Published on: 03/26/25

#development-logs

Welcome to the fourth BobaBoard end-of-year retrospective! This year, you might say we truly circled up (or is it bubbled up?). Need a refresher? Here's the recap of how we got from point A to point B(oba)!

Before we recount all we accomplished last year, we'd like to share an exciting update with you that literally JUST happened:

As you might know, this weekend was the first ATmosphere conference, where many people from all walks of "really giving a shit about the future of the web" came together with the excuse of discussing ATProto—the open, decentralized protocol being pioneered by Bluesky.

Ms Boba participated in the conference as a fandom community ambassador (unofficial) and guest speaker (official). To make a long story short, she's proud to report that the type of grassroots, community-driven, kinda-wacky efforts that started with BobaBoard are an important piece of the puzzle everyone is coming together to assemble (which will hopefully resemble something like a functioning online social ecosystem 🤞). But she's even prouder to report that, no matter what all this will end up being in practice, we've put our own unique stake—dare I say, paddle?—in it by closing out the conference with organizers-sanctioned geese yaoi.

If you know the history of fan communities, you know the significance of this moment. If you don't (welcome, kind stranger or young sapling), here's what "an adoring observer of slash (and other) fan communities" had to say:

To more deeply appreciate the significance of the moment, we invite everyone to watch the recording of the conference on YouTube. All the talks are worth it (although some are more technical than others), but we definitely recommend the opening talks of the two days ("Network Punk" by Twitter's first lead engineer Blaine Cook, and "People in Platforms" by the aforementioned Erin Kissane), as well as (duh)—Ms Boba's own talk about involving fandom in building for the future of the web—just continue pretending you don't know what she looks like.

And with that,

Following up on Roadmap for 2024

Starting out with the most important question as we move further into 2025 — did we accomplish the things we outlined in our 2024 road map? Let's break it down in a little more detail.

Following up on Ms Boba Steps Back

In 2024, Ms Boba announced she was stepping away from steering the BobaBoard ship personally and transitioning the project to a much more community-led structure.

...and that's exactly what happened! This year, Ms Boba, now a volunteer like everyone else, has been able to continue helping BobaBoard without needing to assume responsibility for the overall forward motion of the organization.

The Task: Making Sociocracy Happen

To facilitate Ms Boba's step back, BobaBoard has adopted a sociocratic organizational philosophy. Sociocracy is an egalitarian governance structure that helps organizations ditch top-down hierarchy without losing clarity or efficiency. It offers a well-tested roadmap for implementing a decentralized system of authority and effective collaboration. And it's got some excellent suggestions for how to plan and run productive meetings!

Bubble Structure

BobaBoard, in the style of a sociocratic organization, is structured as an interconnected web of circles (or as we here at BobaBoard call them, "bubbles"), each with a specific area of responsibility. The core principle of the bubble approach is that the people doing the work have the power to make decisions about how the work gets done. But they're not operating in isolation, either—every bubble focused on a specific area shares some of its members with a 'parent' bubble, and that parent bubble is then responsible for coordinating work across its child bubbles.

In our last retrospective, we touched on the launch of several self-governing teams: Steering, Coding, Communications, and Community. However, in their initial pre-sociocracy launch, they were operating largely independently, suffering from lack of consistency and coordination. As we began implementing sociocracy more intentionally, we un-launched the unstructured Communications and Community teams, then brought them back to life as the Docs Bubble and Volunteer Wranglers Bubble respectively.

We now have four permanent bubbles meeting regularly, with more on the way!

Meeting Structure

Sociocracy has also helped us standardize our meeting structure to get more out of every meeting. Through the whole process, the system emphasizes effective forward motion, equality between members, and total transparency of decision-making. It definitely involves a lot more digital "paperwork," but it's also really helped us mature as an organization.

But we didn't just blindly adopt sociocracy practices: we also put our own unique spin on them! For example, we had to adapt the more traditional voice-only format of sociocracy meetings to our hybrid voice + chat system. So, whenever we need group consent—from 'no more questions about this policy, let's move on' to 'shall we adopt this policy for the next six months?'—we have everybody react with the same emoji.

This process is not just a(n adorable) time-saver: it's also a fantastically effective way of making sure everyone is tuned in throughout the meeting and is taking responsibility for their part in collective decisions.

Task Management Journey

Ms Boba stepping back means everything the organization needs to get done has to be exported from her brain and converted into a format volunteers can use. To that end, we've been working all throughout 2024 on a custom-made task management system.

Not wanting to expend financial resources on an enterprise-level project management software like Asana or Jira, we assembled our own DIY task tracker in Google Sheets. Ms Boba met regularly with another volunteer to dump tasks out of her brain and into the spreadsheet where others could take them on.

This first incarnation of the task list certainly wasn't perfect, requiring a lot of maintenance and institutional knowledge in order to function. We hosted an internal retrospective for all the volunteers using it and synthesized their feedback into a proposal for a second, revised version of the task list.

It was clear from the retrospective that we not only needed improvements to the user interface, but also to the policy surrounding its use. The newly-christened Volunteer Wranglers Bubble took on official responsibility for the Task List and collaborated on creating both a more user-friendly, lower-maintenance list, as well as a clearer maintenance procedure and user guide.

By the end of the year, we had moved from the task list as a dumping ground for Ms Boba's responsibilities to the task list as the place department leads were instructed to track their team's projects. It's still very new, but we're really excited about the direction things are moving!

The Outcome: Increased Member Participation

One of the biggest advantages of embracing sociocracy has been an upswing in member participation! First of all, it allowed us to more clearly see where we could use help and empowered us to recruit volunteers for more clearly defined roles. Secondly, both old and new volunteers clearly feel more comfortable stepping forward, assuming responsibilities, and acting as part of the community under this new system.

Our move to sociocracy has been a huge win for everyone, and the system has received rave reviews from both new and existing volunteers! We're excited to continue improving on these practices in 2025, smooth out the ever-present difficulties (no system is perfect!), and continue evolving this system to adapt it to the needs of a community like ours, as well as advocating for it in other aligned communities... in the FujoVerse™ and beyond!

Following up on Getting Ready for Self-Hosting

In our last retrospective, we mentioned our plans to finish a self-hosting setup using NixOS. We did that!

Self-Hosting Livestream

On May 30th, 2024, Ms Boba hopped on Twitch for three hours to demonstrate how to use NixOS to launch your own BobaBoard Galaxy.

Then, we recruited several volunteer video editors and captioners to take the resulting video, break it into timestamps, add some sweet background music, and pepper in fun little highlight animations. We hope to share it with you sometime soon!

Self-Hosting Documentation

A volunteer (now a member of the new Docs Bubble) wrote up some initial documentation covering the first two thirds of the livestream's content. While the second half of the write-up remains just an outline, it's still a great overview of the steps required to handle the creation of a self-hosted BobaBoard Galaxy.

With the recent launch of the new Docs Bubble, we're a significant step closer to addressing BobaBoard's ongoing documentation needs in a systematic manner. The self-hosting documentation is just one of many articles that need polishing in 2025, but we're happy to know how we're going to get there!

Self-Hosting Priority Reassesment

After self-hosting was successfully demonstrated, the Steering Bubble put their heads together to decide how much of a priority it was to make self-hosting easy and attractive rather than merely technically possible.

Ultimately, Steering agreed that the current build of BobaBoard requires so much manual administration of the database (with no accompanying documentation) that it offers a very poor user experience for anyone choosing to self-host—unless they're very, very, very brave. So, we've currently punted the idea of recruiting folks willing to help us test self-hosting, and chosen to focus on what's needed to set them up for long-term success: making sure both our documentation and engineering teams find their groove, and that they can deliver features and documentation in a timely manner as our future self-hosters' needs surface!

Following up on Building Fiscal Stability

While BobaBoard is a not-for-profit organization in the literal sense—we're here to help fans build communities in a capitalist hellscape, not to line our pockets—BobaBoard doesn't have that sweet, sweet 501(c)3 status that would let us take in tax-deductible donations or apply for nonprofit grant funding.

In last year's retrospective, we announced our intention to seek 'fiscal hosting' from a parent 501(c)3, which would make BobaBoard non-profit-y enough to receive grant money while still shielding us from the strict hierarchical governance requirements imposed by 501(c)3 status. But making yourself the most adoptable orphan in the orphanage takes time and effort! While we haven't found a forever home just yet, we did take some other important steps on our path to building fiscal stability.

The "Fujoshi Guide" and the Birth of FujoCoded LLC

Back in April of 2023, difficulty with getting BobaBoard coding volunteers up to speed inspired Ms Boba to kickstart The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development, a series of illustrated zines initially meant to teach fans the wonders of Git and GitHub—essential skills for open-source collaboration. BobaBoard volunteers pitched in to help run the Kickstarter campaign because they saw funding the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development as an important step toward BobaBoard's future success.

While nonprofits can sell books, the revenue from those books has to go to the nonprofit's operating expenses and charitable activities. Wrangling revenue becomes a headache beyond what a group with our resources is equipped to untangle, and you'll find entering into a profit-sharing agreement with your collaborators is a shockingly hard time. So we took a different approach: we launched a for-profit startup that would allow us to compensate the people pitching in their labor without everything needing to go through extra layers of complexity, and that could tackle the broader blockers on the road to success, rather than the social software. FujoCoded LLC was born!

Splitting Up Finances (and Beyond)

With a for-profit alternative established, BobaBoard's merch store and its other fundraising projects (like RobinBoob and Fujoboard) were detached from BobaBoard and re-attached to FujoCoded. Given the "Limited Liability Corporation (LLC)" nature of the latter, this rebalance will make accounting and re-investment infinitely easier for everyone involved. It will also make things simpler for BobaBoard when it comes to adoption by a fiscal host!

Aside from splitting up finances, however, another important piece of this separation is going to be figuring out where and how to collaborate—practically, sure, but also legally. Luckily, the FujoCoded launch allowed us to raise money for legal services relevant to establishing a business and collaborating with an associated nonprofit. With this, we've been able to have BobaBoard help FujoCoded, and have FujoCoded help BobaBoard—for example by collaborating on documentation and educational material that can benefit both!

Steered in the Right (Fiscal) Direction

Establishing an official "Steering Roadmappening Strategy" committee (as they named themselves) allowed us to nail down who's actually able to make decisions about the way BobaBoard connects to other organizations, whether that's FujoCoded or a future fiscal host. The decision is no longer left to Ms Boba, sharing both the responsibility and the power equally among Steering members in an egalitarian, consent-based structure.

What that means is that whatever financial moves BobaBoard makes in the future, we have a clear procedure for researching, discussing, and deciding what those moves should be, as a collective. That's a big step toward stability!

Picked Our Aims and Priorities

A lot of effort this past year has gone into administrative restructuring and forging new protocols, but BobaBoard the organization is ultimately here to build BobaBoard the platform! To know what to build and, more importantly, to enable others to help you build it, it's important to be able to clearly spell what your objective is.

In sociocracy, this is done by setting aims. This process starts with the steering committee, which sets the aim that guides the whole organization. After a lot of discussion, and the approval of all Steering members, here's the aim we've come to:

Bring together, guide, and support volunteers to collaboratively build a modern open-source community social platform that caters to the needs of, and welcomes the contributions of, queer/kinky/fannish people by prioritizing secure interaction within size-limited intentional communities.

This aim allowed Steering to give power to other connected bubbles to carry out their own aims, derived from this same blueprint. For example, here's the aim of our Boba Builders Bubble, which works to fullfill our engineering priorities:

Build and maintain an accessible, self-hostable, modular codebase for a modern open-source community social platform that caters to the needs of, and welcomes the contributions of, its queer/kinky/fannish userbase by prioritizing secure interaction within size-limited intentional communities.

Not only did we choose what the aims would be, but we also used them to inform our priorities for the near future...

Be the Monarch of Your Own (Single) Realm

After discussing the intended use cases for BobaBoard (see the callout below), Steering had to make a decision: what do we build first? And how do we move towards our goal of enabling people to self-host (and starting to give feedback) as soon as possible?

To simplify the development flow, we decided to focus on a single-Realm approach first. While we plan to enable multiple communities to coexist on a single BobaBoard instance, the "single community" use case will come first, allowing us to build up our ability to deliver new features before we tackle more complex set ups. But don't worry: we'll be doing this while still ensuring we aren't coding ourselves into a corner that would make further expansion too complicated.

Prioritizing single-Realm development brought us to our next decision: what feature(s) are we going to test drive our Boba Builders Bubble with? Since BobaBoard is all about anonymity, moderation is both tricky and important. With this in mind, we've come up with a list of admin features we believe must be there before we can share our software in good conscience. These are the ones we'll tackle in 2025!

Just Ship It™

But picking out ambitious new features to work on only goes so far. There is a lot that goes into coordinating shipping code and keeping everyone on track. To test drive our processes with something simpler, and to, well, start defining them in the first place, our short term priority has been to move our documentation from the great (but outdated) Docusaurus to our new framework of choice across all FujoVerse™ codebases: Astro's documentation framework Starlight.

To do so, the Boba Builders Team conducted an audit of our current website, and came up with a migration plan, which we're currently tackling. Once this is complete, we'll pick a feature from our roadmap, and start hacking away at the actual BobaBoard codebase.

Made a Name for Ourselves

In August, Ms Boba and other BobaBoard volunteers attended Citrus Con 2024. You can watch (or rewatch!) Ms Boba's talk, Rebuilding Community on the FujoWeb, to learn about BobaBoard's origin story and the journey to its current shape.

The talk sparked warm, enthusiastic, and very welcome discussions throughout the weekend and beyond, which led to new volunteers joining us and Ms Boba being invited to speak again at Citrus Con 2025! Want to come (virtually) meet us there? Registration is free!

Introduced Fandom Coders to Sociocracy

With Sociocracy now underway in the BobaBoard organization, FujoCoded members decided to try their hand again at a lofty goal they had tried (and failed) to achieve the past: evolving the Fandom Coders community into a self-governed entity.

This is the same process BobaBoard itself went through last year: going from a project under the wing of a few individuals to a project led by the community itself. This time, however, this "graduation" is being carried out in a more organized fashion, with the intention of setting up a blueprint for future projects to learn to fly on their own.

After gathering consent from the community to attempt such an ambitious move, and electing a "Transition Bubble," Fandom Coders is now set to use sociocracy to carry out its next evolution. While this project isn't directly related to BobaBoard, we're excited to see where it leads, and to share what we learned (and to learn from them) as the effort moves further ahead.

This year, our goals are organizational. As we've said, while it is theoretically possible to self-host BobaBoard even now (again, if you're very, very, very brave), doing so is moot unless we have an organization behind it that can keep maintaining and evolving such software. This means our work is going to be focused on continuing our sociocratic evolution and building the stability we need (and deserve).

Each BobaBoard department receives general direction from Steering, but still makes its own decisions about what it will focus on to make progress in that direction. Here's a snapshot of each department's focus areas for 2025!

Boba Builders

Boba Builders' ultimate priority is, well, to build BobaBoard! But BobaBoard's codebase is a bit special: indeed, it was originally built to be modular so that each piece of the whole puzzle (backend, frontend, UI components, post editor, and more) could be tended to and grown independently.

Given this, Boba Builders' goal for 2025 will be to recruit for and launch ulterior sub-bubbles that can take care of these various parts, and to coordinate and support them as they build the admin tools that will enable us to start getting self-hosters aboard.

Volunteer Wranglers

You know it, we know it: the hardest part of building software is...people! While historically we've had a lot of volunteers coming and going, we need to figure out how to get them to come and stay! Sociocracy already helped us to empower them and involve them in decision making, but onboarding and wrangling is still a time-consuming process that's hardly sustainable with our resources.

To fix this, 2025 will see us conducting a major overhaul of the volunteer onboarding process and continuing to improve our task management system. With this in place, we hope to finally start reaching out to the many volunteer-hopefuls who've kindly offered to help over the years. If you're one of them, thank you for your patience! We look forward to having you along with us for the ride!

Documentation

There's only one thing worse than "having no software": having software no one knows how to use or improve! Documentation is going to be key to the success of anything we do, so learning to write and organize quality, useful documentation is going to be THE challenge of the year for our Documentation Bubble.

To achieve this goal, we plan to develop and implement a consistent style guide for all documentation, get the lay of the land regarding existing articles to determine what to keep, improve, or discard, and then begin writing new articles to support other bubbles' goals and needs.

We started 2024 with no true sociocratic bubbles and ended the year with four. We intend for each of the three department bubbles to "bud off" multiple child bubbles over the course of 2025, bringing in new volunteers in each area.

It's hard to predict exactly how things will expand, because sociocracy encourages growing organically as opposed to imposing a top-down hierarchy. Although we cannot predict the future, we have some predictions for how the bubbles may re-bubble... in the callout below! 🔮

Will they materialize as predicted, or will the groups decide to take a different approach? You'll surely find out in the 2025 retrospective... or if the "Socials Bubble" forms, maybe even before then!

BobaBoard is more ready than ever for a nonprofit to serve as its fiscal host. Last year, our goal was "build fiscal stability" with getting a fiscal host as a key avenue we wanted to map out; this year, our goal is to head down the road we mapped and see what we can find!

This is the million dollar question! But since we don't have a million dollar answer (unless one of you wants to buy a lot of yaoi paddles), here are some creative ways to help you all to come help us:

As mentioned, BobaBoard's crew of volunteers has room for more. Having relevant skills is great, but being able to show up and pitch in is worth a lot on its own. We need people who are ready to:

• join a sociocratic organization
• be part of a team
• make collaborative decisions
• provide thoughtful feedback
• keep coming back month after month

If you subscribe to the FujoCoded newsletter or socials, we'll make specific requests there on a regular basis—at least until we can get the BobaBoard newsletter going more regularly. We'll also boost these to BobaBoard's social accounts to keep people in the loop.

If you want to keep up with just the volunteering requests, we have a BobaBoard Volunteers Newsletter we plan to start again. Sign up here, and we'll reach out once our (future) Socials Bubble is ready to put it to use!

While BobaBoard is still waiting on a nonprofit fiscal host to enable us to take donations, the best way to help our efforts financially is to support the financial stability of our sister for-profit, FujoCoded.

FujoCoded's ability to produce high-quality educational resources aimed at fans is directly linked to BobaBoard's ability to recruit and train its volunteers, so throwing money at the former is a huge help to the latter. Not to mention, the better FujoCoded is doing, the more free time Ms Boba has to lend her coding expertise to our engineering efforts!

You can give FujoCoded money many different ways:

• Recurring Support: Become a FujoCoded $upporter on Patreon
• One-off Support:
• Buy something from the FujoCoded store—a funny sticker, a memeable T-shirt, a nostalgic piece of BobaBoard merch, or, tastiest of all, a Fujoboard to serve goodies on during your next party
• Buy a digital Certificate of Ownership for your favorite ship
• Buy—SOON!—the digital preview version of the first issue of the Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. Sign up here to know when it ships!
• Limited Edition Support: A Mysterious Treat for a lucky friend...as is April 1st tradition 👀

BobaBoard exists to empower fans to take control of their own internet experience. Everywhere we turn, social platforms are enshittifying and user interfaces are becoming more hostile to curation and customization. Whether or not you're ready to get involved directly with BobaBoard, you can still help us in our overall mission by taking steps to empower yourself!

For you, that could mean:

• Learning how to use Terminal to access files and execute programs without the help of a slick user interface
• Learning how to use HTML & CSS to cultivate your own website outside of a corporate walled garden
• Learning how to use Git to collaborate with others on software, and to supercharge your power to improve and evolve your own.
• Learning how to handle conflict in productive ways
• Learning how to build and maintain non-hierarchical communities that empower everyone to make and lead change

Skills like these lay the foundation for the world BobaBoard wants to see. We hope you'll pick up a few for yourself and help make that world a reality!

…And with this, another year has gone by! Now more than ever, the future is unpredictable and, frankly, scary. But from our vantage point we see something else brewing under the surface: people coming together to make change happen in their local areas—that is, their communities.

We hope this year BobaBoard can come to welcome more and more fannish folks, and help them connect and grow together, while building places of learning and joy that can help us navigate the darkest of times.

Love,
A Bubbly Bunch of Boobies BobaBoard Volunteers

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