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 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 […]

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 […]

ActivityPub software usually (but not always!) uses a handle format defined by RFC 7033, Webfinger, which looks like username@domain.example. 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 […]

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 user@domain.tld handle to a API endpoint […]

This week, Social Web Foundation Executive Director Mallory Knodel joined EFF’s Babette Ngene and public interest technologist Bruce Schneier for a conversation about how to build a decentralized web that truly works for all. The discussion was part of EFF’s EFFecting Change series and explored what the fediverse can offer as an alternative to today’s […]

One of the requests I (Evan) have heard often over the years about ActivityPub is to make publishing on the Fediverse as easy as publishing with RSS. To make an RSS feed for a person or a site, a publish provides, dynamically or even statically, a single file, with a simple format, and makes it […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I (Evan) will be at UN Open Source Week this week. I am not speaking, but I’ll be meeting with others in the #SocialWeb space. If you’re at the conference and want to meet, please let me know!

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 […]