humanetech

Some very early announcement of something very noteworthy that is happening on the Fediverse right this moment. Currently most of the discussion still takes place under the #weblite hashtag only.

As you know the current Web specifications have become very bloated. They serve established browser vendors, which operate monopolistically and dominate the (corporate) internet. For new FOSS browser projects it is nigh impossible to start from scratch and implement crisp and modern web rendering engines. The complexity and scope is just too high.

Existing standard bodies such as WhatWG, W3C and IETF move slowly and are beholden to Big Tech lobbying and influences, who want to keep this the status quo.

But there's nothing that withholds the free software community to derive their own open standards that are lightweight and intuitive. So it happened, only yesterday 15 October, that some fedizens decided to pick up that glove.

Adrian Cochrane and Alexandra kicked off the Weblite initiative. Adrian has been working for a long time on two very cool greenfield browser projects, Odysseus and Rhapsode, an auditory browser. From this many insights on what #weblite specifications should and should not contain was gleaned and hopefully and with collaboration from many others this will be transcribed into Unicode chars in some initial drafts. So, if you are interested, then don't hesitate and lend your helping hand.

You'll notice that the linked repositories on Codeberg are still mostly emtpy as of now. Yep, it is indeed that early. On Fediverse you always learn the cool things first 😜

As posted by Adrian these are the principles of Weblite:

• Simplicity
• Vendor, platform, and device independence
• Forwards and backwards compatibility
• Maintainability
• Flexibility
• Richness
• Accessibility

Note too that with these principles Weblite is somewhhat different than what ProjectGemini aims to achieve. Gemini strips to absolute essentials and has more in common to Gopher, that came before the current web.

Join forces, Lemmy people! Let's bring lite where now darkness rules.. (Don't forget to add a #weblite hashtags to your fedi toots)

I think a great use case for this Community would be to ask other people to interact with projects on Github/Gitlab on their behalf, and report back the link to new issues or issue comments to the Community.

The URL attached to this post is an example of that, where Pilou created an issue in the Gitea tracker on behalf of Loïc who does not have a Github account for ethical reasons.

(Gitea is still on Github, but they intend to dogfood their own code forge any time soon. The issue Pilou created deals with adding ForgeFed-based federation support to Gitea. See this issue for details. FedeProxy community is trying to speed this up, by arranging funding).

In a recent announcement also published on Lemmy Gabe Kangas told about Owncast's roadmap with regards to adding federation features. These include interoperability with PeerTube.

Both PeerTube and Owncast are are now both members of SocialHub, the community of technologists and fedizen that collaboratively evolve the fediverse foundation.

I encourage anyone willing to help envision how this interop may look like to become a member too and participate in forum discussions. Alternatively you can also use the SocialHub companion Fediverse Futures brainstorming space on Lemmy.