Next week is European Open Source Week in Brussels, culminating in FOSDEM 2026 on the weekend. There are several important ways to stay connected to the Fediverse while you’re visiting this week!
As always, watch the #FOSDEM and #socialwebfosdem and #FOSDEM2026 hashtags for news and updates.
If you’re not travelling to Brussels, watch for streaming video from room H.2215 . There are also Fediverse events happening throughout the world throughout the year; Fediforum keeps a great list of the most prominent.
Today the W3C standards organization announced a new working group to advance the ActivityPub and Activity Streams standards. The Social Web Foundation, as a W3C member organization, will be participating in the group. The working group’s goal is to release a backwards-compatible iteration of each specification in Q3 of 2026.
Activity Streams was released in 2017, and ActivityPub was released in early 2018. Since that time, the experience of hundreds of implementers and millions of users has shown places that the specifications are confusing or unclear, or missing features. Some problems have been documented with errata, but others require more work. The Next Version tag in the ActivityPub GitHub issue repository gives some good examples of topics to be considered. The new Social Web Working Group will provide revisions of these documents to make them easier to use for implementers.
ActivityPub is an actively used protocol with millions of users and billions of notes, images, video and audio files published. Standards work on ActivityPub will necessarily be evolutionary, not revolutionary, and will incorporate backwards compatibility. Developers can confidently keep working on ActivityPub today without worrying about breaking changes in the future.
The Social Web Working Group will work closely with the Social Web Community Group, the organization that has been stewarding ActivityPub and its extensions since 2018. The Community Group will remain the focal point for innovative developments extending ActivityPub into different areas like geosocial applications or threaded forums, while the Working Group will concentrate on the core documents.
One Community Group document that will be moving into the Working Group is LOLA, the live data portability spec that originated in the CG’s Data Portability Task Force. LOLA lets users move from one ActivityPub server to another while retaining all their social connections, their content, and their reactions. It’s a great improvement for data portability on the social web.
The Social Web Working Group will consist of representatives of W3C member organizations and invited experts from the standards and development community. The group will be chaired by Darius Kazemi, longtime contributor to the ActivityPub developer community. Meetings and proceedings will be public, and developers can review the work happening in the ActivityPub GitHub repository.
Thanks to everyone who’s done the work getting this charter to completion; especially Dmitri Zagidulin, the SocialCG chair who drove the charter editing and review process. Now, the work begins!
Search Engine‘s PJ Vogt and Hard Fork‘s Casey Newton and Kevin Roose have started a new Fediverse service called The Forkiverse (that’s “Fork” + “Fediverse”). They document their experience in the new Search Engine episode “The Fediverse Experiment“, talking about their motivations, their issues getting started (including a shout-out to the Mastodon hosting service masto.host), and their hopes for the future of the Fediverse (and the Forkiverse). It’s a great listen. If you haven’t already, make sure to follow pj, Casey and kevin ‘s adventures as they get things off the ground in the #Forkiverse.
One of the project areas of the Social Web Foundation for the last year has been end-to-end encrypted messaging. ActivityPub, the standard protocol that powers the Social Web, has privacy controls, but they do not protect the content of messages from server operators. Encrypted messaging has become a common feature on many social networks since ActivityPub was created, and its lack has inhibited Social Web adoption and public trust in the network.
ActivityPub is extensible, though. As part of our E2EE program, Mallory, Tom and I adapted the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) standard as an extension of ActivityPub to make the MLS over ActivityPub specification. The protocol fits the great MLS E2EE system onto the ActivityPub API and federation protocol.
But a protocol specification is not enough; it must be implemented. That’s why we’re so happy to announce that the Sovereign Tech Fund has commissioned work with the Social Web Foundation to coordinate two new interoperable implementations of MLS over ActivityPub. This investment by the Sovereign Tech Fund will help move the Fediverse towards more privacy for social web users, no matter what server they use.
We decided to partner with two different projects in order to make sure that we’re making an open standard that can work between implementations. With two implementers, we’ll need to communicate clearly about architectural and implementation decisions, and make sure that those decisions end up in the final version of the spec — not in a TODO comment in the source code of a single project.
The first project is Emissary, the great social web application platform behind projects like Atlas and Bandwagon. Ben Pate, Emissary founder, says, “The Emissary Project is deeply committed to the Fediverse, where we are building a free and trustworthy Internet for all 8 billion humans. Delivering on that promise, Emissary is excited to team up with the Social Web Foundation to bring End-to-End-Encryption (E2EE) to the Fediverse. We are eternally grateful for the SWF’s leadership and support, without which this project could not have happened. Our work is already underway, and in 2026 anyone will be able to build E2EE applications on the Emissary platform.”
The second project is Bonfire. Bonfire is a modular framework for building federated apps, with its first app (Bonfire Social) offering a social networking experience enhanced with tools for privacy, trust, and collaboration (such as circles and boundaries).
The maintainers of Bonfire, Ivan Minutillo and Mayel de Borniol, said: “We think that end-to-end encryption should simply be the default for any private communication online. Working with the Social Web Foundation to bring E2EE to ActivityPub marks a crucial step in fostering privacy and trust, and especially in enabling the fediverse to become a safe space for activists and communities to organise, coordinate, and collaborate meaningfully. By making secure, user-friendly messaging a core part of the fediverse, we’re helping lay the groundwork for decentralised networks where people can go beyond talking in the mythical ‘global town square’ and actually organise and accomplish things together.”
This work will happen best if the Fediverse community tracks it closely. We’ll be making updates here on the SWF blog as progress continues. Developers and active users may also be interested in the ActivityPub E2EE Messaging Task Force at the W3C, where the specification is being developed into a report for the Social Web Community group. Finally, we’ll be using the #JustBetweenUs hashtag to share progress and ideas, so you can follow it to see what’s been happening.
The schedule for the Social Web Developer Room at FOSDEM 2026 is starting to be populated as the speakers confirm their availability. We had a tonne of great submissions for this year’s track, and even with double the time from last year, we still had to leave some great talks on the cutting room floor. But we still managed to fit in 24 great talks, large and small. We’re going to see some additional events happening as FOSDEM 2026 gets nearer. Watch the #SOCIALWEBFOSDEM hashtag for more news and events.
Hey, all. One thing that’s different this year about the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2026 is that we’re going to include talks about the organizational and social aspects of rolling out Open Source Fediverse software for individuals and communities. Last year, we focused pretty heavily on technical talks from the principle developers of FLOSS packages. This year, we want to make sure the other aspects of Fediverse growth and improvement are covered, too.
Consequently, the guidance for last year’s event, which was focused on how to make a great technical presentation, might seem a little outdated. But on reviewing it, I’ve found that it still has good advice for social and organizational talks. Just like software developers, community builders see problems and construct solutions for them. The solutions aren’t just about writing code, though; more often they involve bringing people together, assembling off-the-shelf tools, and making processes and rules for interaction.
Talks about Open Source software to implement ActivityPub and build the social web are still welcome, of course. We’re just expanding a bit to cover the human aspects of the Fediverse as well.
I’m looking forward to having the interesting discussions about bringing people together to make the Social Web. If you haven’t already, please consider submitting a talk to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp. Select “Social Web” from the “Track” dropdown, and include the length of your talk (8/25/50) in the submission notes. The deadline is December 1, 2025, so get them in as soon as possible!
I (Evan) will be on stage at the Canadian Technology Law Conference on 14 Nov 2025 to talk about decentralization of social networks and other services. I’m really excited about the conference; a number of thinkers from across Canada will be meeting and discussing. Tickets are sold out, but video will be available after the event.
A quick note: I will be the keynote speaker at SeaGL 2025, the Seattle GNU/Linux conference. I will be talking about how we Free the Social Web, using Free and Open Source software connected with open standards to build an interconnected coalition of independent social networking sites. The event is free to attend, and remote online participation is encouraged. Registration is optional but encouraged. I can’t wait to meet people in the Seattle Fediverse community; please make sure to come say hi!
Just a quick note for those attending IETF 124 in Montreal next week:
The Montreal ActivityPub community is hosting a special meetup (“Activity In The Pub”) at the 3 Brasseurs bar at 5pm on November 2nd.
3 Brasseurs is at 732 Saint-Catherine St W.
Everyone interested in ActivityPub is welcome.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/rWmZNnFj74jnDBy3A
Looking forward to seeing you there!
NOTE: the announcement was originally for a pub that is closed on Sundays. We had to switch to a nearby alternative pub!
The Social Web Foundation is pleased to announce the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2026, and invite participants to submit proposals for talks for the event.
FOSDEM is an exciting free and open source software event in Brussels, Belgium that brings together thousands of enthusiasts from around the world. The event spans the weekend of January 31 to February 1, 2026 and features discussion tracks (“devrooms”) for scores of different technology topics.
The Social Web Devroom will take place on Saturday, January 31.
There will be three available talk formats:
The Social Web Devroom is open to talks all about the Social Web AKA the Fediverse, including:
Submit talk proposals to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026/cfp. Select “Social Web” from the “Track” dropdown, and include the length of your talk (8/25/50) in the submission notes. (Note that the “Lightning Talks” track is a separate event-wide track; if you’re proposing a Social Web micro-talk, please choose the “Social Web” track!)
All attendees and speakers must be familiar with and agree to the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.
Questions about topics, formats, or the Social Web in general should go to contact@socialwebfoundation.org.
Social Web Foundation