Every protocol that reached mainstream had one thing in common: at some point, one product made it effortless to use. Email had its clients, the web had its browsers. ActivityPub has the federation, the servers, the standard — but the work of helping a newcomer find people worth following, and a journalist/creator find an audience, still mostly falls outside the protocol.

We think that gap is not a protocol problem. Over the past months we built Fediway, a discovery layer that any instance can connect to, and tested it in a closed beta with more than 50 people.

This is a builder's report, co-presented by both founders — one from the product and onboarding side, one from the AI and engineering side. We'll cover what ActivityPub gives you and what it doesn't once you try to make the network feel alive for someone who just signed up; the architecture decisions behind a discovery layer that sits on top of existing instances instead of replacing them, and the tradeoffs we accepted; what 50+ testers actually changed about our assumptions; and where this is still hard and unsolved.

For admins, developers, and anyone thinking about how the open social web gets easier to join — without giving up what makes it open. We won't tell you why federation matters; you already know. We want to show you what we built on top of it and have an honest conversation about the parts that aren't figured out yet.