The social web

I recently wrote a post where I ~~ranted~~ shared my thoughts on the IndieWeb. As a result of that I had a great exchange with Jason over email (and that is why you should have a public email) and in talking to him I realised two things:

I had a fundamental misconception of what the IndieWeb actually is (and this is a great post you can read that touches on that misconception around the term)
The Social Web != being social on the web

I’m not going to touch the first one because it’s not really all that interesting—and also because Fyr has explained everything in his post—and so I’m going to focus on the second point which I think is more nuanced and important, at least for me.

I always assumed that when people talk about the Social Web, what they’re referring to is the part of the web that is interested in connecting with others rather than trying to do business. If you have a personal site where you post your content, if you read other people’s content, if you connect with other authors via email, you’re part of the social web. At least that’s what I thought. But I guess I was wrong. Apparently “the social web” doesn’t indicate people who have their own corners of the web and use the web as a way to connect and be social but rather it indicates all those attempts to recreate the social media experience in a more open and decentralised way.

So you blogging on your own blog, hosted on your own vps, not part of the social web. You running your own mastodon instance connecting with other mastodon instances, part of the social web. Does this make any sense to you? Am I getting this thing wrong? Why am I even bothering to write all this? Because, as I wrote before, context is important. If I write about the IndieWeb, now I know that for some people it means something entirely different than what it meant for me. And now that I know it, I’m gonna stop using the term. And I think the same is true for the social web. Because for some people, that combination of words represents something entirely different from what I’m talking about.

When I talk about the social aspects of the web, I’m not talking about social media. I’m talking about the exact opposite. I’m talking about liberating yourself from all sorts of algorithmic grouping and filtering and getting back to experiencing and using the web in a much more deliberate and mindful way. Adding someone's RSS feed to your feed reader requires some intentionality. The only way for you to discover new content is by interacting with it. You have to click links, you have to visit sites, you have to navigate them. You have to judge for yourself if this person with their blog is worthy of your follow. And your feed—yes YOUR feed, because it’s curated by you and no one else—is going to be a finite entity. There’s no doom scrolling in an RSS feed.

That is the web I’m arguing for. A web that is intentional, where what you consume is curated by you and you alone, where connections with others happen because you made the conscious effort to connect. And at this point, I don’t fucking know how to call that web. Maybe “personal web”? I guess I’ll go with that from now on.