Friend Camp has about 50 active users and I just noticed we have more than half a million posts here since August 2018! I mean that's 11 a day per person on average but still. That seems wild to me.

Last I checked something like 75% of our posts are unfederated. That's still 125 thousand posts sent to the fediverse. I think local-only posting increases the vitality of community, increasing the volume of overall activity, and contributing more to the fediverse than a less vital instance would.

(Above post reposted due to silly math error)

In other words: if Friend Camp never had local only posting, we would not have cohered as a community, and we would have contributed far less to the fediverse as a whole than we do with the ability to post unfederated.

@darius I'm intrigued by this idea, and a big believer in the positive effects of interacting in small(er) community groups.

In real-life community is everywhere, and ppl + communities interact in a complex social fabric.

I feel community might be better expressed online, and for a while I'm posting about a "Community has no Boundary" paradigm.

On SocialHub I mention an AS/AP vocab extension on top of Group + Actor.

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/standardizing-on-a-common-community-domain-as-ap-extension/1353

Would be great to have your input on the topic.

@darius

One thing to consider is whether communities explicitly defined allow for taking the concept next-level on the fediverse.

Now it is mostly implicit i.e. instance boundary, discourse forum, etc.

An explicit definition as a domain model, allows modeling things on top of that when needed, such as Membership + Roles, or Governance.

( @hamishcampbell started talk on the latter which - if federated - would require a meta-model AP extension to define policies. See https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/what-would-a-fediverse-governance-body-look-like/1497/51 )

@humanetech @hamishcampbell This is all very much of interest to me. Are you aware of my "neighborhoods" work? (It's not a formal proposal because I'd rather build it first, see how it works in practice, and then make a proposal)