Last Week in Fediverse – ep 100

Welcome to the 100th edition of Fediverse Report! It’s been a wonderful and strange 2 years to report on all the developers in the fediverse and the wider open social web. The current state of the open social web is nothing like I expected it to be when I started writing. When I first started I expected the fediverse to slowly gain wider adoption over the years. Instead, adoption has dropped compared with 2 years ago. At the same time, the current state of the internet and social platforms make it loud and clear that there is a huge need for better social platforms. I do not know what role the fediverse and the open social web will play in all of it, but I do strongly belief in the importance of helping people understand what is going on in the space. Thank you all for reading and the support over the years!

The News

Pixelfed has seen massive growth over the last week. The photo sharing platform grew from some 20k monthly active users in December to almost 200k MAU right now. The inflow of new people is driven by a combination of three things: people are actively looking for an alternative to Instagram, as well as renewed media attention to Pixelfed as a result of the official app release. Pixelfed’s launch of the official apps has gotten significant media attention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The reviews of the Pixelfed apps show that there are two reasons for people to look for an Instagram alternative: not only are people looking to ditch Meta products due to their alignment with Trump, people are also looking for another photo sharing app that has not gotten as bloated as Instagram has. The title of the Lifehacker review makes that point clear, describing Pixelfed as a “Return to Instagram’s Glory Days”.

Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault says he has gotten multiple offers from VCs to chat about Pixelfed, but that he has rejected them all. Instead he will launch a Kickstarter on January 22nd. Not much is clear yet about the Kickstarter, but in the introduction Supernault makes it clear he has big plans, saying: “We aim to be the first Fediverse app with a billion people by taking on the worlds biggest players using open source standards.” Loops got critiqued for it’s “predatory” Terms of Service, which Supernault responded to a few days later by changing the ToS of Loops to be the same as those of Pixelfed.

Forum software NodeBB has officially launched their 4.0 version, which includes ActivityPub support. NodeBB has been working on adding ActivityPub for almost a year, and been testing it for a while as well. The community.nodebb.org forum has been connected to the fediverse for a while now, showing what a connection between forums and microblogging looks like in practice. Developer Julian Lam says that existing NodeBB forums will have to opt-in to the fediverse connection, while it will be enabled by default for new forums going forward. Lam also says that the work on ActivityPub also helped connect NodeBB with competitor Discourse, saying “NodeBB and Discourse have been vying for the exact same market share (forums, community-building, self-started or enterprise) for over 10 years, and it was only after ActivityPub came around that the dev teams even started talking to one another.” By both working on ActivityPub, these competitors are now also collaborators, and both their forums can connect with each other.

BotKit by Fedify is a new framework for building bots on ActivityPub. It is powered by Fedify, a TypeScript library for building with ActivityPub. Using BotKit allows people to easily build bots for ActivityPub, instead of building bots on Mastodon or Misskey.

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin now gives you the ability to show fediverse engagement on the page itself. I’ve enabled it below as well, go check it out!

The Analysis

Some stray thoughts on Pixelfed’s growth:

• It has been a long time since the fediverse has seen a notable increase in users and new signups: the last major event was in July 2023 with people looking for Reddit alternatives. Over time, Bluesky became the default destination for people looking to migrate away from X. The ATmosphere does not have a dedicated place for sharing photos, giving all the more opportunity for Pixelfed to be the new home of people looking for an Instagram alternative.
• One of the advantages of the fediverse is in the interoperability between different platforms, even when two platforms are focused on a different modality of communications. Mastodon and Pixelfed can interoperate with each other, but the much more question is: will this be feature that will be actively used, or more of a niche nice-to-have? Mastodon does have an active traditions for the sharing of photos with hashtags such as #silentsunday, and I’m curious if/how these traditions will evolve with a more active photo sharing platform.
• Supernault is now responsible for the development of two different types of platforms: Pixelfed and Loops, and is also responsible for running the flagship servers for both platforms: pixelfed.social and loops.video. The amount of work that Supernault puts into the fediverse is incredibly impressive. At the same time, it does give me cause for concerns for governance of the platforms. It is an incredibly amount of load and responsibility that is all placed on a single person. Supernault would do well to delegate a significant amount of responsibility here. However, previous cases where other developers have tried to work together have not gone well, for various reasons. I’m concerned that the fediverse is replicating the same problems that Mastodon has had with governance here.
• Pixelfed looks to replicate the same power dynamic that Mastodon has with the mastodon.social server. The large majority of new signups are going to the main pixelfed.social server. The power dynamics of Pixelfed are even more skewed than they are with Mastodon: 75% of Pixelfed’s current monthly active users are on the pixelfed.social server.

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One of the fundamental challenges of building a decentralised social network with ActivityPub is in the tension between local and global. The fediverse is a super-network of connected social networks: you can see mastodon.social as its own social network, that has joined the larger fediverse. This theoretically allows for benefits such as local digital communities with local norms and moderation. In practice, most fediverse software is not interested in the local communities part, and actively discourages using the software as such: Mastodon explicitly prohibits posting only to your local server, for example. As such, the fediverse as it currently is, is mainly a singular global network, and less a network made of a plurality of spaces. This current dynamic in the fediverse is what makes forums like NodeBB adding ActivityPub to their platforms so interesting. Forums like NodeBB are understood to be local communities. When you go to a forum, you expect to see only people and posts from that specific forum. Forums are often tied around a specific topic or community, making much easier to define what the local forum community is all about. Now these forums that understand the value of having a clear local community have an additional connection to a wider network. It is effectively the reverse sales-pitch of most current fediverse servers. Mastodon says: join the larger fediverse, and you might have some additional benefits if you join the fediverse via a specific community/server. NodeBB says: join our specific forum community, and you might have some additional benefits by being connected to a larger fediverse network.

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TechCrunch checked in with Threads on their plans to add account portability to their fediverse integration, writing: “A Meta spokesperson couldn’t confirm that the topic was even on the Threads roadmap, let alone when it was due to be addressed.” I recently published that I do not have a satisfying answer as to “Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?”. Last week I also reported that the Threads-fediverse connection is seeing incredibly low uptake from the side of Threads; in total at best only a few thousand people on Threads follow someone from the fediverse. As Meta is quickly aligning itself politically with Trump, and applying censorship accordingly, the question becomes louder and louder: why is the fediverse still bothering with Threads? In practice nobody on Threads is interested in connecting with the fediverse, it does not allow for people to migrate their account from Threads to the fediverse, and it is bad optics for the fediverse to boot.

The Links

• Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update, Trunk & Tidbits, for December 2024
• PieFed roadmap for 2025.
• Mastodon’s CEO Eugen Rochko gave an interview with on the TechCrunch Equity Podcast.
• My year of Fediverse explorations – Elena Rossini
• ActivityPods published a roadmap for 2025.
• Ghost’s weekly update on their ActivityPub integration.
• Firefox had an interview with developer Takiyoshi Hoshida, who is behind the multi-protocol app Sora.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Owncast January 2025 newsletter.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.

#fediverse #silentsunday

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-100/