Slashdot summarizes: "Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation (SWF) to address the challenges of the ActivityPub ecosystem and foster the growth of the Fediverse." Here's the SWF blog (no RSS, boo hiss) though you can follow it in the fediverse at @swf@socialwebfoundation.org or on Threads or (heh) LinkedIn and (heh) Facebook. There's a Twitter link but it blocks me. Automattic (WordPress) reports, "companies like Mastodon, Flipboard, Ghost, and Meta have expressed their support for the Foundation's mission." Also Vivaldi, NodeBB, IFTAS. Here's Tom Coates's post with the announcement. Here's the Reddit r/fediverse discussion. Here's Ben Werdmuller: here and here.
So this happened three days ago and already there's controversy, and specifically, whether the Social Web Foundation is focused on ActivityPub alone or whether it applies to the broader set of standards defining different versions of the fediverse (such as, say, Bluesky's AT). Prodromou says ActivityPub only. Part of this controversity was set off by Ghost, which is adapting its sofwtare to use ActivityPub, and which declared this week that it required 10 servers for "around 5,000 followers and a decent chunk of replies." Mastodon's Eugen Rochko comments, "it's really easy to make mistakes in computing that make a massive difference in performance... I would not make any assumptions about the protocol itself based on Ghost's work in progress implementation."
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