What is a Fediverse "community"?
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It's a good question. I think some instances are communities, but others aren't. And there are different kinds of communities, for example infosec.exchange and defcon.social are arguably communities of practice but the broader "security community on the fediverse" is much more diffuse.
it's a real problem that instances are the primary mechansm for community so far, because it limits each account to only being in one community. Archipelegos and island networks are another emerging model. as well as supporting archipelagos, Bonfire's got some very interesting ideas on the community front, and I'm looking forward do seeing how that evolves.
@jdp23 I agree that some instances represent communities (in more than an admin/moderation boundary), but it's relatively few and there are a very small percentage of Fediverse users on those instances. In that sense, it looks to me that instances typically do not represent a community. It's probably confusing to new Fediverse users when it's described otherwise. 🤷♂️ "Find your community! Pick an instance!", etc.
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You might be interested to check out my posts around the concept "Community has no boundary" I talked about 5 years ago, e.g. in this topic: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/standardizing-on-a-common-community-domain-as-ap-extension/1353
When I was still facilitator of #SocialHub I claimed that it wasn't a community in any really sense, with mostly people driving by on self-interested motives. It was just a discussion forum, where a poor commons janitor (me) had to do the unthankful volunteer upkeep.
"Expectation mismatch" plays an important role when anyone mentions "community". A "community-driven #FOSS project" is partly the formal governance that is in place, but mostly implicit cultural aspects. Knowing what you can expect is important, to not get disappointed.
A #fediverse instance to me isn't community. I only use the Home timeline.
As we navigate fedi we 'weave' in and out of community seamlessly, without realizing it. A rich concept of inter-community social networking is possible, I think, but it should be carefully designed.
@smallcircles Yes, those are interesting posts. Thanks. A question I have is if instances are not typically "communities" (other than admin/moderation-bound groups of accounts), what are the other options for community in the mainstream (Mastodon-style) Fediverse? For me, some hashtags serve that purpose. However, the "community" in this case is unstructured (no organization other than a common tag) and the "governance" is highly decentralized (both at the instance and individual level).
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@smallcircles Yes, those are interesting posts. Thanks. A question I have is if instances are not typically "communities" (other than admin/moderation-bound groups of accounts), what are the other options for community in the mainstream (Mastodon-style) Fediverse? For me, some hashtags serve that purpose. However, the "community" in this case is unstructured (no organization other than a common tag) and the "governance" is highly decentralized (both at the instance and individual level).
@smallcircles I mostly read hashtag feeds on the Fedi. I follow individual accounts but mostly because #ActivityPub needs the Follows to distribute the tagged messages in an even somewhat reasonably effective manner. Relays or similar (tags.pub) can help too. In any case, I don't tend to read account-level feeds or account list feeds.
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@smallcircles I mostly read hashtag feeds on the Fedi. I follow individual accounts but mostly because #ActivityPub needs the Follows to distribute the tagged messages in an even somewhat reasonably effective manner. Relays or similar (tags.pub) can help too. In any case, I don't tend to read account-level feeds or account list feeds.
Perhaps it is proper #ActivityPub Groups support. Lemmy already calls that "Community". And perhaps the retracted FEP-2100: Unbound Group and Organization to have Groups be independent of instances / multi-instance spanning, can be implemented in mainstream fedi to have a real fedi native concept of Groups (i.e. the abstract concept, not depending on an implementation detail)..
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Perhaps it is proper #ActivityPub Groups support. Lemmy already calls that "Community". And perhaps the retracted FEP-2100: Unbound Group and Organization to have Groups be independent of instances / multi-instance spanning, can be implemented in mainstream fedi to have a real fedi native concept of Groups (i.e. the abstract concept, not depending on an implementation detail)..
Btw, what eventually "Community has no boundary" boiled down to, was that an Actor has a relationships collection of Relationship objects of different types (forming a rich social graph), and where these relatiohships can have metadata that effectively model all kinds of community arrangements.
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@jdp23 I agree that some instances represent communities (in more than an admin/moderation boundary), but it's relatively few and there are a very small percentage of Fediverse users on those instances. In that sense, it looks to me that instances typically do not represent a community. It's probably confusing to new Fediverse users when it's described otherwise. 🤷♂️ "Find your community! Pick an instance!", etc.
@steve agreed that most Fedierse users aren't on instances that are communities, and that it's confusing to new users when "community" is used as a synonym for "instance". I just use "instance", people say "what's that?" and I describe it. joinmastodon uses "server".
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@steve agreed that most Fedierse users aren't on instances that are communities, and that it's confusing to new users when "community" is used as a synonym for "instance". I just use "instance", people say "what's that?" and I describe it. joinmastodon uses "server".
@steve also, with Mastodon's move to a community focus, it might be worth checking with Hannah about how Mastodon is planning on adopting their language.
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@smallcircles One of the reasons I'm asking is because I often see "community" described as the same as "instance" in the Fediverse. That doesn't make sense to me and most instances I know about have no well-defined community. However, there are many facets of "community", so I was interested in other opinions.
@steve @smallcircles The community on my one-man-instance is pretty harmonious. Never had any trouble.. I don't think the fediverse as a whole can be described or moderated as a community.
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