The News

Newsletter publishing platform Ghost has officially shipped their integration with the social web with update Ghost 6.0. Ghost has been working on integrating with ActivityPub for a while now, and the feature was already available in beta using Ghost Pro. With Ghost 6.0, everyone, including people who self-host, can now also use the integration with the social web, and use the social web reader client that comes with it.

Ghost’s integration with the social web consists of two parts:

• The ability to connect with the fediverse over ActivityPub, which allows people to follow the publication from fediverse platforms and to comment, like and share the posts.
• A social web reader client, which allows you to follow and interact with other long-form articles from across the social web, such as from WordPress, Flipboard, Ghost, as well as microblogging platforms.

Ghost also prominently mentions the integration with Bluesky, which is also part of their ActivityPub integration and uses A New Social’s Bridgy Fed to connect to Bluesky’s AT Protocol.

The challenging part for long-form publishing platforms like Ghost and WordPress is how to transition and grow the fediverse from a network where microblogging shapes and determines the mode of interaction for other types of platforms to a network where people can engage with long-form articles in a way that is specifically catered for it. Ghost’s connection to the fediverse currently means that following a Ghost blog from your fediverse account results in seeing a post with the article headline and a URL, which is not much different than following an RSS feed with your fediverse account. The social features such as comments and likes do add an additional dimension to it, creating a form of Social RSS (RSSS?).

Ghost has taken steps in that direction by creating a social web reader client, which does cater specifically for reading long-form writing of fediverse content. However, that client is tied up to having a (paid) account with Ghost, making it not yet accessible to a wider fediverse audience. The WordPress ActivityPub plugin also experiences some of the same problems as Ghost, where their native article design and layout have to be forced into a microblogging-compatible format, losing out on some of the more compelling features of natively reading long-form writing on the fediverse. Fediverse platform developers (including Mastodon, Ghost, WordPress, WriteFreely and more) are collaborating on creating a space on the fediverse that suites the need of blogging and articles well, and while Ghost’s official 6.0 release is a step in this direction, for now the fediverse remains a network that’s more about microblogging than (macro)blogging.

FediCon 2025 happened this weekend in Vancouver, the first edition of a new fediverse-focused conference organised by community member Charles Krempeaux (@reiver). Some thoughts and notes on FediCon:

• A significant number of prominent NA-based fediverse developers were present at the event. Real-life meetings between platform developers significant increases the collaboration for improving support for features and communication modes. The collaboration between multiple platform developers on long-form writing as mentioned above largely grew out of multiple meetings that happened around FOSDEM 2025. The fediverse is largely developed by volunteers or small organisations, and trust and cooperation between these actors can be increased significantly by conferences and other meet-ups.
• At the same time, getting new faces and increasing diversity into the group of core fediverse developers remains a challenge, and better accessibility support for such conferences can contribute to it.
• In monetary terms, Krempeaux put in significant effort to make the conference happen and to make it accessible, funding FediCon largely out-of-pocket and keeping ticket prices low.
• Recordings of the talks and presentations will be posted on PeerTube, and the first are already available: The Last Network Effect by A New Social’s Anuj Ahooja and Connecting the Social Web by ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou.
• Krempeaux used FediCon to reveal CrowdBucks, a fediverse crowdfunding, tipping and payment platform. Information is still limited, and I’ll talk more about it soon.
• Live blogging by NodeBB developer Julian Lam and WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley are a good watch to catch up with the event and it’s vibe.
• There was also a space for a presentation on ATProto, by Boris Mann, who also runs the (Bluesky-independent) atprotocol.dev community. The theme was on joy, and how building apps should be fun for developers and bring joy to its users, echoing Christine Lemmer-Webber’s keynote at Fediforum this spring.
• The amount of experimentation that happens on AT Protocol is a good indication for the value of an ActivityPub (C2S) Api, as Evan Prodromou points out.

Finally, speaking about fediverse conferences: FediForum announced that the next edition of this online unconference will be on October 7 and 8, 2025.

In Other News

Upcoming fediverse platform Bonfire has announced they are collaborating with Newsmast. Newsmast is a non-profit organisation that also runs their own fediverse platform, and is expanding to launch channel.org, which is a fediverse distribution platform catered to organisations. In their collaboration, Bonfire will provide better discovery and interoperability for channels made with channel.org, and Newsmast will provide Bonfire’s Mosaic (a spin-off of Bonfire to build a complete online presence for organisations) as an offering to their partner organisations.

The Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS) organisation has published an extensive guide on how to navigate the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for fediverse service providers.

The ForBetter newsletter takes a look at how scammers have used the new OSA age verification regulations, as well as that most Mastodon servers have taken little to no steps for compliance, as well as a lack of clarify on Mastodon what official staff accounts are, to launch a new spam wave attack on Mastodon.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has announced a new tool, Image Intercept, designed to help smaller platforms detect and block known CSAM, and IFTAS is exploring how this tool can be used by fediverse platforms.

Last week I wrote about some of the client app for fediverse platforms that I’m keeping my eye on, and requested some feedback from readers for interesting clients that I had missed. Thanks to readers for some great input!

• Pachli is a Mastodon client for Android, which is supported by Nivenly, the organisation also behind the Hachyderm.io Mastodon server. Some features of Pachli that stand out to me are anti-harassment features for notifications and conversations, which go beyond what Mastodon standard offers, as well as supporting older versions of Android, back to Android 6.
• Aria for Misskey is a Misskey client for both Android and iOS. I wrote that I couldn’t find any recently updated clients specifically for Misskey, but Aria is well-maintained, with updates as recently as last week.
• Raccoon for Friendica is a Friendica client, that supports Friendica-specific feature implementations, such as photo galleries and event calendars.
• Quiblr is a client for the Threadiverse. I noted that I could find little distinguishing unique features for Threadiverse clients, but Quiblr seems to prove me wrong, with a For You feed that runs an on-device recommendation engine.

And finally some links with software updates:

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Lemmy development update for July 2025.
• PieFed releases version 1.1, and their description indicates how the platform is maturing: “There are now 32 PieFed instances, serving 1750+ MAU. Voyager, Summit, Blorp and Interstellar are mobile apps that connect to PieFed.”

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/

The News

Newsletter publishing platform Ghost has officially shipped their integration with the social web with update Ghost 6.0. Ghost has been working on integrating with ActivityPub for a while now, and the feature was already available in beta using Ghost Pro. With Ghost 6.0, everyone, including people who self-host, can now also use the integration with the social web, and use the social web reader client that comes with it.

Ghost’s integration with the social web consists of two parts:

• The ability to connect with the fediverse over ActivityPub, which allows people to follow the publication from fediverse platforms and to comment, like and share the posts.
• A social web reader client, which allows you to follow and interact with other long-form articles from across the social web, such as from WordPress, Flipboard, Ghost, as well as microblogging platforms.

Ghost also prominently mentions the integration with Bluesky, which is also part of their ActivityPub integration and uses A New Social’s Bridgy Fed to connect to Bluesky’s AT Protocol.

The challenging part for long-form publishing platforms like Ghost and WordPress is how to transition and grow the fediverse from a network where microblogging shapes and determines the mode of interaction for other types of platforms to a network where people can engage with long-form articles in a way that is specifically catered for it. Ghost’s connection to the fediverse currently means that following a Ghost blog from your fediverse account results in seeing a post with the article headline and a URL, which is not much different than following an RSS feed with your fediverse account. The social features such as comments and likes do add an additional dimension to it, creating a form of Social RSS (RSSS?).

Ghost has taken steps in that direction by creating a social web reader client, which does cater specifically for reading long-form writing of fediverse content. However, that client is tied up to having a (paid) account with Ghost, making it not yet accessible to a wider fediverse audience. The WordPress ActivityPub plugin also experiences some of the same problems as Ghost, where their native article design and layout have to be forced into a microblogging-compatible format, losing out on some of the more compelling features of natively reading long-form writing on the fediverse. Fediverse platform developers (including Mastodon, Ghost, WordPress, WriteFreely and more) are collaborating on creating a space on the fediverse that suites the need of blogging and articles well, and while Ghost’s official 6.0 release is a step in this direction, for now the fediverse remains a network that’s more about microblogging than (macro)blogging.

FediCon 2025 happened this weekend in Vancouver, the first edition of a new fediverse-focused conference organised by community member Charles Krempeaux (@reiver). Some thoughts and notes on FediCon:

• A significant number of prominent NA-based fediverse developers were present at the event. Real-life meetings between platform developers significant increases the collaboration for improving support for features and communication modes. The collaboration between multiple platform developers on long-form writing as mentioned above largely grew out of multiple meetings that happened around FOSDEM 2025. The fediverse is largely developed by volunteers or small organisations, and trust and cooperation between these actors can be increased significantly by conferences and other meet-ups.
• At the same time, getting new faces and increasing diversity into the group of core fediverse developers remains a challenge, and better accessibility support for such conferences can contribute to it.
• In monetary terms, Krempeaux put in significant effort to make the conference happen and to make it accessible, funding FediCon largely out-of-pocket and keeping ticket prices low.
• Recordings of the talks and presentations will be posted on PeerTube, and the first are already available: The Last Network Effect by A New Social’s Anuj Ahooja and Connecting the Social Web by ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou.
• Krempeaux used FediCon to reveal CrowdBucks, a fediverse crowdfunding, tipping and payment platform. Information is still limited, and I’ll talk more about it soon.
• Live blogging by NodeBB developer Julian Lam and WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley are a good watch to catch up with the event and it’s vibe.
• There was also a space for a presentation on ATProto, by Boris Mann, who also runs the (Bluesky-independent) atprotocol.dev community. The theme was on joy, and how building apps should be fun for developers and bring joy to its users, echoing Christine Lemmer-Webber’s keynote at Fediforum this spring.
• The amount of experimentation that happens on AT Protocol is a good indication for the value of an ActivityPub (C2S) Api, as Evan Prodromou points out.

Finally, speaking about fediverse conferences: FediForum announced that the next edition of this online unconference will be on October 7 and 8, 2025.

In Other News

Upcoming fediverse platform Bonfire has announced they are collaborating with Newsmast. Newsmast is a non-profit organisation that also runs their own fediverse platform, and is expanding to launch channel.org, which is a fediverse distribution platform catered to organisations. In their collaboration, Bonfire will provide better discovery and interoperability for channels made with channel.org, and Newsmast will provide Bonfire’s Mosaic (a spin-off of Bonfire to build a complete online presence for organisations) as an offering to their partner organisations.

The Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS) organisation has published an extensive guide on how to navigate the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for fediverse service providers.

The ForBetter newsletter takes a look at how scammers have used the new OSA age verification regulations, as well as that most Mastodon servers have taken little to no steps for compliance, as well as a lack of clarify on Mastodon what official staff accounts are, to launch a new spam wave attack on Mastodon.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has announced a new tool, Image Intercept, designed to help smaller platforms detect and block known CSAM, and IFTAS is exploring how this tool can be used by fediverse platforms.

Last week I wrote about some of the client app for fediverse platforms that I’m keeping my eye on, and requested some feedback from readers for interesting clients that I had missed. Thanks to readers for some great input!

• Pachli is a Mastodon client for Android, which is supported by Nivenly, the organisation also behind the Hachyderm.io Mastodon server. Some features of Pachli that stand out to me are anti-harassment features for notifications and conversations, which go beyond what Mastodon standard offers, as well as supporting older versions of Android, back to Android 6.
• Aria for Misskey is a Misskey client for both Android and iOS. I wrote that I couldn’t find any recently updated clients specifically for Misskey, but Aria is well-maintained, with updates as recently as last week.
• Raccoon for Friendica is a Friendica client, that supports Friendica-specific feature implementations, such as photo galleries and event calendars.
• Quiblr is a client for the Threadiverse. I noted that I could find little distinguishing unique features for Threadiverse clients, but Quiblr seems to prove me wrong, with a For You feed that runs an on-device recommendation engine.

And finally some links with software updates:

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Lemmy development update for July 2025.
• PieFed releases version 1.1, and their description indicates how the platform is maturing: “There are now 32 PieFed instances, serving 1750+ MAU. Voyager, Summit, Blorp and Interstellar are mobile apps that connect to PieFed.”

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/

Apps and clients I’m paying attention to

The summer months I’m experimenting with some different content for the weekly report articles. For more information on that, see this accompanying post. Today I’m taking a look at all the different client apps for the fediverse that I’m paying attention to. This is not meant as a recommendation on which client you should use; my experience is that people’s preferences for clients are highly individualistic. The best client for you is simply the client that you enjoy using the most. This is an overview of some the clients for the fediverse that do something differently, and stand out because of that. Part of the reason for making this list is that I do not have the time to keep a close eye on literally every client in the fediverse, and I’m curious to hear from readers if they feel like I missed some.

Microblogging

Phanpy (Web, Progressive Web App)
Phanpy is one of the most innovative clients for any social media platform. The Catch-up feature takes all the posts from your home timeline and gives you the ability to sort and filter them in any way you want. You can filter posts by replies, reposts, followed hashtags, sort them by date or engagement numbers, or group them by author. Another unique feature is the ‘boost carousel’, where boost are delegated in the timeline to a separate horizontal-scrolling ‘carousel’.

One thing that stands out to me about Phanpy is how these standout features have not really seen adoption by other clients, neither for the fediverse nor for Bluesky. Phanpy does have a crowd of hardcore fans (I’m one of them), but it seems to mainly resonate with power-users.

Ivory (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, paid)
Ivory is made by the small company Tapbots, who also created popular Twitter client Tweetbot. Ivory focuses on design, and has some additional features such as account statistics as well. Ivory is a popular client for Mastodon, even though it has a monthly subscription. That makes it also a client worth watching: is the Mastodon ecosystem large enough to support a small team of three developers? Tapbots recently announced that they are building a Bluesky client, and they were frank about needing another revenue stream besides Ivory.

Fedilab (Android, F-Droid)
Fedilab is one of the older clients for the fediverse, that supports multiple accounts on a variety of fediverse platforms. It can be used in combination with Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, PeerTube, Misskey, Friendica and even GNU Social. There are few other clients that I know of that focus on supporting a large variety of fediverse platforms, which indicates both the technical challenge of doing so with none of the platforms supporting the client-to-server part of ActivityPub, as well as it being unclear if there is a real demand for it.

Mastodon (Android, iOS)
The apps developed by the Mastodon organisation itself. Mastodon now has a full-time iOS developer as well as an Android developer, and the app is always up to date with Mastodon’s latest features, such as Mastodon’s recent work on quote post implementations. An ecosystem of third-party clients for Mastodon could proliferate partially because Mastodon was strapped for developer resources and the apps did not always get the highest priority. Third-party clients for Mastodon are often created by hobby developers, who now have to compete with Mastodon having full-time paid developers on their app, making it more important for other clients to show a clear value-add above the Mastodon client developed by the organisation itself.

Some other microblogging clients worth pointing out: Whalebird, (desktop client for Windows, Linux and macOS, supporting multiple platforms), IceCubes (free, open-source iOS app), Tusky (the most popular third-party Android app for Mastodon with half a million downloads), Trunks (web, Android and iOS, that has some cool additional timeline filtering features) and Elk (a popular web client for Mastodon)

Another thing that stands out to me is how there do not seem to be clients targeted specifically for Misskey that are popular. Clients like Kimis, Kaiteki and Milktea seem to have little use or no recent updates. The MissCat app might be more popular, but it is not available in the EU so it is hard for me to judge.

Multi-network clients

Openvibe (Android, iOS)
Openvibe is a multi-network client for Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads. It combines posts from these networks (provided you have an account on that network) into a single timeline, and you can post directly to all the different networks at once. Openvibe is the most popular of these multi-network clients, and is also the best funded of the clients on the new social networks: early in 2025 Openvibe announced an $800k funding round. The company expects to introduce a subscription plan at a later point to generate revenue.

SoraSNS (iOS)
SoraSNS is another multi-network client, that supports Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, Pleroma and Nostr. It also has a algorithmic timeline with the algorithm running locally on your phone. SoraSNS has more of such experimental features, such as analytics per-post and AI summaries.

Reader clients

Surf (Android, iOS, in beta)
Surf describes itself as a ‘browser for the open social web’. The app, made by Flipboard, integrates various platforms: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and RSS are supported. It centers around creating feeds for topics, and users can share these feeds with each other (either via Surf or as a custom feed on Bluesky). Surf stands out for pushing the boundaries on what a social media client can look like, and for the large amount of control that users get over which content they want to see.

Tapestry (iOS, iPadOS, in beta)
Tapestry is made by Iconfactory, the company behind popular Twitter client Twitterfic, and raised funds via a Kickstarter, raising $177k. It is a reader client that combines a large variety of sources: RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, podcasts, YouTube and more. Tapestry places all these sources into a single chronological timeline. The funding model for Tapestry is what stands out: making high-quality apps is not cheap, but getting a large enough paying user base to sustain development is hard. Iconfactory could lean upon their previous work to get a solid Kickstarter to fund development.

Rest of the fediverse

PeerTube is developing their own mobile apps, and have just completed a fundraiser of €75k for further features. I’ve covered the app in other places in more detail, and for here I think it’s noteworthy that no other major PeerTube app has gotten traction over the years.

For the Threadiverse, there are a variety of clients for Lemmy, with some of the most popular ones being Voyager, Thunder, Mlem, Jerboa and Photon. My sense is that the Threadiverse clients do not differ much in features, and mainly differ in platforms and terms of design. The main standout feature at this point seems to be support for PieFed, but a variety of clients (including Voyager, Mlem and multiple more now support PieFed). It points to an ecosystem where clients are aware of each other, and new innovations get rapidly copied by other clients, bringing them effectively to the entire ecosystem. If there are unique features in Threadiverse clients that you think I should pay attention to, let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.

Fediverse News and Links

• Move Slowly and Build Bridges is the new book by Robert W. Gehl, in which Gehl documents the story of the fediverse and how everyday people have build a ‘noncentralized alternative social media system’ over the years. The book is now available for sale online, with physical copies shipping soon. I’ll definitely write more about the book once I’ve read it, so stay tuned!
• Mastodon is adding an in-app donation request for the funding of Mastodon. Mastodon is rolling out this feature very carefully (only their own mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers for now), but they are already thinking about how to expand the feature and make it available for other server admins as well.
• Some polishing updates for WordPress ActivityPub as their blog post explains how they are working towards more social integrations with the rest of the fediverse, with more coverage by WeDistribute.
• How To Improve Your Privacy and Security on Mastodon is a highly extensive guide on Privacy Guides that goes into in-depth detail on all the possibilities people have on Mastodon for better security and privacy.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-127/

Some practical updates for Connected Places:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve gotten a grant from NLnet’s Open Social Fund! The goal of the Open Social Fund is to promote and support the growth of ActivityPub and the fediverse. This is a great fit with the work I’m doing with Connected Places: I write about the ActivityPub and the fediverse because I care deeply about building healthier social online, and I think it is worth understanding in detail how these new networks function. As such, NLnet supports Connected Places with a grant to write weekly Fediverse Reports for the next year, as well as an in-depth analysis article every month.

Some practical details for accountability:

• The grant covers 48 publications of a weekly Fediverse Report, and 12 in-depth articles about the fediverse.
• The grant only covers these writings, and not my other publications.
• NLnet does not have any say in my writing or editing, and I retain full editorial control of the output.
• These articles will be published under CC-BY-SA. I’ll likely put all my articles under this license, but that’s still to be determined.
• Articles funded by the NLnet grant will also be recognisable by a banner at the bottom of the page, for an illustration I’ve added the banner to this page as well.

For other practical news, I’m taking it a bit slower this summer to have some more time to chill and work on some other projects. I’ll be publishing something every week, but not necessarily according to the schedule of Tuesdays Fediverse Report, Thursdays Bluesky Report and Fridays the email newsletter essay. I’m also taking this opportunity to experiment a bit more with the format. For example, for this week’s Fediverse Report I’m taking a look at the various clients in the fediverse ecosystem. Feedback on what works and what does not work is much appreciated.

Thanks again for all your support, I’m super happy to be able to say that Connected Places will be around for another year to cover this interesting and dynamic space!

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/funding-update-and-summer-schedule/

Here comes Movim 0.31, codename Kameny ✨

With this exciting new release you'll be able to share simultaneously your screen and webcam when calling your friends 👀, switch quickly between your one-to-one chats and chatrooms ⚡, add your pronoun in your profile 🏳️‍🌈...

Checkout our release note to discover all the other new features of this version 🗒️

https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/here-comes-movim-0-31-codename-kameny-yQUilX

Thanks again to @nlnet for their support on the video-conference features ❤️

#xmpp #movim #release #nlnet #webrtc #lgbtq

Here comes Movim 0.31, codename Kameny ✨

With this exciting new release you'll be able to share simultaneously your screen and webcam when calling your friends 👀, switch quickly between your one-to-one chats and chatrooms ⚡, add your pronoun in your profile 🏳️‍🌈...

Checkout our release note to discover all the other new features of this version 🗒️

https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/here-comes-movim-0-31-codename-kameny-yQUilX

Thanks again to @nlnet for their support on the video-conference features ❤️

#xmpp #movim #release #nlnet #webrtc #lgbtq

Here comes Movim 0.31, codename Kameny ✨

With this exciting new release you'll be able to share simultaneously your screen and webcam when calling your friends 👀, switch quickly between your one-to-one chats and chatrooms ⚡, add your pronoun in your profile 🏳️‍🌈...

Checkout our release note to discover all the other new features of this version 🗒️

https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/here-comes-movim-0-31-codename-kameny-yQUilX

Thanks again to @nlnet for their support on the video-conference features ❤️

#xmpp #movim #release #nlnet #webrtc #lgbtq

The fediverse is definitely the right place for open science 🔥

I should add that in particular the #EU funded @ngi @nlnet programs also give access to a range of services like the ones you mentioned.

See support service on the #NLnet website:

https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/services/