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 the generous support from our funders and advisors. We also preview 2026 and how we plan to deepen our community engagement and technical work on protocol development.
Read the full report here to learn how we’re laying the foundation for a social web that serves everyone.
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 @Mastodon 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!
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 throughout the weekend.
My hacking project plan is to make an ActivityPub object server for films. There are about 343,000 films in Wikidata, which compares pretty favourably with the 740,000 films in IMDB. There is a JSON-LD interface to Wikidata, but the types used don’t match up with ActivityPub types like Video. So, like places.pub, I’ll set up movies.pub to share an ActivityPub object for every Q-item for a movie, as well as a search endpoint to find films by name.
If I get ahead of the project and I’m not too jet-lagged, I’d like to add an ActivityPub API app to “check in” to a movie that you’re watching (and maybe give a little review). Similar to checkin.swf.pub with places!
If you’re at #wmhack this weekend, please come say hi. I love talking about Wikimedia projects and the open social web.
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 rights and tech community will convene once again this time in Lusaka, Zambia. Annually RightsCon brings together practitioners across civil society, industry, governments, and the technical community. This is my tenth Rightscon and the Social Web Foundation’s second. Like last year, our participation in RightsCon is part of a broader commitment to ensuring that the development of digital infrastructure remains closely connected to public-interest values and to the communities most affected by technical design decisions.
This year, I will be participating in three sessions that reflect different but closely related strands of this work.
The first session, “Human rights reviews in internet standardization – what is at stake?” on human rights reviews in internet standardization, focuses on the processes through which technical standards are developed and the implications those processes have for rights protections. Standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the IEEE play a central role in shaping the digital environment, yet their work often remains difficult to access and unevenly influenced. The discussion will consider how and when human rights and privacy considerations are incorporated into these processes, what is at stake when they are not, and what conditions are necessary to enable more meaningful and representative participation in standardization work. We’ll be in AG03 at 11:30 am on May 6.
A second session, “A little less talk and a lot more action: Mobilising for feminist tech industry standards” hosted by the United Nations Population Fund, turns to the question of “safety by design” in the context of technology standards. While this concept has gained increasing prominence as a corporate and policy framework, the session situates it within a broader set of concerns about whose experiences and priorities are reflected in how safety is defined. By grounding the discussion in feminist principles and human rights obligations, the session creates space to examine how current approaches may fall short, particularly for communities that are disproportionately affected by technology-related harms, including gender-based violence. Catch us in A101 at 10:15 am on May 7.
The third session, “From platforms to people: Reclaiming the internet through the Fediverse” hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and featuring co-panelist Bruce Schneier, focuses on the Fediverse as an alternative model for social networking infrastructure. The session will explore how federated and interoperable systems can support a more open and rights-respecting online environment, and what challenges remain in translating these models into systems that can operate at scale. In this context, the Fediverse is understood not only as a set of technologies, but as an evolving ecosystem shaped by governance choices, standards development, and the practices of its participants. The session is in AG01 at 15:15 on May 7.
Taken together, these sessions reflect the range of spaces in which questions about rights, governance, and infrastructure must be addressed as the social web develops. They also underscore the importance of sustained engagement across technical and policy communities. For SWF, RightsCon provides an opportunity to situate our work within this broader landscape and to contribute to ongoing conversations about how the new social media can better reflect and uphold human rights.
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 this talk, Evan will cover the essential architecture of ActivityPub, what works and what doesn’t, and what is coming up next for the standard. You’ll walk out of this talk with just enough knowledge to speak with confidence about anything at Fediforum.”
If you’ve ever wanted to know what ActivityPub is and how it works, please come along. I hope the event is fun and interesting. Bring questions!
Last week at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Expert Group Meeting we considered what changes to this 20-year-old, UN initiative are required now that the UN General Assembly has made it permanent. This small, invitation-only gathering was tasked with the future of the IGF as a permanent UN mandate and how it achieves outcomes. Now that the IGF’s place at the UN is secure, we can stop trying to prove that multistakeholder dialogue matters, and start showing what multistakeholder governance is multistakeholder governance is capable of delivering.
This means civil society can find purchase for its work in IGF work itself, rather than considering the annual meeting a venue for outreach and promotion of its work that ultimately happens in other places.
The IGF is being actively redefined and the process is open to meaningful influence. I attended representing the Social Web Foundation, both a civil society organization and a key player in the technical community. My remarks were informed by other civil society organizations: the Association for Progressive Communications and its members.
Across discussions several core tensions and opportunities emerged. Rather than either/or, in almost all cases I view the IGF as being able to balance both:
For those of us working on the social web, open protocols, and public-interest infrastructure, this moment is a significant one that can help leverage the IGF toward outcomes, not just outreach.
The IGF has long been a space where principles of openness, interoperability, decentralization are articulated. Last year SWF hosted an IGF session on decentralized social media. What is changing now is the hope, or the expectation, that concrete ideas grounded in these principles can translate into real outcomes both in policy processes and technical designs. To achieve this, two elements are needed: topic coherence and inclusion.
Concrete proposals already exist to strengthen topic coherence through organizing work into thematic clusters, streamlining and better coordinating ongoing work between annual meetings, and producing outputs that are targeted and usable. Some cross-institutional examples for the potential impact of IGF intersessional work:
Strengthening intersessional work reflects a shift toward treating the IGF as an ongoing governance process, not just a yearly event.
Moreover inclusion gets addressed if participation can be reframed not just as a value but as infrastructure. Unlike other internet governance institutions like global standards bodies, the UN provides funding for participation, language accessibility, and mechanisms for meaningful engagement from underrepresented groups and developing countries. Substantively, the IGF can attract more structured engagement with governments, while simultaneously advancing openness to non-state actors in settings that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of multilateral diplomacy.
What was clear in this meeting is that this outcome is not predetermined. It is being actively constructed and influenced by those participating in the process. The next phase will include rounds of consultations on many of the subjects under consideration by this small expert group. It’s important to think about how to leverage the IGF for tangible outcomes that bridge SDOs and other sites of influence over internet governance.
Social Web Foundation