Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
I am @humanetech at Mastodon, #FOSS and #Fediverse advocate, mod at SocialHub, and facilitator of Humane Tech Community.
I help fight tech harms and “Promote Solutions that Improve Wellbeing, Freedom and Society”.
Adding reference to HN submission of this article. Discussion thus far has 233 comments.
I maintain some lists too, PR’s welcome:
Have a look at #flohmarkt, federated decentral classified ad software using #activitypub: https://codeberg.org/grindhold/flohmarkt By @grindhold@chaos.social
Oh, that kind is good. Constructive feedback is very valuable. But the fediverse is full of people dropping derogatory sarcastic comments or even reacting in rage, that aren’t helpful in the slightest. I should’ve made that clearer in my first comment.
There’s no responsibility at all. There’s also full freedom to complain however you wish. If you do that on someone’s free work with which they try to help others, it just doesn’t look very good on you. That’s all.
Dating-like apps come up in fedi discussions quite often. They have interesting aspects, for instance where obviously privacy is a big concern and where current generation of federated apps aren’t adequate for dating. And how do communities / instances establish their trustworthiness? There are kinds of ‘dating’ were the requirements can be less severe. Like “Meet new Friends” kind of services where e.g. you seek folks for collaborative gameplay in some MMORPG or something.
One thing I don’t get. Among the gazilion “Oh, it is sooo easy to do this better” complainers are countless developers and designers. This whole Mastodon thing is Free Software, where countless people spent some of their free time and energy to give you what there is today. Complainer devs and UX folks, are your PR’s getting rejected?
That second comment by goplayoutside says it well: “Maybe the modest technical hurdles are a feature, not a bug.”
I think it is a feature, and the same is true for Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole, imho.
SocialHub has an association with the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG). The SWICG is a continuation of the Working Group that standardized ActivityPub as a W3C Recommendation. So technically this organization exists.
In practice it is really hard to organize in an all-volunteer grassroots movement, and many people for various reasons don’t like to participate in such organization. “Herding cats” is a term that is used. Being grassroots has pros (resilience) and cons (stalled evolution). Personally I have come to think that decentralized development of the Fediverse probably works best when it is split into different domains (e.g. Microblogging, Podcasting, etc.) as long as there’s also a community working on the core common denominator in the protocol. That is currently the SocialHub and Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process.
There are a couple share project listed on https://delightful.club/delightful-activitypub-development/
The question is whether the project should be forked into multiple separate projects at all. An alternative would be to have a generic “Directory Platform” and have modules to make it a Book Review platform, a Movie Database, or whatever-you-wanna-collect platform with another module. The modules would mostly be templates and data structures + user interface widgets to present them nicely.
If you don’t mind, I delete this post again. This is not a community for such tests, there may be a Lemmy-related one that’s better suited.