Week in Fediverse 2025-05-16

Servers

- Owncast v0.2.3
- snac v2.77
- ActivityPub for WordPress v5.9.0
- NeoDB v0.11.6.9
- Vernissage Server v1.14.0
- NodeBB v4.4.0
- Lemmy Development Update April 2025
- How PieFed federates “flair” on posts and comments
- Blocking domains (Ghost)

Clients

- Moshidon v109
- aria v1.1.0
- Blorp v1.5.0
- Flohra: An open source client for Flohmarkt

Tools and Plugins

- PeerTube livechat plugin v12.0.4
- feed2fedi v3.2.1
- fedidb-nuxt: The next generation frontend for fedidb.org

For developers

- FediAlgo v0.40.0

Protocol

- FEP-82f6: Actor statuses
- FEP-0151: NodeInfo in Fediverse Software (2025 edition)
- FEP-521a: Representing actor's public keys (Final comments)

Articles

- ActivityPub Quiz
- Owncast Newsletter May 2025
- My Dream Fediverse Platform
- Fediverse Report – #116

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#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/0196b6aa-923e-5f15-d203-8331fb2924de

Ω🪬Ω
FediAlgo, the customizable timeline algorithm / filtering system for your Mastodon feed, is now deployed on Github Pages and can be used from your web browser.

* Link: https://michelcrypt4d4mus.github.io/fedialgo_demo_app_foryoufeed/
* Code: https://github.com/michelcrypt4d4mus/fedialgo_demo_app_foryoufeed
* Video of FediAlgo in action: https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114395249311910522

#activitypub #algorithm #algorithmicFeed #algorithmicTimeline #Fedi #FediTips #FediTools #Fediverse #Feed #FOSS #MastoAdmin #Mastodon #mastohelp #nodejs #nod #opensource #SocialWeb #timeline #TL #webdev

@liaizon
The Fediverse is a range of different open source softwares, all based on the #activitypub and federated by this protocol which has been designed to allow a federation of independent and totally autonomous instances with full control by their administrators. That's called "decentralisation".

@bsky.app @pfrazee.com @mike @dot_social

Getting started with ActivityPub on WordPress just got a lot easier. A new guided onboarding experience is now part of the plugin, designed to help you configure key settings and understand how your site connects to the Fediverse—from the moment you activate it.

Whether you’re new to ActivityPub or just setting things up again, the onboarding flow helps you make informed choices around visibility, content formatting, and profile setup. It’s built to give you confidence that your content is reaching the right audiences in the right way.

Tailored for You

The plugin now adapts its behavior based on the caching plugins you have installed. You’ll also find clearer guidance if you’re using Surge, and an option to fine-tune how your content is tailored for browsers versus Fediverse services.

We’ve moved profile-related settings out of the welcome page and into new dashboard widgets, so they’re easier to find and update. And to make the learning curve smoother, the Help tab now includes a section explaining how ActivityPub works on the users page.

Media, Previews, and Performance

Beyond onboarding, this release adds support for audio and video attachments in ActivityPub embeds and previews. Posts shared to the Fediverse can now include up to four images, and you can choose how many to include on a per-post basis. Editor previews have also been improved—they now show media even if the post hasn’t been published yet.

For performance, author profiles now return a smaller set of extra fields (up to 20) to avoid bloated responses, and invalid items in the Outbox are skipped gracefully instead of causing errors.

Designed to Grow With You

This update also brings better mobile support for settings pages, improved documentation, and more robust error handling for things like missing or misformatted Outbox requests. And for developers, several filters and hooks have been updated or deprecated to make future work smoother and more predictable.

If you’ve been curious about joining the Fediverse or connecting your blog in a more structured way, now’s a great time to try it. Just activate the plugin and let the onboarding guide you through the rest.

Tried the new onboarding? Let us know how it worked for you and what you’d like to see improved.

Full Changelog

Added

• ActivityPub embeds now support audios, videos, and up to 4 images.
• Added a check to make sure we only attempt to embed activity objects, when processing fallback embeds.
• Add setting to enable or disable how content is tailored for browsers and Fediverse services.
• Adjusted the plugin’s default behavior based on the caching plugins installed.
• A guided onboarding flow after plugin activation to help users make key setup decisions and understand Fediverse concepts.
• Author profiles will cap the amount of extra fields they return to 20, to avoid response size errors in clients.
• Fediverse Preview in the Editor now also supports video and audio attachments.
• Guidance for configuring Surge to support ActivityPub caching.
• Help tab section explaining ActivityPub capabilities on the users page.
• Profile sections have been moved from the Welcome page to new Dashboard widgets for easier access.
• The ActivityPub blog news feed to WordPress dashboard.
• The Outbox now skips invalid items instead of trying to process them for output and encountering an error.

Changed

• Batch processing jobs can now be scheduled with individual hooks.
• Better error handling when other servers request Outbox items in the wrong format, and 404 pages now show correctly.
• Fediverse Previews in the Block Editor now show media items, even if the post has not been published yet.
• Hide interaction buttons in emails when the Classic Editor is used.
• Improve compatibility with third-party caching plugins by sending a Vary header.
• Much more comprehensive plugin documentation in the Help tab of ActivityPub Settings.
• NodeInfo endpoint response now correctly formats localPosts values.
• Reactions block heading now uses Core’s heading block with all its customization options.
• Settings pages are now more mobile-friendly with more space and easier scrolling.
• The number of images shared to the Fediverse can now be chosen on a per-post basis.
• Updated default max attachment count to four, creating better-looking gallery grids for posts with 4 or more images.
• Use a dedicated hook for the “Dismiss Welcome Page Welcome” link.
• Use FEP-c180 schema for error responses.
• Use Audio and Video type for Attachments, instead of the very generic Document type.

Deprecated

• Deprecated rest_activitypub_outbox_query filter in favor of activitypub_rest_outbox_query. Deprecated activitypub_outbox_post action in favor of activitypub_rest_outbox_post.

Fixed

• Broken avatars in the Reactions and Follower block are now replaced with the default avatar.
• Email notifications for interactions with Brid.gy actors no longer trigger PHP Warnings.
• Improved support for users from more Fediverse platforms in email notifications.
• Improved the handling of Shares and Boosts.
• Issue preventing “Receive reblogs (boosts)” setting from being properly saved.
• Mention emails will no longer be sent for reply Activities.
• Prevent accidental follower removal by resetting errors properly.
• Properly remove retries schedules, with the invalidation of an Outbox-Item.
• The blog profile can no longer be queried when the blog actor option is disabled.

Downloads

• WordPress.org: https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/activitypub.5.9.0.zip
• GitHub: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/releases/tag/5.9.0

Who here knows about, @cwebber@social.coop

You should follow them. One of the mainstream protocols that make the Fediverse even possible, commonly used on Mastodon, CherryPick, Misskey, and Sharkey, is called, ActivityPub. They help write that protocol.

#Fediverse #Fedi #ActivityPub #Mastodon #Misskey #CherryPick #Sharkey

By the way, if you’re looking into decentralized tech where people are actually in control of their own data (as in who can use it, when and how), checkout #Solid https://solidproject.org There are a lot of interesting insights, especially for storing sensitive data. #OpenSocialWeb #ActivityPub #Fediverse

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

The fine @michael has deployed the #FediAlgo demo app to a place where you can test out the customizable algorithm + filtering system for your home timeline with nothing more than a web browser. You can find it here:

https://fedialgo.thms.uk/

Here's a video of the FediAlgo demo in action (there's a few new features since the video): https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114395249311910522

cc: @rolle @paige @LaurensHof

#FediTools #FediTips #Fediverse #Mastodon #activitypub #mastohelp #Fedi #foss #nodejs #opensource #MastoAdmin #SocialWeb #Feed #timeline #algorithmicFeed #algorithmicTimeline #TL #algorithm #node #nodejs

Week in Fediverse 2025-05-09

Servers

- Owncast v0.2.2
- Mastodon v4.3.8
- Mitra v4.2.0
- snac v2.76
- Misskey v2025.5.0
- NeoDB v0.11.6.7
- tootik v0.16.0
- kmyblue v18.1
- Vernissage Server v1.12.0
- Gush! v0.18.0
- May 2025: What’s In The Pipeline (Bandwagon.fm)
- Blocking users (Ghost)
- Trunk & Tidbits, April 2025 (Mastodon)

Clients

- Voyager v2.34.0
- Blorp v1.4.0

Tools and Plugins

- Lemmy Schedule v1.15.0
- Enable Mastodon Apps v1.4.6 (WordPress plugin)
- peertube_recomendation_algorythm: A browser extension that monitors the peertube videos your watch and stores them locally

For developers

- FediAlgo v0.30.5

Articles

- When decentralization can get too big!
- Town squares, backyards, better metaphors, and decentralised networks
- Il Fediverso a scuola: uno strumento didattico per la cittadinanza digitale
- Fediverse Report – #115

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#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/0196929b-a80a-322f-a1ba-f42864034290

I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.76 here:

https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/28373

GitHub Actions Continuous Integration checks passed!

It's up to someone else with write access to merge it.

Thanks to you and dandelions and shtrophic (and anyone else I may have missed) for the continued contributions and improvements!

(these modest diffs were prepared in part while listening to "Garlic Braid" by LMNO & D-STYLES: https://d-styles.bandcamp.com/track/garlic-braid [the 1st single from the upcoming full length album: Three Mimes & an Elephant)

#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces

If you care about the ability of the public to share important information today outside of increasing and inevitable efforts at government control, you must support #ActivityPub and the further decentralization with balanced moderation of the fedi. Obviously the big corporate platforms won't be on our side, but neither will #bluesky whose decentralization seems to only be about providing exits of last resort, not a true giving us total control. #SocialWeb
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-suspends-indian-accounts-government/747611/

Added Webmention support for links (Markdown-style or direct) written in a post.

Added new command-line options for list maintenance.

Display custom emoji in more places (contributed by dandelions).

Mastodon API: fixed infinite scroll in many clients (thanks to cheeaun for giving me the clue), added /api/v1/accounts/.../lists endpoint (contributed by dandelions).

Email notifications can now be sent via libcurl SMTP instead of spawning the /usr/sbin/sendmail program. To use this new feature, some additional server configuration is needed, see snac(8) (contributed by shtrophic).

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.

#snacAnnounces

If you're a writer/blogger/press, a friendly reminder that the 17th Year Anniversary of the #Fediverse [social] network (**not** Mastodon® social network) is fast approaching.

May 18, 2008

So, if you want to publish a new article, you can start today. There are a hundred possible angles and scopes for that article. 😉

https://fedia.io/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/2137627/The-17th-Year-Anniversary-of-the-Fediverse-network-is-upon

Anyway…

#MayIsFediverseMonth #FediverseDay #ActivityPub

Doing some fediverse research and discovered that @tkithrta is attempting to "implement #ActivityPub using 16 different web frameworks" in a project called #StrawberryFields
https://gitlab.com/acefed #fediverse #fedidev

I am not an ActivityPub expert so a lot of this was learning while planning this out.

https://codeberg.org/limeleaf/apply.coop/issues/213

#Coop #JobBoard #BuildInPublic

For the question whether Encyclia's ORCID bridge should be opt-in or opt-out (that is, whether we should bridge ORCID records without their owners' knowledge), I – @julian – will speak personally for a moment.

It is the central design question of Encyclia and one that has been on my mind since I started prototyping the platform. I have put as much thought into it as I am capable of, and I have sought feedback from multiple privacy and safety experts.

#ActivityPub #fediverse

It's encouraging to see that my little corner of the Fediverse is the home to a few of the millions of active monthly users across Mastodon.

https://fedidb.com/servers/swecyb.com

Happy to be providing this micro-instance and contributing to the long-term resilience of Mastodon, and the Fediverse as a whole.

Small acts of defiance, Vive la résistance!

#Mastodon #Instance #ActivityPub #Fediverse

Fediverse Report #115 - This week's #fediverse news:

- @peertube launches v1 of their mobile apps
- @Mastodon shares more information on their team is growing
- @swf launches places.pub, a way to put OpenStreetMap data directly on #activitypub

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-115/

We are implementing the final version of RFC9421 (HTTP Signatures) in Mastodon, and would like to test this with other ActivityPub implementations.

Do you know of any AP implementations supporting both incoming (verification) and outgoing (signing) RFC9421 signatures, and if possible with support for the double-knocking mechanism as described in https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-http-signature/ (section 3.5)?

#activitypub

@gyptazy

There's an instance where I have one account, didn't know that there was drama because I keep my nose down.
At a certain point I saw that there is drama regarding some moderator and then I saw another instance where they simply the federated my instance because the leadership don't like what that moderator has done from their perspective

I've read the perspective of the moderator

The stories differ 180°

#community #activitypub #federation #opensource #socialmedia

Is the #Fediverse really open for #freedom?

In the last weeks, I noticed more & more messages from different instances/admins about moderation, banning and de-federations. Initially, people told the Fediverse is more open, not blocking and deleting content compared to other social medias. However, I think it shifted to the opposite where a single instance admin decides for the whole user base (which might not even be aware of it).

#community #activitypub #federation #opensource #socialmedia

Week in Fediverse 2025-05-02

Servers

- Sharkey v2025.2.3
- Hollo v0.5.6
- Mitra v4.1.1
- NodeBB v4.3.0
- Manyfold v0.109.0
- Pleroma ActivityRelay v0.3.5
- Gathio v1.5.2
- Misskey v2025.4.1
- gancio v1.26.0
- Iceshrimp v2023.12.14
- NeoDB v0.11.6.2
- Gush! v0.0.17
- Vernissage Server v1.11.0
- Images, profiles, and preferences (Ghost)
- BadgeFed: Early Decentralization Experiments + OpenBadges Export! - Second April 2025 Update
- PieFed development update Apr 2025 - S3, OAuth, Federation retry queue, Stripe
- Forgejo monthly update - April 2025
- places.pub: A service that makes OpenStreetMap geographical data available as ActivityPub objects

Clients

- Pachli v2.12.0
- Voyager v2.33.0
- Tesseract v1.4.38
- Blorp v1.2.5
- Interstellar v0.9.2
- PeerTube Mobile v1.0.1
- Phanpy changelog

For developers

- Masto.js v7.0.0
- FediAlgo v0.23.0
- apsig v0.5.2
- apkit: Powerful Toolkit for ActivityPub Implementations (Python)

Protocol

- ActivityPub/Primer/Inbox
- ActivityPub/Primer/Outbox
- ActivityPub/Primer/Activity Streams 2.0

Articles

- How I made a blog using Lemmy - a write-up
- Steps Forward in Long-form Text
- Does The Fediverse Need Influencers To Survive?
- Fediverse Report – #114

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#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/01966ea0-7d42-6181-9fdd-ccfe31dab1e2

Notifications are now shown in a more compact way (i.e. all reactions are shown just above your post, instead of repeating the post ad nauseam for every reaction).

New command-line option unmute to, well, no-longer-mute an actor.

The private timeline now includes an approximate mark between new posts and "already seen" ones.

Fixed a spurious 404 error in the instance root URL for some configurations.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider contributing via LiberaPay: https://liberapay.com/grunfink/

#snacAnnounces

This release has been inspired by the song The Answers to the Questions by #Christabell and #DavidLynch.

What kind of issues or concerns might I have if I shut down one kind of AP server software and then set up a different AP server on the domain previously occupied by the now decommissioned first AP server?

(I don’t think the soon-to-be-shutdown server has a self-destruct.)

#MastoAdmin #Fediverse #Admin #SelfHosting

The only way to make sure you don’t contribute to things like this is to not participate in public internet social media services.

https://www.404media.co/someone-made-a-dataset-of-one-million-bluesky-posts-for-machine-learning-research/

Added a new user option to collapse top level threads by default.

Added a new disable_block_notifications boolean field to server.json to disable the notifications of Block activities.

Added a new strict_public_timelines boolean field to server.json to only show an account's posts and boosts (no trees) in public timelines.

Fixed repeated images in posts from some implementations (those that include an image both as an attachment and as an <img> tag inside the post content).

Added a small HTML/CSS tweak to improve post previews from some implementations (contributed by nyanide).

Notifications for EmojiReact activities now show the emoji.

New command-line action insert, to insert a post by its URL in a user's timeline.

Fixed bad processing/rendering of URLs with two or more @ symbols.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider contributing via LiberaPay: https://liberapay.com/grunfink/donate

#snacAnnounces

This release has been inspired by the song Subways Of Your Mind by #FEX.

Anyone got an idea?

Anyone got an idea?

Support for custom Emojis has been added; they are no longer hardcoded, but read from the emojis.json file at the server base directory. Also, they are no longer limited to string substitutions, but images as external URLs are also supported (see snac(8) for more information).

Fixed a bug that caused some notifications to be lost when coming from a user in the same instance.

Added an additional check for blocked instances (sometimes, posts from blocked sites that were ancestors of legit posts were 'leaking' into the timeline).

On OpenBSD, if the disable_email_notifications server flag is set to true, unveil() is not called for the execution of the /usr/sbin/sendmail binary and pledge() doesn't set the exec promise.

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink

This release has been inspired by the album Eternal Embers by #Meltt.

#snacAnnounces

Incoming posts can now be filtered out by content using regular expressions on a server level (these regexes are written in the filter_reject.txt file at the server base directory; see snac(5) and snac(8)).

Improved page position after hitting the Hide or MUTE buttons (for most cases).

Use a shorter maximum conversation thread level (also, this maximum value is now configurable at compilation level with the MAX_CONVERSATION_LEVELS define).

Fixed a bug where editing a post made the attached media or video to be lost.

The way of refreshing remote actor data has been improved.

Posting from the command-line now allows attachments.

Added defines for time to enable MacOS builds (contributed by andypiper).

https://comam.es/what-is-snac

If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/grunfink

This release has been inspired by the song The Raven by #CarolineLavelle.

#snacAnnounces

Speaking of ActivityPub, anyone have some concise and simple breakdown documentation links handy? There’s kind of an overwhelming amount or information out there.