Providers of open social web offerings on FediForum Connect

A New Social

Our mission is to liberate people’s networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.

We believe that a healthy ecosystem competes on innovative features, not critical mass. The social web should be centered around people, not platforms, and artificial walls should not deny them the relationships they’ve built online.

We’re betting on services built on open protocols like ActivityPub and ATProto, and focused on making it easier to connect and move between platforms. We will work directly with developers to continue ensuring competition in the open social web, with a focus on advocating for users every step of the way.

AltStore, LLC

(Placeholder)

Automattic

Automattic is committed to democratizing publishing and the open web. Known for its robust suite of products, Automattic offers WordPress.com for website creation and management, WooCommerce for e-commerce, Jetpack for site performance and security, Tumblr for social publishing, and other tools aimed at enhancing web functionality. The company was founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg, one of WordPress’s original developers.

The company operates as a fully distributed workforce with employees across more than 90 countries. Automattic is a major contributor to the open source WordPress project and supports the WordPress Foundation.

Automattic develops and maintains the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, bringing Fediverse support to the platform that powers over 43% of websites. WordPress.com also offers built-in ActivityPub integration, making it one of the largest platforms with native Fediverse support.

Beyond ActivityPub, Automattic has been an active participant in the broader social web ecosystem, contributing to open protocols and standards that promote a decentralized and interoperable internet.

Bluesky Social, PBC

Bluesky Social is a Public Benefit Corporation. It is owned by Jay Graber and the Bluesky team. The board consists of Jay Graber; Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber/XMPP; Mike Masnick; and Kinjal Shah.

News

Bluesky’s 2025 $100M Series B Lays Foundation for Open Social Web

Bonfire Networks

Bonfire Networks is a non-profit collective building Bonfire, an open-source, modular framework for federated social networking. Rather than offering a single product, Bonfire provides composable building blocks that communities can assemble into “flavours” — preconfigured bundles of extensions tailored to specific needs, from social networking to open science collaboration.

Bonfire was designed from the ground up as a general-purpose framework for community-governed digital spaces. Development is led by a small distributed team practicing consent-based decision-making, with features co-designed alongside partner organisations.

Bonfire launched version 1.0 at the end of 2025, accompanied by a crowdfunding campaign to let communities drive what gets built next. Bonfire Social is the first flavour to ship, while other flavours — including Open Science Network, an ORCID-certified research community platform — are already in development.

Governance & Funding

Funding model: Bonfire runs as a not-for-profit project funded by donations and grants, and we don’t take venture capital. Bonfire has primarily been funded through NGI0, provided by NLnet Foundation with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme. We’ve received multiple grants over the years covering different scopes: search & discovery, federated groups, and framework stabilisation. Alongside that, we accept donations via Open Collective and have run a crowdfunding campaign paired with the 1.0 release so that communities drive what we build next.

Governance: We’re focused on community sovereignty: empowering people to shape their own digital spaces rather than being subject to corporate platforms’ algorithms and enshittification. We draw on consent-based decision-making practices such as sociocracy, with circles as a way to organise autonomous but interdependent teams, projects, organisations, and codebases.

Co-design approach: Features are co-designed with communities and stakeholders. Each feature is being co-designed with organisations bringing domain expertise, from Princeton HCI’s research on collective governance to Co-op Cloud’s work on community hosting infrastructure. We’ve also partnered with UXDI, a user experience and inclusive design course in South America, mentoring design students who use Bonfire as a case study. We use sandbox instances for community testing and co-design, and maintain a public roadmap.

Let’s build together

We invite your community to partner with the Bonfire Team to co-design a dedicated flavour for your community, which can seamlessly integrate your website, social network, and custom tools into a cohesive federated digital space. Book a call to discuss further.

Dan Supernault

hi, I’m dansup 😎

Currently building Pixelfed, an ethical and federated photo sharing platform powered by ActivityPub.

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.

Why The Lucky Stiff, Goodreads

Fedica Inc.

Fedica is a social media analytics and management service. Fedica was among the first services to support Mastodon and Bluesky, and supports other protocols/activitypub and protocols/atprotocol based platforms including Pixelfed and Peertube.

Fedica offers advanced features such as account search, audience analysis, advanced scheduling (threads, polls, crossposting), and analytics so users can see the people behind their data.

Learn more here.

FediHost

FediHost is a managed fediverse hosting company with headquarters and servers located in Montreal, Canada. FediHost manages and hosts your suite of fediverse services all in one place.

FediHost was founded in 2023 by Victor Dyotte and Paige Saunders. As a professional content creator, Paige found recreating his traditional social media presence in the fediverse both inconvenient and expensive. He partnered up with Victor and a team of contractors to build FediHost, starting with Mastodon and PeerTube, building the service for hosting similar heavy users and institutions.

Ghost Foundation

We’re a non-profit organisation building open source technology for modern publishing

Ghost was founded in April 2013 by John O’Nolan & Hannah Wolfe, with a mission to create the best open source tools for independent journalists and writers across the world, and have a real impact on the future of online media.

Today Ghost powers an incredible range of websites; from personal bloggers to large teams of writers and editors at some of the largest organisations in the world. We’ve built a sustainable business around a free core application, funded by a premium managed-service to run it on.

100,000,000+
Ghost installs to date

Behind the scenes, we’re just a group of weird, fun-loving humans who enjoy experimenting with new technology. We believe in creating as much freedom in the world as we can, and everything we do is based on that core principle.

We set Ghost up as non-profit foundation so that it would always be true to its users, rather than shareholders or investors. Our legal constitution ensures that the company can never be bought or sold, and one hundred percent of our revenue is reinvested into the product and the community.

As a public organisation we also believe in being transparent and accountable for everything we do, so we publish our live financial data for all to see.

All of our company metrics are public

Go to ghost.org/about to check them out.

It’s a sustainable open source model.

The more people use Ghost, the more demand there is for our paid service, the more revenue we make, the more great people we can hire to work on Ghost full-time, the better the software gets, the more people use Ghost… and so on. It’s a virtuous cycle that allows us to produce open source software and release it for free.

This sustainable funding model means that we don’t rely on any external donations or grant funding. The Ghost Foundation is completely self-sufficient, and is able to employ a wonderful team.

The Ghost Foundation team

We’ve been a fully remote company since 2013, long before it was common. We’ve never had an office in the history of the business. These days we span 5 continents, 16 nationalities and 15 languages.

Graze Social PBC

We equip developers with the tools to do more, enfranchise curators to shape their communities, and empower brands to own their algorithms.

Graze is committed to fostering an open web that prioritizes people, creativity, and authenticity. We’re putting the power back into the hands of those who shape it.

Mastodon gGmbH

Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit from Germany that develops the Mastodon software. Mastodon started in 2016 as an open-source project by Eugen Rochko, who, as an avid user since 2008, was dissatisfied with the state and direction of Twitter.

Believing that instant global communications were too crucial for modern society to belong to a single commercial company, he sought to build a user-friendly microblogging product that would not belong to any central authority, but remain practical for everyday use.

The first public launch occurred in October 2016. The initial support the project received through Patreon ensured that Eugen could begin working on the project full-time post-graduation. In April 2017 it received its first big break and garnered world-wide attention and press coverage.

The project was officially incorporated as a gGmbH (a German form of non-profit LLC) in 2021 but lost its non-profit status when Germany removed software projects from eligibility. In 2025, the team began the process of moving the project to a new foundation, and began implementing community governance.

Mastodon, Inc. (EIN 92-3333630) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit entity in the United States that supports the growth and operational capabilities of Mastodon, including being able to receive tax-deductible U.S. donations and in-kind support.

Newsmast Foundation Ltd

YOUR COMMUNITY. YOUR PLATFORM.

Bring your people and content together in a safer, calmer, independent space supported by an education charity.

APPS FOR CHANGE

We help mission-driven organisations move their communities to a custom platform owned and run by you. Bringing people together in safe, healthy, independent spaces with our flexible, user-friendly apps.

About Newsmast

Rebuilding digital spaces

The Newsmast Foundation helps mission-driven organisations create independent, ethical digital spaces through simple, affordable community apps. We believe communities deserve online spaces without ads, algorithms or data exploitation, spaces that reflect their values and support genuine connection.

Our goal is to make the open social web accessible to everyone, providing powerful tools without technical complexity.

What does the Newsmast Foundation do?

We help organisations build digital community by:

Building safe, independent and affordable apps with built-in open-source social media, allowing people to nurture ethical online community spaces
Creating educational content that demystifies alternatives to Big Tech on the open social web

What is the Newsmast Foundation?

The Newsmast Foundation is a UK registered charity (1205953), building and advocating for an open, ethical social media ecosystem. Our work is guided by three interlinked pillars:

Technology – developing affordable, independent, no-code tools
Advocacy – promoting awareness of the open social web as a public good
Empowerment – helping organisations and communities own their networks and data

Our mission is to demonstrate that an open-source, independent model of social media is not only viable, but better for society.

NodeBB Inc.

NodeBB Inc. is a federally incorporated corporation operating out of Toronto, Canada. NodeBB started in 2014 and was founded around providing a modern alternative to forum software that had stagnated in the decades since their original introduction.

NodeBB functions as the primary sponsor of development for the NodeBB open-source software, and also provides hosting services, maintenance & support for organizations, as well as custom theme and plugin development.

Learn more about NodeBB at https://nodebb.org/product

Learn more about us at https://nodebb.org/about

Skylight Social PBC

A Public Benefit Corporation is a company that balances profit with purpose, legally committed to creating positive social impact. Our official public benefit purpose statement is below:

“The specific public benefit purpose of the corporation is to maximize human flourishing through digital social connection by empowering creators and users to maintain ownership of their digital relationships and content, and by structuring the corporation’s business model, incentives, and operations to ensure economic success is directly tied to user wellbeing.”

Social Web Foundation

Social networks have transformed the way we communicate, bringing new opportunities and new problems. Now they’re evolving once more – into open and decentralized spaces that no one organization controls.

The Social Web Foundation works to grow this new ecosystem in an open, healthy, and sustainable way—working with technologists and the public to build a new global town square that works for everyone.

The Social Web Foundation is a fiscally-sponsored project of Exchange Point Institute, a US 501(c)3 non-profit.

WordPress Outreach Club

The WordPress Outreach Club is a group of active IndieWebCamp participants who reach out to individuals already running WordPress to add IndieWeb functionality to their existing sites.

The club assists both people who have requested conversion help and those who might be interested in adopting IndieWeb features on their existing WordPress installations. Members coordinate through the IndieWeb community and maintain a GitHub repository for tracking requests.