Fediverse News

Within a month of federation, NodeBB is growing fast.

It has five ActivityPub-enabled servers, with 20,750 total users, and 1,974 MAUs. And keep in mind, this only counts the public (not private) servers.

#NodeBB is currently the 13th most used software distribution on the #Fediverse.

https://fedidb.org/software?page=3

@[email protected]

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

Prior to this change, #FediDB counted 12,923,233 accounts. Now it counts 10,868,233 accounts.

Now let me be blunt: respecting robots.txt is a good thing. But now when we look at #Fediverse accounts, it must clearly be seen with the acknowledgement that these only count services that haven't opted out of tracking.

So when people compare user counts of #Bluesky vs. the Fediverse, remember that Bluesky has the luxury of a more complete count because they host all accounts there. In contrast, the Fediverse is actually decentralized, and a good many services simply do not want to be tracked -- and are therefore not counted.

https://fedidb.org/

@[email protected]

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, @[email protected] 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

@[email protected]

Yep, you can post from a #Pixelfed account to a #Piefed community!

This is a big bloody deal to me, and I have lots of use cases for that ability!

Basically, this means my #Pixelfed account doesn’t have to be devoted to a single topic anymore! I can put all my images on one account and sort them according to community—which can also be used by others!

Here’s the original Pixelfed post:

https://pixelfed.social/p/atomicpoet/798415830074783205

Here’s how it exists on Piefed:

https://piefed.social/post/489174

And the screenshot is how it appears in the #Lemmy app @[email protected].

@[email protected]

Andrew has been working on the piefed API for a long time and now we see its benefits! It's very close, and later we will see it being deployed to piefed.social and other instances.

Testing to see if I can post an image from #Pixelfed to #Piefed. If I can, that would be big news.

@[email protected]

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: bandwagon.fm.

This has lots of potential if you want to build federated social web software with a specific use case scenario in mind.

Here's the website:

https://emissary.dev/

Here's their Git repo:

https://github.com/EmissarySocial/emissary

And here's their kanban board:

https://trello.com/b/Ir9dDTdu/emissary-dev

@[email protected]

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

This community is the next iteration of @[email protected], which is currently a Friendica group that will be retired in a month.

@[email protected] is quite popular, and currently has 2.6K followers. However, I stopped sharing news on venera.social as I discovered that moderation there was quite difficult. Having tested #Piefed for the past month, I am thrilled to see that it has a more advanced moderation toolkit -- so this will be replacing the old community.

A big welcome to everyone who is current or past member of @[email protected].

It's true. I'm retiring @[email protected], and have created @[email protected] 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.

NeoDB now has five active servers!

All of them allow new sign-ups. The newest server, neodb.kevga.de, is aimed at #German speakers.

If you're unfamiliar with #NeoDB, it is a media database and social platform that allows users to review art and media. It is similar to #GoodReads, #RateYourMusic, and #LetterBoxd. #Bookwyrm does something similar, but its specifically made for books.

NeoDB has a public user count of 20,713 with 1,980 MAUs.

https://neodb.net/servers/

@[email protected]