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 info. This is going to be fun!
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 from lots of small servers, this can help connect people with others who share their interests on the Fediverse.
However, some people have said they were surprised by the boosts, since they hadn’t directly connected their server to tags.pub. To avoid this, tags.pub is now unsubscribed from the open registration relay servers it was previously using. If your content is no longer being boosted, you can still connect your account or your server directly to tags.pub. tags.pub may subscribe to relay servers in the future, but we’ll coordinate with the relay server admins first to make sure there are fewer surprises.
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!
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.
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!
Social Web Foundation