Notes from someone who's withstood White House demands to stop an explosive story—and who once even had a 60 Minutes piece spiked
Towards a bigger, better fediverse
Working full time on the Social Web
In January 2026, I will begin working full time in my role as Director at the Social Web Foundation. I am looking forward to the challenge of growing this young non-profit and fulfilling our mission to make a bigger, better Fediverse.
As a refresher: I have been working in the area of federated social networks since starting Identi.ca in 2008. Federated social networks are social platforms that let users on one platform connect to and interact with users on another platform. Linked up with open standard protocols, these platforms together form a Social Web that puts people first.
In 2018, I was a co-author of the ActivityPub standard for social network interoperability. I currently maintain the spec for the W3C and develop extensions for it. In 2024, I wrote ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web for O’Reilly Media. And I co-founded the Social Web Foundation to further encourage the use of ActivityPub in social networks.
For the last year, I’ve been working nights, lunchtimes and weekends on SWF while holding down my full-time role as Director of Open Technology at the Open Earth Foundation. I love working at OEF; the organization build Open Source software to help cities fight climate change. I have felt very fulfilled in my work there, and I’ve made really strong friendships with the team. It’s been a very special place to work that has changed how I think teams can be.
But over the last year, SWF has had some really amazing opportunities, and in 2026 we’ll be making some big steps forward for the Social Web. I can’t keep doing both jobs, and I feel like, after 4 years at OEF, I’ve done what I can to build up that organization, and I am ready to start on this next one.
It will feel good to have my full attention focused on the Social Web. I’m looking forward to seeing my Open Source friends at FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels at the end of January where I’m helping to organize the Social Web track. I’m speaking at Princeton mid-February, and I’ll be in the Bay Area at the beginning of March. All this time, I’ll be working hard to get the next version of ActivityPub released and to push out several software projects to make the Social Web more fun and interesting.
Thanks to everyone who’s put time, effort and help into the SWF. Thanks to my coworkers at OEF for encouraging me on my next steps in my career. Thanks to my wife and family for tolerating yet another leap into the void.
I hope you have as exciting a New Year as I will.
View Stewart Cheifet's obituary, find service dates, and sign the guestbook.
"Stewart Douglas Cheifet, age 87, of Philadelphia, PA, passed away on December 28, 2025.
Stewart is best known for producing and hosting the nationally broadcast PBS television programs Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe. Computer Chronicles aired from 1984 to 2002, producing more than 400 episodes that documented the rise of the personal computer from its earliest days. Net Cafe, which aired from 1996 to 2002, explored the emergence of the internet. Both programs were widely regarded as visionary, capturing the evolution of personal computing and the early development of the digital age."
Chris Geidner flags today an appearance by CBS News’ Chief Legal Correspondent...
You don’t bring a persuasive argument to a gunfight.
all meaning has collapsed in our post-literate society and i wrote a bunch of useless, useless words about it. read it if you, like me, are one of a diminishing minority who still reads www.theverge.com/policy/84960...
The year politics became brain...
Windows 11 is having its worst year yet, with nonstop bugs, broken updates, and unwanted features pushing users to the breaking point.
I had no idea that Windows was doing fractal incremental feature rollouts now and it sounds like an absolute goddamn disaster for anyone who needs to support a senior with a computer.
I did not expect the year of linux on the desktop to happen because everyone else in the world started fucking up their own shit in catastrophic, undiagnosable, incomprehensible ways.
This year, we fought back against the return of a terrible idea that hasn’t improved with age: site blocking laws. More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites ...
"More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was massive": Site Blocking Laws Will Always Be a Bad Idea: 2025 in Review https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/site-blocking-laws-will-always-be-bad-idea-2025-review
A way to build a habit out of what's important.
Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.
© 2021 IN2 Digital Innovations GmbH . All rights reserved.