#discoursesoftware — Public Fediverse posts

@silentashes
thanks for sharing your feedback!
I think we are on the same page. While our instance is in our bootstrapping phase, we chose discord for backend communication because some of us were familiar with setting up a community server and it was easy to manage things there while we figured out what would be our within-instance communication strategy after our processes (governance, rules, CoC) were fairly established.

We currently self-host our decision making system #loomio (https://www.loomio.com/) which is #FLOSS under #AGPL license (https://github.com/loomio/loomio)

We have been discussing how to avoid having to use too many platforms (and having to create different accounts for each) to cooperatively govern the instance because those can become bottlenecks for instance-level participation in important discussions. We are discussing a way to self-host our own forum #lemmy (relevant thread: https://neuromatch.social/@manisha/110641946898243726) but we are volunteers and so our progress has been according to our limited bandwidths (we are trying to get funding though, so pointers to funding sources would be appreciated -- other than the crowd-sourcing ones like OpenCollective, Patreon, etc, we are aware that several #MastoAdmin use that). And how fast we make progress also depends on how much support we can get from other volunteers from our #neuromatchstodon instance to help out with this stuff.

We are slowly but surely working towards using open-source tools and self-hosting and making it easier for instance members to participate in discussions (which is why we let them know to reply to our OP here if they don't want to go to discord).

We currently run a fork of #glitch which allows local-only posts. I had tested that but there was a tiny bug there (e.g. https://neuromatch.social/@manisha/109753892418948128) that I haven't had the time to look into. But that's another option worth considering for instance-only discussions with caveats like this -> replies to local-only posts can become public and then the thread may seem weird for those who can't see the OP.

Given the cooperative structure that we are establishing, we will likely not move to #DiscourseSoftware if we can't have all of our instance member switch there easily (but I don't know the details fully so this is just going off of what you mentioned)

Thank you for pointing us to #Mobilizon. Have you tried it or know someone who has? I'd love to hear how the experience has been there, especially if it uses #ActivityPub

sorry for this #LongPost :)

cc @socialwg