I recently discovered that Jorge Aguilera (@jorge) gave a 1 hour introduction to #ActivityPub in Spanish called "ActivityPub: El Protocolo que Impulsa el Fediverso" at Commit Conf in Madrid and the whole thing was recorded:
https://koliseo.com/commit/2026/agenda/1?selected=JNIEz5zgefpMwrJMRpl7 #fedidev #fediverso

Alt...

a screenshot showing Jorge Aguilera talking about Webfinger

If you know anyone working on an ActivityPub project and they need any advice/feedback/help or want to spread the word, tell them to DM me! I am more than willing to help or spread awareness! #activitypub #fediverse

Somewhere else, this is a patent fight. Here it's a GitHub issue.

https://github.com/pixelfed/starter-kits/issues/1

Almost 2 years ago I started planning federated Starter Kits. @Mastodon took the idea, turned it into a FEP, and built it with my feedback rather than around it.

It shipped in @loops this year. Mastodon shipped Featured Collections months later.

Compatible. Collaborative. Consent-driven 🚀

https://blog.joinloops.org/introducing-starter-kits/

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/06/mastodon-4.6/

#StarterKits #FeaturedCollections #ActivityPub #Collaboration

Name another photo app that will happily send you to a competitor.

If Pixelfed isn't for you, there are many amazing alternatives like:

- @frequency
- @gotosocial
- @admin
- @vernissage

All of them let you share images. All of them talk to Pixelfed. Leaving isn't a punishment here, because you never lose the network.

When you put people first, you build doors instead of cages.

#powerToThePeople #activityPub

If Pixelfed isn't for you, maybe one of these are:

- @frequency
- @gotosocial
- @admin
- @vernissage

Every one of these can share images, and every one of them federates with Pixelfed. Your followers, your posts, your reach: they come with you.

ActivityPub means no one has to be trapped anywhere. That's the magic.

❤️

#powerToThePeople #activityPub

Week in Fediverse 2026-08-28

Servers

- Hollo v0.9.13
- gush! v0.0.41
- tootik v0.25.0
- Mitra v5.10.0
- Pixelfed v0.12.9
- Hollo v0.9.15
- Funkwhale v2.0.10
- PieFed v1.7.13
- tootik v0.25.1
- NeoDB v0.17.8

Clients

- Pachli v3.8.1
- Fedilab v3.43.2
- RaccoonForFriendica v1.1.0

For developers

- Fedify v2.3.6

Protocol

- FEP-49eb: Batched Inbox Delivery

Articles

- A crawler wanted to know who talks to whom on our server
- The Problems and Successes of Fediverse Comments on my blog
- The Fediverse is Throwing a Music Festival

-----

#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/01a0269e-d9e5-7a03-a62d-6ef77099e4a7

What are the most important issues and discussions about the Open Social Web we need to have this late summer and fall?

#FediForum #FediForumFriday #ActivityPub #ATProtocol #Fediverse #atproto

@hongminhee how can we get more East Asian #ActivityPub developers involved in the #W3C #SocialCG and #SocialWG?

RE: https://fairy.id/@Linux/117120415580841810

Over a week ago, I made the following quoted statement.

1 of 3

#Mastodon #Misskey #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Legal

We run social.vir.group - a Mastodon instance on the ActivityPub federated protocol.

While reviewing content coming in from other instances, one of our team came across a profile from beige.party with an unusual field set:

Field name: Anthropic sod off
Field value: ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

The profile also had #nobridge in the bio. Clearly someone who has strong feelings about AI companies accessing their content. Fair enough - but we got curious. Does any of this actually do anything?

So we tested it.

---

THE TEST

We fed the string directly to Claude. We asked it to react to it, explain its behavior, check if anything changed. The result: nothing. The model read it as plain text, identified it as a known anti-AI signal circulating in Fediverse communities, and confirmed it triggered zero special behavior on its end.

We then thought about this from a technical standpoint.

---

WHY IT DOES NOT WORK

AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and others do not train their models in real time by crawling your profile. The pipeline looks roughly like this:

- Web crawlers collect data in bulk, often months or years before training runs
- That data goes through preprocessing, deduplication, filtering at massive scale
- By the time it reaches a training job, it is a static dataset
- No live mechanism exists to honor opt-out strings embedded in content

Even if a magic trigger string existed internally at Anthropic - it would need a preprocessing filter specifically looking for that string in the right field of the right data format. There is no public evidence this exists, and even if it did, circulating the string publicly would be the fastest way to get it removed.

The string in a profile field is symbolic. It speaks to humans who read profiles. It does not speak to crawlers or training pipelines.

---

WHAT ACTUALLY HAS EFFECT

We did an honest assessment of what actually creates real technical barriers for people who do not want their content used by AI systems:

1. #nobridge - this one works. Bridge operators (services that bridge Mastodon to Bluesky and others) actively check for this tag and respect it. If cross-platform bridging is your concern, use it.

2. Robots.txt at instance level - if your instance admin has blocked known AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot) in robots.txt, that creates a real barrier. Most major crawlers respect this. Ask your admin if they have done this.

3. Followers-only posts - content not visible to unauthenticated requests cannot be collected by bulk crawlers. This is the most reliable content-level protection available to you right now.

4. Authorized Fetch mode - some instances require authentication to access any content via ActivityPub. This significantly raises the cost of bulk collection.

5. Choosing your instance deliberately - instances like infosec.exchange and chaos.social have explicit anti-AI policies and enforce them at the network level. Your instance's stance matters far more than your profile fields.

---

OUR TAKE

The frustration behind these strings is completely legitimate. Having your writing, your humor, your creative work, your personal thoughts fed into a training dataset without your knowledge or consent - that is a real grievance. The desire to resist it is understandable.

But a string in a profile field is closer to a bumper sticker than a firewall. It tells other humans something about your values. The crawlers and training pipelines are indifferent to it.

Real protection requires infrastructure-level decisions - and those are mostly in the hands of instance admins, not individual users. If this matters to you, the most effective thing you can do is pick an instance that shares your values and enforces them technically, or talk to your current admin about their crawler policies.

---

What do you think about this movement? Do you have anything like this in your own profile? Do you believe individual-level resistance to AI data collection is meaningful - or is it purely symbolic?

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #AIethics #nobridge #privacy #Mastodon #OpenSource #LLM #dataPrivacy #socialVirGroup

Alt...

Does this stop AI training

wew a lot more traffic after getting the #activitypub #relay online and doing #mastodon relay housekeeping :P

updated #activitypub #relay list my instance connects to: https://www.travnewmatic.com/2026/08/27/the-activitypub-relays-my-mastodon-instance-uses/

https://relay.travnewmatic.com #activitypub #relay is back online! writeup here: https://www.travnewmatic.com/2026/08/27/bringing-my-pleroma-relay-back-online/

There are now more than 700 users on #FediHood, and I've added new topics.

You can tailor your timeline in three ways:
- The distance from your city
- The topics you want to see
- The languages

Topics are more powerful than hashtags (in the context of the project) because:
- They avoid typos
- They work whatever the language
- One mute covers everything, unlike hashtag variants

It also fully supports the #ActivityPub Events used by #Mobilizon.

If you want to join: https://fedihood.social/

Alt...

New topics available in FediHood, with a search field: Lost & found, Food & drink, Jobs & services, Recommendations, Safety & alerts, Gardening & nature, Activism, Art, Music, Announcement. A "Displayed topics" link at the bottom lets you hide the topics you don't need when composing.

I've said it many time before but I will say it again...
What @pfefferle is doing at @WordPress with #ActivityPub is brilliant.
One day the rest of the world will catch on. #OpenSocialWeb

I can see what people on X/Twitter, Instagram and Hacker News are up to once I know someone is making the ActivityPub bridge. Then I can see that my Instagram account has been indexed and connected to the Fediverse.

I can now see what people are talking about on centralised social networks, thanks to @vincent. At the moment, the bridge only has one-way "roads" and we cannot send replied posts from the Fediverse to them. You might be interested to know that this one is better than the work of the Meta guys on ActivityPub on Threads.

#fediverse #activitypub #bridge #social #socialnetwork #socialmedia

Alt...

Showing that my Instagram account now is indexed to the fediverse.

ActivityPub shifts power from CEOs to server admins. This solves the censorship problem but creates new silos based on moderation styles. We are just swapping one set of gatekeepers for another. Decentralization is a tool, not a magic fix for social toxicity.

#activitypub #fediverse #decentralization

Alt...

activitypub The technical and social implications of decentralized social protocols

ActivityPub shifts power from CEOs to server admins. It sounds democratic, but it just replaces one gatekeeper with another. Technical fragmentation will likely kill the user experience before it ever scales. We are trading corporate control for technical chaos.

#activitypub #fediverse #decentralization

Alt...

activitypub The technical and social implications of decentralized social protocols

RE: https://wrzky.com/mutual-aid-request-august/

🚨 UPDATE 25-Aug-2026 06:25 UTC+7 🚨
still urgently need (15h with no movement):
⏳ $143/$250 for groceries, $107 still needed to cover my monthly groceries.
⏳ $0/$218 for meds. Over seven months without medication now, traded for food just to survive. This has to stop.
⏳ ‼️$0/$125 for electricity, water, and internet -- past its 16 August deadline. I'm afraid they are going to cut off my water and internet again.‼️

$450 in total still needed this month.
Please support within your capacity. Any amount helps. Boosting this post also helps. I need it shared further than my reach.
https://ko-fi.com/wrzky/goal

Thank you, thank you 🙂‍↕️💜

@mutualaid@ovo.st @mutualaid@fedigroups.social @mutualaidspace @disability @edendestroyer @QuyetPawz @ellespeaks @frugalcoffee @actuallyadhd @autistics @wrzky@wrzky.com
#mutualaid #mutualaidrequest #mutualaidspace #disability #poverty #helpfolkslive #mentalhealth #healthcare #chronicillness #neurodivergence #activism #activitypub #fedihelp #fediverse #disabilitycrowdfund #disabilitymutualaid #emergencycrowdfund

We're going to delete this poll, we heard you!

We will stay focused on #ActivityPub

❤️

Alt...

Once we fix all open bug reports, and federation, would you like to see us add support for AtProto (what Bluesky uses)? 56% of 43 people said no

"You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences."

In China, the phrase:

"You have freedom of speech, but not the right to be heard."

In the United States, both are being embraced, and we should be concerned.

Authoritarian regimes rarely start by banning thought, but rather they corrupt expression itself. They grant the theoretical right to speak, then engineer a reality where doing so is civic suicide.

Consider the first mechanism, perfected in the shadow of the gulag: "You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences." Under totalitarianism, the state manufactures the consequences. You can say anything, provided you are willing to lose your job, apartment, or liberty. The regime doesn't need to drag you away; they make the price of speaking so high you gag yourself.

Next is the digital cage perfected in China: "You have freedom of speech, but not the right to be heard." You can vent online all day, but algorithms quietly intercept your words. They throttle your reach and shadow-ban your profile, rendering your voice a tree falling in a digital forest with no ears to hear it.

The real tragedy is that these tools are no longer confined to foreign adversaries. They are being enthusiastically imported into the United States by both citizens and institutions.

In America, "freedom from consequences" has been weaponized by a hyper-partisan culture. People demand professional ruin and social excommunication for anyone stepping outside approved ideological boundaries, crowd-sourcing a secret police that imposes a devastating economic tax on wrong-think.

Simultaneously, the American public square has outsourced the "right to be heard" to algorithmic overlords. Under the banner of safety, tech platforms quietly bury non-conforming viewpoints, sterilizing the marketplace of ideas.

When a society willingly adopts both constraints, it ceases to be free. We are sleepwalking into a system where the First Amendment exists on parchment, but its soul has been traded for the illusion of ideological safety.

#FreedomOfSpeech #HumanRights #Humanity #Society #Mastodon #Misskey #Fediverse #ActivityPub

I know the Pixelfed codebase is messy, but I'm a far better Laravel dev than when I started it, and @phpstan has been keeping Loops rock solid at every level.

This week: preparing the new mobile app, fixing comment threading so you never miss a reply, and laying the foundation for the next-gen APIs that will power the new webUI and mobile app.

Tests are coming to lock in stability too. Pixelfed is getting the Loops treatment 💅 🚀

#pixelfed #loops #fediverse #activitypub

I will admit, I did get a bit carried away with @pixelfed features over the years.

Collections, DMs, Ephemeral Stories, Filters, Groups and Portfolios were all started with good intentions, but without the continued focus and stability they deserve.

Once I get caught up with bug fixes and making the core features more solid, they are up next!

No new features will be added until the platform is as rock solid as Loops is 😉

#pixelfed #loops #activitypub #fediverse

I wish there was a Fediverse platform for music #scrobbler. Something similar to last.fm but OpenSource and supporting #ActivityPub. There is libre.fm, but despite being active, I cannot find their source code and I believe they are a centralized platform.

It would be great if we can also self-host our music history and be able to share it.

There is multi-scrobbler under MIT license that can be a nice place to start:

1. https://github.com/FoxxMD/multi-scrobbler

#Fediverse #scrobbler

Does #Mastodon even use `contentMap` in posts (`Note`)? The #ActivityPub spec specifies a method for multilanguage posts in the form of `contentMap`, but does the rest of the #Fediverse even get to read it? Do posts that have `contentMap` but **not** `content` get to show at all?

Re: https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2022/12/mastodon-tip-filter-languages-to-see-only-the-ones-you-understand.html

#i18n #l10n

Going to TPAC 2026 as part of the @sovtechfund Standards cohort!

#ActivityPub #W3C #SovereignTechStandards

Alt...

Confirmation email about TPAC 2026

@kathimmel @raphaellakay @Geri @franciswashere @mutualaid@ovo.st @mutualaid@fedigroups.social @mutualaidspace @disability @edendestroyer @QuyetPawz @ellespeaks @frugalcoffee @actuallyadhd @raphaellakay @wrzky
#mutualaid #mutualaidrequest #mutualaidspace #disability #poverty #helpfolkslive #mentalhealth #healthcare #chronicillness #neurodivergence #activism #activitypub #fedihelp #fediverse #disabilitycrowdfund #disabilitymutualaid #emergencycrowdfund

Oh and I added an #ActivityPub blog 👆to my website that I think? should work with other blog services on the #fediverse

Say goodbye to Linked Data Signatures

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/08/mastodon-4.7/

We now support verifying FEP-8b32 Object Integrity Proofs using either eddsa-jcs-2022 or mldsa44-jcs-2024.

The latest version of Mastodon can verify FEP-8b32 integrity proofs, which replace outdated Linked Data Signatures.

Docs: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/#fep-8b32

#activitypub #fedidev #fep_8b32

Week in Fediverse 2026-08-21

Servers

- Funkwhale v2.0.8
- PieFed v1.7.11
- TinyAP v0.1.13
- Wafrn v2026.08.04
- Mastodon v4.7.0
- gathio v1.6.5
- NeoDB v0.17.7
- NodeBB v4.15.1
- Flox v2.7.0
- 5.0: Laying the foundation (Mastodon)

Clients

- PleromaFE v2.11.3
- chan-fe v0.3.0
- Tuba v0.11.0
- Mangane v1.24.3
- Mastodon for iOS v2026.07
- Miria v4.0.0+125
- Summit v1.84.0
- Voyager v2.48.5
- Pixelix v5.1.1

Tools and Plugins

- Pluraldawn: Decodes indicator emoji information from account avatars to provide a PluralKit-esque experience inside of various fediverse webapps

Protocol

- ActivityPub Miscellaneous Terms

Articles

- Implementing Pagination for ActivityPub Collections
- Owncast Newsletter August 2026

-----

#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/01a001c8-99bc-7663-85ed-1ef3e36035e8

Added @sutty (@distributedpress CMS), #gofed, #Habitat, #Forte (streams fork) and #Sakura (Misskey fork) icons to #FediverseIconography at https://fediverse.wake.st (repo at https://codeberg.org/FediverseIconography)
#fediverse #ActivityPub

Alt...

a screenshot of icons for Kitsune, Librecast, Newsmast, Sutty, go-fed, Habitat, Forte, and Sakura

RE: https://toot.fedilab.app/@apps/117135174541471537

#FediHood now supports #ActivityPub events, which means it is compatible with software such as #Mobilizon. You can create and receive events in the area you selected.

Joining and leaving events is not implemented yet.

fedicat boosted

Fedilab Apps » 🌐 2026-08-21
@apps@toot.fedilab.app

The source code of #FediHood is now available under the AGPLv3.

A #Fediverse app using #OpenStreetMap to display timelines close to you, filtered by topics.

More about the project: https://fedihood.social/about

Source code: https://git.holos.social/tom79/FediHood

Loops, Pixelfed, Mastodon

#loops #pixelfed #mastodon #activitypub

Alt...

My homescreen on my iPhone showing 3 groups of notifications from Loops, Pixelfed and Mastodon

Being able to migrate your posts along with followers to other Pixelfed servers is something we need to do, and will be a priority after I ship the new release, and mobile app later this month.

I say to other Pixelfed servers, because I'm not aware of any other software that would support this, but I do plan to write a FEP so we can support full account migration between software!

#Pixelfed #AccountMigration #ActivityPub

Earlier today I attended the #ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce meeting!

https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety/blob/main/meetings/2026-08-19-interim-taskforce-meeting.md

It was my first time popping by, but I had a specific reason, namely a call to work on a specification for interaction controls based on various existing work. You may remember that I tried this before, earlier in the year, and it stalled due to a lack of time. So this time around I'm doing it during my work hours. Thanks @Lambo! 😉

Here's how I'm trying to get started: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety/issues/159#issuecomment-5348012095

Decided to hop on https://fedihood.social and see what it's like. Seems like a fun concept! Those of you who feel comfortable joining totally should (you can use a pseudonymous acct if you like).

It seems to be largely lacking in users still. I would love to see this thing take off in a real way!

#tech #activityPub #fediverse #socialWeb

We are now more than 300 users on #FediHood. The project is stable enough for me to invite you to try it.
It is a software running on #ActivityPub and using #OSM.
The idea? Discover people near you or all around the world, and filter by topic.
It doesn't use GPS, you pick the town. The app warns you if your city is too small and suggests a bigger one nearby. Bonus: it supports #E2EE DMs.

https://fedihood.social

Don't hesitate to share. Thank you!

Is it OK to write code that does new things on the Fediverse?

#EvanPoll #poll #ActivityPub #Fediverse

Loops has developed it's own optimized server to server communication to support near real-time federation of latency sensitive activities, like Live stream chat messages.

I'm working on the draft FEP, and will share more details soon!

#Loops #LoopsDev #LiveStreaming #ActivityPub

Hashtag following also allow URLs to RSS feeds of ActivityPub objects (like e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/ThankYouTuesday).

Users can now configure a webhook to receive an HTTP POST for every notification. This can be useful for implementing bots that react to activities, like autorepliers, chatbots or interactive textual games (see snac(1) for more information).

The number of pending follow confirmations is shown next to the "people" link.

Faster performance metrics (contributed by dandelions).

Improved lowercasing in hashtags (contributed by postscriptum).

A search-by-url tweak for implementations that return 200 for invalid webfinger queries (e.g. piefed).

Mastodon API: added follow confirmation endpoints, fixed collisions in attachment file names.

Fixed potential crashes in attachment uploads.

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

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

#snacAnnounces #FrugalFediverse

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.