SUPER excited to announce that not only do I get to do a panel at #Fedicon2026 during #FOSSY2026 , but I now get to do my presentation on "The Fediverse Isn't..." !
I'm seriously SO excited. I hope people push back on my presentation, make points, ask questions. I want everyone walking away looking at the #Fediverse different and that includes me!
For those interested it'll be 2PM on Friday in the Fedicon room.
I hope to see you folks there and talk about the future of the open social web!
TITLE: The Fediverse Isn't...
ABSTRACT: There is a word we use loosely, sometimes carelessly. We point to servers, apps, instances, logos—and say this is it. But what if all of that is merely the furniture, not the house? What if we're measuring by the wrong units entirely?
What if the real thing—the actual Fediverse—cannot be found in any repository, cannot be forked from GitHub, cannot be described in a protocol specification?
It's not Mastodon. Not Pixelfed. Not Lemmy. Not your instance's uptime statistics or the purity of your ActivityPub implementation. These are vessels. Vessels can break, can fork, can fade into obscurity. Yet something persists through them all.
And here's the uncomfortable part: the walled gardens haven't left yet. They never did. The infrastructure exists for them to step across, to shed their walls, to breathe freely alongside everyone else. Whether they choose to is not a question of compatibility. It's a question of courage.
We have been building monuments when we should have been tending fires. Protocols don't gather. Servers don't trust each other. Tools don't make friends. People do. Communities do.
This talk will walk through what we've mistaken the Fediverse for—and more importantly, what remains hidden beneath our assumptions. We'll discuss why platform-building is a dead end, why community-building is the only path forward, and why choosing between ActivityPub and ATProto might be the very wrong battle to fight.
You came expecting answers. You'll leave with better questions. That's the point. #fedi #protocol #activitypub #ATProto #openSocial #twitter #bsky #facebook #openWeb #web #community #conference
