Social Web + Browsers = <3

[samuelgoto]

These are some personal notes I took from a session at IIW and a few exploratory designs that occurred to me while meeting folks there.

@aaronpk and I hosted a session at IIW on the topic of ways in which the browser could help the the fediverse succeed.

We discussed a few things, like being able to being able to facilitate the discovery of your ActivityPub instance when you are interacting with another ActivtyPub instance.

For example, we discussed how we all had trouble with the unnecessary friction involved in discovering your instance by manually typing it:

@aaronpk and mine's intuition was that this problem is systemic across every federated system, and equivalent to a proposal on how to make this better for the Indie Web:

How the browser materializes this UX is obviously its own choice, but I think there is something powerful that happens when we transpose this to the URL bar:

I think once you get things into the URL bar, it can become an anchor to a lot more social gestures between websites.

For example:

This translates well too for instances you don't operate yourself:

Or even actions that aren't even that social:

There are a lot of open UX design questions here, here are a few formulations to give you a sense of other materializations:

Regardless of which specific materialization we pick, I just wanted to write down an idea that occurred during IIW that I think could be pretty cool to explore further.

At this point, this is just an early idea that I wanted to get out there to get a sense of what folks may think.

WDYT?

[elf-pavlik]

I like the general idea! It feels like hypermedia with affordances.
It also reminds me of a TPAC session back in 2014 when there was an attempt to reconcile work in Social WG, especially ActivityStreams 2.0 and https://schema.org/Action

https://www.w3.org/2014/10/29-social-minutes.html

[bumblefudge]

but what if you're logged into all 5 (these 4 plus your own domain auth system)-- is there a chooser? a list in your settings ranked by generic preference? a favicon.ico pull down? 😄

sidenote im sad I missed that iiw session!

[samuelgoto]

but what if you're logged into all 5 (these 4 plus your own domain auth system)-- is there a chooser? a list in your settings ranked by generic preference? a favicon.ico pull down?

Good question, I dunno :) I think it is equivalent to some UX problems we are solving with https://github.com/w3c-fedid/multi-idp, so seems solvable to me. But yeah, agreed, hard UX problem here.

[samuelgoto]

It also reminds me of a TPAC session back in 2014 when there was an attempt to reconcile work in Social WG, especially ActivityStreams 2.0 and https://schema.org/Action

Ha, you found my 10 year long plan!! :) You can't step on the same river twice, so maybe we'll manage to affect change now!

https://schema.org/docs/about.html
Sam Goto of Google did much of the work being schema.org's Actions vocabulary.

[chrismessina]

This approach wouldn't work well in browsers that hide or deprioritize the URL bar, like Arc.

[samuelgoto]

This approach wouldn't work well in browsers that hide or deprioritize the URL bar, like Arc.

Yeah, each browser would have to figure out ways to anchor these. It seems like a solvable UX problem though, doesn't it @chrismessina ?

On a related note, good running into you online after so many years (more than 10?) @chrismessina !

[elf-pavlik]

I'm wondering if this could be built on top of Web Share API and Web Share Target API to some extent by adding the semantics of different types of actions.