Werd I/O

[Free Our Feeds]

The non-profit social media foundation space is really heating up. Which is not a bad thing!

Enter Free our Feeds:

"It will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen."

The names involved in this particular venture are really fascinating. Nabiha Syed is the ED of the Mozilla Foundation and is joined by Mark Surman, its President; Robin Berjon has done some of the most important writing and thinking in this space, particularly with respect to governance; Eli Pariser is an experienced activist who co-founded Avaaz and used to run MoveOn; Mallory Knodel is the ED of the ActivityPub-centric Social Web Foundation.

And then the signatories to the letter are people like Jimmy Wales, Mark Ruffalo, Cory Doctorow, Roger McNamee, Shoshana Zuboff and Audrey Tang.

So the Social Web Foundation is ActivityPub-centric and Free Our Feeds is AT Protocol-centric. My (figurative) money is increasingly on A New Social, which posits that all these individual protocols and sub-networks will ultimately be universally addressable as one social internet, and is backing tools to help make that happen.

It's all wonderful. It's all such a great change from the old model - and in a week where Zuckerberg went "full Musk", the timing couldn't be better.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Mastodon]

Mastodon is growing up:

"Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

[...] We are in the process of a phased transition. First we are establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship. We are taking the time to select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe. Then we will determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability."

Eugen, Mastodon's CEO, will not be the leader of this new entity, although it's not yet clear who will be. He's going to focus on product instead.

Another note, right at the end of this announcement: the non-profit seeks to grow its annual budget to €5 million. That's a big increase from current levels, but is absolutely needed. It sounds like plans are in place to make that happen.

I'm excited for everyone involved; everyone who uses Mastodon; everyone on the web. Greater competition through a truly federated solution with decentralized ownership is good for everyone. I can't wait to see what happens next.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Social Web Foundation]

The Social Web Foundation's statement about Meta's moderation changes is important:

"Ideas matter, and history shows that online misinformation and harassment can lead to violence in the real world.

[...] Meta is one of many ActivityPub implementers and a supporter of the Social Web Foundation. We strongly encourage Meta’s executive and content teams to come back in line with best practices of a zero harm social media ecosystem. Reconsidering this policy change would preserve the crucial distinction between political differences of opinion and dehumanizing harassment. The SWF is available to discuss Meta’s content moderation policies and processes to make them more humane and responsible."

This feels right to me. By implication: the current policies are inhumane and irresponsible. And as such, worth calling out.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[A New Social]

I'm psyched about this announcement:

"We're A New Social, a new non-profit organization focused on building cross-protocol tools and services for the open social web.

[...] The first project we'll take on to accomplish this mission is Bridgy Fed, a service that enables users of ActivityPub-based platforms like Mastodon, ATProto-based platforms like Bluesky, and websites to interact and engage across ecosystems."

In other words, A New Social is a non-profit that is kicking off with supporting the long-standing Bridgy project but isn't stopping there. The idea is that we'll all be sharing and communicating on one social web, even if there are a variety of underlying protocols powering it all. Bridgy, of course, helps bridge between social networks. But there's a lot more to do, which is why the non-profit is talking about collaborating with orgs like The Social Web Foundation and IFTAS.

The CEO is Anuj Ahooja, who has been doing wonderful work across decentralized social; he joins Ryan Barrett, who has been developing Bridgy for years and years. I can't wait to see what they do together.

Like I said, I'm psyched.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Ghost]

Another great update from the Ghost team, this time with some lovely animation to illustrate the fediverse reading experience.

The second topic of the post gave me a little bit of pause, because, whoa Nelly, I've been there:

"In light of that, we opted to go for (essentially) no database design at all. Right now, Ghost's ActivityPub service uses MySQL mostly as a key/value store, with no formalized structure of any kind. If that made no sense to you: We're essentially blindly copy-and-pasting blog posts into Excel spreadsheets."

This is how I essentially structured the Known back-end database, using a structure that had originally been pioneered at (genuinely) FriendFeed back in the day. It's sort of a fun way to mimic a NoSQL database inside of MySQL when you don't know what the ultimate structure of the data is going to be and you don't want to create database tables on the fly. But does it scale? I mean, no, not really.

So it's good to hear that the team was just using the NoSQL fakery for a test, and is now using the data they gathered to build something more structured and efficient. It sounds like the experience is optimized for Ghost Pro, which makes sense; I wonder if non-Ghost-publishers will be able to use it in some way.

As always, the full update is worth checking out - both for the content itself, and for the example of how to develop in public in an engaging way. It's great work.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Erin Kissane]

Erin Kissane breaks down some interesting research about alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World:

"The Engine Room team found that their informants with deep experience in Majority World civil society and social justice work understand exactly what’s wrong with and dangerous about corporate mega-platforms. They also use them anyway, because as flawed as they are, they’re still the best way to reach people both inside and outside of their communities."

In other words, when the world around you is coming down, you don't have the energy to rally people to join another social network. You just need to concentrate on meeting people where they already are and helping them effectively. The same goes for privacy concerns and other ethical tech considerations; they simply don't have the luxury of considering them.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be building alternative social networks or creating more private tools; if the place where people are already sharing is safer and more private, these communities will see the benefit. They will gain from a holistic, long-term move, but don't have the time or energy to concentrate on it themselves. Which is quite understandable!

A relative lack of trust and safety support is also a problem - although this is improving in leaps and bounds, there's an obvious gap today. Co-developing new platforms will help:

"The factors/characteristics include a call for alternative platforms to be both designed "from the margins" to ensure a sturdy understanding of the needs of their most vulnerable users and designed "around the needs and capabilities of non-technical communities" to make a transition to alternative networks possible."

Both of these things are vitally important - but have the potential to be real advantages of alternative social networks. There's no chance that X or Facebook would be co-designed in this way. On the fediverse, say, there's an opening for platforms to be built more inclusively, and for there to be a plurality of them so platform builders aren't stuck trying to make something be everything for everybody.

There's a lot here; Erin's summary is characteristically great, and I'm looking forward to diving into the research.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Skyseed]

Really fascinating play:

"Open Source veteran entrepreneur Peter Wang today launches Skyseed Fund, the world's first venture fund and incubator focused exclusively on Bluesky and its open ecosystem."

Peter has been involved in decentralized social networking for a long time. There's $1M in committed capital here, which is small, but at the same time, not nothing! I'd really love to see the deck (mostly to understand how they see the upside playing out) and understand who the LPs are.

This isn't just for VC moonshots, either:

"Skyseed offers traditional venture-style pre-seed terms but will also fund projects that can graduate into more sustainable for-profit or cooperative business models. Additionally, Skyseed has reserved a portion of capital for pure development grants. This is the first tranche of funding, and the goal is growth."

Do I wish there was something like this for ActivityPub? Absolutely. But any kind of investment in decentralized social networking is great to see, in my opinion. I'm really curious (and quite encouraged) to see where this goes.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Wes Davis at The Verge]

Threads added a little more fediverse support:

"While fediverse posts won’t show in feeds, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says their profile and posts do appear on Threads, and you have the option to get notifications when they publish. That’s something, at least."

This is pretty cool, but there's still a long way to go before Threads has full fediverse integration. When I tested it, I could mention my Mastodon profile in a post (when I published it using the web interface), and then subsequently could follow the generated link in the post to follow my Mastodon account in Threads.

What it won't do is show you fediverse content in the main feed. Apparently it will notify you when the fediverse profiles you subscribe to post new content, which I haven't had an opportunity to test yet; I can imagine that getting annoying if someone I subscribe to posts frequently.

A test post from my Mastodon account that referenced my Threads account, but wasn't in response to a Threads post, didn't generate a notification on Threads. I imagine there's a lot to think through with these kinds of interactions.

Clearly it's very early days - as you can see in the linked post, embedded Threads posts don't render fediverse handles properly, for example - but it's still exciting to see this kind of progress on genuine interoperability. It's the kind of thing internet services should have been doing at scale decades ago - but the second best time is now.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Christine Lemmer-Webber has written a superb post that sets out to ask how decentralized Bluesky is but goes far deeper into the different models at play in decentralized social networking. It's required reading for anyone who cares about the space.

"What many users fleeing X-Twitter right now care about is a replacement for Twitter. For that matter, if you're coming from Twitter, whether or not Bluesky is truly decentralized, it certainly seems more decentralized than Twitter, the same way that Twitter may seem more decentralized than cable news. Things are sometimes more decentralized in degrees, and I certainly think the fediverse could be more decentralized than it is. (More, again, on this later.) But in all ways related to the distribution of power, Bluesky's technology is notably much less distributed than existing and prominent decentralized technology in deployment today."

There are few people more qualified to go into the nuts and bolts than Christine, and I really appreciate this perspective. The incremental nature of the improvements here doesn't mean that they're bad - and, indeed, Bluesky has done so well at curating a thriving community that the relative lack of decentralization compared to Mastodon doesn't matter to most users. Social networking is not about the technology; it's about the people. If it wasn't, we'd call the space subscription protocols or some other term that prioritizes the technology interactions. (And what a boring space that would be.)

Additionally: "the organization is a future adversary" is a wonderful rallying cry for anyone trying to build a platform that is free from lock-in and seeks to be a net positive for society. If you assume that some future state version of you or your organization will go bad, you're far more likely to put measures into place that help the work you're doing exist without you. I think that's both noble and wise.

As is, for the record, Bluesky's attempts to give itself enough runway to operate with. I fear that we may see challenges with Mastodon over the next year that relate to its low budget - unless it can pull something together to put it on more stable ground.

Anyway, this piece is fantastic, and I recommend everyone who cares about the state of decentralized social networking read it and its references.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Oxford Martin School]

The Oxford Martin School is a multidisciplinary research institution at the University of Oxford focused on tackling global challenges and shaping a sustainable future through innovation and collaboration. It ran a study on the societal implications of decentralized social media and found that "such platforms offer potential for increased citizen empowerment in this digital domain."

The lead author of the paper, Zhilin Zhang, noted that:

‘Decentralised social media platforms represent a shift towards user autonomy, where individuals can engage in a safer and more inclusive digital space without the constraints and biases imposed by traditional, centralised, algorithm-driven networks.

[...] Decentralised social media is more than just a technical shift; it's a step toward restoring autonomy and trust in our digital lives, empowering individuals and communities to connect without compromising their values or privacy.’

While the paper was undertaken under the auspices of the Martin School, its authors are affiliated with Oxford, University College London, and Stanford University: a true collaboration between centers of excellence with respect to the intersection of computing and society.

There's (I think) an obvious follow-on, which is that public interest funders should consider how they might support non-profit decentralized social media efforts, and continue to investigate their societal impacts. Which fund or foundation will step up first?

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Julia Angwin at The New York Times]

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Julia Angwin makes a strong argument for the open social web:

"If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.

We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (a.k.a. journalists) and by finding new ways to reach audiences beyond the grip of social media algorithms that are designed to promote outrageous content rather than sober facts. There is also a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms."

Julia goes on to describe the fediverse and how it's a key part of the solution. I particular, it's a way for all of us to seize control of our social media environment from platforms that are not acting in any of our interests.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Mathew Ingram at The Torment Nexus]

Mathew wrestles with where Bluesky sits in the future of social media given its connections to venture capital and blockchain supporters:

"I have no doubt that, as Cory says, Graber and the other founders of Bluesky are sincere in their desire to build an open service with a federated protocol, etc. But history has shown time and again that economic interests often interfere with the best efforts of founders."

Here's my slightly controversial take: I think there's something to learn from blockchain and how it developed. We already see that represented in the data structures Bluesky uses behind the scenes, and beyond that, an optimistic cultural take on decentralization. That doesn't mean crypto markets aren't full of scammers - there's certainly more to avoid than to learn from - but blockchain is not an irrelevant pursuit, even if blockchains themselves are not the best route forwards.

This feels right to me:

"In the short term at least, it seems as though we could have three or four competing social networks: one, Twitter/X, is the place for right-wing Musk fans and tech bros and Trump supporters (and journalists and others who need to be there for work); Bluesky is the place for that early Twitter anything-goes vibe plus journalists and real-time news; Mastodon is the place for nerds and geeks and others who like the nuts-and-bolts of social tech; and Threads is... well, Threads is whatever is left over after all of those other things are removed :-)"

Let's see what happens.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Ghost]

"Last week we officially started the ActivityPub private beta and sent invitations to our first 3 publishers to start testing things out. This was the first big milestone we've been working toward for months, and it felt great to get there! 🚀"

The Ghost team continues to build their ActivityPub integration in the open. It's really fun to see.

This update goes into the kinds of bugs you discover when you start showing your work to early adopters, and I love the joyul attitude here. I also particularly love the animated preview of the ActivityPub-aware profile viewer.

It's all coming together nicely - and it looks like it'll be one of the slickest Fediverse apps out there. I can't wait.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth at Tech Policy Press]

"Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web."

Most major decentralized and federated platforms don't have the necessary tooling "for scalable management of harmful content and conduct — or even the enforcement of their own rules."

For some, of course, this is by design: the same version of "free speech" which animates Elon Musk and in effect prevents speech from anyone except for in-groups and the loud and powerful. To have truly free speech - where people from vulnerable communities can have a voice and real debate can be held without threat of violence - there must be trust and safety and moderation.

The piece rightly calls out IFTAS for the great work it's doing in this area. More must be done - which in part means convincing federated communities that these ideas are important.

Unfortunately a common attitude is that "we don't have these problems" - a common refrain when your bias makes you blind to your lack of inclusion. As many Black users found when they joined Mastodon and were asked to hide the details of their lived experiences under content warnings, or when people told them that these were American-only experiences (which, of course, they aren't), a predominantly white and male Fediverse that seeks to maintain the status quo rather than learning and growing can be quite a conservative place.

This is an important piece, and an important finding, which everyone working on decentralized tech should pay attention to.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesday announced it would be ending its experiment in running a server on the fediverse. The server, Mozilla.social, today connects users with the Mastodon social network, an open source rival to Twitter/X. It will be shut down on December 17."

I wish Mozilla had taken a more ambitious approach to the fediverse, rather than running a Mastodon instance for a handful of people. An organization of its size could have prototyped different kinds of social media on the fediverse, or incubated disparate projects running on the protocol. It could even have experimented with adding social functionality directly to Firefox. Instead, precisely none of that happened, and its instance was apparently used by 270 people or so.

Sarah Perez points out that this isn't the only initiative that's been shuttered recently:

"Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down."

Mozilla itself has a lot of potential but never seems to quite realize it: it doesn't seem to be very good at building a joined-up product strategy, which has led its existence to become increasingly at risk. The vast majority of its funding (nearly 90%) has come from Google's payments to the organization in exchange for being the default search engine pick - and now that's under threat.

There's a need for a mission-driven organization with Mozilla's values that executes more fearlessly, where product voices hold more weight vs open source engineering discussions. But, right now, I don't think it exists.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Media Economies Design Lab at University of Colorado Boulder]

"The Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is launching a 5-month process of mentorship and peer-to-peer learning, empowering veteran community builders to adopt emerging open social networks."

This seems like a wonderful initiative for the right people, as well as for new social networks. The incubator covers a broad set of networks that include the fediverse, Matrix, Bluesky, and Nostr.

From the site:

"Participants will meet as a full group monthly and receive ongoing, 1:1 project-specific technical support as they seed and grow new communities using open social media tools of their choosing. Participation is fully remote and all sessions will be conducted in English. All participants should commit to making strides toward community-building in open social media by the end of the program. Completion of the full program, from November 2024 to April 2025, will be compensated with a stipend of $3,500 USD."

No prior experience is needed.

I love that the Media Economies Design Lab is doing this. I'm very curious to see the cohort as it emerges!

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Ghost]

"It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond."

This is a big step: a Ghost publication puts something out on the web, and then anyone on any ActivityPub-compatible network (Flipboard, Mastodon, micro.blog, soon Threads) can respond and the publisher can see it straight from their dashboard.

This is not just limited to Ghost: any platform can implement this using ActivityPub without asking anyone for permission. And they will. Expect to see this functionality across both publishing and social networks within the next few years. Anyone who doesn't have this functionality will be left out - it'll more be about the level of sophistication with which they implement it, and the nuances of how they make it right for their respective userbases.

The web, finally, is becoming social. Let's go.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Martin SFP Bryant at The New Stack]

"How do you get started if you want to integrate your own software with ActivityPub? [Evan] Prodromou has written a new book on this very topic, and we caught up with him to explore the practicalities of linking up with the fediverse."

I'm convinced that ActivityPub is the underlying standard that all future social software will be built on. Evan is one of the founding parents of the fediverse, and this article is a great overview. His new book will be an invaluable resource for everyone who wants to embark upon this journey.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Erin Kissane]

"Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re releasing our findings. We found so much."

This is an impressively in-depth report by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi, which has some important conclusions about how moderation can work in a federated system (including the not-insignificant conclusion that it can work). There's room for more tooling, and better communication between instances - but this is all doable stuff.

The shorter satellite documents - opportunities for funders and developers who want to serve this ecosystem and a quick-start guide to fediverse governance - are super helpful, too.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Anuj Ahooja and Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Starting today, Flipboard will let users search for and follow accounts from across the Fediverse from the comfort of their own dashboards. [...] This new feature isn’t just limited to Mastodon or PixelFed, but includes Threads profiles that opted in to Fediverse Sharing, such as MKBHD, Molly Jong-Fast, and Nilay Patel. You won’t need to have a Threads account to cross this boundary, but will still be able to see what your favorite creators are up to. This is a neat way of letting people dip their toes into the wider network, without needing to fully commit to it on day one."

This is the power of the open social web: you can follow someone who's publishing on social network A from social network B, and interact with them as if they were on the same network. Everyone can choose which social platforms that fit them best without having to sacrifice reach or the ability to follow people they care about.

Flipboard has been a leader in this space, and this is a major step forward. It, Threads, Mastodon, Ghost, Micro.blog and others are pushing the social web forward by embracing these standards - and there's a lot more to come. No company and no developer needs to ask anyone permission to join the network; they can opt to support the protocols and - boom! - they're in.

Every media company and every individual publisher should be jumping on this. I could not be more excited about the possibilities.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election, Democratic supporters have gained a massive influx of energy and support all over the Web. Hours after the president made his announcement, Heidi Li Feldman, a law professor emeritus at Georgetown University, launched an ActBlue fundraiser comprising of Mastodon users."

It's been pretty successful: almost half a million dollars at the time this article was written. It's another example of how Mastodon users are politically engaged, more active per capita than any other social network, and ready to contribute.

It's also a facet of Mastodon's wider userbase that there were some criticisms this money was being raised for the Presidential election than, say, local mutual aid. From my perspective, both are important: perhaps there's a way to learn from this in order to fund a wider mutual aid campaign, but contributing to an election campaign to stop an authoritarian, nationalistic second Trump administration feels incredibly important.

Political purity tests and fractions unfortunately are a feature of Mastodon's communities, and will likely continue to be - but one positive way of looking at it is that it means they care, a lot, and are interested in ways to improve the lives of vulnerable people. That's an incredibly good thing that should give us all hope for the future.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Joel Gascoigne]

"The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term."

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne talks about how the rise of the new, decentralized / federated social networks allow publishers to retain control.

"They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to."

I'm a Buffer customer. I love that it works with both Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as every other major social network. More than that, I've long admired Joel's approach while running Buffer: it's a transparent company that works in the open and genuinely values independence. Alongside excellent ventures like micro.blog, I wish there were more like it.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Carl Sullivan at Flipboard]

"Flipboard has worked with local papers and websites since its inception. Now, as part of the gradual federation of our platform, we’re bringing some of those publications to the fediverse."

Flipboard turns the fediverse on for a whopping 64 US-based local and regional publications. This is big news - if you'll pardon the pun - and an enormous step forward for bringing journalism onto the fediverse. I love how easy Flipboard has made it.

I also really like this approach:

"To learn more about what fedi folks actually want when it comes to local outlets, we simply asked them. They told us the specific publications they’d like to see, and voted in a poll on the region they were most interested in. (The Midwest, it turns out!)"

Asking people is always the best approach. And as I've learned, the fediverse is full of highly-engaged, well-informed people who are hungry for great journalism.

#Fediverse

[Link]

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start."

I'm certain that this is a large part of the future of how information will be disseminated on the internet - and how publishers will run subscription programs. Subscribers who use the fediverse see the benefit of rich content that they can reshare and comment on; publishers get to understand a lot more about their subscribers than they would from the web or email newsletters.

Ghost's reader will certainly be augmented by other, standalone readers that work a bit like Apple News. Its fediverse publishing capabilities will be followed by other content management systems. Notably, Automattic has been working on fediverse integration, for example, and Flipboard has been doing amazing work in this area.

I'm also convinced there's room for another fediverse-compatible social network that handles both long and short-form content in a similar way to Substack's articles and Notes. If someone else doesn't build that, I will.

#Fediverse

[Link]

"Remember! If you only signed up to hear when this feature is available, or you're wondering what ActivityPub even is: This probably is not the newsletter for you. This is a behind-the-scenes, engineering-heavy, somewhat-deranged build log by the team who are working on it."

And I love it.

Ghost's newsletter / blog about building ActivityPub support into its platform is completely lovely, and the kind of transparent development I've always been into. Here it's done with great humor. Also, they really seem to be into pugs, and that's cool, too.

In this week's entry the team is investigating using existing ActivityPub libraries and frameworks rather than building the whole thing from scratch themselves - and doing it with not a small amount of humility.

And they're building a front-end to allow bloggers to consume content from other people who publish long-form content onto the web using ActivityPub. I'm excited to see it take shape.

#Fediverse

[Link]