Are We Living Up to the Promise of the Open Social Web?

Convener: Johannes Ernst (@j12t@j12t.social, @j12t.org)

Notes

• https://opensocialweb.net (Johannes’s very early draft of a definition)

• The term Open Social Web seems to have won in the press over Fediverse

• No we are not fulfilling the promise of Open Social Web from the discussion that happened in the “The off-ramp: Easy switching for creators. Peertube synchronization, micro.blog PESOS approach, what else?” – Alexis

• It’s the comments but it’s also attention via boosts – William Maggos

• More broadly, I think we should be able to post content in reply to content. The promise of the Fediverse is actual social interaction and communities that aren’t just sales funnels. So we should have features that enable us to socialise.

  • Counterpoint: There are some contexts where it is valuable to have a bit more friction in between delivery and response. There ARE reasons for people to use “the web” for broadcast, promotion. It becomes a problem when we mash everything together as “social web” without putting guardrails around the context of the moment. In shorter terms - letting the entire web become the comments section was not always for the best.

• Back in the old days, community groups used facebook, which has groups and events. Mastodon doesn’t really have those things, which makes it harder for community groups to organize using open software – Michelle

• We have lost client vs server understanding. People think 5 big websites are the internet now. – Johanna

• We are fighting 20 years of breakage of that relationship, in favour of the “platform”

• The browser is supposed to work on behalf of the user, we need to get back to that.

• Live video & video in general is an Open thing that all kinds of things can consume it with.

• Web vs internet.

• The power of hyperlinks - they made everything linked. This is why walled gardens like Facebook fall down because they are not connected in that way.

• Younger generations have lost a sense of awe and wonder at the entire world being out there and available to us - and that is not true in the app world.

• Younger generations have forgotten how to use the web because they just use a few social apps. Open Social Web needs to bridge that gap and open the door to the beauty of the millions and billions of pages out there.

• The whole web is social - the idea that there is a subset that is ’the social web’ is in error, I think. The real divide is between that part of the web that is ‘open’ and that which is ’not open’ – Stephen Downes

• Even reading news is social, we should choose what we’re reading and share it. Younger generations are going away from social media and moving to private messages, so the Open Social Web should be for them because what’s driven that is the growth of algorithms – William Maggos

• The main requirement users have is that it’s easy to use; easy to connect with friends, arrange to do something etc. And we fail at that. The people building here need to make it easy. We can’t get people to come over unless we meet that requirement. The reason we’ve stalled out is that we’ve got all the early adopters already, everyone else doesn’t want to put up with bugs and workarounds and it being janky. – Kirsten Lambertsen

• Social media is more like watching TV shows now where you just get random stuff and someone else decides what you see. Often people aren’t even following people anymore, they just see what the algorithm presents to them. How do we give people the activity back so they want to follow people and discover new people without handing over control to an algorithm. How do we push people to enjoy that part again? – Jan Schütze

• Johannes doesn’t own a TV!!!! Alexis doesn’t either! Neither does Lexicaleigh! Brave! JohannA has also been TV-free since moving out of my parents’ house at 18. Mark Corbett Wilson has never owned a tv.

• We need to move beyond “we built a cool thing” to defining the purpose of the community and the connections people want to make and figure out which of the things that already exist fits that. Social is too broad a term and doesn’t help. Our communication isn’t just reductive to word tokens being exchanged, there is context and nuance and meaning. Find the right tools for the job rather than trying to shoehorn everything into a platform or a protocol. – Johanna

• We also need to be OK with the fact that there is a large “community” of people who do want relatively guided content delivery. Billions… – Jaz-Michael King

• We have stretgic competition going on and we should not be adopting the mindset and words of the opponent.

• Yes and we still need a shared language and it’s harder to communicate with people in the Big Tech silos if we have to teach them a whole new language to even begin that conversation – Alexis

• Our understanding of community has changed, now it means platforms a lot of the time. In the Fediverse you join a community by joining a platform. We’re trying to use large platforms to have what used to be small group conversations. We need to ask what open can do that closed can’t. How do we get back to open networks without having to put everything on one platform. – Stephen Downes

  • we really need to flip that - a platform is just one tool for a comm

• If someone can turn off your communication, you are not in “community.” – Mark Corbett Wilson

• well … you may be trying or you may be a member of a community - but your community is being corrupted if “someone else” can do that. – Johanna

• Even the smartest computer graduates can’t conceive of an open network now because they’ve not been exposed to it.

• We need to broaden the people who are involved in these discussions and narrow what we provide - specifics that meet specific needs.

• Open is inherently easier (HTML) but then open and social are at odds because while it can be easy to put a post on the open web but people can’t easily find it. That’s why walled gardens have worked so well. People want things served up on a platter but if I create an open site nobody can find it. – Gabe Kangas

• the point of social imo is democratizing discovery – William Maggos