Between FediForum and now the Social Web Foundation I'm very tired of seeing these intensely corporate initiatives in this space where the majority of projects are entirely volunteer (or grant supported) efforts
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@erincandescent Thanks for the note.
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@erincandescent We have an ActivityPub presence on wordpress.com; you can follow @swf. We also have a presence on other services, but that's our main one. I haven't set up a separate Mastodon server yet; I want to see if we can just use WordPress and if it will meet our needs.
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@erincandescent Challenge accepted!
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@erincandescent question for you: if you had money to donate to, say, three fediverse-related projects, what would they be?
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@evan Mastodon is the obvious starting point. From a community perspective, better health and safety tools will help. From an ecosystem perspective, raising the baseline feature support will be very valuable. It is very obvious they're pulled in a multitude of directions and are having a hard time progressing them all.
Beyond that, I think it's worth thinking about: which projects are bringing new things to the space? What can we do to support those? Maybe you work with a grant giving org like NLNet or maybe you look at their model.
Finally, I would ask: how do you get more of the projects in existence involved? How do you get more of the *community* projects involved, because so far all the ones involved in the SWF are those with legal entities representing them except PixelFed (which is very much run like a project with a legal entity backing it would be) -
@erincandescent thanks, that's really helpful.
I agree, getting more funding for Mastodon is a top priority for the health of the Fediverse.
In terms of other projects: we're mapping out our programs in the coming months. One thing we want to do when we decide to work on a project is fund and support existing projects in the space rather than build something anew.
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heh. Occasionally I see mention of this thing called FediForum and I assumed it’s like the little unconferences or meet-ups people organise when they’re a fan of something. I see a lot of white cis dudes talking about it yknow?
And I was like cool, well, not my vibe then is it.
I don’t know a single admin, where all the admins I am friendly with are trans and or queer and or neurodivergent and or disabled and or black or brown and/or indigenous, who has every spoken about it or has been invited
But you’re saying it’s a big thing? Well, isn’t that swell. Good luck out there FediForums on making the Fedi a better place to be! Of course, I won’t be around to accept any future invites
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james is on a breakreplied to james is on a break last edited by
We didn’t need money to run our instance. We were well volunteer funded but I could have paid for it forever out my own pocket (a huge privilege to be sure, many servers struggle) if needed (and we did for the first few months until people suggested they’d like to contribute)
Money isn’t going to fix the core issues. It’s going to facilitate their deepening into the essence of Fedi. Fedi is just a warped snapshot of the world at large.
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james is on a breakreplied to james is on a break last edited by
I think I’ve only ever interacted with one big “Fedi project” here and that was me going out of my way to educate them on some missteps on their trans “allyship”.
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james is on a breakreplied to james is on a break last edited by
Also I’m gonna just throw this out here, and I’m sure it’ll make some very angry:
Growth should be the lowest of everyone’s priorities. I have literally no idea why this would be anyone’s focus. It is unfathomable to me.
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@james @erincandescent not angry, but my motivation is thus: I [now] live in the woods near a tiny community (the "big city" an hour away is 10,000 people), and we're dependent on Facebook for community communications. Not just whatsapp, full-on Facebook groups.
The only way I can imagine getting my neighbours off their Zuck addiction is to grow the fediverse to the point that it's a viable space for the individuals and groups alike.
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@james @erincandescent one (I think very legit view) on *not* growing the fediverse is that having "the" "fediverse" serve "our" "community" (for any value of "our" and "community") relies in part on it being inaccessible to others. I don't believe in borders, but I do believe in humanity's capacity to build safe, respectful and diverse communities, even in the context of hostile environments. ️
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