Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, or FEPs, are community documents used to develop conventions, extensions and interoperable practices around decentralised social protocols. They fill gaps where implementations need to agree on behaviour that is not fully specified by standards such as ActivityPub itself.
How the FEP process works
A FEP is identified by a short hexadecimal-style code and published through the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process. Proposals can describe protocol extensions, implementation conventions, documentation practices or other interoperability work. The process provides states and a common review mechanism so ideas can be discussed independently of any one software project. Some FEPs become widely implemented; others remain experiments or records of a particular approach. A FEP does not automatically become a W3C or IETF standard simply by being finalised in the FEP repository.
Why ActivityPub needs conventions around it
ActivityPub deliberately leaves room for extension, which is both a strength and a source of interoperability problems. Mastodon, PeerTube, Lemmy, Misskey, WordPress and newer applications do not all model social features in exactly the same way. FEPs give implementers somewhere to document a shared solution before or without going through a formal standards organisation. For someone trying to understand where the Fediverse is heading, the proposal list can reveal emerging features earlier than mainstream documentation does.
A proposal is not automatic interoperability
The important caveat is adoption. A FEP can be well designed and still be unsupported by the software you use. Implementers should check real deployment status rather than assuming the label 'FEP' guarantees compatibility. The process is also intentionally lightweight compared with formal standards bodies, so maturity varies from proposal to proposal.
Related reading
- What Is an ActivityPub Shared Inbox and Why Do Fediverse Servers Use One?
- What Is WebFinger? How ActivityPub Finds Accounts Across the Fediverse