1.8 KiB
+++ title = "social web foundations: defining posts, contexts, and audiences" summary = "looking at prior art and synthesizing a data model that makes sense as the foundation for a protocol" date = 2024-10-20T03:58:55-05:00 toc = true autonumbering = false draft = true streams = ["all"] tags = ["activitypub", "activity streams", "as2", "fedi", "indieweb", "social web", "social networking", "social media", "social communication", "social"] +++
Things vs References
At the base of the data model, you either have a thing, or a reference to a thing. The distinction between the thing vs. the reference is important because the reference might have its own properties, separately from the thing.
Prior art
Microformats 2
Initially, the Indieweb and Microformats community started out with a much narrower scope for their building blocks:
- h-entry started out as a way to represent "datestamped or episodic content", but has since evolved to represent any content piece in general.
- h-cite started out as a way to represent "citations or references to online publications", but has since evolved to represent any reference in general.
Activity Streams 2.0
Activity Streams 2.0 defines two base classes from which everything else inherits:
- Object, which represents any object ("thing")
- Link, which represents a web link ("reference")
Posts
A "post" is a thing that generally has content.
Context and Audience
For any "post", the most important bit about it (after the content itself) is to be able to understand why the post was made, and who it was made for.