The Social Web Foundation Launches, to Much Confusion

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Today, kind of just completely out-of-the-blue, this thing called “The Social Web Foundation” launched. Basically, this group of companies and corporations who are banding together to throw their hats together as a supporting web to build up ActivityPub and the Fediverse. Except … It reads and feels a lot like, “We made this.”

As some may know, I’ve written about Mastodon, all of its diverse software, ActivityPub, and the Fediverse quite frequently. I even wrote a little bit of a beginner’s guide to jumping in, which also features some history. History that is entirely missing from TSWF.

My first question to all of this would be: Who exactly asked for this? The Fediverse, as mentioned in my guide, has existed since 2008, without corporate or moneyed influence.

Quoted from their mission page,

The Fediverse cannot thrive without people building clients or running providers. And to do those things, they need money. Whether that’s advertising supported, or funded by charities and non-profits, or based on paid-for services, or affiliate revenue, we are working to find ways that companies can do well in the Fediverse.

To a majority of the people who populate the Fedi, we don’t care if companies are doing well across the protocol. It wasn’t built for them. And it should remain that way.

Yes, I run my own instance. No, I don’t make any money from it. And if I ever did, it would be entirely up to future potential users who want to support mkultra.monster. But, until then, it’s run entirely out-of-pocket, and I’m okay with that. I chose to do this, and I’m running a hosted service that caps out at a certain amount of users. And I’m also okay with that! I have no interest in running a social media platform that’s populated by one hundred million people.

Now, there are a lot of companies and non-profits coming together on this page, companies, like:

• Flipboard
• Automattic
• Meta
• Ghost
• Medium
• IFTAS
• Write.as
• Fastly
• Vivaldi
• The BLVD

So, it kinda makes sense that writing platforms want to get in on ActivityPub and the Fediverse. But I feel a little uneasy about Automattic getting too involved. Their CEO is a major douche-nozzle, who once had a meltdown over a joke on Tumblr, and just recently slandered a Wordpress provider for no reason.

Vivaldi makes more sense to me, even though they’re a web browser provider. But, their words on the matter are actually aligned with what many people across the Fediverse believe:

“The Fediverse reminds us of the early days of the Web. We are competing against silos and corporate interests, using a W3C-based open standard and a distributed solution,” says Jon Von Tetzchner, CEO of Vivaldi (@jon@vivaldi.net). “It’s great that social networking companies are supporting the Fediverse, and Vivaldi is pleased to support the Social Web Foundation so that we can once again have a town square free of algorithms and corporate control.”

Which makes absolutely no sense when you put these words and these developers right next to Meta, and Threads.

I’ve spoken a lot about Threads. I feel like, if you’re an instance provider on the Fedi, it’s entirely up to you whether you want to federate with them or not. But let’s not forget, Meta is a corporation. One of the richest corporations in the world, who definitely have corporate interests when it comes to social media, the web, and ActivityPub.

On top of that, it has been almost an entire year, and they still have not fully integrated federation on Threads. As it stands right now, likes and comments coming from the Fediverse show up as additional links you have to click multiple times in order to see, while on Threads. It’s a very tacked-on, a very, “These people aren’t Threads users, but here they are if you really want to see them” kind of gesture. Right now, its mostly superficial, and it rubs me the wrong way. It makes me feel like they don’t have any intention of true integration.

Not mentioned, but included in the list, are Mastodon and Pixelfed. These are, at least, entities that have been involved for a long time, and are partially responsible for the Fediverse becoming just a little bit more mainstream than it was before.

But where’s the mention of Akkoma, Pleroma, GNU Social, Freindika, Misskey, Peertube, and so on, and so forth? Are we just going to ignore them into the ether?

The Fediverse is home to something like … 15 million people or so (not that much more than Bluesky, and with this news, bsky devs are probably sharting themselves)? And it’s only growing as users on Threads turn on federation. But if companies and corporations can’t see themselves as part of the Fediverse without injecting money, sponsors, and ads into it, then they should get out, and stay out. The internet is overrun with sludge-content designed to waste your time and steal your attention for someone else’s financial gain. Rebuilding the open web is completely and entirely about escaping all of that, for good. It’s about bringing back the days of people, building their own spaces, having their own ideas and conversations free of algorithms and corporate influence.

To want to interfere in that, and possibly even destroy it, well. Maybe I should full-block Threads, and other corporate entrances into the Fediverse via my instance.

I really don’t know right now.