I set up ActivityPub.Space because I wanted to have one central place to catch-up, consume, and distribute content about ActivityPub. Forums are intensely topical, and the ability to federate with the open social web allows one to skip the hardest part of starting a forum: building the community.

At the same time, existing fediverse software (the most popular being Mastodon, a microblogging UI) tends to act more like a window to a digital public square of sorts, where anything and everything can be discussed. This is wonderful in many ways, but contrary to how forums themselves are run.

We’re at a point where we don’t really know what the scale of the ActivityPub developer community is. we’re fractured between multiple channels: mailing lists, W3C groups, Matrix channels, forums, blog posts, etc., but the one thing that unites all ActivityPub developers is that we are all on the fediverse. It simply doesn’t make sense to conduct our conversations elsewhere!

Additionally, I wanted to combat the ephemeral nature of microblogging. A decade or more of corporatized social media has taught us to just shout our hot takes out into the universe, and optimize for engagement. A forum does the opposite — you submit your content for considerate discussion and a simpler, more honest form of engagement. Your contributions stay here accessible to history and generations (hopefully) to come, and aren’t scattered to the winds the moment it falls off the front page feed.

You are posting to something, not just broadcasting.