The activity of the SocialHub community, like all other ‘fediverse-substrate’ bodies, has waned. From an active community to just a forum. Now a decision has to be made for the future of SocialHub. The options are stopping, be just a forum, or revitalize a vibrant community. The last option needs people willing and committed to do so. To step up for the sake of Fediverse Futures.
No, there are other factors. But that involves a whole lotta time to elaborate, which I don’t have atm. Fedi might be dogfooded, but it would not help with the issues of SocialHub, and fedi isn’t quite there to replace Discourse forums.
Here’s a data point:
I brutally kill any page I encounter that has Discourse enabled, because the Discourse Javascript is horrific. Discourse causes my mobile browser to freeze, and pegs the CPU on my desktop. Any site using Discourse is utterly unusable with javascript disabled, which is accessibility-hostile.
I’m not saying SocialHub is dying because of Discourse, but the fact that the Discourse UI is so horrible has certainly driven me off sites thay use it (the Home Assistant community forum, sadly, does too).
Yea. Not specific to the JS, but more people have indicated that Discourse forms a barrier to them for participation. Evaluating different tools is an open topic, and also we are looking into bridging so discourse content federates.