Last week

Last Week in Fediverse - ep 95

The Dutch broadcaster NPO quits their Mastodon pilot project, Mastodon is working on Starter Packs and a preview of PeerTube 7.0

Laurens Hof

03 Dec 2024 — 3 min read

The Dutch broadcaster NPO quits their Mastodon pilot project, Mastodon is working on Starter Packs and a preview of PeerTube 7.0

The News

The Dutch Public Broadcasting Organisation NPO stops their Mastodon pilot at social.npo.nl. The organisation cites a lack of engagement and reach as a reason to stop running their own Mastodon server. NPO say that they found it difficult to build more durable connections with people on Mastodon. They note that most channels that were part of the pilot already had quit earlier. One channel, KRO-NRCV has decided to continue, and transferred their account to the mastodon.nl server. The Dutch community pushed back against the decision, asking the question to what extend the NPO actually tried with their pilot, as most accounts seem to have stopped posting quickly, with the NPO doing little to promote the pilot as well. The struggles that the Dutch NPO have had on Mastodon seems similar to those of the BBC and their Mastodon pilot, where channels that are part of the pilot also have stopped posting since the summer.

Website League has published an update for December to tell what the network has been working on. Website League is an allow-list based federated network that uses familiar fediverse software (GoToSocial and Akkoma), and does not connect to the rest of the fediverse. It was created a few months ago after the platform Cohost shut down. The Website League has build an significant system of governance over the last few months: the project has their own decision making system, planning system, coordination platform, wiki and git forge, all for collaboratively working on this closed federated network.

Bluesky's starter packs are such a success that all other competing microblogging platforms are racing to implement them as well. Threads is working on them, and Farcaster has their own version of Starter Packs already released. Pixelfed and Loops developer Daniel Supernault is also working on ActivityPub starter kits that are on a opt-in basis, and Supernault is currently rewriting them before releasing the feature. Mastodon is also working on adding Starter Packs, but not much is known yet about the feature. It seems to be an extension of Mastodon's current private list functionality into public lists. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko has not given details yet about questions regarding opt-in and opt-out behaviour of such public lists.

Mastodon has added a year-in-review, Wrapstodon, with some details about your account of the last year. The feature is slowly rolling out now, and requires server admins to update to the latest nightly version of Mastodon.

Mastodon has launched a donation drive to fund a new Trust & Safety Lead role. The campaign is launching today, but no further information has been made available yet at the time of publication of this newsletter.

PeerTube is starting to showcase their yearly big update, with the first release candidate of PeerTube 7.0 now available for testing. The main feature of PeerTube 7.0 is a global client redesign, and the interface of PeerTube looks a lot more modern now. The spectra.video instance already has the update running if you want to take a look what the redesign looks like.

Fedidb.org now shows daily stats for instances, as well as the ability for fediverse software to add themselves to FediDB.