Towards a Unified Open Social Web Spec

Hi All,

The open social web is making great strides, but we're seeing varied
efforts with different trade-offs.

ActivityPub is federating at scale, reaching millions with solid
moderation. Nostr, though smaller with 10k-20k DAUs, offers a rich
playground for R&D with advanced features like zaps, encryption, and app
portability. IndieWeb is driven by passionate folks focused on interop,
specs, and running code. Solid blends social with personal data storage,
standards-compliant and hopefully WG-bound soon.

Yet, we lack a unified data model to bridge these efforts seamlessly. Some
promising bridges exist—Alex Gleason’s “Ditto” between Nostr and
ActivityPub, and Bridgy unifying across systems, even touching Bluesky. But
there's no consistent, extensible, and interoperable spec that allows
everything to just work together.

The promise of standards has often fallen short—things built outside the
standard, or standards not quite fitting needs. For instance, adding a
second "Nip-05" identifier in Nostr could take ages to agree on, despite
being technically simple. Similar issues linger in Solid, even with its
theoretically compliant system.

We’re not reaping the full benefits of standardization, though they’re
within reach. Maybe it's time for a few of us to craft a unified W3C social
web spec. We need a flexible template where developers can build freely,
rapid prototyping in a permissionless environment, with specs that don’t
require months of consensus. Backward compatibility, unihibited
development, and a an outlet to unlock new waves of creativity, could be
the result of a clean unified social spec

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. (yes, I know xkcd!).

Best,

Melvin