Presenter: Evan Prodromou (@evanprodromou@socialwebfoundation.org)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Johannes Ernst (@j12t@j12t.social, @j12t.org)
• Jayne Samuel-Walker @tcmuffin@toot.wales" %}}
• Anca (@anca@mastodon.xyz
• Jeremiah Lee (@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold
• Matthias Pfefferle (@pfefferle@mastodon.social
• Anthony Zone (@ozoned@btfree.social
• Andre Kudra

Notes

• ‘Portmanteau’ was invented by Lewis Carrol in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  • https://theweek.com/articles/468355/10-whimsical-words-coined-by-lewis-carroll#:~:text=portmanteau

• WebFinger, I believe, was named after an ancient (and now obsolete) Unix utility called “finger” where you could find out more about some user somewhere else on your local network.

• Jeremiah: Still an unfortunate name. We should just rename it WebFinder

• Jeremiah: I highly recommend Evan’s non-bullshitter’s guide to ActivityPub: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/activitypub/9781098162733/

• “Long live the portmanteaui-verse”

Q&A portion:

• Anthony Zone: How do you not let perfect be the enemy of the good in terms of ActivityPub?

  • Evan:

    • People have different mental models.
    • UX is evolving, but network is growing, so we have to evolve without breaking

• What if I wanted a globally inclusive usernames with UTF-8 characters? ActivityPub is open to non-ASCII characters, right?

  • Evan: ASCII indentifiers is part of WebFinger, not a limitation of ActivityPub. It’s where we come with the baggage of the old Internet (old UNIX tools, email protocols, etc). Question is now how do we introduce them? Do it fast or pull people alongside the change? We’re at the point to start doing things faster and start introducing systems with non-ASCII characters. It makes sense for us to support. This is an international system.

  • 🦦@💕.example

• Why do we describe Fedi as being both defederated and federated? What is going on there? How is it both?

  • Evan: Someone can set up a server and they don’t have to ask someone for permission to connect with other servers. No Dept of Fediverse. Open by default. But some people do bad things. Defederation is the process is many servers deciding to take action to block a particular server.

• What’s the difference between the fediverse and the social web? Is ATProto part of the fediverse?

  • Evan: Fediverse and social web are mostly synonymous. More of a cultural association with fedierse.

  • Jeremiah: ‘fediverse’ is not intuitable to normal people, so I use social web

  • Ozoned: Open social network is what I’ve been saying.

  • Evan: ATProto has ‘ATmosphere’ term, but I can be followed when bridged, so it’s like both sides of the glass.

  • Emelia: Yeah, I think the Open Social Web includes both the ATmosphere, Fediverse, Indieweb / POSSE, and whatever the name for Solid’s eventual thing is.

• What stands in the way of progress when building consensus for ActivityPub evolution?

• What’s next? Is standardization over?

  • Evan: Now going through it’s first revision! We’re doing a backwards compatible, mostly-not-new update in 2026Q3. After that is when we start thinking about ActivityPub 2.0. Will try to have backwards compatibility, we can’t tear it up.