SWF is glad to support European.social getting off the ground in Berlin today. This new association brings together Fediverse and other open protocol communities to build real digital autonomy for European governments, companies, organisations and individuals.

Open Source and open standards aren’t uniquely European, of course. Everyone around the planet deserves to exercise their autonomy on the open social web. But the freedoms and opportunities that open standards bring — to own and operate services that can stay connected on a first-class basis to the rest of the social web — are especially important as the balance of technology power shifts globally.

SWF supports European efforts to build domestic social networking infrastructure from the bottom up — connecting companies, civil society organisations, universities, cities, families and friend groups together into an integrated social web. We believe ActivityPub is essential technology for this vision — a Web-based technology for the Social Web. We will continue to participate in events as well as software and networking projects that bring communities together in Europe.

Thanks to our partners and colleagues, especially Michael Foster of Newsmast and Björn Staschen of Save Social, who’ve been so important in getting the European Social Association launched and moving forward. It’s been especially good to work with people from other protocol communities to connect Europeans across technological boundaries with bridging, dual-stack and other strategies.

SWF also hope that the movement for European social network autonomy can catalyse further digital autonomy movements around the world. Already in Canada and Brazil, we’ve seen the beginning of efforts by social network operators to collaborate with each other and partner with domestic businesses and government agencies to promote locally-owned and operated networks. We hope to see this continue in other regions: East Asia, Africa, West and South Asia, around the Americas and Oceania.

Regional and national digital autonomy is one of many important lenses to understand the Fediverse movement. We’re looking forward to being a leading part of this conversation as it spreads worldwide.