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+===============================================
+ ActivityPub and the federated social networks
+===============================================
+
+I believe a lot of people here care about Free Software, and I guess
+that a number of those also care about freedom in general computing,
+which nowadays involves more and more things running on computers that
+we can't control.
+
+Today I'm talking about one of those things: social networks.
+
+They are a pretty useful thing, enabling an egalitarian access to
+communication, and by stretching a bit the definition to include email
+one can claim that they are involved in enabling the existence of
+projects like debian itself.
+
+They are also, sadly, a great way to attract people to one's platform in
+order to squeeze every bit of sellable personal data out of them.
+
+If this was about showing ads to make people choose between two
+equivalent brands of, say, pasta, it wouldn't be a big deal, but that
+data has already been used to manipulate elections and it has been
+leaked multiple times and made available to criminals.
+
+On the topic of why social networks as a business model are toxic and
+a cost on society, I'd recommend reading Cory Doctorow's article “Zuck’s
+Empire of Oily Rags”, which is much better written than I could do.
+
+Free Software has been offering technical tools to solve this for a long
+time, by developing federated, self-hostable server software to allow
+people to have the advantages of social networks while keeping control
+of their data and experience; like email, except designed in the current
+millenium.
+
+The first such projects I know of were StatusNet in 2008, Friendica and
+Diaspora in 2010, so federated social networks have been available for
+more than 10 years.
+
+When I say networks, plural, of course I mean that there were a few
+incompatible protocols, none of the platforms were completely mature,
+and the kind of community they attracted meant that the federated social
+networks back then were a great place to find people who were interested
+in talking about federated social networks. I was there, I was happy
+with it, but I'd be the first to admit that something like that wasn't
+going to help more than a tiny minority of people.
+
+Since then, things have improved. Helped also by the policy changes of a
+few centralised platforms, the number of people, and most importantly
+the variety of people on the fediverse, and specifically mastodon have
+grown. 
+The raw numbers are still low compared to the centralized platforms, so
+you're not likely to find your old school mates on it, or any other
+specific person you already know, but it's a great place to get to know
+new people that share your interests, no matter what they are.
+One day I've even stumbled on somebody who posted about soccer!
+something that in the early, nerd-biased days would have been pretty
+rare.
+
+The mastodon community also developed a set of community rules and
+expectations about moderation which helps managing the social
+interactions between instances with wildly different content rules.
+
+As for the technical part, in January 2018 the World Wide Web Consortium
+released the ActivityPub standard which, while not perfect, has given a
+big boost to interoperability between different projects.
+This was followed by the summer of activity pub, when the ecosystem
+grew significantly with the birth of many projects, often centered on
+specific usecases, such as pixelfed for pictures or peertube for videos.
+
+Having such a standard also gives a platform for experimentation: new
+projects can interoperate with all of the existing fediverse users,
+helping them overcome the network effect in favour of existing
+platforms.
+
+For the fediverse to work as designed, however, it is important that it
+remains composed of many small instances rather than having a few big
+ones that control most of its users, and here Debian could help.
+Having packages in debian for a federated server would help more people
+install and maintain a server, encouraging the existence of instances
+sized for families and groups of friends.
+
+Sadly, as web apps, they tend to be pretty hard to package, and thus at
+the moment work on those is mostly stalled; there are however a wiki page
+and an IRC channel for people who are interested in improving this
+situation.
+
+Another thing that Debian is doing, with way more success, is running
+instances of a few federated platforms for Debian Contributors, but here
+I'll let Rhonda talk, as she's actually part of the team doing so.