Social Web Foundation Launched — How In Is W3C on Fediverse?

Today a group of open social networking advocates has launched the Social Web Foundation (SWF), “a non-profit organization dedicated to making connections between social platforms with the open standard protocol ActivityPub.”

I chatted with one of the three co-founders, Evan Prodromou, about the new organization and what its goals are. The other two founding members are Mallory Knodel, previously CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology (who will act as executive director) and Tom Coates, a product designer whose work with the BBC and Yahoo during Web 2.0 was an inspiration to many (he will serve as product director).

Prodromou, whose title with SWF is research director, was one of the creators of ActivityPub (AP), a decentralized social networking protocol that was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2018. ActivityPub is the main protocol of the fediverse, an evolving set of decentralized applications and websites that are starting to challenge the hegemony of centralized services like X and Facebook.

SWF’s Circle: Threads Inside, Bluesky Outside

Ironically, Facebook’s parent company Meta has also begun to build in the fediverse — although its Threads product is still a long way from being fully open (you can subscribe to a Threads account from Mastodon, for example, but not the other way round). Meta is one of the organizations that has declared its support for the SWF, alongside Mastodon, Flipboard, Automattic, Fastly, Medium, and multiple other companies and individual advisors.

Prodromou explained that the goal of SWF is “expanding and improving the fediverse” across a number of different dimensions. One is user education — “raising awareness of the fediverse, not only with the general public but with particular cultural stakeholders like media organizations, universities, companies, tech companies, things like that,” he said. The SWF will also work on helping policymakers “understand the fediverse, especially how it interacts with things like privacy and kids and things like that.”

Among the three founders, Prodromou is the most experienced at standards-building. So he will “work pretty closely with the ActivityPub protocol,” including working on “extending and improving the protocol.” The group will also “work on plumbing,” which in practical terms means helping others implement the protocol.

I asked whether non-AP social web products are involved, such as Bluesky and Nostr. Prodromou said that, no, this effort is restricted to ActivityPub products.

“I think it’s really to build out that ActivityPub network,” he said, adding that Bluesky is accessible to Mastodon users through bridging software. He described the bridge as “really nice and convenient,” but that the SWF isn’t concerned about Bluesky from a protocol level. “We’re not going to be working to advocate for the Bluesky Protocol, or anything like that,” he said. “They’ve got money, they can do that if they want.”

What About the W3C — Is It Really a Fediverse Supporter?

Update, 4 October 2024: a couple of days after this article published, Tim Berners-Lee replied to my Bluesky post that linked to it. He thanked me for my feedback and said he’d now joined the fediverse at this Mastodon address: https://w3c.social/@timbl. He also updated the W3C post I referenced below, to include mentions of ActivityPub and the fediverse.

It’s worth noting that the W3C is not involved in the SWF either. Indeed, the W3C’s founder, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, appears not to use fediverse products — or at least he occasionally posts on Bluesky, but doesn’t have a Mastodon account. In a recent post on the W3C website, Berners-Lee wrote about “the problems of the web, and specifically of social media,” but neglected to mention either the fediverse or ActivityPub (which, remember, is a W3C standard). Bluesky, on the other hand, was mentioned five times in the article.

Regardless of whether the W3C figurehead personally supports ActivityPub, the job of the W3C itself is to work on protocols.

“So W3C as a standards organization mostly does coordinating the work of a number of different groups to make protocols,” explained Prodromou. “So we’ll still be participating in the W3C — we’re going to become a member organization of the W3C — [and] we have talked with the W3C [and] they’re supportive. We’re not going to have their logo on the site, but they’ve been really helpful so far.”

Prodromou added that the SWF will take on the role of advocacy and user education, which is typically outside of the W3C’s purview for standards work. As for how it will liaise with the W3C, he gave the example of long-form text.

“One of the program items we’re planning for the next six months is focused on long-form text. I don’t know if you follow any blogs from Mastodon, but the experience isn’t great, and so working on a profile of ActivityPub that covers the needs of long-form text — like [from] Ghost or WordPress or WriteFreely — and making sure that experience works well, is something that we want to see happen, right? So that’s the kind of thing where we’ll focus down on a particular application areas, work on seeing what the implementers need, what users need, and coming up with those recommendations, which we will then take to the W3C to get standardized.”

Happy Days (But It’d Be Nice if TBL Used Fediverse)

Overall, it’s great to see a non-profit foundation being created for the fediverse. It reminds me a bit of the Metaverse Standards Forum, which likewise separates itself from the W3C but actively liaises with them.

The fediverse has been a critical development in the open web over the past several years, since most of the social media landscape is dominated by centralized platforms — including Meta. If we want the open web to not just survive, but perhaps thrive again one day, we should all (hopefully including the father of the web) get behind the fediverse and support the Social Web Foundation.