Against fragmentation: unifying dev discussions with forum federation
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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 times, a Discord backchannel on the other hand, it's all over the place. We could get more organised here I think, but it's a start."
@johnonolan@mastodon.xyz, 2025
Rediscovering the Magic of the Blogosphere, with John O’Nolan and Matthias Pfefferle
Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper? Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this...
Flipboard PeerTube (flipboard.video)
The fragmentation of dev discussions is something I hear about a lot lately. Forum federation could be a solution!
Imagine every federated software project has its own forum space. Smaller projects might be content with a dedicated category on a community-hosted dev forum. More well-resourced projects might host their own instance of Discourse or NodeBB or whatever suits them.
Cross-project forums like SocialHub can then have a dedicated category for each software they know about, and use forum federation to sync that with the home forum space preferred by that project.
Eg the Discourse category on SocialHub is synced with the ActivityPub tag on meta.discourse.org. Any post in that SH category appears on Meta with that tag, and vice-versa.
With enough careful plumbing, that solves the fragmentation of public dev discussion across forums. But a lot of potentially insightful chats start in micro-posting threads. Adding a limited ability to start a new forum topic, by mentioning the relevent category or tag actor (eg @discourse@socialhub.ActivityPub.rocks), could bring those in too.
However, most of the examples John gives are private chats (fedi DMs, email, Discord, etc). I encourage devs to gird their loins and apply the 'release early, release often' principle to dev chat. Make public the default for dev chatter, unless it really is sensitive.
That said, with some careful work, support could be added for federating private conversations between forums too. Ideally in a way where AP actors could be included, that automatically open the chat to trusted groups.
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SocialHub has been the most prominent place for cross-project collaboration for years. This is where the FEP process was born, after all. I suspect that the need to create an account there was a major barrier to entry, but this is no longer the case as the forum supports ActivityPub.
Cross-project forums like SocialHub can then have a dedicated category for each software they know about
There is such category already: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/c/software/14
It appears to be not federated, though.
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Aside:
For the size of the group [working on federating long form articles], which as you say is not large
I wonder what they meant by this. There are lots of projects that support long form content.
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silverpill1:SocialHub has been the most prominent place for cross-project collaboration for years
Indeed, but thanks to forum federation, we're reaching a point where we can maintain a unified source of truth without a central dev forum (which is a SPoF). In theory, any general-purpose fediverse dev portal could host all the same discussions. But I'm not sure how widely understood this is.
silverpill1:the need to create an account there was a major barrier to entry, but this is no longer the case as the forum supports ActivityPub.
I'd say that's more an aspiration than a reality. SH does have 2-way syncing with Discourse and NodeBB dev spaces, which is a great PoC. But do any of the other projects with their own dev forum (eg FunkWhale) have federation relationships with SH?
As we explored in the recent thread about the.socialmusic.network, there's lots of ways to plumb different forums together. Which means there's a bunch of experimentation to be done, and probably UX improvements to be made in all participating software, to make the various options easier to understand and use.
silverpill1:I wonder what they meant by this. There are lots of projects that support long form content.
You'd have to ask John to be sure. But I suspect that he's describing projects that can send and display formatted Articles; long form content with things like titles, summaries, headings, footnotes, and positioned images. Not just plaintext Notes without a character limit. Which shortens the list quite a bit.
John's comment might also reflect the fact that there are projects that do belong on that list, but which don't yet have devs in communication with the "longformers" group including John (Ghost), @pfefferle (WordPress), Matt (WriteFreely) and @devnull (NodeBB). All the more reason to get more of these discussions public, and defragmentated with federation.
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silverpill@mitra.social said in Against fragmentation: unifying dev discussions with forum federation:
> I wonder what they meant by this. There are lots of projects that support long form content.I think what johnonolan@mastodon.xyz was trying to say was that given the relative size of the ActivityPub developer community, it's a little (or a lot) surprising that our developer discussions are as fractured as they are.
That's probably why I push so hard for discussions about fedi to take place on fedi.
I do get the appeal of smaller back channels, but they shouldn't be where the main business is conducted if possible...
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@julian @silverpill sorry I need a sec, busy girding my loins over here.
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@julian @silverpill @johnonolan
I think a significant part of it boils down to a failure of imagination. People who used to be active Twitter users are familiar with how you build communities on microblogging platforms and how to create clusters of like-minded people. that never seemed to really have happened here on fedi.
I'm also surprised that building a dev community on Lemmy never really seemed to have gained traction either. At this point theres better options, but still
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I think the nature of our grassroots ecosystem, where we are still pioneering at protocol level, trying to fill gaps and overcome protocol decay (cope with the 'reality on-the-wire') has led to a bit of an upside down approach to software development. Where first technical facilities are built, then the impact of federation assessed in production, and then trying to make it address people's needs in subsequent improvements.
What does it mean if someone says they "joined the fediverse" with their app? By itself this says no more than that some form of technical implementation of ActivityPub is present in the project. It is a pure technical observation.
Looking at needs. What is the need for SocialHub? Maybe something like..
Support the communication and cocreation of all participants in the ActivityPub ecosystem to help foster healthy growth and evolution of the Fediverse.
There is no Forum in there, there's no dependency on apps. Apps are only the implementation of the need. Including the federation support in those apps. Currently the fediverse is highly app-focused:
"I have an existing app, and I add ActivityPub support so my app can federate with other apps."
And we currently have one reasonably mature way to do that, which arose from federated microblogging, but became a sort of baseline interoperability level (unfortunately).
@strypey raises an interesting question. What is a Forum if it becomes fully federated? Is it still useful to think in apps, or better to think in services? A Forum server delivering Conversation Services perhaps.
For SocialHub given the need above it made perfect sense to make it part of the Fediverse, give inclusive access to all fedizens. But the mere technical connection into a microblogging communications network did not take the need fully in consideration. Federate, deal with consequences afterwards. That's how we do it now.
Downsides to the technical integration, and where improvements are needed, are context collapse, and a shift of dev community communications to microblogging style, which is more ephemeral and fragmented by nature. And there is cultural impact. Is there more or less "sense of community" now, for instance? A more elaborate assessment on the extent to which federating SocialHub helped or hurt might be interesting.
Even more interesting I think, and where @strypey indicated a use case, is to venture beyond all the technical considerations that dominate the discussions. What do we hold conceptually in our hands? Envision the paradigm shift the fediverse brings if we wielded the technology to its full potential.
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But do any of the other projects with their own dev forum (eg FunkWhale) have federation relationships with SH?
I haven't seen any posts from them.
It is not necessary to have a forum, though. I post from my own server (which is not a forum) whenever possible, that works pretty well for conversations. The only missing feature is an ability to create new topics. Some forums support topic creation using @group mention (Lemmy, NodeBB? cc @julian), but not Discourse.
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That's probably why I push so hard for discussions about fedi to take place on fedi.
Yeah, I am 100% on board with this.
By the way, Ghost already uses Discourse (https://forum.ghost.org/). Enabling federation there (for specific categories) could help reduce fragmentation @johnonolan
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silverpill@mitra.social it should work, try mentioning the ActivityPub or testing ground category. Fingers crossed.
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@julian It worked
Creating a new thread on a NodeBB forum
Creating a new thread on a NodeBB forumThis is a test. You can create threads by mentioning a group.@testing-ground
NodeBB Community (community.nodebb.org)
