Community Spotlight: Casey Kolderup, creator of Postmarks, has joined the W3C’s Social Web Community Group!

If you regularly read my stuff, you know I have a lot to say about how we can save the web, and what it will take to do it. We’re blursed to live in interesting times — in the midst of not only a social media revolution, but a revolution of all mass media. One powerful tool we have to affect change in media is the technological systems that underpin it. Building systems that are fundamentally safe, that protect people, especially marginalized communities, is imperative to building a better web. One of those technological systems is ActivityPub, the most widely used protocol in the burgeoning social web — the Fediverse.

The W3C ActivityPub Recommendation was finalized on January 23, 2018, but due to re-invigorated interest in decentralized social media platforms that are not owned by corporations, the Social Web Community Group (CG) has started meeting again. They plan to address issues and advance solutions facing the entire community, most recently at the W3C’s annual gathering, TPAC. A fellow Fastly employee and all-around awesome human, Casey Kolderup, joined the Community Group’s meeting — I wanted to learn more about the community group, so I cornered Casey in the office kitchen* and asked them a few questions.

[*...No cornering was needed to get Casey to answer my questions, they did so very graciously, and we work on opposite sides of the US, so there’s no kitchen... Anyway!]

Hannah: When did you first get involved with the social web? What excites you about it?

Casey: I've been finding communities online since I was joining newsgroups and IRC when I was a pre-teen, but for this modern fediverse-enabled social web I've been instance-hopping around to various degrees since 2017, sometimes public, sometimes private. The fediverse is newly energizing to me because there are a few big platforms that can draw people in with broad utility like Mastodon and Pixelfed, but they can interoperate with things that are similar (comparing something like Firefish to Mastodon, for example) or that are fairly different (like Bookwyrm). Each community can decide on its own standards and also what they want to get out of the software they're using, which is really cool.

Hannah: It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I think it reflects how humans form communities in person more than any social software I’ve seen before — well, maybe forums. So why did you want to join the social web community group?

Casey: I think it's great that an organization like the W3C recognizes the lasting importance of the concept of a "social web" to the internet at large, and having a standards organization that has been working in tandem with both companies and also the indie web community seems like a great alternative to the turmoil we've experienced in the last few years over closed corporate platforms.

Hannah: Completely. What do you want to accomplish by joining, and what are some of the biggest challenges the social web faces?

Casey: For now I mostly want to learn more about what the folks who have already been doing the work are thinking about and try to understand where things are headed. I've spent some time in the past 12 months reading the ActivityPub spec and its associated documents & protocols, but it was with the perspective of an end goal in mind (making Postmarks work and getting basic interoperation with Mastodon in place). Understanding the larger and more forward-looking perspective seems important to me right now!

As for challenges the social web faces, based on what I do have vision of right now, it's all stuff that I hope is, or will become, familiar to people who have worked more in the open source world than I have: How do we bring in a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives, while prioritizing the safety of people who have been historically excluded & hurt? How do we take something that is so powerful and open-ended and enable developers to refocus it as packaged software that is useful to people & a joy to use?

Hannah: It’s a daunting task, but with thoughtful and brilliant people like you working on these issues, I believe we can overcome those challenges! I want to ask you about Postmarks but before I do — can you tell us what happened during the Social Web Community Group meeting at TPAC?

Casey: While I unfortunately didn’t get to attend in person, the vast majority of the participants did, which seemed like a good opportunity for them to move forward on some discussions that have been in progress about a few upcoming proposals, mostly very specific details of the ActivityPub spec that some people feel would improve its clarity or usefulness–but as with any controlled standard, figuring out how best to revise is difficult. Can you make the revision non-breaking to existing implementations? If so, will that diminish the usefulness of the change?

The other topic that came up was somewhat related: the idea to request a separate “working group”, which is a W3C designation that has different membership requirements and powers, was floated. The proposal as it has been made is structured around incorporating the errata mentioned above (and what sounds like some previous material of a similar scope) into the ActivityPub and ActivityStream specs; from what I understand it will need to be discussed more formally at a future meeting. Since the meeting, there’s been lively discussion about it among individual members of the group and the community at large on Mastodon and a thread for comments has been opened on the ActivityPub SocialHub forum.

Hannah: Interesting — sounds like the beginning of a long and winding road. like Now Postmarks! I know you just released it a week or so ago. Tell me more about it— what does it do, and are there any hidden features people should know about?

Casey: Postmarks is a social bookmarking site that runs as a single-user website. You can use it like a Pinboard account or a linkblog, but you can also interact with the fediverse while you're doing so, sharing your content out in real-time to Mastodon users or watching for cool links from any ActivityPub platform that supports sharing URLs. It's still in its early days, but I've been experimenting with different versions of it for almost a year now and I'm now hoping to get more people involved so we can try to make it useful, fun, easy, and safe for as many people as possible.

It's not a super "hidden" feature necessarily, but we don't really telegraph it on the site right now: every Postmarks site also publishes its own Atom feed! RSS and its related formats were things that really got me excited about the web around the time I moved from working on legacy/proprietary software to working on the open web. You can even run a Postmarks site without ever enabling its ActivityPub functionality but still make it easy to keep up with via its feed.

Hannah: That is so cool! I can’t wait to play with it. [Readers — you can learn more about Postmarks here and find the repo here.] Last question — where should people go if they want to get involved in the Social Web CG too? What recommendations do you have for people who want to contribute?

Casey: Lately I've been lurking on the ActivityPub.Rocks SocialHub, which I did not know existed and wish I had during all this time that I was working on Postmarks! There's more general info on the ActivityPub.Rocks site, and I cannot recommend enough Darius Kazemi's guide to learning about ActivityPub – it was this guide that helped me get from zero to working demo, and I'm slowly picking out all the code from Postmarks that I copied over from Darius's demo server that he has graciously made available.

—

I’m excited to follow along with Casey as they help advance this important and impactful corner of the new web. If you want to follow along with them too, you can find them on their blog, personal home page, or on Mastodon!

Now let’s go build the good internet — together ⏩