Currently two additional FEPs are being drafted. First drafts will be shared publicly at latest in about a month.

• Event Attendees (is pulled out of 8a8e)
• Series of Event Objects: based on recurrence rules or not and related events

#Fediverse #FEP #RecurringEvents

Two weeks later, I travelled to Sofia, Bulgaria, to attend this year’s OpenFest, give a talk and lead a workshop on how the Fediverse can help announce and discover events. Unfortunately, the talk didn’t attract much attention, as LLMs are currently drawing more of an audience. But the discussions with those in attendance were very interesting. The workshop was mainly about trying out #Gancio, #WordPress and #Mastodon and learning about the possibilities for local communities by trying out the applications themselves. I simply provided real test instances, created a list of tasks, including minor pitfalls, and, of course, answered all the questions that came up – and there were quite a few! And a big thank you to the crew and the organizing team, who were so friendly and simply wonderful throughout. #OpenFest

Yesterday, I had an awesome online meeting with the incredibly cool folks behind LAUTI, a free and open-source software for hosting small event calendars. #LAUTI is aimed at small and medium-sized communities and has a big focus on social, cultural and activist stuff. The instance for the Stuttgart area, run by the collective that develops it (@klasse_methode@chaos.social), can be found at https://eintopf.info. The developers are in the process of exploring the potential of #ActivityPub and the #Fediverse. I’m very excited and think this could be really great! In case you’ve been wondering: I see LAUTI kind of in between #Mobilizon and #Gancio. In my opinion, it would not be a competitor to them, but it could be a great addition to the Fediverse by filling this gap.

I will be at the #SFSCON in Bolzano, Italy, in two weeks. There will be a whole afternoon focusing on the Fediverse! So in case you’re there you’re invited to join my short talk about Interoperability of Events in the Fediverse: status quo and vision. Or you’re welcome any time to say hello and let’s have a chat.

After that, it’s time to sit down and get back to programming. But it’s very important to me to continually evaluate and understand what the priorities are, and to remind myself why it’s so important that we all continue our work in this area.

Events are at the heart of social life and deserve to be treated accordingly in the Fediverse. […]

In addition, we will also investigate the Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider Specifications (FASPs) for discoverability and filtering of public events.

• Improvements and new features for the Event Bridge for ActivityPub plugin for WordPress
  Continued development to maintain, fix issues, enhance, and expand functionality.
• Work on Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEPs)
  Ensuring a robust final status of FEP-8a8e and focus on recurring and irregularly scheduled events.
• Support for event interoperability in other Fediverse applications
  Contribute to other Fediverse applications and help them to explore and improve support for Event objects. For example, @linos@graz.social has outlined a potential roadmap for Mastodon.
• Contribution to GatherPress
  Active involvement in the GatherPress project — a modern and truly FLOSS community oriented WordPress event plugin — to ensure full ActivityPub compatibility, including RSVP support and advanced federation features.
• Community engagement and outreach
  Participation in conferences, public talks, and direct conversations to foster knowledge exchange, gather feedback, and grow the ecosystem around federated events.

Additional updates and technical details will be shared soon. Input, testing, and collaboration from interested parties are always welcome. Or if you know any conferences we should attend, let us know.

It now covers:

• Required attributes
• Events with Open End
• Timezone
• Physical and Virtual Locations
• Event status
• RSVP (Attendee Management)
• Event Banner and Poster Images
• Event Categories
• Discoverability
• Event Organizers
• Upcoming Events Collection for ActivityPub actors
• Term Definitions

Many thanks again to all reviewers and co-editors:

@lesion @heiglandreas @naturzukunft @laurin

We warmly welcome further feedback from the communities of #Friendica, #Mobilizon, #Hubzilla, and other Fediverse platforms supporting events.
If you’re working on such an application or are part of these communities, your insights would be very valuable! @developers @mobilizon

Smaller instances in particular often lack reactions to content published in the Fediverse. In principle, this is not a bad thing. Nevertheless, it makes sense for both servers and clients to be able to retrieve a complete comment tree in some scenarios (possibly at the request of a user).

To this end, we have submitted a first draft in a pull request to the Upstream #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress. In this case, we benefit from the already existing comment management of the WordPress core and only list approved comments in the replies collection.

Mobilizon was the first Fediverse application with true event federation. #Gancio has very limited ActivityPub capabilities, partly by design, but is working on an enhanced federation, and other services like #Friendica have a very different approach to events: their implementation focuses on sending invitations rather than publishing events. #Pleroma might get initial event support soon and it’s fork #Rebase already implemented it. As is usual with any software, you will find a lot of small bugs if you have not done any tests beforehand. In the case of Mobilizon, this was not possible since there were no alternative platforms to do the tests with in the past, especially if it comes to the instance-to-instance federation, so the only option was to test the Federation with other Mobilizon servers. We seem to be the first and we are fascinated and incredibly grateful for the willingness and prioritization that such issues have among the other developers (thanks to tcit and les). The issues may seem small, but they have a big impact: 304, 33, 321, 1509, 1507, 1392, 1385, 1388, 1387, 1378, 1376.

The other deciding factor for us was that we didn’t know how close the interaction with the upstream WordPress ActivityPub project would be. The exchange of ideas and the desire for a joint solution is strong. We would like to thank @pfefferle again for the regular exchange, his ideas and inspiration, without his commitment to the community our project would be less sustainable.

Tasks done (almost)

• We published a repository that aims to make it easy for other developers, including ourselves to start developing and debugging WordPress along with Mobilizon.
• We have created a pull request to add management of various ActivityPub transformers to the admin interface. The current implementation basically works, but we have a lot to polish and improve on our roadmap.
• Using that patched ActivityPub plugin we explored writing transformers for two popular event plugins, this gave us a lot insight on what is important. These transformers already have fundamental compatibility with Moblizon.
• Updating our About us page showing some information who we are.

Upcoming tasks

• Implement FEP-2677: Identifying the Application Actor
• Implement the followers list of the application actor in the admin UI along with the ability to reject, approve, and remove followers. We are very inspired by how #PeerTube has solved this in the admin UI. This of course includes a an option as:manuallyApprovesFollowers that can be set for an ActivityPub actor within WordPress.
• Write an initial draft of the user documentation informing about custom ActivityPub transformers and instance-to-instance federation with Mobilizon. The target audience will be non-tech people. Parts of this will also be used as a non-tech description of our project.
• Improve the admin UI and propose a solution to handle the settings for each transformer, if there are any.
• Write more transformers for other popular event plugins to discover common pitfalls.

If you have any questions, ideas, or would like to help us, for example by testing our progress in case your are running a WordPress site with events yourself, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We don’t care if you have technical experience or what your background is: any kind of involvement is valuable to us.