Organization
ActivityStreams §4.1"type": "Organization"
Organization represents a formal organization, company, or institution. Semantically similar to Group but intended for organizations rather than informal communities. Less commonly used than Person or Group in current Fediverse deployments. ActivityStreams does not define significantly different behavior from Group.
Details
Organization is one of the five ActivityPub actor types defined in the ActivityStreams vocabulary. It is intended to represent formal entities like companies, non-profits, government bodies, or institutions.
In practice: Organization is rarely used distinctly from Group in current Fediverse software. Mastodon does not have a separate Organization actor type – it uses Person for all accounts (including brand and organization accounts). A Mastodon account for a company looks identical to a user account at the protocol level.
Some platforms that use Organization: - Mobilizon uses Organization for event organizer entities - Some custom Fediverse implementations for institutional directories
The main semantic difference from Group is intentional: Group implies a collection of members who participate; Organization implies a formal entity with an official presence.
Future use: as more institutions join the Fediverse (universities, news organizations, government), Organization actors may see wider adoption to distinguish institutional accounts from personal accounts programmatically.
Required Fields
| @context | "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams" |
| type | "Organization" |
| id | Permanent HTTPS URL |
| inbox | HTTPS inbox endpoint |
Common Optional Fields
| name | Organization name |
| url | Organization website |
| summary | Description |
Examples
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"type": "Organization",
"id": "https://social.example.org/org/ietf",
"name": "Internet Engineering Task Force",
"url": "https://ietf.org",
"inbox": "https://social.example.org/org/ietf/inbox",
"outbox": "https://social.example.org/org/ietf/outbox"
}