Welcome! It has been an interesting week in the fediverse, with some events that will play out over longer timeframes. Conversations about defederation, but also a growth in tech projects that go beyond microblogging, and the continuation of developer organisation. Besides that, it took around a month for Mastodon to add another million accounts, crossing the 12 million line this week.
Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about Meta’s new project Barcelona, a microblogging platform that (allegedly) interoperates with the fediverse. One of the main questions is if servers on the fediverse should interact with this new platform, or if they should defederate from Meta’s projects. Quite a few people have vocally advocated for the immediate and full defederation of all Meta’s projects on sight. The power of the fediverse is that every server admin gets to set their own rules, and that there does not have to be full consensus on policies. However, for people who fear that Barcelona is a full Embrace-Extend-Extinct project that can only be thwarted by avoiding content altogether, the result of the latest poll might spell bad news:
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-1.pngA 4k response is a pretty high result for fediverse polls. Anonymous polls cannot be a fully representative sample, but there is a good case to be made that the selection bias is probably in favor of people who are opiniated about the subject. This makes a full-on defederation by the entire fediverse quite unlikely and not particularly effective at preventing EEE.
In the meantime, an article by Johannes Ernst places some question marks with the assumption that the Barcelona project will fully implement ActivityPub. A careful reading of all the leaked information does not definitively confirm it. It might be that Meta implements a connection with Mastodon in a more asymmetric way, which would complicate the question even further.
In other trends that is worth keeping an eye on, is the continued integration of cooperation of fediverse developers. Until quite recently, coordination on fediverse work mainly happened on the social hub for ActivityPub, with only few developers who worked on implementation actively participating. Now the is a large Matrix Space, with channels for most fediverse projects, as well as more conversation space for the fediverse in general. There are also regular meetings (next one May 31st), and a conference later this year.
Beyond microblogging
While microblogging has gotten by far the most attention as the main form of communication on the fediverse, new projects are also springing up that focus on the forums.
Kbin is a federated link aggregator, similar to reddit. The main public instance is available at kbin.social. It also integrates with Lemmy, the other link aggregator on the fediverse. Kbin is currently in active development, adding features such as ‘magazines’, and even has it’s own extension already. The project recently got funding from NLNet, and released an accompanying roadmap. It is still early days in the project, but it is fully functional and usable. An interesting and exciting project that will certainly be checked in with later to see how it is progressing.
Besides Kbin, there are now three other forum software projects that are adding federation: Flarum, nodeBB and Discourse are all working on integrating ActivityPub into their current forum software. All the projects are still in early development. However, it does provide a clear indication that if you want to think about the future of the fediverse, you should think beyond just (micro)blogging, as decentralized forums are close on the horizon.
PixelFed is also rapidly shipping changes and updates. Most notable are post editing, better tools to handle spam (including Advanced Autodetection of spam), account verification in the similar style as Mastodon, and Place tags. Even more features are being worked on, such as Stories, Loops and live streams. There is also an interesting parallel between Instagram and it’s tightly connected Barcelona project, and PixelFed and it’s tight connection with Mastodon (and other fediverse microblogging platforms), especially since there will be a connection between them soon. How this will all play out is worth watching.
The links
The Linux Experiment has an excellent video about Framasoft, a French NGO that is quite impactful in the fediverse, even though their name might not be very well known. They are behind the fediverse projects PeerTube and Mobilizon. The Linux Experiment also hosts their videos on both YouTube and PeerTube, which is cool to see.
Flipboard is continuing with their integrations into their app. You can now use Bluesky and Pixelfed accounts via the Flipboard app.
Bridgy Fed is a service that turns your website in your own fediverse account. Developer Ryan Barrett (@snarfed) is looking for feedback on the draft for the further bridging with the other open protocols like ATproto and Nostr.
Calckey continues to become a serious player in the fediverse. It will soon change it’s name, as the main developer Kainoa feels its not right to have the project named after him anymore now that there are so many other contributors. Work is also slowly starting to completely rewrite the backend, as it currently consists of a lot of legacy code from Misskey.
The European Commision has supported many fediverse projects via NGIZero. This infographic has an overview of all the projects that are supported.
Fedilabs is one of the earliest apps for the fediverse, and is now 6 years old!
Ivory is a premier Mastodon app for iOS, that is now also available on Mac.
Martin Holland has diligently been tracking traffic to the German news website heise.de for both Twitter and Mastodon, and sharing the data in great detail. This is the latest update.
Add comment