The Fediverse in Real Life

Just a quick note for my readers: I meant to write and publish this like two weeks ago, but my summer schedule of relaxing and doing nothing got in the way of that. I'm sorry. This post can be thought of as a companion piece to my experience at Fediverse House back in March.

FediCon took place a few weeks ago, and it provided a golden opportunity for a large part of the community: to come together, meet face-to-face, and talk about our hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations, and convictions. It also gave us a chance to know each other more deeply, not just as 3D representations of our social avatars, but as individual people compromised of stories.

Meeting online friends in person, especially at scale, can feel very weird. Suddenly, you're surrounded by people who are all part of the same broad movement that you are, and they want to talk enthusiastically about the things you really care about, possibly for hours on end. This is great, fantastic even, but can be extremely demanding on your social battery.

Conference Coverage

The conference itself was great, and was located on a public college campus at UC Robinson Square in Vancouver. Attendees were extremely enthusiastic, and very willing to get into all the nitty-gritty details of the Fediverse, including where it's going, what problem areas are present, and how we can solve these problems as a community.

We benefited from extensive live coverage by attendees. We made use of collective hashtags like #FediCon, and even set up a wall where everyone could catch up on the conversation. This was pretty great!

There were some excellent talks, and the organizer and I have been slowly uploading the videos to PeerTube, as time allows. We haven't gotten everything up yet, but we're really close. Charles dealt with the editing, transcoding, and uploads, and I made all of the thumbnails and cleaned up the captions for accessibility.

Meeting Friends in Meatspace

I'm very privileged to say that I connected with some of my dearest friends on the Fediverse. In fact, I flew up to Vancouver on my birthday, and was very surprised at the Speakers' Dinner to be presented with a birthday cake.

This was awesome, and extremely humbling, and I'm reminded of how many amazing people are working together to build this thing. This isn't just software engineers, technologists, or enthusiasts, but true friends. Kind people with hopes and dreams, who have encyclopedic knowledge and incredible skills, working together to make beautiful things possible.

Every day, I tried to maximize the amount of time spent with my friends and colleagues. Whether it was getting coffee with Anuj Ahooja from A New Social, hearing Michael Foster's amazing stories about breaking ground with tech in the early 2000's, or geeking out about music theory with Ben Pate, I was having the time of my life. Jaz-Michael King and I basically killed gallons and gallons of dark Vancouver beer, wandered the streets, and shared our life stories.

Just good vibes all around. I've said it once and I'll say it again: these are the people I want to work with for the rest of my life.

Sean Runs a Panel

One new experience that I can cross off my bucket list: I ran a panel for the event! While I've been part of a crowd-facing panel before with BackerKit, I ended up acting as the host this time, fielding questions and fostering conversation amongst six people who are probably way smarter than I am.

I'm honestly very proud of being able to do this. My little blog and 15 years of experience got me here, and I was able to talk shop on stage in front of about 200 people. I think I did a pretty good job!

Key Takeaways

As always, here's an overview of some of the main talking points I got out of this event. There was a lot going on, and it's not possible for me to remember all of it, but here's what stuck with me:

• ActivityPub C2S API - Evan Prodromou was very much talking up the Client-to-Server Protocol API for ActivityPub. There are reasons that it hasn't caught on, but there are absolutely valid use-cases worth exploring with it. We could absolutely build a universal Single Sign-On with it, which could lead to more interesting client applications and integration with the Fediverse.
• AT Protocol's Killer Apps - Look, there's some rivalry between some parts of the Fediverse and some parts of Bluesky. However, there's some really brilliant ideas on the other network, and it was super cool seeing a showcase of how many different clients AtProto can power. Boris Mann did a great presentation on some of them. It was eye-opening.
• Payments and Monetization - This often comes across as a big scary no-no word for a big part of the Fediverse, but there's some legitimately interesting developments happening with paying server admins, artists, and developers. I've written a bit about what Bandwagon and CrowdBucks are doing, and hopeful some collaboration can emerge between projects.
• Cooperative Organizations in the Fediverse - There's a small but growing trend of Fediverse instances being owned by nonprofit cooperative organizations, and these have had some interesting impacts. The main goal is to provide infrastructure and services for local communities, and SocialBC and CoSocial are two really great examples of how to start small and really engage the world around you, at a hyperlocal scale.
• We're Getting Our Shit Together - Not completely, not all at once. But, I think a lot of us were comparing notes on how to overcome some of the classic problems that have plagued the Fediverse and decentralized communications in general. Some of this is subtle, like realizing we need to produce comprehensive documentation for ActivityPub implementors, or that we need to get better about mentoring newcomers into the fold. However, some of our collaborations are starting to bear fruit, and that's exciting.

Anyway, I was originally apprehensive about attending this event when I first heard about it. I didn't have my passport, wasn't sure how my schedule was going to shape up, and felt uneasy about how expensive this journey might be. Being able to attend something like this in person is a massive privilege, and that needs to be acknowledged. I'm so, so glad that I went, and got to connect with so many amazing human beings. I will definitely make an effort to go to the next one!