But I don't want Mastodon. I want Web Annotations built in to the browser, including the ability to share them with other browser users using [insert distribution and authentication mechanisms].
Like, I read Ars Technica. I have friends who read Ars Technica. Why can't we leave annotations for each other on Ars Technica without Ars Technica having any control over or knowledge of what we say? Why can't we do that to Facebook and Twitter and reddit and Hacker News and Mastodon and Medium? Sidechannels for everything. End-to-end encryption eventually. Self-hosted, you bet. All the most important features of social, with none of the advertising opportunity.
My intuition is that browser plugins based on some federated system (e.g. Mastodon, Matrix) could enable this. Why complicate browsers even more? (No expertise here, so I'm probably missing the big picture)
To simplify it for normal people. My family all use browser extensions to block ads/tracking and shore up security because I set it all up for them. My non-technical friends don't. They understand video game mods because adding mods is fun. But the idea of modding other kinds of programs makes no sense to them, because those are for getting work done, not for tinkering with.
So in order for it take off, it needs to be presented as just a native feature of the web. In people's heads, the logic should go like: "My email software lets me forward emails. My calendar software lets me invite people to calendar events. My contact software lets me merge duplicate contacts. My web browser lets me annotate web pages with other people. What a strange world it would be if things didn't work like that?"
Annotea was an W3C experiment for Web Annotations. Had an RDF/XML data model and used XPointer for locating the annotated part of the resource. You could also have self hosted servers for your annotations.
Only really implemented in Amaya, the W3C’s own browser/editor, and like the rest of the browser a little bit clunky.
Mozilla seems to be hellbent on squandering its resources, working on anything and everything except for their browser.
Moreover, the Fakespot acquisition and building a social platform (with an explicit political position) jeopardizes their position as a neutral browser vendor. Because a lot of people and resources in the organization would now be devoted towards content moderation, it would be easy for an extremist political group (which could either be left or right leaning) to force Mozilla to bake in censorship in their browser, by way of litigation or otherwise, as they already have the technology to do it elsewhere.
It started when they fired pretty much their entire Servo team and then a lot of their MDN staff, and then gave their CEO a pay rise. I think the last useful thing they made was their file sharing web app, which they also dropped.
They do, this isn’t it. And I don’t trust Mozilla to help with it.
I’d rather Mozilla work on making the browser the best client software ever. Make it a good citizen that uses local data in ways only a browser can.
Would be neat to have some productive peer to peer functionality and get a really nice distributed compute and storage system that uses like 5% of resources so users don’t notice. That would be neat and something Mozilla can do because they have client software that respects privacy and user autonomy.
Like, I read Ars Technica. I have friends who read Ars Technica. Why can't we leave annotations for each other on Ars Technica without Ars Technica having any control over or knowledge of what we say? Why can't we do that to Facebook and Twitter and reddit and Hacker News and Mastodon and Medium? Sidechannels for everything. End-to-end encryption eventually. Self-hosted, you bet. All the most important features of social, with none of the advertising opportunity.