Tag: Social web
Cultural Heritage Digital Collections: Unwelcome Guests on Social Media, Homeowners on the Social Web
A reflection on digital sovereignty, cultural memory, and the role of memory institutions at a decisive moment for the internet
The web was always social
Diving into the idea of bridging different social networks and protocols like ATproto and ActivityPub to enhance the web. Looking back at my personal web journey, from Web 2.0 to now, emphasizing that building connections can strengthen online communities.
Adding Standard.site Support
At the beginning of February, I wrote about my recent adventures in the ATmosphere. At the time of writing, I was working on adding standard.site support to this website. In the meanwhile, I've finished it and my blog should be fully compliant with the specification.
Flying Into The ATmosphere
Since FOSDEM, I've gone down the rabbit hole of the world of the AT Protocol - or the ATmosphere, as some would say. I've learned about a lot of cool projects, tried some of them, and made my website also a bit more atmospheric. As such, I decided it was worth sharing!
A more social IndieWeb
My entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of December 2025 about the IndieWeb in 2030.
But First, Interoperability
Back in November, I wrote an essay that explored the significance of services like Bridgy Fed, a protocol-level bridge that connects open social platforms. Since then, Ryan Barrett, the builder behind Bridgy Fed, and I have started A New Social: a nonprofit focused on building more cross-protocol tools like the bridge.
My social home on the internet
I moved Mastodon instances and got a cool new internet identity in the process.
Diving into the Atmosphere
Some initial thoughts about Bluesky and the AT protocol.
Diving into the Fediverse (once again…)
A list of interesting links from my recent trip into the Fediverse rabbit hole.
The Untapped Potential of Fediverse Publishing
Long-form publishing has been a mainstay of the Web since the very beginning. As the network adopts it, we have to think about UX.
Introducing Decentralized Social Icons
We're building our own icon font for the Social Web, featuring over 91 logos of projects, protocols, and platforms.
Slowly Pulling out from the Fediverse
Thinking more about why and where I'm putting my thoughts and what I should be spending my online time on.
Social Recommendator update
The IndieWeb as a minimum viable social web ecosystem
I wrote a post as a submission for the W3C's upcoming Workshop on Social Standards: The Future of Business. great post to readargue I believe that these compelling business models exist, and that they are most easily discoverable in the enterprise. However, belief is not demonstration: we must continue to test and iterate them. During this exploration phase, this means that, our software and underlying protocols must be easy to write, adapt and change. Ease of development is more important tha
Silos, the open web, and selfdogfooding
Tantek Çelik has written an important post about silos vs an open, social web: Selfdogfood It's thought-provoking, and worth a read: On Silos vs an Open Social Web. Tantek defines "selfdogfooding" as "using your own creations on your own personal site that you depend on, day to day." That's an important perspective, because for one thing, many of us don't have personal sites anymore, and yet more of us never did. Some of us have social networking profiles, but I wouldn't classify those as sit
Making billions of dollars from the federated social web
Diaspora was pretty exciting. A Kickstarter campaign that promised it all: a platform created "for everyone to have full control over their data and to empower people in to become responsible, secure, and social Internet dwellers". They raised over $200,000, which at the time was the largest Kickstarter funding round ever. Neat! Yesterday, Diaspora announced that they were becoming a community project. That means that the wider open source community will be responsible for its direction; the or
Tent
Tent appeared out of the blue today: a protocol and reference server implementation for individual-to-individual distributed social networking. Or to put it another way, Tent is a way to host your own social data - posting and reading from as many apps as you want. Here's their announcement, and here's the GitHub repository. The Tent manifesto is right-on: Every user has the right to control their own data. This includes who can access the data they create and how that data is later used. Eve
Here's what Google+ could have been
Confession: I want to like Google+. I think competition is a great thing, and Google is in a unique position to do something fascinating with social platforms. It's also significant that a lot of really brilliant people from the decentralized web community - Chris Messina, Will Norris and Stephen Paul Weber, for example - now work at Google. (Not to mention Elgg's Evan Winslow.) I have nothing but respect for those guys. And, hey, I'll admit that I'm a little envious that they get to work on it.
Occupy Facebook: innovation in the era of social protest
Wired reports that a group involved in the Occupy movement is working on its own decentralized social networking platform: “I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest. Dave Winer notes that it probably won't succeed: Internet In principle, I agree with Dave. It's a fundamental mistake that a lot of people
Patronism and monetizing the social web
This post is adapted from something I wrote on Google+. There are more comments over there; also see Evan Promodou's riff on the same idea. Google+'s combination of streams and circles works. So here's something I've been mulling over for a while: I really like Patronism's central idea. Rather than buying an album, you subscribe to an artist's feed, and get access to songs, photos etc as they're produced. That makes a lot more sense to me as a 21st century model for music. I also follow a lot
httpID: adding identity to standard HTTP requests
This is a more technical post than I've been writing lately. I'm considering splitting out into two blog channels; let me know if you'd prefer this. This is a request for comments and ideas. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks! One of the advantages of the decentralized social web, as opposed to a social network (federated or otherwise), is that identity can, theoretically, be shared with any web page, anywhere. That page doesn't have to be running any particular software
Where to find me at SXSW
I'm stoked to be at this year's South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin. As well as enjoying the talks, attending events and enjoying wandering around one of my favorite cities in the world, I'm appearing as part of two panels: The Why & How Of Decentralized Web Identity with Blaine Cook and Christian Sandvig (March 12, 11am in the TX Ballroom 2-4 at the Hyatt) Wikileaks, the Web, and the Long, Strange Journey of Journalism with James Moore and Scott Braddock (March 15, 9:30am in th
For your consideration at SXSW Interactive
I’ve submitted a talk for South By Southwest 2011: Building the User-centered Web By establishing a general standard for social application interactions, the services and technologies used to make connections become less relevant; the Internet is people, one big social network, and users no longer have to worry about how they connect. We can all get on with communicating and collaborating in contextually appropriate ways. In this talk, I'll discuss how to build a decentralized, user-centered w
Adapting to the real world
I’ve spent the last week in a series of very interesting mind-sharing meetings. First, the American Association of Colleges & Universities flew me into Washington DC to discuss the future of assessment in higher education with education professionals as well as new techsphere friends like Silona Bonewald and Amber Case. Second, Michael Byrne from Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations invited me to speak there about the open, social web, the notes for which I’ll write up
Top 10 blogs about the social web
Blogs.com just published a top 10 list of blogs about the social web that I wrote for them. People are already beginning to comment with blogs they’d love to see added to the list – if you know of one that I missed out, please feel free to add it or link in with your own blog post. This isn’t, of course, meant to be the top 10 social web blogs ever – these are just some of the blogs that I keep coming back to regularly. (I had more that I dearly wanted to add, but don’t update quite often enoug