Fediverse Report – #117
-
Fediverse Report – #117
Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.
The News
PieFed, a link aggregator platform for the fediverse, has made some interesting updates recently. It is one of the first (if not the first) platform to add support for Passkeys to the platform. It has also added flair (community-specific tags) to posts, that are federated as well. PieFed has also made a image hashing service available that can be used by any fediverse platform. This service generates a unique fingerprint of every image, and that fingerprint can be used to identity other posts that use the same or fairly similar images. This can be used for content moderation, PieFed has a demo video available on PeerTube showcasing how it can find and take down multiple posts that all contain a similar image.
FediForum has announced three keynote speakers and published a tentative agenda. On Thursday, June 5, Ian Forrester will give the opening keynote. Forrester has been a driving factor for the BBC R&D department to get the broadcaster to experiment with a Mastodon server. Later on Thursday, Cory Doctorow will give a keynote. On Friday June 6, Christine Lemmer-Webber will give the opening keynote. On Thursday, I will be hosting a session on Whats New at the Open Social Web, where I’ll be going over all the news and events that have happened since 2025.
The branch of fediverse software that consists of Friendica, Hubzilla and more, is now 15 years old. The main developer Mike Macgirvin lists the large number of features that the platforms have, including groups, nomadic identity, comment controls, and much more. When it comes to the large variety of features, no fediverse platform comes anywhere close to what this branch of platforms offer. The software platforms have managed to create their own small self-sustaining communities. While a number of the software platforms such as Streams do not publish any statistics, extrapolating data from what some servers running Hubzilla and Friendica publish, together I would estimate the active accounts to be less than 10k MAU. Still, these communities have managed to find long-term sustainability, exisiting over 15 years in various forms is no mean feat. As Macgirvin says: ‘if you think that this “alternative fediverse” is going away any time soon, you must be new here.’
The United States has signed the Take It Down Act into law, which criminalises the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images, and requires social media platforms to remove them when notified within 48 hours. IFTAS has written a guide with more information, focused on fediverse server administrators. IFTAS notes that “even small, volunteer-run instances will be expected to comply if they are based in or hosted in the US, host US user accounts, or federate content that reaches US audiences.”
The Links
- Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser – Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast
- My Dream Fediverse Platform – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
- Ben Werdmuller has been writing a four-part series on strategies for the open social web, with articles on product strategies for Mastodon, Bluesky, starting fresh, and now his most recent article on various funding strategies for the open social web.
- A detailed overview of how federation between Lemmy and Mastodon works in practice. It is a good indication that using the same protocol does not automatically guarantee good interoperability. Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look like.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- Ghost’s weekly update on their fediverse integration, mentioning that ActivityPub is now also available at another vendor who offers Ghost hosting.
- Flipboard is federating another 124 accounts, this time from international publishers. Flipboard now federates over 1200 accounts of publishers.
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 Report – #117
Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.
fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)
-
Fediverse Report – #117
Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.
The News
PieFed, a link aggregator platform for the fediverse, has made some interesting updates recently. It is one of the first (if not the first) platform to add support for Passkeys to the platform. It has also added flair (community-specific tags) to posts, that are federated as well. PieFed has also made a image hashing service available that can be used by any fediverse platform. This service generates a unique fingerprint of every image, and that fingerprint can be used to identity other posts that use the same or fairly similar images. This can be used for content moderation, PieFed has a demo video available on PeerTube showcasing how it can find and take down multiple posts that all contain a similar image.
FediForum has announced three keynote speakers and published a tentative agenda. On Thursday, June 5, Ian Forrester will give the opening keynote. Forrester has been a driving factor for the BBC R&D department to get the broadcaster to experiment with a Mastodon server. Later on Thursday, Cory Doctorow will give a keynote. On Friday June 6, Christine Lemmer-Webber will give the opening keynote. On Thursday, I will be hosting a session on Whats New at the Open Social Web, where I’ll be going over all the news and events that have happened since 2025.
The branch of fediverse software that consists of Friendica, Hubzilla and more, is now 15 years old. The main developer Mike Macgirvin lists the large number of features that the platforms have, including groups, nomadic identity, comment controls, and much more. When it comes to the large variety of features, no fediverse platform comes anywhere close to what this branch of platforms offer. The software platforms have managed to create their own small self-sustaining communities. While a number of the software platforms such as Streams do not publish any statistics, extrapolating data from what some servers running Hubzilla and Friendica publish, together I would estimate the active accounts to be less than 10k MAU. Still, these communities have managed to find long-term sustainability, exisiting over 15 years in various forms is no mean feat. As Macgirvin says: ‘if you think that this “alternative fediverse” is going away any time soon, you must be new here.’
The United States has signed the Take It Down Act into law, which criminalises the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images, and requires social media platforms to remove them when notified within 48 hours. IFTAS has written a guide with more information, focused on fediverse server administrators. IFTAS notes that “even small, volunteer-run instances will be expected to comply if they are based in or hosted in the US, host US user accounts, or federate content that reaches US audiences.”
The Links
- Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser – Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast
- My Dream Fediverse Platform – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
- Ben Werdmuller has been writing a four-part series on strategies for the open social web, with articles on product strategies for Mastodon, Bluesky, starting fresh, and now his most recent article on various funding strategies for the open social web.
- A detailed overview of how federation between Lemmy and Mastodon works in practice. It is a good indication that using the same protocol does not automatically guarantee good interoperability. Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look like.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- Ghost’s weekly update on their fediverse integration, mentioning that ActivityPub is now also available at another vendor who offers Ghost hosting.
- Flipboard is federating another 124 accounts, this time from international publishers. Flipboard now federates over 1200 accounts of publishers.
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 Report – #117
Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.
fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)
@LaurensHof
> Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look likeIt looks like people on micro-posting apps being able to join forums, see new thread posts from them in their feed, and comment on them. While forums benefit from a larger pool of people who might join and contribute, compared to only people using Lemmy, MBin or PieFed.
-
F fediforum@mastodon.social shared this topic
