Yesterday, Sen. Ron Johnson held a hearing, “Voices of the Vaccine-injured.” As expected, the misinformation and conspiracy theories flowed.
The post “Voices of the Vaccine-injured”: Old school antivax nonsense on steroids appeared first on RESPECTFUL INSOLENCE.
Fediverse Report is now Connected Places! You can read more about this in the announcement post. For this week’s news, Mastodon announces and retracts a new ToS for mastodon.social, Threads continues their streak of implementing ActivityPub in the most confusing way possible, and Wanderer is a new fediverse platform for sharing your hiking and biking trails.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!
Mastodon introduced a new Terms of Service for the mastodon.social and mastodon.online instances, and then retracted the new ToS after criticism from the community about some of the conditions that are in the ToS. Mastodon announced the new ToS with a summary email that explained that the new ToS would “explicitly prohibit the scraping of user data for unauthorized purposes, e.g. archival or large language model (LLM) training. We want to make it clear that training LLMs on the data of Mastodon users on our instances, is not permitted.” It would also set a minimum age of 16 for everyone, and clarified rights regarding content licensing. There were multiple points of criticism with the ToS:
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko noted in the Mastodon Discord that “the lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms”, which points to the challenge of writing a ToS for federated platforms. Rochko also said that he has taken up on Doctorow’s offer to have lawyers of the Electronic Frontier Foundation get involved. The first two concerns listed above seem fairly straightforward to handle. However the question of how Terms of Service apply in a federated network seem more complicated to resolve, as it is unclear if there is even a broad agreement on how the ToS should function in a federated context, let alone how to translate that into legalese.
Meta, the company that relentlessly removes friction from their social apps to maximise engagement, has moved fediverse posts on Threads to a separate ‘fediverse’ feed. Posts from fediverse accounts will only appear in this new fediverse feed, and will not appear in the regular timelines on Threads. You can not reply on posts from the fediverse with your Threads account, Threads engineer Peter Cottle says that this feature (lol) is an ‘eventual goal’. The fediverse feed on Threads also shows top-level posts, not replies and reposts. Cottle says that this is to create a ‘cleaner product experience’. You can now also search for fediverse accounts in Threads, before this update users had to wait for a post by a fediverse account showed up in their feed so they could click on the profile and hit follow. David Imel from the MKBHD and Waveform channels asked Cottle about Threads’ plans for account portability, noting that this was an important point made by Threads’ Adam Mosseri. Cottle says that this is “top of mind for us”, but that they do not have a concrete timeline for this. Threads’ fediverse integration is also still not available in the EU, with no clear indication if or when it will launch in the region.
Wanderer is a platform for managing and sharing your hiking, running and biking trails. It is self-hosted and open source, and the latest update for Wanderer has added ActivityPub, making it decentralised and federated as well. There is a demo instance of Wanderer available to try out what the platform actually looks like. Wanderer also has the option to import trails from other platforms like Strava and Komoot. Wanderer does face a familiar challenge that goes for a new type of platforms on the fediverse however: how does it bootstrap itself into becoming a community?
Mastodon shared an update on their strategy for 2025. The organisation said they are still working on new non-profit organisation in Europe that will own the Mastodon assets. When Mastodon announced this in January 2025 they also said that the current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down and work on product strategy. The latest update by Mastodon does not share any news on a potential new CEO. Growth his one of the three key pillars of Mastodon’s strategy for 2025, and they are working on making Mastodon more accessible for general users, as well as some features that other organisations have asked for, such as greater customisation for instances. Regarding financial sustainability Mastodon said that they are working on offering additional commercial service, and that they’ll announce more on that soon.
Related to Mastodon growing into a more mature and sustainable organisation, they also announced this week that Mastodon is registered as a digital public good. This registration is part of the Digital Public Good Alliance, a large multi-stakeholder organisation. In a speech during the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies‘s Open Source Week, Mastodon Board of Director member Hannah Aubry explains what it means for Mastodon to meet the DPG Standard: “adhering to privacy best practices, doing no harm, and contributing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. And it aids us in our mission to empower public institutions to speak directly to their citizens and constituents, without the filter of a corporation.”
PieFed is officially out of beta, and has released the 1.0 version. The Reddit-like platform has grown significantly over recent weeks. Popular Lemmy instance Lemm.ee announced they would be shutting down, and PieFed has been one of the main recipients of users and communities looking for a new place. Lemmy app Voyager is also in the process of adding support for PieFed to the app. The growth of PieFed in recent weeks is instructive for understanding how community growth within the fediverse actually happens. PieFed has been around for over a year, with a compelling feature set (especially regarding moderation, as well as clustering communities in feeds and topics), but had a low adoption rate. It took an exogenous event for people to actually take the effort to give PieFed a serious consideration and migrate away from Lemmy to a different platform.
Framasoft has successfully completed their crowdfunding campaign, raising over 75k EUR. The large majority of the funds are for further development of the PeerTubeapp , such as playing video on background, adding support for live streaming, and managing videos within the app. The final part of the campaign funds is for the support of the Framasoft organisation itself. Framasoft says that most new features will likely be released late this year or next year. Live broadcast is currently already in development and is scheduled to launch “fairly quickly”.
Wafrn is a Tumblr-like platform with native support for both ActivityPub and ATProto. The platform developers have released an Android app for Wafrn on F-Droid.
Manyfold is a fediverse platform for hosting and sharing 3D printer files, providing an alternative to platforms like Makerworld and Thingiverse. Manyfold was already available for self-hosting, and the 3dprint.social is the first publicly available instance that is now open for joining as well.
Bonfire is fediverse (micro)blogging platform that is getting close to release, and the developers are hosting online install parties to help people get started setting up their own instance.
FediThreat is a newly announced open source content moderation API for the fediverse by Pixelfed and Loops developer Daniel Supernault. There is not much publicly known yet on how FediThreat actually works. The project is scheduled for July.
The Event Federation project shares what they’ll be working on in the future to make events more accessible within the fediverse.
Media discourse about how Bluesky is dying, a new type of moderation relay by Blacksky, and backing up your ATProto account with bsky.storage.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!
US and UK media outlets (1, 2, 3, 4) have published various opinion articles these weeks about how Bluesky is dying, a narrative well-supported by the fact US Vice President JD Vance has joined Bluesky this week. The opinion pieces, as well as Vance joining Bluesky, illustrates that Bluesky has grown to the point where it is both part of mainstream culture, as well as one of the new battlegrounds for the culture wars. Bluesky does have an issue with retention rates, with the monthly active user numbers dropping by around 30% in the last three months. While this drop in user numbers is held up as the reason for the ‘Bluesky is dying’ discourse, the main frustration in the articles is about Bluesky, culture and audience. Sarah Perez wrote a response for TechCrunch, arguing that the main point of Bluesky is the open network and technology that it enables. While the protocol indeed matters, the main conflict is about the social capital and culture that Bluesky is creating, and who has influence over it. The impact on current culture and politics that Bluesky is having is illustrated by Wired’s coverage of the Tesla Takedown protest, documenting how a single post on Bluesky had led to widespread continuing protests.
Blacksky has build a moderation relay, which takes all moderation actions by all labelers on the network, and bundles them into a single relay output. As Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser explains: “With this update, folks building custom feeds can leverage moderation actions from the whole network more easily in their algorithms. Wanna exclude twitter screenshots, transphobia, AND anti-blackness from your feed? rsky-relay is now a one-stop-shop for all of those labels.”
Blacksky also has reached their fundraising goal, and they will launch a Blacksky app. Some of the features for the Blacksky app will be the ability to set defaults for the Blacksky community, such as using the Blacksky moderation labeler by default and having the Blacksky Trending feed as default. Blacksky is also requesting feedback from the community on what they want from the app.
Bsky.storage is a new service that allows people to store an hourly backup of their ATProto PDS. It also can generate a recovery key that allows people to take back control over their account even when they have lost access to that account or Bluesky becomes unavailable. Bsky.storage is made by Storacha, which stores the data on a decentralised storage network with IPFS and Filecoin. ATProto gives people the ability to take full control over their account’s PDS, and it feels like the design space that this allows has only just starting to be explored. Bsky.storage is such an example, the ability to always take back control of your account even when the service provider goes offline or becomes adversarial, is something genuinely new for the space of social networks.
Publishing platform Leaflet has added the ability subscribe to publications via ATProto. Writers can create Bluesky posts with every new post, and when the audience subscribes to a publication, Leaflet generates a custom Bluesky feed for them that contains only the posts from all Leaflet publications they subscribed to. Leaflet is further exploring how to use the social graph for more ways to keep up to date with Leaflet. They are also working on email subscriptions, placing it in closer competition with other newsletter platforms such as Substack and Ghost.
On the topic of email subscriptions, subs.blue is a new tool to create email notifications on ATProto. It allows people to create an email channel. When other people subscribe to that channel, they get email notifications for posts in that channel, on the email address that they registered their ATProto account with.
OAuth remains one of the more challenging technical parts of ATProto to implement. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy posted an article that explains some of the design considerations that the team has made in their OAuth implementation design. Bluesky PBC also shared some of the improvements to OAuth that they are making. Relevant for non-developers: the time it takes before you need to log in again to a client is now two weeks, where it used to be one week. For developers that do use OAuth, check out the entire post.
UFOs is a new dashboard and API for exploring the ATmosphere, measuring the activity of all the lexicons on the network. In practical terms, this gives visibility into which apps are used on the network, and how often. It shows unusual activity (such as blocks on Bluesky being up 100% day over day), as well as giving insight into what other apps are used. It shows how incredible dominant Bluesky is over the ATmosphere, and how much of a hard time other apps have getting traction. UFOs also gives an indication of how mass adoption of the open social web has some interesting side effects as well, such as that statistics about user behaviour becomes publicly visible for everyone. UFOs also has an API, and it is part of microcosm, a larger collection of projects by developer @phil that build on the aggregate data of the ATProto firehose.
Smol.life is a new fork of the Bluesky web client, that has additional integrations with other ATProto apps. It has a section for games, where you can play Skyrdle and at://2048. These are two web-based games that have ATProto integrations, where you can keep track of your scores on your own PDS. Smol.life also has an integration with linkat.blue, a Linktree-clone on ATProto. This allows you to see someone’s linkat links while viewing their Bluesky profile on smol.life.
atproto-os is a virtual desktop that runs in your web browser, where the current state of your desktop (which applications are you currently running, etc) is stored on ATProto in your PDS. It uses Open Web Desktop, a larger project for running desktops on the web. As the project says: “Each window with its metadata can eventually be broadcast via #atproto Jetstream to update real-time data about whoever is on your desktop”. What a use case would be for broadcasting your current desktop applications to the entire public internet is somewhat less clear to me however.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
You did it!
Thanks to your support, we achieved all three of our fundraising goals for developing features in the PeerTube application!
We now have the necessary resources to work on it during the year!
Throughout the campaign, your enthusiasm has truly warmed our hearts. We would like to thank everyone who contributed to its success, from those who talked about the campaign on social media, to the various news outlets that relayed the information to their audiences and the hundreds of people who made a donation!
Furthermore, through this crowdfunding campaign, we aimed to introduce PeerTube and Framasoft to individuals who may not be familiar with them, particularly in the English-speaking world. Thanks to your many voices and your help, we’ve succeeded!
You really are wonderful… thank you! ❤️
Here is an overview of the features we’ll be able to develop, thanks to you:
We also had a fourth, slightly more “meta” objective: to support Framasoft.
We saw this objective as a bit of a bonus, which would of course help the PeerTube project, but whose main aim was to make Framasoft and its actions more visible. Emphasize that PeerTube is not just a technical project, but part of a broader vision that we have at Framasoft.
The vision of a digital environment that empowers everyone.
Despite the fact that this “meta” aspect didn’t seem directly related to PeerTube, you supported us in achieving it… and what a support it was!
On behalf of the entire Framasoft team, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!
During the three weeks of the campaign, the PeerTube project continued to live on via:
The rest of this year’s adventure is fully planned.
For the mobile app, we’ll be spending the rest of the year developing features you’ve enabled us to fund! While some of these will arrive fairly quickly, others, such as live broadcasts, are unlikely to be released before the end of the year or early next year.
On the PeerTube software side, we’ve already published the roadmap for 2025.
Many improvements are planned for the coming months!
To stay informed about developments and improvements to the PeerTube project, follow us on social media (Mastodon, Bluesky and other platforms) or subscribe to our newsletter.
Finally, we count on you to promote the PeerTube project, install the mobile app, and ensure that more people discover spaces where they can control their digital lives, including posting videos.
Thank you all for following us in this campaign, and thank you again for supporting us during it!
Without you, PeerTube would never have been possible. Thanks to you, we’ll put PeerTube in everyone’s pocket!
The Framasoft team
Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum available, and bridging to Bluesky op a per-server basis.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!
Fediforum has published the videos of the keynotes and the software demos. For a list of all the demos, you can check out the website. Some thoughts on some of the demoes that stood out to me. For some of the other cool demos (such as Bounce and Bandwagon), check out last week’s news.
The team implementing the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has posted a blog with a roadmap what they are working on. The team has plans to majorly expand the plugin, and make WordPress a full member of the fediverse. So far, the interaction has mainly focused on publishing to the fediverse, which will now be expanded to also be able to follow, read and interact with the rest of the fediverse directly via a WordPress account. The main feature will be a reader experience, which is effectively a timeline feed within WordPress. It places WordPress into even more direct competition with Ghost, who also offers a timeline reader as part of their ActivityPub integration.
The Social Web Foundation released a draft of their work to implement end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging over ActivityPub. Their plan uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS), a protocol for encrypting messages, that is designed to be used in combination with other protocols for sending the encrypted messages. One of the parts that is missing for ActivityPub is the ability to send real private messages to each other, and an integration with MLS can help with that. It might take a while before it gets there, this first version of the draft is now ready for proof-of-concept implementations and interoperability testing.
Bridgy Fed, the bridging software that connects ActivityPub with ATProto, has gotten an update where server admins can opt-in to the bridge for their entire server. For some context: Bridgy Fed was originally designed to be opt-out, meaning that every fediverse account could automatically be bridged to the Bluesky network and visa versa. After massive pushback from the fediverse community, this was changed to opt-in, where people have to actively take action to have their account be connected to the other network. The debate laid bare to what extend the fediverse struggled with being a decentralised network, where decentralised means that there are different communities with values that at times are incompatible with each other. Instead the debate got largely framed in terms of what the value (opt-in or opt-out) should be for the entire network. However, with this latest update individual communities can now be independently decide for themselves if they want to be connected to other protocols by default.
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:
We have just reached €55,000 in contributions for the PeerTube app crowdfunding!
We were not certain to reach it but you followed us until now… that means a lot to us, thank you very much! 🥰
Thanks to this completed goal, we will be able to work with peace of mind on every improvements we wanted to make to the application this year! 🎉
Whether you want to cover an event happening in your street or to share your road trip with your community, you will soon be able to do so directly from the mobile app!
In addition to making broadcasting easier (no more need for computer or OBS), this enhancement will let you be more spontaneous: you will soon be able to start your live streams on the fly, in just a few seconds…! 🥳
For those of you who have been following the PeerTube project for a long time, maybe you remember we have already funded an app dedicated to PeerTube live streams, soberly called PeerTube Live.
At the time, we called on an external developer to work on this app: we never thought that one day we would maintain our own mobile app!
Today, we can’t imagine not integrating this major feature for videomakers into our app. Fortunately, we will be able to draw on the previous work to implement it, even if that will still be a lot of work!
We can imagine many of you have questions about this goal.
If you didn’t know, PeerTube is developed by a small french non-profit called Framasoft (yeah, this is us!).
Our mission is to raise awareness about digital issues and cultural commons: to help people all around the world (even if we mostly work in France) to have a critical look on our digital society by sharing keys to understanding.
However, we define ourselves as being an organization “that does”. We like to think but above all we seek to build solutions that enable everyone to take ownership on these issues and become emancipated.
That is why we built PeerTube: to allow everyone to get back control on their videos.
That is also why we have been running the “De-google-ify” campaign for the past 11 years, providing alternative services to those offered by Big Tech. These services, which are free and accessible to all, are among the largest non-commercial services in the world!
Finally, we opened Framaspace for the same reason: to provide a free collaborative space (based on Nextcloud) for small non-profits and collectives.
We seek to equip those who wish to build a fairer and more equitable world.
Of course, even though all of our services are free, they still have a cost. We have to pay each month for our 10 employees and the whole infrastructure we maintain.
To do so, our business model is based on solidarity: that’s donations from thousands of people (mostly based in France) that fund us! That’s thanks to all these people that PeerTube was born, that 2,000 collectives can enjoy Framaspace today or that more than 2,000,000 of people can freely use our services each month!
By supporting Framasoft, you support both PeerTube and all our other projects.
By doing so, you allow us to help to (digitally) empower those working for a better world.
To support Framasoft and help us to continue to act, you can:
WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing digital badges and attestations, and more.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!
The Linux Foundation has announced FAIR, a package manager project for WordPress. It is “a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” To achieve this independent and federated repository of tools for the WordPress ecosystem, FAIR uses ATProto underneath. FAIR has build their own protocol, the FAIR protocol, on top of ATProto. It uses DID PLC as an identifier for the packages, and ATProto for indexing and discoverability. As the project has just launched and some of the final parts are still being ironed out there are no packages yet that use the FAIR system. As such I cannot give yet a good context for what discoverability of WordPress packages over ATProto actually looks like. The chaos of the last year around the management of WordPress shows a need for decentralised repository of packages and plugins, and FAIR does already show that ATProto can be much more than only a microblogging network.
Gnosco is a new tool for digital badges and attestations on ATProto. It acts as a secure middleman between the application that issues the badge and your PDS. This allows applications to create a signed record to award a badge of attestation for a user. This badge is then not yet placed into the user’s PDS, but instead held in escrow by Gnosco. Users can then log into Gnosco with their ATProto account and review the badges. If they approve, the signed badge then added to their own PDS.
Gnosco took me a while to wrap my head around what the tool is and what it does, but it tackles the following problem. Badges and awards and other attestations need to be accepted and signed by both the issuer and the receiver. But not for all attestations that are issued it is known in advance if the user actually wants to receive this attestation and store it on their PDS. So there needs to be a way for the user to accept or reject a badge or attestation that is issued. Gnosco provides this interface that is platform-neutral, where users can accept and reject any attestation or badge.
Photo-sharing platform Grain now has their own moderation system on their own infrastructure. Grain is building a social photo-sharing network on ATProto that is separate from Bluesky, using their own lexicon. One reason why image-sharing platforms so far tend to have been alternate Bluesky clients is that means that the client does not have to be responsible for moderation. For Grain, the goal is to build their own independent social network, and thus their own moderation system is mandatory as well. The Grain developer also released a stand-alone app to embed Grain galleries on your own website.
Blacksky is proposing to make a soft-fork of the Bluesky client for the Blacksky community. With their own forked app, Blacksky can set some default values that benefit their community, such as setting the default feed to the Blacksky Trending feed, and setting the Blacksky moderation as default moderation. The organisation is looking for 2500 USD in recurring monthly donations, and they are close to reaching that goal.
ATProto chatroom app Roomy has released the another alpha version. Besides offering public chatrooms, Roomy continues to experiment with features for collecting and aggregating chat messages into longer-lived places for text. In this update they included ‘boards’, where people can create simple markdown pages as well as collect ‘threads’ that are pulled out of the chat log. Roomy is on the bleeding edge of technology when it comes to using ATProto, by combining it with Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT). The Roomy blogs go into more detail on why they are building the architecture this way, but the current practical problem is that CRDTs are new enough that what Roomy needs is still in development.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
Fediforum 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.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!
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.
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.
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.
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:
Signal Desktop now includes support for a new “Screen security” setting that is designed to help prevent your own computer from capturing screenshots of your Signal chats on Windows. This setting is automatically enabled by default in Signal Desktop on Windows 11.
If you’re wondering why we’re only implementing this on Windows right now, it’s because the purpose of this setting is to protect your Signal messages from Microsoft Recall.
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