Yeah, discovery remains one of the big domain area problems for the network. There's some promising work happening in the space, but it'll be a while before we see something.
Incidentally, our publication is federated, and can be followed at @news@wedistribute.org!
I don't disagree, but again, the listed platforms are launch partners who have opted to publicly support the organization on Day 1. It very well could be that they reached out to Lemmy and other projects, and didn't hear anything back.
The list of shout-outs in the main announcement pertains to projects who have partnered with the SWF, and intend to support it and collaborate.
It's also worth keeping in mind that there are more than 80 different platforms in varying states of development. Yeah, Lemmy is one of the bigger ones, and OG Threadiverse, but the list of platforms to name is absurdly long at this point. I think it makes sense for them to focus on the protocol, and immediate partners.
A new organization emerges to help tackle some of the challenges the Fediverse faces, from advocacy and policy to training and tooling.
Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, the OStatus protocol, and co-author of ActivityPub, is launching a dedicated nonprofit for the purpose of advocating for and supporting the Fediverse.
RFF is amazing, and offers so much high-quality music. Historically, it's all been done by one guy, supporting 500+ artists.
The connotation has more to do with the long tradition of Pirate Radio, not a bunch of random CIA stuff.
Dr. Heidi Li Feldman and Tim Chambers make the case for the Fediverse and other decentralized social networks being crucial for enabling activism.
In a guest article co-written by Heidi Li Feldman and Tim Chambers, the case is made in favor of political organizing in the Fediverse, rather than through corporate social media.
Both authors bring up case studies in their experience in grassroots fundraising and advocacy for the Harris-Walz presidential campaign through Mastodon and Bluesky.
The difference here is that you literally sign in with your existing Fediverse identity.
Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.
BandWagon is a new music experience for Fediverse musicians, and offers much of what they're looking for from Bandcamp.
For Fediverse musicians looking for a new Bandcamp alternative, Bandwagon feels extremely promising. It's built on top of the Emissary platform, and offers a robust amount of features for playing, promoting, and discovering music.
A new startup in Fediverse space offers a unique way for people to support their favorite creatives and builders on the network.
sub.club is an emergent new platform for paid subscriptions in the #Fediverse. It's simple, smooth, and easy to use.
How do you create an icon for a network that no one individually controls? Here's a showcase of many different attempts for the Fediverse.
In the development and building of a shared, open, collaborative network, efforts have come and gone over the years for the Fediverse. We dig into the history, various attempts, and some of the ideas people have had.
Yeah, I'm aware. I think the Nostr space in particular is doing a really great job, and has some good ideas on how to make it work. Why this development is significant, though, is that it's happening in ActivityPub space. It's not as robust, and doesn't have all the answers. But, the existence of such a project means that people within the space are already thinking about how to make this concept viable for the Fediverse.
Flohmarkt is still a really young platform, but it shows promise as a way for people to create listings, and reach out to one another.
As the Fediverse continues to grow, people are looking to build new experiences that change what's possible on the network today.
Flohmarkt is a nascent project intended for selling personal items, and may be the first attempt of its kind here.
Good question. For now, we have a basic process for submitting icons, which requires adding details about the project repo, information on the icon, and Copyright attribution for whoever created / owns the brand.
We recently incorporated a JS library that allows us to generate the font from the SVG files themselves, which also builds the preview pages that can be viewed at icons.wedistribute.org. With a bit of extra automation on Codeberg, we could basically update the preview page and generated set every time a new icon gets merged in to the main branch.
Our goal is to get to a point where new releases automatically get created, and an archive of the assets gets attached as well. That way, once a milestone gets completed, a new release will get put out with minimal amounts of work.
A beloved social news reading platform has been carefully inching towards full connectivity with the Fediverse. This update is the closest yet.
Flipboard continues its rollout of federation capabilities, this time implementing a “soft-follow” system for users to try out federated subscription for the very first time.
Long-form publishing has been a mainstay of the Web since the very beginning. As the network adopts it, we have to think about UX.
Within the last few years, publishing within the Fediverse has started to take off. This week’s opinion piece focuses on some of the current hurdles this network has, when it comes to user experience, and proposes ideas and a vision of what’s possible.
Interesting insights!
The original reason we started this was actually for our own development. Our site includes project icons and colors in dedicated tags, which link to dedicated topic hubs. As we started working on this, we realized that there wasn't a really good resource, and that we would have to build something from scratch.
Those symbols that you see are typically Unicode. Icon fonts are generally a CSS hack, in that a collection of SVGs have been converted into a font. The Unicode strings can be thought of as "letters" for that font. You're absolutely right that there are accessibility limitations, but the tradeoff is that people get an easy way to use their favorite project icons to represent where they are on the Web.
At the very least, you won't have any uBO problems with our site, as the font is incorporated directly into the theme we're using. We'll likely explore making a WordPress plugin next, so people can add these to their profiles and menus and other places.
Honestly, this is the first I'm hearing about it. Maybe we'll try to submit project SVGs.
That's not really enshittification, is it?
I was under the impression that Cory Doctorow's definition was largely based on how social media platforms entice people with "free" offerings, then gradually tighten the screws over time to make service worse. This usually happens when a platform becomes the dominant player.
Over the past year, we've been looking at how to solve a really specific niche problem. We've been building dedicated news hubs on our site for various platforms, and thought it would be nice to store icons for all sorts of different platforms, apps, and protocols. That way, when you look at any giv...
As we've been building out our site, we've wanted to showcase the icons of various projects and protocols. However, there's been a real lack of any kind of icon font for that purpose...Mastodon is pretty much the only Fediverse project to be featured in FontAwesome, and the ForkAwesome project has been dormant for a long time.
So, we've been building our own.
A grassroots fundraising campaign for the 2024 election is trending towards half a million dollars raised by Fediverse members.
The Mastodon For Harris campaign has raised close to $500,000 within two weeks of being live. It is probably the largest attempt for political organizing on the Fediverse, and may provide a playbook for other efforts going forward.
Not yet, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to add in support for that. I think one of the core ideas here are that you could take NeoDB and use it as a foundation for any review system you want to integrate. Hook up to a service on the search side, support data import on the backend, suddenly you have a way to not only create the reviews, but populate the objects being reviewed with the necessary metadata.
NeoDB is a review system with some remarkable tricks up its sleeve, and may provide a way forward for decentralized content discovery.
Today, we sat down and reviewed NeoDB, a review system that lets you track books, movies, music, tv shows, games, podcasts, and more. There's some really incredible ideas beneath the surface.
I agree with you in spirit, but some of this stuff needs to be spelled out for people interested in the space. Not every person that builds for ActivityPub is overly aware of technical and cultural expectations. A lot of that knowledge exists in someone's head somewhere, and the Fediverse does a pretty poor job of making assumptions about those people.
Case in point: one of the stories linked in the piece discusses a guy that implemented ActivityPub on his own, got it to work, but didn't know enough about the space. People thought it was a crawler, turns out it was a blogging platform, but the drama ignited to the point that someone remote-loaded CSAM on the dude's server using Webfinger. Dude was in Germany, and could have gone to prison simply for having it.
We can't hold two contradictory positions, where we invite people to build for this space, and then gaslight them over not knowing things that nobody told them about. More than ever, we need quality resources to help devs figure this stuff out early on. This article is one small step in service to that.
Google Fonts
Yeah, I need to work on that. It's been on the back burner, because writing and publishing has kind of been a main focus for me in recent months. But, this hasn't been the highest priority, mostly because modifying WordPress and making it behave correctly can be a massive pain in the dick.
I'll get around to it when I'm able.
Some people think that privacy, openness, and user consent are all at odds with one another. Here's a guide on how to navigate all three as a developer.
Sometimes, developing a new app, platform, or concept for the Fediverse can seem like a minefield. Here's some rules of thumb on how to maintain goodwill with the community, and ideas of how to do it.
Honestly, self-hosting is kind of the way to go, so long as you stay on top of your backups and storage. There are a lot of Object Storage providers out there that offer reliable storage for cheap, it's a good investment if you plan on uploading somewhat frequently.
It's actually not too bad to run, it's just that my community instance has grown a lot, and is close to four years old at this point. Issues crop up, I mostly wrote this guide to share some insights on how I deal with things.
Yeah, I kind of screwed up. In hindsight, I should have just made the question accept a text answer, rather than a multiple-choice one.
The ActivityPods team released a new example app that's easy to get up and running, to help developers hit the ground running.
In an effort to better help prospective Fediverse developers understand Solid, the ActivityPods team has released an example app as a reference point for understanding how everything works under the hood.
I wrote a counter-point to this a while back: https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/
I'm not saying "don't do it", but realize that the amount of commitment required to make a hard fork even moderately successful is vast.
It's telling that the biggest project in the space is barely able to pay more than a handful of people to work on it, and it still develops at a snail's pace. Notably, those are the people who deeply understand the system and its internals. While it's not impossible, you have to be realistic about how much further a group can get when they don't have the insight or technical chops required to take development further.
Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.
A social network founded by a former OpenAI employee was caught importing public posts from Mastodon...and ran AI analysis to add tags to them.
Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
The dedicated Trust and Safety organization launched their community platform for moderation support last week. Here's what it does.
IFTAS, the Trust and Safety organization for the #Fediverse, launched a new community portal full of guides, resources, discussion groups, and tools for community moderators and instance admins. We take a look at what it does.
It's time to listen and vote in this year's edition of the Fediverse's favorite annual music contest, FediVision!
FediVision is an annual music competition in the spirit of Eurovision. This year probably had the biggest turnout ever: 72 entries from a variety of artists and musicians, and you can listen to all of them!
With Mastodon founding a US-based 501c3, the question has come up: who are the board members? What do they do? And why were they chosen?
We dug into Mastodon's new US-based non-profit entity, and checked out who their board members are, and what they've accomplished in the past.
Bridgy Fed's integration between Bluesky and the Fediverse is now in public beta, and you can try it for yourself!
Bridgy Fed's Bluesky integration is now in beta, and makes it possible to connect your account from the Fediverse to Bluesky, and vice versa.
There's still some quirks, and every bridged account has to opt in to it, but it's a promising moment for people that want to communicate across networks.
In recent weeks, people unhappy with Mastodon project talked about forking the project in a different direction. It's harder than it looks.
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
An increasing amount of Fediverse platforms support Live Streaming. We wrote a short guide to help you get started!
The Fediverse has, not one, but two different streaming platforms readily available to people. They both work a bit differently...but, both of them work great with OBS Studio. We dive in to how to set each up.
Sean Tilley @lemmy.world I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.