Fediverse Report – #119
A quiet news week this week, as all the new announcements seem to be waiting for FediForum. FediForum will be this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On Thursday I’ll hold a session on What’s new in the Open Social Web, so come check that out!
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 NewsPeerTube announced that they reached their first milestone in the funding of the PeerTube app, with over 15k EUR raised of the targeted 75k. This milestone will add the ability to play videos on the app in the background, add notifications for new uploads, and the ability to cast a PeerTube video to a TV using Chromecast. Framasoft also held an AMA on Lemmy this week, as part of their fundraiser. Some of the answers of the AMA that stood out to me:
- PeerTube is mainly framed as a YouTube competitor. But here, Framasoft describes PeerTube more as a Vimeo competitor, placing it in the market for video hosting. PeerTube is indeed more suitable as a product for pure video hosting than for the social-networking side that YouTube also has. As Framasoft says, PeerTube is not on the same level as YouTube when it comes to providing a distribution channel with social features, and it is also missing the monetisation options that creators are looking for. Monetisation integrations with platforms like Patreon are a potential avenue, but Framasoft says that this would be a long way off.
- Framasoft is an explicitly French organisation, with most of their communications in French, their funding largely depending on French donors, and French employees. Framasoft says they are okay with this meaning that the audience for Framasoft products is thus more focused on the French-speaking audience, and often less accessible to the rest of the world. They say that they would rather prefer if there were other organisations who do the same as Framasoft.
Framasoft employee Booteille also did an interview on the Fireside Fedi show this week.
The Social Web Foundation has published a new software library that makes it easier to embed or display ActivityPub content on a website. The software, ap-components, is a set of Web Components for ActivityPub.
Fediverse forum platform PieFed has shared their development update for May, with a large number of new features: PieFed posts now can have flair (that federates), you can schedule posts, nofication and UX improvements, support for passkeys, better moderation of images and more. Lemmy also shared their monthly update, and they are focused on getting the software ready for a 1.0 release.
The Links- The DAIR Institute did a livestream about the future of the Black web experience, with Ro from The Bad Space and Rudy Fraser from Blacksky.
- Ghost’s weekly update on their work on adding ActivityPub, and mentions are now working correctly.
- Splinter is a web app to split a long post into a Mastodon thread.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- FediAlgo has had some behind the scenes updates, which improve the speed significantly. A few weeks I wrote about how taking control of your timeline on the fediverse usually means giving users control of *how* they can see their content, and FediAlgo remains one of the best examples of that.
- Andy Piper, head of Comms at Mastodon, did a podcast interview about how Mastodon can break social media siloes.
- Fediverse indie radio channels.
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: