swf

One thing people have asked me over the last month is whether #SWF will be organising the Social Web Devroom at #FOSDEM2027 . The answer is: fingers crossed!

We submitted the application to manage the devroom ahead of the October 4 deadline. We haven’t heard back yet; the announcements are scheduled for October 20, about a week from this writing.

If the dev room is accepted, we will put out the call for proposals soon after that — it has to be published by October 27.

We have been really lucky to have broad participation from volunteers and partner orgs in doing the organization for the last 2 events. It encompasses everything from soliciting applications, judging the entries, and building the schedule to MCing the event, helping people at the door, and watching the time for speakers.

If you want to be part of that work, please let us know! It is much easier work if we spread it around.

SWF is also not organising BOFs at FOSDEM. So, if you have something to discuss, please plan a BOF!

I really recommend coming to @fosdem  if it’s affordable and convenient for you. It’s a great event.

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.

Some quick news about the Long-form Text project at the Social Web Foundation. After the publication of the draft FEP b2b8 (“Long-form Text”), the Social Web Foundation has been working with implementers to get more support for the Article data type, representing multi-paragraph text on the Fediverse.

One of the big pain points has been how subscribers to long-form text from platforms like WordPress, WriteFreely, Plume and Ghost.org see the text in their microblogging platforms like Mastodon or Threads. Often, the data is abbreviated or misformatted. FEP b2b8 is, in part, a way to improve and standardize this problem.

The work in this area is bearing fruit; a few weeks ago, Shubhankar Srivastava of the Fediverse team at Threads announced that Threads is now properly displaying long-form text from Ghost. This is a big step forward in support.

The participants in the project are aiming to have better standards support from both publishers and consumers over the next few months, so I’m optimistic that other platforms will see similar improvements.