Digital badges promise portable, verifiable recognition, but in practice, they’re locked behind proprietary platforms, expensive subscriptions, and rigid workflows. For many nonprofits and open communities, that makes them unusable.

BadgeFed rethinks digital credentials for the open web. Built on the Open Badges standard and the ActivityPub protocol, it brings badge issuance, sharing, and verification into the Fediverse, fully open source, self-hostable, and designed to run on Linux.

This talk explores how federated social infrastructure can replace centralized credential platform and build sustainable recognition systems without vendor lock-in.