I want to draw attention to an administrative process at the W3C Social Web Community Group (SocialCG), the standards group that manages ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 and a number of other open social networking standards. The group is considering a new charter to define how decisions are made and how the members work together. This might seem like a minor process, but it’s actually part of a bigger deal for the Fediverse. To see why, you need to understand the structure of the W3C.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is the standards organization that specifies the Web platform, like HTML (kind of), CSS, and RDF. It also is the organization that standardized ActivityPub and AS2 in 2019. The W3C process requires a special kind of group, called a Working Group, to create official recommendations on the part of the organization. Working Groups can have members nominated by the W3C member organizations, as well as some Invited Experts.

The W3C has another structure, called a Community Group, that’s much looser. Anyone can join a community group, as long as they sign the Contributor License Agreement, which grants a copyright and patent license to the work they do with the group. Community Groups don’t produce formal recommendations in the W3C; they can produce Community Group Reports, which can be documents, software, or really anything.

So, the Social Web Working Group created and edited ActivityPub and AS2 back in the mid-2010s. The group had a charter that extended into 2018; it was extended to early 2019 so the work on ActivityPub could be finished. The working group was then disbanded. A new Community Group, the SocialCG, had been started in 2017. It took over the process of supporting new extensions to AP and AS2, as well as maintaining the errata for the two main documents. Importantly, it can’t make major changes to the documents themselves — that requires a working group.

The experience of developers and users over the last decade in using ActivityPub has pointed out some real needs for updates to the documents. The W3C staff have asked the SocialCG to draft a charter for a new working group that could make backwards-compatible changes to these documents — adding clarifications, and possibly including new features. This would be great for the specifications, great for the Social Web, and great for the Internet at large.

The problem is that there isn’t a clear relationship between the boundaries of the new working group and the boundaries of the community group. What input would members of the community group have in the editing of the updated ActivityPub documents? Especially given that W3C members tend to be more commercial and institutional than the mostly Open Source developers who work in the SocialCG, there is a concern that a new Social Web Working Group would prioritize the needs of corporate developers with lots of resources, at the expense of Open Source devs making code for small communities.

The answer we’ve landed on is to implement a stage process, in which new ideas are initiated and documented as Community Group Reports before the Working Group takes them up for possible inclusion the main recommendation documents — or becoming new recommendations on their own. This process has worked well in other Community Groups at W3C, and the W3C staff is really supportive of it.

One problem with this process for the SocialCG is that we never adopted rules for how we make decisions when we started the group. We agreed casually to use the same consensus-based mechanisms we’d used in the Social Web Working Group, but never put together an official charter for the group. This casual structure has worked well for a long time, but in order to set up this more formal staging process, we need to have a more formal decision-making process.

The good news is that the norm in the W3C, as in most Internet standards organization, is to use consensus-based decision-making. So, the new SocialCG proposed charter has a lot of casual consensus, too, as well as pretty open participation on a very peer-oriented basis. It’s about the minimum structure you need to have a long-running organization.

So, let me recap: we want updated, backwards-compatible versions of ActivityPub and Activity Streams 2.0 with more clarity and maybe even new features. In order to get those, we need a Working Group. In order to get that, we need to establish a stage process. And in order to adopt the stage process, we need to have a new CG charter. So: CG charter leads to stage process leads to WG leads to new specs leads to new features.

The Community Group intends to consider approving the new CG charter at its January 2025 meeting. So, people interested in ActivityPub, standardization, and group dynamics in general are invited to review the documents and submit GitHub issues or comment on existing issues. If you’re not already a member of the SocialCG, you can join in a just a few minutes. It’s also reasonable for non-members to comment or make suggestions.

This work is complicated, but it’s also fascinating, and it is an exciting part of putting ActivityPub on a solid footing for the future.

• NVIDIA Kepler (600 and 700 series) GPUs are no longer supported for NVENC.
• NVIDIA users may need to update their GPU drivers to 551.76 (Windows) / 550.54.14 (Linux) or newer.
• The code signing certificate for OBS has been updated. This may impact game capture compatibility with some anti-cheat solutions with this OBS update. If you are a game or anti-cheat developer please see obsproject.com/kb/capture-hook… for more information.

31.0 New Features

• Added NVIDIA Blur Filter and Background Blur [pkviet]
• Added preview scrollbars and zoom/scale indicator [cg2121/Warchamp7]
  
  • Added v210 format support for AJA device capture [paulh-aja]
  • Added Amazon IVS service integration [palana]
  • Added QSV AV1 Screen Content Coding [thyintel]
  • Enabled first-party YouTube Chat features [msuman-google]

  
  

31.0 Changes

• Updated the browser source/docks CEF (Chromium) to version 127 (6533) on all platforms [reitowo/WizardCM/PatTheMav/tytan652/pkviet/kkartaltepe/Lain-B]
• Changed scene items to use relative coordinates [derrod]
  
  • Existing scene collections will be automatically converted to use relative coordinates if the scene collection has a known output resolution set.
    
    • Split NVIDIA Audio Effects from Noise Suppression [pkviet]

    
    

  • Existing filters will be automatically migrated.
    
    • Changed the Image Slideshow's Playback Mode property from radio buttons to a dropdown [derrod]
    • Disabled the (currently unsupported) built-in Automatic Scene Switcher when using Wayland on Linux [tytan652]
    • Improved error messages for macOS Virtual Camera [jcm93]
    • Changed Display and Window capture on Windows to not capture the first found display or window [Lain-B]
    • Changed display and window capture on Linux to not capture implicitly [Lain-B]
    • Added a warning to Window Capture when trying to capture WinUI 3 applications with BitBlt [qhy040404]
    • Refactored the NVENC implementation with various improvements [derrod]

    
    

  • SDK 12.2 features, such as split encoding, are now supported.
  • Additional features from old SDKs are supported:
    
    • B-Frames as reference
    • Target Quality VBR mode (CQVBR)

    
    

  • A custom options field has been added to allow setting more options that don't warrant their own UI elements.

  
  

• Improved screensaver inhibit functions on Linux in Flatpak
• Changed scripts to correctly pass settings to modified callbacks on reload [Penwy]
• Removed legacy QSV code for old devices (Haswell or older) [RytoEX]
• Removed legacy QSV code for Windows 7 [RytoEX]
• Removed default desktop audio device on macOS 13+ [jcm93]
• Removed NVIDIA Kepler GPU support for NVENC [derrod]
• Removed FTL support [derrod]
• Removed legacy migrations from OBS Studio 28.1 and earlier [derrod]
  
  • If updating from these older versions, you may wish to update to OBS Studio 30.2 first, and then update to OBS Studio 31.

  
  

• Removed support for Ubuntu 22.04 [derrod]
• Removed legacy YouTube chat [gxalpha]
• Blocked TikTok Virtual Camera from loading in OBS due to known issues [notr1ch]
• Application settings have been split into "app" configuration and "user" configuration, rather than storing everything in global.ini [PatTheMav]

31.0 Bug Fixes

• Fixed two crashes with the QSV encoder on Linux [kkartaltepe]
• Fixed a crash with a race condition involving multitrack video output reconnect [dsaedtler]
• Fixed two potential crashes in Linux Window Capture [Lain-B]
• Fixed a crash on macOS that could occur if an audio device was disconnected [jcm93]
• Fixed a crash on Windows when capturing D3D12 games [confusionattack/Lain-B]
• Fixed a crash on Linux when importing a scene collection created on Windows [SarenDev]
• Fixed a crash on Windows when capturing a Vulkan application [Charlese2]
• Fixed a deadlock in MP4 muxer [derrod/notr1ch]
• Fixed a deadlock when shutting down muxer [exeldro]
• Fixed a potential deadlock when stopping an encoder [derrod]
• Fixed a potential memory error and crash in text parser [fzwoch]
• Fixed a couple minor memory leaks [pkviet]
• Fixed a memory leak in PipeWire plugin [dimtpap]
• Fixed a memory leak when playing an HDR media file [tt2468]
• Fixed an issue on FreeBSD with handling SSL certificates [emaste]
• Fixed an issue with pressed button color in the Rachni theme [shiina424]
• Fixed an issue with some missing icons in the System theme [shiina424]
• Fixed an SRT listener bug where the socket was not closed properly [pkviet]
• Fixed an issue where the current scene collection could be erased to default when trying to switch to a different scene collection that's corrupted or invalid [derrod]
• Fixed a buffer overrun in UTF-8 text conversion [derrod]
• Fixed an issue that could cause bitrate spikes in QSV CBR [thyintel]
  
  • Note: This fix only applies to Lunar Lake or newer except Alder Lake N.

  
  

• Fixed an issue where the Auto Configuration Wizard could unintentionally enable Enhanced Broadcasting [lexano-ivs]
• Fixed issues with the audio clipping indicators displaying incorrectly on volume meters [norihiro]
• Fixed an issue causing hotkeys to register inconsistently on macOS [jcm93]
• Fixed an issue causing multitrack video output to fail if color format was set to I444 [dsaedtler]
• Fixed an issue where Custom CSS in browser sources no longer worked with certain websites (namely YouTube chat) [vvto33]
• Restored STUN support for WHIP output [mondain]