FediForumTM

Event Listing

Project Map

@fediforum@mastodon.social
@fediforum.org
FediForum April 2026:

Small is Beautiful (Smaller Focused Group Discussions on Fediverse)

/2026-04/session/6-e/

Topics:

Convener: Scott Jenson (@scottjenson@social.coop)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Notes

  • Scott preamble:

    • UX researcher who helps with Mastodon team
    • Where do we see the fediverse in 5 years?
    • Coming from research. Many people hate Facebook, but find value in groups feature.
    • Many people want to have a chat with a group of friends and not have reply guys
    • Visibility controls: the lightweight group control available today in the fediverse
    • Wants to have a social discussion rather than technical discussion today

  • Anca: A group is a set of people who want to have a specific conversation in private (so people not in the group are not seeing or participating in the conversation)

    • control over who is in the group and not in the group

  • Alexis: Community understanding is important context. Avoiding having a conversation with people who take something the wrong way by people outside the group who don’t share the group’s context

    • Groups are a shared context

  • Unnamed: What does the network formed by the set of intersecting groups look like? are there fully disconnected subsets?

  • Signal groups don’t have moderators - they are usually small

  • Denmark study on Facebook Groups are “load bearing” for (Danish) society https://www.osogdata.dk/en

  • Scott: There is big group and little group sets of problems

    • Gen Z people moving to Instagram for support groups.
    • Technical challenge of moderating, letting people in, etc

  • Other group models: email mailing lists, Reddit sub-reddits. “We are interested in this topic”

  • Johannes: spectrum of types of groups worth enumerating. Facebook Groups are bad approximations of the many types of groups in the real world. Examples:

    • a group of friends sharing something in person with the door closed, not to be repeated
    • FediForum having this group discussion with notes that will be shared after
    • a panel discussion on stage, but now rest of world can ask the panelist questions that might be moderated by a moderator
    • Someone brings their new girlfriend to a group gathering is ok, but not their girlfriend’s whole football team

  • Alexis: visibility of participation in the group must be opt in. Difference between talking with people who “get it” versus becoming a representative for the group externally. Don’t want to have the “token” member of the group to have to explain things to outsiders, even if well-meaning.

  • Evan: Social Web Community Group E2EE (end-to-end encrypted) task force https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-e2ee - messaging groups

  • Evan: Social Web Community Group groups task force https://github.com/swicg/groups <- standardization process

  • Evan: People are members of more than one group. They have many interests and people shouldn’t have to choose one. The idea of an instance being your dominant/only interest doesn’t recognize that people are multi-dimensional human beings.

  • Scott: Sometimes people want to have a group chat in a public setting, but don’t want the unwanted reply guys.

    • visibility controls are a lightweight solution: built-in group of people that you follow
    • maybe able to take action now before larger technical options are decided

  • Mayel in chat: we removed the mentions when messaging in bonfire and it just works, having them included in the message body is only convention inherited from twitter and not required by ActivityPub

  • Marci: Hashtags as a way to promote out, as well as an organizing principle for a larger group.

    • Momentary group when following an event hashtag as an example
    • Challenge of wanting a private hashtag where anyone following the hashtag interested in it can see it, but don’t want to blast entire following.
    • Can this be a lightweight group to create directed conversation?
    • Johannes in chat: To Marci’s point, I would like to see the posts of some people I follow when they talk about ActivityPub, but not when they talk about football.
    • Scott: technical question: how close would be to getting that?
      • Mayel: Difficult to use hashtags as currently architected in that way. We have smart people who can build the right solutions in the fediverse.

  • Mayel: Risk of people in this group trying to figure out what groups out there in the communities know what they need. Need to talk with them for them to tell us what to build because they can be so many things. Don’t need to figure it out from first principles.

    • Scott: Purpose was to have a conversation about landscape.

  • Jeremiah: I love the idea of hashtags as creating a “channel” of myself. So people who love me, but don’t love all of me, can still follow just unsubscribe from certain hashtags, or who only love one part of me can follow just that one hashtag channel of mine.

    • My promise to a follower would be that I commit to consistently hashtag categorizing myself for you.
    • Example: You might like my software and digital rights activism posts, but not my workout selfies.

  • James in chat: I wonder if an extra option when you post, along with “Public/Followers-only/Private/etc.”, could be “hashtag only”? Where a post is not distributed to a recipient list, but people who follow the hashtag would see it. (For public posting only, of course.)

  • Mayel: Challenge of subgroups within groups. Example of people dealing with a heath challenge where there are the individuals, but also the people who care for them and are affected by that health challenge too where there are unique needs within a group but also a shared group interest

    • Alexis in chat: subgroups within groups is a challenge I suspect! more a breakout rooms type style?

  • Johannes: It’s not a flat, giant town square. Instead, we have local neighborhoods within that town square.

    • Jeremiah: GeoCities got it right! GeoCities used location-based url paths for users’s websites. For example, mine was geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/4346

  • Ben: One challenge in Mastodon is that all of the notifications end in up one place. Matrix also hasn’t solved this because now I click through 15 groups to see all the notifications.

    • A group can be an ActivityPub Actor. Following that Actor Group would be the membership.

  • Scott: What is the current state of the groups FEP?

    • https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/issues/22
    • Evan: One of the oldest FEPs. Lightweight group structure.
    • If I @groupname, it will rebroadcast that mention to everyone who follows it.
    • Guppe and Lemmy, Threadiverse implement today
    • Does not work well for:
      • private posts that anyone who is not a follow cannot see
      • membership control

  • Marci referencing James’ comment: allow post to “hashtag-only”, not to public/followers/private/etc.

  • Scott: If you had the ability to sign in with your fediverse account into different experiences, would that work? You could switch between instances to have different conversations.

    • Mayal: Nomadic identity feature loved by some implementations, but challenge is data is spread to many places
    • Scott; Would be for rock-solid, super isolated group participation

  • Mayel: preview of groups in Bonfire tomorrow

  • Johannes: What is the “geometry of cyberspace”? TBL never had concept of a person. Now it does.

    • Scott: If we had more composable components, we could experiment with the bounded conversation types. The one group solution today in a FEP is that it’s not built with composable parts.

    • in the context of j12t’s question - let me point to this paper: https://bford.info/pub/soc/personhood/

    • William: Is social media a separate thing or an attention layer for the Web? Groups are a separate space from what I’m doing on social media to me.

  • Mayel: Task for working on this now: https://github.com/swicg/groups/issues please join convo here