2024-07-13
Sometimes I hear about a brand new web thingie, with its main differentiator being that it implements ActivityPub. It could be forums, blogs, or image galleries, but with ActivityPub involved in it.
I'm going to admit I've never actually tried any of them, but personally I don't feel like every web site necessarily has to be "social". Not every web site needs to take part in some sort of grander discourse. Sometimes a web site is just a place to put all of your stuff that interests you, stuff that you've made or written.
Personally I also wonder about the value and tradeoffs of making something "social". Perhaps it might help a bit with getting noticed, in some cases, but from my experience having tried out some fediverse instances, no one really cares about most things you post on them, it seems to be mainly a write only medium where no one is really reading. Among at least some parts of the federated subculture, it seems that discoverability is also deemed an anti-feature 1, with many of these types of web sites shunning search engine indexing altogether.
Also of the type of traffic that your web page might get, traffic from search engines have always been of people that want to find out more about a topic. Social media while there is a bit of that, most traffic is usually passive.
Compared to most other ways of structuring information, the social media linear timeline is a curse which I don't think needs to be replicated anywhere else. Blogs are technically chronologically linear, however there are a whole lot of other differences that at least make them good citizens of the classic web. Blogs often have healthy semantic linking across relevant pages, allowed by the fact they have real links as opposed to posting bare URLs in a social post. Also every post tends to have a far higher effort put into them, and the posts are usually meaningful. So often this also means there's a lot fewer posts to go through.
I think the better structured alternatives are still the hierarchical style and wikis. The hierarchical style being the kind of information structure that is used by web directories, image galleries, old article sites, and classic web pages which have all their content organized and categorized by themes and topics. Finding something in such a site is simply much faster than perusing for the information by scrolling back through some linear timeline. Wikis, while looser than the hierarchical, arguably are the better one when it comes to large scale knowledge bases.
Now why would I bring those up? How often when you do a search in a search engine, is a tweet in the results? Its incredibly rare. I have seen far more often "old fashioned" forum posts in the results than tweets too. It could be that search engines weigh down social media posts, but its more likely that social media posts just don't have any good signals about them. If they are below a certain word count then they probably don't have a lot to say, or if they have a lot of information, they use strange abreviations, neologisms, and txtisms to cram the information into it. They also don't have any of the healthy contextual and semantic properties of normal web pages that make the web good (pages linking to other pages, categorization, and so on).
Now for some other reasons I'm not really for ActivityPub on every little web site. Because I am often busy doing a lot of different projects, I can't always be at my web site, so I keep my web site completely static. By using ActivityPub on your web site, your web site is now by some definition not static, even if other people cannot comment or change information on your web site. It is now something you will need to maintain, the same as maintaining a whole forum. The point of ActivityPub is your web site can keep track of subscribers and send them back messages, this forces you in a way to engage with the wider network even if you don't really feel like it. Now you may have to contend with trolls running other ActivityPub services. Now you will have to contend with trolls that may try to mess with your web site by trying to find bugs in the pubsub implementation, perhaps to cause it to unintentionally send something that will anger the other ActivityPub sites and you will have to contend with that too. In some ways it now contends with many of the same issues that one would have to contend with maintaining an email system, except the messages are sent over HTTP, otherwise its the same.
By making your web site a "social" web site, it stops being an individual web site, and also becomes a lot more of a thing to maintain. By having a simple web site, I get to be away from the social dynamic and get to focus on the things I like.
1. Attitudes toward indexing on the fediverse seems generally negative. Some links about it: Participation in the Fediverse and HN News discussion