>It’s one thing to argue that ActivityPub is “the future of the social web” (as Ben does, and as I hope it isn’t)<p>Then what it is? I think ActivityPub is the good start. Imo Fediverse is the most exciting thing on the Internet since Bitcoin.<p>>Blogs were the social web. Friendster was the social web. MySpace was the social web. Twitter was the social web. With the exception of blogs, this wasn’t cross-platform sociality, but it nonetheless was the social web.<p>Blogs were and are the only true decentralized and distributed social platform; in the early days of the commercial internet, people thought that the prevalent social platform would be something like Atom/RSS where you would be distributing content in a decentralized fashion e.g. Blogosphere and not concentrate everything in a centralized fashion ala Medium or other similar platforms. Even Blogger and Substack were and are steps in a good direction since they are not per se centralized.<p>Friendster, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were the opportunistic social networking projects because it was easier to centralize everything under one host and under one management because it's easier to control the platform that way. Powerful distributed social networking protocols didn't exist and it wasn't clear how they would work but now picture is getting clearer. Project like aforementioned ActivityPub and Web Monetization[0] are decent attempts at trying to reclaim back the control of your digital social interactions because everything is getting easier now: cross-platform interaction, migrating your data(content and contacts) from one platform to another etc. etc.<p>[0] <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/web-monetization/" rel="nofollow">https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/web-monetization...</a>