The web was always social

Bridging protocols is how we preserve that without locking into any one silo.

Following my last blog post about what I’ve been working on in the past month, @davew and I had an interesting conversation around what it means to develop for the web, and to work to improve the web.

My recommendation for Automattic and Bluesky.

It’s really simple

It got me to think:

Does building bridges between social networks like ATproto or the Fediverse, and reading tools like the WordPress.com Reader, contribute to improving the web?

Given that I chose to work on just that for a month, you know my answer. 🙂 But our conversation made me think. We may not have the same views on what the web is, and what it should be.

I am a child of the Web 2.0. The Social Web was my first real entry into the web. I started participating and getting involved with the web when the “web 2.0” term was coined, when online forum boards were popular. I became a forum mod, I started building phpBB themes, I learned how to do that on forums. A year later, I started blogging and quickly found myself in small community of like-minded people commenting on each other’s blog posts every day (aka a blog ring). In parallel, I learned how to build my own WordPress theme by asking questions in the WordPress.org support forums.

I am now old enough to say “back in my day”, I felt part of multiple communities of like-minded people. Those people were the reason I kept coming back. Those small communities are what makes the web interesting to me.

While some may think of the social web as the chase for the most Likes, Retweets, and overall baiting for engagement, I see it as a group of individuals exchanging ideas, communities.

And more generally, I see the web as social by default. Although maybe not for much longer, the web is made for humans exchanging ideas.

In that way, “social web” really should just be “the web”.

The tools, technologies, protocols, and standards used to help people find each other continuously evolve.

20 years ago, the tools were fewer, RSS, blogging, and forums were at the center of many communities. Today, the landscape is fragmented into an increasing number of different corporate tools and services. Some of them were clearly introduced not to make the web better, but to make money (surprise, surprise).

But that doesn’t mean we should thrive towards a web with only one tech behind it all, or that the social web has to be just RSS. I think there is room for new standards to grow.

New protocols like ActivityPub and ATproto were introduced because they add additional interaction layers on top of basic content consumption. They make it easier to Like, reply, and build community in different ways.They are still the web, though. They make up a place to create, consume, and interact like everywhere else.

As more and more people use those tools, gaps start appearing though:

• ActivityPub is great, but its standard needs to grow to make it easier to create, consume, interact, from different clients. It’s why the W3C Social Web Community Group and its ActivityPub API task force work to address the gaps real clients run into.
• ATproto works well, but needs to grow for folks who don’t want to be limited to 300 characters. This is why folks are working on implement support for long-form content with standard.site.

That said, because those protocols aren’t perfect, it doesn’t mean we should drop them. Quite the opposite.

I think that building bridges between protocols can help all of them grow and close their respective gaps.

• Now that we use the ActivityPub API in the WordPress.com Reader, we can follow the work of the API taskforce and chime in with real-life examples.
• Now that you can publish long-form content to ATproto from your WordPress site, we’ll see more and more long posts on ATproto services like Bluesky, and it will help Bluesky implement better support for long-form content in their apps.

By building these bridges, we aren’t fracturing the web; we are pushing the underlying standards to mature.

All in all, I truly believe that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, and I’ll continue to work and experiment with all those tools, in the hopes that the web can stay a good place for humans for a little bit longer.

To put my money where my mouth is, this post is available via RSS, via a REST API query, via ActivityPub, as a Bluesky short record (app.bsky.feed.post) with a link to the full post, and as a standard.site long-form record (site.standard.document). 🙂