Against fragmentation: unifying dev discussions with forum federation
-
On a recent episode of the Dot Social podcast, John O'Nolan of Ghost said;
"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's all over the place. We could get more organised here I think, but it's a start."
@[email protected], 2025
https://flipboard.video/w/g8BgnihyFkMsZ4fwGe3MZn
The fragmentation of dev discussions is something I hear about a lot lately. Forum federation could be a solution!
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.
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.
Eg the Discourse category on SocialHub is synced with the ActivityPub tag on meta.discourse.org. Any post in that SH category appears on Meta with that tag, and vice-versa.
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 @[email protected]), could bring those in too.
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 'release early, release often' principle to dev chat. Make public the default for dev chatter, unless it really is sensitive.
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.
Cross-referencing another fragmentation issue:
Update: I made more reference to this fragmentation issue, by necro-posting to this topic:
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login