Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/January 23

Today in 2018 the W3C published an open standard for social networking. ActivityPub enables decentralization and interoperability (federation) between social networking services (similar to the network structure of e-mail) and can thus reduce dependence on providers and promote competition. It allows users to interact across services and maintain their social graphs, which can break the vendor lock-in caused by the network effect. ActivityPub-enabled services have largely remained a parallel universe, but some existing commercial services have joined, and there has been a significant surge in popularity following the takeover of Twitter.