One year in, we’re launching the Website League!
Howdy, folks. It may have been a while since you heard from the Website League, but exciting things are afoot. On October 1, 2025 the League celebrated its first birthday, and in light of that milestone, we're ready to pick things back up and consider ourselves formally launched!
Where have we been?
A lot of our collective silence is simply down to the year 2025, which continues to happen and continues to be kind of terrible. We need not linger but, particularly for our United States-based stewards and users, the overall everything has affected many folks' ability to contribute and dampened momentum on our work growing the League—at least for the past few months.
Nevertheless, the infrastructure we've built has stood strong and the League has been a real refuge from everything else. You would be forgiven for having missed the soft launch last year—but we do already have a small, but active and established userbase who are quite passionate about what we’re doing here. Survey work suggests that across all the nodes, the League has about 330 accounts and a rough estimate of 180 monthly active users. By the time this reaches you, those numbers will be higher! An informal survey among those users also showed that over 70% of respondents considered the League to be either their sole social media presence or equally important to the other social media websites that they use. Now we’re officially launched, we hope you’ll soon join them!
Our new website
The Website League has a brand new website at https://websiteleague.org!
The old site served well as a minimum viable product and for giving you a sense of what we want to do here, but it did not make it easy to actually join the League. This is a problem that our new site fixes: we now have a dedicated, front-and-center page with the full list of public nodes that you can sign up for—today!
The Fediverse technology behind the League isn't always intuitive, especially when so many of us are used to the structure of centralized platforms. One of the benefits of our confederation model is that it retains many of the desirable traits of a centralized platform while not actually being one. We know the size of our network, all of the nodes that are part of it, and all of the things that make them distinct from one another. This should help intuitively explain what it means to sign up for the League by joining a specific node, and it should help you in finding a node that best meets your specific wants and needs.
On the design front, the new site has been built from scratch but retains the design sensibilities of the original. It has also been designed to allow any Steward to update it as needed and when necessary, with nobody having to be in charge of manually deploying it. This will free up time and resources for other work.
Technical work
Speaking of work—quite a bit has been done on the technical side since our last newsletter!
Surveying the nodes
As part of the launch, we’ve taken stock of the shape of the League. Some of the nodes and node operators that were with us from the start didn’t stick around, some of them closed public signups, while others opened them. We’ve carried out a formal survey of the nodes and collected the metadata we need to keep track of things in future—more on that below.
Here’s your update: The League is made up of 22 different nodes, of which 7 are currently open for public signups. So, if you would like to join, there’s room! (The other 15, if you’re curious, are a mixture of single-user nodes, family/friend nodes, and smaller communities which use an invite system for signups.)
Standardizing our allowlist infrastructure
The survey work has replaced our spreadsheets and wiki pages with a single, curated source of truth for League Nodes - one standardized file that describes the whole League by listing all the nodes that are part of it and the important things to know about them.
This allows us to:
- Keep all the nodes connected with less work on the part of the node operators;
- Lay the foundations for a smooth process of adding new nodes to the League;
- Start building automatic monitoring of the health of the network;
- Automatically update the Join page on the new website, listing the nodes that are open for signups without requiring anyone to manually spend time and effort keeping it up to date.
Pretty important!
Governance and moderation
Our governance has also seen a few things change as part of the relaunch; the overall structure is the same, but we’ve dusted the house and spruced up a few things.
Stewardship pruning check
On the Steward front, the Stewardship remains our governing body for running the Website League. If you aren’t familiar with this body, the quick summary is that the Stewardship acts as stewards for the whole League. (The name is quite straightforward.)
In terms of day-to-day responsibilities, Stewards make and vote on proposals for what the League should do and how it should operate; they help maintain its central infrastructure as well as Node infrastructure; they contribute toward overall League technical development; and everything in between that needs to be done. Anyone on the Website League can apply to be a Steward, and we try to have it include a variety of skill sets and representatives from every Node that wants one.
Every now and then, though, we check who actually has time to be a Steward and who does not. For obvious reasons we figured a good time to do one of these checks would be right before this relaunch; this check has slimmed the body considerably from its peak of 42 members late last year.
We now have 13 active stewards and 17 inactive stewards, for a total of 30. If you’d like a good “starter list” of people to follow on the League, we’d recommend the list at the end of this section.
New stewards
Among those 13 active stewards are our first new stewards since the process for nomination was agreed and implemented a year ago! alloyed and normalhumangirl are now part of the stewardship and are responsible for most of the organization on our Bookstack and the new iteration of our website respectively.
Current list of stewards
Active stewards
- @ruby@isincredibly.gay
- @alyaza@akkoma.mellivora.social
- @atonal440@akkoma.mellivora.social
- @wenchcoat@akkoma.mellivora.social
- @tenna@pleasetf.me
- @kda@isincredibly.gay
- @muffinlord@minimumviable.website
- @wholewheatbagels@goats.detjens.dev
- @chaiaeran@beam.phosphor.buzz
- @ocean@gts.seafoam.top
- @normalhumangirl@pleasetf.me
- @alloyed@pleasetf.me
- Sirocyl
Selected inactive stewards
- @adam@league.adamski2003.lol
- @airylan@akkoma.mellivora.social
- @wolf@channel.coolstation.space (atomicthumbs)
- @kalium@weague.awful.cloud
- @spdx-wl@isincredibly.gay
- @vision@akkoma.questingbeast.fyi
- @wish@floatinginthe.wishdream.org
A final reminder: our Community Code of Conduct and Steward Code of Conduct
Finally, we would like to note, as we did in the last newsletter, that our Community Code of Conduct (mostly based on the Cohost Community Guidelines) and Steward Code of Conduct (mostly based on the Contributor Covenant) are complete and in effect League-wide.
We spent a lot of time workshopping these documents to be accommodating to some of the unique needs and considerations of our community, but to also still be clear in what is and is not allowed. Hopefully we have done that, and hopefully you agree. If you have any concerns or suggestions, or specific questions about why we phrased something what way, hop on the Zulip (coordination.websiteleague.org) and we should be able to figure things out.
Get involved
If you have skills and time to volunteer—for programming and systems administration, usability design, writing, planning, community organizing, art, you name it—we’d love for you to join the Zulip (coordination.websiteleague.org) and take part in building our network. You don’t have to commit to Stewardship in order to be involved. Exciting things are in the works as we look towards writing our formal vision plan and take our first steps towards bringing back CSS crimes ;)
If you are interested in running your own node, we’d say that now is a good time to start doing that, too!
Join the League and get posting!
That’s it for now! Make sure you check out the new website. If you were holding off on joining the League or didn’t catch on to the soft launch phase, now is a great time to sign up, find out what it’s like, and take part in shaping what it will be like in future. If you have friends who you think would be interested in the League, let them know!