Totally agree about Pump and I've mostly stopped using Identi.ca because Pump has basically turned it into yet another Twitter clone, with fewer features even that it had on StatusNet, eg the ability to echo messages onto a Twitter account.

@seanboileau

so many different decentralized social projects exist, but they all use different standards, concepts, and implementations.

Yes, this is the biggest problem, and it's not a technical problem but a social problem. It seems to me that the missing piece of the puzzle is some kind of federation working group, with representatives from as many projects as possible, tasked with evaluating and agreeing on the best standards/ protocols/ formats for interoperability.

Without this, each project's developers has manually build in and maintain support for any other project their users wants to federate with. As the number of projects increases, this quickly becomes impossible to keep up with, and only the projects with the largest user base get supported, which discourages the itch-scratching innovation that powers so much free software, and somewhat defeats the point of a federated social web.

:) Bang on @alanna . That's why it's important to get buy-in from the people working on the projects, and evaluate existing standards first, only proposing new standards as a last resort. That's why I say it's primarily a social problem rather than a technical problem.

There are also elements of this involved (isn't it great how XKCD comics have become like emoticons for complex ideas? :)

I am confused about what kind of work is being proposed here, but I agree with most of what @robertguthrie has said.

Step 1) Make it freaking simple to make decisions with other people on Loomio
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Profit
Step 4) Make it freaking simple to make decisions with any group of people online

I'd love to hear more of @karissamckelvey's thinking!