Evan Prodromou

Just a reminder for those of you out there thinking about producing great content on the Fediverse: our Fediverse Multimedia Grants program has a deadline this week: 23:59 4 Nov 2026 AOE (anywhere on earth). If you or someone you know (or someone you’re a fan of!) is looking to develop a new publication or channel on the Fediverse, please take a look at the program and apply before the deadline.

The Social Web Foundation is pleased to announce the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2027, and invite participants to submit proposals for talks for the event.

FOSDEM is an exciting free and open source software event in Brussels, Belgium that brings together thousands of enthusiasts from around the world. The event spans the weekend of January 30 to January 31, 2027 and features discussion tracks (“devrooms”) for scores of different technology topics. This is the third FOSDEM Social Web Devroom.

The Social Web Devroom will be a 5 hour track.##

FormatThere will be two available talk formats:

TopicsThe Social Web Devroom is open to talks all about the Social Web, AKA the Fediverse, including:

Important dates

SubmissionsSubmit talk proposals to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2027/cfp. Select “Social Web” from the “Track” dropdown, and include the length of your talk (8/25) in the submission notes. (Note that the “Lightning Talks” track is a separate event-wide track; if you’re proposing a Social Web micro-talk, please choose the “Social Web” track!)##

Code of ConductAll attendees and speakers must be familiar with and agree to the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.##

ContactQuestions about topics, formats, or the Social Web in general should go to [email protected].

One thing people have asked me over the last month is whether #SWF will be organising the Social Web Devroom at #FOSDEM2027 . The answer is: fingers crossed!

We submitted the application to manage the devroom ahead of the October 4 deadline. We haven’t heard back yet; the announcements are scheduled for October 20, about a week from this writing.

If the dev room is accepted, we will put out the call for proposals soon after that — it has to be published by October 27.

We have been really lucky to have broad participation from volunteers and partner orgs in doing the organization for the last 2 events. It encompasses everything from soliciting applications, judging the entries, and building the schedule to MCing the event, helping people at the door, and watching the time for speakers.

If you want to be part of that work, please let us know! It is much easier work if we spread it around.

SWF is also not organising BOFs at FOSDEM. So, if you have something to discuss, please plan a BOF!

I really recommend coming to nostr:npub1yaucq4lpxpm2qzayehm42g98gnuz5swjyg8m233dggu9annluxfsyhatjv  if it’s affordable and convenient for you. It’s a great event.

A few months back, we posted about the new Fediverse instance called “the Forkiverse“. This is a Mastodon instance started by the hosts of the Search Engine podcast and the Hard Fork podcast. The site has picked up tens of thousands of users, with a distinctive local culture, and is a nice part of the Fediverse.

The hosts are planning to shut down the server on Dec 31, 2026. They go over the reasons in an episode of the Search Engine podcast, Vladimir Putin’s Forkiverse. The reasons are pretty understandable — the cost of the hosting and the effort needed to moderate and manage the Forkiverse instance isn’t offset by their own enjoyment of the platform or a sense of mission.

I (Evan) am interviewed as part of this episode. It was a tough interview to do — I never want to talk about servers shutting down. But it’s part of the work that we are concentrating on here at the Social Web Foundation — in particular, the study of Fediverse server sustainability that is partly funded by our grant from the Interledger Foundation. Understanding what it means when instances shut down is important.

The interview was one of several that I’ve done with the Search Engine folks. We talked for several hours back in 2024, when my ActivityPub book had just come out, and when the SWF was just starting. We had follow up interviews in the intervening years. It’s been a good relationship, actually.

Search Engine has a new episode that includes excerpts from those interviews on its premium feed today. The episode is available on a few platforms — I found it on Spotify at Thirty-three minutes of hopefulness for a better internet . I was worried that it was going to be kind of saccharine — here’s this idealist, fighting for hopeless cause — but I think it actually is a pretty good listen. I got to be human, instead of a caricature, which was nice.

It’s been nice to stay connected to the Search Engine team, including PJ Vogt, during this time. I’m glad that he and the other people involved in the Forkiverse are giving the site a long enough time to wind down that the users there can move to other instances. And I’m glad that they’re going to stay connected to the Fediverse from their accounts on Threads, Bluesky, or elsewhere.

I remain hopeful for the Fediverse, and I hope you are, too. We’re doing something important together.

Today, with the help of our partner the Interledger Foundation, we are announcing a new program of grants for multimedia software and creators. In this program, we are asking software developers and publishers to partner to make new and better content on the Fediverse.

Multimedia, such as audio, video, and images, provides an engaging experience for Fediverse users. It can give a more visceral social and media experience than text alone. Multimedia software, however, can be difficult to develop, host, and use, and integrating it with other ActivityPub services takes time.

It’s also challenging to produce engaging media on the Fediverse. It can be hard to develop an audience, work with unfamiliar tools, and understand the different dynamics of a federated architecture.

Our intent with the Fediverse Multimedia Grants program is to bring more, and newer, rich content to the Fediverse for people to enjoy. We want to give creators a chance to get their feet under them, develop an audience, and make a permanent home on the Fediverse. We also want this program to help developers concentrate on creators’ needs — authoring, editing, organizing and publishing rich, engaging content.

For this program, we are offering grants of up to US$20,000 to developer/creator teams to start new publications on the Fediverse. We expect the teams to work in close cooperation, providing mutual support and feedback. Our expected outcome is ActivityPub-enabled software that’s better fitted to the needs of creators, and new publications with a foothold in the Fediverse.

Applications are open today at the Fediverse Multimedia Grants round of our grants portal. Applications are only for developer/creator teams. For publishers who aren’t familiar with Fediverse software, or developers who don’t have a good idea for a publisher to work with, please feel free to contact us and we’ll try to point you in the right direction to make a match.

Important dates for the program:

Please ask questions in the comments and replies for this post, or contact us privately. I (Evan) will also be organizing a session on the grant program at Fediforum today, 7 Oct 2026.

Thanks so much to the Interledger Foundation who generously funded this and other programs at the Social Web Foundation and who have been excellent creative partners in crafting this program.

ActivityPub software usually (but not always!) uses a handle format defined by RFC 7033, Webfinger, which looks like [email protected]. There’s a ActivityPub and Webfinger report from the Social Web Community Group that details how this interaction works.

All parts of this handle format can include non-ASCII Unicode characters, like accented Latin, Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi scripts. But it takes extra work, so users can’t count on non-ASCII characters being supported in their own or others’ software.

This is a problem for the Fediverse. Of the most-spoken human languages, only three primarily use only ASCII characters (English, Malaysian, Indonesian), for a total of about 500 million people. That means about 90% of humans use languages with non-Latin, or accented, character sets. We are missing an opportunity to include more people worldwide with internationalized handles with names, words and domains in their native languages.

Jim DeLaHunt nostr:npub1sst9ked4cx52ldcmc5g8kdxnhwag23u7jzhucv3suq7ph37nvcmqs64hjt has been doggedly pursuing better support for internationalized Webfinger handles in ActivityPub. To this end, the Social Web Community Group started tracking Internationalized Webfinger Handle Adoption. Covering dozens of servers, clients, and libraries that implement ActivityPub, the tracker helps to discovery which software can interoperate with inclusive handles.

If you know of ActivityPub software that isn’t on this list, or that doesn’t have its adoption tracked (question mark in the matrix), please add an issue or open a PR in the ActivityPub Webfinger task force repository.

About 14 years ago, I created a webfinger package for NodeJS. At the time, NodeJS was only a few years old. I had created pump.io as a new social networking engine and the successor to StatusNet. I needed a client for webfinger lookup — the process of converting a [email protected] handle to a API endpoint for processing messages — and there wasn’t one for NodeJS, so I made it.

It is kind of an antique — very old callback-style code that has its own HTTP processing system. It supported the older version of Webfinger, RFC 6415, using XML for the data format. It also supported the (at that time) new Webfinger specification, RFC 7033.

Since its last release in 2013, version 0.4.2, I hadn’t touched the project. It’s just been languishing in the npm repository, squatting on the “webfinger” package name, and collecting dust. The Webfinger RFC was published, ActivityPub was standardized, and the Fediverse grew and grew, without a single change to the package.

I realized I was sitting on this package a couple of years, ago, and I’ve been wanting to get a new version out. This week, I just did it. I ripped out all the legacy support for RFC 6415, upgraded the tests to use the Node test runner, switched from callback style to async/await, changed to ESM modules, and changed the format to StandardJS.

I also added a little utility method, so it’s easier to look up links in the JRD file that is returned. Now, to get an ActivityPub actor, you just do this:

I think the dependencies are low enough that you can use this version of the library from browser apps, although I haven’t tried it yet.

Anyway, I published version 0.5.1 today. I hope it provides some value to other people working on Fediverse software.

Mallory and I (Evan) will both be at HOPE in New York tomorrow. Mallory is giving a talk on I-Stars: Protocols and Power on the main stage which looks awesome. I’ll be holding a workshop to help people Get on the Fediverse Already – setting up their Fediverse accounts for the first time. Since we’re both there, we want to have a meetup with the wider Fediverse community in New York!

So, we’re organizing a Fediverse Meetup at the Irish Exit inside the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station at 7PM. HOPE is just a block away at the New Yorker Hotel, so we think this is a good location. And who doesn’t love Penn Station?

We’ll grab a biggish table and put up a sign — you should be able to find us pretty easily. All Fediverse denizens and lovers of the Open Social Web are welcome. We will be around for a couple of hours at least — if you have a favourite evening talk at HOPE you don’t want to miss, please feel free to stop by. And watch the #fediversemeetupnyc hashtag for news and pics.

This is a quick reminder that I (Evan) will be speaking about 10 Ways to Grow the Fediverse at Fedicon 2026. Fedicon is a fantastic event in Vancouver, colocated with FOSSY, that brings together some of the most interesting people working on the Fediverse today. I’m excited about talking about Fediverse growth, but I’m equally excited to see the other speakers on the agenda. If you’re going to FOSSY and/or Fedicon, please come say hello!

On Friday, August 14, 2026 at the HOPE conference in New York City, we’ll be running a workshop to help new people join the Fediverse. This is an exciting first for us, and we’d love your help making it a great experience.

Here’s what we need:

Please reply to this post with ideas or contact info. This is going to be fun!

A relay server is a server that collects public content from many Fediverse servers and distributes it to the other servers. tags.pub , the global hashtag server run by the Social Web Foundation, can follow relay servers and boost any tagged content coming from the connected servers. Especially for relay servers that gather together content from lots of small servers, this can help connect people with others who share their interests on the Fediverse.

However, some people have said they were surprised by the boosts, since they hadn’t directly connected their server to tags.pub. To avoid this, tags.pub is now unsubscribed from the open registration relay servers it was previously using. If your content is no longer being boosted, you can still connect your account or your server directly to tags.pub. tags.pub may subscribe to relay servers in the future, but we’ll coordinate with the relay server admins first to make sure there are fewer surprises.

I (Evan) will be at DWeb Camp Berlin this year. DWeb camp is a 5-day camping event in a forest near Berlin, where decentralized web hackers and advocates from around the world convene to discuss the state of the Web. I’ll be there hacking on ActivityPub implementations and meeting interesting people. If you’re coming to DWeb camp, please let me know — it’d be great to connect.

I am OVER THE MOON excited to see that #Mastodon now has a filtering option for notifications from bots. It’s working spotlessly from a build of Mastodon 4.6 from today (Here’s a screencast of me demoing the feature). This means that people using servers with #tagspub as a relay can opt out of getting boost notifications from tagbots but still keep sharing their content and still keep getting boost notifications from people. Thanks 🙏🏼 to the nostr:npub163hduy0fd2evxcc7298ck4yplx9pege9ne06wgra9h342jcxh5wszvmv0n team for including this feature; it goes a long way to making tags.pub work for everyone.

We’re proud to have been involved in organizing and supporting the european.social effort to promote European social sovereignty. Digital independence is an important topic for policymakers worldwide; local control of social network platforms needs as much if not more attention. Working with our fellow signatories, we think the European Social Stack declaration provides a framework for giving Europeans control over their social networks while staying fully connected to the rest of the world. Federation and bridging let people on different networks, with different ownership and business models, share their lives on the Internet, inside and outside Europe. SWF thinks this common-sense approach to social sovereignty is a good template for others outside Europe to borrow. Thanks to all our fellow signatories; we’re looking forward to building the sovereign social web with you.

Just a note — we are finishing up our analysis of the data from the Social Web Sustainability Survey that we announced recently. If you run a Fediverse server — a Mastodon or Pixelfed site, a Lemmy site or a NodeBB forum, or an ActivityPub-enabled WordPress blog or Ghost.org newsletter, or even if you run Threads.com — we want to hear from you. What’s difficult about operating a service? What’s useful? How do we keep you on the Social Web? Please take this chance to respond to the survey — it’s the best way to let SWF and others know your priorities for sustainability and support.

A quick reminder that NLnet has an Open Social Fund specifically for projects that implement ActivityPub. They make grants of 5000 to 50000 euros. Their next proposal deadline is June 1, 2026. The proposal process requires just a few hours of work. It’s definitely worth the time to get into this important program!

As part of the work on Fediverse sustainability announced earlier this year, the Social Web Foundation is running our first Fediverse Sustainability Survey . We’re seeking operators, moderators and administrators of Fediverse sites, from the smallest to the largest, to fill out the anonymous survey and share information about how their instances work. If you help run an instance, please take the 10-15 minutes needed to fill out the survey. We need a lot of responses (hundreds!) to get statistically relevant data, so please feel free to share the link. We’re also on the lookout for operators of instances that are no longer running; there is a lot to learn about sustainability from servers that closed down, for whatever reason. We’ll publish findings here as part of our sustainability report, supplemented by interviews with selected respondents. Thanks!

The call for proposals is open for the COSCUP Fediverse track in Taipei, Taiwan. ActivityPub-related software, including server and client implementations, are great topics for the event.

COSCUP (“Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters”) is the FOSDEM of East Asia. Run by the Open Source community in Taiwan, it brings together people excited about FOSS across the region.

For the first time, this year, members of the Korean ActivityPub developer community FediDev KR are joining up with FediLUG of Japan to program and run a Fediverse track at COSCUP. This has the potential to be a huge step forward for the Fediverse developer community. Although many major projects, like Fedify and Misskey, are created and promoted in East Asia, distance and language barriers make it hard for East Asian devs to participate in European and North American in-person events.

The Fediverse track is open to proposals about ActivityPub implementations, clients for ActivityPub platforms, ancillary services, libraries and toolkits. But also, as at FOSDEM, talks about the human aspects of Fediverse technology, like moderation, policy and governance, are welcome and encouraged. This event looks like it will cover as much interesting conceptual space as its twin at FOSDEM.

Hong Minhee, [email protected], was one of the main speakers at FOSDEM’s Social Web devroom this year. Their talk about Fedify was important, but even more important was their effort to bridge the gap between Asia’s and Europe’s Fediverse development communities.

I (Evan) hope that COSCUP brings together many Asian developers, but I also hope that North American and European individuals and teams put in proposals as well. Knitting together these two important communities on the Fediverse requires effort from both sides. That’s why I’m applying to speak (about ActivityPub 1.1), and why I hope to see many familiar faces among the new ones in Taiwan.

Thanks to the Interledger Foundation for their generous Grant for the Web to the Social Web Foundation. With the help of ILF, we are launching a new program area focused on economic issues on the Social Web. In particular, we’ll be producing three reports: one on sustainability for social web instances; one for the Fediverse and the creator economy; and one for cooperatives on the Social Web. In addition, we’ll be engaging multimedia Fediverse apps for using the Web Monetization standard. You can read more about grant on our shared announcement: Interledger Foundation awards $200,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media.

Today the W3C standards organization announced a new working group to advance the ActivityPub and Activity Streams standards. The Social Web Foundation, as a W3C member organization, will be participating in the group. The working group’s goal is to release a backwards-compatible iteration of each specification in Q3 of 2026.

Activity Streams was released in 2017, and ActivityPub was released in early 2018. Since that time, the experience of hundreds of implementers and millions of users has shown places that the specifications are confusing or unclear, or missing features. Some problems have been documented with errata, but others require more work. The Next Version tag in the ActivityPub GitHub issue repository gives some good examples of topics to be considered. The new Social Web Working Group will provide revisions of these documents to make them easier to use for implementers.

ActivityPub is an actively used protocol with millions of users and billions of notes, images, video and audio files published. Standards work on ActivityPub will necessarily be evolutionary, not revolutionary, and will incorporate backwards compatibility. Developers can confidently keep working on ActivityPub today without worrying about breaking changes in the future.

The Social Web Working Group will work closely with the Social Web Community Group, the organization that has been stewarding ActivityPub and its extensions since 2018. The Community Group will remain the focal point for innovative developments extending ActivityPub into different areas like geosocial applications or threaded forums, while the Working Group will concentrate on the core documents.

One Community Group document that will be moving into the Working Group is LOLA, the live data portability spec that originated in the CG’s Data Portability Task Force. LOLA lets users move from one ActivityPub server to another while retaining all their social connections, their content, and their reactions. It’s a great improvement for data portability on the social web.

The Social Web Working Group will consist of representatives of W3C member organizations and invited experts from the standards and development community. The group will be chaired by Darius Kazemi, longtime contributor to the ActivityPub developer community. Meetings and proceedings will be public, and developers can review the work happening in the ActivityPub GitHub repository.

Thanks to everyone who’s done the work getting this charter to completion; especially Dmitri Zagidulin, the SocialCG chair who drove the charter editing and review process. Now, the work begins!

One of our important projects for the Social Web Foundation is developing a Fediverse Starter page, helping people get onto the social web. As part of this work, our team is conducting user interviews with current Fediverse users to get to know how they joined up and what their experience has been so far. If you’re interested in being interviewed and sharing your story, please reply to this post, or email [email protected] . Thanks for your help!

I’m on the train back to Montreal from New York, where I attended HOPE_16 over the weekend. I wanted to capture some thoughts while they were fresh, even though they might not be fully formed.

HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a technology and information security conference sponsored by 2600 Magazine. The SWF had two points of presence at the event this year: I gave an hour-long talk about the Fediverse which was streamed live. We also hosted the Fediverse Village, which turned out to be mostly a booth in the non-profits area of the vendors floor.

We had people streaming by all day long Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I had thought the Village was going to be more like a hang-out room, so I was caught off guard on prep, but I put out all the ActivityPub and Social Web Foundation stickers I had, covers for the ActivityPub book, and a stack of CoSocial.ca stickers to boot. But there was a definite stone soup aspect to the village area: people brought by schwag for Fediverse software like WriteFreely, instances like GardenState.social and Masto.nyc, and projects like DWeb.

I’d hoped to have more structured discussions, including a meetup for Fediverse governance and a hackathon. But it turned out to be a lot more loosey-goosey than I expected, and most of the weekend was spent talking to other Fediverse fans, and helping people who came up to the booth to ask about the Fediverse.

I think I expected because of the level of technical expertise that was shown at the event that we’d be speaking to only true believers. But there were many people there who hadn’t heard of the Fediverse, and who were excited to try it out. One thing that struck me that was an advantage for these people over commercial social networks was the option to get out from under the “real names” policies of many platforms. It’s hard to remember that the alternative to the Fediverse that most people are familiar with are services that require a real-looking legal name to be used, and force you to send a scan of a government ID if they’re at all suspicious.

The other thing that struck me was how many people came to the booth saying that they’d registered for a Mastodon account at some point, and were really excited to get it reactivated, but forgot which server it was on and didn’t want to register for another. I think that’s a real pain point for a lot of people — and one we should do better at solving.

I plan to come back to HOPE next year. I’d love to have more schwag for Fediverse software, services, and platforms. I’d like to have a way to get people signed up and onboarded for the Fediverse right at the table. And I’d like to have some more formal get-together events. There are spaces to meet at HOPE if you know how to set it up — I’m going to try to use them better next time.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Fediverse Village, my talk, or just talked to me around the HOPE event. I was energised by the people and the technology that was happening, and I look forward to engaging again.

Hey, all! I’m seeking some help testing an application I whipped up for the Geosocial task force of the W3C Social Web Community Group. It’s called https://checkin.swf.pub/ , and it’s a barebones checkin service, similar to Swarm, but implemented as a pure Web client. You can watch the application in action.

It logs into your account on an ActivityPub server using OAuth 2.0. It then reads your inbox, filtering the activities there to only show geosocial ones. You can use the geolocation services in the browser, and the places.pub service for a place vocabulary, to find nearby places. You can then “check in” to one of the places, with a note, and control of the privacy of the activity.

Geosocial activities are part of the core Activity Vocabulary that underlies ActivityPub. But, they’re not as widely implemented as other activities in the vocabulary. This app is trying to change that, by making them available on the network, and making it easy to create them.

To test the client, your service will need to support:

To test federation, your service will need to support:

As of this writing, Mastodon does not work for either of these. If you want to test receiving federated messages, follow me on [email protected] . I’ve been using it a lot!

Code for the checkin application is here: https://github.com/social-web-foundation/checkin

This is my second ActivityPub API client (ap, the command-line client, was my first), and my first one for the Web. I found this process really fun and invigorating. I was able to create a new kind of social networking application (well, new on the Fediverse…) purely from the client side. The app saves no data to the server; everything is done in the browser.

Please reach out on GitHub or comment here if you want to work on interoperability. I’m happy to help debug connections if needed. https://videos.files.wordpress.com/zCMu0OeZ/screen-recording-2025-07-14-at-9.30.21-pm.mov

Good news in privacy for ActivityPub. The first early draft of the MLS over ActivityPub specification went out this week. It’s been part of my work on our E2EE for ActivityPub project at the Social Web Foundation.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is an IETF standard for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging. It lets people on laptops and phones communicate with each other in a secure way that no one in between can see.

MLS is designed to use pluggable lower-level protocols. This specification defines an envelope format for distributing MLS messages through the network, and an Activity Streams 2.0 profile for the packets of application data stored inside the messages.

This specification is ready for review from both ActivityPub developers and security analysts. It’s time to start making proof-of-concept implementations and testing interoperability.

The best place to make comments or report problems is on the ActivityPub E2EE GitHub repo issues list. I’m looking forward to these next steps!

I want to share some information about a repository we just published. ap-components is a set of Web Components for building interfaces for the ActivityPub API. I built it as I was making a sample application for handling the acct: URI scheme. I found myself making more and more components for the UI, and realised that they would probably be useful for other applications, too.

The library is available on npm at @socialwebfoundation/ap-components. It currently covers some of the simplest ActivityPub data, but I hope to expand it to give visibility to other types of objects and activities. Please feel free to try it out and let us know if it’s helpful for your work.

I’m making an initial version of places.pub available today. places.pub is a collection of Place objects suitable for use in geosocial applications on the ActivityPub network.

Part of my work in the Social Web Community Group at the W3C has been participation in the GeoSocial Task Force. This is a sub-group of the SocialCG that focuses on implementing user stories in ActivityPub related to the intersection of geographical systems and social networking, for example, tagging an image with the place it represents, or checking in to a location.

One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as their id property, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.##

Using the serviceSo, I worked on making places.pub for geosocial hackers to experiment with. It’s a service that exposes places from the amazing OpenStreetMap collection of data as AS2 objects on the Web. So, given an OpenStreetMap object like the Rogers Centre Ottawa, it provides an AS2 version suitable for use in geosocial activities in ActivityPub. It also has a rudimentary search mechanism, although I think most users will want to use the Nominatim service for searching the OpenStreetMap database, and then map the IDs onto places.pub.

Once you know the places.pub ID for a place, you can use it for geotagging objects, people, activities, or using special geosocial activity types like check in, check out, and travel. There is a good list of examples on the places.pub home page, but obviously this is not an exhaustive list!##

How it is builtThis wasn’t my first time trying to build places.pub; I’d done two earlier versions with different architectures and the same interface. The first time out, about 7 years ago, I created a full NodeJS server that used a full mirror of the OpenStreetMap database, so I didn’t need to hit the OSM API to fetch data. It worked pretty well, but it was really expensive — hundreds of dollars per month to keep a database server of that size running and synched.

I tried a second version a few months ago, which did batch generation of AS2 Place objects from the OpenStreetMap exports, and then uploaded them to the S3 service at Amazon Web Services. This was a whole lot cheaper, but it took a long time to download, convert, and re-upload the data.

This third implementation, with source code available on GitHub, is a little bit easier than both. Instead of sloshing the huge OSM dataset back and forth, I used the version of the data stored in the Google Cloud Public Datasets system on BigQuery. This let me ignore the effort of moving data, and just focus on giving it a good ActivityPub-compatible interface using a Google Cloud Run function. It seems to work pretty nicely.##

Next stepsI’d love to see some experimentation with using places.pub for geosocial activity in the social web. I’m going to work on some implementations in my own ActivityPub software. If you find problems with the software, please add an issue on GitHub or let me know on the Fediverse at nostr:npub1c6t07wcgd5qqapmcmt57eg05v996sn6q76xgh6ecyt8dcam8zads98hwrh.

I’ll be leading a session on the Browser experience of ActivityPub social networking as part of W3C Breakouts Day 2025. This is a virtual event, open to all members of the Web community; connection information in the link.

ActivityPub encourages interconnection between independent, heterogeneous social networking platforms. One of the most confusing parts of the ActivityPub network for many users is interacting with people and content on remote servers. How can you like, share or reply to an image or article on one server with your account from another server? How can you follow or block a person whose profile page you are looking at?

I briefly outlined one solution to this problem on Cross-server Interactions in ActivityPub on my personal blog last year. In that article, I cover how remote servers can act as clients for your home server, sending your activities directly to your ActivityPub API endpoint.

In the breakout session, I’ll be going over another solution: letting the browser be an API client on its own. The Social Web Incubator Community Group (SocialCG) has a task force for ActivityPub HTML discovery, with a draft report on ActivityPub discovery . This report shows how we can surface API information about a person or content in the HTML pages displayed in the Web browser. In the session, I’ll discuss how that API information could be used in a browser extension to make API calls for liking, sharing, replying to the content on the page, or following a person.

I’m especially interested in developing a proof-of-concept browser extension for Vivaldi (my daily-drive browser) to show how this can work.

If you’re interested in deeper integration of social networking features into the Web browser, please make sure to come to the talk!

The Social Web Foundation took part in the Fediverse House at South by Southwest on March 9-10 2025. We hosted the networking meetup on day 1, as well as a developer meetup immediately afterwards. We were lucky enough to have Manton Reece present micro.blog and Charles Krempeaux (@reiver) present spacehost.one and robin.live.

I (Evan) also spoke on stage with Peter Cottle of Threads, Mike Masnick of Techdirt, and David Imel. We had a great conversation about the way the Fediverse is developing in 2025, how the different connected networks are interoperating, and what to look forward to in the coming year.

One compelling part of the Fediverse House experience was the outreach to different communities that can benefit from using social web technologies: marketers, creators, and publishers. I think addressing broader sets of needs can be helpful for spreading the technology. The talks were recorded and will be released online over the coming months.

Thanks to everyone who attended or spoke at Fediverse House; especially to Cory Doctorow, who gave a great talk about enshittification and the social web. And a special thanks to the team at Flipboard, including Mike McCue, Marcie McCue, and Mia Quagliarello for making the whole event happen and for inviting SWF to participate. We look forward to even more Fediverse events at SXSW 2026!

A quick update for people at #FOSDEM who are interested in the Fediverse. There are three main public events: the Social Web Devroom is a main track in room ua2118 from 3pm to 7pm Sat Feb 1. The Social Web BOF (“birds of a feather”) is on Sunday Feb 2 from 12pm to 1pm in . Finally, Social Web After Hours is on Sunday Feb 2 from 7pm to 9pm at HSBXL. And use the #SocialWebFOSDEM hashtag to track the community on the Fediverse!

I loved this video that the Daily Show‘s Desi Lydic posted on Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube. Give it a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv-X1E71RGo

Lydic talks about the dizzying changes that are happening in social media these days. Internet users over the last decade have gotten used to a small number of huge social platforms. But political changes, content policy issues, and legal platform shutdowns have upended that formerly stable structure. People can no longer count on their friends, family, colleagues and neighbours all being on the same social networking system, much less news outlets, politicians, and celebrities. So they’re racing around, trying new applications (including, as Lydic notes, the awesome Pixelfed), and seeking a place to be social again.

Why should anyone have to do this? After all, you and I didn’t change our political outlook or our content policies or our legal ownership structure. We have governments and companies changing all around us that interfere with how we can interact with the people that matter most to us. Regardless of how you feel about these changes, why do everyday users have to be the ones to scramble to adapt?

The Fediverse is based on the simple belief that your social connections and your published content are yours. They belong to you. You should get to decide where to set up your home on the social web, based on your own priorities — technical, political, financial, romantic, whatever. And once you have that place on the social web, you can connect to anybody else, on any Fediverse platform, as easily as if they were on your own.

So when your friends are all trying a new Fediverse-enabled app from the app store, you can follow them from your own Fediverse home, see what they’re posting, like, comment, and share. You don’t have to scramble to install yet another application, go through the complicated signup flow, set up your profile, and alert everyone you know about yet another identity you have. You can stay put, keep all your current connections, but still stay connected to your restless friends and bleeding-edge influencers.

And if you get tired of the place you’ve set up your Fediverse home, you can move completely — taking all your social connections (and, soon, all your content) to the new platform you’ve chosen. You won’t have to make a series of announcements, like Lydic does, about all the different places your Internet presence is scattered. It’s handled automatically by the Fediverse platforms. Your followers, family and friends might not even notice the difference.

Social media is fun; we get it. And there’s nothing wrong with trying new apps. Being a pioneer on the cool new platform is invigorating. But if it’s not fun, and you’re feeling the whiplash of multiple platforms rising and falling weekly, please consider setting up your long-term homebase on a Fediverse-enabled platform. You might be surprised how many platforms are already Fediverse-enabled, and more are coming online every day.

Welcome to the New Non-profit on the FediverseMastodon today announced a new non-profit to manage the next steps for the project. From our perspective, this is a great sign of maturation in the social web software space. Best of luck to Eugen and team as they take this next step. We look forward to working with Mastodon towards a bigger, better Fediverse.

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced a new content policy for Meta on Threads. We are disappointed in these changes, which put vulnerable people on and off Meta platforms in harm’s way for harassment. Ideas matter, and history shows that online misinformation and harassment can lead to violence in the real world. There are good analyses of the details of the policy changes at EFF, The Verge, and Platformer.

Meta is one of many ActivityPub implementers and a supporter of the Social Web Foundation. We strongly encourage Meta’s executive and content teams to come back in line with best practices of a zero harm social media ecosystem. Reconsidering this policy change would preserve the crucial distinction between political differences of opinion and dehumanizing harassment. The SWF is available to discuss Meta’s content moderation policies and processes to make them more humane and responsible.##

Distributed ModerationWhat do these changes mean for the Fediverse? Through ActivityPub, Meta’s Threads network is connected to the social web, also called the Fediverse. This is a diverse network of independent social services using different codebases and different kinds of content. The network of 300M users of Threads can follow and be followed by people in tens of thousands of other communities. These services are operated by a variety of entities: corporations, universities, enterprise IT, cooperatives, non-profit organizations, and self-organized volunteers.

Theoretically, this distributed structure allows people to make choices about which platforms they want to use – based not only on technical features, but also on community composition and moderation policies. Users don’t need to give up on social connections they already have with friends and family; they can stay connected across services using ActivityPub. Different communities and services can have different content policies, but people in different communities can still stay connected. 

Ideally, having an account on a Fediverse service gives people the best of both worlds: they can stay connected to users and content they like, and filter out content and users that they don’t. When unwanted content from one community lands in the feeds of people in other communities, the receiving users or their moderators can react under their own local policy: removing individual text or image posts; blocking individual users; or blocking the entire sending community.

Practically, though, there are limitations to this flexibility.  Filtering on the receiving side requires orders of magnitude more effort. If a single sending service delivers bad content to users on one hundred or one thousand receiving services, each moderator on the receiving end has to clean up the mess locally. Moderators get understandably frustrated with this kind of displacement of responsibility. A common response is to block servers that send bad content entirely.

In the case of Threads, though, there are complicating factors. Threads is much, much bigger than the typical Fediverse community, and it has many high-profile users in politics, media and technology. It’s also an easy onboarding service to the Fediverse for people who are used to Facebook or Instagram, meaning many of our friends, colleagues and family use it. Blocking the Threads service means blocking access for all users on the receiving service from all these important accounts.

Unfortunately, there’s not an easy answer for Fediverse moderators. We encourage trust and safety teams across the social web to use their best judgement and the tools available to keep users safe, connected, and informed, and also to minimize moderators’ stress and burnout. IFTAS Connect is a great community resource for connecting with other moderators to discuss these tradeoffs.##

Improving Social Web ResilienceWe see the challenge of a large service that has poor local content policy as a chance to strengthen the social and technical infrastructure of the Fediverse. None of these options will resolve current problems immediately, but we hope starting the research now will make the Fediverse more resilient in the future.

Ultimately, the safety and well-being of people around the world should not be in the hands of any single company. Moderation policies are a competitive advantage in an open social network. We continue to encourage the use of ActivityPub, and the distributed control that it brings.

I have good news and bad news. Our Call for Participation for the Social Web track at FOSDEM 2025 was extremely successful; we had almost 40 submissions of great talks about Free and Open Source software for the Fediverse.

The bad news is that we’ve got only a 4 hours of time at FOSDEM, and we’ve been unable to allocate more time for the track.

So, right now, I’m looking for space in Brussels for additional space for an offsite event — “Social Web After Hours”, let’s call it — to run on Friday night Jan 31 or Sunday night Feb 2.

If you’re aware of a meeting space in Brussels, close to the centre or to the FOSDEM venue, that would accommodate an audience of 50-100 people and has screens for presentations, available for maybe 2 hours, please let me know. It would be great to have some Social Web discussions on the FOSDEM fringe.

I want to draw attention to an administrative process at the W3C Social Web Community Group (SocialCG), the standards group that manages ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 and a number of other open social networking standards. The group is considering a new charter to define how decisions are made and how the members work together. This might seem like a minor process, but it’s actually part of a bigger deal for the Fediverse. To see why, you need to understand the structure of the W3C.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is the standards organization that specifies the Web platform, like HTML (kind of), CSS, and RDF. It also is the organization that standardized ActivityPub and AS2 in 2019. The W3C process requires a special kind of group, called a Working Group, to create official recommendations on the part of the organization. Working Groups can have members nominated by the W3C member organizations, as well as some Invited Experts.

The W3C has another structure, called a Community Group, that’s much looser. Anyone can join a community group, as long as they sign the Contributor License Agreement, which grants a copyright and patent license to the work they do with the group. Community Groups don’t produce formal recommendations in the W3C; they can produce Community Group Reports, which can be documents, software, or really anything.

So, the Social Web Working Group created and edited ActivityPub and AS2 back in the mid-2010s. The group had a charter that extended into 2018; it was extended to early 2019 so the work on ActivityPub could be finished. The working group was then disbanded. A new Community Group, the SocialCG, had been started in 2017. It took over the process of supporting new extensions to AP and AS2, as well as maintaining the errata for the two main documents. Importantly, it can’t make major changes to the documents themselves — that requires a working group.

The experience of developers and users over the last decade in using ActivityPub has pointed out some real needs for updates to the documents. The W3C staff have asked the SocialCG to draft a charter for a new working group that could make backwards-compatible changes to these documents — adding clarifications, and possibly including new features. This would be great for the specifications, great for the Social Web, and great for the Internet at large.

The problem is that there isn’t a clear relationship between the boundaries of the new working group and the boundaries of the community group. What input would members of the community group have in the editing of the updated ActivityPub documents? Especially given that W3C members tend to be more commercial and institutional than the mostly Open Source developers who work in the SocialCG, there is a concern that a new Social Web Working Group would prioritize the needs of corporate developers with lots of resources, at the expense of Open Source devs making code for small communities.

The answer we’ve landed on is to implement a stage process, in which new ideas are initiated and documented as Community Group Reports before the Working Group takes them up for possible inclusion the main recommendation documents — or becoming new recommendations on their own. This process has worked well in other Community Groups at W3C, and the W3C staff is really supportive of it.

One problem with this process for the SocialCG is that we never adopted rules for how we make decisions when we started the group. We agreed casually to use the same consensus-based mechanisms we’d used in the Social Web Working Group, but never put together an official charter for the group. This casual structure has worked well for a long time, but in order to set up this more formal staging process, we need to have a more formal decision-making process.

The good news is that the norm in the W3C, as in most Internet standards organization, is to use consensus-based decision-making. So, the new SocialCG proposed charter has a lot of casual consensus, too, as well as pretty open participation on a very peer-oriented basis. It’s about the minimum structure you need to have a long-running organization.

So, let me recap: we want updated, backwards-compatible versions of ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 with more clarity and maybe even new features. In order to get those, we need a Working Group. In order to get that, we need to establish a stage process. And in order to adopt the stage process, we need to have a new CG charter. So: CG charter leads to stage process leads to WG leads to new specs leads to new features.

The Community Group intends to consider approving the new CG charter at its January 2025 meeting. So, people interested in ActivityPub, standardization, and group dynamics in general are invited to review the documents and submit GitHub issues or comment on existing issues. If you’re not already a member of the SocialCG, you can join in a just a few minutes. It’s also reasonable for non-members to comment or make suggestions.

This work is complicated, but it’s also fascinating, and it is an exciting part of putting ActivityPub on a solid footing for the future.

Reminder: Social Web Devroom Deadline is Dec 1A reminder for Open Source developers working on the Fediverse: proposals for talks at the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2025 are due by December 1.

If you get them in well before the deadline, you can get helpful feedback and give your proposal a better chance of being accepted.

More information on how to submit a proposal at FOSDEM 2025 Social Web Devroom Call for Participation.

SWF’s Evan Prodromou on the For a Better Web PodcastI, Evan, was interviewed on Vivaldi’s For a Better Web podcast. I talked to host Bruce Lawson about ActivityPub, the Social Web Foundation, and how open standards win.

https://vivaldi.com/blog/better-web/evan-prodromou-social-web-foundation-for-a-better-web/

One of the Social Web Foundation’s programs for this year is to work on making long-form text more useful and available on the Social Web. By this, we mean multi-paragraph texts of “web page” length, like a blog post, a magazine article, a newsletter, a forum post, or a wiki page. This length of text can usually fit comfortably into a single ActivityPub object — let’s say tens or maybe low hundreds of kilobytes of content. Longer texts like books are probably too big for this use.

There are a lot of producers of long-form text on the Web, and many have enabled ActivityPub for their software. There is some discussion of longer texts in the Activity Vocabulary — the definition of most of the data types used in ActivityPub — but it’s not all in one place, and there’s not practical guidance on restrictions.

To help publishers and consumers of long-form text objects, I pulled together the relevant properties and types into a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP), which is a community-led standardization process. The document, FEP-b2b8: Long-form Text, is currently available as a draft for review.

If you’re a publisher of long-form text, or you are developing user interfaces that may encounter this kind of data, please take some time to review. This is still a draft-level document, but I’d love to see it shaped and improved by incorporating the experience and knowledge of many practitioners and implementers.

The Social Web Foundation is pleased to announce the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2025, and invite participants to submit proposals for talks for the event.

FOSDEM is an exciting free and open source software event in Brussels, Belgium that brings together thousands of enthusiasts from around the world. The event spans the weekend of February 1-2, 2025 and features discussion tracks (“devrooms”) for scores of different technology topics.

The Social Web Devroom will take place in the afternoon of Saturday, February 1.##

FormatThere will be two available talk formats:

TopicsThe Social Web Devroom is open to talks all about the Social Web AKA the Fediverse, including:

Important dates

SubmissionsSubmit talk proposals to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025/cfp . Select “Social Web” from the “Track” dropdown, and include the length of your talk (8/25) in the submission notes.##

Code of ConductAll attendees and speakers must be familiar with and agree to the FOSDEM Code of Conduct https://fosdem.org/2025/practical/conduct/.##

ContactQuestions about topics, formats, or the Social Web in general should go to [email protected].

I want to highlight some of the blog posts and social updates of support for the Social Web Foundation since our launch on 24 Sep 2024.

It was great to get so much support and encouragement from everyone involved in making this launch happen. This is just the first step on a ten thousand kilometre journey, but we’re lucky to have such an encouraging and supportive team and community behind us.##

Founders

Supporters

Advisors

Press

Friends and allies

Leaders of the open social networking movement have formed the Social Web Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.

The “social web”, also called the “Fediverse”, is a network of independent social platforms connected with the open standard protocol ActivityPub. Users on any platform can follow their friends, family, influencers, or brands on any other participating network.

ActivityPub was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2018. It has attracted over 100 software implementations, tens of thousands of supporting web sites, and tens of millions of users.

Advocates of this increased platform choice say it will bring more individual control, more innovation, and a healthier social media experience. But there is work to do: journalism, activism, and the public square remain in a state of uncertain dissonance and privacy, safety and agency remain important concerns for anyone participating in a social network.##

LeadershipThe founding team of SWF merges knowledge of the Fediverse with a user-centric mindset.

Mallory Knodel (@[email protected]) says, “To fight inequality, participate in democracy, build an equitable society and economy, we can’t rely on a few corporate-owned, profit-driven spaces. The Social Web Foundation is our best chance to establish the conditions in which the new social media operates with zero harm.”##

ProgramThe foundation’s program will concentrate on:

“With this program, The Social Web Foundation can catalyze more growth on the Fediverse while improving user experience and safety,” says founder Prodromou (@[email protected]). “Our goal is to unblock users, developers and communities so they can get the most out of their social web experience.”##

Industry supportThe founders are supported by advisors from the social networking world including Chris Messina, Kaliya (Identity Woman) Young and Johannes Ernst, as well as companies and Open Source projects that have implemented ActivityPub:

“Mastodon is committed to the Fediverse and proud to back the Social Web Foundation’s efforts to build a stronger, more open, and dynamic social web for all,” says Eugen Rochko, Founder and CEO, Mastodon (@[email protected]).

“Our vision for Threads has always been to make it the place for public conversation, and interoperability is an important part of that. That’s why we integrated Threads with the Fediverse through ActivityPub,” says Rob Sherman, VP and Deputy Chief of Privacy Officer at Meta (@[email protected]).  “We believe that the Fediverse helps create a more diverse ecosystem that empowers users to connect, share, and learn from each other in new and innovative ways.”

“Automattic is excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation and its mission,” says Matthias Pfefferle, Open Web Lead at Automattic, makers of WordPress.com (@[email protected]) “We’re eager to collaborate with the Foundation to expand platform diversity and enhance the support for various content types—especially long-form content—within the Fediverse, fostering greater interoperability across the ecosystem.”

“We’ve been inspired by the products being developed across the Fediverse and the people we’ve had the pleasure to work with,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO (@[email protected]). “And now, with the Social Web Foundation established, there will be a dedicated organization to foster even greater awareness, collaboration and innovation. We’re excited to be a part of this next wave of the web, using open standards to advance how we connect with each other every day.”

The Foundation will collaborate with other non-profit organizations in the space. “IFTAS wholeheartedly welcomes the launch of the Social Web Foundation and its commitment to a healthy Fediverse,” says Jaz-Michael King, executive director (@[email protected]). “We anticipate great opportunities for collaboration in our efforts to enhance trust and safety, and we look forward to working with the Foundation to strengthen the Fediverse for the benefit of all its communities.”

“The Fediverse reminds us of the early days of the Web. We are competing against silos and corporate interests, using a W3C-based open standard and a distributed solution,” says Jon Von Tetzchner, CEO of Vivaldi (@[email protected]). “It’s great that social networking companies are supporting the Fediverse, and Vivaldi is pleased to support the Social Web Foundation so that we can once again have a town square free of algorithms and corporate control.”

“We’re really excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation,” says Bart Decrem, founder, The BLVD (sub.club, Mammoth) (@[email protected]) “This will help accelerate the growth of the Fediverse, which is so important for the future of the open web!”

“It’s time to bring back the open web we were promised, rather than the closed networks we got. We’re very excited to support the Social Web Foundation and collaborate on building a more transparent and constructive future for the internet,” says John O’Nolan, CEO of Ghost Foundation (@[email protected])

“As a long-time ActivityPub implementer, Write.as is thrilled to support the launch of the Social Web Foundation,” says Matt Baer, Founder and CEO (@[email protected]). “With our shared mission of fostering a diverse and thriving social web, we look forward to collaborating with the Foundation, its partners, and community to realize the full potential of publishing on the Fediverse.”##

Learn moreThe Social Web Foundation can be found on the web at https://socialwebfoundation.org/ and on the social web at [email protected]. Email [email protected].