Re: The "Social Web" vs the "Fediverse"

Johannes,
One obvious thing that BBC, or any other web publisher, could do to work
better with the Social Web would be to extend the "Share" options they
provide to include a link to Mastodon or to a more generic ActivityPub
service. Today, the BBC supports "sharing" with Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and
Email, but there is no Mastodon or ActivityPub option. (See image below and
look on the right side.)

Of course, this exposes a couple issues with ActivityPub today:

   - As far as I know, there is no way to link, in a generic way, from a
   web page to the user's preferred ActivityPub service. Today, it seems like
   one would have to provide links which are specific to implementations (e.g.
   Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc.). Ideally, one could have an ActivityPub
   link that would work with whatever a user's preferred ActivityPub service
   might be. Has anyone implemented such a thing? How does it work? Would it
   need to involve a browser extension? (i.e to store the preferred instance,
   etc.?) If so, could we create a browser extension standard for adding an
   appropriate link to any "Share" menu? (Note: An extension specific to the
   BBC would be trivial, a more general extension would be challenging if
   there wasn't some standard that web publishers could use to indicate "AP
   share link goes here..." That would be something like a menu option with
   "display: none" and a well-known name that an extension could find and
   rewrite to link as appropriate.)
   - A web site publisher, like the BBC, is likely to want to be able to
   see ActivityPub posts that refer to their content. But, to do this, there
   would need to have some kind of search capability that allowed publishers
   to find such references. (e.g. Like Twitter's support for searching for
   URLs in their search bar. Use this link to see many Tweets linking to
   the BBC story below
   <https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-europe-67821515&src=typed_query>.)
   Of course, this raises all kinds of issues with the Social Web since there
   are so many people who argue against indexing of Social Web content...
   Alternatively, Social Web systems might implement a "ping-back" to notify
   sites when they are referenced in posts. Personally, I would prefer a
   search-based solution since that would be more generally useful.
   - I believe that user's experience of sites like the BBC would be
   enhanced if, whenever they are viewing content on the BBC site, they were
   able to see a list of all Social Web posts referencing that site. This
   could be implemented easily if the search capability mentioned above were
   available. Ideally, users would be able to filter the list of posts to
   include only those from those they follow and/or their followers, etc.

You wrote:

> "So if the BBC wanted to do that, for example, *they would (and have) set
> up bbc.social,* in addition to their primary website at bbc.com."

It shouldn't be necessary for the BBC to set up their own instance in order
to enhance social web interaction. Doing so might provide some advantages,
but it shouldn't be necessary. Most of us participate in the Social Web
without hosting an instance. The BBC should be no different.

[image: BBCShareLink.png]

bob wyman


On Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 5:44 PM Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 1. We know how the Fediverse looks like:
>
> You want to socially interact with your friends without a central server
> in the middle? Set up a Fediverse instance, or find an account on somebody
> else’s, follow your friends on other instances and microblog (and more)
> away.
>
> So if the BBC wanted to do that, for example, they would (and have) set up
> bbc.social, in addition to their primary website at bbc.com.
>
> 2. In contrast, the vision of the “Social Web” is broader and less
> “separate” from the rest of the web.
>
> E.g. Wikipedia says "The social web encompasses how websites and software
> are designed and developed in order to support and foster social
> interaction.” [1]
>
> So if the BBC wanted to be part of the “Social Web”, for example, they
> would augment/change bbc.com to be a first-class social web participant
> rather than setting up a separate fediverse site.
>
> 3. Roughly agree so far?
>
> But what does that mean exactly? How would bbc.com look exactly if it
> were a first-class participant of the “social web” that “supports and
> fosters social interaction”?
>
> I know what I would want to do … but there are a bunch of
> conventions/protocols/standards missing to do that. On the other hand,
> nobody is really working on those, at least not here, so perhaps my vision
> is different from other’s vision.
>
> I’d appreciate pointers or explanations that outline various points of
> view on how the “social web” would ideally look like, and also how the
> fediverse could morph into it over time. Assuming people think that is
> still a worthwhile goal.
>
> (With apologies to the BBC for using them as my example vehicle here …
> obviously it has nothing to do with the BBC per se)
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> Johannes.
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_web
>
>
> Johannes Ernst
>
> Fediforum <https://fediforum.org/>
> Dazzle Labs <https://dazzlelabs.net/>
>