IndieWeb and triki supports Activity Streams 2.0

triki now supports Activity Streams 2.0 for blogs. Learning about AS2 has opened up the very cool IndieWeb project to me, so there are plenty more options to improve triki's connectedness.

Posted: Sat 21 May, 2016, 13:32
As per my last blog on open social networks, I planned to support Activity Streams 2.0 within triki. I am pleased to say that the first cut of this is now finished and available via the blue streams icon in the header. At the moment this only produces updates on new blogs, but I will add in updates on Recommendations ("Likes" effectively), Albums and Photos. The stream is produced in the preferred JSON-LD format. From a triki perspective, this works perfectly. triki naturally stores all data as linked data as it is basically a semantic web server, so the fact that JSON-LD is emerging as the preferred format for exchanging social data is awesome.

Having implemented Activity Streams 2.0, I now know a bit more about it. Compared to RSS there is a much wider vocabulary of updates that can be provided. From Likes, to Invitations, to Travel announcement so plain Notes. In a few years time it is conceivable that some of the siloed social networks could start to produce these feeds.

In the meantime, those involved with the IndieWeb are building up the working groups, protocols, and software to move us towards a more open social web. It is really focussed on everyone having their own website, for their own content and working out ways to integrate that with the existing silos and directly with each other. Many of their goals are amazing similar to what I described in a previous blog before I even knew IndieWeb existed. They have even tried to tackle the limited authentication options on the web today with IndieAuth. Good times.

What I like about IndieWeb is that it is has adopted an incrementalist approach. Rather than working towards a big vision that may happen in ten years, they are asking what we can do today to allow us to control our content but still enjoy a social network on the web. Another nice thing is the focus on protocols and interfaces rather than software, in recognition of the fact that we do not all need to run the same software, but we do need to be able to talk. +1 IndieWeb.

One the coolest things is POSSE to Twitter where content is created locally and shared to your network on Twitter. This is a good balance for me and offers a nice "Push" based distribution option to compliment the more "Pull" based RSS and Activity Streams 2.0 feeds.

I am debating adding POSSE to Twitter support into triki. This may be the next, we will see.