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!
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.
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 that Evan is interviewed by WordPress social networking lead Matthias Pfefferle on the OpenChannels.FM podcast about the history of the Fediverse and where we’re going next. How Decentralized Social Platforms Grew from Identica to Modern-Day Mastodon covers a 15+-year period as the Fediverse was born and developed. The shownotes alone are extremely detailed and a great resource.
I’m making an initial version of places.pub available today. places.pub is a collection of Place objects suitable for use in geosocial applications on the ActivityPub network.
Part of my work in the Social Web Community Group at the W3C has been participation in the GeoSocial Task Force. This is a sub-group of the SocialCG that focuses on implementing user stories in ActivityPub related to the intersection of geographical systems and social networking, for example, tagging an image with the place it represents, or checking in to a location.
One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as their id property, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.
So, I worked on making places.pub for geosocial hackers to experiment with. It’s a service that exposes places from the amazing OpenStreetMap collection of data as AS2 objects on the Web. So, given an OpenStreetMap object like the Rogers Centre Ottawa, it provides an AS2 version suitable for use in geosocial activities in ActivityPub. It also has a rudimentary search mechanism, although I think most users will want to use the Nominatim service for searching the OpenStreetMap database, and then map the IDs onto places.pub.
Once you know the places.pub ID for a place, you can use it for geotagging objects, people, activities, or using special geosocial activity types like check in, check out, and travel. There is a good list of examples on the places.pub home page, but obviously this is not an exhaustive list!
This wasn’t my first time trying to build places.pub; I’d done two earlier versions with different architectures and the same interface. The first time out, about 7 years ago, I created a full NodeJS server that used a full mirror of the OpenStreetMap database, so I didn’t need to hit the OSM API to fetch data. It worked pretty well, but it was really expensive — hundreds of dollars per month to keep a database server of that size running and synched.
I tried a second version a few months ago, which did batch generation of AS2 Place objects from the OpenStreetMap exports, and then uploaded them to the S3 service at Amazon Web Services. This was a whole lot cheaper, but it took a long time to download, convert, and re-upload the data.
This third implementation, with source code available on GitHub, is a little bit easier than both. Instead of sloshing the huge OSM dataset back and forth, I used the version of the data stored in the Google Cloud Public Datasets system on BigQuery. This let me ignore the effort of moving data, and just focus on giving it a good ActivityPub-compatible interface using a Google Cloud Run function. It seems to work pretty nicely.
I’d love to see some experimentation with using places.pub for geosocial activity in the social web. I’m going to work on some implementations in my own ActivityPub software. If you find problems with the software, please add an issue on GitHub or let me know on the Fediverse at @evanprodromou.
Are you coming to FOSDEM 2025 to attend the Social Web Devroom? Do you like helping make things happen? We need volunteers to help with the audio/visual (A/V) system (no experience necessary), to answer questions at the door, to coordinate questions, to keep time for the speakers, and otherwise keep things moving smoothly. Reply here if you’d like to help out, or email social-web-devroom-manager@fosdem.org .
I loved this video that the Daily Show‘s Desi Lydic posted on Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube. Give it a watch:
Lydic talks about the dizzying changes that are happening in social media these days. Internet users over the last decade have gotten used to a small number of huge social platforms. But political changes, content policy issues, and legal platform shutdowns have upended that formerly stable structure. People can no longer count on their friends, family, colleagues and neighbours all being on the same social networking system, much less news outlets, politicians, and celebrities. So they’re racing around, trying new applications (including, as Lydic notes, the awesome Pixelfed), and seeking a place to be social again.
Why should anyone have to do this? After all, you and I didn’t change our political outlook or our content policies or our legal ownership structure. We have governments and companies changing all around us that interfere with how we can interact with the people that matter most to us. Regardless of how you feel about these changes, why do everyday users have to be the ones to scramble to adapt?
The Fediverse is based on the simple belief that your social connections and your published content are yours. They belong to you. You should get to decide where to set up your home on the social web, based on your own priorities — technical, political, financial, romantic, whatever. And once you have that place on the social web, you can connect to anybody else, on any Fediverse platform, as easily as if they were on your own.
So when your friends are all trying a new Fediverse-enabled app from the app store, you can follow them from your own Fediverse home, see what they’re posting, like, comment, and share. You don’t have to scramble to install yet another application, go through the complicated signup flow, set up your profile, and alert everyone you know about yet another identity you have. You can stay put, keep all your current connections, but still stay connected to your restless friends and bleeding-edge influencers.
And if you get tired of the place you’ve set up your Fediverse home, you can move completely — taking all your social connections (and, soon, all your content) to the new platform you’ve chosen. You won’t have to make a series of announcements, like Lydic does, about all the different places your Internet presence is scattered. It’s handled automatically by the Fediverse platforms. Your followers, family and friends might not even notice the difference.
Social media is fun; we get it. And there’s nothing wrong with trying new apps. Being a pioneer on the cool new platform is invigorating. But if it’s not fun, and you’re feeling the whiplash of multiple platforms rising and falling weekly, please consider setting up your long-term homebase on a Fediverse-enabled platform. You might be surprised how many platforms are already Fediverse-enabled, and more are coming online every day.
We’ve got an amazing lineup for the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2025. We managed to fit 12 talks into 4 hours, covering a huge range of topics related to Open Source software and the Social Web.
FOSDEM is the premier Free and Open Source software conference in Europe. It’s a grass-roots event, available free of charge, and attracts hackers and advocates from around the world. The event is organized into presentation tracks called “developer rooms” or “devrooms”, which bring afficionados of a particular technology all together for a long block of presentations on related topics.
The main programming in the Social Web dev room on Saturday, Feb 1, will focus primarily on technical topics. A related Social Web Birds of a Feather (BOF) meetup on Sunday, Feb 2 will feature another 5 presentations about social aspects and advocacy for the Fediverse. It’s still in the scheduling phase; BOFs get scheduled late at FOSDEM. But the speakers have confirmed, and it should be a really good track.
Finally, SWF and Hacker Space Brussels are hosting Social Web After Hours on Sunday, Feb 2. It should provide some closing talk. Some of the most interesting speakers in the Social Web will be presenting; this should be a great way to wrap up the FOSDEM weekend.
To stay informed about Social Web activities at FOSDEM, follow the #SocialWebFOSDEM hashtag, or join the Social Web Devroom Matrix channel on the FOSDEM Matrix server.
Social Web Foundation