This is just a soft inquiry for now, but I wanted to open up a discussion about public-facing documentation for the Fediverse: whether it’s beneficial to have, what form it should take, and to what degree thorough historical and technical information is needed for preservation and reference.

I’ve been kind of unhappy with where various Fediverse information projects lie currently, such as the Join the Fediverse wiki. To me, there are a few problems with existing efforts:

• Inherent Bias - Public resources taking a particular biased stance regarding things like competing technologies, what community values should be defined by, or who gets to be counted as part of the Fediverse based on a wide range of assumptions.
• Lack of Organization / Quality Control - Generally, existing community efforts do not pass muster for technical documentation or cultural reference, and instead suffer from poorly-written explanation of what a given platform “is like”.
• Lack of Resources (People / Information / Etc) - Could probably fall into the previous category, but compounds problems by generally leading to even higher levels of inconsistency / abandonment.

The thing is, I’m of the belief (maybe delusion) that the wider community would benefit from a dedicated wiki detailing project history, cultural developments, technical insights, and functionally unique spaces within the network. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a “here’s how to do ActivityPub” guide for developers, or a “here’s all the platforms and what they are” dictionary for end users, but I think it might be a useful resource for pointing a lot of different people in the right direction.

Two potential paths

The question boils down to this: hosting a wiki is easy. Cultivating and maintaining one is hard. We (We Distribute) might be in a position to do one of two things:

1. Try to support and upgrade a vast body of information on an existing community wiki project.
2. Launch our own initiative under the We Distribute umbrella.

I think either one is an initiative worth taking to, but each option has their various benefits and drawbacks. It would be interesting to get insight from the wider community on whether this kind of thing is even wanted or needed, and if so, whether we should spearhead it, or if we should try to improve something that already exists (even if it’s bad).

I would love to hear some thoughts from anybody who’s interested on the subject.