"When the web – and its browsers – were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the #W3C to secure even more dominance. As the web turned into Tom Eastman's "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four," that kind of collusion became much easier."
"#ActivityPods is a combination of two #W3C standards: #ActivityPub, and the #Solid specification. The first standard is for data federation and networks, the second is for data storage and access. The ideals of both projects put together create a compelling vision: data control, across user applications, in service to communication across the web."
In order for the open social web to happen at scale, lots of companies and apps, big and small, need to adopt #ActivityPub. Threads is the largest player so far to do this and the implications are huge.
Why is #Threads doing this? Is federation just another feature or is it foundational to their entire experience? How is the Threads team thinking about moderation, monetization and privacy in these early days and going forward?
I asked @rklambo and @pcottle, two thoughtful and genuine leaders on the Threads team who joined me on the latest episode of #DotSocial. Check it out on our #PeerTube instance or wherever you get your podcasts.
maybe you were trying to push them in this direction, but what we need from somebody as powerful as #meta is help building a decentralized #w3c standard to transfer money (not crypto). as easy as sending $5 from me@mybank.com to you@yourbank.com with the ability to build apps around it. To directly pay for servers, apps, media etc. I don't see how it would help them but it's so needed and it would probably require their resources and connections to make happen. #FedNow
Re: AI and the future of Web accessibility Guidelines
'Absolute statements such as “it will never work”, and “AI will be better than people at X” are not helpful to the conversation because it is very unlikely to be an absolute result in the end. Different contexts, different machine-learning approaches, and different data-sets will produce different results.'
I’m the current editor of the Vision for W3C and helped get it across the line this year to reach #w3cAB (W3C Advisory Board @ab) consensus to publish as an official Group Note, the first official Note that the AB (Advisory Board) has ever published.
I’m very proud of this milestone, as I and a few others including many on the AB¹, have been working on it for a few years in various forms, and with the broader W3C Vision TF² (Task Force) for the past year.
W3C also recently announced the Vision for W3C in their news feed:
One of the key goals of this document was to capture the spirit of why we are at #W3C and our shared values & principles we use to guide our work & decisions at W3C.
If you work with any groups at W3C, anything from a Community Group (CG) to a Working Group (WG), I highly recommend you read this document from start to finish.
See what resonates with you, if there is anything that doesn’t sound right to you, or if you see anything missing that you feel exemplifies the best of what W3C is, please file an issue or a suggestion:
Check that list to see if your concerns or suggestions are already captured, and if so, add an upvote or comment accordingly.
Our goal is to eventually publish this document as an official W3C Statement, with the consensus of the entire #w3cAC (W3C Advisory Committee).
One key aspect which the Vision touches on but perhaps too briefly is what I see as the fundamental purpose of why we do the work we do at W3C, which in my opinion is:
To create & facilitate user-first interoperable standards that improve the web for humanity
“Interoperability: We verify the fitness of our specifications through open test suites and actual implementation experience, because we believe the purpose of standards is to enable independent interoperable implementations.”
These are both excellent, and yet, I think we can do better, with adding some sort of explicit statement between those two about that “We will” create & facilitate user-first interoperable standards that improve the web for humanity.
In the coming weeks I’ll be reflecting how we (the VisionTF) can incorporate that sort of imperative “We will” statement about interoperable standards into the Vision for W3C, as well as working with the AB and W3C Team on defining a succinct updated mission & purpose for W3C based on that sort of input and more.
In a related effort, I have also been leading the AB’s “3Is Priority Project³” (Interoperability and the Role of Independent Implementations), which is a pretty big project to define and clarify what each of those three Is mean, with respect to each other and Incubation, which is its own Priority Project⁴.
As part of the 3Is project, the first “I” I’ve been focusing on has unsurprisingly been “Interoperable”. As with other #OpenAB projects, our work on understanding interoperability, its aspects, and defining what do we mean by interoperable is published and iterated on the W3C’s public wiki:
This is still a work in progress, however it’s sufficiently structured to take a look if interoperability is something you care about or have opinions about.
In particular, if you know of definitions of interoperable or interoperability that resonate and make sense to you, or articles or blog posts about interoperability that explore various aspects, I am gathering such references so we can make sure the W3C’s definition of interoperable is both well-stated, and clearly reflects a broader industry understanding of interoperability.
Last week I participated @W3.org (@w3c) #W3CAC (W3C Advisory Committee¹), #W3CAB (W3C Advisory Board²@ab), and #W3CBoard (Board of the W3C Corporation³) meetings in Hiroshima, Japan.
The AC (Advisory Committee) meeting was two days, followed by two days of AB and Board meetings which started with a half-day joint session (including the #w3CTAG), then separate meetings to focus on their own tasks & discussions.
The W3C Process⁴ describes the twice a year AC (Advisory Committee) Meetings⁵. In addition to members of the AC (one primary and one alternate per W3C Member Organization), the meetings are open to the AB (Advisory Board), the W3C Board, the W3C TAG (W3C Technical Architecture Group⁶@tag), Working Group⁷ chairs, Chapter⁸ staff, and this time also a W3C Invited Expert designated observer⁹.
The AC currently meets in the Spring on its own and a shorter meeting in the Fall as part of the annual #W3CTPAC (W3C Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee¹⁰ meetings). The existence, dates, and location of the event are public¹¹, however the agenda, minutes, and registrants are generally Member-confidential. Since those individual links have their own access controls, I collected them on a publicly-viewable wiki page for easier discovery & navigation (if you work for a W3C Member Organization¹²):
Most of the W3C meeting materials and discussions were also W3C Member-confidential, however many of the presentations are publicly viewable, and a few more may be shared publicly after the fact.
Myself and others at #W3C who believe in pushing for more openness and transparency in standards work, even (or especially) governance of said work, will be doing our best to work with others at W3C to continue shifting our work accordingly.
Aside: I started the #OpenAB project when I was first elected to the AB (Advisory Board) in 2013, documenting it on the publicly viewable W3C Wiki, and updated it with the help of others since: https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB#Open_AB
Like most conferences, I got as much out of side conversations at breaks (AKA hallway track¹³) and meals as I did from scheduled talks and panels.
For now, here are the events, slides, and videos which are publicly viewable that provide an interesting glimpse into some of the topics discussed:
🖼 slides: https://w3c.github.io/adapt/presentations/ac2024/ Warning: the proposed use of .well-known therein is IMO a bad mistake. Unnecessary reinvention (most handled by existing rel values¹⁴), more complex to author (requires sidefiles¹⁵), harder to publish (requires site admin root access), likely to become inaccurate (Ruby’s postulate¹⁶), and fragile (site admins frequently break .well-known for individual pages). A full critique likely requires its own blog post.
This specification describes how to generate digital #signatures for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of #VerifiableCredentials using the BBS signature scheme (👀 BBS is the acronym of its creators: Boneh, Boyen and Shacham).
All you've ever wanted to know about what me and my team do in Communications at the World Wide Web Consortium @w3c in one single evergreen slide deck!
The March 2024 update has the full-time equivalent rise from 2.80 to 2.90 😅 and updated bios slide.
A rant about social protocols Introduction
Recently, I read an article that talked about that someone, tried to do a new platform called “Content Nation”. This is a German platform that allows people to write content (to be honest, I don’t really know what it does.) and publish it. And recently, the creators tried to implement the ActivityPub protocol. They did so by using the official documentation provided by @w3c.
The problem was that the last time the official documentation was updated, was in 23 January 2018. So, this means that a lot of new standards that other platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, etc... use are not written in there. But this isn’t the fault of the service developers, this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards in the industry such as Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes, and Opt-Out for Search…
The thing, is that this led to a lot of people thinking that this site was some kind of scraper and started making the crawler crash or, even worse, someone tried to load CP inside the platform. BlueSky
Recently, BlueSky opened its AT protocol for everyone to use and federate, due to this, there has been a bit of a discussion inside these platforms. This made me think, why did BlueSky feel the necessity to make another protocol? If there is one already, why do we need another one that competes, wasn’t the objective of protocols to allow interoperability?
So, I did a bit of digging and I found two things. The first one is that they wanted so solve a few things that AP does not support officially (here are the main points, not all of them):
Account portability. A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.
Algorithmic choice. Algorithms dictate what we see and who we can reach. We must have control over our algorithms if we're going to trust in our online spaces. The AT Protocol includes an open algorithms mode so users have more control over their experience.
A lot of these problems are already present on ActivityPub for a long time. The account portability of ActivityPub let’s say it’s not intuitive. You have to do a lot of things and even then, there are some things like the posts that you make or the favourites that don’t transfer (in the case of favourites you need to transfer them manually, the same for blocks and mutes).
Also, right now 99% if not all software that uses ActivityPub, does not have an algorithm that orders content for you to see, but shows you everything in chronological order (I don’t know if its intentional or if it’s a limit of AP) and the only thing you have to discover topics is trough hashtags that maybe someone forgot to tag.
Furthermore, not to mention that on ActivityPub, you are at the mercy of the server moderators, so this means that if you know someone that is on an instance that is blocked by yours, you won’t be able to talk to them unless you change the instance, which in a way it’s not very decentralized. The other protocols
By doing research, I realized that there are a lot of other protocols (for example Nostr) that have its own implementation of things maybe there are some that are bridged and other not.
Such protocols have different features, for example Nostr allows you to suggest content edit to other people’s posts, move your content easily, etc. How can we solve this?
First, we have to know why all these other companies make their own. I must say, that most of them probably do because AP does not allow customization of posts or the adding of new features for everyone and the fact that it’s not been updated for 6 whole years makes matters worse.
What the developers want, is a protocol that lets them create wherever they want and add everything the want, for example the edit thing that I said the Nostr supports, the only way to add it to AP, would be or only on your software or find another software that is willing to implement that feature, the rest of the market is left behind as well as the users that depending on what it is, they don’t understand.
My solution to this problem would be to add some kind of per user plugin system directly to the AP that allows for devs to implement add-ons that do with the JSON strings that add buttons or scripts at least to send and receive data. As well as to add some kind of CSS support for the posts and profiles. Of course, the point of these is that if you make a platform, and you are the only one using these characteristics, well… but in case that everybody wants to use it and everybody makes their own plugins it would be chaos.
For this, the solution I proposed would be like something you add while the W3C updates the protocol to support a very popular feature. #socialprotocols#nostr#activitypub#W3C#ATprotocol#rant#blogpost#ContentNation
> this is the fault of the W3C that hasn’t been an update to the protocol officially to support the new standards.
There is no "THE" #W3C that maintains or is responsible for evolving the #ActivityPub related specs. There's the #SocialCG, a community group, with representatives (read: volunteers) from the same grassroots movement that is engaged with the #Fediverse, i.e. fedizens.
Going back to the actual point that matters most, to me at least.
What's the total carbon footprint of the advertising and social media-based web? (Not just the highly optimised servers)
The W3C – the standards body of surveillance capitalism – on privacy.
If you had any “privacy principles” to speak of, what would Adobe, Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Bloomberg, Google, Huawei, IAB, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Bilibili, SoftBank, Tencent, Yahoo!, Zoom, etc., be doing on your members list?
Going through some of my old photos. I found the photo where we discussed on May 18, 2004 in New-York (20 years ago), where should be developed the Atom feed format: #W3C or #IETF.
"Here’s the thing: if you were to take the #ActivityPub specification from the #W3C…you’d end up with something that wouldn’t correctly talk to any service. #Mastodon have a dozen or so behaviors that are not in the spec: Webfinger, SharedInbox, Privacy Scopes & Opt-Out for Search…
…these things are almost completely undocumented, and can only be developed by lengthy conversations with people who already built those things."
Give @julian#Github comment some good reactions to show the folks of the #W3C Federated Identity CG that there's more than #BigTech#identity providers to take into account..
This article by folks working on a #SolidProject based app called Liquid Surf mentions the specs of the #W3C Federated Identity Community Group.
And in particular how this CG - having Big Tech members - could improve their specs so that small identity providers are also taken into account properly.