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

@evan @silverpill I'm sorry to tell you, but points 2 and 4 (lack thereof) are exactly why I would say most people that have been here for years, came here in the first place. To get away from corporate accounts spam and blatant attempts at engagement farming. The general lack of money making abilities on the Fediverse is why it is attractive to many. If you want an example of the hole you, and others, are digging themselves into, look at Twitter's monetization scheme and try to browse the timelines for a few minutes. Nothing interesting happens there, it's all engagement farming for a few Musk bucks every month.

And point number one reads like a point about moderation, which SWF has talked about multiple times, and centralizing it in some way. Which goes against the very point of Fediverse/AP and all decentralized social media networks. The fact that IFTAS is one of SWF's partners makes this even more alarming.