It is pretty cool to see all the different forks of major fediverse platforms. Just learning about Chuckya, a "soft fork" of glitch-soc, which itself is a fork of Mastodon.
A bit of a slower news week, where everyone’s feeds turned purple with pictures of the aurora borealis. Still, work on (and interest in) bridges, curated content and new products in development show that things are dynamic all the same.
Fediverse Bridges
Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed and the new bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, has given another update on the Bluesky-fediverse bridge that recently was quietly launched. He says that now more than 2500 accounts have bridged now. Barrett also explains that there are still many bugs with the bridge, and that he is busy working on it.
A week after Threads launched their beta version of federation, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput said that mastodon.social knew about 2800 federated Threads accounts. While the total number of federated Threads account will have been higher, it will likely not have been that much higher either. Comparing this to the 2500 bridged account for a service that is still in active testing and development, indicates that there is significant interest in connections between the fediverse and Bluesky. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also bridged her account this week.
The bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse also allows Nostr to connect to Bluesky, with a case here where a post is made on Bluesky, replied to from Nostr, and then replied to again from Mastodon.
Bridge Finder is a new tool to help people with using the bridges between the networks, providing an easy visual interface with an explanation on how to use the bridges, as well as the requirements for opting into using them.
The News
Ghost recently announced their major push for ActivityPub support, and published their first update this week. Ghost explains the history and background of why they are working on the project, and why now specifically, saying: “In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.” Molly White’s response, saying “is this feeling… hope?” captures the sentiment well. Ghost also shared a first screenshot of their new ActivityPub powered reader app:
Ghost reader app that showcases activitypub powering the app.Recently Mastodon announced their new U.S.-based non-profit board members. People had quite some questions about it, and Mastodon has updated the blog with a detailed FAQ. One point of contention was why Biz Stone and Amir Ghavi are on the board. The FAQ explains that Ghavi has provided pro-bono legal council to Mastodon over the last year, with specific knowledge about open-source licensing and further connections to the tech industry. About Biz Stone Mastodon says that “as a Twitter co-founder [Stone] has invaluable experience scaling a social media platform to its first few million users and many connections to experts who are familiar with the problems Mastodon is facing”.
Flipboard announces that they have enabled federation for another 100 curators this week, briding the total of federated Flipboard magazines over 2500. Flipboard also announces that they have had over 100k social interactions on all the federated magazines in the last month.
Forgejo has set their first step towards federation, with the ability for federated likes. What makes this stand out is that Forgejo is a self-hosted software forge. While the fediverse is predominantly understood as a (microblogging) social network, Forgejo shows that federation can also be used for very different types of software products.
Fedihosting Foundation is a non-profit that was recently founded by the admins of the .world (lemmy.world, mastodon.world) cluster and mstn.social has expanded to include the toot.community server as well.
The Links
Trunk & Tidbits is a new series by the Mastodon engineering team. This edition shows what they’ve been working on in April 2024.
Last week I wrote about some conversations about a hard fork for Mastodon. WeDistribute wrote about the trouble forking Mastodon, going into more detail about previous attempts that place it into a historical context.
Upcoming short video platform Loops has started to roll out the first invites for a closed beta test.
ActivityPub server framework Fedify has some more updates.
Documentation to get starting on a plugin for Lemmy.
PieFed gives an overview of their work of the last few weeks.
Das vermutlich unbekannteste Fediverse Projekt. Audon, der Audiochat. Zu Unrecht wie ich finde. Probiert es selbst aus.
Auch wenn (mal wieder) for Mastodon drauf steht, funktioniert es natürlich auch mit den weiteren Projekten. Das mit dem Markennamen scheint so ein Marketingtick zu sein ;)