@eyeinthesky @evan @trwnh the charter has the correct scope. I believe Evan was responding to discussion about the Fediverse and trying to point out the venn diagram overlap of Fediverse and WG charter. As such, indieweb stuff didn't factor in to that conversation. Or at least that was my read -- I raised an eyebrow when I read the email too!

@trwnh @evan @darius So maybe the narrow WG focus is aspirational (or participant-specific) rather than official. I've read that Indieweb leaders like Tantek will be involved so that sounds like there's interest from them too. Maybe there will be somewhat independent subgroups working on different subsets of specs?

@eyeinthesky @evan @darius a lot of this is probably in https://github.com/swicg/meetings but you'll have to find it first -- it's not in one piece

@eyeinthesky @evan @darius i believe the rechartering process led up to people landing on more or less the following:

- the primary reason for rechartering is that AP people want to work on updating AP/AS2
- however, there are other specs which also need updates, but don't want to recharter separately
- the w3c liaisons advised making the charter broader rather than narrower, to avoid potentially needing to amend the charter
- the work will be driven primarily by availability of editors

iirc?

On the W3C SocialCG mailing list, I saw that @evan wrote "The WG ... is focused on a narrow core: Activity Streams and ActivityPub." The WG charter describes a much broader scope. What am I missing?

/cc @darius @trwnh
#ActivityPub

https://www.w3.org/2026/01/social-web-wg-charter.html

The new W3C #ActivityPub Working Group is not that. Or not just that. It's a "Social Web" Working Group and includes maintenance of ActivityPub, WebSub, Activity Streams, Activity Vocabulary, MicroPub, Linked Data Notifications, Webmention, and LOLA specifications. Maintaining all these disparate specs in one WG seems like it will lead to similar results as the first time this was tried (not great). What's that saying about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results? 🙃

@bengo i'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on this matter, because it seems to me like activitypub and fedi were never really on the same page, and the w3c spec diverged from the mastodon network almost before it was ever published. is there a path to fixing this within w3c cg/wg structure? what does that look like? are there any other paths?

@bengo

> It's a bad and unfair idea [to make class 3 and 4 changes] [...] Totally respect your position if you disagree

i'm not super familiar with the w3c process but from a pragmatic standpoint what do you do when userspace is already broken and nothing is class conformant?

activitystreams was intended to describe streams of activities, and activitypub was intended for publishing activities to those streams of activities. no one in fedi does this. they syndicate posts and discard activities