Check out Fedify. There are still advantages to bespoke protocol implementation, but this is the closest we've gotten so far to "protocol-in-a-box", and it's great.
As a biased[0] party I must mention that the Go programming language has at least one and a half libraries in the form of Go-Fed[1] and Go-ActivityPub[2].
Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, the OStatus protocol, and co-author of ActivityPub, is launching a dedicated nonprofit for the purpose of advocating for and supporting the Fediverse.
We just sat down and wrote a review about NeoDB, and it's a fascinating project. In a nutshell, it's a federated user review system for cultural works. Not only does it log books, but also movies, tv shows, video games, board games, music, podcasts, and more. The project is pursuing some really interesting ideas through data integrations, and the ability to import archives from other services to easily rebuild your social graph.
PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project's lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.
In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: “Why didn’t the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?”
Here’s some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don’t consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.
I'm actually writing a piece about this today for We Distribute. The long and short of it is that it's not impossible, there's just a lot of red tape.
Whether it's a government entity, or a large corporation, you're going to have the same issues with procurement:
* Finding software that fulfills requirements on auditing and security requirements.
* Selecting a vendor that fulfills a laundry-list of contractual obligations / legal requirements. They'll need to honor comprehensive Service Level Agreements for government access, and be proactive in patching, deployment, and mitigation.
* Integration with a government-grade Single Sign-On solution like ID.me
* Onboarding resources for agencies and individuals, plus tooling for social media teams
* Setting policies that respect the First Amendment, while also moderating things like hate speech, pornography, etc
The other hurdle for this is funding and staffing to run all of this.
None of this is necessarily impossible, and I think something like this could be really beneficial. But, I don't think the ecosystem of the Fediverse (from a platform or vendor perspective) is necessarily there yet. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Speaking as someone who does the technical bits of these kinds of integrations/implementations under FedRAMP, the technical issues are not the real barrier, the real impossibility is the last item, policy. There is no path to a successful/sustainable moderation policy in a non-corrupt administration.
Seems like a standard laundry list of requirements and hoops that would need to be jumped through for any other software / service. If they can do this for their email, accounting, database, nuclear submarine, etc. software I'm sure they could do it for some "social media" software.
Technically, yes, that's totally doable. However, whatever NGO is operating the instance would still have to get buy-in from administrations and officials that this is the server to join. You'd still likely have contractual and service-level obligations.
But I'd imagine that it's probably less red-tape than a government entity self-hosting their own Fediverse infra.
We talked to Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed! Ryan has a lot of experience in working with a variety of decentralized social web protocols, including IndieWeb, ActivityPub, AT Protocol, and Nostr, and has a lot of interesting thoughts on making them talk to each other.
ActivityPub-WordPress is a plugin sponsored by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Recently, they made a 1.0 release with some quality-of-life changes that makes integration easy and approachable to most people.
We wrote a guide going over how to get set up, along with the variety of configuration options that can be used to adjust the output.
