#TIL about hypothes.is, a site intended to offer a scholarly meta-moderation layer on top of web discussions. According to the Wikipedia article they publish their software as free code. I wonder if there could be some benefits in an integration with the fediverse?
@strypey I use Hypothesis. Mostly as member of Climate Feedback a group of climate scientists who review media articles on climate change.
You can make general comments on the entire article, but the strength is that you can select a portion of the text and then comment on that.
That would be hard to mimic in the Fediverse, you would have to tell the system what you are commenting on. Reversely these comments do not make much sense outside of their context (the webpage they comment on).
@VictorVenema does it federate? Can sites other than hypothes.is running compatible/identical software participate? I guess that is what would bring it to the fediverse, whether the federation is ActivityPub or something else.
@tetrislife Not sure. Hypothesis uses web annotations, which is a W3C standard. And there are several such systems. Whether they exchange messages I do not know. I think I heard that it is possible to use your own server, but not fully sure, that is long ago.
@VictorVenema I take that back. On reading more about Web annotations, it sounds bigger than ActivityPub was.
And with descriptive Resources not having to be URI's, you could annotate anything by describing it using its checksum! Commenting on photos, yes. But also, commenting on Git commit hunks!
And an offline-first version could somewhat replace Zotero?
hypothes.is isn't a lock-in either; I could, hypothetically, get @strypey 's annotations on anything directly from his "feed".
@strypey @tetrislife @VictorVenema I've been using h. since the summer more. I'd be interested in running the code myself if it could somehow interact with h. itself. The API is useful for me in two ways: I display that annotations exists underneath my blogpostings, I pull in my own annotations into my local notes. I also follow the RSS feeds of h. annotations of a range of people, as a means of discovery. Want to explore sharing annotations from my local notes towards h. as well.
@ton
> I'd be interested in running the code myself if it could somehow interact with h. itself.
Have you raised this possibility with the devs? It might already be a thing, or they might be willing to do investigate doing it if somone's showing interest.
@tetrislife @VictorVenema Sounds like hypothes.is is worth a bit more investigation. I've only had a quick skim so far. They describe their project goals here:
https://web.hypothes.is/about/
"We typically use the 2-Clause BSD License":
https://github.com/hypothesis
#WebAnnotations #Hypothesis #FreeCode