The Roundup - episode 15
Tons on news this week! ActivityPub gets a major spotlight, Misskey is rapidly growing, Flipboard is expanding further into the fediverse, and so much more!
Welcome to another episode of the Roundup! The week feels like it has been absolutely dominated by news about Twitter and Elon Musk. Even if you use the fediverse to get away from Twitter drama, it is hard to escape people talking about it. At the same time, this gives extra renewed energy to efforts to get people to use the fediverse. One major of such projects is the launch of SpreadMastodon, a website and movement to get people to use Mastodon. It specifically targets the onboarding flow, and tries to make that as easy as possible. This renewed interest in Mastodon has Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko note that MAU is trending upwards again for the first time in a few months.
Tons of links and news, lets dive in!
The links
- WriteFreely, a federated blogging project, has a blog post on how WriteFreely will develop into the future.
- A blog post by the creator of Mastodon iOS app Ice Cubes on how AI is incorporated into the project.
- A presentation on federated software forges such as GitHub.
- An excellent in-depth article on The Verge about ActivityPub.
- Misskey's rapid rise (especially in Japan) means its about to be the second biggest fediverse project.
- AndroidCentral writes a guide on how to use Mastodon.
- A short history on how 10 years ago the first federated comment was posted on the indieweb.
- Discourse announced two months ago they are adding ActivityPub support. This week they showed a short demo of how work is progressing.
- An extensive reflection on how to write your own ActivityPub server.
- Flipboard has moved their most popular curation desks onto Mastodon, which are accounts with hand-curated links of interesting content in various subjects.
- Flipboard is extending their integration with the fediverse beyond Mastodon, and is actively designing a next generation of Flipboard on top of ActivityPub.
- TootsSDK, an open-source library that helps iOS app developers build fediverse projects is starting work on supporting Calckey.
- Fediview is an algorithmic timeline for Mastodon, and is now implementing recommended posts as well.
- Fedistats launches a new feature that tracks a number of hashtags and sites and bookmarks each new item in the top 10.
- Mastodon is hiring a full stack web developer.
- The Nordic Council of Ministers received a recommendation from their appointed think tank that they "embrace open source, open standards and open protocols, such as #ActivityPub and #RSS"
- BigRelay.social is a new relay by the newsie.social server that helps connect smaller servers on the fediverse.
- Verified accounts on verifiedjournalist.org and lawstodon.org now have access to account and post metrics.
- One of the biggest German broadcast networks, ZDF, has joined the fediverse and set up their own Mastodon server.
- Medium has made it easier to embed Mastodon posts.
- Wikipedia has joined Mastodon.
The poll
Evan Prodromou ran a bracket of polls for the best bot on the fediverse this week. The result? Alt_text is the best bot, but the final championship was very close! @ca_dmv_bot, @mastodonusercount and @APoD were all close contenders!
Meanwhile, Stefan Bohacek is still running polls about fediverse culture and documenting into his netizen's guide. An interesting one this week was the question whether you refer to posts as 'toots'. The userbase is very split on this question, see the results here.
This weeks poll:
