2026-03-26T19:50:42Z https://yabu.me Danyl Strype https://yabu.me/npub14r4ymc8fuwn9kpdsaf5j7knf86cgclh4j45c7dp4x2uf8vaaskxsnx0n7f https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/user_avatar/socialhub.activitypub.rocks/strypey/96/2171_2.png https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/user_avatar/socialhub.activitypub.rocks/strypey/96/2171_2.png https://yabu.me/nevent1qqsd0snf32xtv2agq9jds35g69xqq0938yr9dr05rwz3agzdd4manuqzyz5w5n0qa836vkc9kr4xjt66dyltprr77k2knre5x5et3yanhkzc6uq2ddy On a recent episode of the Dot Social podcast, John O&#39;Nolan of Ghost said;<br/><br/>&#34;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&#39;s all over the place. We could get more organised here I think, but it&#39;s a start.&#34;<br/><br/><span itemprop="mentions" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person"><a itemprop="url" href="/npub1d2v7jswf49u0htsx3ftv6906hvsp7ck6uxlvdmsp854n5hkvzz5q0r0l89" class="bg-lavender dark:prose:text-neutral-50 dark:text-neutral-50 dark:bg-garnet px-1"><span>John O'Nolan</span> (<span class="italic">npub1d2v…0l89</span>)</a></span>, 2025<br/><br/><a href="https://flipboard.video/w/g8BgnihyFkMsZ4fwGe3MZn">https://flipboard.video/w/g8BgnihyFkMsZ4fwGe3MZn</a><br/><br/>The fragmentation of dev discussions is something I hear about a lot lately. Forum federation could be a solution!<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>Eg the Discourse category on SocialHub is synced with the ActivityPub tag on [meta.discourse.org](<a href="http://meta.discourse.org">http://meta.discourse.org</a> ). Any post in that SH category appears on Meta with that tag, and vice-versa.<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>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 &#39;release early, release often&#39; principle to dev chat. Make public the default for dev chatter, unless it really is sensitive.<br/><br/>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. 2025-07-02T06:04:24Z