Sarah Perez reporting on the financial backing of the new Social Web Foundation. This is an impressive start:

The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.

@SimonWoods I am not sure if you are being serious or ironic here.. 🤪

@pcora 100% sarcasm. I should have used that emoji 😂

@SimonWoods 🤣 I'm glad I picked the right tone to read it then!

@SimonWoods 🙂

@SimonWoods -- omg i thought that was serious. the name is ridiculous. there's so much potential in that name, and they have their hands full finishing ActivityPub and getting some good example code out there. i'd love to see a bare bones activitypub Node app. That would be worth $1 million.

@dave No not serious at all — if we had that mythical "sarcasm font" I would have made liberal use of it in my reply. I'm with you; the name is bad, and combined with their fumbled announcement — weird proclamations, excluding Manton, etc — doesn't engender much trust from an admittedly cynical blogger like me. To be honest, Dave, I'm confused as to why they didn't stick to a name along the lines of ActivityPub. It would have been much more honest, at least.

@manton I'm delighted money is being raised for the open web — we need proof of that happening as much as possible — but as ever I'm a stickler for the use of words. I don't understand how bloggers can be so clumsy for such important moments. I suppose the people with money don't care as much.