MootDACH 2026: Moodle on the Fediverse

My devcamp idea is to implement the ActivityPub protocol in Moodle, so that Moodle instances can federate with each other and other apps on the fediverse.

Applications for this could be to allow other fediverse users to follow a Moodle account, which could publish achievements like course completions, badges that have been awarded, etc. and receive likes/comments from followers. For institutions with more than one Moodle instance, it could enable inter-Moodle messaging between different instances.

Re: Moodle on the Fediverse

par André Menrath, mercredi 13 mai 2026, 09:51

I am working in the Fediverse ecosystem for more than 4 years, and in the role of someone who loves both Moodle and the Fediverese I would like to point out a few things:

- Moodle has deprecated the chat-system, hasn't it?
- The publishing side of ActivityPub is rather easy – The receiving side is the hard part.
- ActivityPub is based on JSON-LD and therefore is extendable, so I guess which schema/types for course-completions, bagdes, etc would be used would have to be evaluated.
- The moodle-database is really comple, and finding a way to cache remote data from federation might became very tricky.

FYI: the MoodleNet once had ActivityPub for federation of Learning-Management-Resources and interaction with those on the high priority list, but not anymore, we can chat about that in Zürich ;)

Re: Moodle on the Fediverse

par Mark Johnson, mercredi 13 mai 2026, 11:23

Hi André,

Thanks for your insights! I have experimented with ActivityPub a bit for personal projects, so I definitely see where you're coming from. Perhaps just thinking about publishing first would be good, so you can "follow" a Moodle account (I realise this still requires some inbound traffic handling to process follow requests). I'm thinking about the sort of things where you might say "Share this on $site", except rather than sharing it on someone else's site, Moodle publishes the activity itself.

Moodle's chat *module* is gone, but the messaging system is still there. However, I wasn't necessarily talking about "messaging" like a user types a message and clicks send, more like Moodles could subscribe to each others' feeds, or a federated group of Moodles could have a "global" feed.