Holy Hell, the Social Web Did Not Begin in 2008

The social web was blogs. That kind of peaked around 2008 and fizzled out after Google Reader was shut down a few years later. Which would be around the time Twitter and Facebook emerged. Before that you had things like various messengers ICQ, MSN, AOL, etc. that are long forgotten. And before that you had NNTP, which some people might still remember is where all the action used to be in the nineties. Before the web took off, you had things like gopher. But that never really took off and kind of was squeezed in between the early web and the BBSes of the nineteen eighties. Several of those things were popularized in popular culture (movies, etc.). You had War Games in the eighties. You've got Mail in the nineties. The social network. Etc.

In short, the social web has been around for decades in various forms. Mastodon has yet to make any impact in popular culture. I wouldn't necessarily call Mastodon very modern. It lacks basic security features (like content signatures or end to end encryption) and it's based on a random thing that W3C standardized some decades ago that never really took off otherwise. It wouldn't be too hard make it a bit more modern. But there's an odd resistance against doing sane things like that in the mastodon community. It's a very conservative community looking backwards at the past and not the future.

In my opinion, the most interesting part of that website is the author's self-presentation: https://slow.dog/

I don't really care if you think that someone has appropriated a term you think they don't deserve. I do care and support any movement that has the goal of detoxifying the social media scene.

If we're just talking web, I'm old enough to remember web rings [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Usenet was federated. And it is old...

Then there is https://irc-galleria.net which to me is clearly social media started in 2000... And I think there might be some older sites.

I have memories of computer mediated social networks that extend back to about 1982 or so. For a long time, I got messages from friends I met there at this email address

  inhp4!chinet!ka9dgx

I belonged to APCU, a user group even longer than that. This web of social computer users extends back into the 1950s before me with organizations like SHARE[1]. Founded in 1955.

[1] https://www.share.org/About/About-Us

>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)

Then what it is? I think ActivityPub is the good start. Imo Fediverse is the most exciting thing on the Internet since Bitcoin.

>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.

Blogs were and are the only true decentralized and distributed social platform; in the early days of the commercial internet, people thought that the prevalent social platform would be something like Atom/RSS where you would be distributing content in a decentralized fashion e.g. Blogosphere and not concentrate everything in a centralized fashion ala Medium or other similar platforms. Even Blogger and Substack were and are steps in a good direction since they are not per se centralized.

Friendster, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were the opportunistic social networking projects because it was easier to centralize everything under one host and under one management because it's easier to control the platform that way. Powerful distributed social networking protocols didn't exist and it wasn't clear how they would work but now picture is getting clearer. Project like aforementioned ActivityPub and Web Monetization[0] are decent attempts at trying to reclaim back the control of your digital social interactions because everything is getting easier now: cross-platform interaction, migrating your data(content and contacts) from one platform to another etc. etc.

[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/web-monetization...

It's a shame that it's such a taboo analogy to use in professional situations, because I've found explaining things to friends via "the Pornhub analogy" to be the final thing that makes them 'click' when explaining similar things relating to the web.

E.g. "I don't get it, what's the difference between git and github? Well, it's the same as the difference between porn and pornhub. Oooooh I get it now."

Same here. What's the difference between the 'Social Web(™)' and the internet as a place full of social "web" spaces? Well, it's the same as the difference between the 'PornHub(™)' and the internet as a place full of porn "hubs".

Sorry, I'll let myself out.

I really wish .plan files and the finger protocol had won this battle

Who cares what they call it? Anyone that cares about decentralized social networking and is serious about it is on Nostr by now anyway. Let them say whatever they want in their cold, lonely, dark corners, which they've all secluded themselves in lording over their instance fiefdoms as they break the very federation they claim to be building.

I'd go back even further and say Napster was the original social net. You had to kill time somehow while downloading MP3's slowly. Might as well chat with folks who like the same music you did!

I don't see much issue with using the term in the sense defined by the W3C[0], particuarly for a group developing technology around that definition. It doesn't mean the term can't also have a broader/colloquial meaning (web that is social). Same with the semantic web.

> shit on everything else that’s been the social web

> fuck this noise

> it’s astonishingly brazen for ActivityWeb partisans to move to claim the banner for themselves

Maybe this hostility towards their use of the term stems largely from already being in a position of resentment towards them? It seems disproportionate to me when as far as I can tell it's a non-profit group with positive goals, and I've heard positive things of those involved, but maybe I'm missing some reason to hate them?

[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/

ActivityPub, the Fediverse and all of that are great places to go and discuss ActivityPub, the Fediverse and all of that. That's pretty much it.

EDIT: this was a snarky comment that didn't add anything, can't delete anymore but can still edit, so here goes.

Too busy too read, we're developing Web 9.0 over here.

It seems blogs weren't social networks in the way Friendster was. Average people didn't have a blog. Creating a Friendster account was much easier.