2026-07-11 –, Open Social Space
How can social media and messaging protocols become more decentralized? We will review the state of the art of distributed interactive media protocols, including Secure Scuttlebutt, Nostr, ATP, decentralized revisions to ActivityPub (FEPs), and Decentralized Trust Graphs, and its relationship to local-first software.
The dominant protocols for "decentralized" interactive media – ActivityPub and Bluesky – are heavily dependent on federated or centralized servers in practice. But distributed social networks like Secure Scuttlebutt and Nostr have their own problems, like key management, recovery, and multi-device support. Meanwhile, some Fediverse Enhacement Proposals (FEPs) aim to make social media more distributed, bridging these two worlds. We will survey this landscape and review current projects. Topics will include:
Why key management is essential for security, but problematic in Nostr and Secure Scuttlebutt
How verifiable key histories like did:plc (Bluesky) and KERI make key management easier
Why multi-device support is difficult for decentralized social media and messaging
How ActivityPub actors can declare identity keys, independent of any server (FEP-521a)
How ActivityPub actors can sign activities (FEP-8b32), making them portable and tamper-proof
Current projects implementing some or all of these FEP proposals
How these FEPs and similar cryptographic techniques support "local first" software
How content moderation works (or could work) in distributed media platforms
The interactions between distributed/permissionless identity and server-owned identity
How decentralized trust graphs (DTG) enable privacy-first social graphs
Zach is a designer and technologist based in Oakland, California. He was previously the designer of Meedan's Check, and a founding engineer at Ethos Life.
zionillinois@mastodon.social / zionillinois@bluesky
Hi. My name is Stefano De Vuono (he/him). I'm sometimes a San Francisco-based and sometimes Earth-based software engineer. I've often straddled the line between art and technology, design and code. I wrote my first university essay on emacs on my new Linux install. I've worked as a web (and sometimes embedded hardware) developer a digital art startup, where I designed and patented a digital image security system.
Whether helping a client revamp their developer tooling, shortening onboarding from two weeks to less than a day, collaborating with artists to develop interactive installations, or mentoring junior engineers, I have a passion for making things better Currently, I'm open to senior or staff-level engineering roles, ideally with a focus on backend or infrastructure work.
I'm also open to collaborating on interesting projects or chatting about math! Please don't hesitate to reach out! You can find me. I believe in you.