Convener: Julian (@julian@community.nodebb.org)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Saskia (@saskia@newsmast.social)
• Dr Implausible (@drimplausible@mastodon.online)
• Valen (@valen1@mstdn.social)
• Aaron Klemm (@aklemm@mastodon.social)
• Paige Saunders (@paige@canadiancivil.com)

Notes

Context:

• Forums rely on community building to survive. It has been traditionally very difficult, and one promise is that the fediverse can resolve this problem.
• What are the current recommendations and best practices?

Chicken and egg problem:

• Content not federated to anyone if you have no followers.
• You can’t get followers if you don’t post content.

Outcomes:

• Current state of content discovery and community building (a report).

DrImplausible:

• Fediverse: described as “locally boring”.
• Solution often relies on education for the end user: follow lots, follow back, increase engagement.
• How do you inform new users? User assumptions re: microblog are that it acts like twitter, where is the content, etc.
• https://implausi.blog/2023/06/locally-boring/

Valen:

• Just lurking leads to nobody knowing you’re there.
• Reply to people, don’t just post.
• Use hashtags.
• Brand new server, island, no bridges in and out.
• You need to start on a main server for awhile until you get enough followers.
• Migrate followers to account on new server.
• The person who runs https://fedi.tips/ also has https://fedi.directory/, which is a somewhat curated list of people to follow. https://fedi.directory/

Aaron Klemm:

• Alert people to having different expectations.
• Is having more followers more important? Higher value in each communication.

Saskia:

• “At Newsmast we include some tips in our onboarding emails for new users. We hope to offer similar onboarding emails to servers that signup for Patchwork Channels. New server subscribes to channel, won’t give you the followers but will give you the content.”
• “A community straight away of things you care about”.
• Also: potentially make it easy to build channels yourself.
• https://channel.org/

Anon:

• How did our predecessors solve the problem?
• Fill out friend list via communities.
• Community features are fairly new (https://gup.pe, threaded discussions) -> look to groups to populate the empty village.
• Solution could potentially be found in further development of group discussion functionality.
• Starter packs (like bluesky has).
• Pre-filled follows list! In an on-boarding step.

https://Fediscovery.org/

Algorithms (spin-off discussion):

• Paige: Anyone else seeing a firehose in their feed they need to scroll through to see what they want?
• Anon: I think we’re nearly there with the protocol, but clients have a lot they can do to reduce the firehose.
• Valen: Different languages show up in my feed, but I don’t speak those languages, how can we filter them out? I want people to post in their language - but I can’t read it so I don’t need it in my feed.
• Valen: Any algorithms must be opt-in and not imposed on people.
• Paige: Don’t want us to fall into the hole of Linux where the problem can be solved but isn’t user-friendly.