Evan Prodromou

As part of the work on Fediverse sustainability announced earlier this year, the Social Web Foundation is running our first Fediverse Sustainability Survey . We’re seeking operators, moderators and administrators of Fediverse sites, from the smallest to the largest, to fill out the anonymous survey and share information about how their instances work. If you help run an instance, please take the 10-15 minutes needed to fill out the survey. We need a lot of responses (hundreds!) to get statistically relevant data, so please feel free to share the link. We’re also on the lookout for operators of instances that are no longer running; there is a lot to learn about sustainability from servers that closed down, for whatever reason. We’ll publish findings here as part of our sustainability report, supplemented by interviews with selected respondents. Thanks!

Update: we hit a survey response limit in LimeSurvey — it’s been fixed. If you had a problem getting to the survey, it should be cleared now.

The call for proposals is open for the COSCUP Fediverse track in Taipei, Taiwan. ActivityPub-related software, including server and client implementations, are great topics for the event.

COSCUP (“Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters”) is the FOSDEM of East Asia. Run by the Open Source community in Taiwan, it brings together people excited about FOSS across the region.

For the first time, this year, members of the Korean ActivityPub developer community FediDev KR are joining up with FediLUG of Japan to program and run a Fediverse track at COSCUP. This has the potential to be a huge step forward for the Fediverse developer community. Although many major projects, like Fedify and Misskey, are created and promoted in East Asia, distance and language barriers make it hard for East Asian devs to participate in European and North American in-person events.

The Fediverse track is open to proposals about ActivityPub implementations, clients for ActivityPub platforms, ancillary services, libraries and toolkits. But also, as at FOSDEM, talks about the human aspects of Fediverse technology, like moderation, policy and governance, are welcome and encouraged. This event looks like it will cover as much interesting conceptual space as its twin at FOSDEM.

Hong Minhee, @hongminhee@hollo.social, was one of the main speakers at FOSDEM’s Social Web devroom this year. Their talk about Fedify was important, but even more important was their effort to bridge the gap between Asia’s and Europe’s Fediverse development communities.

I (Evan) hope that COSCUP brings together many Asian developers, but I also hope that North American and European individuals and teams put in proposals as well. Knitting together these two important communities on the Fediverse requires effort from both sides. That’s why I’m applying to speak (about ActivityPub 1.1), and why I hope to see many familiar faces among the new ones in Taiwan.

tags.pub is a new service under development by the Social Web Foundation. It is a global hashtag server — it lets you follow a hashtag across the Fediverse. There’s lots of information on the tags.pub home page, and I (Evan) did a talk about tags.pub at FOSDEM 2026. This blog post answers some basics about tags.pub.

• To follow a hashtag globally, search for a user with that name at tags.pub, like @example for the #example hashtag. Follow that account, and it will share all the content it sees with that hashtag to you. If you unfollow the account, it should stop sharing to you. The usernames only have letters and numbers in them, and they only go up to 64 characters.
• To share your content with tags.pub, search for and follow the @_followback account. It will follow you back (thus the name) and your public posts will be shared by the hashtag accounts on tags.pub. If you unfollow the follow back account, it will unfollow you back, and your content will no longer be shared.
• You can connect a whole server to tags.pub by using the relay interface. Add https://tags.pub/user/_____relay_____/inbox (Mastodon) or https://tags.pub/user/_____relay_____ (Pleroma) to your server relays. This is a one-way pipe — your server will send public posts to tags.pub, but tags.pub won’t send all its public data back to you. Instead, your users should follow hashtag accounts to get specific feeds.
• We respect your agency. If your server is connected to tags.pub and you don’t want it to boost your content, add #NoTagsPub to your bio. If you already have #NoBots, that should be plenty. You’ll still be able to follow tags.pub hashtag accounts. If you don’t want to see or be seen by tags.pub at all, you can block the domain ‘tags.pub’ entirely.
• Becoming the ‘global’ hashtag server is a goal. We are still ramping up, and there are a lot of people and servers that are not yet connected.
• tags.pub will not share your content with accounts or servers that you have blocked. It only shares the link to your content, so your block will be respected.
• tags.pub is developed and operated by Social Web Foundation. We are a US non-profit. The servers are located in Beauharnois, Quebec, Canada in a data centre run by OVHCloud, a French corporation. We try to keep the data storage to the absolute minimum necessary to provide the hashtag sharing service. There is no search index, and we don’t archive your content. The code is Free and Open Source software under the AGPL-v3.
• If you have a feature request, or a bug report, please add a GitHub issue. If you have a private comment or question, please use our contact form.

Thanks to the Interledger Foundation for their generous Grant for the Web to the Social Web Foundation. With the help of ILF, we are launching a new program area focused on economic issues on the Social Web. In particular, we’ll be producing three reports: one on sustainability for social web instances; one for the Fediverse and the creator economy; and one for cooperatives on the Social Web. In addition, we’ll be engaging multimedia Fediverse apps for using the Web Monetization standard. You can read more about grant on our shared announcement: Interledger Foundation awards $200,000 to Social Web Foundation to support decentralized social media.

Next week is European Open Source Week in Brussels, culminating in FOSDEM 2026 on the weekend. There are several important ways to stay connected to the Fediverse while you’re visiting this week!

• Mastodon maintains a booth at FOSDEM throughout the weekend. It’s a great place to get Mastodon merch or take a selfie with the Mastodon team.
• The Social Web Dev Room is a day-long event on Jan 31 in room H.2215 with loads of talks about Fediverse software and Fediverse organizing.
• There will be a loose mingling of Fediverse people at the À La Mort Subite bar in Brussels on Friday Jan 30 after 8PM. Wear a Fediverse symbol on a nametag or some other creative way so people can find you. Find your own table and then start mingling. There’s no organized activities or special space; just a node in space-time where you’re more likely to run into Fediverse people than normal.

As always, watch the #FOSDEM and #socialwebfosdem and #FOSDEM2026 hashtags for news and updates.

If you’re not travelling to Brussels, watch for streaming video from room H.2215 . There are also Fediverse events happening throughout the world throughout the year; Fediforum keeps a great list of the most prominent.

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 ActivityPub data, but I hope to expand it to give visibility to other types of objects and activities. Please feel free to try it out and let us know if it’s helpful for your work.