The activity of the SocialHub community, like all other ‘fediverse-substrate’ bodies, has waned. From an active community to just a forum. Now a decision has to be made for the future of SocialHub. The options are stopping, be just a forum, or revitalize a vibrant community. The last option needs people willing and committed to do so. To step up for the sake of Fediverse Futures.
Any thoughts on why it has waned? Maybe it would be better to analyze that first?
There’s a whole host of reasons. But right now there’s the observation that there aren’t many active members to analyze them with. This call is a first to state that no activity means no community… a rallying cry to get involved. Note that the discussion involves 2 separate parts: the SocialHub itself, and its relation to the broader fediverse (how do we want to evolve fedi?).
Without having been involved too much in the community I would guess it is a factor of two things: a general move towards chat based discussion and that fediverse tools have matured enough that people can dogfood them instead of using an external non-federated forum.
No, there are other factors. But that involves a whole lotta time to elaborate, which I don’t have atm. Fedi might be dogfooded, but it would not help with the issues of SocialHub, and fedi isn’t quite there to replace Discourse forums.
Here’s a data point:
I brutally kill any page I encounter that has Discourse enabled, because the Discourse Javascript is horrific. Discourse causes my mobile browser to freeze, and pegs the CPU on my desktop. Any site using Discourse is utterly unusable with javascript disabled, which is accessibility-hostile.
I’m not saying SocialHub is dying because of Discourse, but the fact that the Discourse UI is so horrible has certainly driven me off sites thay use it (the Home Assistant community forum, sadly, does too).
Yea. Not specific to the JS, but more people have indicated that Discourse forms a barrier to them for participation. Evaluating different tools is an open topic, and also we are looking into bridging so discourse content federates.
To my knowledge I’m not a member, but I am interested in a thing like this. I mostly deal in client-server stuff though so my opinion on the actual federation side is largely irrelevant. I suppose this is the only time I’ll concede value in bridging. But on the other hand… Just a collection of communities, one per ecosystem, is probably fine. People will gravitate towards the ones that suit the spaces they exist in. This would be easier with cooperation, eg. every project and instance pointing towards its respective collab space. I say all this but I haven’t paid attention to the matrix room. I set my notifications according to the size of the room, so I pretty much ignore larger rooms. I’d be willing to be involved in the forum if I had a decent client for it; something light that I could leave open on a spare monitor. To my knowledge there are no desktop tapatalk clients, letalone good ones. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while, but well, always more projects… Because, well, without a client: >Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled
Thank you @[email protected] … linking to our fedi CC of this post
