The lack of deeper integrations between different app types and the federated identity issue (every instance their own signup and user acccount) form significant barrier to widespread collaboration is my general observation.
For instance in any well-received toot with a link to a SocialHub forum topic on average no one takes the effort to respond on SocialHub. Mostly the discussion remains microblogging, and then it sinks into history when activity peters out. The insights and collective knowledge isn’t gathered and lost.
As Mike MacGirvin remarked on SocialHub it is okay if there’s some friction to the ‘dogfooding’, i.e. the tools used being non-optimal provide a clear incentive to optimize them. Discourse forums provide a very rich feature set and have different, more-appropriate UX at places, so there’ll definitely be such friction. Problem with forking a Lemmy project is that right now we find it hard to even find people willing to work on the evolution of fedi’s specifications and now that is tied to a project where contributors should be willing to spend the time to build it.
A way forward may be to ‘just do it’ and use existing apps & tools as-is, and see where we end up. But its a bit risky, because when it doesn’t work we’ll have a lot of knowledge and discussion stuck in different places and should do manual migrations to gather them.
The biggest problem fedi has is finding people willing to spend the time to do non-app related community work, which is very time-consuming, and also oftentimes an unthankful task.
It’s true that having those (I mean Socialhub’s) discussions in or out of the Fediverse is not so much of a dogfooding issue : most developer are known to use the fediverse, the fact that it doesn’t have yet full forum features is not too much of a liability.
On the other hand, as you point out yourself in the original thread, the problem with having that out of the fediverse is that it fails to gather opinions that tend to stay lost somewhere in a random fedi thread.
So, even without going as far as integrating discourse inside the fediverse, it would be useful to at least be able to embed a fedi post into a forum message.
But of course, it will be better if, in some (I hope not too far) future, it becomes possible to just convert seemlessly fedi exchanges into forupm threads and vice-versa.
I mean beyond the explicit link sharing that you do so extensively everyday, the network should stop relying on you to do its own job 😁
One thing I promote is a common concept for “Community” to become native to the fediverse. In some early info gathering I found SIOC ontology or Semantically Interlinked Online Communities, which - while not a suitable Community concept - might provide an interesting basis for a fedi dogfooding platform, as it combines the tools that would be needed in its information model and is also Linked Data that can be mapped on top of the ActivityStreams vocabulary that fedi uses.
I will make some more cross-references. Haha, yes sometimes I feel like a link-sharing bot 🤣