The past week had two fediverse conferences, and both had interesting versions of building bridges, toward European politicians on one side, and across protocols toward atproto on the other. The latest edition of FediForum had a Dutch Greens MEP (Member of European Parliament) as headline guest and prominent program slots for introductory talks on both ActivityPub and atproto. The Monday after, the German 2mr.social conference brought politicians, media and civil society together in Hamburg, organized by Save Social, and closed with a panel on whether Mastodon and atproto-based projects could find common ground.
FediForum
FediForum 7 was the regular twice-yearly online gathering for the open social web community, and some things stood out two me compared to other versions. First, the headline slot went to a fireside chat with Kim van Sparrentak, the Dutch Greens MEP. Second, both ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou and Bluesky protocol engineer Daniel Holmgren were given prominent slots to give introductory talks on ActivityPub and atproto. While FediForum started as an unconference that mainly attracted people already active in the fediverse space, that there is now space to have talks by MEPs, as well as talks about atproto shows that FediForum has expanded.
The Van Sparrentak conversation ranged across digital sovereignty, EU regulation, and what the community could practically do to help. On where the money for European digital sovereignty actually comes from, her answer is European governments should start funding compliant European companies instead of continuing to bankroll US infrastructure. On regulation enforcement, Van Sparrentak said that the DSA, DMA, and AI Act are creating change, but enforcement is too slow, and European companies that already comply are frustrated because the level playing field they were promised has not materialized. She also said openly that the GDPR is now under attack from both big tech and the European Commission itself. Alongside corporate pushes, such as Amazon plastering Brussels with advertisement about how Amazon makes European business thrive, the current US administration is running an active campaign to get the EU to roll back its tech laws via tariff threats. The European Commission has agreed to a “structural dialogue” with the US about EU law, which she finds questionable in itself. She closed on a more hopeful note about how recent scandals have pushed digital sovereignty into mainstream public consciousness in Europe, and credited “the nerds” (complementary) for keeping the stories alive long enough for comedy shows and broader media to pick them up.
Some of the speed demos that stood out to me: (worth watching the videos on PeerTube here) Ben Pate showed progress on end-to-end encrypted messaging in Emissary, built jointly with Bonfire on top of MLS, with general availability planned for the end of June. A New Social demoed an update to Bounce that lets users move a bridged Bridgy Fed account into a chosen PDS provider without losing the atproto follow graph they accumulated while bridged. FediProfile addresses the proliferation-of-accounts problem on ActivityPub, working as a meta-fedi profile that aggregates a person’s presence across the network. Stefan Hayden’s Fediponics brings configurable bot detection system to small Mastodon instances, scoring signups against more than seventy signals, finally giving more moderation tools that are highly needed. Bonfire Mosaic introduces embeddable federated comment threads for blogs and CMS sites, with the Jacobin DE political magazine and the Totnes Pulse local newspaper as pilot communities.
Mastodon’s own demo focused on UX changes in 4.5 and 4.6, mostly around profile redesign. The more interesting detail came up in one of the sessions, how the team described handling compatibility with other ActivityPub software. Mastodon’s profile fields are limited to four entries of about a hundred characters each, but some other ActivityPub implementations let users put effectively unbounded text in the same fields. So the Mastodon team takes a statistical approach: looking at what is actually out there and deciding what to support based on what they see, rather than agreeing with anyone on what should be supported. The underlying point for me is that none of the other fediverse microblogging softwares can function as an institutional counterpart to Mastodon, with which Mastodon can negotiate to determine which other implementations of fediverse profiles should be supported, and which ones not.
2mr.social
This past Monday saw 2mr.social, a one-day event organized by Save Social, focused on German civil society and media to demonstrate how they can “successfully use open networks without relying on big tech”. The whole event was designed to show German political and broadcasting institutions that leaving X for the open social web is something other people are already doing successfully, and that they can do it too. By coincidence or by design, that was also the day SPD, Grüne, and Die Linke announced in coordination that they were halting activity on X under the hashtag #WirVerlassenX. The decision affects official party accounts, parliamentary group profiles, and many leading politicians. Save Social itself had spent the previous year collecting more than 250,000 signatures, stating that “politics and society must strengthen and expand these services”, meaning open social infrastructure such as Mastodon. Save Social announced that they have secured funding for the next two to three years via two corporate sources, the search engine Ecosia and the Rossmann drugstore chain, with Raoul Rossmann himself as personal donor.
Professor of digital media Martin Andree’s keynote, “winning united rather than losing separately” made a call for broad collaboration, saying that everyone fighting against platform monopolies (such as broadcasters, press, civil society, political parties) is fighting essentially the same fight, but they each see it as their own separate problem and rarely team up. Andree wanted everyone in those camps to align across political and institutional lines. Andree described the internet as basically consisting of monopolies and a giant graveyard, backed by his own attention measurement work mapping all 18 million German online services on a single chart, where almost everything collapses to nothing while a few platforms have it all. His point is that when the monopolists decide where attention goes, it does not really matter whether better alternatives exist somewhere else.
Carsten Brosda, Senator for Culture in Hamburg, made a similar point in policy terms. He laid out three paths for digital infrastructure (American profit-driven platforms, Chinese state-driven ones, or a third European way built on decentralized open standards) and gave a five-point program for getting to the third: build alternatives, set rules for the platforms we already have, democratize them from within, help users develop the skills to actually use them well, and create journalism institutions that can help people make sense of fragmented information environments. The “democratize from within” piece is the most interesting one. Brosda borrows directly from Montan-Mitbestimmung, the postwar German model where workers in heavy industry got seats on company supervisory boards, and proposes user co-determination on platforms as the institutional analogue. That is a very specific German social-democratic template being applied to platform governance, not just a generic call for more participation.
To demonstrate that the fediverse is indeed something other people are already doing successfully, and to encourage others to join as well, the event had panel sessions the entire day about ‘What Works’. There were a lot of practical examples for how people are using the fediverse, but one interesting point stood out to me, where two creators pointed out that that the creators do want algorithms, just controllable ones. They described Mastodon’s strict reverse-chronological feed as overwhelming after just a couple of days away, and pushed back against the assumption that algorithms themselves are the problem. What they want is transparency and user control over how content is sorted, not no sorting at all.
The closing panel paired Felix Hlatky, the executive director of Mastodon GmbH, with Sebastian Vogelsang from Eurosky Hlatky pitched Mastodon as a network of authentic, deeply human community connections, and stressed that Mastodon collects very little user data, even relative to Bluesky. Vogelsang explained Eurosky as European-hosted atproto infrastructure that exists so that other developers and publishers can build their own apps on top, with DSA-compliant moderation (CSAM removal, terror content removal) offered as a service component so that small developers do not have to build it themselves. Vogelsang: “We don’t want to build the next X for Europe, we want to build the infrastructure on which developers can build the next 20 or 30 new social media applications”.
When panel host Aya Jaff explicitly asked how the two protocols could work together, Hlatky opened his answer with “it’s important to understand these protocols are very different” before pointing at shared moderation tooling as a possible adjacent layer of cooperation. Vogelsang followed with the same answer (“you took my talking point”) and added bridges, naming Bridgy Fed. That answer was the one the cooperation statement at the end of the day was built on. Newsmast and Save Social presented a Hamburg Declaration that frames Matrix, the Mastodon-and-fediverse network, and atproto as three complementary protocols making up a single European social stack: Matrix for private messaging, the fediverse for connected community networks, atproto for large-scale social media. The declaration lists eight common principles (such as digital autonomy, decentralized networks, wide and diverse ownership, strengthening democracy, and European content that reaches an audience) and three concrete cooperation areas: a European-hosted Euro Bridge between atproto services and the fediverse to replace the US-based Bridgy Fed, shared moderation tooling, and joint funding work. It was signed at presentation time by people behind Bridgy Fed, A New Social, Eurosky and the Social Web Foundation. Mastodon was notable absent as a signee, and that falls in line with Hlatky’s hesitancy on describing how Mastodon and Eurosky can work together.
Across both events, the open social web is widening out a bit. FediForum gave the headline slot to a Dutch MEP and put introductory talks on both ActivityPub and atproto on the program. 2mr.social brought politicians, media and civil society together in Hamburg, and ended with a declaration framing Matrix, the fediverse, and atproto as three parts of one European social stack. This political coalition-building is not without friction, and the Mastodon non-signature on the declaration is the clearest sign of that. But this past week did show a bit more room than before for conversations across protocols and across institutional lines.
