Fediverse Party for end-users AND researchers & developers?
This is just an idea that popped up, and I'd like to do some brainstorming.
TL;DR
The complexity and fragmented knowledge needed to develop new groundbreaking fediverse apps is the weak spot hampering the speed of Fediverse evolution.
Fediverse Party is excellent for end-users, and has the best SEO. It should also be the first entrypoint those developing the Fediverse and researching new specifications & use cases.
Background
So we have a lot of discussion on how the structure of the wiki, what info should be where, how many entries should be on a page, etc. The main purpose of the wiki is as a place of research and curation of stuff before it is added to fediverse.party.
I love the look&feel of fediverse.party and how it makes the Fediverse accessible for normal users, not just the technical/geeky types like us ;) The Fediverse itself is evolving fast, as the number of additions to the watchlists make very clear. But in this evolution - the development of new fediverse applications - is also where the biggest challenge still is. E.g. it is a PITA to gather all the knowledge for a codebase that federates with Mastodon. Things are harder still if you want to tread new grounds that go beyond microblogging. It is really hard to find developments/research for AP vNext. Things are so fragmented. It is a weakness that slows the evolution. And it is an opportunity for fediverse.party to jump into this spot.
The wiki for me, and I imagine any other fediverse-interested techie, is the most interesting. But whereas fediverse.party has excellent SEO (ranked first on DDG and Google for 'fediverse' search term), the wiki is basically unfindable. I've shared the link to the AP watchlist numerous times, to the delight of people not knowing about it.
Idea: Fediverse Party R&D section based on Wiki pages
The current site has a 'Knowledge' section, which is underused and frankly not clear on what knowledge it should hold. This section could be converted into a top-level 'R&D' section for those developing the Fediverse.
Gitlab's wiki features are only so-so, but at least the wiki is a git repo in itself. What we could do is to auto-publish the wiki pages to the R&D section.
This way:
- Findability of research is as good as fediverse.party site.
- Content is nicely formatted and ordered the way we want (based on front matter).
- The existing wiki links stay intact so there's no link rot.
- There can be as many wiki pages as we want. Need not worry about wiki structure.
WDYT?