fediverse

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:

• Open-registration Fediverse servers that are welcoming the HOPE audience. The HOPE conference welcomes people involved in information security, digital rights, as well as experimentation with radio, electronics, and other tech. It also usually has people from New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere in the Atlantic seaboard. If you know of servers that would welcome this kind of new member, please let us know! Even if the server isn’t open registration, but can accommodate new users on the day of the workshop, we’d love to coordinate.
• First-timer Collections. Do you know of a good starter follow pack that new users might enjoy? Especially if their interests overlap with the HOPE audience. Just some names to follow is a big help, too.
• New user tips. What helps people get started on the Fediverse? What helps them stay engaged?
• Volunteers. Will you be at HOPE? Want to meet interesting people and help them get started with the Fediverse? It should be fun and easy.

Please reply to this post with ideas or contact info. This is going to be fun!

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.

As part of the work on Fediverse sustainability announced earlier this year, the Social Web Foundation is running our first Fediverse Sustainability Survey . We’re seeking operators, moderators and administrators of Fediverse sites, from the smallest to the largest, to fill out the anonymous survey and share information about how their instances work. If you help run an instance, please take the 10-15 minutes needed to fill out the survey. We need a lot of responses (hundreds!) to get statistically relevant data, so please feel free to share the link. We’re also on the lookout for operators of instances that are no longer running; there is a lot to learn about sustainability from servers that closed down, for whatever reason. We’ll publish findings here as part of our sustainability report, supplemented by interviews with selected respondents. Thanks!

Update: we hit a survey response limit in LimeSurvey — it’s been fixed. If you had a problem getting to the survey, it should be cleared now.

The call for proposals is open for the COSCUP Fediverse track in Taipei, Taiwan. ActivityPub-related software, including server and client implementations, are great topics for the event.

COSCUP (“Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters”) is the FOSDEM of East Asia. Run by the Open Source community in Taiwan, it brings together people excited about FOSS across the region.

For the first time, this year, members of the Korean ActivityPub developer community FediDev KR are joining up with FediLUG of Japan to program and run a Fediverse track at COSCUP. This has the potential to be a huge step forward for the Fediverse developer community. Although many major projects, like Fedify and Misskey, are created and promoted in East Asia, distance and language barriers make it hard for East Asian devs to participate in European and North American in-person events.

The Fediverse track is open to proposals about ActivityPub implementations, clients for ActivityPub platforms, ancillary services, libraries and toolkits. But also, as at FOSDEM, talks about the human aspects of Fediverse technology, like moderation, policy and governance, are welcome and encouraged. This event looks like it will cover as much interesting conceptual space as its twin at FOSDEM.

Hong Minhee, hongminhee@hollo.social, was one of the main speakers at FOSDEM’s Social Web devroom this year. Their talk about Fedify was important, but even more important was their effort to bridge the gap between Asia’s and Europe’s Fediverse development communities.

I (Evan) hope that COSCUP brings together many Asian developers, but I also hope that North American and European individuals and teams put in proposals as well. Knitting together these two important communities on the Fediverse requires effort from both sides. That’s why I’m applying to speak (about ActivityPub 1.1), and why I hope to see many familiar faces among the new ones in Taiwan.

tags.pub is a new service under development by the Social Web Foundation. It is a global hashtag server — it lets you follow a hashtag across the Fediverse. There’s lots of information on the tags.pub home page, and I (Evan) did a talk about tags.pub at FOSDEM 2026. This blog post answers some basics about tags.pub.

• To follow a hashtag globally, search for a user with that name at tags.pub, like @example for the #example hashtag. Follow that account, and it will share all the content it sees with that hashtag to you. If you unfollow the account, it should stop sharing to you. The usernames only have letters and numbers in them, and they only go up to 64 characters.
• To share your content with tags.pub, search for and follow the @_followback account. It will follow you back (thus the name) and your public posts will be shared by the hashtag accounts on tags.pub. If you unfollow the follow back account, it will unfollow you back, and your content will no longer be shared.
• You can connect a whole server to tags.pub by using the relay interface. Add https://tags.pub/user/_____relay_____/inbox (Mastodon) or https://tags.pub/user/_____relay_____ (Pleroma) to your server relays. This is a one-way pipe — your server will send public posts to tags.pub, but tags.pub won’t send all its public data back to you. Instead, your users should follow hashtag accounts to get specific feeds.
• We respect your agency. If your server is connected to tags.pub and you don’t want it to boost your content, add #NoTagsPub to your bio. If you already have #NoBots, that should be plenty. You’ll still be able to follow tags.pub hashtag accounts. If you don’t want to see or be seen by tags.pub at all, you can block the domain ‘tags.pub’ entirely.
• Becoming the ‘global’ hashtag server is a goal. We are still ramping up, and there are a lot of people and servers that are not yet connected.
• tags.pub will not share your content with accounts or servers that you have blocked. It only shares the link to your content, so your block will be respected.
• tags.pub is developed and operated by Social Web Foundation. We are a US non-profit. The servers are located in Beauharnois, Quebec, Canada in a data centre run by OVHCloud, a French corporation. We try to keep the data storage to the absolute minimum necessary to provide the hashtag sharing service. There is no search index, and we don’t archive your content. The code is Free and Open Source software under the AGPL-v3.
• If you have a feature request, or a bug report, please add a GitHub issue. If you have a private comment or question, please use our contact form.

I’m going to be participating in the Growing the Open Social Web workshop at Fediforum on March 2, 2026. I’m excited to talk to other people who care about the Fediverse about ways to connect more people through ActivityPub.

Fediforum invited attendees to publish position papers before the workshop. SWF has a number of hypotheses about growth of the social web; I’ll try to summarise some of them here.

• Growth can’t come at the expense of privacy. People currently on the Fediverse must have the tools they need to preserve their privacy as the network grows. This means privacy from other users, as well as privacy from new platform operators. Expanding the options for private interactions on the Fediverse, like end-to-end encrypted messages and private groups, is necessary for preserving privacy as the user base and platform list expands.
• Connecting platforms to the Fediverse is our most efficient way to grow. There are already billions of people on social platforms across the Internet. Getting these platforms to let users publish to the Fediverse, as well as having two-way interactions with remote users, lets people share in the benefits of the Fediverse with a platform and interface that they’re already used to. Even when brand new social platforms adopt ActivityPub, they bring their new features and users.
• Connecting communities helps us grow fast and stay cohesive. Bringing formal and informal communities onto the Fediverse is a great way to enable a lot of new users quickly. By formal communities, we mean organized groups like clubs, universities and schools, professional societies, enterprises, or local and regional governments. These groups can set up their own places on the Fediverse, like Mastodon servers, and provide user accounts for all their members. (One great way to connect formal communities is to Fediverse-enable the community platforms they already use.) These new Fediverse users have the kind of connections in place that retain active users, as well as the support they need to use the Fediverse. More informal communities, like people sharing the same profession, fans of a particular hobby, or users of a language or technology, can be great additions to the Fediverse, but these groups are less cohesive and less likely to bring their own infrastructure.
• People come to social networks for existing social ties. Bringing on new users one-by-one is the most difficult way to grow this network. The best way to engage new users on the network, and to keep them active and interested, is to make sure they can connect to people they already know and care about. That may be friends, family, colleagues and neighbours, or brands, creators, and publications they recognise. Our onboarding processes for Fediverse users need to encourage the social contacts so that people feel a reason to stick around for day 2, 7, and 30.

We’re looking forward to engaging with the Fediforum community on these and other topics. We’ll see you on March 2!

Thanks to the Interledger Foundation for their generous Grant for the Web to the Social Web Foundation. With the help of ILF, we are launching a new program area focused on economic issues on the Social Web. In particular, we’ll be producing three reports: one on sustainability for social web instances; one for the Fediverse and the creator economy; and one for cooperatives on the Social Web. In addition, we’ll be engaging multimedia Fediverse apps for using the Web Monetization standard. You can read more about grant on our shared announcement: Interledger Foundation awards $200,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media.

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.

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!