Fediverse News

This community is the next iteration of @fediversenews@venera.social, which is currently a Friendica group that will be retired in a month.

In case you don't know, this is about Forte. (Scroll down for the official release note.)It's Mike Macgirvin's newest creation in a family tree of Fediverse server software that has been growing for almost 15 years. Everything started in 2010 with Mistpark, now Friendica.In 2012, Mike introduced nomadic identity to the Fediverse by forking Friendica into what would soon be known as the Red Matrix. In 2015, the Red Matrix evolved into Hubzilla, a highly powerful, feature-rich "federated social CMS".The last step before Forte came in October, 2021, after a whole number of forks: the streams repository with a Fediverse server application that's intentionally nameless, intentionally brandless, intentionally released into the public domain, intentionally mostly without nodeinfo code and thus intentionally incapable of sending statistics. "(streams)", always in parentheses, unofficially refers to this software.Forte was created almost seven months ago, in August, 2024, with the intention to slim (streams) down further, especially the maze of identities it uses for everything.If you need something as a comparison: Forte is another Facebook alternative (not "clone" as in "the same but federated", but "alternative" as in "better") with a side of full-blown long-form blogging like on WordPress, a built-in WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV cloud storage like the Google Cloud and server-independent identity that surpasses what Bluesky has promised and never delivered.Up until Forte, everything that Mike has created was based on a protocol designed by Mike himself. Friendica was built against the DFRN protocol. Everything from the Red Matrix to (streams) was built against a protocol originally named Zot, now named Nomad.Forte is the first member in the family that is based on ActivityPub. While it isn't the first Fediverse server application that supports nomadic identity via ActivityPub ((streams) was), it is the first Fediverse server application that entirely relies on ActivityPub for nomadic identity.Be aware, though:I'm not sure how stable Forte is right now.Forte has a substantial learning curve. Not as steep as Hubzilla's, but steeper than Friendica's and quite a lot steeper than Mastodon's.The only mobile apps that you can use Forte with are standard Web browsers. Or you can install Forte as a progressive Web app that you can launch with its own icon, but that still gives you the Web interface. There are no dedicated mobile apps for Forte, and Forte does not and most likely never will implement the Mastodon client API.

PieFed just added a multi-reddit feature, which we're calling "Feeds". It combines multiple Communities (actors of type "Group" in ActivityPub) into one.

The Verge just interviewed Evan Prodromou. That is, @evan@cosocial.ca, Research Director at @swf@socialwebfoundation.org, and co-author of #ActivityPub. And he shares some big news:

Two new features are coming to #Fedify! Both have to do with controls over domain names:

this is interestingso a little while ago a big nodebb forum at community.sketchucation.com upgraded to latest nodebb and suddenly became the second largest server in the fediverse by usercount (just behind mastodon.social)i see their users are federating, but i don't think any of their posts are (yet)?except for exactly ONE (1) post (i think because of being posted in "uncategorised")this one: https://community.sketchucation.com/post/1613037@fediversenews

FediDB respecting robots.txt has resulted in appr. 2M Fediverse accounts no longer being counted.

I wanted to see the current status of group actor support in #Mastodon.This feature has been requested all the way back in 2016. It’s a feature request that is so old, it’s the 139th ticket. After it was made, @gargron stated shortly after:I made a decision not to implement groups. They offer little benefit over a cost of added complexity, and the bangtag syntax personally irks me too.A year later, he re-opened the feature request and said:Reopening, but not high priority.No further update since then. Nearly a decade after this feature had been requested, group support has not been added and it’s still not a high priority. Now the intent of this post isn’t to wag my finger at Mastodon and say, “How dare they!” It’s clear that Mastodon is in a transitional state right now, and their focus is on other things – like quote posts and search. But it is to say that the development of this feature is so completely out of Mastodon’s control that it now represents an opportunity loss for the platform. Because the truth is – whether or not Mastodon supports group actors – many Mastodon users are using it anyway even though this causes quite a few UI/UX problems along the way. Namely, the common Mastodon user cannot differentiate between a single user account and a group actor. So now we have two groups of Mastodon users: those who want to make use of services like #Lemmy, #Piefed, #NodeBB, and those who are completely unaware of those services and ask, “Why the hell is Mastodon acting like this when I try to interact with that account?”More to the point, group actors should be embraced because not only is this a valuable feature, but they’re also critical for community safety. No one can moderate a hashtag, but they can certainly moderate a Lemmy community.Like I said, though, development of Mastodon is ongoing – whether Mastodon participates or not. And that specific element of the #Fediverse continues to grow, despite the fact that the most used Fediverse service (sans Threads) regards it as “low priority”. As long as Reddit and Facebook Groups users seek out an open, federated alternative, there will be demand for group actors.Why am I saying all this? Because this is my plea for better interoperability. It is certainly within Mastodon’s right to be picky about what features they implement. However, the Fediverse would be plainly better if Mastodon finally supported this important ActivityPub standard.https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/139@fediversenews

Just discovered Emissary. It’s a social web toolkit that’s “designed for end users, app creators, and hosting admins”. It’s a highly customizable and scalable ActivityPub-enabled server software with few dependencies.Only two known servers currently use #Emissary, but one of them is highly prominent: https://emissary.dev/Here’s their Git repo:https://github.com/EmissarySocial/emissaryAnd here’s their kanban board:https://trello.com/b/Ir9dDTdu/emissary-dev@fediversenews

A Pixelfed non-profit is coming soon!@dansup, the creator of #Pixelfed, has announced progress with the formation of the Pixelfed Foundation. He’s already set up a website for it. https://pixelfed.foundation/@fediversenews

It’s true. I’m retiring @fediversenews, and have created @fediversenews as its successor.I used to post constantly to that #Friendica group. However, I am incredibly pleased with the moderation toolkit of #Piefed, so it only makes sense to use that software instead.For those who don’t know, Piefed is a #Reddit-like platform – similar to #Lemmy and #Mbin – but I feel it has amongst the best community management tools of the federated Reddit-like platforms. So I am thrilled to be migrating an old community over to Piefed.Oh yeah, and I’m looking for moderators. So if this interests you, let me know.RE: https://piefed.social/post/488665

NeoDB now has five active servers!All of them allow new sign-ups. The newest server, https://neodb.net/servers/@fediversenews