Egregoros

Ripple/XRP (a cryptocurrency company) just granted 200k USD to Social Web Foundation, "...to research sustainable revenue and operating models for digital publishers and community-run platforms":

https://interledger.org/news/interledger-foundation-awards-200000-social-web-foundation-support-decentralized-social-media

This means they will be able to influence the development of the ActivityPub specification at W3C.

For those who don't know: Interledger, WebMonetization and OpenPayments are basically the same thing, these projects were created by Ripple ~10 years ago in order to insert their cryptocurrency and related payment services into web standards. These projects are sometimes presented as independent, but this is a lie, they are not (not in 2019, not in 2025).

Needless to say, Ripple itself is a borderline scam: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/03/01/is-ripple-a-scam/. It's not even a cryptocurrency really, their infrastructure is completely centralized and no one in cryptocurrency space takes them seriously. But they have a lot of money to bribe people, so I am sure that we will hear more about their adventures soon.

RE: https://socialwebfoundation.org/?p=99982

@silverpill @kirby Now that this popped up in my timeline again, I completely forgot who social web foundation was. And now I remembered that fediblock mastodon had a meltdown about them couple months ago, after Meta became a sponsor and Mastodon got involved.

Funny thing, Flipboard, a public fediverse scraper, and IFTAS, an autojanny blocklist aggregator, are also involved.

This might be the time, when the network splits completely in half, if they manage to convince Mastodon to do another subject-esque hijack, but on a larger scale.

https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/03/27/defederation-on-the-fediverse/
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/12/content-policy-on-the-social-web/

@FourOh-LLC @kirby @silverpill I don't think it's an issue. At this point the network is split so much and diverse enough, that if an actual takeover of the protocol happens, nobody except those involved (Mastodon) would implement it.

If Mastodon wants to make a splinter network, they can, and very little people would care I think. Actual development would continue anyway through FEPs and progress on a spec alà LitePub, but built from FEPs would probably accelerate if people realized it's necessary.

Maybe pointless and endless discussions why a certain special URI should be banned would finally stop.