Lady, EVOLVED 
can’t sleep so i’m thinking about defunct social web specifications
obviously there WAS a community of weirdos who were willing to put the time in over decades to write specifications and build software just to talk to each other, but like, WHAT kind of a community? how? why?
all we have is their weird software detritus that we’ve picked up and repurposed for our own uses
@Lady uh, well, usenet archives are available, if you want them, and the people who wrote those specs posted on usenet all the time
@Lady if you mean like, gnusocial, i think those servers are still up
@clayote i don’t mean gnusocial exactly, i more mean ActivityPub and ActivityStreams were built by the Social Web WG, which was formed out of the OpenSocial foundation, which built its specification in concert with Portable Contacts, which OStatus and thus GNU Social also used
i’m positive the fediverse looks very different from what the people developing the original Portable Contacts / OpenSocial specifications, in 2008, were imagining. but i also don’t actually know: what WERE they imagining? what problems were they trying to solve? were they at all successful? i think largely maybe no; i think what applications people wanted to write and what parts of the specification actually got picked up changed quite a bit from what they were originally going for. but it’s hard to chart a narrative in my head when i don’t even know who they were, really, or how they found the time to be working together on all of this, for so many years, if indeed they did stick with it from 2008 to 2018 when ActivityPub became a thing
