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Fireside Fedi Interviews Dansup!
The Fireside Fedi podcast beat us to the punch in interviewing the creator of Pixelfed and Loops. @dansup has an impressive portfolio of Fediverse apps, and it’s interesting to hear about the experiences that brought him to where he is today.
FediForum is a virtual “unconference” that meets twice a year to showcase new developments, hold community discussions across a variety of important subjects, and give members of the wider Fediverse an opportunity to connect. For the most part, it’s been a successful effort to bring the network together and talk about ideas and future directions worth taking. However, the event has recently found itself at the center of controversy, and has been subsequently canceled.
One recent development still fresh within community awareness involves Kaliya “IdentityWoman” Young, co-organizer of the unconference alongside Johannes Ernst. Community members recently stumbled into problematic rhetoric made by Kaliya regarding her position on transgender athletes in women’s sports.
Sex isn’t a “gender orientation” it is really simple biology.
Gamete size – its really simple.
Stop confusing young autistic vulnerable people.
— Date Unknown
You think it IS moral to have male-bodied people who identify as trans women playing in elite comparative sport for female-bodied people?
Gender can be socially-constructed.
Sex is not. Female categories for sport where hard won. They need to stay female.
— April 8th, 2023
There are only two sexes.
Gender expression can be broad and have a vast range of possibilities – literally 100s if not 1000s.
Sex denialism is dangerous.
We can have both things together. 2 sexes, 1000s of genders.
— Jul 10th, 2023
Telling male children who have feminine tights they must be female is what is happening and it is hurting boys.
Go listen to detransitioners and what has happened as the culture has gone competely bonkers confusing sex and gender.
— March 31st, 2023
There are more receipts floating around, however Kaliya appears to have deleted most of her Mastodon posts and marked her X account as Protected. These statements stand in stark contrast to her latest Mastodon statuses.
I fully acknowledge the right of trans people to exist, thrive and live their lives to the fullest with equal rights and dignity. They have always been welcome at events I have helped organize over the last 20 years.
— March 29th, 2025
When asked whether she still held her more problematic views in a follow-up comment, Young responded ambiguously with “I fully stand by the statement you are commenting on.”
Within the following 24 hours of the community learning about these statements, a number of prominent community figures have signaled an intent to withdraw from FediForum entirely, citing a sense of discomfort and lack of safety for event attendees. A number of people have stated a desire to form an alternate event, and are currently discussing details.
Johannes Ernst stepped forward shortly afterwards with a public update:
In the past day or so, it was pointed out that my FediForum co-organizer has made some public statements that are incompatible with the kind of community we want to bring together at FediForum, and that I personally disagree with. Accordingly, Kaliya and I have agreed that she will be transitioning out of FediForum.
— March 30th, 2025
This response rang hollow for some community members, and raised more questions about whether or not Young would still be attending the event or getting paid from the proceeds. One day later, FediForum posted an official update to clarify matters.
Organizational update: FediForum, this time, is organized entirely by @j12t . The previous co-organizer is no longer involved.
Johannes’ previous announcement said “transitioning out” because there were a lot of accounts to transfer and settings to change and responsibilities to be moved so the transition could not be immediate. However, we have been scrambling and believe it is now complete.
(It is possible we missed something. If so, please point this out, gently if possible :-))
— March 31st, 2025
While this more or less resolves the immediate issue, the organization continues to receive criticism for its management, communication, and handling of the situation.
In a series of posts, the FediForum account officially confirmed the event will be held at a later date. The transcription can be read below.
We’ve all had a difficult few days. Tempers are high. Some of what’s been happening in the Fediforum comments section has reached insult-only stage and I have heard of physical safety concerns.
This is needs to stop, right now, none of this helps anybody.
So hold it, people.
FediForum April 1-2 is canceled, to be rescheduled at a future date.
In this environment, it is hard for me to see how a typical FediForum event could be successful tomorrow or the day after, we all need a time out. So I’m pulling the plug right now.
Registration is disabled as of now. Everybody who has a ticket can ask for a full refund. If you don’t, we will credit the purchase price for a future FediForum. Use the e-mail on our contact page https://fediforum.org/contact/
My apologies to the people who have diligently prepared for demos, presentations and sessions, and all of you who just wanted to come and help build a better social media future at FediForum.
We will create opportunity for you in the future, even if it’s a little hazy right now how and when this future will come to pass. Thanks for your understanding.
As next steps forward, we will be organizing a set of roundtables to listen to the FediForum community, to hear how we can do better — with a reconstituted organizing team. I clearly am not able to do this myself.
We want to do this with the community, and with all parts of the community, including trans folks, black people, and the many other marginalized groups that are under attack from so many directions these days. We want to do what we can to stand with you.
We will start this discussion tomorrow morning, right at the time when FediForum was supposed to start. We scrap the agenda that we were supposed to have, and make it a townhall or roundtable listening session, depending on how many people show.
We have the online venue, you probably have reserved time for FediForum and have received invite codes already, we might as well use it.
This one time, the roundtable / townhall will be for people who have invite codes already from their FediForum registration, to hopefully keep the size manageable. In the future, we will broaden participation.
I realize now that have made a number of mistakes in the past few days, as well as before, top of which is that I have not communicated better — in both directions. Some misunderstandings as well as real problems could have been avoided.
Thanks everybody who pointed this out. We/I need to fix this and do better, and I appreciate your help.
But I own this. So: sorry!
Recently, Ghost announced that their new ActivityPub offering is available in public beta. The company has been famously public with documenting their development, soliciting feedback from the wider community about how their integration should work. We took some time today to explore the beta, and showcase what the system can currently do. Keep in mind, these are still early stages for the platform, and there’s a lot of development happening behind the scenes.
The first big change you’ll likely notice is that Ghost’s dashboard now incorporates a timeline under the Home tab. The layout is simple and minimalist, and breaks out into several different sections: Inbox, Feed, Notifications, Explore, and Profile.
One interesting design choice involves how content is split up between views. Long-form articles from your subscriptions show up in the Inbox, but general statuses instead land in the Feed. This seems like a good design decision, since Ghost is trying to straddle the line between being a social reader, and a general microblogging platform. You can easily keep track of your subscriptions and reading list, while also being able to move at a much faster pace on the timeline.
In our testing, we followed a variety of different actors from across the Fediverse, including our ActivityPub-enabled WordPress site. Happily, our articles showed up in the Inbox without a hitch, and clicking on one opened up a clean reader view. This all happens without navigating away from your position in the Inbox or the Timeline.
Clicking on profiles also renders a social view for any Actor recognized by Ghost’s platform. There are still a few hiccups here: remote profiles can be a bit slow to load, and posts don’t always show up right away. Given that this is still a beta, it’s very likely that Ghost will continue to focus on performance improvements.
So, what does the experience of using Ghost’s social dashboard feel like? Honestly, it’s pretty slick. It’s hard to measure exactly how well the design nails the overall experience, considering I just set my own Ghost site up two days ago. As more interactions come in, this will be easier to measure.
A form for status updates sits at the top of the feed, and it’s minimalist and unobtrusive. At the moment, it’s not particularly fleshed-out: hashtags, mentions, polls, visibility scopes, quote posts, and attachments don’t currently exist. This is something that I really hope to see improve in the short term, given that most of the Fediverse supports these basic features.
Notifications are also pretty simple here, but they look nice and can stack together when multiple people perform the same interaction. It might be nice to have the ability to filter notifications and view them by type, but this is a pretty decent start.
One really nice affordance Ghost makes involves how comments work. Prior to this new development, Ghost historically did not natively support comments, and the main workaround most people relied on was to integrate Disqus or another third-party commenting system. Now, social commenting is supported in several places: on the feed, in side discussions, and on article entries themselves.
One slight annoyance here is that the commenting system technically supports threaded conversations, but doesn’t do the best job at showing which parts of a thread have replies. You kind of just have to click in to a section and hope to see some responses.
Currently, search and discovery are pretty limited. Ghost offers an Explore tab that highlights a number of featured accounts across the Fediverse, but it’s a short list. Search, on the other hand, just lets you look up people through their ActivityPub handles. It works, but it would be nice to be able to pull in remote content the way other Fediverse platforms do.
The biggest opportunity here involves Ghost’s expansive user base. There are a huge amount of Ghost publications out there. As more people and organizations opt into the beta, it would be great to see a similar design to how Ghost’s publication explore page works.
This is more of a “wish list” than it is a set of defined expectations, but we think there are some things Ghost could do to really shine.
Overall, the future is looking really bright! Ghost has done a phenomenal job in talking about their progress and findings in their ActivityPub Newsletter, and their product is really starting to take shape. I ended up migrating my personal blog over for testing purposes, but I think I’m going to stick with it. What Ghost is promising in slick, polished, and works incredibly well. If they can focus on smoothing the rough edges, it will be a huge win for Fediverse publishing.
Coinbase, the popular cryptocurrency exchange, recently announced that the Farcaster social-feed and mini-apps (called “frames”) will be coming to the Coinbase Wallet. This collaboration has the potential to transform the Coinbase Wallet into a Farcaster social-media client, and potentially bringing Farcaster to millions (if not tens-of-millions or hundreds-of-millions) more users.
If realized, this user-growth could significantly impact Farcaster, which, as of now, is the smallest among prominent decentralized social-media (DeSo) networks such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, and others.
While Farcaster currently appeals mostly to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, the partnership with Coinbase could signal a coming effort towards attracting non-crypto users. This could involve focusing on entertainment, influencers, or other cultural elements that appeal to the masses. Coinbase also echoed this on the 2025 roadmap they published:
We’re rebuilding Coinbase Wallet into an open platform that anyone can build and grow into, and we’re going to help builders go viral. To do this, we’re focusing on:
Helping apps get discovered. We’re adding a social graph to the Coinbase Wallet app by leveraging Farcaster, an open, social protocol that anyone can build on top of. We’ll use Farcaster to power a full social feed, as well as mini-apps with Frames v2. These are bite-sized onchain experiences — created in minutes — allowing users to take actions without leaving the feed.
In the announcement, Farcaster founder Dan Romero highlighted two key elements that will come to Coinbase Wallet:
Virality occurs when a social media post gains significant attention in a short amount of time. For example, a user with 1,000 followers might see their post engaged with by tens of thousands due to sharing and resharing across the social-network.
This phenomenon is not just about popularity; it’s a powerful marketing tool. Smaller creators or startups can use virality to gain visibility without relying on paid ads, which many people find intrusive.
But, what about the open social-graph? Virality happens on a social-graph — without a social-graph there is no virality. A social-graph is essentially the network of users and the connections between them. An open social-graph is one that can be accessed by anyone in an open & permissionless manner.
This is a key characteristic of all decentralized social-media (DeSo) networks — including of course Farcaster, but also includes Bluesky, the Fediverse, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, Nostr, and many others. And, is important to developers looking to build an application or service on top of a social-network.
While Farcaster stands to gain significant growth from this partnership, one might wonder: Why is Coinbase interested? Several factors may be at play:
Another consideration involves Nostr. Nostr’s network and ecosystem heavily embrace Bitcoin, and also benefit from Jack Dorsey‘s company Block. Three of Block’s companies involve Bitcoin: CashApp, Square, and Proto, while the TIDAL music platform features a Nostr integration. Given that Nostr’s community largely prefers Bitcoin, this partnership might be an attempt to steer Farcaster in a similar direction, but with Ethereum.
There’s an interesting schism happening in the Fediverse, illustrating two competing visions for the network. One advocates for massive growth and universal adoption as a means for changing the shape of the Web. The other advocates for a smaller, more personal network shaped by individual consent and intention.
In a nutshell, this debate is what we could call “Big Fedi vs Small Fedi“. As platforms such as Threads and Flipboard bring massive amounts of new people to the network, a different group is embracing the concept of “Island Networks”.
Island Networks take the concept of federation, and leverage it on a scale where individual operators choose who they want to connect to. The community is made up of smaller servers, usually with a capacity for a small amount of people on each, and federation is done with an allowlist-only model by admins.
One approach to this is Website League, an island network that aims to use Fediverse technology to build its own member community.
The Website League, as a “federated” system, is a collection of small social media sites that are connected together (as compared to being one big one, like Twitter or Cohost).
You can sign up for any of those websites; users on any website can see posts and follow users from any website in the League. Instead of a username, users have an address that works like an email address: “@username@website.org.” You don’t need to know anything technical, or how to make a website, to participate.
There are a few interesting caveats that member sites have to take into consideration. Operators are required to disable all forms of post metrics, remove the federated timeline, and disallow users from seeing or accessing each others’ follower / following lists. The Website League describes these as dark patterns, which drive unhealthy interactions within social media.
Website League volunteers have been busy developing a governance framework to help guide instance admins on how to work within their system. Patches have been developed for GoToSocial and Akkoma, to provide allowlist-only communications. The ultimate goal is to provide all of the information an instance admin needs, while taking out the complexity required to participate.
Island Networks are a fascinating experiment in leveraging open technologies to build safe spaces with unified sets of policies and vetted communities. Theoretically, this could be one approach to building dedicated federated communities without having to connect to countless servers across the network. In thinking about this paradigm shift, I wanted to break things down between potential benefits, and potential liabilities.
For now, the Website League is in early stages. The best way to get in touch would be to join the Coordination system, announce your intentions, and request access to the project’s shared allowlist. Get your instance added to the list, import it, and you should be able to get your initial connections to the rest of the island network.
The long-dormant Funkwhale project is still alive and in active development, with an impending 2.0 release predicted to land soon. Recently, the project posted an update regarding a new initiative for the platform: filtering fascists off the network.
Given the current political climate, we want to talk about making Funkwhale more actively involved in the fight against far-right ideologies.
To achieve this, we’re developing a filter to remove all far-right-associated artists from the network. Since anti-fascism is not optional in our community, this filter will be hardcoded into our codebase, preventing right-wing extremists from using Funkwhale.
While the ethos behind this seems laudable, some aspects to this approach seem deeply problematic. Firstly, there’s a question of autonomy and agency: self-hosted software generally gives admins the power to decide how to manage their server or community. Building a central, automated mechanism into Funkwhale may violate this expectation of user agency.
Curious to learn more, we dove into the development threads [1,2] to make sense of the proposal. There are two big changes worth understanding: mandatory tagging, and tag processing.
Future versions of Funkwhale are pushing to require all uploaded tracks to have MusicBrainz data associated with them. If the track is missing a MusicBrainz ID or incorrectly using a different ID, that track may be filtered out of network discovery and possibly not even federate to other Funkwhale servers.
This isn’t so much of an issue for established artists producing studio releases, but it does undermine Funkwhale’s long-underserved secondary community: independent musicians on the Fediverse. While producing MusicBrainz data for a track isn’t necessarily hard, it can be extremely time-consuming, and brings friction to a simple process like uploading your own music. For people looking for a more Soundcloud-like publishing experience, Funkwhale’s approach is the exact opposite.
Funkwhale is currently leveraging WikiData and hopes to filter out music with the following MusicBrainz tags:
This is a limited list, and the project is already contemplating adding more genres. Based on existing code and public statements, the filter does the following things:
An open question remains regarding already-uploaded materials. If it meets the criteria of the filter, does the media disappear entirely? For now, there doesn’t seem to be any automated deletion, but a filter may just hide that media for everyone regardless.
There are a few areas that raise concerns about the approach the project intends to take. Even though labeling bigoted content and filtering it out seems cut and dry, there are a lot of details that raise questions. The biggest concerns involve delegating project infrastructure to a public WikiData community, using crowdsourcing to produce this data, what the criteria for filtering music should be, and whether this approach is actually effective.
One point of contention here is that the Funkwhale project is hoping to motivate some subset of the WikiData community to effectively do the work of tagging musicians. Not only is this project not part of Funkwhale’s own core infrastructure, but it’s also completely crowdsourced, while providing a central authority on how individual servers process music locally.
There will be no artist list hardcoded in funkwhale. The only hardcoded thing will be the query to wikidata to get the list of artist. This task can be launch manually by the admin to update the list to the last wikidata state.
And a fallback, static (but manually updated) list will bee available in funkwhale.audio in case wikidata get attacked.
Using project infrastructure as a backup instead of the main source seems like an odd decision, in that it would only be used if the existing way of doing things was ever compromised.
Enlisting a crowdsourced, public platform to do the dirty work here could open up a proverbial can of worms. Labeling known out-and-proud Neo-Nazis and white supremacists is one thing, but this mechanism could theoretically be used against any artist for any reason, with little accountability in place. Now that a precedent is set and a mechanism exists, will this scope be expanded to other kinds of controversial and problematic artists? Given the reactive nature of online spaces and hearsay, could this mechanism be used against independent musicians that have nothing to do with the far-right?
There’s also some categorical issues worth considering. Does this initiative aim to only block overtly bigoted media, or does it aim to remove media from anyone publicly known to be a bigot? An open issue in the project tracker mentions one user enjoying music from Burzum: despite the artist himself being labeled a Nazi, the artistic and lyrical content were influential to blackened death metal, and are not considered to contain Nazi content. The project lead effectively shrugs and states that they, too, are a fan of the band, but they would rather lose access to that music than have to implement the extra logic necessary to allow certain kinds of music, while blocking the artists themselves from being on Funkwhale.
There’s also an open question as to whether admins who disagree with this decision could simply just fork Funkwhale and remove the mechanism. We’ve seen this in the past: when a number of fediverse clients blocked access to Gab and a number of other right-wing Fediverse instances, they ended up getting forked as new projects to restore access. There’s nothing in standard open source licenses to prevent this behavior – in fact, Gab and Truth Social both benefit from forking Mastodon’s own codebase.
The main problem that Funkwhale is trying to address here is that instance admins don’t really have any power over what other servers are hosting. The main tools at their own disposal involve defederation, blocking, and filtering content, all actions taken within the moderation layer. An automated filter mechanism effectively circumvents that sense of agency, with its central argument being “What? We’re only preventing you from uploading Nazi music. Are you against this because you’re a Nazi or something?”
While Funkwhale is attempting to take an admirable stance against fascism and hateful ideology, it could be argued that this project is trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution, which doesn’t always work out well. One thing to keep in mind is that some of the most effective approaches for establishing norms and drowning out hate speech is to do this at the community level.
One alternative here might be to adopt an approach similar to the CARIAD blocklist by IFTAS, but for music:
While this development decision might introduce some level of controversy within the community, we believe it’s important to investigate this fairly, and report what we’ve found. Some posts have already started circulating that the Funkwhale project is trying to control instance libraries and delete existing media, but the existing mechanisms don’t appear to actually delete anything. Time will tell whether this initiative is effective, but it’s an interesting decision coming from an established Fediverse platform.
The weekend is coming up. You’ve been thinking a lot about that online community you want to start. It’s time to launch a Fediverse server!
The weekend is coming up. You've been thinking a lot about that online community you want to start. It's time to launch a Fediverse server!
We Distribute (wedistribute.org)
The Fediverse’s premiere Trust & Safety organization is struggling to make ends meet, and needs help with meeting its goals.
The Fediverse’s premiere Trust & Safety organization is struggling to make ends meet, and needs help with meeting its goals.
We Distribute (wedistribute.org)
A beloved community radio station featuring only music by Fediverse artists has closed its doors. This is its legacy.
A beloved community radio station featuring only music by Fediverse artists has closed its doors. This is its legacy.
We Distribute (wedistribute.org)
@ODD@mastodon.online Hey sorry, this is a weird issue we get with our WordPress integration. It seems to be caused by caching. It should clear up in a few minutes, sorry for the inconvenience.
In the face of public backlash, a Fediverse developer is forced to shut down a hobby project after people misunderstood what it did.
In the face of public backlash, a Fediverse developer is forced to shut down a hobby project after people misunderstood what it did.
We Distribute (wedistribute.org)
