Before the news: applications are open for the first Open Social Awards, and I want to make sure they’re on your radar. The awards, presented by New_ Public, PublicSpaces, and Waag Futurelab, are looking for projects built on open social protocols that are past the prototype stage and in active use. That includes applications, shared infrastructure, and tools built on any federation or interoperability protocol. The awards will grant €10,000 to a grand prize winner and €5,000 to two excellence award winners, sponsored by ZDF and Bluesky. If you’re building something on the open social web, or you know someone who is, this is worth applying for. The jury includes Audrey Tang, Mike Masnick, Johannes Ernst, Melanie Bartos, Robin Berjon, and myself. Applications are due by May 1st, and winners will be announced at the PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam on June 5th. You can apply here.
Mastodon has been awarded a €614,000 service agreement by the Sovereign Tech Agency, the German federal government’s programme for investing in open source infrastructure. The funding covers five major deliverables over the next two years, and Mastodon is hiring two new backend developers to carry out the work.
The most immediately consequential deliverable is blocklist synchronisation, including implementation of the FIRES protocol (Fediverse Intelligence, Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server). FIRES was developed by software engineer Emelia Smith on an NGI Zero grant, and is designed to make it easier for server administrators to share moderation decisions across the network. The protocol works as an incremental changelog: when an admin blocks a domain or flags a pattern of spam, that decision is recorded, and other servers can synchronise with it by requesting only the changes since their last sync. Mastodon plans to give administrators the choice to either automatically apply third-party blocklists or use them as suggestions for manual review. Implementation is expected by the end of 2026.
In an interview with the Association for Progressive Communicatio, Smith described the conditions under which fediverse infrastructure gets built. The ecosystem “depends almost entirely on volunteer labour,” she said, and “the only way that the Fediverse will grow is if people start seriously thinking about how do we make this sustainable, how do we make whatever it is we’re doing into something that isn’t just a hobby.” FIRES, built by Smith on a small NGI Zero grant, will now be implemented by paid developers with government backing. But it also underscores how far there is to go: Smith herself, one of the few people working across both ActivityPub and ATProto, has had to pivot away from fediverse work at times because grants and donations alone could not sustain it as a livelihood.
The second near-term deliverable is a new Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider for remote media storage. Currently, fediverse servers store local copies of all federated media, which creates escalating storage costs for administrators. The new FASP will allow servers to share storage and media processing infrastructure. A second FASP for automated content detection, helping administrators scan for spam and illegal material, is planned for later, with implementation expected by mid-2027. Both services are designed as open infrastructure that other fediverse software projects can plug into, and €90,000 of the total funding is earmarked specifically for interoperability grants to help other projects adopt the new protocols.
The remaining deliverables are further out. Mastodon will coordinate with the Social Web Foundation’s end-to-end encryption project and implement E2EE for private messages once the W3C’s ActivityPub E2EE Messaging Task Force delivers a specification, likely during 2027. The agreement also covers documentation improvements and a new container-based installation method, which will proceed alongside the other work.
Separately, Mastodon is preparing the release of version 4.6, which includes two notable new features. Collections allow users to curate and share bundles of recommended accounts, a feature clearly informed by Bluesky’s Starter Packs. Mastodon is taking a deliberately cautious approach: collections are limited to 25 accounts, there is no bulk “Follow All” button, and users can opt out of being included. The team says they want to observe how the community uses the feature before expanding it. Version 4.6 also brings a redesigned profile page, with a new Activity tab that offers granular filtering of posts and boosts, a unified profile editing experience, and updated handle explainers aimed at making the fediverse more intuitive for newcomers. Both features are currently being tested on mastodon.social ahead of the general release.
The STA funding matters for Mastodon, but it also puts European digital sovereignty rhetoric into perspective. The political energy behind digital sovereignty is enormous right now, and open social infrastructure aligns with that agenda as well as anything in the technology landscape. Yet the actual funding remains remarkably small. €614,000 is meaningful for a nonprofit with a small team, but it is a negligible sum relative to the priority that digital sovereignty occupies in European political discourse. The fediverse’s infrastructure funding comes almost entirely through public channels like the Sovereign Tech Agency and NLnet’s NGI Zero programme, which is European Commission money. These are the right kinds of institutional support, but the scale does not yet match the rhetoric.
Flipboard has launched Surf, a new app that aggregates content from across the open social web into curated, shareable destinations the company calls “social websites.” After more than a year in beta, the first public release is web-only; mobile apps are still in testing. Users sign in with a Mastodon or Bluesky account, and Surf pulls together posts, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and blog content from across ActivityPub, ATProto, RSS, and the broader web into feeds that can be customised, assigned a custom domain, and shared as standalone websites. Interactions on Surf flow back to the underlying protocols: a like is a real like from your social account, a reply is a real post. The launch comes with a roster of major publisher partners, including The Verge, WIRED, Rolling Stone, 404 Media, and The Oregonian, each of which has created a social website combining their journalism with community conversation. Independent creators have built their own destinations as well, from a film photography community to an NBA fan hub.
What Surf is tapping into is a property of open protocols that becomes visible once multiple protocols coexist. Because content on Mastodon, Bluesky, podcasts, and RSS-powered blogs all lives on open, queryable infrastructure rather than inside proprietary platforms, it becomes possible to build an aggregation layer on top, combining content from different sources and different protocols into a single view without requiring those sources to know about each other. Surf is not itself a social network; it is a browser for this layer. Flipboard is betting that this aggregation layer, rather than any single protocol, is where the user experience of the open social web will ultimately live.
The Newsmast Foundation has published an update on its Apps for Change programme, which builds customised community apps on top of Mastodon. Over the past quarter, the team has launched or entered testing with four distinct types of app: a local journalism app for the Leicester Gazette that combines news from Ghost with a social community, a creator app for the progressive podcast network Find Out Media, community apps for fediverse instances in Wales (toot.wales) and Quebec (qlub.social), and a professional networking app for a climate science research network. Each app is tailored to the specific needs of its community, from bilingual onboarding in Welsh and French-Canadian to working groups and calendars for the research network. Jaz-Michael King, whose work on the Twt app for toot.wales I wrote about in last month’s article on Mastodon’s community dynamics, has joined the foundation as Commercial Advisor.
The more significant development is what comes next. Newsmast is pausing new custom pilots until the end of May to consolidate everything it has built across these four projects into a single modular platform it calls Build-an-App. The goal is to combine the four separate codebases into one Ruby gem, build a dashboard for community configuration, and create a unified mobile app that can be quickly adapted for any new partner. The foundation says it aims to have a system where a demo app can be created in hours, a test app shared in days, and a full community app launched in weeks. The ambition is to move from bespoke development to repeatable infrastructure that any fediverse community can deploy.
