Social breakout sessions at TPAC 2024
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I had a lightning 24 hours in Anaheim, California for the 2024 TPAC conference of the W3C. Today was breakout sessions for working groups and community groups, and we had 3 sessions for the SocialCG, the group that maintains and extends ActivityPub.
The first was about Data Portability — the ability to move your account between servers. There’s some basic portability supported by Mastodon and others, but we have a new specification called LOLA that helps move more of your content between servers. We need to start testing implementations so this functionality can roll out for more Fediverse users.
The second event was for E2EE messaging over ActivityPub. I’ve been leading this effort, so I gave an update on progress. The awesome part of this session is that we had security experts from all the major browsers and other companies who enthusiastically commented on the state of the spec. One thing I learned is that Mozilla is working on an MLS implementation in the browser, which would change the game for implementers. Very exciting stuff!
Finally, we had a retrospective session covering the last year of work in the SocialCG. We have published some important documents, started SEVEN task forces, and made a lot of strides in processes. I’m especially proud that the weekly issue triage sessions I lead have gotten us to Inbox Zero on the ActivityPub and Activity Streams issue lists.
It was great to see friends and allies, gossip a bit about social technology, and move some of the work forward. This was the first time I participated in any W3C activity with a Social Web Foundation badge on, so I was excited to be starting a new chapter.