Then there is https://irc-galleria.net which to me is clearly social media started in 2000... And I think there might be some older sites.
inhp4!chinet!ka9dgx
I belonged to APCU, a user group even longer than that. This web of social computer users extends back into the 1950s before me with organizations like SHARE[1]. Founded in 1955.E.g. "I don't get it, what's the difference between git and github? Well, it's the same as the difference between porn and pornhub. Oooooh I get it now."
Same here. What's the difference between the 'Social Web(™)' and the internet as a place full of social "web" spaces? Well, it's the same as the difference between the 'PornHub(™)' and the internet as a place full of porn "hubs".
Sorry, I'll let myself out.
Then what it is? I think ActivityPub is the good start. Imo Fediverse is the most exciting thing on the Internet since Bitcoin.
>Blogs were the social web. Friendster was the social web. MySpace was the social web. Twitter was the social web. With the exception of blogs, this wasn’t cross-platform sociality, but it nonetheless was the social web.
Blogs were and are the only true decentralized and distributed social platform; in the early days of the commercial internet, people thought that the prevalent social platform would be something like Atom/RSS where you would be distributing content in a decentralized fashion e.g. Blogosphere and not concentrate everything in a centralized fashion ala Medium or other similar platforms. Even Blogger and Substack were and are steps in a good direction since they are not per se centralized.
Friendster, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were the opportunistic social networking projects because it was easier to centralize everything under one host and under one management because it's easier to control the platform that way. Powerful distributed social networking protocols didn't exist and it wasn't clear how they would work but now picture is getting clearer. Project like aforementioned ActivityPub and Web Monetization[0] are decent attempts at trying to reclaim back the control of your digital social interactions because everything is getting easier now: cross-platform interaction, migrating your data(content and contacts) from one platform to another etc. etc.
[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/web-monetization...
> shit on everything else that’s been the social web
> fuck this noise
> it’s astonishingly brazen for ActivityWeb partisans to move to claim the banner for themselves
Maybe this hostility towards their use of the term stems largely from already being in a position of resentment towards them? It seems disproportionate to me when as far as I can tell it's a non-profit group with positive goals, and I've heard positive things of those involved, but maybe I'm missing some reason to hate them?
In short, the social web has been around for decades in various forms. Mastodon has yet to make any impact in popular culture. I wouldn't necessarily call Mastodon very modern. It lacks basic security features (like content signatures or end to end encryption) and it's based on a random thing that W3C standardized some decades ago that never really took off otherwise. It wouldn't be too hard make it a bit more modern. But there's an odd resistance against doing sane things like that in the mastodon community. It's a very conservative community looking backwards at the past and not the future.