Re: Towards a Unified Open Social Web Spec

Hi Melvin,

Please don't be put off there's still lots of furtile ground within
ActivityPub and JSON-LD, and extensions to Activity Streams to bring
existing extensions https://swicg.github.io/extensions-policy/ within a
meta framework, where the nonstandardized can be "standardised based on
source or destination domain and a JSON-LD description.

I am not sure what the others in SWICG will think of this as my ideas are
generally not well received but its one of several ideas I have been
looking at inorder to standardise the non standardizable and bring about
interop using meta descriptors.

Kind regards,

Aaron Gray

On Tuesday 27 August 2024, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>


-- 
Aaron Gray - @AaronNGray@fosstodon.org | @aaronngray@threads.net

Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher,
Information Theorist, Amataur Computer Scientist and Environmentalist and
Climate Science Disseminator.