💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 10-21.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:51:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-04)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
WordPress now offers official support for ActivityPub
For years a lot of us have been lamenting the death of RSS and the blogosphere. The web changed, and how we used it changed; for a lot of people, a curated list of bookmarks and a daily feed gave way to social media and relinquishing control over what we see. This was an enormous change: remember when Yahoo! was an enormous portal, constantly updated? We can try to influence the way social media presents Stuff to us - follow certain people, certain topics, etc - but algorithmic feeds in the big, corporate social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) by default are driven by engagement maximization metrics, to the detriment of, well, everything. You gets what you gets.
The Fediverse is, in the face of this, a pretty big improvement. ActivityPub is a standard for "creating, updating, and deleting content", and while the most well-known software in the Fediverse is undoubtedly Mastodon, ActivityPub can be implemented so that different pieces of software can publish and share content with each other. It's both incredibly boring and incredibly powerful.
With the announcement today that ActivityPub support is now available in all centralized, WordPress.com-hosted websites (off by default, but easily enabled), this feels like something that has the potential to be a huge shift, or at least a nudge towards larger change. WordPress is used in something like 40% of all websites - or more. So even if this is something that needs to be enabled manually in a control panel, there's a huge potential for people to be able to created curated feeds from posts in Mastodon, from Pixelfed or Lemmy, and now from updates to people's WordPress sites.
Part of me wonders if this matters, I mean, from a long-term perspective. Mastodon has around 10M accounts, which in the grand scheme of things is nothing, at least when compared to the big corporate networks. But 10M is also ten million people - a staggering number. And even if many accounts lie dormant, created during one of the many moments when people thought, "Fuck this Musk guy, I'm going to try Mastodon", there are still a lot of active users. My own feed of a few hundred follows refreshes so quickly I never see everything posted in a given day. I keep telling myself: this is not what a lot of people are seeing. The Fediverse is one window of many into the wider internet, and a small one, all things considered. But it feels like it's going to get bigger.
I think this has the potential to seriously improve the self-curated feed, provide people a better way to spend their time online. There are a lot of people who aren't going to change how they do things, will stick to Facebook or Instagram forever. But for the more technologically minded, or those who remember better times, I feel like this could be transformative. At the very least, an enormous amount of blog posts, website updates, etc, are about to be made available. Maybe software to make sense of all this is coming. The other half of the equation is to pry people away from a consumption-based approach to their online lives, to convince them that making things is good, worthwhile, satisfying even. And this is a harder problem, the sort of big, social problem that doesn't have an easy answer. It stands in the way of finding our way back to a more interesting internet. I'm convinced that where we were pre-2004 was a much more interesting time. Everything I do here and on the small web is a nod to this: I don't want to scroll, I want to write, and read. I want the serendipity of strangers. So I'm interested to see where this goes, and I'm hopeful this is a step towards a healthier online commons.