The Social Web Foundation Is Shaping the Next Era of the Web

No it isn't. HTTP/3 was open-washed through the IETF by Google and Microsoft employees. Corporate needs shaped the next era of the web. And it's not even TCP. The next era of the web can't even connect to a webserver unless that web server gets continued regular permission to exist from a third party corporation (CA TLS only, no self signing, no plain text).

Regarding activitypub itself: it is a very heavy protocol that can only operate with cryptographic signing of communications. That means you need to be running an active program to compute the cryptography. Activitypub cannot be implemented statically like many better social web protocols can (ie, indieweb webmention). That means activitypub websites are fragile and won't last more than a few years without active maintainence. This is bad for the long term health of the web created by human persons.

I sure hope this activitypub-centric "Social web foundation" doesn't take over for the W3C like they say. But even if they do, it's too late, W3C's role was already taken over by the corporate run WHATWG years ago.

>Every new service and platform that contains social features — which is most of them — will support the ActivityPub protocol within the next few years. Service owners can use it to easily avoid the “cold start” problem when creating new networks, and to plug their existing platforms into a ready-made network of hundreds of millions of people. Publishers will use it to reach their audiences more easily. And it’s where the global conversation will be held.

This is spoken like someone with technical vision, not product vision.

Content owners don't want these networks shared. The data inherent - who follows who, what the pause over when scrolling, etc. - is where the value is and companies don't want to give that up.

I've worked in app platforms before, specifically trying to build this kind of "follow the entities you want across platforms, your network is unified" solution, and the companies do not want this and will not play ball. The users don't care about this - at least nowhere near as much as they care about being on the apps where their friends or the content they want to create is.

OpenSocial v2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41636491