If you haven't heard, sadly, #ChirpSocial, one of the popular #ActivityPub “groups” platform, is shutting down “probably” on February 29th.
In an email they sent to admins, the owner and developer can no longer support https://chirp.social financially as they failed to find a new job after they were laid off by #Google last year.
This reminds us the importance of having a built-in groups feature, and one where the groups feature actually federates.
Back in 2008, when the #Fediverse was born, we did have a built-in federated groups in #Laconica / #StatusNet (today known as #GNUsocial). We used bang (!) instead of at (@). A built-in groups feature is more stable as established instances can host them.
Today, we have #Friendica and #Hubzilla (as well as #Streams-based instances) to fill in that, as groups is a built-in feature in those software products. It's just a matter of finding an instance that's open to hosting groups for any topic for the ActivityPub protocol.
That said, any Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams-based instances you suggest for groups?
I just had a bit of a look at kbin.social and I have to say, kbin looks really impressive!
If you've never heard of kbin, it's a fediverse platform specifically focusing on groups. Broadly speaking, similar to lemmy, the goal is to create a fediverse take on the reddit experience. However, kbin also integrates fediverse groups like gup.pe, chirp and friendica groups, and that is a killer feature as far as I'm concerned!
We've been running a lemmy instance for a few months now, but it might be time to look at spinning up our own kbin instance too!