Workshop: Public Activity? ActivityPub! - Comunitat Canòdrom

Public institutions generate public content that they ultimately publish on proprietary platforms, surrendering its exploitation and turning users into raw material for data extractivism. In contrast to this model, the Fediverse emerges as an alternative that is attracting growing interest, yet still lacks the presence of collectives, cultural organizations, and public institutions: the very actors that genuinely help shape and sustain public discourse.Public Activity? ActivityPub! is an international campaign that seeks to encourage collectives, associations, organizations, and public institutions —each at their own pace— to join the Fediverse, the alternative to proprietary social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. But it is also a political and communicative experiment, and a way of articulating a civic demand, rethinking how we relate digitally, and imagining a relationship with technology that is more aligned with collective needs. Born at Hackeja la Terra 2026 in Calafou, the initiative is structured through local and situated iterations, such as working sessions, debates, and spaces for shared imagination, where a many-fest is continuously rewritten (a text that rejects the idea of unity in favor of plurality), actions are proposed to give visibility to the campaign, and doubts, experiences, and desires around digital communication are collectively explored.For this session, we want to focus specifically on the obstacles, fears, challenges, and questions faced by collectives and public institutions when adopting ActivityPub, the protocol that enables the Fediverse. The session will begin with a brief introduction to the initiative, the workings of ActivityPub and the Fediverse, and the differences between a federated logic and the centralized model of major platforms. The campaign also aims to gather useful resources for people, collectives, and institutions interested in joining the Fediverse, understanding its logics, and escaping dependency on social platforms.