September 7th: Rising Tides
Welcome back to Relay, We Distribute's newsletter that aims to keep a pulse on what's happening in the Social Web.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."
—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
From We Distribute
Before we dive in to the meat and potatoes of our newsletter, here's the latest updates coming from us. We promise to keep it short and sweet!
News Updates
You might not know this, but the ActivityPub protocol that powers most of the Fediverse has two major parts to it: a server-to-server federation API, and a client-to-server API. Historically, the second part of the spec has not been well-supported by most Fediverse platforms, but the Social Web Foundation has been building out some interesting tools and demos to demonstrate why it's valuable.
Social Web Foundation is Betting Big on Client-to-Server API
From the outside looking in, it can sometimes feel unclear as to what steps the Social Web Foundation is taking to achieve its goals. The non-profit organization’s About Page states lofty ambitions, such as bringing together implementers to build tools, policies, and protocols to advance the Fediverse. The Projects Page includes End-to-End Encryption, a Fediverse…
The Decentered Podcast
We technically have TWO new episodes of Decentered available for you today! The first is actually a recording from the We Distribute Live panel we conducted at FediCon 2025. It's a great conversation, featuring the following people: Boris Mann, Anuj Ahooja, Evan Prodromou, Janet Vertesi, Chris Alamany, and Johannes Ernst.
spectra.video/videos/embed/eLF…
For our new episode, I'm sitting down to talk to Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett, the co-founders of A New Social. Their organization maintains and develops Bridgy Fed, and recently brought Bounce, their new migration tool, to an open public beta. They're super thoughtful and forward-thinking, and gave a lot of interesting insights about what they hope to accomplish.
S2E5: A New Social, With Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett
We sit down again to chat with our friends from A New Social, the team working on Bridgy Fed and Bounce!
Around the Network
Here, we attempt to take a bird's eye view of what's going on within different parts of the Social Web. It's a bustling, constantly-growing space, and there's often lots of wild things going on in the background.
Fediverse
The Fediverse appears to be taking some small, but substantial evolutionary steps in how its organized. As an overarching project, the network has always been a loose collaboration between many different groups and projects. Working together in an anarchic space such as this can be really challenging, but it feels as though things are starting to bear fruit.
Governance
These first three articles focus on sea changes happening within the ActivityPub developer community. The venerable ActivityPub.Rocks site is being moved to community hands, and discussions are happening regarding a revamp to make it more accessible to developers and newcomers.
Handing off activitypub.rocks to the ActivityPub community -- ActivityPub Rocks!
SocialHub is one of the oldest places to discuss the ActivityPub protocol, share notes on problems and solutions, and propose protocol extensions for different projects to adopt. Management of the forum in recent times has been reportedly rocky, with a lack of volunteers to maintain and moderate the platform, and a lack of clear leadership policies. Laurens Hof does a great job digging further into some of the challenges of maintaining a decentralized social movement.
SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks
SocialHub, one of the primary forums to talk about the fediverse and ActivityPub, has been struggling how to continue the operation. Decentralised networks need a coordination layer, but how to build this in a decentralised manner?
Julian Lam, the development lead of NodeBB, has opted to launch a new forum called ActivityPub.Space, which seemingly aims to fill in some of the gaps left behind by SocialHub. One notable difference with SocialHub is that this new community forum heavily emphasizes federated conversations, where the people building their own Fediverse platforms can directly communicate with the forum from their own vantage points.
Introducing ActivityPub.Space
The in-person events at FediCon in Vancouver lit a fire in the Canadian ActivityPub community. One of the louder calls were for a place in the fediverse for…
An interesting statement appeared from contributors working in the W3C Social Web Community Group, in response to some of the infighting regarding ActivityPub and ATproto.
Statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol
Date: 6th September 2025 A community letter on the recent heated discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol, co-signed by the people working on or with the respective protocols. This statement was originally published on the swicg/general repository after I had been granted approval to merge. Since then one community
Trust & Safety
In light of Bluesky's recent update regarding compliance with Mississippi's age verification law, Mastodon has similarly found itself under scrutiny by its users. While Eugen Rochko tried to spin the architectural differences between Mastodon and Bluesky as a positive, there are still open questions as to how and when such legislation may affect individual instances.
Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws | TechCrunch
Decentralized social network Mastodon says it cannot comply with age verification laws, like in Mississippi and elsewhere, and says it’s up to individual server owners to decide.
IFTAS, the Trust and Safety nonprofit for the Fediverse, is currently surveying instance admins for their 2025 Needs Assessment. The organization is actively seeking input from admins, moderators, and community members of all federated platforms, to gain deeper insight into what their needs and challenges are.
Annual Needs Assessment
Our work is directed by the needs of the communities we serve, and we conduct an open survey of administrators, moderators, and community managers to ascertain their needs and priorities. Current A…
Music
In the vein of our previous Mixtapes, we're partnering with our friends at NHAM to help bring a focus back towards artists and musicians within the Fediverse. They have a great curated radio station up and running at The Indie Beat FM.
Now Hold A Mirror – NHAM Mixtape 15
Now Hold A Mirror - NHAM Mixtape 15 It’s been a busy month, so busy I’ve not had time for artist discovery or to reach out to artists for consent. Therefore this month’s mixtape takes a pause and reflects on some tunes from the journey so far. The 12 tracks come from 10 nations. Five [...]
Here's some new tracks that have been recently released by Fediverse Musicians:
"Fall of the Republic" by Samantha J Smith
A track on Mirlo
A track by Samantha J. Smith
Samantha J Smith presents an atmospheric, dystopian track that feels highly reminiscent of Year Zero. Dark, moody, and introspective, this feels like a synthwave introduction to Fallout London.
"90925" by Fast Ghost
Fast Ghost gives us a really fun track, with a bumping beat and some really funky synth noises. It's got a great energy, and doesn't let up!
"Earthfast Wondersmith" by Rob Of Walthamstow
Earthfast Wondersmith
A track by RobOfWalthamstow
This track feels like a long, introspective walk across town. There's a sense of personal discovery, growth, and anticipation as the listener travels through this soundscape.
Videos
The Fireside Fedi podcast recently had an interview with Dr. Robert W. Gehl, author of Move Slowly and Build Bridges.
video.firesidefedi.live/videos…
Lorenzo's Music Podcast does a great job of reaching out to musicians within the Fediverse. In this episode, they interview Setto, the founder of Basspistol, an Underground Artist's Union that aims to support musicians and promote Creative Commons works.
spectra.video/videos/embed/c1z…
Bluesky
Bluesky / The ATmosphere also has a lot of interesting things going on, and it's worth visiting some of the ongoing discussions happening in their space.
Community
Blacksky is doing some truly revolutionary work within the ATmosphere, effectively building all of their infrastructure from scratch to provide something that's simultaneously compatible with Bluesky, while also completely independent from it.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
The scientific community has gradually been making its way to different pockets of the Social Web. Notably, some academics found their way onto Open Science, a Bonfire instance, while others have comfortably settled in to Bluesky.
Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
A new survey suggests that scientists vastly prefer Bluesky to X - and to its other alternatives.
Moderation
The big controversy over the past few weeks has involved Bluesky's shuttering of services in US States that have age and identification laws for social media services.
Our Response to Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law - Bluesky
A new Mississippi law requires us to block full access to Bluesky unless all users complete age checks. We have concerns about this law’s implementation.
This has led to some conversations about how decentralized Bluesky really is, and whether the Fediverse might be subject to the same problems.
Can we please stop arguing about whether Bluesky is decentralized?
Nobody’s changing their minds at this point, so let’s stop wasting our time.
New Developments
There's been a few interesting platform updates around the Social Web. Most notably is Mastodon 4.4, which will finally bring Quote Posts to the federated microblogging platform, along with lots of UX improvements.
Mastodon 4.4 for Developers
Here’s what developers need to know about the upcoming Mastodon 4.4 release.
The WordPress-ActivityPub integration continues to push forward with new improvements and updates, this time with better moderation controls, improved following systems, and support for federated deletion.
7.3.0 – Ctrl+Fed+Delete
Say hello to smoother moderation and a proper goodbye to old accounts. ActivityPub for WordPress 7.3.0 lets you block, filter, and even fully delete your presence from the Fediverse—site-wide or us…
Pixelfed recently revamped their Stories feature, and this re-imagining adds a ton of new functionality for creating interesting, layered images with text and media.
Release v0.12.6 · pixelfed/pixelfed
Added Pinned Posts (2f655d000) Custom Filters (#5928) (437d742ac) Legal Notice page (#5606) (c72fa0529) OIDC Support (#5608) (c72fa0529) Avif, HEIC, webp, libvips support + Preserve ICC color prof…
BadgeFed is a wild project that aims to create federated achievement badges that can be conditionally assigned to profiles for a variety of things, like participating in events or completing a task. Now, more instances are cropping up!
BadgeFed Update: Multiple Instances Online!
Hey Fediverse! 👋 We’ve been quiet… but not idle. Forget waiting for long blog posts, time for micro updates. Today’s news: We’ve got a few BadgeFed instances live and federating! 🏅 To make it happen, we did a hardcore backend rewrite to support multiple domains on a single machine. For most, it’s a niche cost-saving move, but it might be useful for others too. Under the hood: each domain runs its own SQLite DB, with backups in place.
Loops has released their server backend's source code as part of v1.0.0-alpha1, and a handful of instances have started taking off.
Release v1.0.0-alpha.1 · joinloops/loops-server
🚀 Loops v1.0.0-alpha.1 - First Alpha Release! We’re thrilled to announce the very first alpha release of Loops! This marks a major milestone in bringing federated short-form video sharing to life.…
New Apps and Projects
- Oeee.Cafe is a federated doodle board where people can share their pictures with each other. It's cute, fun, and simple! The dev talks about it a little bit here.
- fedinspect-gtk is a tool for the Gnome desktop written by Andy Piper. You can use it to inspect instances!
- chatfed is an experimental application that aims to fit a real-time chat interface onto Fediverse groups.
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading Relay, and be sure to support your local instance admins, developers, and community members as they work to keep the network great.
Before you go!
We Distribute Media is a very small nonprofit operation. We've been able to get by, but our organization depends on small recurring donations to keep the lights on.
Please take a look at our OpenCollective Campaign, and consider how you might help compensate the volunteers that help keep We Distribute going.
Social Web Foundation is Betting Big on Client-to-Server API
From the outside looking in, it can sometimes feel unclear as to what steps the Social Web Foundation is taking to achieve its goals. The non-profit organization’s About Page states lofty ambitions, such as bringing together implementers to build tools, policies, and protocols to advance the Fediverse. The Projects Page includes End-to-End Encryption, a Fediverse Starter Page, GDPR Compliance, and Long-Form Text.However, the SWF has been working on several interesting projects outside of these stated scopes, and it’s something Evan Prodromou has been bullish about: leveraging the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API. Historically, this piece of the ActivityPub protocol is rarely ever implemented, due to complexity as well as the fact that Mastodon’s own client API has seen widespread adoption.
A quick ActivityPub C2S primer
To really understand the C2S API, we have to go back in time to when the protocol was being developed. The basic concept was that any ActivityPub implementation would effectively act as a generic server, with clients providing unique experiences. Compared to Mastodon’s dedicated API, C2S isn’t explicitly limited to microblogging or statuses. Instead, clients dispatch activities to and from an Actor’s inbox and outbox.
Instead of every new social experience in the Fediverse acting as a bespoke server, the C2S API instead lets a wide range of clients interact with an instance. Instances no longer become specific delegates of what activities can or cannot be used. C2S opens the floodgates for any kind of application to hook in to a Fediverse account. Instead of an instance doing all the hard work, clients would handle much of the advanced logic themselves.
spectra.video/videos/embed/1FR…
There is a meaningful parallel to ActivityPub C2S, and oddly enough, it can be found within the AT Protocol’s ecosystem. Boris Mann presents a fantastic talk that shows radically different sets of apps that all do very different things, some of which have their own social graphs, leverage unique kinds of data, or offer interactions not available in other places.
Social Login
Setting aside unique applications for a moment, one of the key killer-features that ActivityPub C2S could offer the Fediverse is a coherent and streamlined login system for any Fediverse account.
I don’t know what this thing would look like or what we would collectively call it, but here’s some ideas.
This idea is actually not new. Pump.io, the prototype that largely became a foundation for ActivityPub’s design, offered the ability for people to remotely sign in to any other Pump server, using the account that was local to them. This was initially designed to let people interact with remote objects that their own instances had not yet collected.
Pump crawled so that ActivityPub could run.
The idea of a unified method for Social Web logins is extremely compelling. Right now, a lot of Fediverse apps offer platform-specific sign-on, leveraging a bunch of different APIs.
GreatApe, an upcoming media platform, offers four different ways to log in through the Fediverse.
The upside of this approach means that more apps and services can just let people sign in with their remote accounts, without creating a local account there. The downside is that it adds to the maintenance pile, because of how many different platforms exist within the Fediverse today.
What is the SWF is working on?
There are a few experimental areas where the Social Web Foundation is focusing on building up, so let’s talk about them. The main thing to understand is that these are building blocks, meant for iterative development and discussion with the wider community. As time has gone on, these projects have become more ambitious, and exist to showcase what’s possible with the C2S API.Places.Pub – GeoSocial Data
Places.pub is an attempt to marry OpenStreetMap data with ActivityPub by using specific GeoSocial parts of ActivityStreams. More specifically, it uses these vocabulary words for activities:Travel,Arrive, andLeave.One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as theiridproperty, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.Evan Prodromou, Blog Entry
Interestingly, Places.Pub operates as a hosted service by the SWF, and allows developers to connect to it using the C2S API. It simply acts as a repository of places, represented as ActivityPub objects.CheckIn – An Example Client for Using GeoSocial Data
Checkin is the example client developed specifically for interacting with Places.Pub. It’s a relatively simple app, but the intention is to demonstrate a proof-of-concept to the community.
Something like this could be used to build a Foursquare-style GeoSocial app, powered entirely by open APIs and protocols. As a bonus, the client-first approach here would mean that developers wouldn’t necessarily have to take on the burden of building a full-stack Foursquare clone with a server backend and federation.
ReactivityPub
Although this is still in the tentative stages, ReactivityPub is an upcoming effort to integrate the ActivityPub C2S API directly into the React framework. It may or may not be related to the ap-components project, which intends to offer a toolkit for rendering and representing ActivityPub data using Web Components.OnePage – A one-page ActivityPub Server
OnePage.pub is more of a personal project by Evan Prodromou, but could eventually be moved under the SWF project umbrella. Effectively, this acts as a headless server that’s primarily intended for the ActivityPub C2S API. It can be used to log into the CheckIn example client.Why is this important?
At face value, all of these developments might not appear to mean much. However, these are significant because it shows the SWF taking a progressive approach on several fronts. It showcases the benefits of a long-neglected API, while attempting to address several wide-spread design issues that affect the network. If the organization can continue to build libraries, tooling, and other resources, they might be able to drum up further interest in making C2S possible.
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