NGI Fediversity

Open internet discourse is part of the future of open collaboration and open discussion, forming a federated safe space for what used to be called social networking. The Fediverse, funded by the NGI program as an implementation of such a federated space, is already taking shape and approaching ten million users. It has special safeguards for marginalized and oppressed groups in our global society. This NGI technology is mature enough to be joined by older institutions and organizations, many tech-savvy media outlets and public institutions have already joined [^adoption]. But for wider adoption the Fediverse needs to be supported by dedicated and knowledgeable support organisations, for which this project will lay the groundwork in the form of reproducible deployment configurations, how-to documents, cookbooks, playbooks and descriptions of success stories. Not only will we create a complete script for support organisations that want to _host_ Fediverse services and other open discussion tools on how to deploy them on their infrastructure, we will also onboard several public organisations that want to _use_ these services to show-case, and to gain and document experience on do's and don'ts. After all, public communication infrastructure, even though very practical, isn't easy to do and this project is accordingly about creating a simple to use, very practical and safe environment to communicate, assembling various powerful components that NGI and others have built into unified end-to-end services. This is where we can make a difference, especially in contrast to existing centralized solutions owned by Big Tech.