Evan Prodromou Launches the Social Web Foundation
Evan Prodromou launched The Social Web Foundation to enhance the ActivityPub ecosystem and the Fediverse, focusing on education, policy, protocol development, and infrastructure while maintaining a decentralized approach.
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Evan Prodromou has launched The Social Web Foundation (SWF), an organization aimed at addressing challenges within the ActivityPub ecosystem and promoting the growth of the Fediverse. Prodromou, who co-authored the ActivityPub protocol, expressed a desire to have initiated this effort earlier, noting the increasing commercial interest in ActivityPub. The foundation's team includes Mallory Knodel as Executive Director and Tom Coates as Product Director, all bringing expertise in technology policy and open-source development. The SWF will focus on four key areas: People, Policy, Protocol, and Plumbing. It aims to educate the public about the Fediverse, clarify policy implications for international operations, support protocol development without overshadowing the W3C, and provide infrastructure for users and developers. The foundation has partnered with 12 organizations, including Meta and The Ford Foundation, to leverage resources and knowledge. Despite its formal structure, Prodromou emphasized that the SWF does not intend to act as a central authority over the diverse Fediverse community. The foundation's mission is to enhance and expand the Fediverse while respecting its decentralized nature.
- The Social Web Foundation aims to improve the ActivityPub ecosystem and promote the Fediverse.
- Key focus areas include education, policy clarification, protocol development, and infrastructure support.
- The foundation has partnered with 12 organizations, including Meta and The Ford Foundation.
- It emphasizes a decentralized approach, avoiding central authority over the Fediverse.
- The foundation seeks to provide resources for developers and businesses to engage with the Fediverse.
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9 commentsMy advice would be to target the teens. They seem to switch social nets at the drop of a hat (speaking as the father of one). Get a bunch onto your network, then let them experience the fact they can still speak to their mates on another network. Then the penny might drop and you'll soon get them proselytising about the benefits of federation.
I know the protocol looks fairly simple at first glance but it takes about 2 man years to build a decent implementation, which frankly just means it's too complicated. Sending text ultimately should not be that hard. One huge point of friction I found with the protocol was the failure to just make things type-safe. You have lots of object properties that are "Sometimes a string", "Sometimes an array", etc. That makes all your models super ugly and all your marshaling super ugly.
By comparison, Nostr proved you certainly can avoid all the complexity. Nostr got it right. Nostr kept it simple. And Nostr is censorship resistant unlike the Fediverse which is full of politically motivated admins who love to maintain "block lists" to be sure no "Other Viewpoints" (that disagree with their own) are allowed to proliferate. Admins were having their entire servers blocked simply for saying something nice about some POTUS candidate for example. That just creates a very toxic environment, from all the people who of course claim they're fighting toxicity.
I believe that in order to successfully and safely move posts between nodes they need to be immutable and signed. Because you're essentially creating a new history on a new node.
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