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Good news in privacy for ActivityPub. The first early draft of the MLS over ActivityPub specification went out this week. It’s been part of my work on our E2EE for ActivityPub project at the Social Web Foundation.

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is an IETF standard for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging. It lets people on laptops and phones communicate with each other in a secure way that no one in between can see.

MLS is designed to use pluggable lower-level protocols. This specification defines an envelope format for distributing MLS messages through the network, and an Activity Streams 2.0 profile for the packets of application data stored inside the messages.

This specification is ready for review from both ActivityPub developers and security analysts. It’s time to start making proof-of-concept implementations and testing interoperability.

The best place to make comments or report problems is on the ActivityPub E2EE GitHub repo issues list. I’m looking forward to these next steps!

Some quick news about the Long-form Text project at the Social Web Foundation. After the publication of the draft FEP b2b8 (“Long-form Text”), the Social Web Foundation has been working with implementers to get more support for the Article data type, representing multi-paragraph text on the Fediverse.

One of the big pain points has been how subscribers to long-form text from platforms like WordPress, WriteFreely, Plume and Ghost.org see the text in their microblogging platforms like Mastodon or Threads. Often, the data is abbreviated or misformatted. FEP b2b8 is, in part, a way to improve and standardize this problem.

The work in this area is bearing fruit; a few weeks ago, Shubhankar Srivastava of the Fediverse team at Threads announced that Threads is now properly displaying long-form text from Ghost. This is a big step forward in support.

The participants in the project are aiming to have better standards support from both publishers and consumers over the next few months, so I’m optimistic that other platforms will see similar improvements.