The Fediverse is all about demolishing walled gardens. In our future you should be able to follow anyone from anywhere! #Lemmy#Mastodon#Fediverse#vegan
If you're on a centralised platform like Reddit, this is what they can do. Centralised platforms have all-powerful leaders who can do whatever they want, and you have no alternatives if you disagree.
The point of the Fediverse being on lots of servers is that each server's power is limited. If you disagree with one server's actions, you can move.
Blahaj zone (the Calckey instance) has been running for around 6 months now. We've had a slow but constant growth of new members, with a big spike when Calckey drew a lot of attention. And as a result, even though we're not a huge instance, we are one of the larger Calckey derived instances around.
lemmy.blahaj.zone on the other hand has seen crazy growth! In the last week, our lemmy instance has gone from almost no members, to nearly as many users as our Calckey instance. The mind blowing part though, is that the lemmy instance isn't even close to being one of the largest lemmy instances. We don't even appear on the first page of Fediverse Observer! And the sheer number of lemmy instances online now is huge compared to where it was a couple of weeks ago.
And that's before we even talk about kbin and the threadiverse as a whole, of which Lemmy is only a part
I can honestly say that this whole thing has shifted my view of just what the future of the fediverse might be. I assumed it would always be microblogging centric, but now, I question that...
So it seems a sure thing that Apollo, Sync and RIS - three of the most popular 3rd party #Reddit apps for iOS and Android are all shutting down by EOM. I was there for the great Digg Implosion / Migration, but honestly no idea where things are going to land from here? #fediverse federated solutions seem ideal, but #lemmy last I checked had servers with double digit numbers of members... Were do y'all plan on link aggregating?
PeerTube, the Fediverse's alternative to YouTube, is normally associated with video. However, you can also upload audio files directly to PeerTube. It will accept lots of audio formats including .mp3, .ogg, .aac, .flac, .wma etc.
You can optionally upload an image file as a thumbnail. If not, audio files will show a black screen by default.
Can those of you that are tenured here in the #Fediverse tell me where this alarmist #EEE views have come from? Either this people are grossly misinformed/uninformed or they are disingenuous and that would bother me more. Like how if you believe in the #fediverse do you believe some corp can come and take it all over?
There's lots of talk right now about how #Reddit alternatives such as #Lemmy, #kbin and #Lotide fit into the overall picture of the #Fediverse, with some calling these link-aggregation sites collectively the "Threadiverse". But how does #Pinetta fit into the mix?
Much like a link aggregator, Pinetta allows users to collect and comment on various things like links, text, images, video, and so on. In that sense, it will interact almost seamlessly with federated link aggregators. The main difference, of course, is in the user interface. Pinetta will have a number of modes that users can choose to display content:
As a "feed" chronologically or ranked based on most engaging posts (based on favourites and boosts);
As a "grid" similar to how #Pixelfed displays images in profiles;
As a "masonry" layout - much like how #Pinterest displays pins by default;
As a "mood board", which will allow users to arrange pins visually to their liking in a freeform 2D layout.
Like what you're reading? So do we. Give us a follow and star our repos on Codeberg to keep up with development!
Welcome to another edition of The Roundup! I’ve mentioned this blog post by Signal a few times before, and will do so again. One of the reasons why I think it is so relevant, is that it shows how the same communication platform is used it wildly different ways in different geographical regions, with people often not even realising that this happens. This already happens when everyone uses the same app, Signal. I’ve pointed out before that this effect must therefore be even stronger on the fediverse, where people are not even using the same app.
This differentiation in the fediverse is starting to play out in more and more pronounced ways. For most fediverse users in the Western world, the fediverse is tightly linked with Mastodon. But the Japanese fediverse community is growing extremely rapidly, mainly using Misskey. It has grown in less than half a year from 75k accounts to 325k accounts. Not only that, people on misskey.io love to post. Compared to Mastodon’s biggest server, mastodon.social, people on misskey.io post 12 times as much!
The language barrier between English and Japanese contributes that these groups do not overlap much, with people often not really knowing what happens at the other side. Still, if you want to understand the fediverse, its getting harder and harder to ignore Misskey. We used to have a moment where people referred to Misskey and Calckey as *key, but with Calckey getting a rebranding and name change soon, the field of fediverse microblogging clients keep expanding.
Discussion platforms
Beyond the expanding scene of microblogging services is the field of forums and link aggregators. Reddit’s changes to their API pricing, effectively killing 3rd party apps, has a lot of people upset, and some are looking for new places to go.
Lemmy is one of the main recipients of the new inflow of people. As an illustration, Beehaw.org is a small Lemmy community that is focusing on being a safe and diverse place. They have had to restrict signups after their user base doubled in the last few days. Lemmy has an Android client, and an iOS client that entered TestFlight beta a few weeks ago. Another project to work on a read-only client for Lemmy is underway as well. Lemmy is not without controversy though; the large account FediTips voiced their concern about the politics of the developers, regarding the denial of human rights abuses. As one of the largest Lemmy server explicitly states that they like Stalin, and some developers of Lemmy associate with this server, it is understandable that people are hesitant to recommend Lemmy. For a more in-depth article regarding this, as well as the context where this happens regarding Reddit’s changes, as well as the potential for Kbin in this, I recommend this article by @jayeless.
Forum software Discourse has been working on a plugin to enable federation, and the first version of this is available. As of now, it only publishes a note to the rest of the fediverse when a new topic is created, and does not allow for the federation of comments yet. The ActivityPub Social Hub is one of the first forums to make use of this functionality, so you can now easily see on your fediverse account when new topics are created.
The links
Mastodon is featured on the Apple App Store. It describes Mastodon in fairly good detail, and links to popular client apps such as Ivory and Mona.
Trunks is a Mastodon app for iOS, Android and web client, and after 5 months in beta has now officially been released.
An excellent article that goes into the details of making an app for the fediverse, and the practical complications with interoperability. While in theory all apps should talk with each other via ActivityPub, getting the details correct for the implementation turns out to be quite a bit more complicated.
Web browser Vivaldi has been running their own Mastodon server for a while now. In a new interview, the CEO talks more about federation and running their own server.
An overview of the top 30 most popular servers that relate to the fediverse in some way. This list takes the widest possible interpretation of fediverse. Quite a few people will disagree with including Truth Social on the list for example, as it does not federate. I personally see this list as a good overview of what is out there, even though I hold a narrower definition of fediverse.
Bonfire is a microblogging client that is still in alpha testing, that focuses on circles and boundaries. A new blog post explains their thinking in more detail.
Calckey has the feature to add plugins. This is barely used, as their is little documentation on how to make plugins. Jeff Sikes has been building plugins, and documenting the process on how to make them.
Owncast celebrates its 3 year anniversary with a major update.
PixelFed has updated their onboarding process for new users. One notable thing is that they use the word ‘communities’ to describe servers/instances. Personally I think that is a great term that makes it easier for new users to understand what is going on with federation.
John Gruber might have some mixed feelings on Mastodon (stating last month that Mastodon is doomed to relative obscurity, compared to Bluesky), but still implemented federation for his blog Daring Fireball.
Beyond the fediverse
Quite a lot of news this week that is not directly about the fediverse, but still relates to it in some way.
On Bluesky: This article by The Intercept answers some basic questions about Bluesky in an detailed manner, such as who exactly owns Bluesky. It also reiterates Bluesky’s goal to federate with other servers that run ATproto. If/when that happens, bridging to the ActivityPub fediverse is all but guaranteed. This will complicate the question about what the fediverse entails even further.
Bluesky, continued: Bluesky has a roadmap update. They give a shout out to an extension Skylink, that shows you if a domain that you visit while browsing is used as a domain on Bluesky. This is pretty much the exact thing as the StreetPass extension for Mastodon.
One of the servers in the far-right server cluster that include places like Kiwifarms suffered a databreach, which includes leaked DMs. The Daily Dot reports that the DMs show that Alex Gleason is working closely with Trump’s Truth Social as well. This in itself is not surprising news, as both platforms use the Soapbox front-end, of which Alex Gleason is the creator. Gleason claims that this information was public all along. The story by Daily Dot did bring this connection into the spotlight, with outlets like Yahoo also reporting on it.
WordPress.com has launched paid newsletters in a challenge to Substack. This is not fediverse news, for now, but the impact might be visible in the fediverse later on. WordPress is actively working on further integration into the fediverse with their ActivityPub plugin. Substack has so far not focused on interoperability with other platforms. Their new microblogging platform, Notes, does not interoperate, for example. How this will play out is uncertain, but worth watching.
Lemmy the Fediverse alternative to Reddit is having his moment of glory, but it takes the help of the whole Fediverse to make this magical moment become the beginning of a new era!
#Reddit's API policies for third-party apps are causing a small exodus of users to what is now its most functional alternative: #Lemmy.
In the last 48 hours, the Italian instance feddit.it has had the registrations they usually have in two months, but it seems that this is a generalized phenomenon!
Now we need to make those users stay. How can we do it?
Here we need help from all over the Fediverse and above all we need the #mastohelp of the largest community in the #Fediverse!
In fact, Reddit users feel comfortable there, not only due to its ergonomics, but also due to the liveliness of the subreddits and the number of threads; the problem is that Lemmy users are a fraction of those of Reddit: how will they be able to guarantee a vitality comparable to that of Reddit? But this is exactly where the Fedeverse comes into play! In fact, even without subscribing to Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, Pleroma, Misskey and even Pixelfed users can comment and open threads on the Lemmy communities.
Here is a simple explanation of how to write a post about a Lemmy community:
Introductory text of the message (less than 200 characters and possibly without hashtags or mentions) which will become the title of the thread as you will see it on Lemmy
Community mention
Additional text (with any hashtags and other mentions) that will become the text of the post as seen on Lemmy
Any additional mentions for Friendica groups/forums
Link to the article (let's remember that Lemmy is basically an alternative to Reddit, which is basically a news aggregator)
Any attached images
Many of the current Fediverse users landed on Mastodon when Musk switched Twitter, and stayed mostly because they found the environment enjoyable and inspiring; now it would be perfect if they could help the "refugees" of Reddit by creating an inspiring environment on Lemmy!
If you want a list of global communities, you can take a look here: browse.feddit.de/
And if you want to support the Lemmy development project you can go to this page join-lemmy.org/donate
A #Fediverse Enhancement Proposal has reached FINAL status:
FEP-f1d5: NodeInfo in Fediverse Software
" #NodeInfo is a #protocol intended to standardize upon a way to provide server-level metadata to the public. This enables tools and clients to utilize this metadata to assess server health or facilitate end-users choices about servers and software to use on the Fediverse."
It's #Newstodon Friday again and today we have something very very special! We have 3 new or newly awakened accounts from folks in our newsroom...follow them & give them all your best #fediverse tips!
I just had a bit of a look at kbin.social and I have to say, kbin looks really impressive!
If you've never heard of kbin, it's a fediverse platform specifically focusing on groups. Broadly speaking, similar to lemmy, the goal is to create a fediverse take on the reddit experience. However, kbin also integrates fediverse groups like gup.pe, chirp and friendica groups, and that is a killer feature as far as I'm concerned!
We've been running a lemmy instance for a few months now, but it might be time to look at spinning up our own kbin instance too!
Welcome! It has been an interesting week in the fediverse, with some events that will play out over longer timeframes. Conversations about defederation, but also a growth in tech projects that go beyond microblogging, and the continuation of developer organisation. Besides that, it took around a month for Mastodon to add another million accounts, crossing the 12 million line this week.
Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about Meta’s new project Barcelona, a microblogging platform that (allegedly) interoperates with the fediverse. One of the main questions is if servers on the fediverse should interact with this new platform, or if they should defederate from Meta’s projects. Quite a few people have vocally advocated for the immediate and full defederation of all Meta’s projects on sight. The power of the fediverse is that every server admin gets to set their own rules, and that there does not have to be full consensus on policies. However, for people who fear that Barcelona is a full Embrace-Extend-Extinct project that can only be thwarted by avoiding content altogether, the result of the latest poll might spell bad news:
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-1.pngA 4k response is a pretty high result for fediverse polls. Anonymous polls cannot be a fully representative sample, but there is a good case to be made that the selection bias is probably in favor of people who are opiniated about the subject. This makes a full-on defederation by the entire fediverse quite unlikely and not particularly effective at preventing EEE.
In the meantime, an article by Johannes Ernst places some question marks with the assumption that the Barcelona project will fully implement ActivityPub. A careful reading of all the leaked information does not definitively confirm it. It might be that Meta implements a connection with Mastodon in a more asymmetric way, which would complicate the question even further.
In other trends that is worth keeping an eye on, is the continued integration of cooperation of fediverse developers. Until quite recently, coordination on fediverse work mainly happened on the social hub for ActivityPub, with only few developers who worked on implementation actively participating. Now the is a large Matrix Space, with channels for most fediverse projects, as well as more conversation space for the fediverse in general. There are also regular meetings (next one May 31st), and a conference later this year.
Beyond microblogging
While microblogging has gotten by far the most attention as the main form of communication on the fediverse, new projects are also springing up that focus on the forums.
Kbin is a federated link aggregator, similar to reddit. The main public instance is available at kbin.social. It also integrates with Lemmy, the other link aggregator on the fediverse. Kbin is currently in active development, adding features such as ‘magazines’, and even has it’s own extension already. The project recently got funding from NLNet, and released an accompanying roadmap. It is still early days in the project, but it is fully functional and usable. An interesting and exciting project that will certainly be checked in with later to see how it is progressing.
Besides Kbin, there are now three other forum software projects that are adding federation: Flarum, nodeBB and Discourse are all working on integrating ActivityPub into their current forum software. All the projects are still in early development. However, it does provide a clear indication that if you want to think about the future of the fediverse, you should think beyond just (micro)blogging, as decentralized forums are close on the horizon.
PixelFed is also rapidly shipping changes and updates. Most notable are post editing, better tools to handle spam (including Advanced Autodetection of spam), account verification in the similar style as Mastodon, and Place tags. Even more features are being worked on, such as Stories, Loops and live streams. There is also an interesting parallel between Instagram and it’s tightly connected Barcelona project, and PixelFed and it’s tight connection with Mastodon (and other fediverse microblogging platforms), especially since there will be a connection between them soon. How this will all play out is worth watching.
The links
The Linux Experiment has an excellent video about Framasoft, a French NGO that is quite impactful in the fediverse, even though their name might not be very well known. They are behind the fediverse projects PeerTube and Mobilizon. The Linux Experiment also hosts their videos on both YouTube and PeerTube, which is cool to see.
Flipboard is continuing with their integrations into their app. You can now use Bluesky and Pixelfed accounts via the Flipboard app.
Bridgy Fed is a service that turns your website in your own fediverse account. Developer Ryan Barrett (@snarfed) is looking for feedback on the draft for the further bridging with the other open protocols like ATproto and Nostr.
Calckey continues to become a serious player in the fediverse. It will soon change it’s name, as the main developer Kainoa feels its not right to have the project named after him anymore now that there are so many other contributors. Work is also slowly starting to completely rewrite the backend, as it currently consists of a lot of legacy code from Misskey.
The European Commision has supported many fediverse projects via NGIZero. This infographic has an overview of all the projects that are supported.
Fedilabs is one of the earliest apps for the fediverse, and is now 6 years old!
Ivory is a premier Mastodon app for iOS, that is now also available on Mac.
Martin Holland has diligently been tracking traffic to the German news website heise.de for both Twitter and Mastodon, and sharing the data in great detail. This is the latest update.
I want to love Mastodon but for some reason even when I follow people, I can't see certain screened images/nsfw, and then when I load it on their instance, it works fine. But I can't like/comment/retoot it from there. Catch 22 really makes this frustrating and I think is something holding this service back. #fediverse#helpisneeded#help
Free and Open Source Content Circle is hosting an event next week and I'd like to invite you!
Exploring Self Governance in the Fediverse: A discussion about decision making among a federated ensemble
--> May 29th 15:00 - 16:30 UTC
We're a circle within @SociocracyForAll , so I'll be interested to find out how sociocracy can support you. There will also be time to chat about common governance models and tensions that arise.
Last week's fediverse news roundup, episode 19 is out! Some highlights:
🎉Happy 15-year anniversary to the fediverse!
📸More details emerge about Instagram's new text app, that connects to the #fediverse.
🌉Skybridge is a new way to view your #bluesky feed in a #mastodon app such as @ivory
🦌Quote posting is added to a fork of #Elk
🌐Verify your #Wikipedia user account on Mastodon
Happy 15-year birthday to the fediverse! One of the fascinating aspects of writing about the fediverse is how quickly the field is continually changing. One of the main theme’s of the last weeks relate to defederation. Questions came to the foreground about when servers should defederate regarding search policies and spam moderation. New questions are still waiting to be answered regarding connecting with other protocols, Nostr and Bluesky’s ATproto. Meanwhile, more news leaked about Meta’s new text based network that connects to the fediverse in some way, with people having drastically different attitudes towards connecting with them as well.
The latest info regarding Meta’s Barcelona project can be found here. While people on the fediverse have understandably focused on what this means for the fediverse and ActivityPub, the project should also be framed in a context of a Twitter competitor. The downstream effect of Twitter having a new real competitor on the fediverse is still an open question, but it seems likely that something that breaks Twitters dominance will also be good for the fediverse as well.
Meanwhile, Bluesky continues to grow and be its own thing. The culture of shitposting, centred around a main character (or theme) of the day, in order to get on the What’s Hot feed, is decidedly different than the posting culture that exists on the fediverse. This cultural difference will be interesting to keep in mind while people are trying to bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto.
The bridging between Bluesky and the fediverse are quickly progressing. Skybridge is a way to use Mastodon clients (such as Ivory) with your Bluesky account, allowing you to post to both networks with a single app. It got released a few days ago, and it is surprising how polished this experience already is. Dave Weiner, one of the pioneers of RSS, made his Bluesky feed into an RSS feed, allowing you to follow any Bluesky user as an RSS feed.
The links
One-click privacy-conscious post quoting with Elk. It feels like the debate around quote posting is largely over, and now it is a matter of slowly implementing and integrating quote posting into most fediverse software. This is one of the latest examples.
Tuba is a Mastodon client for Linux in active development. The latest release advertises that it has native support for Bookwyrm and Funkwhale previews. The fediverse advertises itself as a network that goes beyond microblogging, so it is interesting to see clients actively working on this.
The W3C SocialWeb Incubation Community Group had a meeting, here are the notes. Setting up communication channels like this shows that the interesting in ActivityPub is indeed finally gathering steam again. Coordination like this between developers is of great importance.
You can now verify your Wikipedia user page on Mastodon. Tim Chambers explains the importance of integrations between Wikipedia and the fediverse like this one, here.
Mastodon has had the groups feature on the roadmap for a while, and the feature has been available in the GitHub repo for months. Truth Social, which is build on Mastodon but does not federate with the rest of the fediverse, has decided to add this groups feature before Mastodon itself does.
A podcast interview with WordPress developer Alex Standiford on how WordPress and the fediverse can be combined.
Funkwhale has posted an April and May update. One of the interesting things is that they are starting work on an API for tools to synchronize podcast playback, and that they are working with podcast players like AntennaPod.
A tool to visualise your connections on the fediverse.
Micro.blog held a virtual conference, Micro Camp. You can rewatch the talks on their website.
fedi.software is a new server that is specifically to provide fediverse software projects a home for their accounts.
For my Fediversery, a reminder that NSA and CIA were probably on the fedi before you were ( www.vice.com )