I’m extraordinarily excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation, which has been created to promote and support the growth of the Fediverse: the interoperable social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol.

Users of services on the Fediverse can follow, share, and interact with each other, regardless of which service each one is using. The most famous Fediverse platform is Mastodon, but there are many more participants, including Threads, Flipboard, and Ghost.

From the announcement:

[…] Advocates of this increased platform choice say it will bring more individual control, more innovation, and a healthier social media experience. But there is work to do: journalism, activism, and the public square remain in a state of uncertain dissonance and privacy, safety and agency remain important concerns for anyone participating in a social network.

The Foundation’s founding members are Mallory Knodel, the former CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology; Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of ActivityPub and its current editor (who just published the canonical book on the topic); and Tom Coates, a product designer and founder who was one of the earliest bloggers and has been involved in many things that have been good on the web. They become the Executive Director, Research Director, and Product Director respectively.

Excitingly, the Foundation’s partners are a who’s who of companies doing great work on the web today. Those include Automattic, Ghost, Flipboard, Fastly, Medium, and Mastodon itself. Meta is also a backer, in an indication of its continued investment in the Fediverse, moving away from the walled garden strategy that it used with Facebook and Instagram for decades.

In a conversation with Richard MacManus over on The New Stack, Evan explained the Foundation’s relationship with existing standards organizations like the W3C:

“W3C as a standards organization mostly does coordinating the work of a number of different groups to make protocols […] So we’ll still be participating in the W3C — we’re going to become a member organization of the W3C.”

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.

My opinion: this is the future of the social web. Every new service and platform that contains social features — which is most of them — will support the ActivityPub protocol within the next few years. Service owners can use it to easily avoid the “cold start” problem when creating new networks, and to plug their existing platforms into a ready-made network of hundreds of millions of people. Publishers will use it to reach their audiences more easily. And it’s where the global conversation will be held.

When I was building social platforms in the 2000s, this is what we dreamed of. Elgg, the open source social networking platform which launched my career, was intended to be the center of a federated social web. Although we made some crucial steps towards open data protocols and embracing open standards, we didn’t get there. I’m beyond thrilled that the Fediverse and ActivityPub exist, and that there are so many robust platforms that support it. The Social Web Foundation is another great step towards building the social web that we all deserve.

As Casey Newton published just yesterday about the future of his publication, Platformer:

One way I hope it will evolve is to become part of the fediverse: the network of federated sites and apps that are built with interoperability in mind. The fediverse is built on top of protocols, not platforms, which offers us a chance to decentralize power on the internet and built a more stable foundation for media and social apps.

The Social Web Foundation’s existence as an advocacy, research, and development organization is another key step towards making that happen. But to be clear, its role is in support: each one of its partner organizations has already taken concrete steps towards supporting ActivityPub, and the movement is well underway.

Check out the Social Web Foundation and its projects at its website.

Updated: Read more coverage of the launch.