Berlin FediDay 2026

Berlin FediDay 2026 was a weekend-long event gathering all sorts of people interested in and advocating for the Fediverse. The SHIELD project was represented by Julian Fietkau, who gave a presentation about SciOp’s federation plans. We provide the presentation slides (PDF) and the recording of the presentation including Q&A (tba).

Presentation Outline

  1. What is SciOp?
    A quick summary of SciOp’s purpose and origin.
  2. Why federate a BitTorrent index?
    If governance did not matter, we would need only one giant BitTorrent index. However, different people and institutions have different ideas about which datasets are relevant and how decisions for or against inclusion should be made. A federation of autonomous instances allows them to make their own decisions, but also cooperate where interests align.
  3. How to extend ActivityPub
    ActivityPub is mainly designed for social media, but its vocabulary can be extended. The FEP process is one avenue to make this possible.
  4. Torrents, uploads, datasets
    The current SciOp data model describes torrents, uploads, and datasets as distinct types of things. Each can have its own kinds of metadata.
  5. Actors and identities
    ActivityPub differentiates between actors that do things and objects that are acted upon. SciOp is planning to use FEP-ef61, a protocol extension to separate actor identities from servers – something that will be incompatible with current versions of Mastodon.
  6. Breaking backward compatibility
    The idea of breaking interoperability with large parts of the current Fediverse is not taken lightly, but the SciOp team believes that the benefits will be worth it in the long run.
  7. Sounds cool – now what?
    SHIELD is working on a SciOp instance at TIB. Contact us or SRC if you would like to be involved.

Panel Discussion

Our presentation was part of an evening-filling session about research of and on the Fediverse, which concluded with a panel discussion involving all presenters. Berlin FediDay is aiming to provide a video recording of this panel soon. Even though it is only tangentially related to SHIELD, we will link it here once it is available.