Ladys Webforum

I’ve been working on documenting this vocabulary for a while now and recently published the results to vocab.ladys.computer. This is mostly a topic to show that off, but feel free to chime in with other thoughts about social networking metadata and various approaches there·of.

i can't say i fully understand this BUT i would love to know more as i find it quite fascinating! mapping the vocabulary of the social web is very awesome and unique. i do like the changes you've written up and your explanations, they're very insightful.

i think something like this is very handy when discussing the social internet and every aspect of it. it helps to have a sort of framework for how we discuss the platforms we build and/or live on.

synchro wrote: Monday, 13 January 2025 @ 22:37 EST i can't say i fully understand this BUT i would love to know more as i find it quite fascinating!

It’s hard to judge what anyone’s level of experience with this stuff is, but I know you know about the fediverse, so I’ll work my way backwards :⁠—

• The contemporary, Mastodon‐compatible fediverse is built on something called ActivityPub (and ActivityStreams).
• These are, in turn, built on top of something called JSON–LD.
• JSON‐LD is effectively just one of a wide variety of serializations for a graph‐based data model known as RDF.
• RDF is, like XML, fundamentally just a data structure. It gets its meaning from the vocabularies that people use with it, which provide classes and properties and so forth. ActivityStreams is one newish vocabulary, but RDF has been around for two decades now and there are a lot of older ones.
• RDF was developed and promoted by Tim Berners‐Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) with the idea of creating a web of data in addition to the existing web of documents. This idea was called “Web 3.0” (before the cryptobros stole the name), or more commonly and appropriately, “Linked Data”.
• In addition to powering the current federated social web, Linked Data is most commonly encountered in the “preview cards” that appear when you paste a link into Twitter/Facebook/Discord/etc, or in the helpful search result cards that used to appear on Google before they replaced them with unhelpful AI summaries. (These are simple applications, but widely‐deployed ones, typically leveraging the schema.org vocabulary. It’s reductive to say that a Mastodon post is basically just a preview card that gets shuffled between websites, but like, kinda?!)
• But prior to all of that, there was a vision of using Linked Data to model human relationships, like who knows who, as an early form of networking. This resulted in the aptly‐named vocabulary “FOAF” (for “Friend‐of‐a‐friend”), which was a product of the RDFWeb group, again about two decades ago  (for the initial drafts).
• After the blogosphere, forums, and later social media started to become A Thing, people realized that they could used Linked Data pretty easily to federate this stuff. SIOC is an early vocabulary that people developed for doing that. It never really saw adoption, because “Google, MySpace and other social networks” instead threw their weight behind OpenSocial, which was not RDF‐based. Some aspects of OpenSocial diverged to become G·N·U Social, which is what Mastodon was originally developed to use, while others eventually became the aforementioned ActivityPub (which probably only pivoted back to Linked Data because of the involvement of people like cwebber). All the big players abandoned the effort long before anything became of it, because they realized a walled‐garden approach was more profitable (altho those winds seem to be shifting back in the other direction).
• I don’t like ActivityStreams or ActivityPub personally, and think that maybe some of these earlier approaches (FOAF, SIOC) might have had some potential, so I’m trying to document them all. This isn’t precisely useful in‐and‐of‐itself, but it might form the basis of future work (profiles, etc) for modelling the federated social web.
• So this website is a reference material for me (and anyone else curious) to figure out what these vocabularies are and how they might be used, to be taken under consideration when designing these future things.