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Welcome Fedi Friends to episode 39 of Fireside Fedi! I'm your host ozoned. Fireside Fedi is a show about folks within the Fediverse. If you're seeing this, you are a part of the Fediverse.

With me today is Julian Lam. Julian is the Co-Founder (NodeBB) | Husband 🤷‍♂️ and Dad 🙉 to three | Rock Climber 🧗‍♂️ | Foodie 🥙 | Conductor 🎵 | Saxophonist 🎷
A better forum platform for the modern web.
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https://activitypub.space/
https://nodebb.org/
https://spectra.video/w/72dbS6nFMwrgEtRb5h3Sk2

I set up ActivityPub.Space because I wanted to have one central place to catch-up, consume, and distribute content about ActivityPub. Forums are intensely topical, and the ability to federate with the open social web allows one to skip the hardest part of starting a forum: building the community.

At the same time, existing fediverse software (the most popular being Mastodon, a microblogging UI) tends to act more like a window to a digital public square of sorts, where anything and everything can be discussed. This is wonderful in many ways, but contrary to how forums themselves are run.

We're at a point where we don't really know what the scale of the ActivityPub developer community is. we're fractured between multiple channels: mailing lists, W3C groups, Matrix channels, forums, blog posts, etc., but the one thing that unites all ActivityPub developers is that we are all on the fediverse. It simply doesn't make sense to conduct our conversations elsewhere!

Additionally, I wanted to combat the ephemeral nature of microblogging. A decade or more of corporatized social media has taught us to just shout our hot takes out into the universe, and optimize for engagement. A forum does the opposite — you submit your content for considerate discussion and a simpler, more honest form of engagement. Your contributions stay here accessible to history and generations (hopefully) to come, and aren't scattered to the winds the moment it falls off the front page feed.

You are posting to something, not just broadcasting.

The in-person events at FediCon in Vancouver lit a fire in the Canadian ActivityPub community. One of the louder calls were for a place in the fediverse for ActivityPub discussions; a place for groups to form and for long-running discussions to be had.

I was more than happy to get involved. I also wanted such a place, and I've discussed it on and off for the past year. ActivityPub development discussions are fragmented across multiple disconnected channels, and none of them fully capture the entirety (or a majority, or even a sizeable minority) of the AP developer community. ActivityPub.Space is my answer to that call.

One constant about ActivityPub is that all ActivityPub developers are on the fediverse, and so it only makes sense that discussions about AP development should also take place on the fediverse.

At the same time, the "fediverse" isn't one singular entity. @jaz famously quipped "There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses." While I can't make guarantees about this site connecting with a million fediverses, I can say that it does connect with the microblogiverse, the blogiverse (WordPress blogs!), and the Threadiverse (Lemmy/Piefed/MBin/NodeBB/Discourse).

So how does it work?

The site is divided up into several categories:

General Discussion is for any non-technical discussions about ActivityPub
Technical Discussion is for technical deep-dives
Meta contains discussions about this site itself
Random is for everything else (there's always a "Random" category on a forum, isn't there...?)

We also pull in content direct from Fediverse news outlets such as "Week in Fediverse", "Connected Places", and "Relay, by We Distribute".

On the threadiverse side, we directly link to several other fediverse-focused communities on Lemmy and Piefed.

We utilise a number of relays to both distribute local content out and receive content from the wider microblogiverse. When content comes in via microblogs, they're not usually categorized, so we check for relevant hashtags and automatically categorize them into one of the local categories.

The wonderful thing about this site is that it fully federates, which means you can follow all of these categories from your app of choice. You don't even have to register a local account if you don't want to, but you definitely can (and should!) if you want the best experience browsing the categorized topics.

The categories today are rather broad, but over time I hope to split them up into smaller topics based on user demand. Give the site a try today!