The contours of the fediverse as the open social web, in a vision that goes beyond decentralised microblogging, are starting to become more visible, with more bridges, connections and other types of media getting pulled into the fediverse. It also raises the question of expectations and boundaries, with different visions of the fediverse arising: that of a highly interconnected space, or with many more insular communities and groups that are loosely connected.

WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:

“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”

This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.

Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.

Podcasting news

Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.

In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.

Bluesky has 3 million accounts

Some news from Bluesky: yesterday the network reached the milestone of 3 million accounts. This milestone comes 2 months after hitting the 2 million mark. While there are no official numbers for Monthly Active Users (MAU), Kuba Suber estimates around 500k MAU, based on the daily and weekly active users. For comparision, Mastodon has between 1 million and 1.5 million MAU, depending on the source.

Bluesky’s growth is far from over, as Bluesky said that that ‘invite codes are going away soon’. This is different from opening up the network for federation, which is also planned for early 2024.

Bluesky is explicitly positioning itself as a place that is welcoming and suitable for news organisations. Bluesky team member Emily published an explainer how newsrooms can use Bluesky for the upcoming election season. Not everyone is convinced the network is ready yet though, as ændra explains some features that the network needs to be fit for purpose.

In other news

Another write-up of the meeting that Meta held last December to discuss the fediverse, by Tom Coates. It contains some more details about the planned roadmap, and how the integration is planned to happen in separate steps. What strikes me is that both this report, and the notes by Johannes Ernst, mention that they feel they have not gotten a clear answer to the most important question: ‘Why is Meta doing this?’. Tom Coates writes: “I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find [Meta’s explanation] enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it”. And Johannes Ernst: “Personally I believe this question needs a better answer than has been given publicly so far”.

An OpenAccess article in Cell Press for researchers that are considering to switch their research from X to Mastodon, by Robert W. Gehl and Roel Roscam Abbing. It describes key differences between the fediverse and X, and how Mastodon is quite different from X and Twitter from the perspective of researchers. It focuses on the expectations of privacy that people in the fediverse have, and one of the main recommendations for researchers is to shift from studying individuals to studying instances.

ActivityPods, the project to combine ActivityPub with the Solid protocol to create data ‘pods’, has been updated to version 1.5. With the new version it becomes easier to invite new people to your network, as well as better organisation of your contacts. ActivityPods tries to solve the problem that currently in the fediverse, you need to have a separate account for every fediverse service. With ActivityPods, applications can connect to your own Pod, so that your data and connections all live in one place.

The new link aggregator PieFed ‘emphasise trust, safety and happiness‘, and as part of that they have added extra notifications for commenting on posts made on servers with higher standards of moderation, such as Beehaw.org.

Fediseer, the project that provides a public space to crowd-source approval and disapproval of instances, has added a ‘rebuttals’ feature. Creator db0 noticed that instances were issuing ‘counter-censures’ (a censure is a negative judgement from one instance to another for any reason) just to reply to the original censure. Rebuttals provide an outlet for instances to explain their perspective or reasoning.

Bridgy Fed, the bridging project to connect the indieweb, fediverse (and Bluesky and Nostr in the near future) has expanded support for non-indie websites as well. Similar to RSS-Parrot, you can now follow websites and their RSS-feeds directly in your fediverse account.

The links

Pixelfed is building their spam filtering feature into a dedicated service, and working on adding parental controls.

PeerTube is building a mobile app, and is looking for people to help better understand their needs.

The research project by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi has kicked off as The Federalist Papers.

Designing a fediverse application with Bovine.

Updating your Mastodon status from a Kindle.

Mastodon client Oliphaunt for MacOS launches in beta.

radio free fedi is at a crossroads.

Short update by Write.as, saying they are working on post imports from WordPress and Substack.

The new Firefish fork Catodon moves towards the other Firefish fork, Iceshrimp. It’ll stay a separate project however.

A deeper look at one of the stand-out features of Misskey and it’s forks: Pages.

If you want to receive this weekly update directly in your inbox, subscribe below!

You can also follow this blog directly on the fediverse:

Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.

In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:

“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”

This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.

Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.

Welcome to the second year of Fediverse Report! This edition has: everyone is excited about RSS, a new link-aggregator platform, PieFed, launches in beta, major issues with blocking security in the fediverse, and more!

Everyone loves RSS

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.

An uncertain future for Firefish

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.

A new link aggregator platform with PieFed

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.

Authorized Fetch circumvented

Alex Gleason announced that Authorized Fetch has been circumvented. Authorized Fetch (in-depth explanation here) makes sure that a blocked server is fully blocked, and cannot access posts. Alex Gleason, behind fediverse platform Soapbox and currently working on the bridge Mostr (which connects the fediverse with Nostr), found out that Threads already blocked a few servers, such as Spinster, Poast, and the Mostr bridge, some of which he is involved with.

The Nostr community actively promotes the idea of adverse interoperability. In that spirit Alex Gleason reimplemented a method first used in Pleroma that circumvents Authorized Fetch. The blocked servers can now connect to Threads again. This is accomplished by spoofing the domain name from which the request came from.

There is a lot more to be said about this, and warrants an extensive follow up. I fully agree with WeDistribute’s concluding remarks: “Look, Mastodon has been providing a half-measure to its users for years. Now it’s the time to make things right: going into 2024, I think it’s going to absolutely be a requirement to develop more robust forms of privacy options and access controls to empower users”.

The links

This week’s award for most esoteric fediverse implementation goes to DiveDB, the online scuba diving blog site, which has recently added ActivityPub support. This allows you to follow scuba divers and their dives directly from fediverse feeds.

Micro.blog creator Manton Reece is publishing a book Indie Microblogging. The entire book is available as a text site as well, on book.micro.blog.

The blog Nexus of Privacy has a five-part series about ‘Strategies for the free fediverses’.

YouTuber MKBHD talks about Threads and the fediverse on his podcast Waveform.

More RSS: Goblin is a fediverse platform currently in development that is strongly inspired by Tumblr. They showed the ability to follow Tumblr blogs in Goblin via RSS this week.

Bookwyrm has been updated with full account migration.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe below to receive the update via email, or follow @LaurensHof in your favourite fediverse app.

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.