Is social media its own thing or is it an attention layer for the open web?

Is social media its own thing or is it an attention layer for the open web? Is it mostly about these separate things we call posts, or should every piece of writing or audio or video be able to be boosted itself?

I think that's the divide between #ATproto and #ActivityPub. #bluesky wants to dominate a world of posts like Gmail dominates email etc. Social running on a protocol but one company decides most people's experience. Or should we give the public full control over what media goes viral?

@wjmaggos@liberal.city I think that thinking of "anything" being boostable is both weird and expected at the same time. We hold these thoughts in our heads concurrently because it was how the web-at-large (indieweb notwithstanding) worked.

What I mean is...

A news article isn't a discrete resource shared on a common social web — such a construct does not exist outside of the Fediverse.

... but news articles are littered with "share via..." buttons that sort of approximate the experience.