Laurens Hof

2024-11-05 18:10:59

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 91

Loops has finally launched, Radio Free Fedi will shut down, and governance for Bridgy Fed.

The News

Loops.video, the short-form video platform has finally launched, after weeks of delays. There is now an iOS app on TestFlight available, as well as an Android APK, and it there is no waitlist anymore. In some statistics shared by Loops developed Daniel Supernault, Loops now has more than 8000 people signed up and close to a 1000 videos posted. The app has the bare minimum of features, with only one feed that seems to be algorithmic, and there is no following feed. Supernault says that he is currently working on adding discovery features as well as notifications to the app. The app currently loads videos smoothly and quickly, and Supernault has already had to upgrade the server to deal with traffic. Loops is currently not federating with the rest of the fediverse, and you cannot interact with Loops from another fediverse account. This feature is planned, but there is no estimation when this will happen. Third party clients are already possible with Loops, and one is already available.

Radio Free Fedi has announced that it will shut down in January 2025. Radio Free Fedi is a radio station and community that broadcasts music by people on the fediverse. The project has grown from a simple stream into multiple non-stop radio streams, a specialty channel and a channel for spoken word, and build up a catalogue of over 400 artists who’s art are broadcast on the radio. Running a project requires a large amount of work, and was largely done by one person. They say that this is not sustainable anymore, and that the way that the project is structured make handing the project over to someone else not an option. Radio Free Fedi has been a big part of the artist’s community on the fediverse, which has contributed to a culture of celebrating independent art, and the sunset of Radio Free Fedi is a loss for fediverse culture.

In an update on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.

The Social Web Foundation will organise a Devroom at FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a yearly conference in Brussels for free and open source software, and will be on February 1-2, 2025. The Social Web Foundation is inviting people and projects to give talks about ActivityPub, in the format of either a talk of 25 minutes for bigger projects, or a lightning talk of 8 minutes.

OpenVibe is a client for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and has now added support for cross-posting to Threads as well. OpenVibe also offers the ability to have a combined feed, that shows posts from your accounts on all the different networks into a single feed, which now can include your Threads account, as well as your Mastodon, Nostr and Bluesky accounts.

The shutdown of the botsin.space server lead to some new experiments with bots on the fediverse:

• Ktistec is a single-user ActivityPub server that added support for bots in the form of scripts that the server itself periodically runs.
• A super simple server scripts for bots.

The Links

• Fediblock, a Tiny History – Artist Marcia X.
• A faux “Eternal September” turns into flatness – The Nexus of Privacy.
• Fediverse Migrations: A Study of User Account Portability on the Mastodon Social Network – a paper for the Internet Measurement Conference.
• IFTAS is collaborating with Bonfire on building moderation tools into the upcoming platform.
• Another update on how traffic from different platforms compare to the German news site heise.de
• Lemmy development update for the last two weeks.
• An infographic and blog on how account recommendations work in Mastodon.
• Ghost’s weekly update on their work on ActivityPug.
• For Mastodon admins: a script to ‘restart delivery to instances that had some technical difficulties a while ago but are now back online’.
• Letterbook is a social networking platform build from scratch, currently under development, and is holding office hours for maintainers.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-91/

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