tbd Welcome back to the Web.
tbd This is a pre-release version of a site/app in heavy development, in such an early phase that it still has a placeholder name!
We've all lost our way on the Internet. The more we delegated over to centralized corporate systems, the more control they took over our lives, and the more awful things like mass surveillance, hyper-monetization, and manipulation we got in return. But the Web has been here all along, and it's still ours for the keeping.
Have a look at what we're talking about.
That could be news, blogs, social media, even YouTube channels. These open standards let anyone on the web offer updates directly to their readers, with no big platform required.
Here you can follow any site that offers this service, and you see their posts in time order as they occur, with no walled gardens, no tracking, and no algorithm manipulating what you see.
Modern Web search is overrun with spam, AI-generated junk, and surveillance.
Rather than trying to catalog the entire Web, good and bad, communities can choose sites to include based on relevance, quality, or whatever positive impact they bring to the community of Web users.
And different communities can band together to share their search capabilities with each other, giving everyone a deeper well to draw from.
We connect to the Social Web through ActivityPub, the same open system that powers Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other platforms used by millions worldwide.
There's no company in control. Follow people and pages just like news sites, and join in the conversation without being led around by an algorithm.
Other Social Web users on the Internet can follow you back, and you can share your posts or even let them see your followed content
There's no central ownership or control over this system, no agendas or algorithms, or weird billionaires trying to manipulate you. Just open standards and people connecting on their own terms.
Are you the person who fixes everyone’s email and Wi-Fi? You can probably run your own server. Don’t like how something works? You’re free to change it—and share your improvements with others.
Servers can collaborate with each other too, sharing search indexes, content, and moderation with each other. The result is a safer, more private, and more democratized Web, shaped by people and not corporations.
And there's more coming too.
This isn't designed to mimic any single existing site or app. Its goal is to become your new front page for the Web, helping you find the people and information you really seek, and rewarding people and sites that practice good citizenship.
Here are some more of the tools to that end:
Once it's ready for collaboration[1], the code for this site will be shared, and anyone with the desire and ability will be able to host their own instance of it. Sites will be able to peer together and share data with one another, and users will be able to connect around the world with the Social Web via networks like ActivityPub
Things are in an imperfect state here, and as of this moment the site is closed to registration for private testing. But if you ask, you can probably get access. Several people use the site daily but you need a certain tolerance for instability.
For more details, check out the About page.
Also I post updates fairly often about progress or ongoing work:
I know this isn't everyone's favorite thing to hear, but people would laugh me out of the room if they saw how messy some of the code is right now. And I want more of the bones of this thing to be built up before I'm ready for anyone to collaborate. ↩︎