The Surf app goes even deeper on building custom feeds for the fediverse and Bluesky, , a crowdfunding campaign for the PeerTube mobile app, and updates to the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky.
The Surf app goes even deeper on building custom feeds for the fediverse and Bluesky, , a crowdfunding campaign for the PeerTube mobile app, and updates to the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky.
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The News
Surf is a new app by Flipboard, that describes itself as a browser for the open social web. The app allows people to build and browse custom feeds, that take in content from across the open social web. It can combine Mastodon posts with Bluesky posts, as well as RSS and more, into a single feed. With their most recent update, Surf has created Starter Sets for building custom feeds. Starter Sets are organised around various popular themes, like News, Tech or Sports. Within these themes, people can choose from a large variety of data sources to get started with building their own custom feeds. These custom feed sources can be from across the open social web and are modular. This means that a list of Mastodon accounts can be combined with a Bluesky custom feed to create a new single custom feed that consists of both data source. These custom feeds can also be published to Bluesky, so people who are not using the Surf app can also view these feeds.
Surf also now offers a variety of tools to manage the content of a custom feed. For example, a feed can be customised to include or exclude reposts, replies or adult content. There are also options to filter out posts about politics from the feed. The ability to filter about posts about Elon Musk is surely a popular feature as well. Surf categorises all posts via algorithmic clustering, which gives the ability to limit posts in a feed to a certain topic. This means that you can add an account to a feed, but only their posts related to the specified topic will be displayed. The app is currently in closed beta, and Flipboard is gradually onboarding more people from the waiting list.
PeerTube is starting a crowdfunding campaign for its mobile app. The first version of the PeerTube app was officially launched earlier this month. PeerTube is developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit organisation that builds a variety of open source software tools. The crowdfunding campaign is a way to raise money for the organisation, and also provides a way “to gauge public enthusiasm for the mobile application and the PeerTube project in general”. Some of the features that PeerTube wants to work on for its app are the ability to play videos in background, casting videos to TVs, managing channels and accounts directly from the app. Livestreaming from mobile is also being worked on, although Framasoft says they do not expect to release this in 2025. Framasoft says that these features will be worked on regardless of whether the fundraising goals are met, and that otherwise money from the generic Framasoft budget will be used, as a way to show their dedication towards PeerTube.
Mastodon has announced some upcoming new features that help server admins with the legal side. Server admins will be able to set a Terms of Service (ToS), besides server rules and a privacy policy. Server admins will also be able to set the server rules into multiple different languages. There will also be the option to set a minimum age requirement for sign-up for servers. Having a ToS is standard fare for any online platform, and multiple countries require by law that platforms have these. Europe’s DSA is fairly explicit about this, which states: “Providers of intermediary services shall include information on any restrictions that they impose in relation to the use of their service in respect of information provided by the recipients of the service, in their terms and conditions.” In that context, it is high time that Mastodon has added the ability for servers to set a ToS. Mastodon also says that they will provide a template for a ToS that other servers can use if they so desire.
A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, has launched a dedicated page for people to manage their account bridging. Bridgy Fed is a piece of software that allows people to ‘bridge’ their account across multiple protocols. This allows people on the fediverse to interact with people on Bluesky (using AT Protocol). For this, people need to manually opt-in their accounts to be bridged to other networks (largely due to cultural reasons from the fediverse communities). Up until now, doing so was a fairly confusing process that involved manually following other accounts. With the new update, people can log in to Bridgy Fed with the account they want to bridge, and simply turn it on or off. It also has an easier option to update the handles for Mastodon accounts that are bridged to Bluesky. For example, by default my Mastodon account on Bluesky can be found at @[url=did:plc:43qcmg2xbxakj6mp4puqyayv]Laurens Hof[/url], which is a fairly cumbersome handle, to put it mildly. At the settings page I can now change it to any handle I want, similar to how any Bluesky account can change their handle. A New Social is also launching a Patreon as they are working towards financial sustainability, with plans to launch merch soon as well.
Ibis is a federated wiki platform that is currently in development, made by nutomic, one of the Lemmy creators. With the most recent update, Ibis wiki articles are now compatible with Lemmy, and can be viewed directly from Lemmy. One of the driving reasons for making Ibis is that nutomic views Wikipedia as untrustworthy. He also says that other centralised Wikipedia alternatives have failed to gain traction, and sees federation as a solution for this. For now, Ibis has the same problem of getting traction.
Tvmarks is a new self-hosted platform to keep track of shows you’ve watched. It gives you a clean overview of shows you are watching, which ones you’ve completed, and provide reviews and ratings per episode. This information can be federated via ActivityPub, allowing others to see what you’ve been watching.
Upcoming photo sharing platform Vernissage gives an update on the work and design considerations for the last month.
A thread on how the name ‘ActivityPub’ came to be.
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Today, we're launching two projects we've been excited to unveil for a while: a settings page for Bridgy Fed and a Patreon for all the folks who have asked us how they can support our work.
