SocialHub and Spiral Island: A Fediverse Foundation Analogy
socialhub.activitypub.rocks
Spiral Island was created by Richart Sowa from stuff other people considered trash. An inspiring symbol of sustainability and hope, it was nonetheless destroyed by a hurricane. Richart’s work in a way mirrors how we build our beloved Fediverse… but we must prepare to be hurricane-proof… See also Wikipedia: Spiral Island The people that are passionately advocating and building the Fediverse… They are a friendly bunch from all around the world having very diverse backgrounds and leading inte...

You 💖 love Fediverse, right? It’s vibrant unique culture and the lovely people you meet. You want to protect it, increase its beauty, see more applications interoperate seamlessly. You know that you are part of a ‘reimagining of social networking’ that is much needed, as traditional social media are destroying the fabric of society.

What you may not know is that:

  • The Fediverse is still incredibly weak. That it has a tiny community of technologists that evolve it, and that this process is stalling as people are absorbed in their own projects. (“The Tragedy of the Grassroots Movement?”)

  • That what Fediverse currently offers is just the tiny tip of the iceberg. That humongous potential still lies dormant, waiting to be explored. That we can go way beyond microblogging features that dominate the fedi now.

  • That YOU are instrumental in tapping this potential, and that you don’t have to be a techie to help with that.

At SocialHub community we come together to improve the Fediverse, evolve its standards and the ecosystem. And regardless of your skills and expertise we need all the help we can get to move forwards, to progress this thing we love.

Throw off your individualism and become a fedi builder. It’s a win-win for all. We are ‘United in Diversity’ and should build together. Join SocialHub as member and interact. And also join Fediverse Futures on Lemmy to brainstorm on exciting ideas.

We are Spiral Island still, and can become a sprawling archipelago.

  • smallcirclesOP
    2·
    3 years ago

    Discourse is a self-hostable, open source software, and the best forum software available, if you ask me. This instance is self-hosted by volunteers, and indeed this is the place where federated project devs, technologists and anyone interested to evolve the tech foundations of the Fediverse is gathering to share their knowledge, discuss and plan meetings and events. The fedi itself is not suitable for that, and valuable knowledge is continually lost in toot thread history, while the various federated apps are fragmenting as they go their own way individualistically. This is understandable, but undermines fedi future. Active participation on SocialHub means win-win for any federated project.

    PS. If you are interested to see Discourse become part of the Fediverse (they received a NGI Zero grant for that in the past, but have returned the money), then I encourage you to comment or like posts in this thread I created some time ago: https://meta.discourse.org/t/community-has-no-boundary-discourse-as-a-fabric-ideation-brainstorm/174578

      • smallcirclesOP
        2·
        3 years ago

        Fair enough. I nuanced the statement above. I know Flarum, and it is indeed more lightweight, but nowhere near up-to-par with the breadth of features that’ll come with discourse and are great helpers for facilitating community. Again imho. Flarum is refreshing in its newness and moving fast. Didn’t know NodeBB, thx for the pointer.

      • pinknoise
        1·
        3 years ago

        Do you happen to know some even more lightweight forums (preferably php or standalone)? Id like to set one up but I can’t seem to find anything reasonable. NodeBB uses Node.js and Flarum apparently needs composer and URL-rewriting :\ Also their frontends are still really unfriendly (slow animations, low contrast, “best with javascript”, etc.)

          • pinknoise
            2·
            3 years ago

            FluxBB seems nice and super fast compared to the modern ones in spite of not being a single page app. To bad it’s quasi abandoned. Isso uses python which I went through quite some lengths to not have on my server for security reasons. But the concept of just having a (not even tree like) comment system on a simple cms might be enough for my usecase. Maybe I’ll build it myself, it would have to be hacked to use my user database anyways.

    • Liwott
      1·
      3 years ago

      Thanks !

      If you are interested to see Discourse become part of the Fediverse

      Indeed that’s what’s behind my comment, the paradox that a project about linking all kinds of exchange platform has its exchange platform that cannot be linked to others.

      The fedi itself is not suitable for that, and valuable knowledge is continually lost in toot thread history, while the various federated apps are fragmenting as they go their own way individualistically.

      I mean a thread being answerable from another fediverse account doesn’t exclude it to be present in full on the forum page. Is there a fundamental difference between this and Peertube comments?

      • smallcirclesOP
        2·
        3 years ago

        Slowly the fedi is getting a broader range of different application types and deeper integrations between them. I’m a strong proponent of that interoperability and moving towards a more task-oriented fedi. I co-maintain the ActivityPub Application Watchlist and it is encouraging to see the list steadily grow.

        On the other hand many of these projects evolve very slowly with an individual dev behind it, some abandoned again. This is natural to a certain extent, but fed has a high barrier to access, as there’s a lot of hidden complexity that’s not apparent from the specs. I often see people asking questions on fedi and getting no response (probably because they are just not connected to the right people, or these people overlooked the question on their timeline). The dev base of fedi is tiny.

        I see the community forum as the ‘ActivityPub technologist instance’ in relation to fediverse. It sure could be integrated with the microblogging infra that’s most popular now, and also a truly federated forum software to ‘dogfood’ would be great. We aren’t there yet, though Redaktor CMS has been suggested for this in the past.