Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008
Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years.
Here’s how Even Prodromou, co-author of ActivityPub, glowingly and self-promotionally describes himself on the foundation’s Team page:
Evan made the first-ever post on the social web in May 2008.
Yeah, fuck this noise.
The web has been social for a very long time, and it’s astonishingly brazen for ActivityWeb partisans to move to claim the banner for themselves just because your average web user doesn’t understand what the hell is a “fediverse”. I know it drives ActivityWeb partisans batshit that everyone just says “Mastodon” because that’s the single most popular (if I can even use such a word in this context) ActivityWeb implementation, but the answer isn’t to degrade and disdain the years of social web that existed well before ActivityPub ever became a thing.
ActivityPub partisans want the protocol and social media timelines to eat the web. Just look back at last January’s debate between the author of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress and an expert on designing for online community who literally wrote the book on the subject, released in 2001—seven years before Prodromou thinks the social web even existed.
What the thirteen-hour conversation (if you include that technically it began last night but didn’t really get going until this morning) made me wonder is what became the title of this post: is ActivityPub a thing that the IndieWeb community just seems reflexively to think should be implemented everywhere, without necessarily thinking through the implications in advance, in much the same way as Silicon Valley thinks about A.I.?
It’s one thing to argue that ActivityPub is “the future of the social web” (as Ben does, and as I hope it isn’t), but it’s an altogether different bit of self-puffery and disrespect to claim that ActivityPub is the social web.
Blogs were the social web. Friendster was the social web. MySpace was the social web. Twitter was the social web. With the exception of blogs, this wasn’t cross-platform sociality, but it nonetheless was the social web. You don’t build the future of the social web by sweeping the bones of all the prior art of web sociality under the carpet.
What the ActivityWeb partisans want is the timeline-ization of everything, where all contexts collapse but we’re supposed to celebrate because it’s a distributed collapse that no one entity can own. Meanwhile, those of us with blogs have all this time been pretty well distributed, no one entity owns us, we chatter back and forth all the time, and no context collapses.
Dave’s suggestion is to “pick another more humble name.”
Mine is to pick another goal.
Addenda
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Of course, the social internet writ large pre-dates the web itself, if for no other reason than the tumultuous existence of the beast that was Usenet, and that was both distributed and not owned by any one entity, to boot.
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An organization claiming the 25-year mantle of the social web exclusively for ActivityPub is a far more brazen act of quasi-IP transgression (that’s Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol) than that whole, dumb kerfuffle between WordPress and WP Engine.
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This ended up on Hacker News and on Lemmy, and given the first comment I saw on the latter was from someone who clearly had only read the pull quote and not the actual post, I will be saving my sanity by not reading these threads.