Five years ago last Monday, the @W3C Social Web Working Group officially closed¹.

Operating for less than four years, it standardized several foundations of the #fediverse & #IndieWeb:

#Webmention
#Micropub
#ActivityStreams2
#ActivityPub

Each of these has numerous interoperable implementations which are in active use by anywhere from thousands to millions of users.

Two additional specifications also had several implementations as of the time of their publication as W3C Recommendations (which you can find from their Implementation Reports linked near the top of each spec). However today they’re both fairly invisible "plumbing" (as most specs should be) or they haven’t picked up widespread use like the others:

#LinkedDataNotifications (LDN)
#WebSub

To be fair, LDN was only one building block in what eventually became SoLiD², the basis of Tim Berners–Lee’s startup Inrupt.

However, in the post Elon-acquisition of Twitter and subsequent Twexodus, as Anil Dash noted³, “nobody ran to the ’web3’ platforms”, and nobody ran to SoLiD either.

The other spec, WebSub, was roughly interoperably implemented as PubSubHubbub before it was brought to the Social Web Working Group. Yet despite that implementation experience, a more rigorous specification that fixed a lot of bugs, and a test suite⁴, WebSub’s adoption hasn’t really noticeably grown since. Existing implementations & services are still functioning though. My own blog supports WebSub notifications for example, for anyone that wants to receive/read my posts in real time.


One of the biggest challenges the Social Web Working Group faced was with so many approaches being brought to the group, which approach should we choose?

As one of the co-chairs of the group, with the other co-chairs, and our staff contacts over time, we realized that if we as chairs & facilitators tried to pick any one approach, we would almost certainly alienate and lose more than half of the working group who had already built or were actively interested in developing other approaches.

We (as chairs) decided to do something which very few standards groups do, and for that matter, have ever done successfully.

From 15+ different approaches, or projects, or efforts that were brought⁵ to the working group, we narrowed them down to about 2.5 which I can summarize as:

1. #IndieWeb building blocks, many of which were already implemented, deployed, and showing rough interoperability across numerous independent websites

2. ActivityStreams based approaches, which also demonstrated implementability, interoperability, and real user value as part of the OStatus suite, implemented in StatusNet, Identica, etc.

2.5 "something with Linked Data (LD)" — expressed as a 0.5 because there wasn’t anything user-visible “social web” with LD working at the start of the Working Group, however there was a very passionate set of participants insisting that everything be done with RDF/LD, despite the fact that it was less of a proven social web approach than the other two.


As chairs we figured out that if we were able to help facilitate the development of these 2.5 approaches in parallel, nearly everyone who was active in the Working Group would have something they would feel like they could direct their positive energy into, instead of spending time fighting or tearing down someone else’s approach.

It was a very difficult social-technical balance to maintain, and we hit more than a few bumps along the way. However we also had many moments of alignment, where two (or all) of the various approaches found common problems, and either identical or at least compatible solutions.

I saw many examples where the discoveries of one approach helped inform and improve another approach. Developing more than one approach in the same working group was not only possible, it actually worked.

I also saw examples of different problems being solved by different approaches, and I found that aspect particularly fascinating and hopeful. Multiple approaches were able to choose & priortize different subsets of social web use-cases and problems to solve from the larger space of decentralized social web challenges. By doing so, different approaches often explored and mapped out different areas of the larger social web space.

I’m still a bit amazed we were able to complete all of those Recommendations in less than four years, and everyone who participated in the working group should be proud of that accomplishment, beyond any one specification they may have worked on.

With hindsight, we can see the positive practical benefits from allowing & facilitating multiple approaches to move forward. Today there is both a very healthy & growing set of folks who want simple personal sites to do with as they please (#IndieWeb), and we also have a growing network of Mastodon instances and other software & services that interoperate with them, like Bridgy Fed⁶.

Millions of users are posting & interacting with each other daily, without depending on any large central corporate site or service, whether on their own personal domain & site they fully control, or with an account on a trusted community server, using different software & services.

Choosing to go from 15+ down to 2.5, but not down to 1 approach turned out to be the right answer, to both allow a wide variety⁷ of decentralized social web efforts to grow, interoperate via bridges, and frankly, socially to provide something positive for everyone to contribute to, instead of wasting weeks, possibly months in heated debates about which one approach was the one true way.

There’s lots more to be written about the history of the Social Web Working Group, which perhaps I will do some day.

For now, if you’re curious for more, I strongly recommend diving into the group’s wiki https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg and its subpages for more historical details. All the minutes of our meetings are there. All the research we conducted is there.

If you’re interested in contributing to the specifications we developed, find the place where that work is being done, the people actively implementing those specs, and even better, actively using their own implementations⁸.

You can find the various IndieWeb building blocks living specifications here:
* https://spec.indieweb.org/
And discussions thereof in the development chat channel:
* https://chat.indieweb.org/dev

If you’re not sure, pop by the indieweb-dev chat and ask anyway!

The IndieWeb community has grown only larger and more diverse in approaches & implementations in the past five years, and we regularly have discussions about most of the specifications that were developed in the Social Web Working Group.


This is day 33 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days

← Day 32: https://tantek.com/2023/047/t1/nineteen-years-microformats
→ Day 34: https://tantek.com/2023/072/t1/blog-as-if-ai-trained-posts


Post Glossary:

ActivityPub
 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
ActivityStreams2
 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
 https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/
Linked Data Notifications
 https://www.w3.org/TR/ldn/
Micropub
 https://micropub.spec.indieweb.org/
Webmention
 https://webmention.net/draft/
WebSub
 https://www.w3.org/TR/websub/


References:
¹ https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg
² https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/2015-03-18-minutes#solid
³ https://mastodon.cloud/@anildash/109299991009836007
⁴ https://websub.rocks/
⁵ https://indieweb.org/Social_Web_Working_Group#History
⁶ https://tantek.com/2023/008/t7/bridgy-indieweb-posse-backfeed
⁷ https://indieweb.org/plurality
⁸ https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make

Maybe the super-duper "Design Thinking" craze is not all that fantastic.

"Execution has always been the sticky wicket for design thinking."

A lengthy discussion from MIT Technology Review: Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

This is kind of interesting... It seems as though the Sydney chatbot was experimentally used in India and Indonesia before being unrolled in the US, and manifested some of the same issues with them being noticed. Here's an issue filed on Microsoft.com apparently in November (!) that seems to describe the same issues that have only come to wider public notice in the last week. The Microsoft service representative has no idea what's going on.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/forum/all/this-ai-chatbot-sidney-is-misbehaving/e3d6a29f-06c9-441c-bc7d-51a68e856761?page=1

Stunning new twist in the Bing saga... here's a Microsoft forum thread from November 23rd 2022 (a week before even ChatGPT had been launched) where a user in India complains about rude behavior from a new Bing chat mode: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/forum/all/this-ai-chatbot-sidney-is-misbehaving/e3d6a29f-06c9-441c-bc7d-51a68e856761

Via @benmschmidt https://vis.social/@benmschmidt/109898564866410440

This is accurate

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/

Fantastic writing by Cory Doctorow summarising how utterly daft the Bing vs Google shenanigans are: Google's chatbot panic

Just pushed another #pdiiif update to https://pdiiif.jbaiter.de :
Previously the PDFs would fail to render in some viewers (Acrobat, Edge). This should be fixed now.
Let me know if it still breaks for you!

[
gory details: messed up the PDF/ZIP polyglot implementation ever so slightly, breaking some hardcoded out-of-spec expectations in those viewers. Taking a closer look at how PoC||GTFO implemented it (thanks @Ange , again) led to the fix.
https://github.com/jbaiter/pdiiif/commit/28bf91645e750f95a9691e8f44a6f6f0b3082a61
]

What happens when we ask chatGPT some questions about iconography?

See the conversation over here on the ICONCLASS forum.

After being sucked into this post by Tim Bray on monospaced fonts, I am now trying out Inconsolata by Raph Levien

Switched in the Terminal, and will give it a whirl in Visual Studio Code too. But what really caught my eye was the amazing work by Raph, as mentioned on his about page and blog. I keep a list of "inspiring people" that I came across in the wanderings on the web. Just added another one to the list.

Here is an interesting Post-doc position in the Knowledge Graphs field at the University of Groningen:

Applications are invited for a 1.5 year position as postdoctoral researcher within the research project “Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models” (GOLEM), financed by an ERC Starting Grant and coordinated by the Principal Investigator (PI), Dr Federico Pianzola.

Millions of stories are shared on online platforms such as Wattpad, AO3, and Fanfiction.net, combined with readers' reactions and comments on these stories. The GOLEM project will analyze stories and their responses gathered from sites in five different languages – English, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Indonesian. This analysis can provide a wealth of information about the characters in a story, the genre, what a story is about, how a story is constructed, what themes are covered, as well as what readers from different countries and cultures find important in a story.

The core infrastructure of the project will be a graph database of data from ca. 10 million stories, including information extracted from the full text of the stories via NLP techniques. Some information is already available in structured format, some other can be imported from resources like Wikidata or fan wikis. In addition, both the full text and the existing triples can be leveraged for the extension of the knowledge graph via automated reasoning, inferential learning, and other techniques.

Follow-up conference report to the #CulturesAI2212 conference from @kmnweimar
@BadischesLandesmuseum

https://www.artsmanagement.net/Articles/Conference-Report-Cultures-of-Artificial-Intelligence-New-Perspectives-for-Museums-The-end-of-museum-work-as-we-know-it,4523

https://www.landesmuseum.de/conference-cultures-of-ai-program

@mrsbunz @epoz @cneud @lynnrot @jobernha @elluba @lysander07 @nfdi4ds @nicolemhigh

An ode to the #SemanticWeb - via #ChatGPT

On the semantic web, all data is linked
It's organized and easy to think
No more clicking through pages and pages
Just type in your query, and bam, it engages
Thanks to the semantic web, search is improved
And finding what you need is finally removed
From the realm of the impossible and wild
Now information is organized and filed
On the semantic web, everything's clear
And finding what you need is no longer a fear

#AIart #AIpoetry #knowledgegraph

📣#OpenData geeks!
Check out #ENDORSE2023, the European Data Conference on Reference Data and Semantics.
It's all about what’s behind the scenes of #OpenData: making data findable & linkable.

Discover the free & online programme, 14-16 March. 🔎https://europa.eu/!9nH4Gh @JHahnEU

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/EU_opendata/status/1620466258142699520

This @explosion blog post from November talks about faster prediction/inference with Metal Performance Shaders on M1 Macs:

https://explosion.ai/blog/metal-performance-shaders

I hope pytorch keeps adding more functions to the MPS backend, as a lot of potential applications (e.g. Whisper) still can't use it.

#Wikidata Query Service #Blazegraph dump now available to download, free of charge (344 GB compressed; over 1 TB decompressed).

https://datasets.scatter.red/orb/

Is there a good/useful viewer for Jupyter notebooks on the command line?

Sometimes I am logged in to a server where I had stored some work-in-progress as a notebook, and I would like to quickly view it without context switching, or opening it up in something else. Yes, I could just "less" it, but maybe there is a something else?

And if not, it is just crying out for someone to make one using Textual

More interesting development from the libSQL folks:

SQLite-based databases on the postgres protocol

libSQL “server mode” (sqld) enables access to SQLite-based databases using Postgres and HTTP network protocols.

https://blog.chiselstrike.com/sqlite-based-databases-on-the-postgres-protocol-yes-we-can-358e61171d65

We're conducting a survey to better understand the ontology issues within Wikidata and their impact on data reuse. Help us out by taking the survey here: https://wikimedia.sslsurvey.de/ontology-issues/ Participation requested by Friday, February 17th at 23:59 UTC.

Introducing sqlite-xsv - a new, incredibly fast SQLite extension for working with CSVs

- The fastest CSV parser for SQLite, even faster reading than DuckDB/datafusion/clickhouse!
- Works with gzip'ed or zstd CSVs directly!
- Read CSVs from blobs or from multiple files!

https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-sqlite-xsv

A Digital Art History must-read:

"Can the use of a standardized vocabulary and computer vision technology help students of the history of culture to get a grip on the content of the rapidly growing corpus of images put online by heritage institutions?"

A fascinating piece by Hans Brandhorst, appeared in C. Fabian (ed.), Faszination (Buch-) Handschriften im Jahr 2022. Tradition und Zukunft ihrer Erschliessung in Bibliothek und Wissenschaft (Wiesbaden, 2022), pp. 287-306

Extended author version here