Feedback strategy draft

[aschrijver]

Hereby my feedback on this commit of fedi-devnet-strategy.txt.

General points:

• We may add a Glossary for terminology used.

• Avoid the term 'app' where possible.

  • Term is often unclear, overloaded use.
  • Can replace with 'project' and 'solution'.

• Avoid the term 'user'. Use 'people' instead.

  • People may use particular solutions.
  • While being exposed to externalities from ones they don't use.
  • Avoiding 'user' (while sometimes hard) is good humane-tech practice.
  • Positioning: "Fediverse is for People, corporate Social Media are for users".

• Avoid 'user experience'. Use 'social experience' instead.

  • Social experience rises above individual products / projects / apps.
  • It encompasses the totality of human experiences in fedi interactions with others.
  • Social Experience Design (SX) is a field we can revive, distinguishes from UX.

Section 1 Overall Vision

• "any online application or service where people interact involves social networking".

  • Sets the scope of the vision. This is very important.
  • We need to get beyond the point where most everyone only thinks of traditional Social Media.

• "these solutions can be made to richly and reliably interoperate with each other;"

  • Set expectations. There are ∞ different areas where people build technology support.
  • Solutions only interoperate where it makes sense. And interop needs to be specifically accounted for.
  • What we should provide is a clear and comprehensive way to achieve that.

• "federated Fediverse network" --> "Fediverse social network".

  • Do not 'hardcode' that it is federated, the future may be hybrid decentralization (federated + p2p).

• ~~thereby forming the federated Fediverse network, which aims to deliver at least as good and valuable user experiences as today's centralized services, even as users choose different apps to interact with each other;~~

  • Fediverse is "the better way". We should formulate that in our vision and not be just "at least as good".

thereby forming the Fediverse, a heterogeneous social network that is open to everyone to expand and extend, and where people freely choose how they interact with others given the solutions available to them. The Fediverse thus offers rich social experiences that bridge the online and offline worlds and are an enrichment to life;

• created and maintained by an ever-growing community of developers world-wide;
  • Beware the use of 'community'. This too is an overloaded and vague term.
  • We must take diverse grassroots environments and its social dynamics + cultures into account.
  • We must recognize and emphasize that many decentralized community hubs will evolve the Fediverse.
  • We are tasked with giving them the 'instrumentarium' to do so, while staying part of the larger whole.

Section 2 Objectives

• "Fediverse Developer Network". You know my stance on this wrt the Grassroots Fediverse.

  • I have to suppress a big Sigh as I hope there's willingness to embed this with existing efforts.
  • FDN rings like a separate community than e.g. SocialHub + SocialCG. Fragmenting where it isn't needed.
  • I have given this feedback time and time again only to see it ignored. Separate, and I will not join.
  • Why not make "AP-spec-done-well" a project, instead of a separate movement?

• Objective 1, 2, and 3 describe the SocialHub and its full, overly broad scope.

  • Setting up a Project, combine our existing channels, we can hone to restricted scope + focused activity re:"AP-spec-done-well".

I will review up to here, because as @jernst says on the chat:

Here is a rough draft, in three sections, which flow from each other. If we don't agree on an earlier section, not much point trying to agree on a later section.

[jernst]

Thank you for the extensive comments. Some responses:

Re terms:

If we decided that we wanted publish some form of this, I think that would be a good time to wordsmith it (and perhaps have a glossary as you suggest.) For now, I think it's good enough if we understand each other, even if we wouldn't use the same terminology for the same thing. Building consensus around the concepts is hard enough, also building consensus around the terminology used makes it twice as hard ;-)

Re scope:

I'm unclear what the right scope is. Just a little while ago I would not have thought it might include distributed software development as in Gitlab and AP. I define the Fediverse as all the things that interoperate, so the scope is simply all apps that interoperate, regardless what their feature set is, and whether or not they do anything we would call "social networking".

Re "the better way"

I meant to identify a minimum quality. "At least as good as" and hopefully better. But right now, in many ways, we are quite far below what centralized services do, and IMHO we have a ton of work to do to catch up if we ever can. Here is an example from a high-profile, technical user: https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/CwzqXRKLxVE

Re social hub etc

My work stream 3 item is: "Continue to maintain existing online discussions groups ... Integrate them into the authoritative destination website so developers will easily and confidently use the right group at the right time." I think that was your point?

[aschrijver]

Re scope:

I define the Fediverse as all the things that interoperate, so the scope is simply all apps that interoperate, regardless what their feature set is, and whether or not they do anything we would call "social networking".

That definition is still vague. My feedback wasn't well enough in context either. If we have in glossary:

• Social Networking: Any interaction of people using online applications or services.

• Fediverse (technical viewpoint): A decentralized social network based on open standard protocols that allow applications and services to interoperate.

• ActivityPub: A pluggable protocol that allows application and service developers to define how their solution interoperates with the Fediverse social network.

Then the scope is something like:

This initiative involves taking the next step in the Fediverse evolution. We focus on ease and comprehension of the ActivityPub specification and provide hands-on guidance for application and service developers to join the Fediverse and build standards-compliant and interoperable integrations with other peers on the rapidly growing decentralized social network.

Re "the better way"

I agree with what you say, but in a vision I would put a positive outlook and not a negative hill to climb. The new initiative should stand on its own two feet, consider new and creative ways to do exciting stuff with what the innovative technology provides, and not be focused on mimicry of what's already out there or feel that we are in a race (even though that's factually what we're in).

The vision shouldn't be reactionary, and give vibes of "Oh damn, our time is running out, and we have still so much to do". It should be proactive, positive and energizing. People reading it thinking "I wanna be part of this".

Re social hub etc

I think that was your point?

My point is don't do anything that creates further splits, fragmenting already very small active community. Any new channel or place where information is stored will spread us thin, requires attention to be drawn to it, which is a maintenance burden and source of inefficiency. Even this issue will not be seen by our full community audience unless the URL is copied around with quoted text to it as well.