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:
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.
