Convener: Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca>)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Julian Lam (@julian@community.nodebb.org)
• Matthias Pfefferle (@pfefferle@mastodon.social)
• Fred Hauschel (naturzukunft@mastodon.social)
• Jeremiah Lee (@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold)
• Samir Al-Battran (@samir@m.fedica.com)
• Kyle R. Conway (@K_REY_C@social.coop)
• Johannes Ernst (https://j12t.org, @j12t@j12t.social, @j12t.org)
• Jason Culverhouse (@JsonCulverhouse@flipboard.social)
• Eugenus Optimus (@ujeenator@ujeenator.net)

Notes

Website: https://activitypub.rocks/

Evan:

• Site started by Christine Lemmer-Webber in 2016 (almost ten years ago!)
• Has important links to AP resources like tests, socialhub, docs, tools, etc.
• Also included news about AP
• Top hit for “ActivityPub” on search engines
• But it fell out of maintenance
• Christine offered to let the SocialCG maintain the site 🙏🏼
• SocialCG set up a Website Task Force in 2024. https://github.com/swicg/meetings/blob/6c3dcd8d9b84ccfe7535c90a575a65710658fe51/2024-09-06/README.md?plain=1#L216C36-L216C53
• New repository set up in the SocialCG organization https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-website-taskforce
• Christine’s Gitlab repo ported to GitHub https://github.com/swicg/activitypub.rocks
• Deploys to GitHub pages automatically using Haunt https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html

Julian: Drive to update the website wanes over time

• introduce dynamic content, RSS feeds from AP devs?

Jeremiah: atproto.com as an analogue, has user-centric introduction, quick start, specs, guides. Basically, be the MDN of ActivityPub.

• Julian: FediDevs meant to be the MDN, but not many people with bandwidth to contribute

Julian: Split site out based on audience

• Press
• Developers
• End Users (maybe this can be merged with Press)

Kyle: highlight other places where this is already done (W3C explainers, fedidevs, etc.)

Matthias: The site is linked from spec

• FediTest funding is in limbo

Samir:

• Tools/Projects page (ATProto has a community tools page)
• A repository to show projects
• An “app store” concept of fediverse tools

Evan:

• Anyone who joins the task force are members
• Question of who can commit/merge. Chair can select. Currently, Evan and a few others. Will talk with Dmitri to figure out how to onboard more merge approvers.
• Call now for people to start writing issues of what we’d like to see: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub.rocks/issues
• Now that repo is setup and on GitHub page, now time to finally have a task force meeting
• Delightful Fediverse apps repo inclusion, maybe CC0?

[Johannes has entered the chat]

• Need to get the latest news from being from a few years ago ;-)
• Maybe an approach to merges being timeouts with no objection

Chat comments:

• RSS feeds of Fediverse Report or links to those posts
• Links to Evan’s ActivityPub book

Evan: Challege of current site being Scheme-based CMS

• Jeremiah: Proposal to use Eleventy with HTML and tools that people are familiar with. MDN, for example, is a great case point of using familiar tools to have a wide breadth of contributors
• Current SSG requires a Docker container to run Haunt
• Dual stack approach for new pages for now

Johannes: What does the audience want from this website?

Julian: This is the site everyone lands first and then everyone has to go elsewhere. Everyone seems to have the blog posts that actually guided them and people shouldn’t have to use search engines or ask into the fediverse to figure out how to get started.

Matthias: It’s the first page you landed on when you started working on it. It’s dominantly linked to from the spec, says there is a test suite that people might want to try. FediDevs is one, but would be nice to have something more official.

Kyle: Just ideologically aligned, it’s something interested in, more as a user, works in marketing space and might be able to help

Samir: +1s to the getting started, but then hard to keep up with all the new developments. What else is new and where else should we spend efforts? Search, or FediDB, or other places, but this would be good starting point for finding.

Johannes: how do we keep it updated?

Samir: People will come to add the updates if there were a way to do so.

Matthias: There was no way to participate and change the site before. With the new GitHub process and some guidelines, people will want to share what they’re working on.

Johannes: What about people who dislike W3C?

• Evan: This is a W3C group. They can contribute elsewhere. It’s CC licensed, they can fork.