@[email protected] Don’t thank me, I did a terrible job reuniting you! I tried to DM and spelled your name wrong 10 times!

@[email protected] She’s looking for you!

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!

Are you coming to FOSDEM 2025 to attend the Social Web Devroom? Do you like helping make things happen? We need volunteers to help with the audio/visual (A/V) system (no experience necessary), to answer questions at the door, to coordinate questions, to keep time for the speakers, and otherwise keep things moving smoothly. Reply here if you’d like to help out, or email [email protected] .

@[email protected] No, a pretty important project.

Kickstarter for Pixelfed

One of our supporting organisations, Pixelfed, has a Kickstarter active to raise money for Pixelfed and Loops. Donations help support development of these pioneering Fediverse projects. We support the great work going on with both projects, and encourage Fediverse fans to donate to the cause.

@[email protected] I’m glad to hear that!

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

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 Fediverse

Mastodon 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.

@[email protected]

Thanks! I think there is still a lot to do.

@[email protected]

You should definitely read the links! Those cover pretty well what the harmful changes are.

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 Moderation

What 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 Resilience

We 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.

• Finer-grained filtering tools. As mentioned above, moderators on the Fediverse can automatically filter content by author or by originating service. Some platforms also let moderators filter by keywords – for example, blocking out racist or homophobic slurs. More difficult forms of filtering, such as detecting unacceptable images, or the subtle meaning of text, requires more sophisticated algorithmic filtering not supported by many Fediverse platforms. Balancing the ease of use of this kind of filter with the desire from many communities to have final control by human moderators is a good area for future research.
• Collaborative moderation tools. Email filtering systems re-use signals received from other users, so that if a message is marked as spam by one user, or a few users, other users will never see the message. This can balance the desire for human moderation with a significantly lowered total effort for moderators. Shared server blocklists are somewhat common on the Fediverse, but deeper per-user and per-post collaborative filtering is not. Balancing, once again, the specific priorities of a given community with the advantage of collaborative filtering would also require further research.
• Fact-checking and community notes. One major part of the Meta announcement was a cancellation of the fact-checking program for posts on Meta, and its replacement with a community notes feature, which defers fact-checking to volunteers. Neither of these features (professional and volunteer fact-checking) are supported directly in ActivityPub. We think there’s a place for a variety of fact-checking services on the Fediverse, providing annotations on Fediverse content without requiring permissions from the author, the sending service, or even the receiving service. Building the protocol features and reference implementations, as well as encouraging the participation of fact-checking services, is a good next step in this area.
• Jurisdictional boundaries. Zuckerberg mentions in his update that Meta will be collaborating with the US government to resist demands for content policy changes by other governments. Regardless of the valence of these content policy demands, this question highlights an important feature of the Fediverse, namely, that federated services can operate within specific jurisdictions and conform with their regulations. Content that is conveyed across legal boundaries between services can be more clearly filtered or blocked to comply with local rules. We encourage national and regional governments to further investigate this structure for social networking and global connectivity.
• Data portability. Choosing a social media platform to use is an important freedom in the social web. The Fediverse supports limited data portability, such that users can move their followers and followed accounts to a new server almost seamlessly. However, this move leaves all posted content, like text and images, on the old server, as well as metadata such as likes and shares. The new LOLA protocol would allow a full move between servers. We want to see more work on implementing LOLA in Fediverse platforms.

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.

The Social Web Foundation and Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL) are co-hosting an off-site event at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium on Sunday, February 2, 2025 from 19:00 to 21:00 local time. Social Web After Hours will feature four Fediverse-focused presentations from leaders of the ActivityPub community:

• Darius Kazemi will discuss the Fediverse Observatory
• Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon will discuss their work at the Spritely Institute
• Julian Lam will discuss NodeBB and using ActivityPub for threaded discussions
• Matthias Pfefferle will present the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress

The event is open to the public, but space is limited. HSBXL is at Rue Osseghem 53, 1080 Molenbeek, Brussels, Belgium. Light food and drink available for purchase at the event; proceeds benefit HSBXL.

Absolutely.

We did! That was a great event.

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.

Read the post!

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.