This month, the Social Web Foundation is joining the UN’s 20th annual conference on the internet, the Internet Governance Forum. Held in Oslo, Norway, IGF 2025 brings together policymakers, technologists, activists, and academics to address the most pressing questions about digital governance. From AI regulation to connectivity in underserved regions, the agenda reflects how internet governance is now inseparable from broader social, economic, and political concerns.

Mallory Knodel, Executive Director of the Social Web Foundation and founder of this newsletter, will be moderating a workshop on “Privacy-Preserving Interoperability and the Fediverse”, a session that speaks directly to the Social Web Foundation’s mission: growing, healthy, sustainable and multi-polar Fediverse.

The session will examine a practical tension: interoperability allows people to move fluidly across platforms—whether it’s Mastodon, PeerTube, or other services in the Fediverse. Yet this fluidity exposes new privacy risks. For example, a user’s profile photo or contact list might unintentionally follow them from one service to another without explicit consent. To ensure the social web continues to grow in a responsible way, we need thoughtful policy, smart technical design, and cross-sector collaboration.

To tackle this, Mallory will be posing three concrete questions to a diverse panel featuring voices from academia, civil society, and the private sector:

1. User agency: How can we design cross-platform data flows so that individuals—not servers—decide what travels with them?
2. Legal alignment: What does real compliance with the GDPR look like for a decentralised network, and how might the Digital Markets Act nudge the large incumbents toward meaningful interoperability?
3. Technical safeguards: Which standards or privacy-enhancing tools could make federation safer by default?

By grounding the discussion in technical and legal constraints, this workshop aims to develop practical, actionable recommendations that platforms, developers, and policymakers can adopt. We’ll refine these into a summary document outlining key takeaways and next steps, which we’ll share in a future edition of this newsletter.

This conversation also comes at a critical time. The momentum behind decentralized platforms is growing, but regulatory clarity and technical safeguards lag behind. Without coordination, we risk repeating the mistakes of Web2: centralisation of power, opaque data practices, and exclusionary design.

Attending the IGF is free! Whether you’re joining us in Oslo or tuning in online, we encourage you to participate. Your questions, insights, and lived experiences help shape the conversation. We’ll be taking audience questions during the session, and they’ll feed directly into the discussion.