Support for end-to-end encrypted messaging in ActivityPub has been stated as a long-term goal by the Social Web Foundation, but the network might be gaining support for it sooner than anyone expected. Ben Pate, the lead dev of Emissary, posted to the network earlier this week:
Since January, Bonfire and Emissary have been working on true E2EE in ActivityPub, using the MLS protocol — which is a successor to Signal protocol with better support for very large groups.
Anyway, here’s today’s progress video of where I am. Here’s what works: exchanging public keys, creating groups, sending/receiving messages and replies, and realtime notifications.
There’s a lot more to do. We’re planning on general availability in June, so right now we’re about 1/3 of the way into the project.
Funding for this feature was secured through the Sovereign Tech Fund, with leadership provided by the Social Web Foundation. Emissary and Bonfire are both working on this project, and are due to provide deliverables by June 2026. The result of this work will eventually provide a clear standard in a future version of the ActivityPub protocol spec. A December 2025 draft of the existing spec can be read here.
A Quick Demo
Ben was nice enough to record a quick demo for people to get a visual representation of where things are currently, and what support for encrypted messaging looks like.
For now, implementers are working hard to iron out wrinkles and resolve outstanding points of ambiguity. The demo above already showcases a working product, although a number of client-side bells and whistles could be added for things like read receipts, native support for different content types, and autocomplete for looking up contacts.
The spec currently appears to propose an idea that client implementers could leverage end-to-end encryption through a future version of the ActivityPub API. While the proposal spec is relatively fleshed-out, it would benefit greatly from community feedback.
We’re still alive, just kind of on a hiatus for the moment. We want to get things going again soon, what cool developments have you seen happening in the #Fediverse recently?
More developments are happening on the front to provide payment and monetization options for the Social Web. Over the past few years, there have been interesting experiments in making this possible. Mitra, notably, pioneered subscription payments by utilizing Monero. Bandwagon has also built on the concept by instead relying on integrations with traditional payment networks, starting with Stripe and PayPal. The short-lived SubClub implemented private feeds for paid access.
Introducing CrowdBucks
CrowdBucks is a new effort developed by Charles Iliya Krempeaux, better known by his online moniker, Reiver. It builds on some of the ideas previous implementations have tried, and aims to make the process as smooth and simple as possible.
“The long-term vision that CrowdBucks is a part of is to create a payments layer for the Fediverse,” Reiver explains, “obviously, it’s not the only part, there will be other projects later.”
Source: CrowdBucks
Signing Up
Instead of forcing users to create yet another account, CrowdBucks does something really smart: you can just sign in with an existing Fediverse account.
At the moment, sign-in is limited to just Mastodon, but the plan is to gradually support a number of different platforms. Since a lot of Fediverse software implements part of the Mastodon API, I attempted to log in with both Akkoma and WordPress, but neither one seems to work yet. We opted to use a tried-and-true community instance.
After doing the Authorization dance, CrowdBucks directs users to a simple dashboard, where they are prompted to do basic setup for their page. Fediverse integration automatically pulls in profile details, including the username, avatar, header, and handle, although most of the public-facing details can be customized.
Getting Set Up
The first thing to do with your account is to set fundraising goals and donation tiers. The flow feels reminiscent of something like Kickstarter or Patreon, where rewards can be spelled out as something symbolic, something digital, or even something tangible.
Support tiers can be set up with any monthly denomination, and these get prominently displayed on your CrowdBucks page. Donors can use their CrowdBucks accounts to find a page, select a tier, and support creators and projects easily.
When a person pledges towards a Tier, they’re automatically taken to a checkout page. For the time being, the only supported Payment Processor is Stripe. Reiver has explained that this is because Stripe was easiest to implement, but the team intends to also add support for PayPal and other providers, as well as support for standards such as Web Monetization and OpenPayments.
Quick Demo
CrowdBucks was initially revealed in a brief demo at FediCon a few weeks ago, which was recorded and added alongside the FediCon Talks on PeerTube. It’s a useful insight into where Reiver is coming from, what’s being built, and ideas of what CrowdBucks could be used for.
Open Source and Self-Hostable
“Anyone will be able to set up their own CrowdBucks server,” Reiver explains, “just like anyone can set up their own Mastodon server.”
The CrowdBucks project itself is licensed under the GNU AGPL, with source code readily available. The CrowdBucks.fund site is simply operated as a flagship instance, but the goal is to allow anyone to host their own version as part of their operational infrastructure.
“We want CrowdBucks to help pay server bills, to support developers building Fedi software, and to fund creators on the Fediverse. The whole thing is designed to be native to the Fediverse.”
Future Plans
While the project itself is still fairly young, the team is actively thinking about how to improve. One area CrowdBucks is already exploring involves the ability for the app to post to the Fediverse on the behalf of fundraisers, for example, to give credit to supporters. Another possibility might involve collaborating with Emissary to standardize pieces involving payments and private access.
This is an exciting endeavor, and might be one of the most polished attempts yet to make payments possible on the Social Web. Hopefully, existing projects will get involved, and hash out the details on how to make this as open and interoperable as possible.
We Distribute is currently evaluating whether to launch a crowdfunding campaign to help support our organization. Right now, almost everything we do is created, produced, and edited by one person.
With funding, we would be able to pay regular contributors and hire people to help us produce media on a much more frequent basis.
If you’re interested, please feel free to fill out this short survey:
A new report from Dropsite News makes the claim that Meta is allegedly scraping a large amount of independent sites for content to train their AI. What’s worse is that this scraping operation appears to completely disregard robots.txt, a control list used to tell crawlers, search engines, and bots which parts of a site should be accessed, and which parts should be avoided. It’s worth mentioning that the efficacy of such lists depend on the consuming software to honor this, and not every piece of software does.
Meta Denies All Wrongdoing
Andy Stone, a communications representative for Meta, has gone on record by claiming that the list is bogus, and the story is incorrect. Unfortunately, the spread of Dropsite’s story is relatively small, and there haven’t been any other public statements about the list at this time. This makes it difficult to adequately critique the initial story, but the concept is nevertheless a wakeup call.
However, it’s worth acknowledging Meta’s ongoing efforts to scrape data from many different sources. This includes user data, vast amounts of published books, and independent websites not part of Meta’s sprawling online infrastructure. Given that the Fediverse is very much a public network, it’s not surprising to see instances getting caught in Meta’s net.
Purportedly Affected Instances
The FediPact account has dug in to the leaked PDF, and a considerable amount of Fediverse instances appear on the list. The document itself is 1,659 pages of URLs, so we were able to filter down a number of matches based on keywords. Please keep in mind that these only account for sites that use a platform’s name in the domain:
Mastodon: 46 matches
Lemmy: 6 matches
PeerTube: 46 matches
There are likely considerably more unique domain matches in the list for a variety of platforms. Admins are advised to review whether their own instances are documented there. Even if your instance’s domain isn’t on the list, consider whether your instance is federating with something on the list. Due to the way federation works, cached copies of posts from other parts of the network can still show up on an instance that’s been crawled.
Access the Leaked List
We are mirroring this document for posterity, in case the original article is taken offline.
Regardless of the accuracy of the Dropsite News article, there’s an open question as to what admins can do to protect their instances from being scraped. Due to the nature of the situation, there is likely no singular silver bullet to solve these problems, but there are a few different measures that admins can take:
Establish Community Terms of Service – Establish a Terms of Service for your instance that explicitly calls out scraping for the purposes of data collection and LLM training specifically. While it may have little to no effect on Meta’s own scraping efforts, it at least establishes precedence and a paper trail for your own server community’s expectations and consent.
Request Data Removal – Meta has a form buried within the Facebook Privacy Center that could be used to submit a formal complaint regarding instance data and posts being part of their AI training data. Whether or not Meta does anything is a matter of debate, but it’s nevertheless an option.
(EU-Only) Send a GDPR Form – Similar to the above step, but try to get the request in front of Meta’s GDPR representatives that have to deal with compliance.
Establish Blocking Measures Anyway: Even if private companies can still choose to disregard things like robots.txt and HTTP Headers such as X-Robots-Tag: noindex, you can still reduce the attack surface of your site from AI agents that do actually honor those things.
Set Up a Firewall: one popular software package that’s seeing a lot of recent adoption for blocking AI traffic is Anubis, which has configurable policies that you can adjust as needed to handle different kinds of traffic.
Use Zip Bombs: When all else fails, take measures into your own hands. On the server side, use an Nginx or Apache configuration to detect specific User Agents associated with AI, and serve them ever-expanding compressed archives to slow them down.
In all reality, fighting against AI scraping is still a relatively new problem that’s complicated by lack of clear regulation, and companies deciding to do whatever they want. The best we can do for our communities is to adopt protective measures and stay informed of new developments in the space.
Loops, the open source Tiktok alternative for the Fediverse, is continuing to grow and evolve. Although the platform launched with a fairly limited featureset, development has ramped up to pull in some ambitious new features. Daniel Supernault has this to say:
With Loops, we saw an opportunity to bring short video to the fediverse in a way that feels familiar, fun, and safe — while building something new beyond Pixelfed: a community-first platform of its own.
Daniel Supernault, Pixelfed Development lead
There’s a lot of new features coming in to the video-sharing platform. Let’s break down some of the most significant ones:
Loops Comes to the Web
One of the most important updates of this development cycle concerns a new Web interface for the Loops platform. Soon, users will no longer be constrained to Android or iOS clients to make use of Loops and its social features.
Demo courtesy of Daniel Supernault
The new UI looks incredibly slick, and feels like an evolution of Pixelfed’s own design language. Bringing a Web interface to Loops feels like a smart idea, as it opens up the possibility for more people to use it.
The new Web UI also ships with a Dark Mode, for those of you hoping to shield your eyes from a bright browser page. It’s clean, and really makes the video content pop.
Better User Controls
A big design focus for Loops (and presumably, Pixelfed) centers around giving users greater control over their online experience. This includes what they see on the timeline, who can interact with them, and whether posts can be interacted with in the first place. Taking further lessons from Pixelfed, Loops also brings in comprehensive tools for blocking bad actors, and keeping your timeline civil.
A new user-wellness feature here is called Screen Time, which helps keep track of how often a person is logged into Loops and watching videos. While it’s something of a niche feature, it’s nice to know that there are ways to set daily time limits.
Self-Hosting
The backend code for Loops has been open to the wider community for a while, but the prospect of including a Web-facing interface solidifies the possibility that Loops will soon formally allow admins to host their own Loops instances. This boils down to a few critically important features for the network: admin controls, customization, and federation support.
Loops will be ready to self host very soon, these are the server requirements:
PHP 8.3+
Mysql 8+
Redis
FFmpeg 4.5+
imagemagick/libvips
node + npm
And yes, a dockerfile will be shipped in the first release ✨
#loops
A big focus of Loops development has involved encouraging admins to set up their own community instances. Loops takes a lot of the lessons learned from Pixelfed, and incorporates a lot of flexibility for admins to make their instances stand out, while providing necessary tools to keep communities safe.
Custom Links and Pages in Loops
Admins will be happy to see the addition of custom pages and navigation for instances. With the upcoming release, it will be even easier for admins to put need-to-know instance info front and center to their community. This could include sharing community messaging channels, donation links, methods for getting updates from the admin, or details pertaining to server status.
Federation Support
It might not seem obvious, but Loops technically already supports ActivityPub federation. It’s just that the flagship instance at loops.video only has the feature enabled for select accounts, for testing purposes. Nevertheless, federated following and interactions are possible, and seem to work.
Dan’s account on Loops.Video does in fact federate. Here it is, as seen from Mastodon.
The significance of Loops turning on federation capabilities cannot be understated. Short-form video is an extremely popular medium, and bringing it in to the Fediverse gives people a new way to talk to one another, and might just be the incentive needed to get more video creators on the network.
Loops Studio
One of the more exciting features coming in an update is Loops Studio, a creator’s dashboard designed for uploading and managing videos, viewing interactions, and keeping track of analytics and engagement. This could provide a solid incentive for content creators to commit to using Loops full-time, and allow them to better engage with their friends and followers across the network.
Interestingly, the new composer for creating loops includes some unique capabilities that seem to be directly inspired from Tiktok: there are options to allow other users to stitch your video into theirs, allow users to perform a duet with you, and also disclose Not Safe for Work content. There’s even a way to tag whether something was created using generative AI.
Loops Sound Library
Details on this feature are scarce, but this NLNet-funded project is designed to allow Loops videos to incorporate music from Fediverse musicians that allow for remixing and resharing. The feature reportedly will allow users to select tracks from Funkwhale and possibly other federated music platforms for background music in their videos, while preserving attribution.
The idea of integrating with Funkwhale and other federated music servers is older than it sounds. Over the years, Dansup has experimented with various mockups and ideas on how to incorporate music capabilities into Pixelfed. It seems like some of that work may have eventually influenced this feature.
Comprehensive Data Export
Being an open and federated platform, Loops is aiming to include an export data for all of your videos, posts, and social connections. The goal here is to give users the ability to migrate to other Loops servers and retain their follower graph, much in the same way that Mastodon does. Hopefully, in the future, this might also give users the ability to pull in videos and activities from their old instances when moving.
In Conclusion
Loops is a massive, ambitious undertaking, and it’s exciting to see so much development effort finally bear fruit. While we still have to wait a little while longer for a release to ship and for the flagship instance to get updated, I’m extremely hopeful about the prospects of having a free and open Tiktok / Vine alternative for the Fediverse.
The Ghost.org project has been on an incredible journey over the past few months, documenting all of their hard work in the open, for the whole network to see. The team has shared the various challenges they’ve overcome, and the project has gone to develop a fantastic interface for using the platform for social purposes in addition to an authoring tool.
I’ve actually been dogfooding Ghost for my personal site since the March Beta, and wrote about the initial experience earlier this year. There are a number of subtle improvements and feature additions now, and the dashboard is generally more stable and loads much more quickly. This new version also ships with integrated comments and better documentation, along with a vast amount of other changes under the hood.
Posts can now have image attachments with alt text. Profiles can now be customized. Notifications are clean and helpful.
With that being said, Ghost members using the Beta likely won’t see major differences between the version they were using previously, and the 6.0 release now. The real story here is that anyone can now set up their own Ghost blog, switch on the Social Web integration, and be able to reach out to the rest of the network. Ghost’s reported compatibility work with WordPress and Flipboard will hopefully continue to bear fruit.
An article in my Ghost timeline vs an article as seen on Mastodon.
If you were interested in self-hosting a Ghost installation, now is a great time to do it! Check out the installation guide if you’re doing it for the first time, or read up on how to update your existing Ghost install to use the new federation features!
Today, our podcast features an interview with an Internet OG: Evan Henshaw-Plath, aka Rabble. We talk about Twitter, Secure Scuttlebutt, and the evolution of Nostr!
The ActivityPub plugin team at Automattic has been doing some amazing work. Over the past few years, this single-person project has shifted from a single-person effort to a team of full-time developers. With the release of the 7.x branch of the ActvityPub integration plugin, project devs announced that they would be working on bringing remote following capabilities to the plugin itself.
Today, version 7.1.0 was released with a very early sneak peak at this new feature. While it’s currently hidden behind an “Advanced Options” toggle, it’s now possible to use the ActivityPub plugin to directly follow other Actors on the network.
This is still a relatively new feature, and the plumbing hasn’t been completely fleshed out yet. Team member Konstantin Obenland explains further in the announcement:
There’s really no functionality around it yet, beyond following accounts from other instances, as we have yet to start processing incoming posts and adding the ability to interact with them. But if you just can’t wait to show your appreciation for other accounts by following them, go wild!
Why is this Important?
The connection from WordPress to the rest of the Fediverse has always kind of been in a weird place. While the main ActivityPub integration for WordPress generally works great for sending articles to subscribers, following people directly from the WordPress dashboard has been messy. Right now, if you wanted to use your WordPress blog as an actual Fediverse account, you would need the following things:
Friends – a social dashboard for WordPress, still in the early stages. This piece is primarily used for following other people in the Fediverse.
Enable Mastodon Apps – This implements a substantial amount of the Mastodon API, so that you can post microblog updates directly to your WordPress site.
Event Bridge for ActivityPub – This technically adds support for federated Events, by converting your site’s events calendar into something people on the network can subscribe to and indicate their attendance.
With these three pieces, it’s possible to cobble together something that comes close to being a complete Fediverse user experience. Still, this process takes time to set up, can be prone to configuration issues, and sometimes has missing features. Having different plugins that all touch the ActivityPub integration can also be harder to test code and report issues.
We use Tusky with our site for social purposes. It’s pretty good, but definitely could be better.
By introducing remote following functionality directly into the ActivityPub plugin, the project team will effectively provide standard mechanisms for other plugins to directly rely on. In the near future, this might mean that you won’t have to rely on Friends to be the broker of your social connections. Instead, Friends can just use what’s already put in place by the core plugin, and focus on ways to just work as a social dashboard.
Also, Starter Packs!
One other thing worth mentioning involves preliminary support for the Fediverse Starter Kits, a proposed recreation of Bluesky’s Starter Pack functionality. While there have been a number of attempts to make something similar for the Fediverse in the past, there has yet to be a Fediverse standard for lists filled with recommended users to follow. However, the WordPress team has put in the effort to support Pixelfed‘s Starter Kit Data Schema as a point of reference.
A screenshot of the importer in action. Credit: Matthias Pfefferle
In all, this release iterates on the current ActivityPub stack for WordPress, and could provide a stable foundation for a lot of future functionality that we’ve all come to expect from platforms such as Mastodon, Misskey, or even Bonfire.
In case you missed it, @radiofreefedi has been running Radio Free Fedi Fest for the month of July! This is a gathering of Fedi artists and musicians, who are live streaming performances and creative talks through the fabulous OwnCast platform!
FediCon is a new #Fediverse conference in Vancouver, Canada, taking place on August 1st and 2nd, 2025. So far, there’s an impressive lineup of attendees and speakers!
Sean Tilley and Damon Outlaw are making an effort to get to Canada, and we hope to host an IRL panel there!
This new payment system allows for ways to financially support artists on the Fediverse, and the levels of support resemble a hybrid of what both Bandcamp and Patreon offer. Not only does this feature include line items for digital media, but a new mechanism for access and distribution. Additionally, the flagship instance of Bandwagon.fm will be taking 0% of any money musicians make.
Premier Plans
To support development, Bandwagon’s flagship instance will be offering a $10 per month Premier plan that allows musicians to sell their music and offer their tracks at a higher bit-rate, among other features. To support the artist community, a number of Fediverse musicians will likely be gifted a lifetime Premier membership for free.
Album and Track Purchases
Once this feature becomes available to musicians, they will be able to configure a Merchant account to dictate what items they want to include for purchase. This could cover individual tracks, EP’s, or entire albums. It’s also possible to configure Support Levels with monthly billing.
Managing products and exclusive media in a merchant account.
When someone buys music through Bandwagon, their purchases get added to a profile. If you’re a native Bandwagon user, those live in your account. If you’re visiting from another platform, purchased items instead live in a special Guest Profile that can be connected to a Fediverse identity.
Special Access
Another new feature unique to Bandwagon is the concept of Circles. These are special, privileged collections of followers who can pay to access exclusive content: special album drops, rare tracks, secret shows, and private “behind the scenes” posts can all be accessed by premium followers.
What’s remarkable about this system is how things are tied together: this mechanism checks for payment, recognizes a Fediverse handle, and grants access on that basis. Previously, other systems needed to provision this kind of thing manually: you might have been able to pay for something through Stripe or PayPal, but there wasn’t always a way to account for a user’s Fediverse identity afterwards. Instead, that all had to be dealt with by hand.
Posts, Events, and Media can now be scoped to specific audiences with Circles
This also means that it’s possible to create multiple kinds of support levels, which could give a Bandwagon musician profile almost Patreon-like functionality. Different support tiers could receive access to different things, allowing rewards to stack with the level of donations. One level might receive private blog posts, whereas another might have access to a monthly track plus access to private blog posts.
Alternate Payment Methods
For the time being, Bandwagon will support Stripe and PayPal when the feature launches. However, Ben has stated an interest in supporting many more payment processors, in the hopes of providing choice to artists and buyers:
Bandwagon will build integrations with private companies (lots of them, actually) but we will never depend on any one specific company. Open APIs are best, but when those are unavailable, we’ll connect directly to Stripe, PayPal, or anyone who can deliver benefits for indie artists. But If I have to integrate with one merchant provider to accept payments, then I’ll integrate with two, or seven, or as many as we can to guarantee that the companies we work with cannot abuse their position with monopoly power.
The project has also stated having zero interest in implementing support for cryptocurrencies. However, given that Bandwagon is an open source project, it wouldn’t be that surprising to see third parties build in support for various crypto payments for their respective communities.
A demonstration of a check-out purchase through Stripe, which also supports Apple Pay.
Looking at the Big Picture
On the surface, these new features are big milestones for supporting the Fediverse music community. If we dig a little deeper, we’ll find that everything powering this new experience is part of the underlying Emissary platform. This is one more tool in Emissary’s arsenal for developers to build distinct services with donations, payments, and commerce in mind. Maybe in the future, we’ll see new kinds of Emissary apps that could act as replacements for DeviantArt, Nebula, or GameDev Market.
There’s a reason this development is so important: the Fediverse today lacks any kind of commerce. While it’s possible to support people out-of-band through things like Patreon or OpenCollective, the reality is that the experience is pretty fragmented. Being able to support artists, musicians, game designers, open source developers, and instance admins are a necessity for growing a healthy Fediverse. If we could build standardized support for this kind of market commerce across different platforms, it could have a huge impact on the network’s ability to sustain itself.
For the last few months, A New Social has been working hard to support and improve Bridgy Fed, a popular tool for connecting different Bluesky and IndieWeb platforms to the Fediverse. While it does some impressive work under the hood, the team behind it is looking at a new tool to help people seamlessly move across networks, while keeping most of their contacts. This is the core premise behind Bounce.
The Purpose of Bounce
Bounce aims to tackle a distinct problem for the open Social Web: providing an easy way to get onto the network, or move from one to the other.
Starting on a new platform is tedious, and it often makes us hesitant to try something new, even if we know it could be a better experience for us. It’s how we become locked into experiences that, over time, are no longer ideal for us.
Bounce Announcement
“We want to make this process as easy as possible,” says Anuj Ahooja, Executive Director of A New Social, “it shouldn’t have to be rocket science to join a network and find all of your friends.”
Trying to move platforms or, heck, even move instances has historically been a tedious process. Within the Fediverse, a handful of platforms support Mastodon’s “move action”, but the process tends to be tedious and sometimes prone to failure.
How Bounce Works
The main idea behind Bounce is fairly simple: connect two different accounts, and click “Move” to migrate from one place to the other. Under the hood, Bounce uses the ActivityPub and AT protocol to handle migrating contacts. If you’re on Bluesky and move to Mastodon, or vice versa, Bounce handles the accounts on the other network by providing you with your contacts through Bridgy Fed.
Source: A New Social
Obviously, there are some caveats. The opt-in nature of Bridgy Fed means that your followers only need to enable Bridgy Fed for themselves, if they want their replies to make it back to you. People that you’re following will need to have Bridgy Fed enabled for you to see their posts from across networks. Not every Mastodon or Bluesky user wants to be connected to the other network, so it’s reasonable to assume that some contacts won’t be carried over. Bounce anticipates this by showing just who exactly you’re able to stay connected with.
Future Potential
There are a few areas where Bounce could have a significant impact for the Social Web. One might involve migrating ActivityPub data from one Fediverse platform or instance to another. A more interesting area for opportunity might be to import data and contacts from a proprietary social network, and help people easily find their friends in a new space.
What’s important to understand is that Bounce could end up providing critical infrastructure for user account migration between different networks and services. If the project can make the process of joining the Fediverse or Atmosphere easier for new people, it could have a significant impact on growing both networks as a whole.
After a long break, we're back to provide a pre-event commentary for FediForum 2025, which starts tomorrow! Sean and Damon were excited to launch the new season, and provide some insight on the FediForum postponement, collaboration between ActivityPub and AT Proto, and make some predictions for what topics are coming to FediForum this year.
Video Version
You can watch the video version of this episode on PeerTube below!
Show Notes
Our delay on this new season took so long that Sean grew […]
Mastodon’s work to highlight their platform to journalists led to the opportunity to host an aperitivo, with special guests Save Social, at the International Journalism Festival (April 9th – 13th, 2025) in Perugia, Italy.
IJF brings together people from across the news industry to talk about the issues they face and celebrate the work they are doing. This year, Big Tech was one of the topics that dominated the panel discussions.
Bonjourno Mastodon
Andy Piper speaking at the event. Source: Saskia Welch
Mastodon, represented by Andy Piper, Head of Communications, Felix Hlatky, CFO, and Philip Schröpel, Head of Staff, brought together supporters of the open social web, Big Tech-disbelievers, and curious locals to a small bar nestled in the old walls of Perugia.
Understanding that many in the audience were unfamiliar with Mastodon, Piper introduced the social platform to the room, highlighting the benefits for journalists. This included the work to highlight article authors, using the byline feature that rolled out in July last year, and emphasis on the value of links to external publications.
Mastodon promised new tools to track referrals through links would be rolling out across the network soon but were already live on mastodon.social – the server run by the Mastodon team.
Looking Ahead
Hlatky spoke of Mastodon’s future as an organisation and their ongoing work to transition from a German gGmbH to a new European nonprofit. He acknowledged internal work to restructure and remove single ownership from Mastodon claiming, “No one gives you money if one owner can run away with it.”
There was a strong message that Mastodon wanted what is best for their users, rather than their pockets. A stark contrast to the Big Tech platforms that had been discussed across the Festival.
Björn Staschen presenting Save Social at the event. Source: Saskia Welch
Save Social is a predominantly German-speaking effort to turn away from Big Tech social media platforms and strengthen alternatives. In less than three months, their petition has reached 200,000 signatures.
“We, as a society, have to be part of the solution,” said Staschen. “We want to strengthen alternative platforms. Ensure freedom of expression by creating diversity and transparency.”
Converting Attendees
When it came to joining Mastodon, Schröpel admitted there are “multiple ways”, but that the Mastodon team are able to support individuals and organisations in setting up their own instance or offer advice on the network.
Philip Schröpel presenting ways to join Mastodon. Source: Saskia Welch
However, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use.
Alongside presenting Mastodon as an alternative platform, the aperitivo offered one of the only opportunities to take tangible action against Big Tech at IJF – attracting doers, rather than the commentators that lined the panels of the main event.
Wrapping Up
“There’s a mix of people in this room right now with the same instincts we have to save democracy,” Piper said in his closing remark, encouraging collaboration and action.
Based on the panels at IJF 2025, journalists are more worried than ever about the role they play in democracy. Witnessing the actions of the White House, many journalists are now calling for an “EU alternative” to Big Tech platforms.
Mastodon now has the opportunity to present themselves as the EU alternative and help journalists protect democracy.
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.
Transphobia From a Co-Organizer
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.”
Community Response
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.
Official Updates
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.
Official Cancellation
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.
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 New Timeline
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.
Inbox vs Feed
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.
Inbox, left. Feed, right.
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.
Social Interactions
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.
Publishing
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
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.
Commenting and Discussions
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.
Search and Discovery
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.
Top of the landing page for Ghost’s publication directory.
Things We’d Love to See
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.
Privacy Scopes / Settings: some people will inevitably want to make some or all of their posts private, or choose not to be searchable on the network. Right now, this new timeline and integration lack any sort of configuration.
Profile Customization: Currently, Ghost doesn’t really let you customize your Social Web profile. Sure, you can see it, and it’s populated with data from your publication. However, some people are going to want to set an avatar and a header that don’t necessarily match their publication settings.
Rich Interactions: it would be great if the publisher modal could support hashtags, mentions, quote posts, polls, attachments, and visibility scopes. These are general baseline features supported by most Fediverse platforms to some degree.
Mastodon API: An increasing amount of Fediverse platforms leverage the Mastodon API to make use of the many, many Mastodon apps out there. In lieu of an official Ghost mobile app, this would be a great way for people to stay tapped in to the Social Web with very little friction.
Identity Migration: I would love to move my whole Fediverse identity onto Ghost at some point. The WordPress-ActivityPub plugin has recently started supporting this, but being able to “move with your feet” is a great feature.
Discovery / Explore: Let us find existing Ghost publications that have ActivityPub enabled! Let us subscribe directly through the protocol!
Template / Theme Support: From a design perspective, I would love to find a way to incorporate my status updates into my blog’s theme. This is something we’ve been experimenting on with WordPress, and it would be cool to see more publishing platforms support this.
The Bottom Line
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.
