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  We are happy to see the patent non-aggression pledge published by Bluesky today. Software patents and related intellectual property can have a dampening effect on innovation in an entire application domain, such as distributed social networks. They make developers use complex, roundabout methods to do simple tasks, just to avoid the appearance of using a technique that may or may not be patented by another company now or in the future. By offering this pledge, Bluesky makes it that much easier...

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  Today the W3C standards organization announced a new working group to advance the ActivityPub and Activity Streams standards. The Social Web Foundation, as a W3C member organization, will be participating in the group. The working group’s goal is to release a backwards-compatible iteration of each specification in Q3 of 2026. Activity Streams was released in 2017, and ActivityPub was released in early 2018. Since that time, the experience of hundreds of implementers and millions of us...

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  I’m going to be participating in the Growing the Open Social Web workshop at Fediforum on March 3, 2026. I’m excited to talk to other people who care about the Fediverse about ways to connect more people through ActivityPub. Fediforum invited attendees to publish position papers before the workshop. SWF has a number of hypotheses about growth of the social web; I’ll try to summarise some of them here. Growth can’t come at the expense of privacy. People c...

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  As part of my book “ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web“, I created a coding example to show how to program for the ActivityPub API. ap is a command-line client, written in Python, for doing basic tasks with ActivityPub. For example, you can log into a server using this command: ap login yourname@yourserver.exampleOnce you’re logged in, you can follow someone: ap follow other@different.exampleOr, you could post some content: ap create note --public &...

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  I want to share some information about a repository we just published. ap-components is a set of Web Components for building interfaces for the ActivityPub API. I built it as I was making a sample application for handling the acct: URI scheme. I found myself making more and more components for the UI, and realised that they would probably be useful for other applications, too. The library is available on npm at @socialwebfoundation/ap-components. It currently covers some of the simplest Activit...