FediForum Day One Recap

Just wrapped up a successful first day of FediForum.

The vibes and energy were high. Tons of great conversations and projects around the social web.

A few emerging themes I noticed:

• Identity
• Portability / Interoperability
• Feeds
• Commerce

Ian Forrester kicked us off with his Public Service & The Fediverse keynote (Slides).

One of the ideas that struck a chord of public service integrated into the fediverse. More specifically the interest that sparked in me was that publishing and social shouldn't be two separate things. Following the POSSE principle from the IndieWeb. You publish on your own site and then it's syndicated elsewhere.

This was interesting enough for me I even hosted a session on the topic, I think it was called Tightening the Loop between CMS and the Fediverse. It was my first unconference, so I appreciated the way the agenda was built. Announce your topic, see whether there's interest, put it on the agenda, chat with fellow participants. Super easy.

Identity & Portability

These are such a huge topic but for the purpose of this post, I'm lumping them together.

https://bounce-migrate.appspot.com/ is one of the projects aiming to make portability easy. What's so interesting is they're making it easy to migrate across protocols. So if you're in one network like ATProto (Bluesky), migrating to the Fediverse should be relatively seamless with Bounce.

Some great discussions that emerged on the topic as well include:

• Reputation - How do you build a web of trust?
• Compartmentalization and Deduplication - A single identity or multiple identities? When "following" someone, which of their feeds takes priority?

Feeds

Talk of feeds was everywhere. I made a note to myself throughout the conference.

It's amazing how big the feeds theme is. Feed ownership, customization, and sharing. All powered by open protocols.

• Bonfire releases 1.0 - Congrats to the Bonfire team on this milestone. I haven't tried Bonfire myself, but the Circles feature caught my attention. It made me reminiscent of Google+.
• Surf.Social is now in beta - As an avid user and curator of RSS feeds, I'd heard about Surf before but hadn't really looked into it. The beta release was announced at the conference and I quickly was able to sign up and download it. Kudos to the team on this milestone and thanks for being so responsive to my request to join the beta. I did almost no waiting in the waitlist. Once I have a chance to try it out and get familiar with it, I'll share some thoughts.
• Channels from the folks at Newsmast Foundation looks like an interesting way to curate and customize feeds. Bring Your Own Timeline Algorithm leverages semantic search to help you seamlessly leverage the power of algorithmic feeds but doing so under your control. Cool use of AI.

There were a few unconference sessions on the topic as well.

Commerce

It was great to see folks talking about enabling creators to earn a living on open platforms and the social web.

I believe Bandwagon.fm showed of an implementation of a payments and subscription system built on top of Emmisary, a social web toolkit.

Additional Resources

Here's a list of other links and projects I was exposed to during the conference.

• FediForum Advisory Board and Organizers
• An Internet of Many Autonomous Communities
• FediMeteo - Weather updates in your Fediverse Timeline
• Public Interest Technology Group (PITG)
• Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)
• A New Social
• WeDistribute FediForum Live Coverage
• BBC Human Values
• The Indie Beat Radio
• Tie Yourself to a Federated Mastodon
• The No Network Effect

As always, Cory Doctorow was great way to close out the first day. I even learned a new term, tron-pilled. Which means as a creator of a platform, you're on the side of the users.

Looking forward to tomorrow's sessions!

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