The Social Web Did Not Begin in 2008 | Hacker News Reader

The Social Web Did Not Begin in 2008

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54 pointserlend_sh62 comments

The social web was blogs. That kind of peaked around 2008 and fizzled out after Google Reader was shut down a few years later. Which would be around the time Twitter and Facebook emerged. Before that you had things like various messengers ICQ, MSN, AOL, etc. that are long forgotten. And before that you had NNTP, which some people might still remember is where all the action used to be in the nineties. Before the web took off, you had things like gopher. But that never really took off and kind of was squeezed in between the early web and the BBSes of the nineteen eighties. Several of those things were popularized in popular culture (movies, etc.). You had War Games in the eighties. You've got Mail in the nineties. The social network. Etc.

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.

It was not just blogs. Several specific or general forums [0]. They just were not global.

[0]: nyx.cz as an example

>The social web was blogs.

The social web was mailing lists: a common meeting place for anyone to communicate near-instantly to anyone else that was also interested in the same thing.

The web came along later and made it prettier. But the social web is a soulful concept, not a mechanical one. It doesn't matter what technology was used - as long as people had the purpose and intention to communicate with each other on a common subject, there was a social web of interconnected minds.

By this definition, would the telephone network also be the social web given things like chat room PBXes? Or even telegraphs?

Yes indeed, there were many social networks created during the age of telephony.

Why wouldn't guestbooks, forums, webrings and things like that count? They certainly predated blogs, were on the web, and seemed social enough to me.

An exhaustive list would necessarily include a lot of stuff. But I would consider most of that part of a long tail of stuff that vaguely converged around blog related technology in the early 2000s. So much that blogging became a verb.

IMHO, the "social web" was "forums" (think "phpBB" for example) and the "webrings", that enable to find other website/forums like the one you were on. It was quite usual to see some people refering to other forums in their comments, so it was a way to share a community of forums.

Even if there was no "single personal page", it was quite usual to wander in the same forums on some specifics topics (like "reverse engineering" or "wargames") and people usually used the same username... so you could "follow" the same people in differents forums

Then, later, people interests started to be more egoistic, sliding from "what" to "who", and the era of (micro-)blogging started : everybody wanted its own website to share its own view and be the superstar of the day...

Web 2.0 was the consecration as it allowed "comments" under blog posts (and so called "community" knowledge). Facebook, MySpace & consort allowed people without any technical knowedge or technical resources to have their own "profile page" and the rest is history

PS: yeah... I still miss the 90's-95's, when the web was full of "hackers", "free spirits", having already lived a long and rich life, and eager to share to the youngest generation...

In my opinion, the most interesting part of that website is the author's self-presentation: https://slow.dog/

Wow, that's a lot of disorders. And ME is a bitch. I regret posting a snarky comment here earlier.

>Wow, that's a lot of disorders

Eh, a bunch of those are just a part of the package that comes with AuDHD[0], Specifically these three:

- Pathological demand avoidance [1]

- Rejection sensitive dysphoria [2]

- Sensory processing disorder [3]

Then these two are can easily result from trying to live up to neurotypical expectations at one's expense:

- Persistent adjustment disorder

- Generalized anxiety disorder [4]

...and those, plus compounding trauma/cPTSD, easily yield this:

- Severely deficient autobiographical memory

(Which might, in itself, be a manifestation of Time Blindness [5]).

Personally, I don't consider these two as disorders[6] or limitations:

- Aphantasia

- Autism spectrum disorder

That's not to diminish the difficulty of living with any (much less all) of those conditions; just to say that they are not uncorrelated, and often come together.

The rest (namely, these three) have an overlap in traits with Autism:

- Developmental coordination disorder (Dyspraxia)

- Obsessive-compulsive disorder

- Chronic fatigue syndrome (Myalgic encephalomyelitis)

Of those, fatigue in general is common with autistic people, as masking can result in it.

The PSA here is that techniques, methods, tools, etc. that help Autistic/ADHD people are likely to alleviate the symptoms of everything on this list to some extent.

So if you find the list of issues relatable, but have not yet looked into Autistic/ADHD resources and communities, I would recommend taking a look to see if you find anything that you can add to your toolbox.

_____

[0] Talking from experience. See below; main page: https://romankogan.net/adhd

[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Being%20Told%20What%20To%20Do

[2] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Rejection%20Sensitivity

[3] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Auditory%20Processing

[4] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Depression

[5] https://romankogan.net/adhd/#Time%20Perception

[6] I know two three people with Aphantasia, and one of them was a geometry/topology mathematician (who has since left academia for software). He's at least as good in geometry as I am, and I'm a highly visual person (I'm a mathematician as well), and we share the same interest in photography (we both got Fuji X100), so at the very least, it's not obvious that it's an impairment to him to do anything.

While ADHD traits can be great to have if you are in the right environment, they also come with very obvious drawbacks. Autistic traits, on the other hand, have been a perk for me.

In general, many of the pathologized aspects of the so-called "high-functioning" autism are issues that allistic people have with autistic people, and not something that autistic people perceive as a problem for themselves. Research has shown that e.g. communication issues aren't significant in fully allistic groups or fully autisitc groups, but may appear between allistics and autistics (and therefore amount to protocol difference - which can be solved from either side accommodating the other).

> - Chronic fatigue syndrome (Myalgic encephalomyelitis)

> Of those, fatigue in general is common with autistic people, as masking can result in it.

You clearly have not the slightest clue what ME is, so how can you judge? Protip, it's not "I feel a bit tired all the time". Look up what PEM (post-exertional malaise) does to people.

It is evident that you misunderstood what I wrote. Please read it again.

Some comments:

-I am not equating ME with fatigue in general;

-The fatigue that I say is not uncommon in autistic people is "I can't get out of bed for a day after making a phone call" kind of fatigue;

-I made no judgement in my comment, period (side note: the phrase "you have not the slightest clue" is a judgement, however).

To re-iterate, my point was that:

- There are significant overlaps between autism and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) [1], in both symptoms and comorbidities;

- Autistic people are more likely to experience CFS/ME [2];

- What helps autistic people with fatigue is not unlikely to help CFS/ME fatigue, and vice versa (follows from the above two).

Both of those points are scientifically supported. Please see [1][2], from which the above statements are literal quotes.

The links between autism and CFS/ME are subject of ongoing active research.

I ask you to read this (and the previous) comment, read the two references below, and come back here and comment on what you concluded.

[1] https://neurodivergentinsights.com/blog/autism-and-health-is...

[2] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/autistic-individuals-hav...

My conclusion hasn't changed. People with bad ME spend 99% of their lives lying down in darkness. I recognize that phone calls can be extremely draining for autistic people, but walking 12 steps can be equally draining for people with ME. It's only comparable when you make two lists of symptoms and compare them by checking boxes, disregarding qualitative aspects. It's the medical equivalent of tech HR people saying you can swap any C++ programmer out with a different C++ programmer, because they both got "C++" on their CV.

It's hard for me to qualitatively reject your comments here because you're being very precise, and quote all kinds of sources that look very sciencey, whereas I only have the lived experience of myself and people near me. All I can say is that ME is a bitch, and your comments make me feel like you think ME isn't so bad and is just part of the package of autism so deal with it.

You say that your point is that "What helps autistic people with fatigue is not unlikely to help CFS/ME fatigue", but nobody was arguing otherwise. In fact, you made that point in response to a comment that merely said "wow that's many disorders! ME is a bitch!". This makes it seem very much like you're downplaying the life struggles of people with many disorders and/or ME. I can imagine you don't mean to, but it's how it comes across. It's that implication that I object to.

When you say "Damn I hate spinach" and I start listing the many health benefits of spinach, and studies that show that well actually, 84% of people really like the taste of spinach, and other studies that show how spinach is an acquirable taste, I doubt you'd experience that as helpful. This is how I feel reading your comments here.

To the contrary!

My point was that out the lot of disorders listed, ME is the real bitch, and a bunch of others can be grouped together.

In any case, I can assure you the implication you object to wasn’t intended, and my sincere apologies for writing a comment that appears to give it. Thank you for explaining what’s wrong with what I wrote.

I’m autistic (if that wasn’t apparent), and implications aren’t my territory. Take what I wrote in the most literal sense possible.

I can’t edit that comment, but I’ll surely try to be more mindful next time I write about this.

Implications are hard! Glad to help & sorry for being grumpy about things earlier.

I don't really care if you think that someone has appropriated a term you think they don't deserve. I do care and support any movement that has the goal of detoxifying the social media scene.

I’m on your boat, but I don’t think there is any reason to oversell yourself as the pioneer of the social web with statements which are blatantly false. If anything that will only hinder the mission of what you’re trying to achieve.

To me it’s so unnecessary to sell the project as being run by the inventors of the social web, when the mission to decentralise control over social networks is brilliant on its own. I still don’t think any elected officials in Denmark should be on social networks where they don’t control the policies. I don’t agree with some of the outrageous stuff some of our less professional right wing politicians post on social media which gets them banned, but the very fact that a foreign tech company can chose to ban elected officials is just wrong. It would be much better if our Government ran something like a fediverse instance where they would control it and still reach the wider social network. I frankly think any news organisation should run their own server instances as well.

That is a good mission. I’ll support anyone who works for it, but I also think it’s stupid to over present yourself with false claims.

Detoxifying social media is like detoxifying cyanide IMHO. You end up with nothing of real use.

I like almonds. The domestication process has removed nearly all of the cyanide from wild bitter almonds.

Let's domesticate social media.

Mmmm…mealy, bland, and incredibly resource intensive social media.

I enjoyed that lovely quip. Thank you!

>detoxifying the social media

Technology cannot detoxify social media. Only ethics can, and we humans have very little in the way of tools to maintain a solid basis of ethics, besides ourselves.

Thank you. I keep telling people the same thing over and over again. It’s a human problem not a technological one.

My observation is that this move has increased the amount of toxicity in social media. There's plenty of room for ActivityPub and atproto to work together to decentralize things. Instead, this has generated a lot of infighting. Nothing wrong with starting a foundation, but recognize potential friends from foes. I suppose it's possible that they invited atproto to the table and they declined, but based on the way Even has been talking lately I highly doubt that.

If we're just talking web, I'm old enough to remember web rings [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Never heard of this cause I'm not as old as you but it seems interesting....something like precursor to web directory or something similar to Blogroll.

OK, if you use reddit:

Do you know how subreddits often link to other, related/friendly subreddits in the side bar?

That's a modern webring.

Yea I use Reddit every now and then and I saw that but Reddit is a walled garden and websites and web blogs are part of the Open Web so it's not quite the same but your analogy is right.

Blogroll is the much closer analogy.

You might enjoy this: https://brisray.com/web/webring-history.htm

Usenet was federated. And it is old...

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.

IG (Irc-Galleria, not Instagram) was huge in Finland for my age group (late 80s-early 90s) - definitely was an early showcase of just how powerful social media could be.

I wonder if theres a similar local phenomenom going on somewhere right now which will become a global megatrend.

BBS Bulletin Board System > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

GNU/talk is a text chat system for users all on the same multiuser nix system. But it doesn't separate code and data; because of terminal control characters:

Talk (software) > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

Finger (protocol) was named finger. To update your finger "status message" you edit that file in your homedir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)

Finger was written in C and had overflow vulnerabilities, and I don't know whether it ever scaled beyond one multiuser system?

NNTP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol

"Social Media" is distinct from "Media" in being a two-way* dialogue. Like only some newspaper sites, Social Media has comments (and UCC User Contributed Content).

If a newspaper site hosts comments on each article, will it need to be labeled as a potentially harmful social media outlet per proposed US media regulations? Does that make it social media?

User Contributed Content is seemingly inexpensive, but is it high-liability? Section 230 makes it possible to moderate without assuming liability for how people use the service to maim, defame, and harass others. Neither are arms dealers liable for crimes committed using the products that they sell. Media and Social Media operate without catastrophic liability for holding the mirror and abusive user-contributed content; instead of corporate doublespeak selling us into counterproductive wars that benefit only special interests (without a comment section) in a 24 hour news ticker that nobody checks.

But corporate content has displaced grassroots media by real people in so many of the now traditional social media outlets, and now everyone has to go to a different bar.

People grassroots campaigning for peace and equal rights; now replaced by the same old fear, greed, war, pestilence, and violence that TV and radio ad planners and newspaper editors use to sell ads.

Where "mass media" was an opiate for the masses, social media is a panacea for vanity and dysfunction.

Where "War of the Worlds" on the radio might've caused pandemonium back then, today people would likely debunk such claims of alien invasion via online trusted media outlets and bs rags.

FOAF: Friend of a Friend and/or schema.org/Person records describe a social graph of persons with attributes and CreativeWorks, but open record schema don't solve for the costs of indexing, search, video hosting, or federated moderation signals.

I have memories of computer mediated social networks that extend back to about 1982 or so. For a long time, I got messages from friends I met there at this email address

  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.

[1] https://www.share.org/About/About-Us

>It’s one thing to argue that ActivityPub is “the future of the social web” (as Ben does, and as I hope it isn’t)

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...

Blogs, personal sites, digital gardens, those are still by far the best solution imo. But they require effort and so they’ll remain a niche in the broader context of the web.

>Blogs, personal sites, digital gardens, those are still by far the best solution imo.

Tbh, the most interesting and joyful part of the internet and the web are personal blogs and personal sites. I don't want to be logged in Facebook, Instagram, Medium and Reddit to discover content and people and I don't want to be constantly tracked(although there are bunch of trackers on the Open Web as well).

>But they require effort and so they’ll remain a niche in the broader context of the web.

For example Blogger was a good platform for open blogging but I think it's on the sunset now.

We can always make an open platform that lowers the complexity for personal blogging and personal sites and that is accessible to the casual users.

Will do some shameless self promotion but only because you might enjoy this: https://peopleandblogs.com

It's a shame that it's such a taboo analogy to use in professional situations, because I've found explaining things to friends via "the Pornhub analogy" to be the final thing that makes them 'click' when explaining similar things relating to the web.

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.

I really wish .plan files and the finger protocol had won this battle

xtalk!

I love hitting folks with wall whenever we’re on a host at the same time. They’re always like: “what is this dark art??” ^_^

Who cares what they call it? Anyone that cares about decentralized social networking and is serious about it is on Nostr by now anyway. Let them say whatever they want in their cold, lonely, dark corners, which they've all secluded themselves in lording over their instance fiefdoms as they break the very federation they claim to be building.

I'd go back even further and say Napster was the original social net. You had to kill time somehow while downloading MP3's slowly. Might as well chat with folks who like the same music you did!

Napster?

There were online chatrooms before that. And forums before that. And newsgroups. And BBS. And FIDO.

The net was social before web even existed.

What about AOL Online? That predates Napster by a good number of years.

AOL, Compuserve, BBSs, just about everything online prior to 2000 was oriented around social glue.

I have a funny story with napster chat feature.

I was downloading some music from a specific user, they seemed to be the only person who had it, so it was a very slow download.

Below is the conversation

Me: I'm glad you have that version of the X (I can't remember what it was), I couldn't find it anywhere else.

Them: You know that by downloading you are stealing music right ?

Me: Well, I have the original album, but I can't find that version of it, not even to purchase.

Them: It doesn't matter.

Me: hey, you're downloading the song from me, why ?

Them: I'm stealing it back from you.

I remember reading that on bash.org

I think i posted this it to a few different sites. I am that old.

mIRC bro

I don't see much issue with using the term in the sense defined by the W3C[0], particuarly for a group developing technology around that definition. It doesn't mean the term can't also have a broader/colloquial meaning (web that is social). Same with the semantic web.

> 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?

[0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/

ActivityPub, the Fediverse and all of that are great places to go and discuss ActivityPub, the Fediverse and all of that. That's pretty much it.

EDIT: this was a snarky comment that didn't add anything, can't delete anymore but can still edit, so here goes.

I dunno, some people¹ clearly care about the meaning of words, and are pained when the meaning doesn't align with the idea the words are picked to communicate.

Perhaps we could allow ourselves to be unhappy when spotting such abuse in the wild (ranging from "OpenAI" which isn't open to "genocide" resulting explosive population growth), and all of us will be better off from it.

_____ ¹Like Orwell; see https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I’m saying this sincerely: I appreciate you for taking the time to edit a comment after recognizing that it was snarky.

Thanks! It was super weird because I felt so good and smug about myself when I wrote it and then an hour later or so realized how stupid it was. It's nuts how moods can change huh.

It is but it's also important to do what you did and do what you can to correct your past self. And this type of behaviour should be both encouraged and celebrated.

Too busy too read, we're developing Web 9.0 over here.

It seems blogs weren't social networks in the way Friendster was. Average people didn't have a blog. Creating a Friendster account was much easier.

>Friendster is a social network originally based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendster

Livejournal (where anybody could create an account) was a couple of years earlier:

>American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999, as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal

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