February 1, 2025

The social web is the web

I registered this site in September of last year, when an organization formed using the name "social web" to mean a specific protocol. There are others, some older and newer, some more broadly used, and others that are new and innovative. But ActivityPub is by far not the only approach to the social web.

The only requirement imho is that the ideas represented there are web-able, meaning they can link to other sites. And they must interop! It's amazing to me that people throw the term web onto services that are actually silos. Very 1984.

Support for links is the basic requirement of the web, the same way we say feeds are required to be a podcast. If you don't support links not only aren't you the web, you're anti-web.

This is important because the "social" side of it is where that ignorance propagated. We started off with a network of writers, and ended up with business models of oligarchs. It's time to start building webs like we mean it and damn all the wannabe-billionaires. The web is not just a name, it's an idea, a basic value, a way of working with each other.

Dave Winer, Feb 2025