Today's fediverse: a good start, but there's more to do

ActivityPub remains, to this day, the most successful decentralized social networking platform to date: dozens of interoperable implementations, thousands of servers, millions of users, all speaking over the same protocol in what's today called the "fediverse" (federated social web). The modern-day fediverse is an impressive achievement, but it also leaves many issues to be addressed. Servers can go down, content can disappear and users can lose access to their identity. Authorization mechanisms are under-specified and rich interactions are fairly limited. This talk, by the two primary editors of the ActivityPub specification, explores where we think the fediverse should go and how we're building a future for "secure collaboration" technology at the Spritely Institute.