Fediverse Report – #112
This week is a bit of a shorter Report, it’s a relatively quieter news week and some other work is taking up most of my attention this week. Still, there is a PeerTube roadmap for 2025, some more updates on how FediForum is moving forward and more.
The News
Framasoft has published their PeerTube roadmap for 2025. Last year, PeerTube’s big focus was on the consumer, with the launch of the PeerTube apps. This year, PeerTube’s improvement is on instance administrators. The organisation will work on building a set-wizard, making it easier for new instance admins to get started and configure the platform. Framasoft will also work on further customisation for instances, allowing admins to further tune how the instance looks for the end-users. There is also a lot of work being done on video channels, with the new features being the ability to transfer ownership of a channel, as well as having channels that are owned by multiple accounts. Framasoft also mentions they are working on shared lists of blocked accounts and instances, where admins can share information with other admins on which instances to block. And now that PeerTube is available on Android and iOS, other new platforms that PeerTube will come to is tablets and Android TVs.
The planned FediForum for early April was cancelled at the last minute. A group of attendees held the Townhall event that was held in its place to discuss how to move forward, and listen to people’s perspectives. The notes of the FediForum Townhall have now been published. Last week, the FediForum account posted: “Planned next steps: another townhall likely next week, and a rescheduled & adapted FediForum in May.” The organisers posted a survey for attendees on how to move forward as well. Jon Pincus has an extensive article, “On FediForum (and not just FediForum)” that places the entire situation of why FediForum was cancelled, in its larger context.
PieFed now allows people to limit who can DM them. By default only people on the same instance can receive DMs from each other. The Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin network has seen a rise on spam DMs which send gore images, and this is a helpful way of dealing with this harassment.
IFTAS wrote about how they are continuing their mission. The organisation recently had to wind down most of their high-profile projects due to a lack of funding. This is not the end of the entire organisation however, as IFTAS will continue with their Moderator Needs Assessment, the CARIAD domain observatory, which provides insight in the most commonly blocked domains and more, as well as the IFTAS Connect community for fediverse moderators.
A master’s thesis on the fediverse, which looks at the user activity and governance structures, with the main finding: “The findings reveal that instance size and active engagement—such as frequent posting and interacting with others—are the strongest predictors of user activity, while technical infrastructure plays a more supportive role rather than a determining one. Governance structures, such as moderation practices and community guidelines, show a weaker but positive correlation with user activity.”
Sean Tilley from WeDistribute writes how his work on ‘Integrating a News Publication Into the Fediverse’. Tilley has over a decade of experimentation on building journalistic outlets on fediverse platforms, and in this article he reflects on all the different case studies he has done over the years, and where WeDistribute is headed next.
Building a blog website on Lemmy. This personal website uses Lemmy as a backend for a personal blogging site, where the site is effectively a Lemmy client that looks like a blogging site.
The Links
- Pixelfed now has custom filters.
- Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault had an interview on the Fireside Fedi show.
- How to Migrate a Mastodon Account to GoToSocial – Fedihost tutorials
- Ditch the DIY Drama: Why Use Fedify Instead of Building ActivityPub from Scratch? – Hong Minhee
- 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: