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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 Tw
by jillesvangurp 2y ago
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.
- timeon 2y agoIt was not just blogs. Several specific or general forums [0]. They just were not global. [0]: nyx.cz as an example
- boffinAudio 2y ago>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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- j4coh 2y agoBy this definition, would the telephone network also be the social web given things like chat room PBXes? Or even telegraphs?
- boffinAudio 2y agoYes indeed, there were many social networks created during the age of telephony.
- j4coh 2y agoWhy wouldn't guestbooks, forums, webrings and things like that count? They certainly predated blogs, were on the web, and seemed social enough to me.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoAn 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.
- olivierduval 2y agoIMHO, 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...