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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 70

An interesting news week, that fits Newsmast’s description of the fediverse as a hub for the social web: the trend for the fediverse is clearly in the direction of how other products and platforms can be connected together in order to form a larger network.

Digiday writes “why publishers are preparing to federate their sites“, and in the article they break the news that both The Verge and 404 Media “are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.” The Verge has been interested in the fediverse for a while now, and 404 Media are also active users. Both sites are very aware of the risks that come from depending on Big Tech platforms for reaching their audience, and are looking to secure that connection without an intermediary. The Verge has been working on switching to using WordPress, but it is not clear if they will be using the current ActivityPub plugin or are developing their own solution. The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel said in response to Ghost’s announcement earlier this month that The Verge is also interested in having paid newsletters that connect to the fediverse. The interest of 404 Media to connect to the fediverse is directly linked to Ghost as well, as their site runs on Ghost.

Newsmast has posted an update on how the fediverse can be “a hub for the social web”, and how Newsmast can play a role in that. Newsmast is focused on bridging, and how connections between differnet platforms, products and protocols can all be connected to form a larger social web, in which the fediverse can function as a central hub. As a first step, the communities on Newsmast now start featuring posts by people on Bluesky and Threads as well.

Openvibe is a social media client that supports both Nostr and Mastodon. The client was originally for Nostr, but now fully supports Mastodon, and is working on adding support for Bluesky next. What stands out about the way Openvibe supports multiple networks is that Openvibe tries to integrate multiple platforms into a single experience. This means that you can have a single timeline on your homescreen that combines both posts from Nostr and Mastodon. Posting also allows you to easily post to both networks at the same time. There have been clients that allow you to connect multiple accounts before, but Openvibe’s vision of integrating different networks into a single feed represents a new steps towards how the different decentralised social networks relate to each other.

Another update by Bridgy Fed on improvements towards the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. Last week the news got picked up that the bridge was used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messages that originated from Nostr, and Bridgy Fed is now working on implementing spam filters.

Bart Decrem, co-founder of Mastodon app Mammoth, offers a 10k USD seed funding for anyone to build a DeviantArt alternative on top of ActivityPub. This comes after a recent article by Slate about “The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery”, explaining how bots with AI generated content have overrun the revenue-sharing programs of the platform. Decrem focuses on the community aspect of DeviantArt, saying that “the critical thing here is to truly understand what DA is/was all about, what this community needs”.

• FediVision 2024 is live, with musicians all over the fediverse sending in over 70 tracks in a song contest.
• Owncast creator Gabe Kangas wrote a blog post marking four years of fediverse streaming platform Owncast.
• Vivaldi hosted a community talk “Why does being on the Fediverse matter to us?”. Notably they used fediverse audio platform Audon.space for the talk, which integrates with ActivityPub.
• The open Podcasting index at podcastindex.org now allows you to follow podcasts directly on ActivityPub with the PodcastAP bridge.
• Email platform Buttondown recently announced that they’ll work on adding ActivityPub support, and they’ve now updated their roadmap to schedule this work for Q3.
• Shihab Mehboob is building a new Mastodon app called Friendzone. Mehboob also build a Mastodon app a few years ago, which he sold to Mammoth.
• WeDistributes about their future plans and how they handle the distribution of news on the fediverse.
• Two more tables will fix me, with the weekly update of Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub.
• “Call to Action: Fediverse Media Server”.
• Micro.blog now allows for audio voices to be added to posts.
• A brief video explainer on how the fediverse works.
• A new Mastodon command line client.
• Lemmy’s biweekly development update.
• The Weekly overview of all software updates in the fediverse.
• A blog article by Raphael Lullis, ‘A Plan for Social Media – Rethinking Federation’.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-70/