collectively since 2019, so I'm very open to concrete steps now
I skipped the last two posts because tl;dr, and had to catch up on the whole discussion at once. Sorry for that. BTW, thank you @aschrijver for standing up again and making this discussion happen.
The refutation is way earlier… You can read the whole development in Policy Proposal: SocialHub Community Values. It was a long and hard discussion. And the conclusions are here: So you see, even I did not remember that @kaniini finally agreed.
SocialHub admins can federate categories, making categories accessible in the fediverse. This is an overview of current ActivityPub actors that you can follow and participate in from the Fediverse.
|SocialHub Category | ActivityPub Actor @socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Settings||--- | --- | ---||#activitypub | @protocol@socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Full topic as Notes||#activitypub:s2s | @proto-s2s@socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Full topic as Notes||#activitypub:c2s | @proto-c2s@socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Full topic as Notes||#standards:fep | @feps@socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Full topic as Notes||#community | @community@socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Full topic as Notes||#fediversity | @fediversity@socialhub.activitypub.rocks | Full topic as Notes|
You may find federation information in each federated category on the tools line:
Continuing the discussion from SocialCG should consult SocialHub before appropriating tasks: I’m a bit behind on how AP federation works between forums, so I’m not sure what this means.
I doubt that things can be improved if the forum changes ownership (the opposite seems more likely)
Can you elaborate on this @silverpill?
That's because I don't know anyone who is both interested in running this forum, and is qualified to do that.
First of all, I think it shouldn't be handed to someone who is not an active forum participant.
But in this thread? Many share a strange patronizing attitude towards developers. Like we're sheep incapable of self-organizing that must be herded to some website in order to be educated by wise community managers and spoonfed with linked data slop. Thanks but no. This attitude is absolutely the last thing we need on a developer forum.
In theory, the place can be run by developers themselves, but nowadays most of us use our own software, and we can talk to each other directly without SocialHub in the middle, or via other forums and groups.
At this point I am fairly convinced that shutting down the forum and publishing a static archive is the best option.
we can talk to each other directly without SocialHub in the middle
The SocialHub is not exactly in the middle: it's part of the Fediverse. So it would only be normal that discussions relevant to everyone would be archived here, since they would be transmitted here as well.
But most discussions about fediverse development elsewhere on the fediverse aren't transmitted to SocialHub as well. There's a lot that factors into this, including:
technology limitations. Kudos to the work that @devnull et al are doing on that front, and there's steady progress, but are there any forum-based spaces that are well-integrated in this way with the broader microblogging fediverse today?
awareness; some devs don't know that they can tag communities here to create a thread on SocialHub, others know in principle but (since it requires an extra step they don't do on most posts) just don't remember to do it in situations where it would make sense.
on topics other than FEPs, it's not clear what the value is -- and there are also costs to take into account
One way to look at this is that the initial attempts at SocialHub federation were a prototype that wasn't as broadly useful as hoped but has succeeded in revealing issues that need to be addressed. In another thread you mentioned that right now SocialHub "feels like a failure" because it hasn't able to keep a stable and growing and rotating team of responsible people in general, although the FEP team is going well ... looking at it as a prototype, though, it's not a failure: it's identified a use case that's a good match for the current state of the prototype, as well as a big challenge to address to extend to other use cases.
In terms of the overall reboot or shutdown question ... those aren't the only two options. Another possibility is to take a hiatus, putting the community into read-only mode for a while; or, narrowing of focus, at least in the short term, for example keeping the FEP discussions going and shifting other stuff into read-only for the time being (if that's possible in Discourse). Both of these keep open the option of moving SocialHub forward (potentially in a different form). They also create an opportunity to see what alternatives evolve on their own -- and the space to come up with proposals and plans for moving forward that identify and address the underlying challenges.
Then again, sometime the takeaway from a prototype -- even one with valuable learning -- is that this isn't a direction you see as practical to pursue given the overall constraints. If SocialHub shuts down, people who see value in some or all of what happens here will start up other mechanisms; to the extent that there's currently a community here, it can migrate. As long as there's an archive, or the site's available in read-only mode, history isn't lost; and everything here is CC-SA-4.0 so new sites can take whatever subset is useful. All of that's true whether or not you officially pass the torch to somebody else.
But in this thread? Many share a strange patronizing attitude towards developers. Like we’re sheep incapable of self-organizing that must be herded to some website in order to be educated by wise community managers and spoonfed with linked data slop. Thanks but no. This attitude is absolutely the last thing we need on a developer forum.
Where are you seeing this? From what I'm seeing, the discussion is not about any of those things, so this is quite the bizarre statement. I also don't think this is strictly a "developer forum", as there are several different sections dedicated to software, spec work, interest gathering, and so on -- and participation is welcomed by anyone. silverpill:
In theory, the place can be run by developers themselves, but nowadays most of us use our own software, and we can talk to each other directly without SocialHub in the middle, or via other forums and groups.
If there are "other forums and groups", then no one is being made broadly aware of them. If the answer is "we can talk to each other directly", then this is essentially abdicating any sort of collective communication -- if you don't follow a bunch of the people involved, you won't see the conversations.
As it stands, SocialHub is the most prominent place to go if you want to see discussions about ActivityPub and related topics. I'm not aware of any more prominent venues. This isn't to say that anyone is being "herded to some website" or that SocialHub must be "in the middle", but it is generally valuable if the discussions end up being collected somewhere in aggregate, and it is generally convenient if the discussions can be carried out long-form with all the creature comforts of forums and none of the limitations of microblogging. What's the alternative being posed here? Where do people go for this stuff?
> I also don't think this is strictly a "developer forum", as there are several different sections dedicated to software, spec work, interest gathering, and so on -- and participation is welcomed by anyone.
Fair, there is space for all of these discussions, but considering that of a given set of ActivityPub developers, only a small subset of those developers contribute to SocialHub.
That may be a signal that either the existing space is not suitable for AP implementors, or a new space may be a welcome addition.
of a given set of ActivityPub developers, only a small subset of those developers contribute to SocialHub.
That may be a signal that either the existing space is not suitable for AP implementors, or a new space may be a welcome addition.
I would pose this question in two parts:
What are developers doing that could be brought to a forum like SocialHub?
What makes SocialHub specifically not suitable for bringing those topics here?
The existence of any forum implies an opportunity for collaborative participation rather than a mandate. It would be helpful to have explicitly identified examples of discussions that could be brought to a forum, and explicitly identified sentiments of why those discussions weren't brought to this forum.
So far, the most clearly articulated objection seems to be advocating for bypassing forums in favor of ad-hoc communications or backchannels. Perhaps this is adequate for fixing one-off bugs as compared to creating a topic in that software's category. Perhaps that bug was filed on a project's issue tracker instead. But for having sustained conversations over the course of days or weeks or months or even years about meatier topics, I can't imagine much effectiveness in a scattered diffuse set of posts only living on people's profiles if you scroll back far enough.
Personally, I bring such conversations here because I don't want them to be lost to the timeline and I don't want character limits or a lack of blockquotes to impair my communications. I also know that there is an audience here for ActivityPub-related special interest topics, whereas there is no such expectation for my hangout spot where i go to check in on what some friends are doing. the context matters a lot.
Great questions @trwnh, relevant not to just SocialHub but also to alternatives. trwnh:
What are developers doing that could be brought to a forum like SocialHub?
Here's some examples of some of the conversations happening now or over the last couple of weeks that fit in SocialHub's scope (as I understand it) and seem relevant to developers (they all relate to limitations and/or potential improvements in the software).
the Dropsitenews report about Meta's scraping
starter packs and consent (sparked by the Mastodon announcement)
A New Social's post on crossposting vs bridging that also led to discussion of federation in the client
Fedi clients (sparked by a request from Laurens and a couple of discussions in Fediverse Report)
the Online Services Act / EU and Australia age verification and their implications
the "verify your account" spam/scam
Ghost's ActivityPub support (including their currently-proprietary client)
trwnh:
What makes SocialHub specifically not suitable for bringing those topics here?
In a nutshell:
people who are active on SocialHub don't bring those topics here when they see them, presumably because they don't see value in doing so. You mentioned that you personally bring conversations here because you know there's an audience here for the ActivityPub topics you focus on, but that's not necessarily true for topics like these. You also cited character limits and a lack of blockquotes but other than vanilla Mastodon most fedi software supports that pretty well, so again that's not relevant for a lot of people.
people who aren't active on SocialHub generally have no incentive to bring discussions here
even if people who don't have accounts here want to bring discussions here, it's not in general obvious how. I experimented with trying to bring the bridging / crossposting / federation in the client post here. The first dilemma was not knowing what account to tag for a given post; even once I found the list, should it be fediversity, software, or ... ? I chose Fediversity, and replied to the thread tagging the category actor ... but nothing showed up here. So I started a new thread, tagging the category actor ... but once again, nothing showed up here.
Of course these aren't only challenges for SocialHub. A few of these discussions are on piefed.social/c/fediverse and lemmy.world/c/fediverse but most aren't. That said, I do think the specific dynamics of who's currently active on SocialHub and what they're interested accentuate the problems. A reboot could offer opportunities to make progress on those, but if it's being driven by the people who are currently active here I'm not sure how likely that is.
itch.io is a simple way to find, download and distribute indie games online. Whether you're a developer looking to upload your game or just someone looking for something new to play itch.io has you covered.
(In a discussion on SocialHub, @trwnh asked what kinds of developer-focused discussions were happening elsewhere on fedi and what the barriers were to bringing them to SocialHub. This is certainly a good example! So, as an experiment, I'm going to try tagging @ fediversity @ socialhub.activitypub.rocks to see how that works.*)
I certainly agree about the connections and (where feasible) interop across networks/protocols as being critical. From a terminology perspective it might be better to come up with another term that includes server-based federation (via a same protocol), cross-protocol adapters (server-side connect across protocols), and cross-posting with client support for merging discussions.
* EDIT: it didn't work. In fact it may well. have caused a load spike on SocialHub that made SocialHub unavailable for a few minutes, although it's possible that was just coincidence. In any case I edited this post to remove the tag to keep anybody else from unintentionally also temporarily crashing SocialHub!
It goes both ways. There are a lot of interesting discussions started here and not elsewhere. It all contributes to the grassroots ecosystem at large and helps evolve the fediverse. The AP dev community has a broad range of opinions, ideologies, values, things they find important. And all across the ecosystem there are various independent initiatives where people can find their peers, and join groups they feel most comfortable to be with. It is a good thing, that. It helps stimulate the overall diversity of the ecosystem, and resilience of the fedi movement as a whole. If there's sustained custodianship of SocialHub, and a dedicated community team, then SocialHub is viable.
A newly established Hungarian company is spending hundreds of thousands of euros on advertisements attacking Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—far exceeding its reported income and without revealing the source of its funding. Meta eventually removed a wave of similar ads targeting Viktor Orbán’s opponents for violating its terms of service—but only after profiting from displaying them to millions of users.
A newly established Hungarian company is spending hundreds of thousands of euros on advertisements attacking Hungary’s opposition leader Péter Magyar and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Damn what's with the crazy Corbyn hate boner? The one politician trying to stand up for the people but instead everyone wants to slobber off Keir Starmer.
Jeremy Corbyn has just announced he is launching a brand new left-wing party – but it already sounds very similar to the Green Party’s proposals.
Together with fellow former Labour MP Zarah Sultana, the ex-Labour leader promised a “new kind of political party” which “belongs to you”.
They said they would call for a wealth tax, champion an NHS which is free from privatisation, stand up for Palestine and challenge the fossil fuel giants “putting their profits before our planet”.
These policies are not dissimilar to those backed by the Green Party, which many former Labour supporters, now disillusioned, have flocked to over the last year.
That could therefore put the two parties at odds with one another.
Zack Polanski, the frontrunner in the ongoing Greens’ leadership race and the party’s current deputy, told HuffPost UK shortly after Corbyn’s announcement it is clear the parties have plenty in common.
He noted: “I’ve read the statement and I can’t see a single thing in there that’s not Green Party policy or doesn’t align already with the Green Party.”
He said: “I really like Jeremy and Zarah both as people and also as politicians. I’m supportive of anything they’re setting up.”
But the London Assembly member also made it clear they would be “welcome” in the Greens, which he called a “movement for change”.
He said: “I think it’s a positive thing that they’ve recognised that the Labour Party as a vehicle of progressive change that utterly collapsed, and it’s time to abandon it. They’ve not left the Labour Party, but Labour Party has left them.”
However, he noted that – unlike Corbyn’s new group – the Greens do not need to have a conference in the autumn to decide their name.
“Maybe that conference should decide actually, the Green party exists and is doing really well,” Polanski said, pointing to the nearly two million votes they secured in the general election. “It kind of makes sense to join the Green Party.”
A vision-based control system called Neural Jacobian Fields enables soft and rigid robots to learn self-supervised motion control using only a monocular camera.
The Internet Archive is thrilled to host Chuck Tingle and his upcoming novel Lucky Day, for a book talk presented by The Booksmith! We can\'t wait to see you there, […]\n
Bit of a bummer about Ozzy, but not exactly a shocker. Hulk Hogan was a celebrity? He starred in one of the 3 Ninjas movies, but that's the only time I've ever heard of the guy.
This is literally just talk (promise) about a bunch of other talk (recognition). While talk is better than silence, nothing of substance is happening yet. They still trade with Israel, including some weapons.
while this is welcoming news during this atrocious time of the zionist genocidal assault against Palestinians, I am curious of the details. Is this 1967 borders? What about the facts on the ground that zionism has created to make a two state model incapable?
Do we really want to normalize having a new Palestine state existing in a quasi-like existence next to this genocidal state? How far will that go? Will AOC and others say Palestine has the right to defend itself and arm it with iron dome?
Furthermore Israel should not be off the hook in the important work of dismantling colonial regimes.
The only possible way forward is to equalize existence for all peoples on the lands, irrespective of their religion, ethnicity, or who they are. Ethno-nationalist state models like zionism deserve the trashbin of history and I dare any one upholding liberal values to defend an ethno-nationalist state now or in the future, but we all know they've done an trash job in the past.
Yeah, I can understand that, but all the while people & children continue to be slaughtered 🤷♂️ but don’t worry though, September is a good time I’m sure.
(Anger and sarcasm isn’t directed at you OP- just at bureaucracy & politics in general)
Just having him recognize it as a legitimate state doesn't mean the genocide and ethnic cleansing are going to stop. It's still very much just a PR move whether he officially announces it then or now, imo
Secondo Capasa, Presidente di Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, lo sfruttamento nella moda è un fenomeno limitato.
Ad ora sono stati indagati:
• Alviero Martini
• Armani operations
• Dior Manufactures
• Valentino Bags
• Loro Piana
Fenomeni isolati o sistema strutturale?
Si tratta davvero di fenomeni isolati? Oppure la moda è totalmente nella mani della finanza, dei grandi fondi - del lusso (LVMH, Kering, Richemont) e del fast fashion (Shein, Zara, H&M) - espressione del capitalismo puro?
Spazi di resistenza:
🔴 Slow fashion, piccoli brand indipendenti.
🔴 Comunità che rifiutano il consumismo (es. DIY, swap parties).
La domanda vera è: Possiamo immaginare una moda davvero libera dal capitalismo? O è un’utopia?
Decifrare le antiche iscrizioni romane con l'AI è possibile
Google DeepMind, il laboratorio di ricerca sull'AI di Google, ha presentato Aeneas, un modello progettato specificamente per aiutare gli studiosi a comprendere, attribuire e persino ricostruire i testi antichi.
Decifrare le antiche iscrizioni romane con l'AI è possibile
Google DeepMind, il laboratorio di ricerca sull'AI di Google, ha presentato Aeneas, un modello progettato specificamente per aiutare gli studiosi a comprendere, attribuire e persino ricostruire i testi antichi.
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader whose boss's email account got phished and was used to trick one of the company's customers into sending a large payment to scammers.
Researchers identify a mystifying Long-Period Transient with 100% polarized radio emission, suggesting new type of cosmic radio source. A team of astronomers at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for…
As a quite new user to the Lemmy universe and the Fediverse concept, I have a basic question, which I could not get answered elsewhere: If an instance (= a community / topic group, e. g. "memes","World news" or "MapPorn" in the example picture) is moving from one server to another (= the name and/or ending changes), how to properly follow the move? And what happens to the "old" instances, that are discontinued? Should I keep them following?
If an instance (= a topic group, e. g. “memes”,“World news” or “MapPorn” in the example picture) is moving from one server to another (= the name and/or ending changes), how to properly follow the move?
You find out about it the way you did, then follow the new one. I don't think there's a mechanism to do that automatically.
And what happens to the “old” instances, that are discontinued? Should I keep the following?
In this particular case, you can see in the sidebar that the community is locked, i.e. there will not be any new posts, i.e. there is no point in keeping the subscription. It also doesn't hurt anything though.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed designating Apple and Google with "strategic market status" (SMS) for their mobile platforms, which control 90-100% of UK mobile devices1. The designation would allow the regulator to impose new rules addressing app store fees, review processes, and restrictions on digital wallets1.
The CMA published roadmaps outlining priority actions, including ensuring fair app store rankings, allowing users to be directed to external payment options, and enabling better interoperability between devices1. For Apple specifically, the regulator aims to address restrictions on digital wallets and connected devices like smartwatches2.
Both companies pushed back against the proposals. Apple warned the rules could "undermine privacy and security" and force it to "give away technology for free to foreign competitors"3. Google's competition director Oliver Bethell called the announcement "disappointing and unwarranted"3.
The CMA will make final decisions on the SMS designations by October 22, 2025, with initial interventions expected to begin in autumn 20251. More complex issues, like requiring Apple to allow alternative app stores, have been postponed for consideration until 20264.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has proposed designating Apple and Google with Strategic Market Status in mobile platforms in a move t...
The games were mentioned in a 2024 report and are now part of a new lawsuit in which a 11 year old girl was allegedly groomed and sexually assaulted after meeting a stranger on Roblox.
An error message appears saying "The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists" when users try to add the phrase to their bios, but any number of other phrases about political and religious preferences are allowed.
Trump’s bitter dislike of renewable energy first erupted publicly 14 years ago in a seemingly trivial spat over wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf course. As Trump returns to Scotland this week, though, he is using the US presidency to squash clean power, with major ramifications for the climate crisis and America’s place in the world.
Although Trump failed in his legal attempt to halt the Scottish wind farm, an enduring scorn towards renewables appears to have been seeded that now has global consequences.
As president, Trump has declared wind and solar projects unwelcome in the US, barring them from federal lands and signing a vast spending bill that demolishes support for a nascent industry that held the promise of revamping the American economy while cutting dangerous planet-heating pollution.
It's so wild. I vacationed in Northern England, about an hour south of Scotland, in Tynemouth, and our whole family found the offshore turbines to be magical.
There's ruins of like a massive 4-6 story monastery from the 15th century, and it's wild because the remnants of the one wall are the tallest thing in town, and have been for centuries. There's literally paintings and drawings going back centuries showing it, and centuries and centuries of people living in the shadow of this partial massive monument that no longer exists.
It's super interesting, but there's also something kind of inherently scary and depressing about feeling like you're seeing ancient remnants of some massive great thing that can no longer be done.
But then at a foggy sunset we saw the off shore turbines and it was genuinely uplifting and magical in a solar punk way. Just the blades peaked out of the fog, and similar to the monastery ruins, they looked too big to be created by humans, but these were actually still working. It felt like it was providing a glimpse into our future massive endeavours, and was one of the most magical moments of the whole trip.
Data centers, cornerstones of the EU’s digital ambitions, are expanding rapidly across the continent. Public responses to this digital prioritization vary dramatically. Some communities embrace them as engines of development; others push back, citing threats to the environment and their quality of life.
"Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer that allows for running full X11-only desktop environments using Wayland. It is essentially an X11 server backed by Wayland, leveraging wlroots and Xwayland. Our goal is for Wayback to eventually be a completely drop-in replacement to the Xorg binary, thus reducing maintenance burden for distro maintainers."
A more apt comparison would be using the Windows guest to remote into the Linux host via xorg piping, waypipe, VNC, RDP, etcetera, which conveys your feeling of weirdness while being a closer approximation of what this really does.
This project does exactly that, it runs a reimplementation of linux specifically to run wine on platforms that it doesn't natively support. github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine
EADaily, July 24th, 2025. A special section "Examples of the use of "hate speech" against Russia and Russophobic statements by politicians and public figures of foreign countries" has been opened on the official website of the Russian Foreign Ministr…
Just because you say it doesn't make it true. The real Nazi regime ia projecting their Nazism upon the country they are invading. Kinda like the Nazi regeime of 1939...
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
But the truth is that this is an easily debunked fantasy spun out by a handful of propagandists. Yet Western media has repeated their falsehoods with a neglect for the basic tenets of journalism that stretches beyond the fog of war into the realm of intentional blindness.
Nope not a single Russian talking point anywhere to be found.
Try a non biased article, or video
If Ukraine is about to loose why did they just take back a town in Sumy??
How much land has russia taken this year? How many losses per that land?? Where are russias tanks??
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
At 94 years old, Noam Chomsky is as vocal as ever. In May, the American political commentator and linguist will publish his latest book, Illegitimate Authority, a collection of interviews with th
In his new book, John Safran considers how broader cultural, economic and political forces and attitudes have contributed to a resurgence in antisemitism – through the lens of Kanye West.
"He said he supports strong leadership for Ukraine, like Germany during World War II, but opposes the Nazis' genocide against Jews. Minorities should be tolerated as long as they are peaceful and don't demand special privileges, he said, and the property of wealthy oligarchs should be taken away and nationalized." Usa-Today
Seems like there is a bit of miss interpretation of the word Nazi here
'While the Azov Battalion represents only a tiny fraction of the brave Ukrainian defence forces fighting Russia, their regional notoriety has enabled Mr Putin to put across a useful lie to “justify” his invasion of a free democratic nation.' Independant
So a tiny minority that has virtually no power makes all of Ukraine a Nazi state??
On its face, Putin’s smear is absurd, not least because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and has said that members of his family were killed during World War II. There is also no evidence of recent mass killings or ethnic purges taking place in Ukraine. Moreover, labeling enemies Nazis is a common political ploy in Russia, especially from a leader who favors disinformation campaigns and wants to stir up feelings of national vengeance against a WWII foe to justify conquest. - NBC Opinion piece
"Azov is a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit whose members – estimated at 900 – are ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology." & 'In 2015, Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment at the time said that 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s recruits were Nazis.' - Aljazeera
So 900/12,000 makes Azov all nazi??
'It was Azov's Semenyaka who hosted Rundo along with fellow Americans Michael Miselis and Benjamin Daley, RAM members who participated in last year's "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that was the backdrop for the death of 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer.' - Radio Free Europe
"He said he supports strong leadership for Ukraine, like Germany during World War II, but opposes the Nazis' genocide against Jews. Minorities should be tolerated as long as they are peaceful and don't demand special privileges, he said, and the property of wealthy oligarchs should be taken away and nationalized." Usa-Today
Seems like there is a bit of miss interpretation of the word Nazi here
'While the Azov Battalion represents only a tiny fraction of the brave Ukrainian defence forces fighting Russia, their regional notoriety has enabled Mr Putin to put across a useful lie to “justify” his invasion of a free democratic nation.' Independant
So a tiny minority that has virtually no power makes all of Ukraine a Nazi state??
On its face, Putin’s smear is absurd, not least because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and has said that members of his family were killed during World War II. There is also no evidence of recent mass killings or ethnic purges taking place in Ukraine. Moreover, labeling enemies Nazis is a common political ploy in Russia, especially from a leader who favors disinformation campaigns and wants to stir up feelings of national vengeance against a WWII foe to justify conquest. - NBC Opinion piece
"Azov is a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit whose members – estimated at 900 – are ultra-nationalists and accused of harbouring neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideology." & 'In 2015, Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment at the time said that 10 to 20 percent of Azov’s recruits were Nazis.' - Aljazeera
So 900/12,000 makes Azov all nazi??
'It was Azov's Semenyaka who hosted Rundo along with fellow Americans Michael Miselis and Benjamin Daley, RAM members who participated in last year's "Unite The Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that was the backdrop for the death of 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer.' - Radio Free Europe
I mean sure they should ideally get out of Ukraine territory. But realistically, that land is dead and useless, filled with mines and bomb crater's. And Russia will not give up all their captured territory unless completedly defeated/unable to continue the war, also unlikely. So is getting all territory back really worth all the loss of life and the correct diplomatic approach? Russia won't end the war losing their captured territory, or rather Putin will not.
Deadly border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia have reignited a century-old territorial dispute, with both nations exchanging fire, recalling ambassadors, and inching toward open conflict
Cibo, buon vino e musica si fondono per il ritorno, sabato 2 agosto, della rassegna "Calici sotto i tre colli". Il borgo medioevale di Brisighella si trasformerà in una cantina a cielo aperto per poter gustare buon cibo da strada e i calici delle migliori produzioni vinicole del territorio. Il tutto accompagnato da spettacoli di musica dal vivo nello splendido scenario del 3 colli.
Dalle ore 20:15 in Piazza Marconi va in scena l'esibizione di "Encuentros – Live tra Flamenco e Pop" con Carlo Calderano alla chitarra flamenca e Valentina Rambelli alla voce. Sul palco la formazione di flamenco pop che unisce gli studi classici e la sonorità flamenca che restituiscono un mix di accorgimenti armonici e sonorità per nulla scontati.
Dalle ore 21:45 in Piazza Carducci è il turno dei “7SevenUp" con loro carica esplosiva, dettata anche dalla giovane età, nella migliore esplorazione delle hit degli anni ‘90 e Duemila.
Durante la serata, passeggiando per il centro storico, si potranno inoltre assaggiare gli ottimi vini delle cantine del territorio: Baccagnano, Cantina Bulzaga, Ca’ Barchi, CAB Terra di Brisighella, Cantina Casadio, Conte di Val D’Amone, Gallegati, Le lagune Terre Antiche, Loiano, Tenuta Uccellina, Terra e Sale, Terrabusi, Vespignano, Vigne di San Lorenzo, Villa Liverzano, Zinzani.
L'ingresso è a offerta libera. Per informazioni www.brisighella.org.
Nel centro di Brisighella torna “Calici sotto i tre colli” La musica sotto le stelle si fonde con il buon cibo e le degustazioni di vino Cibo, buon vino e musica si fondono per il ritorno, sabato 2 agosto, della...
Torna anche questo agosto il festival che regala due giorni magici nel bellissimo borgo marchigiano di Ripatransone con spettacoli di grandi artisti, laboratori, street food e visite guidate al Museo della Matemagica e alle sue incredibili illusioni ottiche.
Il cuore della nuova edizione di RipaMagic batte forte nel nome di Mattia Flip, al secolo Mattia Bidoli, mago, fotografo e operatore umanitario che da oltre quindici anni porta la magia nei luoghi più feriti del mondo: ospedali da campo, carceri, campi profughi, zone di guerra.
Oltre allo spettacolo che aprirà la prima giornata, Mattia sarà protagonista di un incontro pubblico in cui condividerà esperienze, immagini e storie dai conflitti in Siria, Libano, Iraq, Ucraina e nella Striscia di Gaza, dove ha trasformato le sue esibizioni in gesti di cura, resistenza e umanità.
Accanto a lui, un cast ricco di artisti italiani e internazionali: dal cubano Ernesto Planas Roldan - maestro mondiale della comedy magic, Luca D’Avvero – definito “giocoliere della magia” e “comico del pericolo”, Manuel Guarnori - specializzato in grandi effetti scenici; Tino Fimiani - già protagonista a Zelig Circus e in tournée con Arturo Brachetti - Madame Rebiné, Daigoro e Giacomo Seri.
RipaMagic Magia, illusionismo, comicità e incontri straordinari tra le piazze e i giardini di Ripatransone. Due giorni gratuiti con grandi artisti, laboratori e museo interattivo.
Il 2-3 agosto a Sefro (MC) torna “La Trota e il Verdicchio”, evento tra natura, gusto e racconti, nel cuore dell’Appennino marchigiano. Sabato 2 si parte con la finalissima del social contest dedicato alla trota: tre content creator presenteranno le proprie creazioni alla giuria composta dalle chef Serena D’Alesio e Maria Rita Spoglia, dal prof. Giovanni Caprioli (Unicam) e da Manuel Saraceno, ambassador di Giallo Zafferano.
La serata proseguirà con l’inaugurazione del Parco Sensoriale e con “Sorgenti d’eccellenza”, una cena evento che celebra l’incontro tra trota e Verdicchio, arricchita dalle testimonianze di imprenditori come Lanfranco Beleggia (Brosway), Domenico Guzzini (Fimag) e Antonio Centocanti (Cantine Belisario), intervistati da Erika Mariniello.
Domenica 3 si apre all’insegna del benessere con il Forest Bathing drammaturgico a cura di Barbara Migliorelli. Nel pomeriggio spazio ai bambini con “Il baule delle storie” di Roberta Mora. Alle 18:00 presso la Torre da Varano, Natasha Stefanenko presenterà il suo libro “Dalle Marche con amore” in dialogo con la giornalista Sara Santacchi.
Gran finale serale con l’Aperitrota: clubbing, sperimentazione gastronomica e trota d’autore con gli chef Marta Pierozzi e Paolo Pistola. Alla consolle DJ Jacopo Jajani e il violinista Andrea Casta.
“La Trota e il Verdicchio” è promosso dal Comune di Sefro con il cofinanziamento della Regione Marche nell’ambito del programma FEAMPA, e fa parte del Grand Tour delle Marche, circuito di eventi firmato Tipicità e ANCI Marche. Due giorni per scoprire un borgo che si propone come capitale del buon vivere nella Regione del benessere.
Il 2-3 agosto, a Sefro (MC), torna “La Trota e il Verdicchio”. Sefro: elisir di benessere! Due giorni tra natura, gusto, racconti. Un programma ricco di esperienze per ogni età. Il primo week end di agosto, nell’incantevole borgo di Sefro...
LOS ANGELES — Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slid in June to the slowest pace since last September as mortgage rates remained elevated and the national median sales price rose to an all-time high of $435,300
I don't think it's controversial to suggest that the US economy is heavily guided by the profit motive, and that megacorps control the state, while the PRC has been utilizing a largely planned economy to achieve large infrastructure goals and long-term plans. Even if you're anti-PRC, this is just indisputable.
No the criticisms of the us economy are correct, the smart planning and social stability of the PCR is what i am calling out. They are capitalists as well. Sure they do large scale social works, but corners are cut due to corruption
The PRC has markets, but the overwhelming majority of large firms and key industries are state owned and planned. Even the medium firms are controlled by the golden share system. The PRC's corruption got pretty bad in the 90s and 2000s, but Xi's career has been so successful due to running a strong anti-corruption campaign. The PRC is socialist.
Their large firms and key industries are publicly owned, and central planning is the backbone of their economy. Their economic base is the public sector. This is socialism. State capitalism is when the large firms and key industries are privately owned, but directed by a strong state, like Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Bismark's Germany, and the US post-WWII. As far as corruption, over 90% of Chinese citizens approve of their government. Xi is incredibly popular because of the anti-corruption campaigns successfully removing large amounts of opportunists.
Publicly owned (by xi), socialism would be the government actually looking out for their population, which the Chinese government doesn't do. You know who else has overwhelming positive reviews by their population, the rest of the dictators. C'mon don't fall for their propaganda either.
Xi being head of state does not mean he owns the economy. This is incredibly silly, it's the same logic that people used when claiming Castro was incredibly wealthy, and just pointing to the GDP of Cuba as proof.
A study from a western firm that found that Chinese citizens overwhelmingly approve of their government because of the dramatic and consistent improvements in their lives is absolutely proof of support for the system. It isn't proof of Xi being a "dictator."
Come on, this is nonsense. Please stick to reality.
No, Putin does not own the economy, just like Trump does not own the US. This is silly. Additionally, Russia is capitalist, and the PRC is socialist.
No, the CPC does not take organs from people off the streets. This is incredibly racist propaganda, and I cannot believe you're repeating this.
I'm not "simping" for anything, I've provided sources for what I've said, while you live in fantasy land where heads of state are owners of economies like we live in feudalism. This is nonsense. Plus, not sure why you're bringing in the DPRK and RF unprompted, we were discussing the PRC.
All states are authoritarian, what matters is which class is in control, the proletariat or bourgeoisie. "Authoritarian" isn't something unique to the PRC, it applies to every state, though the nature of that authority depends on the class structure.
Public ownership is collectivized, private is individual or a group of investors. Private ownership requires profits at a systemic level (if not individually), while public doesn't need to. Does that make sense? With collectivized ownership we can abolish the profit motive, and plan the economy more effectively.
Same here. I also kept ignoring my window ac units alert about cleaning the filter until it just stopped working. I cleaned the filter and it magically works a lot better.
The layer of dirt on him was the only thing keeping newer forms of germs from infecting him simce his skin couldnt do it anymore. They washed him and killed him.
A motor that runs at a constant speed all the time can last basically forever. Starting and stopping puts way more stress on the mechanical parts.
Same reason I hate how modern hard drive enclosures force the hard drive to shut down after a period of inactivity. With a lot of workloads it will keep spinning up, stopping, and spinning up again which is a great way to kill the motor.
Well I'm pretty sure my grandpa bought this thing at walmart for like 10$ so idk about a 100 year warranty but it outlived him already. Now it's on to me.
No More Forced Restarts: This is a huge relief for many!. Firefox on Linux no longer requires a forced restart after your package manager applies an update. This means smoother, uninterrupted browsing, even during system updates.
Reduced Memory Usage: ForkServer leads to a significant reduction in memory consumption for content processes. The base resident memory for a content process is now around 50% lower. This helps Firefox run more efficiently, especially if you have many tabs open.
Faster Process Startup: You'll notice that content process startup times are reduced by approximately 35%. This translates to snappier new tab openings and overall improved responsiveness.
I have currently 13 tabs open and I don’t see the issue. RAM is there to be used. I actually expect my programs to extensively cache stuff and use the RAM.
(The other Firefox processes for the individual tabs are cut from the screenshot.)
Absolutely, it's only about convenience. I often miss the fact that firefox is in the list of all the packages that are getting updated and realize it only when I open a new tab and I get the error message, and that's annoying. Very much a first world problem for sure!
We don't notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I've never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.
AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren't technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.
And when they quietly solve a problem, we often expand their use until they start creating new problems. The automobile solved the problem of horses in cities (which were yes, a really terrible thing, between their excrement, their smell, the bodies of the ones driven to death, just horrible). But then we re-designed our whole metro-areas to put people at least 10km away from workplaces, groceries and services. The sprawl made the car necessary for parts of life that were never serviced by horses, and then you have terrible traffic and all the downsides that come with it. My point? The car did actually quietly solve a problem quite elegantly at first.
In any problem, every solution that works is a solution, but not every solution is of equal value. In math we use the word "Elegant : Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision. " To describe solutions that work well, are concise, and don't add pain.
Jigsaw puzzle analogy: If you have a puzzle with one piece missing, there are at least a hundred things you can use that will fill that space .. sawdust, sand, play-doh, cement, but the most elegant solution, is the puzzle piece made to go there.
With tech, its just more complex- we don't create solutions in a vacuum ( a world by themselves ), they have to exist and mesh with a preexisting world. We call those limits constraints. And the problem with tech is that often the people who create the technology ignore (don't care much about) the constraints.
Inventor: Can we do xyz with cameras? Society: And not let them be used for evil? Inventor: Not my problem.
Its easy to solve problems: the cat is sick. kill the cat. people: No that's awful. inventor: but it did solve the cat problem.
Solving problems in a way that meshes well with the world is not easy. And our inventors are at the moment, shortsighted and greedy.
Not really, there's an OR logical element present in our world.
Divide et impera, applied to engineering. For 80% of things this fast cool solution works, for 20% the simpler one works. The aggregating element to make using both in their own situations transparent reduces reliability just a bit, but the efficiency gain is visible.
And the "80%" and "20%" solutions can further on too use such unifying elements to aggregate different solutions for them. To improve efficiency without additional failure points (except for aggregators).
Nobody does that because the "80% solution" producer wants to capture you, they don't want alternatives, they want power, and it's a honeypot.
It's up to you the customer to understand this. In the classical model. Also see customer associations, which are like unions inverted. Isn't it funny how we have big businesses organizing, but not labor and not customers? While for them it's much more important.
As you can see, the aggregator is very important here. We need standards, so that all social media would compete with other social media in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all search engines would compete with other search engines in one interoperable world with standardized interfaces, all file hostings ... you get the idea.
There's a term in hardware design called Mean Time Before Failure or MTBF. Essentially it means that the more parts a system has in it, the quicker it will fail. I think the ever increasing complexity of software tends to follow the same pattern.
There's an idea in marketing that if you create a solution, you also need to create new problems that you can market. For example, you buy a printer to allow you to print at home but now you need to buy overpriced proprietary ink. Or maybe you buy a phone, but now what can we do to make sure you come back to buy a new phone in 2 years? Truly solving a problem sells something once and that will not satisfy the infinite growth mindset.
It's a concept up there with Edward Bernays work in popularizing applying propaganda techniques to modern advertising as the idea that may have done the most to really push capitalism to its worst possible end.
I don't think a socialist society without propaganda would be much better or worse than a capitalist society without propaganda.
The differences would be almost decorative, so the socialist variant can be represented as a market of ideas in many democratic organs, with those people more successful by accepted criteria getting more resources allocated to them "for merit".
Or the capitalist variant can be represented as a system of efficient resource distribution via accepted universal equivalent, with voluntary associations and public morale acting to help those in need.
Those would be both comprised of humans, so without propaganda you'd have normal human hierarchies, human inequality and the resistance to it, human groupings and human hostility, all the same.
Provided, of course, that both are democratic. Otherwise you'll have Stalin's time Soviet bosses with their palaces and lovers and cars, and you'll have Nazi Germany's industrialists, the former as accountable as the latter and the latter as much part of the state hierarchy as the former.
silverpill
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •aschrijver:
Most developers have already left, so I think shutting the forum down is not a bad idea.
Perhaps it can be hosted in read-only mode for another year or two? That would be nice.
Arnold Schrijver
in reply to silverpill • • •silverpill:
I believe there are ways to export the forum and turn it into a static html site, which could be hosted permanently to keep the information archive intact and accessible.
silverpill:
Did they leave or is the forum federated? @strypey did step up, and some time ago there was also interest of other people. Let's see where things go.
Another option is that W3C SocialCG takes over the custodianship role in addition to the activitypub.rocks website, if they are willing.
Against fragmentation: unifying dev discussions with forum federation
SocialHubDanyl Strype
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •silverpill:
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.
aschrijver:
That would make sense, given SH sits under a domain they are now managing. I'd be happy to work with SocialCG on this.
a
in reply to Danyl Strype • • •strypey:
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:
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.
Against fragmentation: unifying dev discussions with forum federation
SocialHubArnold Schrijver
in reply to a • • •The various observations @trwnh makes are spot on.
trwnh:
"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 ..
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 ..
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 ..
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.
Replacing HTTP Signatures with Bearer tokens (or OCaps)?
SocialHubStrypey
2025-07-27 02:51:16
Arnold Schrijver
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •Any discussion and volunteer efforts to collect that information is welcome of course. But as I see it (interpreting @how's ultimatum) there's a stark choice within 4 weeks time of:
What is a viable plan, what is a viable community then? Well, again my opinion, but there is no need at all to be broadly interesting, relevant to a large group, or targeting the entire dev ecosystem. A community team may choose any niche area to focus on. It is up to them. Viable in my book means first of all:
After that happens then I think it is important that the new team has free reign to do whatever they want to forge healthy community in whatever direction, scope and audience they want to serve/explore. They should be able to revitalize, reposition and foster the community as they think is best. They are now sole custodians of that, the ones making the fresh start. The "Why?" and "What to do about it?" may not be all that relevant against their new direction, the mission and vision of this new team.
I'd personally definitely reposition, and can imagine many different directions that might be interesting for a community to explore..
Arnold Schrijver
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •Danyl Strype
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •trwnh:
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:
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:
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;
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.
Pre-FEP: Quote posts, quote policies and quote controls
SocialHubArnold Schrijver
in reply to Danyl Strype • • •strypey:
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:
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.
hypothesis that more people will lurk in a virtual community than will participate
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Arnold Schrijver
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •Cross-referencing to social.coop discussion on Loomio, where @strypey had the great idea to raise awareness on this topic, and asked if members are interested to help and/or the cooperative to consider taking custodianship. I just added to that discussion myself:
loomio.com/d/zbfw1KjW/is-socia…
social.coop
Mastodon hosted on social.coopKristian
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •just small circles 🕊
in reply to Kristian • • •Strypey
in reply to just small circles 🕊 • • •> I answered this on the forum, but your and mine mastodon thread does not show that
The federation of replies from SH into Mastodon might take some time. Due either to the generally slow performance of Mastodon, or to the issues you've raised with the impacts of AP federation of the SH Discourse instance;
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
@z428 @aschrijver
AP processing dragging forum down?
SocialHubIndieterminacy
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •Strypey
in reply to Indieterminacy • • •> I think that is a very strong and sustainable idea, good job!
Thanks : ) Would be good to have your input on that Loomio thread too.
@aschrijver
Philip Mallegol-Hansen
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •Admittedly I'm only a hobbyist ActivityPub developer, I've been toying with a little implementation on nights and weekends for a few months, but I wanted to chime in on the "None of the developers want this, they've all moved on" sentiment and say:
As a lurker, I've found this forum incredibly useful, and would hate to see it go away.
I know community building is under appreciated, difficult, work. So if you haven't heard it enough, thank you to those of you involved in making this place run.
I'd pitch in what effort I can to keep it around, but acknowledge that I can't offer much.
Arnold Schrijver
in reply to Philip Mallegol-Hansen • • •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:
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.
Johannes Ernst
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •I 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 that @silverpill was talking about above. I don't want to name names -- they can stand up for themselves if they want to -- but I got a bunch of views on why SocialHub has had little net-benefit for them and what they are working on.
I believe it's also true to say that while there are developers new to ActivityPub all the time, who want to build and are building stuff, they generally don't end up as regulars here.
For me, the question of "who administers the server" and "who pays the bills" are minor questions that can be solved without much difficulty. I'd be happy to contribute, too.
However, the real question is: how do we (for some value of "we") meet the needs of our "customers" (for some value of "customers"), so they value it and engage and come back and contribute. Because if the customers leave, clearly the value isn't there -- and to be frank and consistent with what I heard, I don't have the impression that this goal is at the top of mind of too many people here. Some other goals appear to be, and is fine, but we should not be surprised at the above consequences.
From my perspective, I want as many developers as possible build as much open social web software as possible, consistent with the values, and to do that, we need to treat potential developers as customers and understand what they want and need, and address that. Ideally, this would include -- in an nicely designed integrated whole:
Beyond that, for "advanced" developers, we also need debate of extensions and mechanisms (FEPs and the process around them) to further the state of the art.
I believe this is the time to design such a "developer journey" to get them to great interoperating software as directly as possible, and I'd be quite willing to help with that. It doesn't make much sense to me to look at the Socialhub forum in isolation and I would not know how to "fix" it in isolation.
Danyl Strype
in reply to Johannes Ernst • • •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:
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:
A community values watchdog is a useful contribution, for sure, as are many of the ideas offered in your post. Thanks for both
Arnold Schrijver
in reply to Danyl Strype • • •Thanks, @j12t and @indieterminacy for your help and feedback!
strypey:
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
fedidocscrowdsourcing 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:
Related info:
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Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)hellekin
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •aschrijver:
We are not planning anything. We've been announcing that we'd like this community to self-manage for years. We're now 'giving an ultimatum' as a last resort because supporting work does not seem to be taken into account as long as things run.
I've read elsewhere that I am "dropping". This is not the case. But if you've been here a long time you must have seen that my participation here has faded away, so I want other people to take over before you're all left with a down server and nobody to turn it on again.
trwnh:
It doesn't. But notifications and registration confirmations go through the activitypub.eu domain since we could not get access to the activitypub.rocks domain to manage email there. So if there's now control on activitypub.rocks domain, we could as well move the email there for consistency.
aschrijver:
We're not shutting down. We want other people to take over. If other people do not take over, then it means nobody wants to take responsibility for it, then it should die.
aschrijver:
No: there is something very political in the way the SocialHub was organized, that fosters collective work and limits to what is acceptable for a community. If fascists want to take over, or people who do not care about privilege and solidarity, then you'll be left with a backup and we'll go away for good. That's the deal IMO. We don't work for years to let this community fall into preying hands.
trwnh:
aschrijver:
If fedi devs are scattered to the winds, then they did not realize that the SocialHub has been part of the Fediverse for some time, and they should be reminded.
aschrijver:
I'll be convinced when:
The keys are yours.
aschrijver:
Most of it is part of the Fediverse. The #software category is lacking fediversity because software owners didn't federate!
lullis:
It's not a hosting issue, and it's not an individual issue. Handling the hosting from a non-profit organization to an individual would not make sense. But thank you for volunteering.
strypey:
I hope this answer is clarifying my position. In other words: either there is a community here, and the community is taking the engagement to take care for itself, and we're good; or there's no community, and this forum is just a drag on my back, and you can do without, so I can shut it down.
The way the community is taking over, is up to you, but my preference would be as stated so far.
jdp23:
We need to federate more, and include the SH groups in the interesting fedi discussions, so that they can be archived here, and not lost in the Fediverse. SH is an archipel, a navigation tool: not a centralizing place. It's easy to add
@fep@socialhub.activitypub.rocksto a federated discussion and have a topic created here that includes the ongoing discussion (and there are more AP actors!)aschrijver:
aschrijver:
Oh yes, that would be great.
aschrijver:
I'm very surprised to read this. I really do not understand why the audience would be too broad. I mean, really. Why?
aschrijver:
Indeed. With more people invested in it, they would use it, either from here, or from the Fediverse.
strypey1:
Isn't Loomio federated? Then why is it not common?
silverpill:
Can you elaborate on this @silverpill?
strypey:
I really do not appreciate your simplification of the situation here @stripey. I find it unfair and quite disrespectful actually. I have been calling for help for years and had to change teams several times over because people actually did not help at all. So putting this on either me or my organization is simply not acceptable.
melvincarvalho:
It's super small.
<pre><code class="lang-auto">root@socialhub:/var/discourse# df -hFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted onudev 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /devtmpfs 382M 656K 382M 1% /run/dev/sda1 38G 23G 14G 64% /tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shmtmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock/dev/sdb 59G 4.1G 52G 8% /mnt/HC_Volume_26171934tmpfs 382M 0 382M 0% /run/user/1000overlay 59G 4.1G 52G 8% /mnt/HC_Volume_26171934/docker/overlay2/f80df69aa53ab6ed8a502f00bcc4a4d7fedf3434041b596480fbf1b54e549cf8/merged</code></pre> j12t:
Well, I tried solving these questions collectively since 2019, so I'm very open to concrete steps now
I skipped the last two posts because tl;dr, and had to catch up on the whole discussion at once. Sorry for that. BTW, thank you @aschrijver for standing up again and making this discussion happen.
SocialHub Community Values Policy
SocialHubhellekin
2024-11-02 10:11:02
silverpill
in reply to hellekin • • •how:
That's because I don't know anyone who is both interested in running this forum, and is qualified to do that.
First of all, I think it shouldn't be handed to someone who is not an active forum participant.
But in this thread? Many share a strange patronizing attitude towards developers. Like we're sheep incapable of self-organizing that must be herded to some website in order to be educated by wise community managers and spoonfed with linked data slop. Thanks but no. This attitude is absolutely the last thing we need on a developer forum.
In theory, the place can be run by developers themselves, but nowadays most of us use our own software, and we can talk to each other directly without SocialHub in the middle, or via other forums and groups.
At this point I am fairly convinced that shutting down the forum and publishing a static archive is the best option.
hellekin
in reply to silverpill • • •silverpill:
The SocialHub is not exactly in the middle: it's part of the Fediverse. So it would only be normal that discussions relevant to everyone would be archived here, since they would be transmitted here as well.
Jon P
in reply to hellekin • • •But most discussions about fediverse development elsewhere on the fediverse aren't transmitted to SocialHub as well. There's a lot that factors into this, including:
One way to look at this is that the initial attempts at SocialHub federation were a prototype that wasn't as broadly useful as hoped but has succeeded in revealing issues that need to be addressed. In another thread you mentioned that right now SocialHub "feels like a failure" because it hasn't able to keep a stable and growing and rotating team of responsible people in general, although the FEP team is going well ... looking at it as a prototype, though, it's not a failure: it's identified a use case that's a good match for the current state of the prototype, as well as a big challenge to address to extend to other use cases.
In terms of the overall reboot or shutdown question ... those aren't the only two options. Another possibility is to take a hiatus, putting the community into read-only mode for a while; or, narrowing of focus, at least in the short term, for example keeping the FEP discussions going and shifting other stuff into read-only for the time being (if that's possible in Discourse). Both of these keep open the option of moving SocialHub forward (potentially in a different form). They also create an opportunity to see what alternatives evolve on their own -- and the space to come up with proposals and plans for moving forward that identify and address the underlying challenges.
Then again, sometime the takeaway from a prototype -- even one with valuable learning -- is that this isn't a direction you see as practical to pursue given the overall constraints. If SocialHub shuts down, people who see value in some or all of what happens here will start up other mechanisms; to the extent that there's currently a community here, it can migrate. As long as there's an archive, or the site's available in read-only mode, history isn't lost; and everything here is CC-SA-4.0 so new sites can take whatever subset is useful. All of that's true whether or not you officially pass the torch to somebody else.
a
in reply to silverpill • • •silverpill:
Where are you seeing this? From what I'm seeing, the discussion is not about any of those things, so this is quite the bizarre statement. I also don't think this is strictly a "developer forum", as there are several different sections dedicated to software, spec work, interest gathering, and so on -- and participation is welcomed by anyone.
silverpill:
If there are "other forums and groups", then no one is being made broadly aware of them. If the answer is "we can talk to each other directly", then this is essentially abdicating any sort of collective communication -- if you don't follow a bunch of the people involved, you won't see the conversations.
As it stands, SocialHub is the most prominent place to go if you want to see discussions about ActivityPub and related topics. I'm not aware of any more prominent venues. This isn't to say that anyone is being "herded to some website" or that SocialHub must be "in the middle", but it is generally valuable if the discussions end up being collected somewhere in aggregate, and it is generally convenient if the discussions can be carried out long-form with all the creature comforts of forums and none of the limitations of microblogging. What's the alternative being posed here? Where do people go for this stuff?
julian
in reply to a • • •Re: SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?
> I also don't think this is strictly a "developer forum", as there are several different sections dedicated to software, spec work, interest gathering, and so on -- and participation is welcomed by anyone.
Fair, there is space for all of these discussions, but considering that of a given set of ActivityPub developers, only a small subset of those developers contribute to SocialHub.
That may be a signal that either the existing space is not suitable for AP implementors, or a new space may be a welcome addition.
a
in reply to julian • • •julian:
I would pose this question in two parts:
The existence of any forum implies an opportunity for collaborative participation rather than a mandate. It would be helpful to have explicitly identified examples of discussions that could be brought to a forum, and explicitly identified sentiments of why those discussions weren't brought to this forum.
So far, the most clearly articulated objection seems to be advocating for bypassing forums in favor of ad-hoc communications or backchannels. Perhaps this is adequate for fixing one-off bugs as compared to creating a topic in that software's category. Perhaps that bug was filed on a project's issue tracker instead. But for having sustained conversations over the course of days or weeks or months or even years about meatier topics, I can't imagine much effectiveness in a scattered diffuse set of posts only living on people's profiles if you scroll back far enough.
Personally, I bring such conversations here because I don't want them to be lost to the timeline and I don't want character limits or a lack of blockquotes to impair my communications. I also know that there is an audience here for ActivityPub-related special interest topics, whereas there is no such expectation for my hangout spot where i go to check in on what some friends are doing. the context matters a lot.
Jon P
in reply to a • • •Great questions @trwnh, relevant not to just SocialHub but also to alternatives.
trwnh:
Here's some examples of some of the conversations happening now or over the last couple of weeks that fit in SocialHub's scope (as I understand it) and seem relevant to developers (they all relate to limitations and/or potential improvements in the software).
trwnh:
In a nutshell:
Of course these aren't only challenges for SocialHub. A few of these discussions are on piefed.social/c/fediverse and lemmy.world/c/fediverse but most aren't. That said, I do think the specific dynamics of who's currently active on SocialHub and what they're interested accentuate the problems. A reboot could offer opportunities to make progress on those, but if it's being driven by the people who are currently active here I'm not sure how likely that is.
Download the latest indie games
itch.ioThe Nexus of Privacy
2025-08-10 19:46:01
Arnold Schrijver
in reply to Arnold Schrijver • • •It goes both ways. There are a lot of interesting discussions started here and not elsewhere. It all contributes to the grassroots ecosystem at large and helps evolve the fediverse. The AP dev community has a broad range of opinions, ideologies, values, things they find important. And all across the ecosystem there are various independent initiatives where people can find their peers, and join groups they feel most comfortable to be with. It is a good thing, that. It helps stimulate the overall diversity of the ecosystem, and resilience of the fedi movement as a whole. If there's sustained custodianship of SocialHub, and a dedicated community team, then SocialHub is viable.
Are there more volunteers for the community team?