Hello! @baldemo.to and I have been in touch privately about this, but I finally have time to join this thread publicly.
I’ve been trying to figure out community infrastructure for niche online communities, especially less-technical ones like fanworks fandom, for a few years now. I’m also currently part of building atmosphere.community, which integrates Open Social with Astro and is itself an experiment in community on ATProto using communities about ATProto.
Like others, I’ve witnessed community-oriented builders circling around the same concepts, just with different names and deceptively similar semantics. I’m excited @baldemo.to has taken on the work of documenting these right as various active implementations are forming, so we can name and extract the shared patterns before they calcify.
One thing @baldemo.to and I both stressed is making sure to turn this mapping of concepts into concrete building blocks as quickly as is wise. My own angle is more on the builder side, so I’m especially interested in hearing from people trying to ship community tools: are there particular pieces you wish were shared, and where do you feel most blocked by the lack of common interfaces?
From integrating Open Social in atmosphere.community and thinking about fandom use cases for ephemeral community sites, some of the most interesting pieces to me are:
- Shared content, both created for the community and shared into the community by members, e.g. articles and events
- Membership mechanisms: who is a member, and what are the primitives to request or grant membership?
- Permissions: who can take what action? How can my custom Astro website know whether to show you that “create event” button?
- Attestations: badges, anyone?
These are already reflected in the current template. My hope is that the interviews and documentation can help us compare how current projects handle these pieces, identify where there is already convergence, and pick a narrow first target that people can actually implement or test against.
Let me know if you have any favorite mechanisms, or particularly hated pain points!