Fediverse Report – #120Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more.
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FediForum and related announcements
The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week.
Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months.
Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session.
Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story.
Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.
Shutdown of Lemmy and opportunity for PieFed
Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server.
The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.
Platform updates
Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’.
Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May.
PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app.
Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.
The Links
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
fediversereport.com/fediverse-…
A 4 minute video that aims to introduce the Fediverse to people not familiar with it
Elena Rossini
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Mastodon
in reply to Mastodon • • •reshared this
neurologo@mastodon.cloud moved, I ❤️ FEDIVERSE, Anuj Ahooja, Mastodon Migration, Linux Is Best, Roni Rolle Laukkarinen, Erik Jonker, Tim Chambers, Renaud Chaput, JonChevreau 🇨🇦 e Carlo Gubitosa reshared this.
Mastodon
in reply to Mastodon • • •We hope you’ll enjoy the enhancements in Mastodon 4.4, and we’re grateful for your support and feedback. We’re a small team, and we depend on your donations to continue making Mastodon better with features and updates. Please contribute to support our mission if you can.
joinmastodon.org/sponsors#dona…
Donate to Mastodon
joinmastodon.orgreshared this
I ❤️ FEDIVERSE, Arun Shah™, Mastodon Migration, nikol, Linux Is Best, Roni Rolle Laukkarinen, Tim Chambers, Renaud Chaput, neurologo@mastodon.cloud moved e Jeremiah Lee reshared this.
KRISÚ クリス
in reply to Mastodon • • •woollypigs
in reply to Mastodon • • •coso
in reply to Mastodon • • •Mastodon
in reply to coso • • •츄
in reply to Mastodon • • •iamdtms
in reply to Mastodon • • •guenther
in reply to Mastodon • • •Renaud Chaput
in reply to guenther • • •@guenther Yes, there is a feed setting for it in 4.4
@Mastodon
RandomMusickMayhem (ON HOLD)
in reply to Renaud Chaput • • •>LEAKLIV:/ Alternative Media
in reply to Mastodon • • •Emil Jacobs - Collectifission
in reply to Mastodon • • •Renaud Chaput
in reply to Emil Jacobs - Collectifission • • •We are implementing quote posts with full control for the user (choose if you want to be quoted, retract a previous quote…) which requires proper server and client support (see blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/…)
@Mastodon
Bringing Quote Posts to Mastodon
Mastodon BlogRoni Rolle Laukkarinen reshared this.
Emil Jacobs - Collectifission
in reply to Renaud Chaput • • •Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋
in reply to Mastodon • • •Renaud Chaput
in reply to Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋 • • •@mackuba This is not yet possible. The only way to see quotes right now is with self-quotes from external ActivityPub servers that support part of our FEP.
@Mastodon
Arataka
in reply to Mastodon • • •Erik Uden 🚩
in reply to Mastodon • • •Clot
in reply to Mastodon • • •Stefan Bohacek
in reply to Mastodon • • •Mastodon Migration
in reply to Mastodon • • •Excellent job @MastodonEngineering !
Have been really impressed by the upgrades and the direction you are taking this fantastic platform. Keep up the good work!
Linux Is Best
in reply to Mastodon • • •Awesome - A new version of Mastodon.
cc: @xrobau
Linux Is Best reshared this.
House Panther
in reply to Linux Is Best • • •Linux Is Best
in reply to House Panther • • •A lot of performance improvements and security patches applied to this build. It is why I tagged my admin @xrobau <-- 👋
Morten Hilker-Skaaning
in reply to Mastodon • • •Sarah A
in reply to Mastodon • • •Renaud Chaput
in reply to Sarah A • • •@ke7zum Glitch 4.4.0 is available as well 😀
@Mastodon
Sarah A
in reply to Renaud Chaput • • •soaproot
in reply to Renaud Chaput • • •Fell
in reply to Mastodon • • •ikuturso 🇪🇺
in reply to Mastodon • • •Renaud Chaput
in reply to ikuturso 🇪🇺 • • •@ikuturso Under an experimental flag, yes. We did not manage to implement the API and client changes to support it fully, but this should be in 4.5.
@Mastodon
Kuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋
in reply to Renaud Chaput • • •Sexybiggetje🐖
in reply to Mastodon • • •6ff334e
in reply to Mastodon • • •akiran_n
in reply to Mastodon • • •Roni Rolle Laukkarinen
in reply to Mastodon • • •☑️ Cath reshared this.
Sérgio Machado
in reply to Mastodon • • •Dmxruser
in reply to Mastodon • • •Waidler
in reply to Mastodon • • •Regardless of this, many thanks for the great work to the Mastodon team.
�
in reply to Mastodon • • •Aleksei 🇪🇪
in reply to Mastodon • • •speaking of the video player, is it possible to disable this sticky video player (or whatever it's called)?
Gustavo
in reply to Mastodon • • •JustBob 🪖🇺🇸♒️
in reply to Mastodon • • •XxPppp678Xx
in reply to Mastodon • • •Renaud Chaput
in reply to XxPppp678Xx • • •@XxPppp678Xx Mastodon.social runs the very latest code, and those changes have already been applied there over time as they were implemented.
@Mastodon
kopio
in reply to Mastodon • • •"Don’t want someone to follow you anymore? You don’t have to block them, simply tap “Remove follower” in the dropdown menu on their profile."
Nice.
Democracy Dies in Dumbass
in reply to Mastodon • • •Whelp, 4.4 broke my shit, had to restore from backup. Will try again tomorrow, too tired tonight. 😀
A docker App for Truenas scale would be HUGE, and I'm too much of an idiot to put one together myself I suspect. 😉
Apfel
in reply to Mastodon • • •'... showing how many of the people you follow are following that person ...'
This feature can be abused to detect someone's follow. [X] Drop it.
What happened to this?
blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/
It's a very reasonable explanation to skip the quotes. Discussions don't become endless then.
Found this:
blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/
'You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time.'
Sounds confusing.
pelzvieh
in reply to Mastodon • • •Did anyone else experience hash changes for typescript@patch version 5.8.2 from hash 5786d5 as shipped with mastodon release 4.4.0 to hash 8c6c40
(and similar for version 5.7.3)
in the `yarn install immutable` step?
And why did the original post provoke 50x errors on several mastodon sites?
GambaJo
in reply to Mastodon • • •Mastodon
in reply to GambaJo • • •GambaJo
in reply to Mastodon • • •Janet Grootebroeder
in reply to Mastodon • • •Can someone please do something about the large 'Verberg' (hide) button on pictures in posts that obscure text very often?
ildiariodiunacri
in reply to Mastodon • • •