It’s also confusing, because haven’t we been using the Web in a Social way since the very early days?
ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Social Web. Bluesky and Nostr? Social Web. Matrix and IndieWeb? Fuck it, why not? Social Web.
“Social Web” very obviously means social-media-oriented web. All of these applications are basically social media. I don’t know why the author is being so difficult about it. From reading the article, there’s no technical content, just moral grandstanding about tone in tweets.
Yeah. There are plenty of good reasons to feel icky about a foundation that welcomes abusive orgs like Facebook, but this article doesn’t cover any of that.
IDK, especially reading through the comments, I got the impression that the author was onto something re: a kind of defensive attitude, and an unwillingness to accept that there are different takes on the concept of a social web.
Sure but that’s just a personal beef; it doesn’t have that much to do with the foundation. The legitimate problems with the foundation run much deeper.
don’t know why the author is being so difficult about it.
Because the mentioned projects and initiatives have used the term for more than a decade, and turning up as “btw, we are the foundation for your topic now I guess” is a shitty move?
Names are /really/ difficult when creating a new institution in a decentralized space – you need to establish what you intend cover with new people, create some originality so people can separate you from other, similar orgs, and also seek minimize this kind of thrash, where people feel excluded because they have a pre-existing relationship with the terminology you choose.
I remember going through this with the Open Rights Group (EFF-like org for the UK). When we created it, ORG’s intended role was just one in an existing loose ecosystem of British digital rights groups (from Privacy International, Liberty, the Foundation for Information Policy Research, and lots more).
A few of us did feel a new institution was needed, and I’d say that feeling was subsequently vindicated – ORG has found its place in that ecosystem. But of course it’s really easy, especially among activists, to jump straight to believing that the simplest route is not to work with an existing org, but fork your own one, and there’s a valuable collective instinct to push back against that kind of dilution. “Open Rights Group” (ORG, get it?) was a novel name we picked to lean very much against taking up anyone else’s turf. The downside was that we spent a long time with people going “wtf are open rights?”, “what are you again?”, etc. We leaned against adopting a known term with an existing community and domain, but that meant we lost some energy by having to re-introduce a new term. But it eventually fixed itself. We just had to spend more time on explanation, and a little less time on reassurance.
TLDR; I’m sympathetic to both the SWF and the response, but these feelings of concern and alienation are very common when a new org starts up. The real proof, I’d suggest, comes in what happens next. It’s best to judge a new arrival on what they do, not their name, or those very preliminary “icky feelings”. And it’s important for a new org to acknowledge people’s nervousness, and work to alleviate it in those first few steps.
The metric that matters to me is how efficiently the foundation funnels corporate money into getting the right people who don’t work for hypercorps the resources they need to make solid standards and usable implementations.
We already have a raft of standards bodies populated almost entirely by hypercorp employees because it turns out that it takes a boatload of expensive work and travel.
“Social Web” very obviously means social-media-oriented web. All of these applications are basically social media. I don’t know why the author is being so difficult about it. From reading the article, there’s no technical content, just moral grandstanding about tone in tweets.
Yeah. There are plenty of good reasons to feel icky about a foundation that welcomes abusive orgs like Facebook, but this article doesn’t cover any of that.
IDK, especially reading through the comments, I got the impression that the author was onto something re: a kind of defensive attitude, and an unwillingness to accept that there are different takes on the concept of a social web.
Sure but that’s just a personal beef; it doesn’t have that much to do with the foundation. The legitimate problems with the foundation run much deeper.
Because the mentioned projects and initiatives have used the term for more than a decade, and turning up as “btw, we are the foundation for your topic now I guess” is a shitty move?
Names are /really/ difficult when creating a new institution in a decentralized space – you need to establish what you intend cover with new people, create some originality so people can separate you from other, similar orgs, and also seek minimize this kind of thrash, where people feel excluded because they have a pre-existing relationship with the terminology you choose.
I remember going through this with the Open Rights Group (EFF-like org for the UK). When we created it, ORG’s intended role was just one in an existing loose ecosystem of British digital rights groups (from Privacy International, Liberty, the Foundation for Information Policy Research, and lots more).
A few of us did feel a new institution was needed, and I’d say that feeling was subsequently vindicated – ORG has found its place in that ecosystem. But of course it’s really easy, especially among activists, to jump straight to believing that the simplest route is not to work with an existing org, but fork your own one, and there’s a valuable collective instinct to push back against that kind of dilution. “Open Rights Group” (ORG, get it?) was a novel name we picked to lean very much against taking up anyone else’s turf. The downside was that we spent a long time with people going “wtf are open rights?”, “what are you again?”, etc. We leaned against adopting a known term with an existing community and domain, but that meant we lost some energy by having to re-introduce a new term. But it eventually fixed itself. We just had to spend more time on explanation, and a little less time on reassurance.
TLDR; I’m sympathetic to both the SWF and the response, but these feelings of concern and alienation are very common when a new org starts up. The real proof, I’d suggest, comes in what happens next. It’s best to judge a new arrival on what they do, not their name, or those very preliminary “icky feelings”. And it’s important for a new org to acknowledge people’s nervousness, and work to alleviate it in those first few steps.
The metric that matters to me is how efficiently the foundation funnels corporate money into getting the right people who don’t work for hypercorps the resources they need to make solid standards and usable implementations. We already have a raft of standards bodies populated almost entirely by hypercorp employees because it turns out that it takes a boatload of expensive work and travel.