Happy 15-year birthday to the fediverse! One of the fascinating aspects of writing about the fediverse is how quickly the field is continually changing. One of the main theme’s of the last weeks relate to defederation. Questions came to the foreground about when servers should defederate regarding search policies and spam moderation. New questions are still waiting to be answered regarding connecting with other protocols, Nostr and Bluesky’s ATproto. Meanwhile, more news leaked about Meta’s new text based network that connects to the fediverse in some way, with people having drastically different attitudes towards connecting with them as well.
The latest info regarding Meta’s Barcelona project can be found here. While people on the fediverse have understandably focused on what this means for the fediverse and ActivityPub, the project should also be framed in a context of a Twitter competitor. The downstream effect of Twitter having a new real competitor on the fediverse is still an open question, but it seems likely that something that breaks Twitters dominance will also be good for the fediverse as well.
Meanwhile, Bluesky continues to grow and be its own thing. The culture of shitposting, centred around a main character (or theme) of the day, in order to get on the What’s Hot feed, is decidedly different than the posting culture that exists on the fediverse. This cultural difference will be interesting to keep in mind while people are trying to bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto.
The bridging between Bluesky and the fediverse are quickly progressing. Skybridge is a way to use Mastodon clients (such as Ivory) with your Bluesky account, allowing you to post to both networks with a single app. It got released a few days ago, and it is surprising how polished this experience already is. Dave Weiner, one of the pioneers of RSS, made his Bluesky feed into an RSS feed, allowing you to follow any Bluesky user as an RSS feed.
The links
One-click privacy-conscious post quoting with Elk. It feels like the debate around quote posting is largely over, and now it is a matter of slowly implementing and integrating quote posting into most fediverse software. This is one of the latest examples.
Tuba is a Mastodon client for Linux in active development. The latest release advertises that it has native support for Bookwyrm and Funkwhale previews. The fediverse advertises itself as a network that goes beyond microblogging, so it is interesting to see clients actively working on this.
The W3C SocialWeb Incubation Community Group had a meeting, here are the notes. Setting up communication channels like this shows that the interesting in ActivityPub is indeed finally gathering steam again. Coordination like this between developers is of great importance.
You can now verify your Wikipedia user page on Mastodon. Tim Chambers explains the importance of integrations between Wikipedia and the fediverse like this one, here.
Mastodon has had the groups feature on the roadmap for a while, and the feature has been available in the GitHub repo for months. Truth Social, which is build on Mastodon but does not federate with the rest of the fediverse, has decided to add this groups feature before Mastodon itself does.
A podcast interview with WordPress developer Alex Standiford on how WordPress and the fediverse can be combined.
Funkwhale has posted an April and May update. One of the interesting things is that they are starting work on an API for tools to synchronize podcast playback, and that they are working with podcast players like AntennaPod.
A tool to visualise your connections on the fediverse.
Micro.blog held a virtual conference, Micro Camp. You can rewatch the talks on their website.
fedi.software is a new server that is specifically to provide fediverse software projects a home for their accounts.
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