Last Week in Fediverse – ep 92
Simple bots, updates to Loops, and Flipboard takes over some automated RSS accounts.
The News
The upcoming shutdown of the botsin.space server has lead to some renewed experimentation and development work around bots on the fediverse. Terence Eden has built a bot to be as simple as possible, needing only 2 files to run. This bot can be bridged to Bluesky as well.
Some more updates on Loops, with some crucial missing features now being added: tapping the Home button brings you to the top of the feed, a pull to refresh, and tabs for notification, search and explore. Loops is also taking a decidedly different approach from other fediverse platforms; while many fediverse platforms pride themselves on not having an algorithmic feed, developer Daniel Supernault is working on placing For You Page is becoming front-and-center for Loops. In turn this makes it difficult for new Loops servers to set up and compete, and Supernault is actively considering having the flagship loops.video server function as the centralised service for the For You algorithm.
Flipboard is taking over the accounts on the press.coop server. Press.coop was a fediverse server that mirrors the RSS feeds of news organisations, and republished them on an unofficial press.coop account. In the press release, press.coop owner Dick Hardt says that he noticed that now that Flipboard is part of the fediverse, these news organisations already have a more official presence on the fediverse via Flipboard. ActivityPub allows for an easy transfer here, if you followed a press.coop account you are now automatically following the corresponding Flipboard account instead.
The fediverse has tied up user names quite strictly to fediverse servers: your username handle contains the server name itself, following the convention of @username@serverdomain.tld. This means your account is tied up to the server and server domain, which does occasionally lead to issues with servers disappearing because the domain is not available anymore. This convention is not in fact mandated by ActivityPub, and the ‘WebFinger Split-Domain Canary‘ is a showcase that it is possible to have an account where the domain in the username is different from the server that the account is on. For developers interested in experimenting what is further possible in the fediverse this might be an interesting direction to look at.
Heise.de has consistently been sharing statistics on the sources of traffic to their news site, and for the last two weeks Mastodon has overtaken X in traffic, with Bluesky and Threads far behind.
The Links
- The rebellion will be federated – Elena Rossini.
- Bridges & The Last Network Effect – Anuj Ahooja.
- Fighting Enshittification with ActivityPub – A presentation by Manyfold developer James at the London Ruby User Group.
- Castopod has updated their new user guide.
- Fediverse Tumblr clone Wafrn is working on a Bluesky integration.
- Letterbook is a fediverse platform that is currently in development, and it has published an overview the current state of development.
- Ghost’s weekly update is about how they are working on performance improvements with queues.
- Owncast Newsletter November 2024.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!