One last push:
The peertube app campaign is just €7000 away from it's €55,000 target, and 2 days to go. Surely there are #fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...

Go!

fediscience.org/@Ruth_Mottram/…
Ruth_Mottram - Apropos @peertube the french developer collective @Framasoft are currently trying to raise the (for #bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
support.joinpeertube.org/en/

Ruth Mottram

2025-06-07 10:45:20

Apropos @peertube the french developer collective @Framasoft are currently trying to raise the (for #bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
support.joinpeertube.org/en/

Support PeerTube

Let's popularize videos shared by the people, for the people!

^{support.joinpeertube.org}

Fediverse Report – #120

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!

FediForum and related announcements

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.

Shutdown of Lemm.ee and opportunity for PieFed

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.

Platform updates

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.

The Links

• I Posted to Mastodon 1 Mile Away from an Internet Connection – Tom Casavant
• Backfilling Conversations: Two Major Approaches – Julian Lam
• The Power of a Niche – FediHost
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

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

fediversereport.com/fediverse-…

Mastodon Engineering

2025-06-04 12:23:57

The first beta release of Mastodon 4.4.0 is ready for testing!

Many user-facing improvements: featured content, updates for lists, follower management, new emoji, and refreshed audio and media players.

For server owners: new legal features, moderation tweaks, announcements updates, upgraded software stack, and some experimental feature options.

Please test it out, and provide feedback 💬

github.com/mastodon/mastodon/r…

Release v4.4.0-beta.1 · mastodon/mastodon

WarningThis is a pre-release! This has not been as widely tested as regular releases, although it is still tested on mastodon.social and some other servers. If you update to this release, you will ...

^GitHub

elenarossini.com/2025/06/my-fe…

Dear readers and Fedi friends,

Thank you so much for your super enthusiastic feedback to my Fediverse promo video. I’m really touched.

My Fediverse posts about the video have been shared over 1500 times yesterday and I’ve been receiving hundreds of comments.

I thought that it may be useful to address a few points in a single post, so that I don’t have to repeat the same things over and over. Also: on Wednesday afternoons pre-schools are closed so I will be offline for the rest of the day.

Questions I will cover in this post:

• “Why can’t I share the video via PeerTube?”
• “Will there be foreign language versions of the voice-over narration?”
• “Can I share this video on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok?”
• “I uploaded the video to LinkedIn and wanted to tag you but couldn’t find you.”
• “What is the license for the video?”

1) “Why can’t I share the video via PeerTube?”

The video is currently UNLISTED on my PeerTube on purpose: I don’t have a solid caching solution in place for that VPS (I’m self-hosting PeerTube) and I want to avoid the Mastodon Hug of Death – aka hundreds of Mastodon servers trying to fetch the cover image of my video and thus taking my VPS offline. I already experienced it twice and I didn’t want to take any risks with this video.

So please, even if you find its PeerTube URL, stick to sharing the URL from the blog post about it: news.elenarossini.com/fedivers…

If you want to EMBED the video on a blog post, I’d happily share the code with you, so just DM me and I’ll send it over.

2) “Will there be foreign language versions of the voice-over narration?”

YES! I plan to record French and Italian VOs next week (I speak those languages too) and I have the perfect person for the German version, who agreed to do it.

This may take a little bit of time. Please remember this is all volunteer / unpaid work. These versions will come ASAP.

3) “Can I share this video on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok?”

YES please! Feel free to share it widely in order to advocate for the Fediverse.

My amazing interns Sam and Riyen are currently producing short cuts of the video made to be shared on those Big Tech platforms. We’ll make them available soon for download.

4) “I uploaded the video to LinkedIn and wanted to tag you but couldn’t find you.”

Yep. I deleted ALL my Big Tech social accounts a while ago, so that’s normal. But thank you for the kind gesture.

5) “What is the license for the video?”

CC Attribution – Non Commercial – Share Alike: creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Thank you again for your wonderful support!!!

Elena

#advocacy #fediverse #filmmaking