From walled platforms to open protocols and a world-wide, open social web

Open protocols that enable people to interact online go back to the very origins of the internet: e-mail, for example, is over 50 years old. However, today the vast majority of social interactions online happen in tightly walled gardens. Unlike e-mail, where one can choose from many e-mail providers and software applications and still interact with anybody on the planet with an e-mail address, if you want to interact with a Facebook user, you have to use Facebook. Similarly, as a Facebook user, you cannot interact with anybody who is not using Facebook. Almost all of today’s big social media and group messaging platforms feature the same lock-in into their various walled social gardens.

This is now changing. First jolted by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the subsequent changes there in content and policies, an ever-growing number of developers are now creating new-era social software that is instead built on open social protocols that work across the internet. Users are receptive, and their decentralized, open social media software is being rapidly adopted by communities world-wide who find it preferable to the unilaterally imposed constraints of the centralized platforms ranging from the software you can use and its features to moderation and governance.

While there are significant differences in architecture, maturity and governance, these open protocols include the ActivityPub stack (standardized by the World-Wide-Web Consortium and implemented widely by platforms such as Mastodon); ATProto (created by startup Bluesky); Nostr, Farcaster, DSNP and others. Beyond merely replicating walled platforms with open protocols, innovation is rapid and innovators have started to pioneer radically different social experiences that address unique user needs, and not just optimize for ad revenue for the social platform. By now there are hundreds of software applications and platforms that support some of these protocols, and more are being built all the time. As the platforms are decentralized, communities can finally define content and behavioral standards themselves and create moderation policies that make sense for their own particular community.

As there is no platform owner to prevent it, bridges between the protocols have also begun to appear, letting users interact with each other not just with different applications, but regardless of the underlying protocols. This looks like the beginning of a single, open, interoperable social network that is owned by nobody and could grow to the size of the web itself, upgrading the World-Wide-Web to the World-Wide-Social-Web, based on open, decentralized protocols.

FediForum is the place for the open social web community to meet, learn, interact and organize

We started FediForum to create a place and an event where the leaders and enthusiasts for this brave new world of internet-wide social communications based on open protocols could find each other, meet, learn from each other, and start projects that move the open social web forward. Starting with the first FediForum in March 2023, each FediForum event has surpassed our expectations, and attendee feedback has consistently been extremely positive.

FediForum is structured as an open space technology unconference, where attendees are facilitated to co-create the agenda for each day at the start of that day. Sessions are then run by attendees. This format creates a space for innovative exploration and collaboration. It has been used, for example, at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), which catalyzed the development of OpenID, OAuth, Self-Sovereign Identity, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials and continues to be at record attendance 20 years after its founding. The community structure, needs and values for the open social web are very similar to those of the IIW community. Many of the early advocates of decentralized, open social network protocols have been frequent IIW participants.

Before we co-create the agenda each day, we run a speed demo track where software developers can showcase cool new social web applications that may be of interest to attendees.

While initially, FediForum participation skewed towards projects built around ActivityPub, we’ve already had participation from many communities including Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB), Nostr, Bluesky/ATProto, the IndieWeb and others. People involved in many of the leading software projects have come, run sessions and in many cases, demo’d their platforms and applications. (For demo recordings, see PeerTube channel · YouTube channel .)

Going forward, we will reach out even further to connect the people who are building this brave new world, as a world-wide, decentralized open social web can only be built by many, cooperating projects. Evidence that the approach is working is in this list of collaboration projects that have been started at FediForum, often by people who met at FediForum for the first time.

FediForum so far

Tickets and sponsoring

FediForum is a paid event with a number of different ticket categories. All ticket categories buy the exact same admission; we do not favor purchasers of higher-priced tickets. Instead, higher-priced tickets sponsor attendees who are not able to afford regular admission. This model has worked well.

We have not accepted sponsorships so far. Instead, we ask attendees from well-funded platforms to purchase one of the higher-priced tickets that allow us to offer almost-free tickets to others.

Organizers

Johannes Ernst is the founder and CEO of Dazzle Labs Inc., which advises organizations how to navigate the new landscape of the open social web and provides technologies to help them do so. He pioneered user-centric identity with LID and OpenID, and helped create Yadis, a predecessor of the Webfinger specification, a key component of the Fediverse. He’s helping to put a Fediverse Developer Network together, and leads development of FediTest, a test framework for interoperability of federated social media platforms.

Reach out to Johannes at @j12t@j12t.social (Mastodon/ActivityPub) or @j12t.org.

Kaliya Young is the co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) and She’s Geeky: Connecting Women in Tech, which are both long-running unconferences. She’s an advocate for Self-sovereign Identity (SSI) and the author of two books: Domains of Identity (2020) and A Comprehensive Guide to Self Sovereign Identity (2018).

Reach out to Kaliya at @identitywoman@mas.to.