In the course of building out the Fediverse Schema Observatory and the ActivityPub Fuzzer I changed how I write my small ActivityPub servers. I used to follow Mastodon's playbook, where I transformed incoming activities into a relational database model, breaking each activity out into rows across an accounts table, a statuses table, a favorites table, and so on. But since learning that relational databases like SQLite and Postgres contain high performance functions for parsing JSON, I have moved to a hybrid model that blends features of relational databases and NoSQL JSON databases. This approach is not new, and there are reasons it hasn't been embraced in other contexts, but I think it is uniquely suited to ActivityPub's interaction model and could be a fruitful avenue for more developers to explore.
In this talk I describe: - how to do it - concrete benefits of doing it - helpful patterns I've learned - drawbacks and caveats
WordPress joined the fediverse more than 15 years ago and is still the underdog, but the potential is huge, after all, nearly 40% of the internet is powered by WordPress.
This talk is about how WordPress made its way into the fediverse (or the other way around), what the fediverse can learn from WordPress and the blogosphere, and how the fediverse can have a positive impact on WordPress.
WordPress doesn’t come from the same place as social platforms. Unlike platforms built purely for social interaction, WordPress is driven by a very different set of needs, priorities and expectations. I want to give a few insights into how running your own ActivityPub instance can feel as easy as installing a plugin (and why that’s only half of the truth). Plus, a short sneak peek into what we’re currently working on to make WordPress a full flavored, fully featured ActivityPub instance.
The social web is bigger than software. It’s a movement to build a liberated internet for the people, and it will take all of us working together to deliver on that promise.
Mastodon is a decentralised social networking platform powered by free software which allows users and institutions to create and join independent communities. It's also the nonprofit foundation that supports them, and looking after the humans of the social web is core to the Mastodon foundation’s mission. If you’ve been following us closely, you’ll know we just completed a radical transformation of our foundation's operations. One reason we did this was to support more direct community participation in shaping and deciding the future of Mastodon. In the coming year, we’re also planning to increase our efforts with and on behalf of the communities we support and that surround us: from server admins to the broader social web and Fediverse.
In this talk, Mastodon’s new Community Director Hannah Aubry will share the foundation’s plans for evolving how the project approaches its many communities, from server admins to the broader social web. Bear in mind this isn’t just a talk; it’s an invitation to co-create the future of Mastodon.
The web is facing a critical moment. In an era of geopolitical fragmentation and relentless platform enshittification, we cannot afford to remain dependent on Big Tech gatekeepers for our digital voices. The Social Web offers an alternative—but only if we actively claim it.
We'll show you how to establish genuine digital sovereignty by federating different content types across the Fediverse. Through live demos of Mastodon (microblogging), Pixelfed (images), and Castopod (podcasting), we'll demonstrate how these independent platforms seamlessly federate via ActivityPub—allowing you to own your content, control your audience relationships, and maintain your voice across media types without surrendering to corporate platforms.
What we'll do together: - Understand why now matters: We'll examine the geopolitical and economic forces driving platform consolidation and why decentralization is a democratic imperative - Break the enshittification trap: We'll show how platforms extract value by degrading service, and why federation breaks this cycle - See federation in action: We'll demo cross-platform federation live—posting from Castopod, watching interactions appear in Mastodon, building community across instances - Get you started: We'll give you concrete next steps to migrate your digital presence to the Social Web
By the end of this session, you'll know exactly where to start. If you have a laptop, you can host a podcast on the Fediverse—and we'll show you how. The tools exist. The community is ready. Let's take back control of how we communicate, create, and connect online.
Illustration: (CC BY-SA 4.0) Eukombos
The German-European initiative Save Social proposes a 25 minutes session focused on broadening the involvement of society in the development and stewardship of the open social web. Despite immense progress in establishing open alternatives like Mastodon or Friendica, today's open social web has struggled to connect with and empower the wider public, often because structural support has concentrated on technical advancements rather than inclusive engagement and content diversity. A handful of global platform monopolies dominate – as we all know - public discourse and information, undermining democratic exchange and transparency. While open alternatives exist, their reach is limited without the structural, content, and educational investment needed to engage broader segments of society. Current alternatives have not always made participation intuitive or relevant for users from fields outside the technology sector, which limits their impact and hinders genuine diversity in dialogue and innovation. Therefore the future of the social web is not just a matter for developers, but for everyone—requiring regulatory support, media education, and the creation of citizen committees to define public-good requirements. The session will highlight specific, actionable pathways for different sectors to join the open web movement, making digital democracy a society-wide project rather than a niche initiative, e. g.: • Frame the strategy around a clear democratic and social purpose, not only technical openness. • Frame strategies around stories and lived experiences instead of only technical roadmaps. • Treat communities as Co-desginers, move from “getting feedback” to “sharing authorship.” • Assume most people are not protocol experts and design engagement accordingly. • Build bridges to sectors of society Save Social's proposal is for a session that inspires and equips participants to break silos and bring the open social web to everyone, ensuring it serves as a democratic, accessible, and resilient foundation for the digital society of the future. Save Social is a network of 120 individuals, being supported by more that 260.000 signatories from Germany, collectively covering journalism, the arts, unions, startup founders, established economic leaders, public institutions, and research. This cross-sector representation is unique and powerful, fostering collaboration and a user-centric approach to digital democracy.
Many ActivityPub servers have a feature to follow a hashtag locally -- subscribing to receive all the content with a particular hashtag that your server knows about, as it arrives. Could we provide a similar feature across the Fediverse? tags.pub is a project to implement that feature -- collecting tagged content and redistributing it by hashtag. In this talk, Evan will discuss the motivations behind tags.pub, its implementation, and outline future steps for global hashtag services.
Since Mastodon, a prominent adopter of ActivityPub, developed its own client API, it has been embraced by various projects, even reaching beyond microblogging platforms. Despite its potential, the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API has received minimal attention, leading many platform developers to overlook it in favour of building bespoke or third-party solutions.
My talk will explore the unfulfilled promise of a general-purpose client built on ActivityPub's Client API. By developing a general-purpose client app, participating in the specification work, and addressing its shortcomings, we can initiate a new cycle of client app development. This approach will empower platform developers to innovate new services, fostering broader adoption and exploration of ActivityPub’s Federation capabilities across diverse platforms.
I'm building a project for sharing bookmarks on the fediverse. I'll cover its unique mix of features from traditional social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and pinboard, feed readers, and graph-based tools like Obsidian or are.na. I'll explain how this works as a companion when exploring the small web as part of tightly knit communities.
Digital laws like the GDPR or the DSA do not really differentiate between Big Tech and the Social Web. This makes many service providers in the Fediverse feel insecure. So far, the Fediverse is not so much on the screen of authorities. But the rise of authoritarian governments raises fears that digital rules could be used as an arbitrary instrument of power against the Fediverse.
However, this circumstance should not lead us to follow the narrative that the digital economy needs "simplification" or "deregulation". The opposite is true: Regulation gives the Fediverse a chance to compete with Big Tech. The lack of enforcement rewards the service providers who do not comply with the law. What the Fediverse needs is rather more legal certainty.
This talk gives an overview about the legal pitfalls that service providers in the Fediverse are facing. It explores possible amendments or exemptions in the law that could make life easier for the volunteers in the Fediverse.
In this talk, I will discuss the collaborative efforts that began in 2025 with the aim of establishing an advocacy network for the social web. While the developer community is flourishing with the support of the Social Web Foundation and others, few communicators have raised their voices and made demands addressed to the political sphere, such as the European Union.
As social web engaged people with professional backgrounds in policy work and communication have become involved in social networks in Europe, interest and efforts to strengthen communication and political demands in the European digital policy landscape have grown.
In order to be approachable by interested lawmakers and public organizations, we need advocacy networks. What goals and benefits could be achieved through such networks? They would enable regulatory influence and support, secure public funding, and help advocates to sit on public and non-public panels. This would enable them to raise awareness and advocate for decentralised social networks as a means of achieving digital sovereignty.
One of our important political messages is to emphasize the importance of social networks as a fundamental building block in the pursuit of digital sovereignty in and for Europe. Social networks should also be recognized as a service that must be included in discussions about Eurostacks.
To get those and other messages heard and repeated, we need more people to join these efforts. In my talk, I will discuss the current state of stewardship of the open social web, and the political goals we should aim to achieve in 2026.
This talk will provide a concise introduction to Fedimedia Italia, a federation of projects run by Fediverse admins, hacktivists, and developers, and its mission to promote the Fediverse and free software across Italy and explores the experiences of Mastodon.uno and the Devol collective in advancing the federated social-web (the Fediverse) in Italy. Since its creation, Mastodon.uno has become one of the largest and most active Mastodon instances worldwide, and a central hub for the Italian-language Fediverse community. The talk also presents some projects in development, focusing on FediPress, a WordPress plugin that enhances the official ActivityPub with a mobile-friendly, messenger-like PWA.
Fedimedia Italia is a non-profit association promoting decentralized technologies, free software, and digital rights, aiming to build an ethical online ecosystem as an alternative to Big Tech platforms. Founded by a federation of hacktivists and developers committed to digital sovereignty, Fedimedia Italia is a key pillar of the Italian Fediverse, with members managing instances and contributing to projects such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mobilizon and additional 9 federated services.
During the talk we will outline the technical challenges required to maintain a stable federated network: server infrastructure, moderation policies, interoperability, scalability issues.
Examine the social and adoption challenges: how to attract and retain users, trust building, and overcoming network-effect inertia compared to centralized Big Tech platforms.
Share the lessons learned by Fedimedia admins over 7 years of operation with mastodon.uno: successes, failures, tensions; and how they reflect the broader difficulties of establishing a truly distributed, privacy-centric alternative to corporate social media especially in a national/language-specific context.
By exposing both the technical backbone and the human/community challenges, the presentation aims to provide a helpful roadmap for those who want to create a federated social networks. It will be particularly relevant for: developers, sysadmins and open-source activists interested in decentralized social infrastructure, community governance, and the practical trade-offs of building a “free web.”
Links to mentioned projects:
Fedimedia --- https://fedimedia.it
Mastodon.uno — https://mastodon.uno
devol: https://servizi.devol.it - https://newsletter.devol.it
fedipress: https://openforfuture.org/fedipress/
The fediverse isn't done! Or, at least, that's the opinions of ActivityPub co-authors Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon! Discover how we could improve the fediverse with ActivityPub-compatible improvements to add more robust and secure communication/cooperation patterns, decentralized storage and identity, etc! Plus: how Spritely is starting to apply its technology towards exactly this goal, bringing Spritely's next-generation internet tech to the fediverse!
FediVariety, a research initiative supported by the NLnet and SABOA foundations, has analyzed the European Data Protection Supervisor's pilot project, "EU Voice/Video".
Our upcoming report, scheduled for publication in early 2026, will offer key insights and recommendations for integrating the Fediverse into public administrations. This report aims to spark open dialogue among diverse practitioners, encouraging experience sharing and fostering new collaborations.
At FOSDEM, we will present preliminary insights from our research and invite participation in an unconference in Amsterdam on March 19-20, 2026.
Building on our findings, we aim to explore how the Fediverse can effectively support public institutions in the long term, addressing critical questions about its future and strategies for developing and adopting decentralized social media. We seek to create a broad coalition and welcome developers, administrators, content managers, moderators, coders, digital activists, and open-source enthusiasts committed to fostering sustainable alternative social media and promoting an open social web.
— "Nodes On A Web (NOAW): The Fediverse in/for Public Institutions", is supported by the Chief Information Office (CIO-Rijk) (Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations) of the Netherlands, the Digitalisation & Innovation Department of the City of Amsterdam, NLnet foundation, and SABOA foundation.
More information on the NOAW unconference, the format and registration can be found here: https://fedivariety.org/unconference
Questions? Feedback? Contact us: https://mastodon.social/@FediVariety noaw@fedivariety.org
FediVariety.org is a European collective of digital activists and researchers dedicated to promoting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for public administration, with an emphasis on the Fediverse.
Public institutions are beginning to take an active role in the Fediverse, integrating ActivityPub platforms into their communication and identity ecosystems. This shift brings specific organisational challenges: introducing large and diverse user groups to decentralised networks, aligning institutional identity with the logic of the Social Web, establishing internal responsibilities, and ensuring that data protection and communication standards translate into federated environments. This talk reflects on the experience of introducing a Mastodon instance at the University of Innsbruck, where more than 5,000 staff members can access the Fediverse through the university’s Single Sign-On system. The focus lies on the institutional layer of Fediverse adoption: designing onboarding procedures, coordinating collaboration between departments, developing moderation and communication guidelines, and embedding ActivityPub into established workflows. In addition, the talk highlights what the Social Web ecosystem needs in order to better support institutional participation: more flexible onboarding paths, clearer role and permission models, moderation tools suited to organisational contexts and interfaces that help bridge institutional communication cultures with the norms of decentralised networks. The aim is to outline how institutions can adopt ActivityPub at scale and contribute meaningfully to the Social Web, not only as operators of individual services, but as active partners in shaping open, federated digital spaces.
Civil organizations like libraries, schools, government agencies and NGO’s base their efforts on public values over financial profit. In their everyday operation however they often rely on tools that do not align with these public values: Big Tech platforms that sell user data as a commodity, suppress voices, increase polarization and undermine democracy and mental health.
While alternative tools and platforms are available, public institutions are often reluctant to start using them. At PublicSpaces, www.publicspaces.net, we work with 40 of these larger public institutions like libraries, museums, broadcasters, local governments and health and education institutions. All these partners share a common goal: to communicate on platforms that align with their public mission and public values.
Doing this as a single institution is often difficult. Institutions often lack the knowledge, the funds or the expertise to create and manage new platforms. By working together we hope to strengthen our efforts, share knowledge and create a common ecosystem. Some of the project we worked on were PeerTube Spaces, a pilot to set up video as a digital commons, the Make Social Social again campaign in which we help institutions to take the first step together by using alternatives to Big Tech social media platforms and the Fediverse Helpdesk we will start in 2026.
While we know from conversation with or partners what the common bottlenecks and holdback towards adoption of alternative platforms are, we would like to underpin this knowledge with actual data. For this talk we will send out a survey to a representative section of our partners institutions about what the mayor issues are with the use of alternatives are.
We will analyze and visualize this data, combine it with our experience in working with public institutions and and present it in a developer friendly form. With this talk we hope to give insight into improvement the developer community can to help public institutions, and their clients, users, citizens, etc. adopt alternative platforms. We will try to answer questions as:
• What hare the main holdbacks for civil institutions towards wider adoption of Fediverse tools?
• What technical and other improvements would help civil institutions adopt Fediverse tools?
• What types of support and knowledge sharing are needed?
• What type of organization and governance are needed to support this?
• How can the Fediverse community help civil institutions and how can civil institutions help the Fediverse community?
The Fediscovery project defines a protocol for "Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers", standardised services which can provide common features like cross-instance search, recommendations, and the potential for many more. This talk will describe, from an outside-the-project perspective, how the protocol works, how you can build support into your apps, and how and why we did this for Manyfold.
A few years ago I volunteered at a non-profit where the go-to digital badge platform (e.g., Credly) was explicitly prohibited due to cost, vendor lock-in and rigid workflows. We needed a badge system for volunteer recognition, skill tracking and event participation — yet the high price and closed ecosystem killed it every time.
This is how BadgeFed was born, an open-source, federated badge system built on the ActivityPub protocol and the Open Badges standard. Because it’s an instance you control, deployable in minutes, fully federated and self-hostable, it overcame the cost/lock-in barrier and unlocked recognition for our volunteer community.
So how do we move digital badges out of locked-down platforms and into the federated social web? In this talk I’ll walk through how BadgeFed, an open-source credentialing system built on the ActivityPub protocol and aligned with the Open Badges spec, powers non-profits to issue, share and verify badges across Fediverse instances.
I will share:
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to deploy a federated badge service, integrate it with their tools, and contribute to a social-web native credentialing future..
Splinter is a tool for Mastodon threads. Splinter turns long articles into Mastodon threads and posts them for you automatically. It started as a project for educational purposes for using Mastodon's API. It ended up being a tool that people actually use!
So let's make threads great again, see what Splinter offers, and which challenges exist when developing for Mastodon.
Bonfire is an open-source, modular platform for creating federated social networks and communities that put users and groups in control. Bonfire’s architecture is designed to be deeply extensible: each instance can enable or disable features, adapt its onboarding, workflows, or governance, and even fork or create extensions or apps for their own needs.
This talk will showcase:
Making federation easy for everyone: See how Bonfire enables developers to connect any new or existing app to the fediverse with much less effort, so these apps can instantly communicate and collaborate with other platforms just by plugging into our standards-based API (ActivityPub C2s).
Live demos in action: We’ll demonstrate this approach with real examples, like creating and sharing events that connect seamlessly between the Lauti events app, Bonfire, and Newsmast's mobile apps. Resulting in a seamlessly integrated networked ecosystem. We’ll also present our work on secure, interoperable, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging.
Bonfire's modular approach with extensions and "flavours" (collections of extensions and default settings) that adapt to diverse use cases, from research to activism to local news.
Lessons learned from co-designing features with scientists, activists, and other diverse communities.
Whether you’re curious about building your own platform, adding ActivityPub to a new tool, or shaping the “next layer” of federated protocols (groups, moderation, decisionmaking, trust), Bonfire’s approach, code, and community offer a living experiment in interoperability and mutual care.
Links:
- Project
- Docs
- Code
- Interop & FEP/Protocol extensions
Implementing ActivityPub looks simple at first—it's just JSON over HTTP, right? Then you hit JSON-LD context resolution. Then HTTP Signature verification fails on Mastodon but works on Misskey. Then you realize the spec spans hundreds of pages across W3C documents and FEPs (Fediverse Enhancement Proposals), and every implementation interprets them differently.
I went through this pain building Hollo, a single-user microblogging server. Halfway through, I realized I was building a framework instead of an app. So I extracted that framework and called it Fedify.
Fedify is an opinionated ActivityPub framework for TypeScript. It handles the protocol plumbing so you can focus on your application logic.
In this talk, I'll cover:
Type-safe vocabulary: The Activity Vocabulary spec is loosely defined, but Fedify maps it to strict TypeScript types. Your IDE knows that Note.content is a LanguageString, and calling await create.getActor() returns an Actor object. No more guessing at property shapes.
Comprehensive signature support: Fedify implements four authentication mechanisms—HTTP Signatures (draft-cavage), HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421), Linked Data Signatures, and Object Integrity Proofs (FEP-8b32). For HTTP Signatures, it uses double-knocking: trying RFC 9421 first, falling back to draft-cavage if rejected, and remembering the preference. This kind of interoperability work is exactly what you shouldn't have to do yourself.
Framework-agnostic design: Fedify works as middleware for Hono, Express, Fastify, Next.js, or any framework that speaks Request/Response. Bring your own database, ORM, and auth—Fedify only needs a key–value store for caching.
CLI toolchain: The fedify inbox command spins up an ephemeral server to receive and inspect activities. fedify lookup fetches any ActivityPub object by URL or fediverse handle—including from servers that require authorized fetch. No need to create throwaway accounts on production instances.
I'll also share production stories: Ghost chose Fedify for federating their publishing platform rather than implementing the protocol themselves. Hollo demonstrates single-user microblogging with full Mastodon API compatibility. Hackers' Pub shows how a developer community can integrate with the fediverse.
Whether you're building a new federated service or adding ActivityPub to an existing app, this talk will show you how Fedify turns months of protocol wrangling into days of actual development.
Friendica has been part of the Fediverse since 2010, building bridges between Laconica and Diaspora*, making it one of the oldest active projects of the Fediverse - yet Friendica has flown under the radar most of the time. After the great success of part I of the saga, Michael and Tobias want to present you part II.
In this talk, we will expand on our brief introduction from last year, showcasing additional features and the latest developments in the 2025 release of Friendica.
You can find the Friendica project homepage at friendi.ca; the source code for the core is maintained on GitHub, and the add-ons are maintained on git.friendi.ca.
Death is inevitable, yet most of us are woefully unprepared. Fear and lack of time often prevent us from putting our affairs in any order, leaving our loved ones to pick up the pieces of a difficult period compounded by uncertainty. While a legal will can address the distribution of assets, it often falls short in capturing the nuanced personal wishes that truly matter.
In this talk we will propose how machine readable wishes could be used to provide to connect to the fediverse and provide digital legacy to friends and followers. In line with the wishes of the dead.
This is a 10min talk
Introduction
For those who are not completely familiar with Mobilizon, a presentation of Mobilizon collaborative platforms and their main functionalities (create groups, publish events...) https://mobilizon.org/
1/ New features
An introduction to the new features developed in 2025, thanks to an NLNet grant (https://nlnet.nl/project/Empowering-Mobilizon/).
2/ Mobilizon and the fediverse
Some feedbacks after implementing Fediverse Enhancement Proposoal regarding events: "FEP-8a8e" (https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/430
Conclusion
Road map and vision for 2026
The "social web" is at a crossroads. To have a meaningful impact on society means growing beyond our roots among tech enthusiasts and social misfits. But growth and change cannot sacrifice the core values that differentiate the social web from closed media systems.
This talk will be one part a manifesto for the social web, and one part technology demonstration showcasing Emissary -- my proposed solutions for the challenges ahead.
https://emmissary.dev https://bandwagon.fm https://atlasmaps.org https://qwertylicious.dev