Growing the Open Social Web un-workshop, 2026/03/02

Submissions

/2026-03-growing-open-social-web/submissions/

Jaz-Michael King:

There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.

Full blog post: https://jaz.co.uk/2025/08/14/there-is-one-fediverse-there-are-a-million-fediverses/

Robert Amlung & Marius Scheffel:

Public Broadcasters Are Going Federated — and We’re Betting on Both Protocols

Seven public broadcasters — from Germany, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and Australia — are building a shared platform for constructive public dialogue called the Public Spaces Incubator….

Full paper: https://fediforum.org/2026-03-growing-open-social-web/Amlung-Scheffel.pdf

Evan Prodromou:

SWF has a number of hypotheses about growth of the social web:

Growth can’t come at the expense of privacy. People currently on the Fediverse must have the tools they need to preserve their privacy as the network grows. This means privacy from other users, as well as privacy from new platform operators. Expanding the options for private interactions on the Fediverse, like end-to-end encrypted messages and private groups, is necessary for preserving privacy as the user base and platform list expands.
Connecting platforms to the Fediverse is our most efficient way to grow. There are already billions of people on social platforms across the Internet. Getting these platforms to let users publish to the Fediverse, as well as having two-way interactions with remote users, lets people share in the benefits of the Fediverse with a platform and interface that they’re already used to. Even when brand new social platforms adopt ActivityPub, they bring their new features and users.
Connecting communities helps us grow fast and stay cohesive. Bringing formal and informal communities onto the Fediverse is a great way to enable a lot of new users quickly. By formal communities, we mean organized groups like clubs, universities and schools, professional societies, enterprises, or local and regional governments. These groups can set up their own places on the Fediverse, like Mastodon servers, and provide user accounts for all their members. (One great way to connect formal communities is to Fediverse-enable the community platforms they already use.) These new Fediverse users have the kind of connections in place that retain active users, as well as the support they need to use the Fediverse. More informal communities, like people sharing the same profession, fans of a particular hobby, or users of a language or technology, can be great additions to the Fediverse, but these groups are less cohesive and less likely to bring their own infrastructure.
People come to social networks for existing social ties. Bringing on new users one-by-one is the most difficult way to grow this network. The best way to engage new users on the network, and to keep them active and interested, is to make sure they can connect to people they already know and care about. That may be friends, family, colleagues and neighbours, or brands, creators, and publications they recognise. Our onboarding processes for Fediverse users need to encourage the social contacts so that people feel a reason to stick around for day 2, 7, and 30.

Original post: https://socialwebfoundation.org/2026/02/18/growing-the-social-web/

Gilles Dutilh (@depemig@social.coop):

How do you like your Fediverse?

Many reasons have been proposed to explain why only a fraction of the online world population has left the fenced gardens of Big Tech to become free citizens of the open social web. Do people find the concepts of federation difficult to grasp? Are platforms' UIs not shiny enough? Or are there just too few friends, too little content, around?

I propose a research project to explore what actually makes people like or dislike the Fediverse. Why do some people join and stay, while others leave or never join? In particular, I aim to study the appreciation for and dislike of features that are unique to the Fediverse (e.g., those related to decentrality and ownership).

I will survey different groups: First, active citizens of the Fediverse. What do they like? Second, people who joined the Fediverse, but who became inactive after joining. What did they not like? Third, people who are not familiar with the Fediverse, but who are a target population for specific softwares. Which features would it take for these people to take the leap? A special fourth group is the community of my own little local instance. I aim to repeatedly survey and involve them as pioneers in the development of this instance.

Through these surveys I aim to create an open knowledge base of which features in the Fediverse people like, what they miss or misunderstand, and how federated platforms may best communicate to potential new users.

This project is envisioned a collaborative effort, so your input is very welcome.

Marci McCue (@marci@flipboard.social):

Let’s discuss ways to decentralize growth. It will require growing in several ways:

adoption of services,
increasing cultural influence, and
incoming capital.

I’d love to hear how others see these themes and discuss ways to tackle and measure growth in each area.

Manton Reece (@manton.org):

I have a very specific proposal: we should move away from email-like user handles on the fediverse. This style of user identity has three problems:

They are confusing to new users. They look like email addresses but aren’t.
They work against portable identity. When you migrate to another server, your identity changes. This also adds friction during registration as new users are again confused about the implication of picking a server.
They conflict with the identity used everywhere else on the web.

Simple domain names and subdomains have been used on blogs for decades (and now for Bluesky usernames too). ActivityPub already supports domain names. The next step would be to formalize how servers can gracefully handle both domain names and email-like user handles. Then we can talk about how onboarding and migration could be improved by embracing this.

Last year I also wrote an email and blog post about this: https://www.manton.org/2025/09/25/email-to-swicg-about-handles.html

Anonymous by request:

I conducted a (very small) survey of people who do and do not use decentralized social networks regularly to find out what would lead them to use these networks more often.

More: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LUwZIceMd7iZNhdD7glGY4LVhEg8oXgXa01e3xHbMmU/edit?usp=sharing

Laurens Hof (@laurenshof.online, @laurenshof@indieweb.social):

For the full argument, see: https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr153-what-does-a-discord-replacement-look-like/

My position on growing the open social web is that it needs to be understood via three axes simultaneously:

There is the decentralisation in the way it is usually understood by communities on ActivityPub and Matrix: from a single centralised server to many decentralised servers run by independent groups. This gives communities autonomy over their own spaces, but each server still replicates the same software and feature set.
There is the decentralisation in the way it is done on atproto: from a single software stack to separating identity, data storage and apps. This means your identity and data aren’t locked to any one application, and different apps can offer different experiences on top of the same underlying infrastructure.
And there is a third axis that is now starting to become visible: the decentralisation of features. Rather than a single app that bundles everything together, like Discord, multiple different apps each specialise in a few things and are interoperable with each other. This is the axis that the developments this week are starting to illustrate, and it may be the one that ultimately matters most for resilience against the kind of platform-wide policy changes that sparked this conversation in the first place.

I think we are now slowly getting to the third axis: how can various products/platforms/softwares integrate with each other to offer a full user experience, while each software can specialise in what it does best?

Bjorn W (@BjornW@mastodon.social):

I’d like to share my experiences in giving workshops and presentations at civil/civic organizations, such as libraries, museums, ngo’s and public broadcasters, on moving away from bigtech. Including moving away from bigtech social media platforms towards the Fediverse. I’d like to discuss strategies such as ‘1+’, ‘POSSE’ and hear about strategies from others based on their experiences.

My experiences are derived from my work as a freelancer with https://PublicSpaces.net - a small Dutch foundation in The Netherlands and a network of public organizations fighting for an internet based on public values. As well as having worked on these topics for many years as an unpaid activist. I’m currently working on a ‘Digital Independence Day’ in The Netherlands inspired by the German https://di.day initiative: showing the many alternatives for bigtech and inspire people to start switching to these alternatives instead of bigtech.

Evan Henshaw-Plath (@rabble@nos.social, @rabble@mastodon.social, @rabble.nz):

Divine is a 6-second looping video app — basically a Vine reboot built on Nostr. Vine created this incredible creative culture and then collapsed because Twitter neglected it, there was no way for creators to get paid, and the whole thing depended on one company’s priorities. That’s the exact problem open protocols should solve.

With Divine, creators own their identity through keypairs, their content lives on an open protocol, and no single company can just decide to shut it down one day. We built on Nostr because it’s simple and it gets out of the way. No server picking for new users, no admin burden, just keys and relays. And we’re already seeing the composability that open protocols promise actually happen — somebody independently got the original Vine app talking to Divine’s servers. No partnership, no API key, no permission. They just did it because the protocol is open. That’s the kind of mashup ecosystem we used to have with RSS and early blogs, and we’ve mostly lost it.

The growth challenges are the same ones everybody here is dealing with. Nobody’s going to show up because they care about protocols. They’re going to show up because there’s something worth watching and making. So the real questions are: how do we coordinate across protocol communities on shared infrastructure problems like media hosting and discovery? And is the open social web ready to build things that prioritize getting real people in the door over protocol correctness?

Howard Stearns:

Is federation enough? Is it really distinguishably better than what is available, so as to build critical mass? What are the infrastructure requirements of an ideal open social system?

We propose:

Accessible: Mobile PWA web pages.
Available: Cannot depend on appstore distribution, nor on people running servers.
Shareable: Each post is externally shareable as an externally scrapable page, and the data is easily portable to whatever comes next while retaining the properties listed here.
Authentic: Support, but do not require, client-verified authenticity-proofs of content, creators, and endorsements. Identities and endorsements are usable across apps.
Safe: Groups/channels directly control their own membership and whether content is cryptographically visible outside the group. Keys are backed up through the cloud and portable across apps.
Rewardable: Support, but do not require, flexible payment (donations, subscriptions, micropayments) directly to individuals and groups for creation, curation, and network resources.
Extensible: Open source, open protocol, open data (subject to safety), open feed algorithms. All this is technically possible – my colleagues and I are building it – but is it necessary and sufficient?

Ben Werdmuller (https://werd.io/):

…There are billions of people who are not well served by the existing social web, particularly in global majority countries. Open social web protocols have the potential to allow them to not just build communities that better address their needs, with features and cultural assumptions that veer far from US and European norms, but to own them…

Full position statement at https://werd.io/growing-the-open-social-web-2/

Johannes Ernst (@j12t@j12t.social, @j12t.org, https://j12t.org):

(In my role as attendee rather than organizer)

So far we’ve been building for “us” and people like “us”. But it’s likely we’ve already reached most of the people who are like “us”. If we want to grow beyond this 0.1% share of the overall social media market, and migrate a meaningful fraction of all online interactions online into healthier environments, we need to build for people who are not like us, solve the problems they think they have (which are different from ours), and solve them better than the commercial platforms do (again: solve not better in our view, but better in their view). This is very doable, but our community hasn’t done much of it so far, and we need to truly prioritize it: customer discovery, shadowing people who are not like us, understand how they go about their lives and where the pain points are, rapid prototyping, iterating quickly etc. Making them happy, not just “us”.

Secondly, to grow, the open social web needs money: far more money than it has attracted so far. Using the open social web to solve problems for (mission-aligned) organizations in exchange for development or service revenue appears to be an avenue we have not tapped much so far, although it does not need to come with the perils of other forms of financing. Conversely, it is far too difficult today for an organization interested in the open social web to find reliable project partners, and I expect to have a little thing that goes in this direction to show off at the un-workshop. Stay tuned.

Luis Cabanzo (https://cabanzo.ooo/):

Is nostalgia our only way out?

As our collective online voice gets more and more shaped by the desires of the few powerful people that own the products we use to connect with each other, and as these desires grow every day further away from our collective well-being needs, it may be interesting to think of these products not as platforms anymore (that is, as elevated structures to see and be seen), but as infrastructure, the collective piping that allow each one of us to exist online.

We might find this shift in thinking useful when exploring the reasons why the current proposition of the fediverse as a collection of “alternatives to horrible big tech apps” is not enticing enough for the general public just yet. After all, why would I switch to an alternative and rebuild my entire social graph just to get content “without the evil algorithm” and “in chronological order”? Is nostalgia our only way out? As someone working in tech since “instagram was acquired by meta” times, I find these questions very pressing.

Looking at the fediverse from a critical standpoint may help us go beyond incremental improvements. To see it less as architectural betterment and more as user value possibilities might open doors for us we didn’t know existed.

Ramalingam Saravanan (@sarava.net):

Organic Self-Curation to Improve the Social Media Experience

As a climate scientist, I use social media to engage with both scientists and non-scientists. While these interactions have been valuable, I still find the landscape frustrating. Commercial platforms prioritize revenue-driven algorithms rather than user benefit, and open alternatives like Bluesky or Mastodon often rely on an unfiltered “firehose” feed that doesn’t scale well. Seeing every post from hundreds of accounts quickly becomes overwhelming, and there is rarely a transparent way to curate what you see.

One advantage of open protocols, though, is that you’re not tied to a single app, which makes it possible to experiment with better approaches to feed design.

To that end, I’m developing a Bluesky client called Skylimit that lets users curate their feed organically, focusing on what they find most beneficial while limiting total volume—for example, to 500 posts per day. Skylimit takes inspiration from how editors assemble a newspaper, balancing different kinds of content within fixed space, and aims to recreate that experience digitally with tunable settings for people and topics. Tasks like highlighting important posts, elevating quieter voices, and creating digests can be handled transparently with simple statistics, avoiding opaque methods such as machine learning.

Damny Laya (@Damny@mastodon.nudecri.unicamp.br, https://elo.jornalismo.social.br)

Strategies for growing and attracting new users to the Fediverse from and within public institutions

At the Creativity Development Center (Nudecri) of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp, Brazil), a research center where we produce science journalism and have communication outlets such as podcasts and magazines, in seeking to create experiences of digital sovereignty from the public university, from the academic community as an autonomous and democratic body, we set up instances on Mastodon and Peertube, decentralized social networks, first as a way for us to appropriate the technology from within the university and strengthen our sovereignty and autonomy, and second, as a way to experiment with science communication on these types of networks.

The idea is that the researchers, professors, and journalists, as well as the center’s communication and dissemination outlets (podcasts, magazines, newspapers), have a profile on these instances and use them as an official means of communication, in parallel with or replacing their activity on private networks.

The instances have been in use since September 2025 by some researchers and outlets from the lab, such as O Plano B, a project by ICTS/Unicamp - Study Group on Information, Science, Technology and Society, supported by the Latin American Network for Studies on Surveillance, Technology and Society (Lavits), which maps the literature on surveillance capitalism in the Global South. ComCiência magazine and the Oxigênio podcast, channels for disseminating and communicating both research work and academic training, as well as for science communication, have also created their own accounts.

With this project underway, at Nudecri we are experiencing the responsibility of having users and taking care of our own data without putting it at risk of falling into the hands of companies that seek to profile users to target often unwanted ads and content. But above all, we are experiencing the freedom to build communities organically, rather than guided by an opaque algorithm driven by profit and, moved by anti-democratic and authoritarian values, far from the ethics of communicating science autonomously and hand in hand with a plural and democratic society.

However, it has been a major challenge not only to attract, but also to encourage the use of the instances by the majority of Nudecri workers. Although a significant group is aware of the advantages of using decentralized networks outside the big techs, as well as the ethical and political problems resulting from the use of these corporate social networks, this does not seem sufficient to engage and fully switch to using alternative social networks.

In this sense, questions arise such as:

What is missing to attract and retain new users from public institutions to decentralized networks like Mastodon?
How can we make the use of these social networks more appealing?
What engagement strategies can we build collectively?
Is there anyone with more successful experiences related to the use of decentralized networks in public institutions or public universities?

Theia Henderson (@theias.place, https://theia.graffiti.actor):

To grow, the open social web must offer something that is both (1) tangible to everyday people and (2) not offered by corporate platforms.

Malleability is one such feature that is both highly tangible and a poor fit for corporate business models.

Today, the open social web largely offers less populated and less usable clones of existing centralized services. For most people, ideological arguments about decentralization and privacy are not motivating enough on their own to drive them to switch to these otherwise lower-quality services. To drive adoption, there must be something genuinely new.

Malleable social software is software that can be personalized to the needs and desires of the communities that use it, rather than those communities conforming themselves to one-size-fits-all apps. For example, a malleable messaging app might be changed by an activist group to pop up warnings when a user attempts to forward a message, helping to prevent accidental disclosures. Alternatively, a group of friends could remix a messaging app to turn their in-joke into a custom reaction with a whole-screen animation. Malleable social software can be both highly practical and simply delightful.

The open social web separates apps from their underlying data for the purposes of interoperability, which makes it naturally suited for malleable reinterpretations of that data. On the other hand, malleable software makes it easy to get rid of addictive features, excessive sponsored content, and other dark patterns, making it highly unlikely that corporate platforms would ever offer it.

Social.Wiki is a prototype of this “malleable social web” vision, built on top of the open social protocol, Graffiti. Graffiti is particularly suited to malleability because a wide spectrum of apps can be built upon it without any server code. Social.Wiki sites, from microblogging sites, to messaging apps, to games, can be edited directly in the browser, either by hand or via AI. Changes to Social.Wiki sites are themselves stored on Graffiti and different “lenses” may filter which edits to a page are shown, similar to BlueSky’s composable moderation.

Christian Jacobs (https://aturi.to/christian.bsky.social):

DID/AT is a protocol suite for internet accounts. Could DID/AT someday be included in the TCP/IP Internet protocol suite? If so, Ecosystem Action is necessary to preserve, advance, and promote Decentralized Identity with Authenticated Transfer as public interest technology.

Public announcement on Tuesday, 17 Feb 2026: https://leaflet.pub/7dfdc734-82f0-48a3-9522-ef1d48349015

Johanna Botari:

Digital Third Spaces, and Purpose over Product

Reclaiming our online social networks from the capture and commodification of corporatized “social media” monoliths requires envisioning our technology as true public infrastructure, and realizing the “social” in social networks only exists in the communities of humans who make use of the tools.

The Third Space is both an apt analogy for a Social Web service, but also is an essential element of three dimensional urban infrastructure we should seek to connect to, not just supplant with a poor digital replica. Neither physical nor digital space holds any meaning except as it is formed by humans, who use these technologies to gather in communities which unite around a purpose.

Building and deploying technology needs to be done with a real-space user community and the community’s purpose at the forefront of every effort. The failure of platforms comes about when they are constructed for the builders’ purposes and merely permit communities to exist so long as they serve a commodified purpose. For the Open Social Web to succeed we need to realize the purpose is not our own, and the technology needs to be built in collaboration with, and to serve, those who use it in their communities and their own creations.

Jon Pincus (@jdp22@neuromatch.social, @jdp23.thenexus.today):

The use cases for alternative social networks – not controlled by techbro white supremacist CEO’s working with their cronies in authoritarian governments – practically write themselves in today’s world. Big tech’s centralized social networks remain vital for activism and organizing (meet people where they are, and that’s where they currently are), but alternative social networks also have a major role to play. And since big tech’s centralized social networks are so hostile to activists – and to organizing – the Fediverse and the ATmosphere have great opportunities to appeal to people whose needs aren’t getting met.

But there are also major barriers; in the Fediverse, these include the racism, sexism, misogyny and other bigotries as well as the lack of anything to fill the niche of Facebook groups. None of that’s new; my slides from the October FediForum remain relevant. https://thenexusofprivacy.net/data/fediforum-1008.pdf

What is new, though, is the way we’ve been leveraging Blacksky and pnw.zone and neuromatch.social and other fedi instances as part of real-life legislative activism here in Washington state – and soon (perhaps even by the time the un-workshop happens) on federal legislation like FISA reauthorization, KOSA, and other Bad Internet Bills. We’ve had several valuable successes, and hopefully will be building on those, although there are also some real limitations.

Of course these tactics will need to be adopted for other countries (and quite possibly even for other states) but there really is a lot to build on here. If you’re interested in following along between now and the un-workshop:

the #waleg (Washington legislature) hashtag works in both ecoysystems
in fedi, https://channel.org/@ageverification, https://channel.org/@privacy, and https://channel.org/@vehicleplates
in the ATmosphere, https://blacksky.community/profile/thenexusofprivacy.net/feed/stopKOSA and https://blacksky.community/profile/thenexusofprivacy.net/feed/Flock-and-other

Thiago Skárnio (@skarnio@alquimidia.social.br) and Ayrton Araújo (@ton@ayr-ton.net):

I am part of Alquimídia, the first organization dedicated to fostering the Open Social Web in Brazil. I will be presenting our efforts to expand the Open Social Web, which are centered on technopolitical initiatives.

We launched the FediGov campaign in Brazil, aimed at encouraging Brazilian public institutions to adopt federated networks. We also engage in advocacy for this model, having achieved practical victories such as the successful proposal and defense of the “social.br” domain category, presented to the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (https://CGI.br) in June 2025.

Additionally, we maintain a campaign on proprietary platforms called “Vem Pro Fedverso,” inviting people to discover and join the Fediverse.

In December 2025, we held the 1st WebSocialBr, the first in-person gathering of Fediverse instances, administrators, and researchers in Brazil.

We are also about to launch the Brazilian Fediverse Guide, a website featuring tutorials and a list of Brazilian instances to make it easier for people in Brazil to join the Fediverse.

Tolulope Oshinowo:

Momentos is a decentralized modular start page that gives users full control over the interface they see whenever they open their browser or device. Unlike traditional start pages curated by browsers or centralized platforms, Momentos enables users to compose a personalized dashboard using self-contained modules. At its core is a configurable search bar that can switch seamlessly between multiple engines and social platforms (Google, Bing, Instagram, Mastodon, etc.). Users can also add modules for video streaming, games, news aggregation, weather, stocks, and other utilities, creating a start page tailored to their priorities, interests, and workflow.

The architecture of Momentos allows each module to function as a full application within the start page, while the decentralized system ensures users retain authority over which modules run and how data is handled. The whitepaper details the design, use cases, and near-term future work, including expanding the modular ecosystem, refining module APIs, and exploring AI-assisted workflows inspired by projects like Base44 and Lovable — all while maintaining user control and privacy.

Momentos Whitepaper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e_BBA_QgN1CnEvotq7ZnPRtCVEXgeJddBTvhmCdIfXQ

Julia Kamin (@juliakamin.bsky.social):

The Open Social Web holds tremendous possibility for individuals and communities to thrive in digital spaces – which is not news to anyone here. My interest is in not only seeing the Open Social Web grow but to also support it growing with prosocial principles and research embedded in its design, so its spaces can continue to effectively foster dignity, understanding and healthy interactions.

Babette Knauer (@babetteknauer@mastodon.social):

The path to growing the open social web runs through public institutions, I believe. Universities, libraries, and other public bodies are natural allies, yet adoption remains slow.

I’d like to share insights from adopting the Fediverse for a university library, advocating within the broader university, conversations with communications peers across Dutch academic organizations, and our research into academic Mastodon use. We found that individual users join for values but stay for community. Peer visibility, onboarding, and practical support matter more than technical fixes like Single Sign-On alone. Both active users and non-users are waiting for institutions to participate and provide legitimacy, and for accounts to reach critical mass.

For communications professionals, top-down advocacy rarely works. Ethical motivations for moving to the Fediverse are compelling in theory, but seldom enough to drive adoption in practice. Peer-to-peer exchange and measurable engagement (to kickstart adoption discussions) have proven to be more effective. Institutions need arguments that resonate with decision-makers (e.g., the growing focus on digital autonomy or GDPR compliance in Europe), visible peer networks that demonstrate professional viability, and resources that address organizational needs, not just ethical appeals.

Progress is happening, just at institutional speed, carefully and gradually, but I’m hopeful to say inevitably :).

William Maggos (@wjmaggos@liberal.city, https://democracyofreach.org):

Ultimately, it’s a collective action problem. people won’t move till the people they want to follow are here. so we have to convince the widely followed that moving is essential, educate them re the costs (mostly social) and keep providing more benefits (creator independence), then create an open letter they all sign, help them get comfortable and set an end date for using the closed platforms.

Blaine Cook:

I’ve come to see the Open Social Web not as a destination, but as infrastructure — a reliable data substrate and system of record for online social interaction. Its job is to make identity portable, data durable, and interoperability tractable so builders can create without trapping users. Protocols should be boring in the best way: stable, dependable, and largely invisible. When we ask everyday people to care about federation or decentralization, we’re collapsing layers. The protocol layer exists to enable. The product layer exists to matter.

Real growth will come from a wide spectrum of products built on that shared foundation — applications that are genuinely meaningful, novel, useful, or even fun in specific contexts of life. Not just another global feed replicating the functionality of first-generation social networks, but community-scale networks, domain-specific tools, civic platforms, creative spaces. People don’t migrate because they’ve been convinced by an architectural argument; they move when something works better for their town, their work, their relationships. The Open Social Web succeeds when it is quietly dependable underneath and unmistakably valuable in lived experience on top.

Richard Reisman (@rreisman.bsky.social):

Growing the usage and functionality of the social web to meet the needs of humanity requires a broadened framing of the task and how the elements work together and evolve. Achieving that requires not just technology, but a whole-of-society effort to support “three pillars” that have always been essential to the social process of human discourse – and to extend that to the emerging use of AI agents.

There is need for a “big-tent” alliance to synergize current efforts in social media protocol ecosystems (including ActivityPub, ATproto, DSNP, and others) – and to broaden the scope of those ecosystems to include all three of these pillars – to build on the first, and include the second two (which have been largely neglected)

Fuller position paper here.

James Smith (@floppy@mastodon.me.uk):

Many people make a living online, through sales, subscriptions, and so on across various media, from blogging (e.g. Substack) to music (e.g. Bandcamp) to 3d models (e.g. Cults3D) to video (e.g. OnlyFans). Federated versions of all of these exist, but people need to bring their business models with them. How should the tech underlying the Fediverse support commercial creators? How do we enable people to charge for their work while not turning every server operator into a merchant? How do we ensure that an account from one instance can securely buy something from someone on a different instance? How do we deliver that content securely over the fediverse to only the right people? Platforms like Peertube, Bandwagon, Castopod, Ghost, Manyfold, and many more will face this challenge, and we should start thinking about how we get them all working consistently.

Nim Daghlian (@octothorpes@hachyderm.io):

Broadly, I think interoperability and ease of use are crucial. I’ll submit a paper abstract with more in-practice specifics.

Vince Scafaria (https://beagtech.ie):

We believe open social web platforms should build connective tissue within and across existing communities, webbing together their members and stakeholders. We also believe it’s important to help people curate experiences for themselves and each other, controlling their own algorithms and sharing them with trusted connections.

Nikolas Wise (https://nikolas.ws):

We need to make stuff that makes it easier to make stuff then use that to make the stuff.

Samir Al-Battran (@samir@m.fedica.com):

Here are my suggestions for growth:

Content is king, do not advocate for major organizations to leave centralized platforms (it’s a losing argument unless they came to that realization on their own), help them publish on open platforms in addition to centralized platforms.
Content is king, invite celebrities and big creators to open platforms and offer incentives so that new comers would stay for the content (Threads was very successful in this).
Reduce churn: Dial down the walled garden mentality and the chasing away of those we disagree with.
Reduce churn: Simplify onboarding and tell better stories.
Inviting: Avoid political messaging. It’s hard to avoid this but it’s a big turn off for most people, OSW should be for everyone not those of specific political leaning.
Inviting: The focus should never be on being “federated” (it’s a bonus not a selling feature), most users don’t understand nor care if you explain it.
Inviting: Do not ignore other continents and cultures.
Inviting: End belittling “other” OSW platforms, continuing to point out one platform is inferior to others is a big turn off for the average user.

Terence Eden (https://edent.tel/):

Usability, usability, usability. No point having amazing technology if no one can use it.

Fred Hauschel (@naturzukunft2026@mastodon.social):

Growing the Open Social Web: Domain-Specific Applications Instead of Clones

The Fediverse today is dominated by microblogging clones. To truly grow, we need domain-specific applications that leverage ActivityPub’s full semantic potential — not just status updates, but recipes, events, reviews, collaborative documents, and more.

Two concrete suggestions:

Take Linked Data seriously. ActivityPub is built on JSON-LD, yet most implementations treat it as “JSON with extra steps.” When you actually embrace RDF/SPARQL, you unlock interoperability between different object types. A recipe app can federate with a food review app because both understand schema:Recipe. This is the protocol’s true strength — not replicating Twitter features.
Invest in Client-to-Server (C2S). Almost everyone focuses on Server-to-Server federation, but C2S enables client diversity — mobile apps, CLI tools, browser extensions that work with any ActivityPub server. This lowers the barrier for developers: build a client once, connect to any server. We need better C2S libraries and reference implementations. The opportunity: ActivityPub can become the “HTTP of social” — a protocol layer enabling thousands of specialized applications to interoperate. But only if we move beyond Twitter clones.

Newsmast Foundation:

We firmly believe that more people, organisations, and communities should be using the OSW to rebuild their digital community.

Alongside working on advocacy and with our partners, our Foundation is taking direct action.

After joining the OSW in 2023, we encountered the barriers first-hand. To succeed, the OSW needed to address these barriers. We, as a UK charity trying to bring people to this space, needed to address these barriers.

Full submission: https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/our-blog/growing-the-open-social-web/

Anthony Zone (@ozoned@btfree.social, @firesidefedi@btfree.social, @btfree@btfree.social):

Be friendly. Be supportive. Share. Build communities. Donate to developers. Donate to admins. Create content. Whether that’s trying different software and showing people, creating docs, creating videos, etc. Make this your OWN that you want to share. Join communities of open social web such as developer communities.

Norm MacLennan (@nromdotcom.cloud):

…The main thrust of mine, is: The Open Social Web’s main value propositions are too hypothetical or intangible for most users. Tangible and differentiating value is the only main path to growth…

Full post: https://my.badtake.space/growing-the-open-social-web/

Timothy Bray (@timbray@cosocial.ca):

My position paper will be based on this blog piece: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/11/03/Time-to-Migrate

Jayne Samuel-Walker (@TCMuffin@toot.wales):

This comment perfectly describes what we at toot.wales are trying to achieve with our local, but global via the fediverse, instance…

https://social.seabass.systems/@seabass/statuses/01KFHBCGX14GSSAEMYWWJMVQFS

Elisabeth McDonnell (@lizanne7.bsky.social):

I’d be very interested in a more in-depth, strategic analysis of where we’re falling short from a growth and engagement perspective.

Is the issue that people make a profile on and then abandon it within 30 days? Is the issue that people are lacking a reason to make a profile in the first place? Understanding what’s actually going on would help us brainstorm and prioritize solutions.

Bonus! This is admittedly an off-the-cuff (and thus not an incredibly well-developed) idea but here goes: I keep thinking of how Farmville initially got a lot of people habituated to Facebook. Is there some kind of game that would not only get new people to the Open Social Web but keep them coming back for a bit? Or some kind of big moments that brings new users online for a specific reason. Some intentional programming, if you will. (The entertainment kind, not the engineering kind.)

Oh and PS: I think we need a better term than “Open social web.” The normies don’t get it. Maybe using the word “free” or the like. Anything we can do to distance ourselves from the crypto-sphere which I think has tainted the public’s view of decentralization!

Larissa Baca (@babaklar@hcommons.social):

I think we can best grow the Open Social Web by continuing to talk about how it benefits the community and how it is not run by tech giants who don’t care about people.

In my work as the User Engagement Manager at Knowledge Commons (which runs the https://hcommons.social server), I curate a lot of updates and content on social media, and have seen firsthand how there was a huge initial migration to open platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. However, while we still primarily use Mastodon and Bluesky as our means of communicating with our users, I’ve noticed that we haven’t experienced long-term growth.

I look forward to thinking through this with the community.

Alexis Bushnell (@alexisbushnell@toot.wales):

I can offer input from the pov of someone who works in social media and has also run events and things to help people move to the Fediverse.

Klaudia Zotzmann-Koch (@viennawriter@litera.tools):

The open social web would be more commonly known, if universities, cities, local and federal governments, public broadcasting media etc. had accounts on the fediverse, as well as get all their employees there via their SSO-solutions. We somehow have to make the fediverse the “household name” for social media, for the “forum”, the go-to-place to communicate and discuss public matters together.