As the open social network movement grows, a new non-profit organization is emerging to expand the “fediverse”

A new project launching today aims to build on the momentum currently seen in the fediverse—also known as the open social network, which describes a network of interconnected social services powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Co-founded by ActivityPub co-author and current editor Evan Prodromou, the new nonprofit, called the Social Web Foundation, will focus on expanding the fediverse, improving ActivityPub and the user experience, informing decision-makers, and educating people about the fediverse and how they can participate.

As Prodromou explains, the group felt the time was right for such a move, given that Meta recently adopted ActivityPub for its latest app Threads, a competitor to Meta’s Instagram team’s X. With the tech giant’s involvement, there are now over 200 million new potential fediverse users, dwarfing the adoption of other popular fediverse apps like Mastodon, which currently has around 7.49 million registered users and less than a million monthly active users.

“The fact that Threads has joined this space has made it really interesting for other companies,” Prodromou says. “Threads is attracting a really big audience, and also big names — like @POTUS on fediverse… That makes it a lot more interesting for other organizations — both publishers who want to reach that audience, and existing social networks who want to make these influencers and celebrities available to their users.”

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) also has some support from Meta, along with other major implementers of the ActivityPub protocol, including the social magazine app Flipboard, the newsletter platform Ghost, Mastodon, and others. The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project off the ground. In total, SWF is approaching $1 million in funding.

Part of the group’s efforts will be focused on making the fediverse more user-friendly. While Mastodon offers a service that works similarly to Twitter/X, its decentralized nature—meaning you can choose from multiple servers—makes getting started confusing and difficult for less technical users. Then, like X, there’s the problem of cold-starting, finding interesting people to follow.

SWF aims to improve this process by offering an alternative onboarding experience in the form of a standalone product that helps users through the first steps.

It also aims to inform users about the different federation applications available, as many users may already be close to participating or being active in the fediverse without knowing it. This is especially true for many on Threads, where enabling federation for their own account is an option they don’t know exists.

While the project is not focused on the Bluesky platform, which uses its own AT protocol, its users can also connect to the fediverse via bridges that are currently being built and allow users from different platforms to communicate.

In addition, SWF aims to better support services joining the fediverse, such as Ghost, which allows long-form text, as opposed to something short, more appropriate to a tweet. While the protocol currently allows long-form text, with no character limit, other considerations come into play, Prodromou says.

“Things like, what’s a good number of attachments to include in a long text? Or how do you embed images? Should you have multiple sizes or not?” he says. “These are things that aren’t formally protocol-specific, but help build real-world usage.”

Another major focus for the nonprofit will be user education—not just for those signing up for accounts for the first time, but also for those in specific industries or organizations that have a different set of needs. For example, SWF will initially focus on guiding media organizations on how to participate in the fediverse and why, offering case studies from others who have led the way, such as ProPublica, NPR, and the BBC.

Following these activities, SWF will publish similar materials for other institutions such as universities, start-ups and large enterprises.

On the startup side, SWF is keen to partner with various accelerators and programs, so that entrepreneurs building new social apps have information on why they should consider federating (connecting to the fediverse).

Prodromou estimates that SWF will release a new set of materials for different groups at a rate of about one per quarter.

In addition to Prodromou, who will serve as research director, the Social Web Foundation is co-founded by executive director Mallory Knodel, formerly CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and chief product officer Tom Coates, formerly of the BBC and (TC’s parent company) Yahoo, among others. Coates also worked on a distributed social startup called Planetary, built on a different protocol.