Parts and wholes

Just landed in London for the event later this week and poring through the news from FOSDEM where there were many interesting sessions: how to level up the Fediverse, improving the distribution of hashtags across the social web, updates on Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) and Bonfire, decentralized public broadcasting, how to use AT Proto… and much more!

Not to mention news coming out of EU Open Source Week which had heavy participation from Drupal, the open source content management system, as well as different agencies looking to fund European initiatives to help them gain back their digital sovereignty.

This past week has run the gamut: from open source hackers working on novel protocols to nation states rethinking their digital infrastructure.

But it is when there is an alignment of incentives both at the individual and collective levels that we get long-lasting change. Those of us thinking about the future of the web must consider the micro and macro trends, and where to align our efforts as we build people power on the open web.

Really looking forward to the conversations at PfP✨London this week.

— PfP✨ Team

Audience 🤝 Content

Laurens Hof (speaking at PfP✨London Stakeholder Forum) reviewed 204 projects in the AT Protocol ecosystem to assess how "Europe can incrementally build sovereign capacity within an open global network, ensuring that European standards and values are embedded in the foundations of future social infrastructure." (A similar ActivityPub analysis is coming soon.) https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-future-of-social-media-may-be

In the 2010s many news sites had removed comments from articles — too much of a liability! But comments can draw readers away from big platforms to your property which can create a valuable community (the FT found commenters up to 48 times more engaged). Trust & Safety tooling and practice has come a long way, but Ben Whitelaw writes that in order to have a successful comment section we need to invest in comment editors too. https://newpublic.substack.com/p/why-newsrooms-are-taking-comments

A tale of the evolution of SEO on an LLM-mediated web, an acronym gold rush, and how the more things change, the more they stay the same: “Google, however, continues to send substantial traffic to websites, even if the percentage is declining. … abandoning Google isn’t just premature - it’s risky. https://lilyraynyc.substack.com/p/a-reflection-on-seo-and-ai-search

The BBC made a deal with YouTube. Even a platform as big as the BBC still feels the gravity of the biggest media platform on the planet. https://variety.com/2026/tv/global/bbc-confirms-landmark-youtube-deal-1236636483/

❎ Negative externalities

From a dataset of 1167 news sites, Nieman Lab found 241 explicitly blocking some or all of 4 Internet Archive crawlers. News publishers are blocking the archiving efforts of the biggest online library because it represents a backdoor for AI crawlers to paywalled content. This ultimately is a question of “respectful scraping” https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scraping-concerns/

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is forcing Google to use distinct User-Agents for SEO vs. AI crawlers. This will give publishers new levers over access, training, and managing load for AI bots. https://blog.cloudflare.com/uk-google-ai-crawler-policy/

The Maybe has a new mini-series on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The first episode shows how corporations can end up controlling "open" protocols, illustrating the importance of protocol governance. https://www.themaybe.org/podcast/the-vaporstate-a-digitised-india

🗓️ Upcoming Events

The News Product Alliance Summit is announced for October, focusing "on solutions to build the audience intelligence and AI infrastructure" for modern newsrooms. https://newsproduct.org/summit

Project Liberty and the Social Web Foundation are holding a very PfP✨ aligned event called "Building a New Social Web: Protocols, People and the Promise of a Democratized AI-Data Economy." This is a side event at the AI Impact Summit happening in Delhi. https://luma.com/25chdoy8

The next IETF AIPREF working group meeting is happening in Toronto (and Online) April 14-16. https://ietf-wg-aipref.github.io/wg-materials/interim-26-04/