A bit of a slower news week, where everyone’s feeds turned purple with pictures of the aurora borealis. Still, work on (and interest in) bridges, curated content and new products in development show that things are dynamic all the same.
Fediverse Bridges
Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed and the new bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, has given another update on the Bluesky-fediverse bridge that recently was quietly launched. He says that now more than 2500 accounts have bridged now. Barrett also explains that there are still many bugs with the bridge, and that he is busy working on it.
A week after Threads launched their beta version of federation, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput said that mastodon.social knew about 2800 federated Threads accounts. While the total number of federated Threads account will have been higher, it will likely not have been that much higher either. Comparing this to the 2500 bridged account for a service that is still in active testing and development, indicates that there is significant interest in connections between the fediverse and Bluesky. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also bridged her account this week.
The bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse also allows Nostr to connect to Bluesky, with a case here where a post is made on Bluesky, replied to from Nostr, and then replied to again from Mastodon.
Bridge Finder is a new tool to help people with using the bridges between the networks, providing an easy visual interface with an explanation on how to use the bridges, as well as the requirements for opting into using them.
The News
Ghost recently announced their major push for ActivityPub support, and published their first update this week. Ghost explains the history and background of why they are working on the project, and why now specifically, saying: “In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.” Molly White’s response, saying “is this feeling… hope?” captures the sentiment well. Ghost also shared a first screenshot of their new ActivityPub powered reader app:
Ghost reader app that showcases activitypub powering the app.Recently Mastodon announced their new U.S.-based non-profit board members. People had quite some questions about it, and Mastodon has updated the blog with a detailed FAQ. One point of contention was why Biz Stone and Amir Ghavi are on the board. The FAQ explains that Ghavi has provided pro-bono legal council to Mastodon over the last year, with specific knowledge about open-source licensing and further connections to the tech industry. About Biz Stone Mastodon says that “as a Twitter co-founder [Stone] has invaluable experience scaling a social media platform to its first few million users and many connections to experts who are familiar with the problems Mastodon is facing”.
Flipboard announces that they have enabled federation for another 100 curators this week, briding the total of federated Flipboard magazines over 2500. Flipboard also announces that they have had over 100k social interactions on all the federated magazines in the last month.
Forgejo has set their first step towards federation, with the ability for federated likes. What makes this stand out is that Forgejo is a self-hosted software forge. While the fediverse is predominantly understood as a (microblogging) social network, Forgejo shows that federation can also be used for very different types of software products.
Fedihosting Foundation is a non-profit that was recently founded by the admins of the .world (lemmy.world, mastodon.world) cluster and mstn.social has expanded to include the toot.community server as well.
The Links
Trunk & Tidbits is a new series by the Mastodon engineering team. This edition shows what they’ve been working on in April 2024.
Last week I wrote about some conversations about a hard fork for Mastodon. WeDistribute wrote about the trouble forking Mastodon, going into more detail about previous attempts that place it into a historical context.
Upcoming short video platform Loops has started to roll out the first invites for a closed beta test.
ActivityPub server framework Fedify has some more updates.
Documentation to get starting on a plugin for Lemmy.
PieFed gives an overview of their work of the last few weeks.
Are you seeing posts in Federated have no connection to anyone on your instance or anyone they follow?
It happened to me recently and the root cause turned out to be #Streams accounts that were following me. I wasn't following them or interacting with them, but they were somehow able to push irrelevant content to my instance, not just from Streams but all over the Fediverse.
When I suspended the Streams instances, all of the unexplained content stopped.
Hmm, only 26 followers after being on Mastodon since November 2022? Ok, here is my intro again: (ex) Full stack web developer with Bread and Roses Creative, full time artist (now) and food critic (currently) with Chuck Eats KC. Kansas City-based web dev since the dawn of browsers (1995). Focus these days is one creative stuff: writing, food criticism, photography, streaming, art, and making fun videos.#Artists#Intros#Writers#FoodCritics#Fediverse#WebDev
Hey @MDN, with Stack Overflow’s ongoing community implosion, now would be an excellent time to launch MDN Answers so people have a better place to help each other learn.
I don't fully understand the point of Pixelfed. I've used it a couple times, but always end up abandoning it. I like the pictures, but I can just view them here on Mastodon. I was even following most of the same accounts since it's all federated anyway.
There are clients for Mastodon with gallery views and you can set feeds to media only. Pixelfed felt entirely redundant to me, and I couldn't find a use case.
Most forks fail because you need a core developer to maintain the project
There are dozens of misskey forks, and most of them fail after a few months or a year (calckey ->firefish)
You can't just fork something and live off hopes and dreams
This is why I believe it's in my best interest as the core maintainer of Pixelfed to work with our community as much as possible to eliminate the need for a fork
Such a vibe when you reach this, I love it, fuck egos, we all equals, lets goooo 🚀
#Threads wants to be the best place where people have relevant, public, real-time conversations, and the #fediverse is the means by which people can find the audiences that are best for those conversations, because not all of them will be on Threads.
The fediverse is a compelling way for creators to own their audiences in a way they aren't able to own on other apps today.
Rachel: people have more choice when their apps integrate with the [#fediverse]. They get to go where the rules are that align most with their values, and they get to vote with their feet.
Also exciting from the product development perspective: if you don't have to build your own [social] graph, you get to spend more time on cool functionality.
Now that the #Fediverse grows and grows, I'm more and more convinced, that the best way to access it, doesn't yet exist. There is no way of really experiencing the diversity right now.
Someone asked how they can publish videos on PeerTube (the Fediverse's video platform). There's a guide to publishing on PeerTube here, it includes suggestions for where to sign up (and also how to make your own server if you prefer):
"In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. ... There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of the open web."
It's hard to imagine #StackOverflow made their decision without considering the fate #Twitter and #Reddit suffered. That they willingly chose to burn the remaining goodwill they had with their users is bewildering.
Genocide apologist are safe and welcome at #mastodon dot social. This person has dedicated their time to harass, lie and libel the @palestine They keep spreading proven lies as the "beheaded babies" and "mass rapes" (there's zero evidence of either), yet Mastodon dot social mods don't do anything about this obvious troll, while they ban pro-Palestine accounts.
@trankten No se que podemos hacer ante eso, pero espero que si es cierto que se ha vendido a Meta le espero que le pase lo mismo que "hizo" el con #GNUsocial cuando dejo Ostatus y puso ActivityPub. El #fediverse como bien sabes es muy grande.