About nine months ago, I ran into Evan Prodromou at an event at Meta. The social media giant was telling an audience of Fediverse and decentralized social veterans about its plans for its social network product Threads – focused primarily on its quite extraordinary plans to integrate it with the wider Fediverse.
At the time, I wrote a very long blog post about the whole experience. It was a fascinating day. I learned a lot. And while I came out of the event with a little trepidation, I also had a sense that maybe this ecology had reached some kind of inflection point. It felt like the Fediverse might be about to take another leap and suddenly be available to a completely new and massive group of people.
But many of the people we met on the day had another sense too: that if that was going to happen successfully—if it was going to result in a better Fediverse for everyone—we needed a way to bring together all the major practitioners to talk about the future. We needed a way to fund and support the projects that the future success of the Fediverse might rest upon – things that were for the good of everyone, but no one was clear who should build them. We needed a way to address the problems that no one company or instance or implementer or brilliant creative technologist could solve by themselves. In essence, we needed some kind of foundation or non-profit that could help fill the gaps.
Evan and I spent much of the next few months seeing if this idea held water. We talked to well over a hundred and fifty experts and practitioners in the area asking the core questions – do you think we need a thing like this? If it existed, what would you like it to do? How should it be funded? What kind of organization should it be? And we then took all of their comments and priorities and digested them down into a clearer pitch and mission. At this stage the brilliant Mallory Knodel joined our team. And with her we then went around in a more formal way to companies and open source projects (as well as to non-profit civil society organizations who are advocating for a healthier internet) to see if we could put together some funding.
Nine months later, I’d like to introduce you to the Social Web Foundation which we launched yesterday. I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to put together. Fundamentally, its goal is pretty simple – it’s there to help the Fediverse grow in a sustainable and healthy way that benefits everyone. And it’ll do that by helping explain and communicate the Fediverse to the general public, by building industry (tech obviously, but also media etc.) engagement with the Fediverse, by creating resources to help people with design, tech and legal questions, and finally by working with protocol and product to patch any holes and gaps in the current ecology.
There’s so much more I could say about how we got here and how we’d like to help, but if you want to know more probably the best thing to do is to go and read our launch announcement and explore the site. It’s not comprehensive, but a lot of what you might be keen to know about right now is there.
Anyway, I think it’s an important thing to exist and I’m extremely proud to have been a part of getting it set up and running. It absolutely would not be here without the help of all the people who talked to us along the way, our brilliant advisors and the partner companies and non-profits who have given us their support. So thank you so much to all of you. It’s enormously appreciated.