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

> On Dec 26, 2023, at 21:51, Benjamin Goering <ben@bengo.co> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> ActivityPub is a protocol for that.
> An ActivityPub Client would retrieve (see Section 3.2) the ActivityPub Object with URL https://bbc.com.
> An ActivityPub Server MUST then serve an Actor Object if that URL is resolvable via ActivityPub.
> If the retrieved object is an Actor Object, the client can send messages or follows to the inbox linked to from the Actor Object. (Actor objects MUST have an inbox property, see S 4.1).
> If the retrieved object is e.g. an Article, the client can follow the attributedTo relation to an actor to display info about the author and/or show affordances to follow the author.
> 
> Here is an example for a different domain, but, fortunately, the same protocol applies to the rest of ActivityPub Actors on the fediverse.
> ```
> bengo@bengo ~ ⚡  curl -s https://socialweb.coop/ -H 'Accept: application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"' | jq .
> {
>   "type": [
>     "Organization"
>   ],
>   "inbox": "https://socialweb.coop/inbox",
>   "outbox": "https://socialweb.coop/outbox",
>   "id": "https://socialweb.coop/"
> }
> ```
> 
> Does this answer your question?

Not quite what I had in mind.

* I agree that today’s protocol stack can be used in more flexible ways than it commonly is: the www.threads.net vs @user@threads.net being implemented by Meta is an example of separate DNS names.

* But the core of my question was intended to be a few abstraction levels higher: is what we can do with the current protocols all there is to “social web” or what other functionality or user experience do we refer to when we say “social web” instead of what we have today? 

Personally I believe — and I gave some examples — we could support far more types of “social” activities on the web than supported by either proprietary platforms or the ActivityPub Fediverse (or the IndieWeb for that matter) today.

Cheers,



Johannes.



Johannes Ernst

Fediforum <https://fediforum.org/>
Dazzle Labs <https://dazzlelabs.net/>