Pondering Standard.site and the Social Web

I've seen a bunch of references to Standard.site^standard. It's an approach to publishing long-form content with/in AT Protocol^at. The same protocol that powers bluesky^bs. My first reaction was "why would I do that when I have a website?" I didn't give it much thought^posse.

A post called "Integrating your Atmosphere account content in your web projects^post" came across today. Instead of publishing, it's about storing your content in AT Protocol to use it as a CMS for your site. I'm not interested in that^cms. What caught my eye was the comments at the bottom of the page. Some of were direct responses. Some were attached via reference to the posts.

My eyebrow went up. Spock style.

Manifesto Made Real

Thinking about how to make the web a better place is my favorite pastime. To the point where I've begun my manifesto^manifesto. A key focus is making it easier to share and connect web content. The link I hit for "Integrating your Atmosphere account..." is on a site called Standard Reader^sr. It aggregates Standard.site long-form content from across the AT Protocol network. If you squint your eyes, it's an RSS reader with two way communication^rss. Damn close to what I've been thinking about.

If that's really what it provides, we have a chance to vastly improve the web. Using it to break away from corporate controlled social media networks^break. Doing that would make the world a better place^better.

-a

[aka @alanwsmith.com on bluesky]

Endnotes

• Standard.site includes some basic theming (in site.standard.theme.basic). It's only four colors at the moment: foreground, background, accent, and accentForeground. That they have it at all is what's encouraging. It points to the possibility for more advanced CSS. The idea being that folks should be able to send a CSS payload that consumers can choose to use fully, partially, or completely ignore at their own discretion.

• ActivityPub is a sibling of AT Protocol. It's what behind Mastodon. I use it too. Nothing like Standard.site has come across my feed from there. Would love to know if there's something like it. (The way I look at it, the more swings we take at breaking down corporate social media networks the better.)

• This post does not get into moderation. There's an entire category of work to be done there. Bluesky has some tools in place. Possibly some of those can be repurposed. Either way, there's a lot to tackle.

References

• Social RSS(?) from Chris Coyier. Just one example of other folks who are thinking about and after the same idea.

• Leaflet, pckt, and offprint - Three services that that provide ways to publish that use Standard.site. I'm more interested in integrating this into my site, but not everyone will want to do that.

  I've only scanned the home pages of each, but the feeling is absolutely the idea of a social web.

  All three are paid services. I like that because I it when I'm interacting with a business where I'm the customer and not the commodity that's being sold. Notes like this on the offprint home page are great: "Funded by writers, not investors - We’re paid by the writers who use Offprint, not advertisers or investors. The writers remain our priority."

  I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone with a website looking to use the protocol to enhance what I have. Doing everything entirely on AT Protocol (which is the approach these services take) is equally valid. I wouldn't be surprise to see it being the majority use case.

• Sequoia - An app that's designed to publish static sites to ATProto. Details in the quickstart.

  This is the thing that I'm most interested in looking at since I want to have the source of truth be my website instead of one of the other services. I wrote my own site builder. I expect I'll mimic what sequoia does internally. Especially since I use a custom text format I designed instead of markdown for my content. The good news is there's a rust create to get me started.

Footnotes