Why This Came from Public Money

On June 3, 2026 the European Commission adopted the European Technological Sovereignty Package, with the EU Open Source Strategy attached. Alongside commitments on cloud infrastructure, workplace applications, and secure email, the Communication on European Tech Sovereignty says the Commission will “strengthen the open source social media space by supporting open and decentralised social media solutions and platforms.” And notes that it already runs its own Mastodon instance at ec.social-network.europa.eu and plans to expand its user base.

Minutillo says European funding is mostly focused on new development rather than maintaining what exists, and open source needs far more of the second than it gets. In late 2025, Bonfire asked its own community to crowdfund maintenance rather than waiting on public funds; this made the following year of co-design work possible. Minutillo’s next criticism is sharper: Funders tend to pay against a list of features you promised to build, which assumes you already know what people need. The research that would tell you – the co-design sessions, and the workshops with the communities who will use the thing – are the parts almost nobody funds.

But comparing public-sourced projects to venture capital shows clear advantages. Lemmer-Webber’s research organization, the Spritely Institute, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization, a US legal form for organizations operating in the public interest – her co-editor Tallon now leads development. Their argument for the structure is that venture capital eventually has to extract money from somewhere, and that will usually be the thing that was supposed to stay open. The organization stewarding the foundational layer cannot be a business: If the internet had remained in the hands of companies like AT&T, it would never have become a general-purpose network, even though contributing research like ARPANET was funded by public works in the first place.

Bonfire’s version comes from the other side of the table. Under venture capital, Minutillo says, the destination is enshittification: the slow degradation of a platform as money is extracted. De Borniol describes the meetings they would be having – how to rebrand advertising that Fediverse users would tolerate, or whether sponsored posts could work. Instead, two people can maintain the project, which means they’re under no obligation to grow in order to keep it running. Their first years were funded by NGI Zero program grants, and income now comes increasingly from custom development and support for partner communities. More than 20 people have contributed to the project directly, with an additional 315 backers between the crowdfunding campaign and the project’s open funding page; about 50 more people have supported the project with non-monetary contributions.

The mechanism that spreads the Fediverse is more specific than “open source,” and de Borniol is careful about the distinction. Bonfire is licensed under the AGPL, the variant designed to cover software delivered over a network. It is also modular with no core at all: 66 extensions, 10 packaged flavors, and 35 libraries. The team maintains each one in its own repository, so a feature built for one community can be picked up by another without dragging along a monolith. Clients are told that everything built for them will be open and shared.

Minutillo returns to the comparison anyway. Venture capital would have produced radically different software, he says, even if the first version had looked similar or even better, because a funded team can invest in user experience in ways two people cannot. And then it would be owned by somebody with an exit to plan for. What Bonfire wants next is not a bigger Bonfire, but a network of cooperatives covering the whole supply chain of a community’s digital space: hosting, moderation, design, development, and translation, with the people doing the work sharing in what comes in. “Federation, we don’t see it as just a technical thing,” de Borniol says. “We see it as a social, economic, and political tool as well.”

What a Day of Computing Sounds Like

A few years ago, a professor asked Lemmer-Webber to talk with a group of undergraduates about what computing had been like when she was growing up. She turned the question around and asked them to describe their previous day with computers. Every one of five students answered with a list of corporation names. “If we succeed, that is not your experience with computing,” she says. “Your experience of computing is: I am working with my friend on this project, we wanted to collaborate in this way, and we did it.” Corporations still exist in that description. They are simply not the story.

She sets this deliberately against the argument that people will feel capable again once enough artificial intelligence is put in their hands. A system nobody can see into teaches nobody anything. “We are undervaluing capacity to participate in their own self-empowerment,” she says, “and to build systems that can help people” do that.

Federated social media’s contribution to digital autonomy runs wider than another place to post. Public money funded a supply of parts and put it where anyone could reach it. Researchers used it to start rebuilding scientific publishing, a magazine’s readers used it to turn an audience into a membership, and a town can use it to let a river tell everyone what the water is doing. None of those had a commercial version to copy, and all of them exist.

Links for further reading:

• ActivityPub, W3C Recommendation (W3C)
• Communication on European Tech Sovereignty, accompanied by an EU Open Source Strategy, COM(2026) 503 (European Commission)
• The EU Open Source Strategy (European Commission)
• EU Voice and EU Video: End of the pilot (European Data Protection Supervisor)
• ActivityPub projects supported by NGI Zero (NLnet)
• ActivityPub: from decentralized to distributed social networks, Rebooting the Web of Trust V (2017)
• Announcing Bonfire for communities: groups and tools to organise together (Bonfire Networks)
• Islands: An Opt-In Federated Network (Oliphant)
• The Archipelago: An Island Network in Practice (Oliphant)
• Spritely Networked Communities Institute
• Implementing Encrypted Messaging over ActivityPub (Social Web Foundation)

Links for your toolkit:

A minimum practice for a community considering its own space: Decide who is responsible for running it before you open it, decide what happens to everyone’s data and accounts if it closes, and tell members both answers in writing on the first day. Federated software makes leaving survivable, but only if somebody committed to the warning period in advance.

• Bonfire
• Open Science Network
• Mastodon
• PeerTube, video
• Pixelfed, photographs
• Funkwhale, music
• Lemmy, forums and link aggregation
• Mobilizon, events
• Owncast, live streaming
• Castopod, podcasting
• Co-op Cloud, shared deployment tools and recipes
• CoQuest, a hosting cooperative
• social.coop, a cooperatively governed instance
• FediTest, the Fediverse Test Suite
• The European Commission’s Mastodon instance

This article was made possible by support from NLnet Foundation through Linux New Media’s Topic Subsidy Program (https://www.linuxnewmedia.com/Topic_Subsidy). NLnet Foundation is the Coordinator of the NGI Zero Consortium. NGI Zero programs are made possible with financial support from the European Commission.