·  activity timestamp 4 weeks ago
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:

#nlnet

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