2026-07-10 –, Hackers Lab
The ActivityPub social API is a standard client-to-server interface for building innovative social applications. In this hands-on workshop, you'll learn how to create an ActivityPub Web client that will work on any compliant ActivityPub server.
ActivityPub, the distributed social networking standard, has two key components: the federation protocol, which lets servers share users' data with other servers across the Internet, and the social API, which lets client applications create and modify data on the server itself. The social API makes it easier to create interesting social experiences without the hassle of building, scaling and securing a network server.
In this workshop, we'll step through creating a microblogging app using the ActivityPub social API, including authorization with OAuth 2.0, reading the home timeline, posting new notes, and liking, sharing and commenting on posts. At the end of this session, you should have enough experience to create your own cool applications with ActivityPub.
Hands-on participants should be familiar with programming with Web APIs; Web client development with JavaScript; forking GitHub repositories; hosting Web applications with GitHub Pages. Attendees who want to just sit back and watch are also welcome.
Evan is the Research Director at SWF. He is the co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and the Activity Streams 2.0 data format. Sometimes called “The Father of the Fediverse,” Evan made the first-ever post on the social web in May 2008. He founded the identi.ca website and GNU Social software, as well as coauthoring the OStatus specification. As chair of the W3C’s Social Web Working Group, he led the development of ActivityPub and AS2 into official standards. He won the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2009 as “Best Social Networking Hacker.” He is the author of “ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web” from O’Reilly Media.