ContentMold

Existing Work Towards a Better Internet

We have to both do and demonstrate our due dilligence here.

It's a very generally stated endevour. ConMo has the more narrowly defined (but still a bit embarassingly broad) goal of "improving the dynamics between content, creator, and consumer". I think for all intents and purposes we can lump this sort of thing into "make the modern internet less premium mediocre and more old school techo-optimist".

The visions of a distributed, benevelently incented information sharing networking is at least as old as World Wide Web as we know it. Tempting as it may be to discuss the history of such things, it seems much more expedient to jump right to current solutions.

The Fediverse

Mastodon is the Twitter-like interface built over a distributed content platform protocol called ActivityPub. Bluesky is the same, but built over a new protocol called AT Proto. Both of these essentially solve the problem of, "I want to publish my tweet/post/video but without supporting a singular platform cartel."

Users belong to servers which host the content they post, and amalgamate and serve the content they consume, pulling from other servers as necessary. In this way, publication/hosting becomes de-coupled from presentation/organization.

The Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is the idea of moving beyond the text-for-humans internet, and pubishing more well defined, machine-meaningful data. Turns out there's not much incentive to do that, centralized, gate-kept structured information is the bread and better of every IT business. Nevertheless, a lot a lot of thinking has gone into how such a universal data model can be designed, shared, integrated, and used.

The fundamental technology of the Semantic Web is a data model for semantic triples1 called the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which use domain names as identifiers. Using the same mechanisms that allow a URL like [BROKEN LINK: en.wikipedia.org/Ford] to universally locate a resource/html page, RDF uses URI's like [BROKEN LINK: purl.org/conmo/curricullate/has_prerequisite] to uniquely identify a resource/data.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a format for publishing data as semantic triples, using URLs as unique identifiers for the objects and properties in the data.

Scheme.org is a similar tool, but instead of publishing arbitrary data, it focuses on publishing website metadata for use by search engines.

Syndication Protocols

RSS/Atom

IPFS

The Interplanetary Filesystem. Not sure this has much to bear on what ConMo is trying to do.

Other Schemes

  • Web Mentions
  • Web Annotations

Footnotes:

1

Using triples of subject, predicate, and object, one can represent data in any schema. %Post{id: "123", title: "How to cook", date_published: "8/25/25", author: "Tom", content: "Cooking is easy. First collect the ingredients. Then combine them in the correct order, interspersed by the correct secondary actions. Done."} becomes <123 is_a post>, <123 title "How to cook">, <123 author "Tom">