what is web

the many webs interpretation, what "web" means to me, and how do we build the "social web"

published around 2024-09-26

the leadup to this

How we move forward past these transparent takeover attempts is a conversation I have yet to see within the ActivityPub sphere, and perhaps that of itself is an answer to the question

that was said by someone in response to the social web foundation launching recently, while using the terms "social web", "fediverse", and "activitypub" as synonyms of each other. my response:

would it be correct or accurate to categorize this as a matter of governance? in that case, who are the constituents? imo the constituents are people who want to be social on the web, and software projects that let them do that, and whatever service providers enable the whole thing

the other thing that leads me to this post is my own musing at roughly the same time (but unrelated to the first thing) about the differences between "fediverse" and "social web", which are pretty clearly not synonyms to me. but that got me thinking: what even is the web? (so this is kind of a follow-up to that.)

the many webs interpretation

the "social web"

we define "social web" as "people who want to be social on the web", but this probably depends on what you consider “web”, because we certainly already have many many ways to be social on the internet. there are a few definitions that could work, but at its core i think that “web” means “anything with links”.

"the web" (or more precisely, the "hypertext web")

in a more practical sense, it's “anything accessible by a web browser”, although that definition is a bit circular. the most popular "web browsers", things like chrome and firefox let you browse the http and https webs. primarily using html documents or representations, so i think the “web” most people are familiar with can be classified as “http or https for the protocol, html for the primary data format”. so something like “http(s)+html” or to pull from those acronyms the “hypertext web”

the "semantic web" or "linked data web"

then separately but partially overlapping you have the “semantic web” or “linked data web” that deals with semantic links between things that are more “data” than “document”, kind of like the difference between the IANA media types for text/* versus application/*.

what "web" means to me

so idk, maybe it's a line in the sand, and certainly the concept of http gateways blurs it even more, but “web” to me is about publishing things that link to other things, in a way that most people can be expected to see them and make use of them and even link back. this makes things like atproto not really “web” until the moment they are (re)published through a gateway (either a web service or a web app) that makes them available over the “web” that most people can access with a “web browser” (currently the http family of protocols). in practice, the "web" part of atproto is bsky.app.

this line in the sand definition makes it clear that something like gemini is not part of “the” web that most people think about (the hypertext web) but is instead the “gemini web” that is browsable by a “gemini web browser”, and so on for other protocols.

it also goes a long way to explain why the semweb/ldweb has not seen as much adoption as some people would like — it is in actuality a different “web” than the “hypertext web”, and it is more of a coincidence that hypertext browsers also have the capability to load semantic/ld resources over the http(s) protocols they share in common

conclusion: how do we build the "social web"

so conclusion. if we say “web” is primarily “hypertext web” then the question becomes “how can we communicate socially with/around hypertext documents or appviews?” which is a different question than “how can we develop a network protocol that lets us be social”. if it were only a matter of the latter, we already have smtp/xmpp/etc. as other "social network protocols". and if a protocol were to be defined for the fediverse, it would also fall into that category of "social network protocols", with the distinction that several softwares in this network also publish your posts as "web resources", so they're not entirely removed from the "social web". they just can't claim a full mantle to it, because they don't give you full control over how you publish those resources to the web.