RSS Parrot is a new tool that allows you to turn your fediverse feed into a RSS feed. What was intended to be an ‘under-the-rader late night launch’ turned about to be massively popular hit in the fediverse. The tool is simple: mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the address you want to follow, and the bot replies with an account that you can follow. Every website is one account, and it posts a link every time the website has a new post.

The responses show the demand for RSS feeds that easily integrate into social networking feeds. RSS Parrot is a great workaround for websites that have not set up their own fediverse presence yet. But for people who do own websites and prefer to have direct control over the relationship with their audience, RSS Parrot’s popularity is a great reminder to set up your own fediverse presence.

The link-aggregator part of the fediverse has grown, with the launch of PieFed’s beta test. PieFed joins platforms like Lemmy and Kbin who all have the ability to share links, and comment and vote on them.

PieFed focuses on making the platform easy to manage, maintain and develop for, and uses Python. Developer Rimu is also emphasising Trust and Safety, and healthy community interactions. One way PieFed does this is by adding the ability for authors to add a ‘I’ve changed my mind’ setting. It draws inspiration from Nick Punt’s work on de-escalation on social media. Another feature is adding a warning on posts made by accounts with low reputation, meaning that their posts get downvoted a lot.

PieFed has launched as a beta test, and comes with the warning that there will be ‘probably many bugs’. You can try PieFed for yourself at piefed.social.

The Firefish project has been on a decline for a while now, with the flagship server firefish.social experiencing severe technical problems over the last months. Another Firefish server, firefish.tech is now also shutting down, partially due to the problems with Firefish. Panos Damelos, who was the community manager for the Firefish project, explains his perspective on how the project declined here, attributing it to severe technical problems, combined with a lack of attention and communication of the lead developer Kainoa.

Together with Firefish developer Namekuji, Panos Damelos have started the Catodon project, a fork of Firefish. In the announcement blog post Catodon dives deeper into what makes the project stand out, noting the community driven aspect of the project. Catodon joins IceShrimp and Sharkey as recent Misskey fork projects that are all gaining popularity as small-scale fediverse servers.

Welcome to the final update of the year. A bit shorter before a break over the holidays, and then Fediverse Report will be back for it’s second year! Stay tuned for more information on how Fediverse Report will evolve over the coming period!

Fediverse Report published two articles published this week:

The links

David Pierce wrote a big article for The Verge about the fediverse and Activitypub.

So did Bloomberg, more from the perspective of Meta.

On Threads, Erin Kissane wrote an extensive article. If there is one article that you’d want to read regarding Threads, Meta and federation, I highly recommend this one.

Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast had Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko as a guest this week.

The Nexus of Privacy wrote an article comparing three safety ininiatives in the fediverse: FIRES, FediSeer and The Bad Space.

A technical post explaining the technical ActivityPub implementation of Threads.

The Fediverse Developer Network has posted a survey for fediverse developers.

MacOS RSS reader NewsNetWire published a blog post about the considerations of adding Mastodon support.

The Event Federation project published an update how the community is an integral part of developing an interoperable system.

The Streams project added a plugin that blocks both scraping, as well as all Meta instances.

That’s all for this year, thank you so much for your support! See you in the next year!

Framasoft has released their plans for PeerTube for 2024, and I hosted the livestreamed AMA to learn more. Framasoft talks about apps, being an alternative, new features, and so much more. Let’s dive right in.

Being an alternative

Framasoft explains that PeerTube is an alternative to YouTube and Twitch, and not a rival. The size of the Big Tech platforms cannot be seen independently from the values that are embedded into the software. To be a rival that can compete in size with YouTube and Twitch would mean abandoning the values of PeerTube. In the blog post they describe how their values such as transparency and autonomy directly influence the features and design of PeerTube.

The massive size difference between the Big Tech platforms and Framasoft is also visible in the size of the teams that work on the products. Up until now, most of the work on PeerTube is done by one paid developer. For the next year, Framasoft is proud to have a second person join the team. It is clear that this means a lot to the team, as they try to balance all PeerTube’s needs with the culture of a small organisation.

During the AMA, Pouhiou talks about the size and growth of PeerTube, and mentions that a sudden burst of growth and attention can be a great risk as well, especially for a platform where not all moderation features are completed. The consistent growth, without moments of intense virality, is a positive for Pouhiou.

New features that got released for PeerTube in the latest update, such as password protection, also benefit the the small groups and creators that Framasoft sees as their audience. During the AMA, Pouhiou said that the team did not realise how impactful the password protection feature can be to creators, until creators told them how important the feature was. This is an indication that PeerTube still has work to do in really growing into the role of being their own product that has their own specific audience.

Plans for 2024

PeerTube will build a Mobile App, as mobile has become the main way of watching videos. While there are unofficial apps, having an official app can be helpful for adoption of the platform. The plan is to publish the app for both iOS and Android, with AndroidTV as an extended goal. As Owncast however has found out recently, Apple can be restrictive on publishing apps on iOS. How this works out for PeerTube remains to be seen.

Content moderation is getting another look in 2024. PeerTube will work on a comment moderation system for both instance admins, and video uploaders. Another aspect is the ability for instance admins to scan all video metadata for specific keywords, that present a list that the admins can than decide on whether and how to take action on. Framasoft will also work with designers to rethink the NSFW/SFW labels into more specific tags for sensitive content.

Framasoft is also putting a big focus on the user experience. As the software has grown and developed over the years, features are not always in logical places anymore. They’ll work with designers to rethink the interface from the ground up.

Framasoft is a non-profit organisation funded by donations. You can find out more about their yearly donation drive, and how to support PeerTube, here.

Reblog via Laurens Hof

“It’s the future of social media, and the future of the web!” Speaking with Mike McCue makes it immediately clear why Flipboard has joined the fediverse. Monday, the company announced that Flipboard has begun federating, and that people from other parts of the fediverse can now interact and follow with Flipboard accounts.

The plan is to implement federation in three steps. The first step started this week, and allows full interoperability between a selected group of 27 publishers and creators. In January 2024, all Flipboard accounts will federate, with people from the fediverse being able to follow and interact with any public curator. Finally, Flipboard plans for April 2024 for all Flipboard accounts to interact with fediverse accounts as well.

McCue explains Flipboard’s Magazines, by saying that if you are interested in a subject, for example Mountain biking, you want to see all of the content, and not limit it to only one type: not just posts (microblogs), but also videos, photo’s, articles. Flipboard’s magazines is a collection of all these different types of media. He says that federation presents a great opportunity to introduce people to the concept of Flipboard and its curated magazines.

McCue is also thinking on how Flipboard maps onto the current structure that most fediverse software uses. In Flipboard, one account can maintain multiple magazines, and you ‘flip’ the content into one specific magazine. With the current implementation of federation, you only follow a Flipboard account, and all the posts you see in your feed get the text “Posted Into [Magazine]” added. You cannot follow an individual magazine from an account yet. As Flipboards Magazines do not easily map onto the structure that other fediverse platforms use. The closest analogue might be PeerTube’s Channels, which also don’t federate.

Flipboard is also thinking about how to share their work on content moderation, stating in their announcement post that “we will share [our red/green domain list] with other instance owners in the Fediverse as soon as is practically possible”. McCue explains that the red/green domain list is used by Flipboard to determine if websites are trustworthy, with quality content and fair reporting (green list), or untrustworthy or harmful for the red domain list.

Flipboard uses these list to determine on how to approach accounts and posts in their recommendations. The fediverse has been thinking and working about various initiatives on how to share information about whether other fediverse servers are trustworthy. For more information, The Nexus of Privacy has an extensive look at three major initiatives in the fediverse, FediSeer, FIRES and The Bad Space. There are many open questions on how Flipboard’s work will look, but it does represent an expansion in the thinking of how the fediverse can work together to share information about trust.

The steps by Flipboard to federate represent two trends going on in the fediverse currently;
a transition of the fediverse towards an open social web, where products and organisations can add a social components to their product by adding fediverse integration. The other is in placing an increased focus on content curation. A significant group of people in the fediverse express skepticism about algorithmic discovery. Hand-curated content represents an alternative way of finding new content in the fediverse, and Flipboard makes that easier now, with their federation of magazines.

“It’s the future of social media, and the future of the web!” Speaking with Mike McCue makes it immediately clear why Flipboard has joined the fediverse. Monday, the company announced that Flipboard has begun federating, and that people from other parts of the fediverse can now interact and follow with Flipboard accounts.

The plan is to implement federation in three steps. The first step started this week, and allows full interoperability between a selected group of 27 publishers and creators. In January 2024, all Flipboard accounts will federate, with people from the fediverse being able to follow and interact with any public curator. Finally, Flipboard plans for April 2024 for all Flipboard accounts to interact with fediverse accounts as well.

McCue explains Flipboard’s Magazines, by saying that if you are interested in a subject, for example Mountain biking, you want to see all of the content, and not limit it to only one type: not just posts (microblogs), but also videos, photo’s, articles. Flipboard’s magazines is a collection of all these different types of media. He says that federation presents a great opportunity to introduce people to the concept of Flipboard and its curated magazines.

McCue is also thinking on how Flipboard maps onto the current structure that most fediverse software uses. In Flipboard, one account can maintain multiple magazines, and you ‘flip’ the content into one specific magazine. With the current implementation of federation, you only follow a Flipboard account, and all the posts you see in your feed get the text “Posted Into [Magazine]” added. You cannot follow an individual magazine from an account yet. As Flipboards Magazines do not easily map onto the structure that other fediverse platforms use. The closest analogue might be PeerTube’s Channels, which also don’t federate.

Flipboard is also thinking about how to share their work on content moderation, stating in their announcement post that “we will share [our red/green domain list] with other instance owners in the Fediverse as soon as is practically possible”. McCue explains that the red/green domain list is used by Flipboard to determine if websites are trustworthy, with quality content and fair reporting (green list), or untrustworthy or harmful for the red domain list.

Flipboard uses these list to determine on how to approach accounts and posts in their recommendations. The fediverse has been thinking and working about various initiatives on how to share information about whether other fediverse servers are trustworthy. For more information, The Nexus of Privacy has an extensive look at three major initiatives in the fediverse, FediSeer, FIRES and The Bad Space. There are many open questions on how Flipboard’s work will look, but it does represent an expansion in the thinking of how the fediverse can work together to share information about trust.

The steps by Flipboard to federate represent two trends going on in the fediverse currently;
a transition of the fediverse towards an open social web, where products and organisations can add a social components to their product by adding fediverse integration. The other is in placing an increased focus on content curation. A significant group of people in the fediverse express skepticism about algorithmic discovery. Hand-curated content represents an alternative way of finding new content in the fediverse, and Flipboard makes that easier now, with their federation of magazines.

An overview of the interesting links from the previous week.

FediForum, the online unconference about the fediverse, has opened registrations for the third edition, on March 19-20, 2024. More information and registration on the website.

Mozilla.social, the fediverse server by Mozilla, is slowly opening up the server, and have added the first group of people from the waitlist.

Mastodon is experimenting with a new recommendation algorithm for finding interesting accounts to follow. The experiment is only available on the mastodon.online server.

Event Federation is a project that aims to federate WordPress events with the rest of the fediverse, and make it interoperable with programs like Mobilizon and Gancio. They just showed a sneak peak on the interoperability between WordPress Events and Mobilizon.

Bonfire has released documentation on their framework, that further explains how it is both a social network as well as a toolkit for communities to (re)design their digital spaces.

IFTAS has announced a sandbox server intended for moderators to practice moderation in a safe environment.

Owncast has started their own monthly newsletter, the first edition is available here.

For all of this week’s news, check out Last Week in Fediverse – ep 48.

It’s been quite a week for news in the fediverse, with the news that Threads has started their process of incrementally adding federation to Threads taking most of the attention. But lots of other great stuff happened in the fediverse as well:

Threads

Threads has started their implementation process of federation and adding ActivityPub to Threads. The first careful step is that a few Threads profiles are now visible in the fediverse, and that posts made by them can be viewed from fediverse servers. For now only the accounts for the profiles of Threads head Adam Mosseri and 2 Threads engineers are visible. Replies to their post made by a fediverse account does not federate back yet. Mosseri says that the process of adding federation will be done gradually in steps, and that he expects that this process will take most of the year. In another post, Mosseri also notes that federation will likely be opt-in for Threads accounts. This is in contrast with most fediverse software, which federates with all other fediverse servers by default, and federation is opt-out (blocking).

PeerTube

Framasoft announced their plans for PeerTube for the next year, in an extensive blog. I also hosted a livestreamed AMA with Framasoft for the community to ask all their questions about PeerTube, and it turned out amazing, with lots of great information. The entire AMA can be rewatched here. I’ll do a larger writeup on all the PeerTube news next week, but for now already the highlights: PeerTube is doubling their dev team, creating a mobile app, and will work on better moderation tools, and a review and redesign of the user interface. Stay tuned!

In other news

Lemmy has released their latest big update, v0.19. In this blog post they go over all the changes they’ve made. Two major new features are improved post ranking and instance blocking for individual accounts. With the new feed sorting of scaled sort, the community size where the post is made gets taken into account. This allows for smaller communities to have better visibility, and should increase their reach. People can now block entire instances as well, which should provide a significant increase in the ability for people to curate their digital spaces.

Discourse has been working on joining the fediverse for a while, and their latest update shows how far along they are. A Discourse category can now follow any actor in the fediverse. Check out their video to show this in practice, with federation between both different Discourses as well as Mastodon. This is a major step in expanding the fediverse, and worth keeping your eyes on.

The links

FediForum, the online unconference about the fediverse, has opened registrations for the third edition, on March 19-20, 2024. More information and registration on the website.

Mozilla.social, the fediverse server by Mozilla, is slowly opening up the server, and have added the first group of people from the waitlist.

Mastodon is experimenting with a new recommendation algorithm for finding interesting accounts to follow. The experiment is only available on the mastodon.online server.

Event Federation is a project that aims to federate WordPress events with the rest of the fediverse, and make it interoperable with programs like Mobilizon and Gancio. They just showed a sneak peak on the interoperability between WordPress Events and Mobilizon.

Bonfire has released documentation on their framework, that further explains how it is both a social network as well as a toolkit for communities to (re)design their digital spaces.

IFTAS has announced a sandbox server intended for moderators to practice moderation in a safe environment.

Owncast has started their own monthly newsletter, the first edition is available here.

Other articles

I wrote other articles as well this week, check it out!

Newsmast, a social network committed to thoughtful knowledge sharing and curated communities, has emerged as a notable project within the fediverse. It is backed by the UK Newsmast Foundation Charity, which has set itself as a mission to change social media for the better. I spoke with Michael Foster, co-founder of Newsmast, and Freddie Johnson, Foundation Ambassador for Newsmast.

The main way that Newsmast is working towards their mission is with curated communities. The idea came to the co-founders after he realised how during the Russian invasion of Ukraine an online community of valuable news and commentators emerged online. As this happened mainly on Twitter, the events of the last year necessitated the use of a different place to facilitate these trusted news communities, which they found in Mastodon and the fediverse.

Over the last year, the team has been busy building their own place on the fediverse. Starting with a fork of Mastodon, they have developed their own apps for Android and iOS, as well as their own web interface. The design puts communities at the core, as a way for people to help with discovery on the fediverse, and find valuable content.

Curated Communities

Newsmast has put quite a bit of work in their curated communities, and it goes beyond just providing a list of accounts to follow. There are communities in a large variety of topics, varying from ‘Government and Policy’ to ‘Biodiversity and Rewilding’, to ‘Ukraine invasion’, to ‘History’. A Newsmast community has some parallels with Bluesky’s custom feed. For creating each community, Newsmast takes a group of hashtags, then apply some strong filters to the posts made with this hashtag. Then it adds some specific hand-picked accounts to the subject as well that are knowledgeable in the field.

Freddie Johnson explains that they have structured the communities around academic or newspaper subjects, and that the focus is groups like academics, news organisations, and non-profit workers. They are thinking about how to provide editorial oversight over communities. The organisation is working on establishing a community based editorial board, that takes inspiration from the academic model for oversight boards.

A unique home on the fediverse

Another aspect about Newsmast that stands out is that it is also a hosted fediverse server that anyone can join. While there are many fediverse servers that are available for signup registration, there are not many servers that provide a clear governance structure in the way that Newsmast can. When new people first join the fediverse, the question of which server to join can be a difficult one, for multiple reasons: for people new to decentralised social networks it is often unclear what the question means, what the impact of the choice is. But the differences between the servers can be hard to find as well. Signing up asks you to trust the administrators of the server, with limited info of who they are. Newsmast stands out in a positive way; it presents a clear and extensive vision for what they want their social network to be, and also shows that the server is run by a UK accredited charity. For new people joining the fediverse, Newsmast provides an attractive option to join.

Expanding communities

Newsmast is working on making their curated content more broadly accessible. In the latest update of Mastodon app Mammoth, there are now curated “Smart Lists”, with the Environment and Nature Smart Lists curated by Newsmast. The organisation is also working on an update so you can log into Newsmast with your current Mastodon account, which should make it easier for people to access the Newsmast communities.

Different organisations are thinking about, and working on, curating and helping people discover interesting content. Flipboard is expanding their native integration with the fediverse for their magazines, Mammoth is providing Smart List, and for Bluesky is curated feeds one of their key features. Newsmast takes this concept and moves it further by actively thinking about how to provide oversight to the editorial power that the curators have. It is one of the more interesting projects in the fediverse that I have seen in quite a while, and certainly worth keeping an eye on. You can try Newsmast at newsmast.org.