What is a Fediverse "community"?

What is a Fediverse "community"? #fediverse #activitypub #community

@steve

Whatever you want it to be. But something nondescript if you don't define "community" for your case. The use of the word is overrated

@steve

The word "community" is often the delusion that community exists. It is a source of expectation mismatch

@smallcircles One of the reasons I'm asking is because I often see "community" described as the same as "instance" in the Fediverse. That doesn't make sense to me and most instances I know about have no well-defined community. However, there are many facets of "community", so I was interested in other opinions.

@steve on lemmy or piefed a "community" usually refers to a specific "subreddit" on an instance.

It's a good question. I think some instances are communities, but others aren't. And there are different kinds of communities, for example infosec.exchange and defcon.social are arguably communities of practice but the broader "security community on the fediverse" is much more diffuse.

it's a real problem that instances are the primary mechansm for community so far, because it limits each account to only being in one community. Archipelegos and island networks are another emerging model. as well as supporting archipelagos, Bonfire's got some very interesting ideas on the community front, and I'm looking forward do seeing how that evolves.

@steve @smallcircles@social.coop

@jdp23 I agree that some instances represent communities (in more than an admin/moderation boundary), but it's relatively few and there are a very small percentage of Fediverse users on those instances. In that sense, it looks to me that instances typically do not represent a community. It's probably confusing to new Fediverse users when it's described otherwise. ‍️ "Find your community! Pick an instance!", etc.

@smallcircles Yes, those are interesting posts. Thanks. A question I have is if instances are not typically "communities" (other than admin/moderation-bound groups of accounts), what are the other options for community in the mainstream (Mastodon-style) Fediverse? For me, some hashtags serve that purpose. However, the "community" in this case is unstructured (no organization other than a common tag) and the "governance" is highly decentralized (both at the instance and individual level).

@smallcircles I mostly read hashtag feeds on the Fedi. I follow individual accounts but mostly because #ActivityPub needs the Follows to distribute the tagged messages in an even somewhat reasonably effective manner. Relays or similar (tags.pub) can help too. In any case, I don't tend to read account-level feeds or account list feeds.

@steve

Perhaps it is proper #ActivityPub Groups support. Lemmy already calls that "Community". And perhaps the retracted FEP-2100: Unbound Group and Organization to have Groups be independent of instances / multi-instance spanning, can be implemented in mainstream fedi to have a real fedi native concept of Groups (i.e. the abstract concept, not depending on an implementation detail)..

https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/2100