Post
Is social media its own thing or is it an attention layer for the open web? Is it mostly about these separate things we call posts, or should every piece of writing or audio or video be able to be boosted itself?
I think that's the divide between #ATproto and #ActivityPub. #bluesky wants to dominate a world of posts like Gmail dominates email etc. Social running on a protocol but one company decides most people's experience. Or should we give the public full control over what media goes viral?
Re: Is social media its own thing or is it an attention layer for the open web?
@wjmaggos@liberal.city I think that thinking of "anything" being boostable is both weird and expected at the same time. We hold these thoughts in our heads concurrently because it was how the web-at-large (indieweb notwithstanding) worked.
What I mean is...
A news article isn't a discrete resource shared on a common social web — such a construct does not exist outside of the Fediverse.
... but news articles are littered with "share via..." buttons that sort of approximate the experience.
@julian @wjmaggos what's weird about it? anything is "boostable" in the sense that you draw attention to it in myriad channels or formats. what stops the entire web from being "boostable" within activitypub? only self-imposed constraints. this is what an Announce activity is supposed to be for -- literally drawing attention to an object (which can be anything!)
in other words, the article *is* a web resource and "shared" on the web via hyperlinks. that's what makes a "web" in the first place...
@julian @wjmaggos it was never a matter of what you can say. it's always been a matter of who will understand what you're saying.
google gets big because it tries to organize everything, but you don't have to do "everything" all by yourself. federation is in essence delegation. multiple parties agree to each manage only a smaller part of the whole. what people need isn't necessarily a global search engine; they just need an entrypoint. that can be a search engine or it can be a directory or etc
