Focus, energy and people

Came across aschrijver's excellent attempt at cat herding here: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/poll-socialhub-scope-and-purpose/2843 back in December, quoting:
> When it comes to Future of SocialHub 2 <https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/important-we-need-your-input-on-the-future-of-the-socialhub/2581> I think it is valuable to define more clearly:
> 
> Scope: What subject matter is relevant to the community, and what is off-topic?
> Purpose: What are objectives? What does the community want to achieve?
I think a similar question can be asked about this mailing list.

We generally can observe that "nothing moves". That is in spite of this observation, from the same post:

> SocialHub is a giant backlog of unresolved open issues.

… and it isn’t limited to SocialHub either.

My suggestion would be that the primary problem is not so much focus, or lack thereof, but a lack of energy and probably time, on behalf of the people here and on Socialhub, to move things forward.

On the other hand, an incredible amount of renewed development related to the ActivityPub standards is happening right now, from independent developers all the up to internet mega corps. Sooner or later, they are all going to run into various parts of that "giant backlog of unresolved open issues”. And they will be highly motivated to solve them, because otherwise their plans — whatever they are — won’t work (reliably). They will solve them either unilaterally or bilaterally or in a community/standards context, whatever appears easiest to them, but solve they will them.

It appears to me that we should use our limited time and attention that we have in this group, to focus on making this a very welcoming place for them. In other words, recruit them to this community, and make sure they can do here what they think they need to do. And by doing so, this community can make sure it’s consistent with prior work and the overall architecture.

This would address both the resource and the focus problem. And keep the community and standardization at the top, as opposed to non-standard solutions.

Thoughts?



Johannes.

Johannes Ernst
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