The open social web — ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and the loose federation of tools growing up around them — needed something most protocols never get: an institution whose only job is to look after it. Not a company with a product to sell, and not a single platform's roadmap. A foundation.
I helped found and shape the Social Web Foundation to do exactly that — convening the people building the protocol, supporting the tooling that makes it usable, and making the case, publicly and often, for why the social web should stay open, plural and interoperable.
It's slow, unglamorous, institution-building work — the kind that rarely makes headlines but that the last twenty years of the open web have taught me is exactly the work that matters most in the long run.