Framasoft, the French non-profit organisation for open source software such as PeerTube, says that after 5 years, Mobilizon has reached maturity. In December 2018 the organisation announced their plans to develop Mobilizon, with the goal of creating an alternative to Facebook Groups and events.

Over the years, they have added multiple updates, such as federation in 2020 and searching across Mobilizon instances in 2020. This month, they are releasing their final update, v4, with a variety of new features.

Event administrators can now send private announcements to attendees, allowing them to contact all people who have registered for an event directly. This announcement is a one-way communications channel, intended for organisers to broadcast information. Besides that, a chat system for attendees is also implemented, which federates with the rest of the fediverse.

Another new feature is the ability to import and synchronise events from other platforms, such as Meetup and EventBrite. Framasoft created an import tool that allows you to import and synchronise event information from these platforms into Mobilizon. iCal event feeds are support too, so this even works with most calendar tools.

The big platform for importing events from is Facebook. Here, Framasoft has done the work to get it to work, and the ball is now in Facebook’s court to approve and validate. Framasoft is clear that they do not have a timeline how long this will take, and that they are unsure if Facebook will do so.

While Framasoft sees Mobilizon has having completed their vision, it is far from over for the project. Framasoft will hand over the keys to the French association Kaihuri, who has been maintaining a Mobilizon presence for a while. Kaihuri recently got funding from NLnet to continue development work on Mobilizon, focusing on the user experience and improving interoperability. Meanwhile, Framasoft is betting big on PeerTube for next year, and is currently organising their yearly donation drive.

Welcome to another episode of Last Week in Fediverse, where I’m experimenting with a slightly different structure. I’m trying to get more articles out directly into the fediverse with WordPress’ ActivityPub plugin, so you can also follow me laurenshof@fediversereport.com to read it all during the week when it comes out.

NLnet funding the fediverse

The NLnet foundation provides grants to an open information society, and over the years they have provided most projects on the fediverse with funding. This week NLnet announced their latest grant round, with a significant number of fediverse projects being supported. For more background on NLnet, read my interview with them. In this article I take a look at all the different projects that NLnet has funded this round.

PeerTube released their latest version

The latest version of PeerTube comes with a variety of cool new features. Two of them stand out to me, as they allow PeerTube to be used in ways that Youtube can’t. For content creators that want to give their subscribers exclusive access to content, the ability to password protect your PeerTube videos might just be a game changer. There is a lot more coming up next year with PeerTube as well, stay tuned for the announcement very soon!

Misskey 2023 recap

Misskey has had a busy year. Developer Syuilo provided an update of the year, describing the new features and how the project went from 500 daily active users in January of the year to 28.000 now. One thing that interests me is how Misskey keeps developing into it’s own unique identity within the fediverse. As it is largely Japanese, there is little overlap with the Western fediverse community.

In other news

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. You can subscribe via email below, or laurenshof@fediversereport.com if you want to follow this blog with your fediverse account.

Misskey, the fediverse microblogging platform that’s popular in Japan, has provided a recap of 2023, and it has been a big year for Misskey. The platform saw massive growth, the main server Misskey.io incorporated itself, and a number of new features and performance improvements.

The flagship server Misskey.io grew from 500 daily active users in January to 28k daily active users in December. They grew from around 20k registered accounts at the beginning of the year to over 400k accounts now. As with most social networks, growth happened in bursts, with a major increase in March and July, while the other months grew much slower.

With the growth came other changes as well: the server misskey.io incorporated itself, and main developer Syuilo became a director of the organisation as well. Donations and sponsorships also grew significantly. For the future, Syuilo says that “there are limits to relying solely on donations from everyone, so I would like to find a way to monetize the project.”

Misskey Pages allow users to create custom web pages on the platform that they can share. It can be programmed as well, and Misskey created a custom scripting language AiScript so people can safely add code to their Misskey Pages as well.

Other updates include refactoring of code and performance improvements, more information on that can be found here and here.

Misskey’s vision for fediverse servers is visible in their updates on moderation; every user can be assigned different roles that control permissions of the user in detail. In the update they say that this has greatly affected the operation of the Misskey server. This implies a vision for Misskey of larger servers, with a more complex structure for administration and moderation.

The future plans for Misskey focus heavily on the playful aspect of social communities: two games will be added that can be played on Misskey; Misskey Room as a way to play with other users in 3D space, as well as a chat interface. This puts Misskey further it’s unique place in the fediverse.

Besides the main news of this week (NLnet providing grants to multiple fediverse projects, and a major new release of PeerTube, Misskey 2023 recap), lots of other news happened this week in the fediverse as well. An overview:

Mike McCue interviewed Evan Prodromou for his podcast Dot Social. The episode can be found here, Johannes Ernst wrote a thread while listening through the episode to get some of the highlights, here.

Bridgy Fed is a project to bridge the different protocols that power the open social networks. Creator Ryan Barrett is working to expand to include Bluesky, so that you can connect to accounts from Bluesky with your fediverse account (and visa versa). As work is progressing, he wrote a reintroduction to the project that explains some more background information about the project.

A longread article on the recent situation with The Bad Space, placing it in a larger historical context.

An essay that argues that scholarly societies should embrace their role as a society more than a publisher, and build upon the digital commons in the fediverse.

WeDistribute wrote a list of the 10 biggest misconceptions about Mastodon.

Radio free fedi is working towards a New Years day 24 hour stream party. Go check it out, it looks like there will be a ton of great content. If you stream on Owncast or PeerTube, you can also participate!

Lemmy gives their developer update on the work they have been doing in the last 2 weeks. Lemmy is preparing for their new release, v0.19, and the lemmy.ml server is already running the update. One of the changes is a new sorting algorithm, scaled sorting, that gives more visibility to smaller communities on Lemmy.

MarsEdit, a blog editing application for Mac, now has direct support for Mastodon.

An overview of all the other software releases for fediverse software this week.

Framasoft has officially released the newest version of PeerTube, v6. The video platform added some of the most requested features in this massive update. Some of the highlights:

Protect your videos with passwords

Video storyboard

Upload a new version of your video

Add chapters to your video

The announcement blog has more details, as well as 10 second videos (hosted on PeerTube of course!) demonstration all the features.

Storyboard is when you hover over the progress bar of a video, and it shows you a preview of the frame at that timestamp. This allows you to quickly browse through a video, or help you search for a specific moment. Chapters allow you to divide the video into different segments, and give them titles. With video storyboard and video chapters, PeerTube brings the experience of the user closer to what they get from YouTube.

PeerTube positions itself explicitly as an alternative to YouTube and Twitch, but with the other new features, offers possibilities that those platforms can not, and help PeerTube create their own unique space.

With password protect, creators can now lock down access to videos with a password. Creators who want to share videos with a limited audience (their paying supporters for example) currently do not have a good way to do this on YouTube. PeerTube has now a specific clear use case where it is better than YouTube. For protected videos, YouTube massive audience is not a relevant metric after all.

Uploading a new version of your video is again a feature that is unique to PeerTube, allowing creators to update a video or correct a mistake. As this feature requires trust between the creator and their audience, it is not enabled by default, and the video will display a “Video re-upload” tag on updated videos.

It is a significant update for the video platform, with even more in the works. Framasoft will announce more details on their plans for PeerTube in the next two weeks. Stay tuned for more information about a special event for this as well!

NLNet has announced 55 new projects that are awarded a NGI Zero grant. NGI Zero is the Next Generation Internet program from the European Commision, that funds projects that work on what they call the next generation internet. For more info in NLnet and NGI Zero, check out this interview I did with NLnet this summer. The latest round of grants has quite a few projects that connect to the fediverse in some way. An overview:

NodeBB is a popular forum software platform. They got funding to add ActivityPub integration to NodeBB, allowing interoperability with both other NodeBB forums as well as the fediverse at large. NodeBB says that the “hardest part of starting a community is gaining a critical mass of adoption in order to sustain interest and content”, and integrating with the fediverse is seen as a way to overcome their biggest hurdle.

The loosely connected group of developers at fedidevs.org got a grant to build an automated test framework and test cases. It is currently hard for fediverse developers to build fediverse software that properly federates with the rest dof the network, as a consistent test suite for ActivityPub is lacking. This new test framework hopes to make it easier for developers to start building for the fediverse.

Bonfire is a federated social network that’s currently in development, with most of the work now on getting the platform ready for release. Their grant will go towards improving the performance, as well releasing their version of the ActivityPub library they are using as open-source.

GoToSocial is a lightweight, customisable, and safety-focused entryway into the fediverse, and is currently in Alpha development. With this grant, the team will add two factor authentication, and improve interoperability and scalability.

Mobilizon is a federated event planning tool, originally developed by Framasoft. Framasoft recently announced that they have completed their vision of Mobilizon. The project is not over however, as another group got funding to further improve the UX of Mobilizon.

PeerTube got funding for further improving the adoption, accessability and popularity of the platform, as well as to develop a mobile app. Framasoft has quite a few announcements in the pipeline, I’ll talk more about Framasoft, PeerTube and Mobilizon in the near future with more information.

Commune is social networking build on Matrix instead of ActivityPub, with a focus on creating communities. The project has interesting ideas about how to build social spaces, and is looking to add fediverse integration as well.

Overall there are a lot of cool and interesting projects that NLnet has funded, with a mix of supporting and scaling existing projects, as well as funding new ideas. For other projects that are interested, you can find more information about their grant process here. The deadline for the next round is December 1st 2023.

It has been more than a year since the #twittermigration started, with a massive inflow of new users towards Mastodon. Growth has plateaued, and the space is settling into a new dynamic. With the news that The White House and Joe Biden have joined Threads, changes in the space of social networks is far from over however.

Mastodon and reply guy culture

Mastodon has a reputation for a harboring a culture of ‘reply guys’. There is a culture of high engagement and reactions on people’s posts, which further alleviates the level and amount of replies that are annoying, irritating or demeaning. The account Mastodon Migration recently collected some posts by large accounts that all experience this issue, and how it turns them off using the fediverse.

Mastodon announced an update to their Android App, that aims to help alleviate these issues somewhat. In a blog post Mastodon announced that they recognise that Mastodon has issues with unwanted reactions, and that they are experimenting with different features to tackle the issue.

The first part is giving people a reminder for basic courtesy, the first time they are responding to someone they’re not following. It also shows a bit of information about the person they are responding to. Eugen Rochko believes that “by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field”.

The second part is to give people a reminder when they are about to respond to a post that is over 3 months old. Due to Mastodon’s heavy focus on reverse-chronological feeds, old posts can sometimes be boosted and go viral on the feeds again, months after they originally have been posted.

Both experiments do not prevent replying, and are simple notifications that can be dismissed, with a ‘Don’t remind me again’ option available as well. The update will arrive soon on the Android Mastodon app, with the update for iOS coming later. If the experiment goes well, it might come to the web interface as well.

Flipboard takes the next steps into the social web

Flipboard has already committed to decentralised social media a while ago, and is now taking the next steps in their commitment. The company announced yesterday that they will completely stop tweeting, and that they have launched a new podcast, Dot Social, about the ‘open social web movement’.

Flipboard will stop posting on Twitter, citing the rise in hate speech and disinformation as reasons. They state that open standards are the future of social media. They will post on most other social networks (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads). On Mastodon they have had active editorial desks accounts for a while (I enjoy their Culture Desk account personally), which will continue to be a focus.

Flipboard also announced a new podcast, Dot Social, hosted by the CEO Mike McCue, about the open social web. It is about how the internet is changing, and how open standards are contributing to a more open social web. Guests are people who are pioneering in the space, and include some people well known in the fediverse, such as Evan Prodromou. The first episode is with Mike Masnick, who wrote the seminal paper ‘Protocols not Platforms’, on decentralizing innovation, and is out now.

Nivenly organisation update

Nivenly is the member-run co-operative that is also behind the Mastodon server Hachyderm.io, and supports various open source projects. They gave an update on projects and project applications, some of which are of specific relevance to the fediverse.

Pachli is a Mastodon Android app, and a fork of the Tusky app. Pachli creator Nik Clayton left the Tusky project this fall over allegations of lapses in governance of the Tusky project (response by Tusky here). Pachli has applied to be a Nivenly project, to provide a governance model and a legal entity that can help with practical matters. Nivenly is currently soliciting feedback on the proposal.

FIRES, Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server, is a project by Emelia Smith, with the goal too provide the ability to subscribe to moderation advisories and recommendations that change over time. Emelia is currently working on a large technical proposal for FIRES, and it is undergoing private peer review at the moment. Her updates (here, here) have more information, and I’ll cover this in more detail once the proposal is made public.

The FSEP, Federation Safety Enhancement Project, was created a few months ago by Ro (author of The Bad Space), with the goal of providing other blocklist providers with a template for compatibility. The proposal got stuck in the first phase, as Ro got targeted with racism and other harassment over The Bad Space (the next update by @jdp23’s article series on fediverse and safety will cover this in more detail). For now the project is shelved. Meanwhile, Ro writes as a reflection on the incident that it has showcased the value of work of The Bad Space, and as a result he has set up think tank that can help develop consent-based tools for independent social networks.

In other news

Here is an overview of all the other news that has happened this week in the #fediverse.

ActivityPods is a project that aims to combine the ActivityPub protocol with the Solid protocol. The goal of the project is that you can have one account on the fediverse, which hosts your data and followers, using the Solid Protocol. Other ActivityPub applications can then connect to your data. ActivityPods posted an update on their road towards version 2.0, scheduled to be released early 2024. They will also be working on Mastopod; a Mastodon-compatible implementation of ActivityPods.

Tagginator is a small new bot for Lemmy, that does something simple but smart: it replies from a Mastodon account to new posts on Lemmy communities that it monitors, and comments with a hashtag that is relevant to that community. This way, people on Mastodon who follow that hashtag will now also start to see Lemmy posts in their feed. As Lemmy will not add hashtags in the near future, this is a workaround to improve the interoperability between the microblogging side of the fediverse and the threadiverse.

Heise Online’s editor Martin Holland has regularly given updates on data and traffic for their news account. In the latest update he provides some insight in the decentralisation of the fediverse. It also shows the extend of the peak of the twittermigration last year, and how traffic has slowed down since.

The University of Innsbruck put out a press release that they’ll be focusing more on Mastodon for science communication, and that their presence at X will be significantly reduced.

Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.

Kbin dev gives an overview of the current work and plans for the near future.

All fediverse client and server updates for the week.

That’s all for the week, thanks for reading. You can subscribe to my blog on the fediverse by searching for @LaurensHof to receive updates during the week as well. Or subscribe to receive the weekly newsletter every Sunday below.

Here is an overview of all the other news that has happened this week in the #fediverse.

ActivityPods is a project that aims to combine the ActivityPub protocol with the Solid protocol. The goal of the project is that you can have one account on the fediverse, which hosts your data and followers, using the Solid Protocol. Other ActivityPub applications can then connect to your data. ActivityPods posted an update on their road towards version 2.0, scheduled to be released early 2024. They will also be working on Mastopod; a Mastodon-compatible implementation of ActivityPods.

Tagginator is a small new bot for Lemmy, that does something simple but smart: it replies from a Mastodon account to new posts on Lemmy communities that it monitors, and comments with a hashtag that is relevant to that community. This way, people on Mastodon who follow that hashtag will now also start to see Lemmy posts in their feed. As Lemmy will not add hashtags in the near future, this is a workaround to improve the interoperability between the microblogging side of the fediverse and the threadiverse.

Heise Online’s editor Martin Holland has regularly given updates on data and traffic for their news account. In the latest update he provides some insight in the decentralisation of the fediverse. It also shows the extend of the peak of the twittermigration last year, and how traffic has slowed down since.

The University of Innsbruck put out a press release that they’ll be focusing more on Mastodon for science communication, and that their presence at X will be significantly reduced.

Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.

Kbin dev gives an overview of the current work and plans for the near future.

All fediverse client and server updates for the week.

Mastodon has a reputation for a harboring a culture of ‘reply guys’. There is a culture of high engagement and reactions on people’s posts, which further alleviates the level and amount of replies that are annoying, irritating or demeaning. The account Mastodon Migration recently collected some posts by large accounts that all experience this issue, and how it turns them off using the fediverse.

Mastodon announced an update to their Android App, that aims to help alleviate these issues somewhat. In a blog post Mastodon announced that they recognise that Mastodon has issues with unwanted reactions, and that they are experimenting with different features to tackle the issue.

The first part is giving people a reminder for basic courtesy, the first time they are responding to someone they’re not following. It also shows a bit of information about the person they are responding to. Eugen Rochko believes that “by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field”.

The second part is to give people a reminder when they are about to respond to a post that is over 3 months old. Due to Mastodon’s heavy focus on reverse-chronological feeds, old posts can sometimes be boosted and go viral on the feeds again, months after they originally have been posted.

Both experiments do not prevent replying, and are simple notifications that can be dismissed, with a ‘Don’t remind me again’ option available as well. The update will arrive soon on the Android Mastodon app, with the update for iOS coming later. If the experiment goes well, it might come to the web interface as well.