In a gesture that’s been a long time coming, Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation. The organization aims to tackle the various headaches and challenges the ActivityPub ecosystem has faced over the last decade of its development. Their mission? A bigger, better Fediverse.

“I wish I would’ve started it five years ago,” Evan explains in a call, “We’re seeing growth of ActivityPub in the commercial sector, we want to help guide that work, especially for devs that don’t know how to engage with the Fediverse, or the work that happens in private spaces. As we’re seeing a lot of growth, it’s important to help push that growth forward, we’re really filling in the crack no other organization is doing.”

The foundation launches with a dedicated team of three: Evan Prodromou is the Research Director, Mallory Knodel serves as the Executive Director, and Tom Coates acts as Product Director. The trio brings a wealth of knowledge regarding protocol development, open source development, technology policy, and product development for the Web.

What will The Social Web Foundation do?

In terms of fulfilling its goals, the organization has a few specific areas of focus: People, Policy, Protocol, and Plumbing. The SWF has deemed these areas as critical to their mission statement, and will start with these core focuses.

People

There’s a big opportunity to explain what the Fediverse is, how it works, and why what it has to offer is important. Unfortunately, we’re still not there yet. There have been countless attempts to make this all easy to parse and understand, and the SWF hopes to produce high-quality materials for the mass public.

Fediverse Starter Page

An easy way for people to learn about and get started with the social web.

socialwebfoundation.org

In addition to producing material for end users, the organization intends to advocate towards individual developers, businesses, and nonprofit entities, and provide them with resources explaining how they might benefit, and how to get started.

Policy

Policy is another big area that would benefit from clarification. The Social Web encompasses many different servers, operating between many different international borders. Many larger organizations rely on policy frameworks to provide service all around the world, and have to consider how national policies affect nodes in a federated network.

GDPR and ActivityPub

Exploring the effects of ActivityPub on GDPR and privacy compliance.

socialwebfoundation.org

In addition, the SWF aims to produce materials for companies and governments on matters pertaining to infrastructure, and provide information and training materials to help interested parties onboard themselves to the network.

Protocol

To be clear, the Social Web Foundation has no intention of overtaking the W3C in ActivityPub’s standardization process. However, they fully intend to serve as a W3C member organization.

End-to-end Encryption (E2EE) over ActivityPub

Expanding the ActivityPub protocol to support encrypted direct messages.

socialwebfoundation.org

Most of their work will initially focus on protocol extensions that they hope will benefit the community. In Evan’s own words:

Fediverse Enhancement Proposals are kind of a standardization process. We may do submissions for FEPs. If an idea comes in one of our workshops or through our supporters and members, we would start through a FEP.

Other times, though, we might go through SocialCG for fundamental protocol changes. We’ll probably use both – FEP for extensions, SocialCG for core stuff, they’re complimentary.

Plumbing

Another big area that the SWF has its eye on is providing supportive infrastructure for users and developers. There’s a real and pressing need to help people engage with their networks, stay up to date, follow hashtags and relays, and finding friends across the network.

One open area that the foundation might find early success in is hosting developer tooling and infrastructure projects. Tools such as PubKit, FediDB, and BrowserPub may one day operate under the foundation’s umbrella. Heck, even the Fediverse Test Suite could potentially be a good fit. For now, though, Evan states that these are still early stages.

Support and Partnerships

At launch, The Social Web Foundation has announced 12 partner organizations, who serve as a pool of knowledge, resources, and stakeholders. The majority of these entities are either building for the Fediverse directly, or providing infrastructure and services indirectly.

Aside from Meta being an early supporter, one surprise is the inclusion of The Ford Foundation, a social justice organization dedicated to supporting next-generation solutions for the social good.

At time of launch, the SWF will have access to more than 20 dedicated advisors, who will guide the organization on current problem areas their own efforts are facing, and provide insights on how to move forward and make progress.

Looking to the Future

It’s extremely exciting to see a formal nonprofit take shape, and take on the challenge of leveling up the Fediverse. Even with the significance of this organization’s liftoff, Evan wants to set the record straight: the SWF is not intended to be a central authority.

“The Fediverse is too big and too diverse for anyone to claim to speak for the Fediverse. That’s not what we want to do or who we want to be,” he explains, “We may do things that people on the network disagree with, like encouraging media organizations to join the network, but what we want to do is help the mission of growing and improving the Fediverse over time.”

You can check out the new foundation at https://socialwebfoundation.org, and follow them directly on the Fediverse at: @swf@socialwebfoundation.org

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