Years of thinking from scholars like Francis Fukuyama and Renée DiResta have gone into what are called “middleware” solutions to content moderation. With Evan Friedman from FABRIC, this is our contribution to the solution space—a standardized protocol suite to facilitate an opt-in way of seeing how different communities understand the same story, where they disagree, […]

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 […]

Into our second year our mission to foster an open, decentralized, and user-centric social web continues. SWF are official W3C members, we have secure core as well as project support through 2026 and, well, we have been all over the world talking about the fediverse. Today we are publishing our 2025 Annual Report to spotlight […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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!

I (Evan) will be at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 in Milan, Italy this weekend (May 1-4). I’m especially interested in how we can connect Wikimedia projects and content to the Social Web using ActivityPub. I’ll be holding a session on the topic on Sunday May 3 at 9AM, but I’ll also be available for discussions […]

Update 4 May 2026: We are sad to report that RightsCon was cancelled by the Zambian government over the political nature of its program, dealing a blow to the global human rights community. SWF remains committed to our human rights work, particularly to expand open social adoption in the Global Majority. Next week the human […]

I (Evan) will be giving talk at Fediforum 26-04 next week, April 28, 2026, on the exciting topic of faking your way through ActivityPub conversations. Here’s the description: “One of the best bluffers in the field of distributed social networks gives you just enough knowledge about ActivityPub to sound smarter than everyone around you. In […]