Fastly and the Fediverse, pt.2

We want to catalyze a shift in the Fediverse conversation where the primary focus becomes how we encourage great, healthy communities with effective, welcoming community management and brilliantly creative participants.

What Can We Expect In The Future?

This is the sequel (aka 2 Fastly 2 Fediverse) of a recent blog post where we wrote about what the Fediverse is and how we think we can help. You can read here!

If we can shift the conversation, we can all focus on the people the Fediverse is meant to serve, instead of just the technology. In the meantime, it’s an exciting time to be watching the long-simmering work of so many in the Fediverse really start to take off. 

We always like to approach a new area by talking to our community and the experts we find there. Fastly has a lot of contacts in the high performance web world, many of whom are the early adopters of technology, including many we’ve been talking to since the earliest days of the Fediverse. We're learning from the people who are in the trenches keeping Mastodon instances running, building new clients and apps for the Fediverse, and implementing ActivityPub on all things social. From these conversations, we’re putting together best practices and ideas for tools to make it easier for the Fediverse to thrive.

As we mentioned, our Fast Forward program is already starting to collaborate with some of the bigger non-profit instances to help them scale with the enormous surge in usage in recent months. (We’re supporting Mastodon’s flagships instances, Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online!) We've also been listening carefully to the feedback that Fastly's minimum pricing can be intimidating for smaller users, so we're working to both clarify and simplify those offerings to make it easier for people to experiment without any unexpected surprises.

We’re also excited about the new Fediverse servers and apps that are popping up, including some that can instantly be remixed on Glitch so you can set up your own Fediverse server incredibly easily, or new systems that can run on our edge computing platform for the ultimate in scaling and performance around the world. We are keeping a close eye on how these tools might make use of our Fanout technology, since that design pattern is so key to much of the exciting interactions made possible in the Fediverse.

Over in the Glitch community, where people have been building ActivityPub apps and tools right from the start of the Fediverse, we're expecting innovation to keep booming. Put simply: we want to be the best place in the world to make Fediverse apps and bots. If you start hacking on your Glitch Fediverse apps now, please let us know so we can help share and amplify your work — you’ll be joining an active community that’s been building cool stuff on these technologies for years. 

We'll be announcing much more exciting news which will help make it easier for anyone to run their own instance without the complexity, stress and technical burdens that most systems demand today — using totally standard open technologies. And soon, we’ll be convening some of the brilliant people who are working to implement ActivityPub, to scale and administrate massive instances, and to design the systems which dictate the way the distributed social networks operate. If you’re interested in learning more and signing up to join, let us know here. 

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking” statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to us on the date of this press release. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our future financial and operating performance, including our outlook and guidance, the demand for our platform, our go-to-market efforts and our ability to deliver on our long-term strategy. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially are detailed from time to time in the reports Fastly files with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on Fastly’s website and are available from Fastly without charge.