Why the open social web matters now

Summary

I was privileged to deliver the opening keynote at this month's FediForum, a conference for people building and supporting the open social web. My talk touched on what's happening now, drew on my experiences building Elgg and Known and investing at Matter Ventures, and gave participants three important questions to ask themselves as they build platforms and serve communities.Here's the talk in its entirety, courtesy of FediForum. The transcript follows below.VIDEOIntroductionIf we haven’t met, my name’s Ben Werdmuller. I’m based just outside of Philadelphia. Today, I’m the Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom here in the US that investigates abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions. If you remember the Clarence Thomas corruption scandal, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought’s private remarks about how he was going to go after the left, or Peter Thiel’s tax-free investment scheme, that was our reporting. I’m not a journalist but I’m very proud to support the people doing this journalistic work.But I actually started my career by building open source social networking platforms. I built a platform that allowed communities to self-host on their terms, using exactly the features that would support their needs. Elgg started in higher education, but it was used by NGOs like Greenpeace and Oxfam to train aid workers, it was used by the anti-austerity movement in Spain to help them organize, and Fortune 500 companies and at least one government used it as their primary intranet.We always wanted Elgg to federate. That was the plan from day one. It was an obvious need. There was no ActivityPub yet. We picked up on whatever tech we could — OpenID, Friend of a Friend — but ended up trying to cobble our own standard together. It wasn’t ActivityPub, and it didn’t work out quite as we’d hoped, but it began to touch on some of those underlying ideas.I built Known as a way for anyone to build fee...