Five days in Sevilla for TPAC. Reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, and making new ones. I didn't do much touristing, but did manage to find decent vegan tapas. An exhausting but worthwhile week.
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I have really enjoyed the DID WG not-face-to-face meetings this week. I still feel pretty lost in most of this, but looking back to almost two years ago when this started, I have learnt so much about so many topics I wasn't expecting to ever know anything about because of this work. I appreciate everyone in this group.
Unending gratitude to manu and others at Digital Bazaar for supporting me - financially, educationally and emotionally - to work in this stuff in the first place.
(It's been challenging at times, but not as emotionally fraught or generally stressful as the Social Web WG was. Maybe most of that is because I've grown since then, though, and also because it hasn't consumed my entire life like SWWG did..)
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I'm gonna be in and out of APConf today and tomorrow, starting in a couple of hours. While the live video bits are full, the talks are all prerecorded and available to anyone, and there's chat on SocialHub that everyone can join in with as well.
I'm extremely multitasking so won't be 100% available but do feel free to ping me or loop me into any conversations you think I might be interested in and I'll do my best to keep on top of things.
(PS. I'm in the keynote panel :D)
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Reading people arguing about decentralised social web stuff makes me 50-50 want to pick back up my own implementations and make them work, and leave computing forever to hide in a cave.
The compromise between these tensions tends to be go back to my day job / pick up a book / go to the beach / make a sandwich.
Sandro Hawke at the W3C track presents the work done by the W3C Social Web WG and ongoing work by the CG, and importantly.. what comes next?
BY THE WAY anonymous internet strangers, if you are upset and confused about decentralised social networks but (and this part is important) don't want to be confused any more, and maybe even are implementing some things or at the very least skimming the specs a bit, do come on over to #social channel on irc.w3.org where we're all still hanging out and willing to help.
This stuff is complicated and distressing... trust us... and we (the Working Group and proximate communities) went through a lot of shiz so hopefully you don't have to.
If IRC isn't your thing, most of the editors and implementors are willing to help out to some degree, and you can track down contact details starting in the metadata at the tops of specs.
We do have lives though and most of us aren't being paid to work on this stuff, but we stick around because it's important to us, so please be patient and considerate too.
ActivityPub and WebSub went to REC this week and the work of the Social Web WG in general has been getting a lot of attention, including AP making it to the top of hackernews. There are lots of good comments, but of course it's the negative ones that stick around when you release your babies into the harsh wilds of the Web for the last time.
There was a lot of conflict inside the SocialWG, and a lot of compromise. The comments that irk me the most are the ones that suggest we made decisions on a whim without thinking about things at length, or ignored prior art.
Sure we standardised multiple ways of doing similar things, but the decision to do that came only after much wailing and gnashing of teeth* and faced with the prospect of not standardising anything at all in this space. Or alternatively one- to two-thirds of the group meeting with suspicious accidents in lieu of consensus. It wasn't for funsies. We weren't trolling implementors. We were just trying to cope.
Anyway, what reassures me in the end is that, as we could never make everyone happy, at least we've somehow succeeded in making nobody at all happy.
The art of consensus™.
* and over a year of work, dozens of telecons and several face-to-face meetings around the world often at participants' own expense, and not a little yelling.
I published Social Web Protocols as a Social Web Working Group Note today.
It's supposed to be a one-stop shop for understanding the various specs of the WG. Hopefully it makes your life easier not harder.
This article was published in issue #296 (Summer 2017) of net magazine!
You may by now have come across the notion of 're-decentralising' the Web, particularly the Social Web. This is about gaining better control over where we store our personal data. It has become common practice to hand over our data to a few major companies in exchange for 'free' services like games, productivity apps, email, and of course social media. Linked Data Notifications (LDN) is a W3C Recommendation, and one of several protocols standardised by the Social Web Working Group as a core mechanism to make decentralisation possible.
Right now, when you get a notification from your favourite social networking app (or your calendar, or your hotel reservation site) you can view it once within that closed system, and then it tends to disappear. Imagine if you could choose a trusted location to store your notifications data (for example a personal data store or server) and grant access to different applications. Notifications are no longer locked in to the system which generated them in the first place; data from one application can be reused by another.
There are clear benefits of this practice. The end user is free to switch between applications without having to input the necessary data from scratch each time, as well as changing where their data is stored without disrupting the apps they use, because applications can just re-discover the new location. This benefits application developers too, who can now focus on their core product or service. LDN integration means that applications can nonetheless enhance their functionality when users choose to share notification data from complementary services, and benefit from a standard mechanism for doing so rather than depending on the proprietary API of a third-party social network provider.
LDN is a simple HTTP-based protocol which describes three roles in notification-oriented interactions: senders, receivers, and consumers. Any resource on the Web (from a user profile to a single blog post) may advertise a receiving endpoint (their "Inbox"). Doing so is like pointing to a webhook URL, with LDN standardising the discovery mechanism. The receiver accepts requests from senders (for new notifications) and exposes received notifications in a standard format for other applications (consumers) to reuse. The sender can place any data in the contents of a notification - as much or as little as the application determines is useful for its own future reuse, or for sharing with other consumer applications in the same domain. Consumer applications which discover and read in the notification data could use notification contents to trigger another process in a system, or simply display it in a user interface.
So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in social networking scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments through monitoring the state of online resources, datasets and files, or sensor outputs, and sending notifications when changes occur.
LDN serves as a building block rather than a complete solution for re-decentralisation. The three roles (sender, receiver, and consumer) can be implemented independently from each other (if you want to build a sender, you don't need to build a receiver to do so), or all together in one system. If you don't want to build your own "Inbox" (and let's face it, most people won't) you can rent one from a third-party you trust. Just like outsourcing the hosting of your social media profile today, but without the service-specific lock-in. No matter where your "Inbox" resides, any application can send notifications there. The protocol works well alongside other emerging or completed W3C standards such as ActivityStreams 2.0, ActivityPub, and the Web Annotations Protocol.
You can get started with LDN today; check out a growing list of reference implementations, and run your implementation against the test suite. Although the standardization process is complete, new implementors are nonetheless encouraged to run the tests and submit the automatically generated implementation reports. The W3C Social Web Community Group is the place to go for follow-up questions and comments about integrating this standard into your applications.