Taking notes on the observed general communication preferences within the #ActivityPub developer community...
1. Microblog, microblog, microblog
2. Seek one-to-ones, mentions-only
3. Don't care about spread of the msg
4. Don't boost, don't use hashtags
5. Tooted today, gone tomorrow
Convenient? Pragmatic? Desirable? idk.
Anyone asked where the #ActivityPub dev community’s communication went to, can let a broad beaming smile come to their face, svivel their eyes skywards, then make a broad gesture with their arms, and exclaim solemnly “To the fediverse, my friend. To the fediverse”. And the dotted clouds high above in the steel blue sky will smile back at them, wave and gesture, and sing in a non-melodious cacophony “Here we are, come join us”.
And so we all do. It is a sight to behold. 🥹
Or with a tad less sarcasm, you might also say: Even though it is a medium that is not up to the task of holding a grassroots open-standards based ecosystem together, #Microblogging #SocialMedia has become the preferred channel for communication in the app-centric #fediverse. Majority of dev happens in the federated cloud and is driven by app owners.
Though luckily there is also a minority of ecosystem atmosphere custodians who help study the weather patterns of the future #SocialWeb.
@[email protected] AP dev discussion is centred around microblogs not because it is the ideal form of communication... because it absolutely is not.
It's that way because the dominant implementor utilises the microblog format.
A more appropriate conclusion is that AP dev discussion is centred around the fediverse because dogfooding makes the most sense.
(1/?)
Why is it that the majority of AP dev discussion seems to be centred around microposting apps? (I say "seems" because I suspect it only looks that way from within one, but I digress ...). Despite the fact that microposting being a poor way to hold dev discussion appears to be one of those rare cases of universal consensus among devs. I've never seen anyone *for* it being a good approach.
So why does it happen?
(2/?)
To understand what's happening, we have to look it from a UX perspective. Why do I tend to start discussions about fediverse development in my Mastodon account? Why does anyone? Because it's quick and easy, it tends to get responses, and it's far from clear where else it would make sense to do it.
(3/?)
For a few years the fediverse dev community was small, and embattled, in the face of the DataFarming giants and the disinterest of the general netizenry. We were a tiny rebel alliance of geeks, with a shared passion for something nobody else seemed to understand or care about. There was enough baseline solidarity that we could all get along enough to share one forum. Administrated and moderated by whoever we could get to do the job and any given time.
(4/?)
Then came Eternal November, and with it the growing pains.
Suddenly much larger organisations were making noises about joining the fediverse. Most of it turned out to be hype-farming, like Mozilla, Medium, and Flickr, who issued loud press releases and dipped their toes in, but that was it. But some biggish fish followed through; WordPress, FlipBoard, Ghost. Even one of those DataFarmers set up a new platform (Meta's Threats) that kind of, sort of, spoke ActivityPub.
(5/?)
Suddenly there were *lots* of people doing fediverse dev. Some of them home tinkerers or small Free Code projects, as before. Some of them employees of large companies, even proprietary platform corporations. just being an AP dev didn't automatically make you one an ally of the rebel alliance anymore.
The resulting suspicion has been deeply corrosive, both to the general community spirit among fediverse devs, and to the relationships between particular community members.
(6/?)
It no longer seemed possible to gather everyone interested in fediverse dev around one table. Tempers frayed. People fell into FUD-spreading and mutual recrimination. The 'rough consensus and running code' approach to governing community watering holes like SocialHub didn't seem to work anymore.
In the absence of a broad agreement on one gathering place for fediverse dev discussion, what option do we have but to post where we we know most of the devs are? Which is the fediverse itself.
(7/?)
But this is not a "tragedy of the commons" (a myth, by the way). This doesn't have to be where the story ends.
Thanks to the efforts of devs working on Discourse, nodeBB, Lemmy, and a number of other software projects, forum-style apps have been brought into the fediverse. With a bit of work on UX, we could be have dev discussions on the fediverse, *and* visualising them forum-style;
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/against-fragmentation-unifying-dev-discussions-with-forum-federation/
(8/8)
The only thing holding us back now is a classic catch-22; where do have the discussions about improving the protocol plumbing between forums, and creating a unified UX across them all?
The only solution I can think of is the pragmatic one we're already using, as laid out in post 2 in this thread. Talk about it in the fediverse, where possible in a way that federates the discussions with the threadiverse of forum-style apps, and eat our own dogfood as we go.
What other option is there?
The only thing holding us back now is a classic catch-22; where do have the discussions about improving the protocol plumbing between forums, and creating a unified UX across them all?
The answer to that is a cross-platform working group focused on just that.
Since FediForum 2024 the @forum-wg has been tasked (under the SocialCG charter) with improving UX between threadiverse applications. Some early wins we can take partial credit for include the widespread adoption of context (thus enabling FEP f228 backfill) and the promotion of long form text support across implementations.
The primary mode of communication is through discussions on the fediverse, as it should be 🙂
@julian
> the @forum-wg has been tasked (under the SocialCG charter) with improving UX between threadiverse applications
Fantastic! I'd love to participate in this if I'm welcome to. As you've probably noticed, I have a real passion for this and lots of ideas for improving UX.
... and we'd love to have you @[email protected]!
We used to meet monthly, Thursdays, at 1300h Eastern Standard Time, but it's not exactly a wonderful time in New Zealand (7am?). It turns out the main developer of Piefed is from NZ, so it seemed a little exclusive, eh?
I'll be hosting discussions exclusively on @forum-wg from now on.
@julian
> It turns out the main developer of Piefed is from NZ
Ae, @rimu and I met years ago, and see each other from time to time at conferences and such. Although not for a while. Aotearoa is a*very* small country ; )
> I'll be hosting discussions exclusively on @forum-wg from now on
Cool, I'll hook into that with my new PieFed account. I'm new to PieFeb so that will take a bit of faffing about. Feel free to prod me if you don't see start participating within about a week.
@julian @rimu
FYI When I click that @forum-wg Actor in @Mastodon web, it opens the ActivityPub.space forum in a new tab, rather than navigating the app to the profile for that Actor. That's not the behaviour I expected, and I'm not sure it's the ideal UX.
Is that a nodeBB problem or a Mastodon problem or both?
@[email protected] I think that was a NodeBB problem, the category wasn't set up to federate (oops!)
Can you try again?
@julian
> Can you try again?
Still doing the same thing in Mastodon web (on mobile this time). Same in @moshidon which is usually pretty good at recognising and opening AP Activities and Actors.
Patchli isn't recognising it as an Actor.
In FediLab it opens a test profile;
Are you sure the nodeBB WebFinger implementation works properly? Some more recent AP implementations haven't worked the kinks out of this yet. Which is fair enough, as it's a de facto standard, not in the AP spec.
@[email protected] I'm able to resolve it on fosstodon: https://fosstodon.org/@[email protected]
If the link itself in the post still refuses to work then perhaps that's a different issue...
@julian
> I'm able to resolve it on fosstodon
When I search for the @ [email protected] Actor, Mastodon web can find it, and follow it. I presume the other apps can too.
> If the link itself in the post still refuses to work
It does, at least when the expected behaviour of clicking on it is navigating to the Actor profile. Also I noticed as I was typing the @name above (before I put a space after the @ to make it render as text), the UI gave me that same test profile as a suggestion.
🫧 socialcoding..
julian
Strypey
