sef boosted
洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee)
activity timestamp 2 days ago
As #Fedify's author, I'm contemplating its adoption beyond Ghost's #ActivityPub implementation. Finding potential users for ActivityPub tools seems challenging—perhaps I'm addressing a very niche need?

While the technical complexity of ActivityPub makes tools like Fedify valuable, I wonder about the actual market demand for federation outside specific communities.

Open, decentralized systems make sense to many developers, but businesses often prefer closed ecosystems that align with traditional models.

Still, I see potential as the #fediverse grows and digital sovereignty concerns increase. Fedify aims to lower the technical barriers to federation.

I'm curious: Which projects would benefit most from Fedify today? What would make federation compelling enough for platforms to implement?

Would appreciate perspectives from both developers and platform owners.
Laurens Hof
activity timestamp 2 days ago
Fediverse Report – #116

FediForum will be next month, Discourse talks about their fediverse integration, and an update on Bonfire.

The News

FediForum has a new date and a new board

The fifth edition of FediForum has been rescheduled, and will be held on June 5-7. The event was originally planned for early April, but got cancelled at the last-minute after transphobic posts by one of the co-organisers of the event were surfaced. FediForum held two sessions in the meantime with the community on how the event should move forward. One of the outcomes is that there is now an advisory board for FediForum with people from the community. For this edition of FediForum, I will be hosting a session on what’s been going on in the fediverse in 2025. The network is constantly changing and evolving, and this session is intended to get you up to speed on what’s been happening in the last half year. More information on that soon.

Bandwagon talks about monetisation and sustainability

Bandwagon is a fediverse music sharing platform that’s currently in development, where artists can share their music. They are currently working on online album sales, and Bandwagon is committed to making this feature available without taking any transaction fees. In order for the project to be sustainable, Bandwagon is a paid 10$/month paid premium plan which will enable online album sales and higher bitrate streaming. At the same time, creator Ben Pate is also committed to keeping the software open source, and says that the project needs other Bandwagon servers to exist if the project is to be successful. – Bandwagon.fm

Discourse and the fediverse

Forum software Discourse has posted a blog talking about how they have integrated ActivityPub into their forums. They explain how Discourse forums can now select per category if it is federated, and thus followable by other fediverse software. It also shows what Discourse-to-Discourse federation looks like, allowing 2 forums to cooperate with each other. Federated forums require a mindset shift as have to get used to seeing forum posts in their microblogging timelines. Forum software like Discourse and NodeBB have made great strides in the technological capabilities regarding what’s possible with federated forums. Now people have to find out and experience what these technological features enable in practical use cases for people.

Bonfire slowly moves towards a 1.0 release

Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform, with a core functionality of microblogging with a focus on extensibility. In their latest update about how the platform is moving to a 1.0 release, Bonfire talks about the values and intentions of the platform, writing: “In a world of ‘move fast and break things,’ we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.”

Bonfire has taken a deliberate and mindful approach to software development, but their own description of “Slow Software” seems fairly accurate as well, as the team has talked about getting ready for a 1.0 release in the next few months since at least September 2023.

FediDB onboarding

Fediverse statistics site FediDB, operated by PixelFed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, now has an onboarding tool to help people get started with the fediverse. It asks the user a few simple questions: first to select the type of content they are interested in, such as microblogging, video or forums. Based on that choice, it recommends various platforms. Based on the platform choice it asks for a few simple filters, such as region and community size, before presenting the user with a list of servers to choose from for registration.

The onboarding tool is sleekly designed, and streamlines the signup process by boiling it down to a few essential questions that the user needs to answer. However, this also showcases the issues that the fediverse has with onboarding new users: picking a platform and picking a server are meaningful choices that are hard to fully grasp the impact from as a new user. When it comes to picking a platform, the tool lists a few features for each platform, but comparing the relevance of these features is hard to do as an outsider. And when it comes to picking servers, the challenge is that servers themselves often do not publish relevant information that is needed to make an informed choice of which server to pick.

Mastodon: Giving Journalists Options Away From Big Tech

Saskia Welch from Newsmast writes about Mastodon and the fediverse at the recent International Journalism Festival. A consistent challenge remains to put all the lofty ideals about healthy social networks into practice, with Welch noting: “However, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use.” – WeDistribute/Saskia Welch

Owncast turns 5

The fediverse streaming platform Owncast turns 5 years this month, with a new merch store. One of the challenges of FOSS projects such as Owncast is the sustainability, and Owncast creator Gabe Kangas “at one point exhausted his personal savings so he could work on Owncast full-time.” Kangas says that now “people want to be around in meaningful ways. From the newsletter, core code contributions, the Roku app, people answering questions in chat, people brainstorming in GitHub, it’s important for it to be bigger than myself”. – Owncast Newsletter/Kit Rhett Aultman

The Links

  • Test your knowledge of ActivityPub with this quiz.
  • Search engine Kagi now has the option to find and filter for PeerTube videos.
  • Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks & Tidbits for April 2025, where the organisation announces that they’ve hired another front-end developer.
  • Lemmy development update for April 2025.
  • Domain blocking and notification improvements for Ghost.
  • FediAlgo, a self-hosted algorithmic timeline for Mastodon, is now available as a web app as well.
  • Flohmarkt is a fediverse market place, and Flohra is a new Android app for the platform.
  • The Social Web Foundation released their first annual report.
  • An interview with Christine Lemmer-Webber about the future of decentralised networks.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-116/

Bonfire boosted
Sciety
activity timestamp 2 days ago
When scholarly discussions happen in private Slack channels or get buried in Twitter threads, most researchers miss out. Sciety has secured funding from @nlnet to build something better. We're working with @bonfire, to develop a space for preprint discussion that is open, interoperable and will allow any preprint evaluation community to replicate and run themselves
Read more: https://blog.sciety.org/sciety-secures-funding-from-nlnet-foundation-to-help-build-discourse-around-preprints/#Fediverse#Preprints #PeerReview
wakest ⁂ boosted
piefedadmin
activity timestamp 5 days ago

How PieFed federates “flair” on posts and comments

On the surface flair on PieFed functions very similar to how it does on Reddit – on posts they’re community-specific tags that can be used to filter posts in a community. People can also add flair to themselves which is just a piece of text that appears next to their name whenever they make posts or comments in the community. This can be helpful for giving a hint about someone’s background, interests or expertise.

However PieFed is federated and there are copies of the communities on multiple servers (instances). The way to use ActivityPub to create and maintain those copies is described in FEP 1b12 which makes no mention of flair. I have made some minimal additions to that FEP, described below:

For flair on posts, the Lemmy devs have already done quite a bit of work on this, which I added a little to, so that flair can have colors. Community actors have an additional type of tag:

{
 "type": "Group",
 "id": "https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta",
 "name": "piefed_meta",
 /* ... */
 "lemmy:tagsForPosts": [
 {
 "type": "lemmy:CommunityTag",
 "id": "https://piefed.socia1/c/piefed_meta/tag/whatever",
 "display_name": "Some Post Tag Name",
 "text_color": "#000000",
 "background_color": "#dedede"
 }
 ]
 }

lemmy:tagsForPosts is a list of lemmy:CommunityTag objects.

So now all the different copies of the community will know which flair can be used there. When creating a post in the community we just need to add one or more lemmy:CommunityTag objects to the Page activity:

{
 "id": "https://piefed.social/post/1",
 "actor": "https://piefed.social/u/rimu",
 "type": "Page",
 /* ... */
 "tag": [
 {
 "type": "lemmy:CommunityTag",
 "id": "https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/tag/whatever",
 "display_name": "Some Post Tag Name"
 },
 {
 "href": "https://piefed.social/post/1",
 "name": "asdf",
 "type": "Hashtag"
 }
 ]
 }

In this example the post also has a #asdf hashtag on it.

User flair is simpler because it’s not managed by the community moderators and is not a fixed list. PieFed simply adds the author’s flair to every comment (federated as a Note activity) they make. When a Note is received the author’s flair is updated on the receiving instances.

{
 "id": "https://piefed.social/comment/1",
 "actor": "https://piefed.social/u/rimu",
 "type": "Note",
 /* ... */
 "flair": "PieFed dev"
 }

This means that when someone changes their flair it will take effect immediately on their instance but until they write a comment it won’t propagate to other instances. As flair is primarily used on comments and the people using flair will tend to be posting a lot of comments this is kinda “good enough”.

It would be trivial to add a “flair” attribute onto posts too and have receiving instances read that. User flair shows up next to the author’s name on their posts so arguably it makes sense to send it then too.

Let’s see how it goes.

#asdf #fediverse #Lemmy #piefed #threadverse

wakest ⁂ boosted
Yohan Yukiya Sese Cuneta 사요한🦣
activity timestamp last week
If you're a writer/blogger/press, a friendly reminder that the 17th Year Anniversary of the #Fediverse [social] network (**not** Mastodon® social network) is fast approaching.

May 18, 2008

So, if you want to publish a new article, you can start today. There are a hundred possible angles and scopes for that article. 😉

https://fedia.io/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/2137627/The-17th-Year-Anniversary-of-the-Fediverse-network-is-upon

Anyway…

#MayIsFediverseMonth#FediverseDay#ActivityPub
Write.as
activity timestamp 7 days ago
Just rolled out some fediverse-related improvements:

- Now you can follow Write.as blogs from Ghost! There was a tiny bug with this that we just fixed. (WriteFreely PR: https://writefreely.org/pull/1373)

- We now support the `preview` property as a fallback for Articles. This will make your posts look much nicer as more platforms support it! (WriteFreely PR: https://writefreely.org/pull/1374)

#WriteAs #WriteFreely #WriteFreelyDev#Ghost #fediverse#ActivityPub
Strypey
activity timestamp last week
@szakib
> filtering toots by matching patterns, like this

I wonder of a plug-in system is the way to go? So devs can build generic fediverse moderation tools, and plug them into whichever software a server runs. Or plug in existing tools, like spam filters designed for email servers or blog comments. Or those existing tools could be forked or extended to create generic fediverse tools.

#fediverse #moderation

@Gargron
Strypey
activity timestamp 6 months ago
What can we learn from all this, as we brace for another influx of confused, excitable newbies from Titter? How can we make it a positive experience, both for newbies, and for the old hands (that's probably you by now)?

The most important things IMHO;

1) We're all in this together. Literally. Be *excellent* to each other.

2) Old hands, don't overwork yourselves. There are millions of us to share the load. Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

3) Less is more.

(7/?)

#fediverse
Strypey
activity timestamp last week
Now that Ghost have opened up their fediverse integration to everyone on their Pro service, we've been getting an influx of people publishing from there into the verse (and the ATmosphere, via BridgyFed). Let's welcome Ghost publishers and give them a positive federated comments experience.

(1/2)

#fediverse#Ghost
Strypey
activity timestamp last week
How hard would it be for a fediverse app to give me a daily or weekly notification about each of my saved drafts? So I can start a reply, decide it needs more thought, save it, and get reminded of it.

Bonus points for being able to schedule a reminder notification for each saved post. A day for this one, a week for this one, and so on.

#fediverse#FediverseIdeas#FediDev

@moshidon

wakest ⁂ boosted
Tommi 🤯
activity timestamp last week
I am humbled and thrilled to be a member of the @fediforum Advisory Board!

It was formed to address the hard questions, and to make #FediForum the most welcoming and ispiring gathering to push our beloved #Fediverse to a brighter future.

Proudly, I am the youngest and hands-down the craziest member of the board—I joined our first meeting from @ilcubobeach, with a beer in my hand. 😎

Reach out if you have issues, questions, or ideas to raise. I am, we are, all ears.

It’s so cool to collaborate with this group of incredibly skilled people!

Long live the Fediverse ⁂ ❤️

https://mastodon.social/@fediforum/114462384030476115
Gina
activity timestamp last week
Hi everyone on #Fosstodon and the #Fediverse. 👋

I've posted a statement on our hub about the events of the past weeks and how we intend on doing better:

https://hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-community-statement

Tldr: Sorry about what happened, Fosstodon is committed to being a safe and inclusive space, and we're taking measures to ensure this won't happen again.

Please let me know what you think!