fediverse
Hey book fans, did you know there is a Fediverse alternative to Amazon's Goodreads called BookWyrm?
➡️ https://fedi.tips/bookwyrm-a-social-network-for-people-who-enjoy-reading
Just like Mastodon, there are lots of different BookWyrm servers that talk to each other:
➡️ https://joinbookwyrm.com/instances
You can also follow BookWyrm accounts from Mastodon etc.
BookWyrm lets you import your existing data from Goodreads, LibraryThing, StoryGraph, OpenLibrary & Calibre:
Did you see that President Joe Biden joined the fediverse this week? Here are some interesting U.S. politics accounts to follow:
President Biden: @potus
Anti-Trump activist George Conway: @gtconway3
Independent journalist Judd Legum: @realjuddlegum
Political scientist Ian Bremmer: @ianbremmer
Politics writer Jason Sattler: @lolgop
And some Magazines from @Flipboard and our publisher partners:
2024 Elections from Axios: @2024-elections-AxiosNews
Politics from Semafor: @politics-Semafor
Joe Biden from Axios: @joe-biden-AxiosNews
Politics from The Christian Science Monitor: @politics-csmonitor
Abortion from the Flipboard Politics Desk: @abortion-ElectionCentral
Immigration from the Flipboard Politics Desk: @immigration-ElectionCentral
New blog post - what I mean(t) when I said governments should have their own "sovereign owned/operated" #fediverse instances. #100DaysToOffload #Blaugust2024
Announcing FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse!
UPDATE: I have created an account for updates and other information on FediMeteo - follow the account @admin to stay updated!
UPDATE: Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland have just been added
Weather has always influenced our lives: from agriculture to outdoor activities, to extreme events that, thanks to modern technology, can now be predicted with greater reliability. Personally, weather plays a significant role in my daily decisions, which is why I decided to create a service tailored for the Fediverse.
FediMeteo uses Open-Meteo data to publish updates every 6 hours, including current weather conditions, forecasts for the next 12 hours, and predictions for the upcoming days. Each country is served by its own dedicated instance (e.g., it.fedimeteo.com for Italy), managed through snac to ensure simplicity and efficiency in publishing.
You can follow FediMeteo directly in the Fediverse (on Mastodon and compatible platforms), via RSS, or by visiting the dedicated page for your city (e.g., fr.fedimeteo.com/paris).
Currently supported countries include:
Austria, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, – with many more regions coming soon!
FediMeteo is hosted on a FreeBSD-based VPS, with each country isolated in its own jail to ensure security and scalability.
Visit the main site to explore the national instances and start following your local weather updates today:
https://fedimeteo.com
Happy weather monitoring to all! 🌦️
FediMeteo is dedicated to my grandfather, who every evening would give me the weather forecast based on TV, radio, and his personal experience. He would convince me that the weather would be bad, so he had an excuse to accompany me to school instead of me going alone.
#FediMeteo #Announcements #FreeBSD #FediMeteo #WeatherForecasts #Weather #Meteo #snac #Fediverse #Mastodon
guess what's coming soon to a #WordPress blog near you?
https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/pull/804
thanks @janboddez ❤️
Me 2 weeks ago: oh I will just do a post about #Lemmy interoperability with the rest of the #Fediverse for my blog series #TheFutureIsFederated.
How hard can it be? I already federated my Wordpress blog and figured out #Friendica.
Me today: I now have accounts on #Lemmy PLUS #PieFed AND #Mbin because my initial federation tests had mixed results. Reading my notes makes me go 😵💫😅
Despite all this I still LOVE the #Fediverse and I’m in awe of #Mastodon’s interoperability (it comes out shining)
I've been very interested in NodeBB and I've been testing their ActivityPub stuff over at try.nodebb.org all from the convenience of this Mastodon account.
Isn't life great?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/21/forum-software-nodebb-joins-the-fediverse/
Week in Fediverse 2025-01-03
Servers
- Hollo v0.4.0
- Mitra v3.13.0
- Ktistec v2.4.3
- Hubzilla v10.0.5
- Sharkey v2024.11.1
- Friendica v2024.12
- Epicyon v1.6.0
- Castopod v1.13.2
- Vidzy v0.2.0
- NeoDB v0.11.0
- Hatsu v0.3.2
- The first 12 plugins of Castopod
- PieFed development update Dec 2024
Clients
- SubwayTooter v5.547
- Pachli v2.9.1
- Tesseract v1.4.25
- Relatica v0.15.0
Tools and Plugins
For developers
Protocol
- Public Key Directory Server Specification v0.1
Articles
- Posty for Pixelfed: What Fresh Hell...
- The Future of Calendaring
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#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub
Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/0194094b-415b-6213-1c3e-a28d90730723
Last Week in #Fediverse - ep 82
This week's news:
- A massive signup wave on #Bluesky after Brazil bans X
- Premium feeds in the fediverse with @subclub
- Moderated microblogging groups by @newsmast
- Popular tech show WVFRM with YouTuber @mkbhd discusses the fediverse as the protocol wars.
- Hiding comments and preventing quote posts with Bluesky's latest update
Read at https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/
Latest in my personal experiences of "you never know to where or how your #fediverse posts will be federated".
https://hachyderm.io/@RangerJosie@lemmy.world/113082651933853659
My mastodon post getting a reply from a lemmy user. Mastodon-lemmy integration is not good, so seeing it happen passive was weird.
Instead, what happened here (AFAICT):
* An #mbin "magazine" sucked up my post due to a hashtag (I think)
* Added it (for some unclear reason) as a post to it's equivalent of a community
* Then federated that to #lemmy as such
Hello, I'm an open source software engineer in my late 30s living in #Seoul, #Korea, and an avid advocate of #FLOSS and the #fediverse.
I'm the creator of @fedify, an #ActivityPub server framework in #TypeScript, and @hollo, a fediverse microblog for single users.
I'm also very interested in East Asian languages (so-called #CJK) and #Unicode. Feel free to talk to me in #English, #Korean (#한국어), or #Japanese (#日本語), or even in Literary Chinese (#文言文/#漢文)!
https://wedistribute.org/2024/07/neodb-review-culture/
Hey #Fediverse, do you love #TV? I've launched a new app to track your tv in a single user app with #activitypub support!
After you watch give my github repo a ⭐ ! https://github.com/stefanhayden/tvmarks
Week in Fediverse 2025-05-30
Servers
- Socialhome v0.21.0
- Sharkey v2025.4.2
- gathio v1.6.0
- Ibis v0.3.1
- NeoDB v0.11.7.3
- Platform update - May 2025 (Vernissage)
- PieFed development update May 2025 - Passkeys, Flair, Image hashing & much more
- Metabolizing mentions (Ghost)
- Tvmarks: a TV tracking site connected to the Fediverse
Clients
- Pachli v2.13.0
- Mangane v1.14.0
- Fread v1.4.0
Tools and Plugins
For developers
- Fedialgo v0.55.0
- ap-components: A collection of Web Components for showing ActivityPub objects in a browser
Articles
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#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub
Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/0196feaa-e902-fdfb-9628-0a17333c6da5
As 2025 starts we can expect a lot of change to many social media platforms with the rise of AI
We will never ever take such steps!
I keep our services running purely by donations from people on #Mastodon and the #Fediverse and sometimes that's a little hard but it is and will be the only way
If you can and want, we can do this together❤️
https://paypal.me/stuxOS
https://patreon.com/mstdn
https://ko-fi.com/mstdn
https://bunq.me/stuxhost
https://stux.me/donate
It can be different 💪
Do you use Flipboard to stay up on the latest news in tech? If so, your experience just got better. Now you can follow people on Threads and Mastodon, like Marques Brownlee, Mark Cuban, David Imel, Kara Swisher, and Taylor Lorenz, right from your Flipboard, and get their latest social posts on all things tech.
Learn more about these new features in this blogpost. And if there's a cool account you'd like us to highlight, let us know in the comments below.
https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/fediverse-tech-voices-on-flipboard/
#Mastodon #MastodonMigration #Federation #Fediverse #Threads #Flipboard
After Meta's rather disturbing actions today, would you like to move to a Fediverse server that defederates Meta and Threads?
Fedi.Garden is a directory of well-run servers that have all blocked Threads:
All of them are compatible with the requirements listed at https://fedi.garden/about-this-site
You don't have to speak English on here. There are lots of servers listed which use other languages:
https://fedi.garden/fediverse-servers-sorted-by-language
If your language isn't listed, let me know and I can try to look for servers to list that match your language.
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 98
Welcome back to Fediverse Report! I’ve had a great holiday break spending time with family and friends, and that has given me some more time to think about why I care about the fediverse, the open social web and why I spend all this time writing Fediverse Report. Explaining to family members what I do was helpful to make this clear: telling an uncle that I write about decentralised technology mainly leads to confusion. But even extremely offline family members easily understand and agree with the idea that having all of our big social platforms being owned by billionaires leads to significant social problems.
As such, it has helped for me to make it more explicit that I care about decentralisation insofar it is a tool to get somewhere else: I care about better forms of governance and ownership of the social web. I want a social web where people are in control, not a few billionaires (nor nationstate governments, for that matter). Building social networks with decentralised technology is a way to get there.
The idea that the value of alternative social networks is in governance is far from new. I’ve regularly posted hot takes on my Mastodon to the same effect as well. But for 2025 I want to bring this more into focus for this newsletter. Writing a newsletter that is a weekly update tends to amplify shiny new software that has recently been released. In contrast, explaining how governance works on the fediverse does not align well with ‘this happened in the last 7 days’, as it involves more structural and slower moving forces. I’m experimenting with ways to bring coverage of governance in the fediverse better into focus. Expect more like this newsletter, where I zoom in on an offhanded comment by Misskey developer Syuilo as an illustration of the issues that come with interoperability between different places on the open social web.
The News
Mastodon has belatedly published their Annual Report for 2023. The organisation acknowledges the delay, and says that the Annual Report for 2024 is planned to be released in Q1 of this year. Mastodon had a total of 545k euro in donations in 2023, with 476k in costs. The large majority of costs go to personnel expenses, in total 343k was spend on salaries, 72% of the total budget. The popularity of Mastodon’s own servers also come with significant costs, in 2023 they spend 75k on servers and hosting. With a rough estimate of averaging around 250k active users on mastodon.social, this means mastodon.social costs roughly 30 cents per active user per year. The Annual Report also looks at the updates Mastodon has made to the site and apps. Mastodon also shares more about their hiring process, and in a great move for transparency, also published all the salaries of everyone in the organisation.
Back in the present, Mastodon is hiring again, this time for a senior front-end developer. The organisation also held a crowd-funding campaign in late last year to fund and hire a Trust and Safety lead. The community seemed to have had little appetite for funding such an endeavour, with funding barely pushing past the 12k after a month. It is an indication of the difficult spot the organisation is in; the community has been asking for more safety features in Mastodon, but is not funding a Trust and Safety Lead. The organisation could clearly use someone who writes clear policy and design goals for the direction the software should go in. Currently, not even a Mastodon employee can explain why a safety feature for Mastodon that is fully developed and waiting to be approved has been waiting for approval for over 2.5 years. It turns out that writing the code is often the easy part of making changes in the fediverse, and navigating the social structures to get the code used by people is much harder, and a dedicated Trust and Safety Lead could have certainly helped here. Instead, even after large community outcry we still do not know why Mastodon has not merged this safety feature developed by their own employee.
Surf is a new app by Flipboard for the open social web. It is a beautifully designed app that allows people to build their own custom feeds. The power of Surf is in that it supports many networks, and you can combine posts from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, YouTube and Flipboard all into a single custom feed. How Flipboard markets Surf is interesting, describing it as a ‘browser for the social web’. The way Flipboard CEO Mike McCue sees it, Surf pulls in content from the social web, and gives you the possibility to display that content in custom feeds of your choice. Surf also allows you to filter a custom feed by content: for example, you can scroll through an entire feed, or switch over to a different tab that shows only videos in that feed, for example.
For more info on Surf, WeDistribute has a closer look at all the features, and The Verge has more context and comments by McCue. Custom feeds on Bluesky have mainly gone in the direction of the power user and community builder: tools like Graze offer an huge potential in programmability and flexibility. This is especially useful for those who want to build custom feeds that other people will also use. Surf takes a different approach, by instead prompting people to build their own feeds as much as possible. It’ll be interesting to see which approach will gain traction, and if there is space for both ways of building custom feeds.
Misskey developer Syuilo made some comments contemplating breaking federation with Mastodon. Misskey is mainly used in Japan, and has a wide feature set that differs notably from Mastodon. The main reason that Syuilo gave is that she feels Misskey development is constrained by having to meet the needs and requirements of maintaining federation with other (types) of software. That Misskey is considering letting federation between Mastodon and Misskey break is an indication of one of the downsides of how ActivityPub is designed: You can send out anything you want with ActivityPub, but it is exceedingly difficult to know how other software will actually receive and display the things you send out with ActivityPub. There is a significant freedom for fediverse software in how they implement and support even more basic functions. For example, see this comparison table for how the different platforms support hashtags, and how many variations there are.
Personally, I think it would be healthy for the fediverse as a whole if more fediverse software would start publishing what they deem as necessary for other software to federate with them. The fediverse mainly currently works on the assumption that any form of federation between projects is fine, even if that means that another federated platform will stripping out all markup and images of a post. It might be healthy for a platform to state minimum functional requirements, such as ‘we only want to federate with software that also shows the emoji reactions as we view this to be an integral part of a message’. For now, Syuilo’s post mainly seems to be to vent some frustrations, so it remains to be seen where any of this will actually go.
The Links
A guide for small websites regarding the UK’s Online Safety Act, with some extra clarification for fediverse sites.
TheIndieBeat.fm is a new radio station for showcasing indie music from the fediverse, that picks up where radiofreefedi left, and will use upcoming fediverse audio platform Bandwagon.
The first 12 plugins of Castopod.
FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse.
“Event Bridge For ActivityPub” plugin released on WordPress.org.
rdf-pub – generic Activity-Pub Server that focuses on using C2S.
Manyfold got a new round of NLNet funding, and published a roadmap of what they’ll be working on.
PieFed development update for December 2024.
Fediverse tech roadmap reflection on developments in the past year, by Mitra developer Silverpill.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
2 questions for the #PeerTube experts out there,
1. Is there a way I can migrate my account? I think my server disabled downloading videos but this is also causing issues for the people that follow me in their podcast apps.
2. What good PeerTube instances exist that are not tied to Crypto, AI, any right wing thing?
My channel is at https://spectra.video/c/robertkingett/videos #Fediverse @FediGarden
I’m kinda done with Mastodon. It’s been my main spot, but it’s missing quote posting, which drives me nuts—I just wanna comment on posts without resharing everything! Also, it’s eating up my server’s resources, and I’m running a bunch of stuff on one machine, so I need something that doesn’t hog CPU or disk space.
I used Akkoma with Mangane frontend before and really liked how light and customizable it was. Problem? The database got huge, and I couldn’t find simple tools to clean out old stuff. It was like digging through a messy closet. I’m thinking of trying Akkoma again, but is there a way to keep the database under control?
I’m also looking at Misskey—it seems fun with quote posting and a cool community. But does it use a lot of server resources? How hard is it to back up or move to another server? I’d love Mastodon API support since my clients need it.
#Mastodon #Fediverse #FediPoll #Poll #Akkoma #Pleroma #Misskey
Options: (choose one)
If you're interested in building your own #ActivityPub server but don't know where to start, I recommend checking out #Fedify's #tutorial Creating your own federated microblog. It provides a comprehensive, step-by-step guide that walks you through building a fully functional federated application. Perfect for developers who want to dive into the #fediverse!
The good thing with federation is that I as an individual can make decisions about who I federate with - be it an individual or an entire instance. There's even some middle ground to customize your choice (silence vs block).
And now, the "federated islands" concept is kicking up, which is really cool. We have many choices - the decision is not mandated for us.
https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/islands-an-opt-in-federated-network