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

Bob,
Daniel,

Hello. You might find interesting the recent Web Share recommendation by the Web Applications Working Group:

https://www.w3.org/TR/web-share/


Best regards,
Adam

________________________________
From: Daniel Hernandez <daniel@degu.cl>
Sent: Monday, January 1, 2024 11:45 AM
To: Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us>
Cc: public-swicg@w3.org <public-swicg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: The "Social Web" vs the "Fediverse"


Hi Bob,

Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> writes:

> 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.)

I just read your text above, and I wanted to comment on it. To me, share
links are a sign of bad design. The main problem with sharing links is
that they are vendor-dependent. To facilitate the sharing of their
contents, websites end with several links to specific vendor platforms
where you can share the contents. Since websites end up giving publicity
to a reduced number of vendor platforms, a reduced set of vendors and
this way to share content gets reinforced. This is a vicious
circle. Instead, websites should not worry about the way content is
shared, nor the vendor platforms that are popular nowadays but declare a
permalink. We just need this:

<link rel="bookmark" href="http://example.com/bookmark/123/" />

This declarative design will allow websites to last. Following the
declarative design you do not need to change your website after a vendor
like Twitter changes its name to X. It should be the responsibility of
the browser to do something with those links. When you right-click on
the link, the browser should ask you how you want to share that content
(and remember your previous decisions). Unfortunately, people (and
vendors) make things complicated and vendor-dependent.

Best,
Daniel