Can you follow your government, or city, on the Open Social Web? (The good kind of government!) Or do they still post only to the closed commercial social media platforms?

What about your kids’ school or sports club? Are they on Mastodon or Bluesky? Or just on Facebook or Instagram?

Or news organizations – the kind of news organization that reports the facts as well as they can, instead of peddling misinformation: can you hear from them directly on then Open Social Web, or do you have to go through a platform whose algorithm rather prefers to put low-quality rage bait in front of you instead of the high-quality facts you want?

We think the world would be better if we all could connect directly with more mission-aligned organizations on the Open Social Web, instead of having their message distorted through profit-seeking algorithms on the closed platforms. And it would be better for them if they could directly connect with us.

So why aren’t more of them on the Open Social Web?

In our conversations we’ve heard one reason over and over again:

The number of projects on the Open Social Web is exploding (e.g. collected here and here). It’s really not viable for an organization to sift through hundreds of projects, and figure out which are maintained and which are not, which are in-development and which have been in production for a while, or which similar organizations have used them and have been successsful with them, or failed with them.

This is important, because no champion of an “Let’s move to the Open Social Web” initiative in an organization would want to recommend to work with software or services whose maintainers might lose interest next Monday (it has happened). Neither the champion nor their boss wants get fired over recommending the wrong partner. How do they find the right partners to work with?

Enter FediForum Connect, which is going live today at connect.fediforum.org.

FediForum Connect is a website that has one specific purpose:

To connect mission-aligned organizations, community managers and creators to providers of products and services on the Open Social Web who are committed to make their customers successful.

FediForum Connect is not a general-purpose directory. It does not and will not list all projects that exist on the Open Social Web. It is not for everybody either! For example, if you are typical human being who has had it with Twitter/X and wants to hang out somewhere better, we’d love you to join the Open Social Web, but FediForum Connect is not intended to help you with finding out how to best do that. (There are other great sites that do that already.)

But if you are an organization, community manager or creator, and have heard something about the Fediverse, the ATmosphere, open decentralized social protocols, the Open Social Web, or something like that, but aren’t sure whether any of this would work for you, or how, then you can browse FediForum Connect and connect with projects that are ready to help you.

Conversely, if you are part of an Open Social Web project, and you are committed to think of your users as customers – customers who you intend to serve and make successful –, and if your intended customers are organizations, community managers or creators, then we want to list your project next to the couple of dozen we have so far! Because we want those customers to be able to find you more easily than they currently can!

So we curate who gets listed on FediForum Connect according to this objective. The criteria are still in flux, the overall categorization of products and services and what information we list about each is work in progress as well, but it’s good enough to make it public today. We’d love to hear what you think. Please be gentle, this is just a beta right now and we are sure we got some things wrong :-)

A few more tidbits of background:

• FediForum Connect is an offshoot of FediForum, the unconference for the Open Social Web, where we already have been curating interesting projects for our software demos and where how to apply all this new technology in mission-aligned organizations is a frequent discussion subject. This seemed like a natural next step.

• We do not charge for listings (although some projects have offered to pay!) because we want the listings to be unbiased. (We may offer additional programs in the future that we may charge for, because the bills need to be paid, but the base listings are intended to remain free.)

• Want to discuss? Come to the next FediForum, April 28-30, 2026, online, where we’ll run a session on the subject. We’d love to hear what you think and how to make this site as useful as we can.

Oh, and we accept suggestions for additional listings.