September 7th: Rising Tides
Here's this week's roundup of things happening across the Social Web. Governance changes, questions of decentralization, and some new developments in the field.
Welcome back to Relay, We Distribute's newsletter that aims to keep a pulse on what's happening in the Social Web.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."
—William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
From We Distribute
Before we dive in to the meat and potatoes of our newsletter, here's the latest updates coming from us. We promise to keep it short and sweet!
News Updates
You might not know this, but the ActivityPub protocol that powers most of the Fediverse has two major parts to it: a server-to-server federation API, and a client-to-server API. Historically, the second part of the spec has not been well-supported by most Fediverse platforms, but the Social Web Foundation has been building out some interesting tools and demos to demonstrate why it's valuable.
Sean Tilley
The Decentered Podcast
We technically have TWO new episodes of Decentered available for you today! The first is actually a recording from the We Distribute Live panel we conducted at FediCon 2025. It's a great conversation, featuring the following people: Boris Mann, Anuj Ahooja, Evan Prodromou, Janet Vertesi, Chris Alamany, and Johannes Ernst.
For our new episode, I'm sitting down to talk to Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett, the co-founders of A New Social. Their organization maintains and develops Bridgy Fed, and recently brought Bounce, their new migration tool, to an open public beta. They're super thoughtful and forward-thinking, and gave a lot of interesting insights about what they hope to accomplish.
Sean Tilley
Around the Network
Here, we attempt to take a bird's eye view of what's going on within different parts of the Social Web. It's a bustling, constantly-growing space, and there's often lots of wild things going on in the background.
Fediverse
The Fediverse appears to be taking some small, but substantial evolutionary steps in how its organized. As an overarching project, the network has always been a loose collaboration between many different groups and projects. Working together in an anarchic space such as this can be really challenging, but it feels as though things are starting to bear fruit.
Governance
These first three articles focus on sea changes happening within the ActivityPub developer community. The venerable ActivityPub.Rocks site is being moved to community hands, and discussions are happening regarding a revamp to make it more accessible to developers and newcomers.
SocialHub is one of the oldest places to discuss the ActivityPub protocol, share notes on problems and solutions, and propose protocol extensions for different projects to adopt. Management of the forum in recent times has been reportedly rocky, with a lack of volunteers to maintain and moderate the platform, and a lack of clear leadership policies. Laurens Hof does a great job digging further into some of the challenges of maintaining a decentralized social movement.
Laurens Hof
Julian Lam, the development lead of NodeBB, has opted to launch a new forum called ActivityPub.Space, which seemingly aims to fill in some of the gaps left behind by SocialHub. One notable difference with SocialHub is that this new community forum heavily emphasizes federated conversations, where the people building their own Fediverse platforms can directly communicate with the forum from their own vantage points.
J Offline julian wrote last edited by #1
An interesting statement appeared from contributors working in the W3C Social Web Community Group, in response to some of the infighting regarding ActivityPub and ATproto.
Emelia Smith
Trust & Safety
In light of Bluesky's recent update regarding compliance with Mississippi's age verification law, Mastodon has similarly found itself under scrutiny by its users. While Eugen Rochko tried to spin the architectural differences between Mastodon and Bluesky as a positive, there are still open questions as to how and when such legislation may affect individual instances.
Sarah Perez
IFTAS, the Trust and Safety nonprofit for the Fediverse, is currently surveying instance admins for their 2025 Needs Assessment. The organization is actively seeking input from admins, moderators, and community members of all federated platforms, to gain deeper insight into what their needs and challenges are.
Music
In the vein of our previous Mixtapes, we're partnering with our friends at NHAM to help bring a focus back towards artists and musicians within the Fediverse. They have a great curated radio station up and running at The Indie Beat FM.
NHAM Mixtapes
Here's some new tracks that have been recently released by Fediverse Musicians:
"Fall of the Republic" by Samantha J Smith
Samantha J Smith presents an atmospheric, dystopian track that feels highly reminiscent of Year Zero. Dark, moody, and introspective, this feels like a synthwave introduction to Fallout London.
"90925" by Fast Ghost
Fast Ghost gives us a really fun track, with a bumping beat and some really funky synth noises. It's got a great energy, and doesn't let up!
"Earthfast Wondersmith" by Rob Of Walthamstow
This track feels like a long, introspective walk across town. There's a sense of personal discovery, growth, and anticipation as the listener travels through this soundscape.
Videos
The Fireside Fedi podcast recently had an interview with Dr. Robert W. Gehl, author of Move Slowly and Build Bridges.
Lorenzo's Music Podcast does a great job of reaching out to musicians within the Fediverse. In this episode, they interview Setto, the founder of Basspistol, an Underground Artist's Union that aims to support musicians and promote Creative Commons works.
Bluesky
Bluesky / The ATmosphere also has a lot of interesting things going on, and it's worth visiting some of the ongoing discussions happening in their space.
Community
Blacksky is doing some truly revolutionary work within the ATmosphere, effectively building all of their infrastructure from scratch to provide something that's simultaneously compatible with Bluesky, while also completely independent from it.
Rudy Fraser
The scientific community has gradually been making its way to different pockets of the Social Web. Notably, some academics found their way onto Open Science, a Bonfire instance, while others have comfortably settled in to Bluesky.
Ben Werdmuller
Moderation
The big controversy over the past few weeks has involved Bluesky's shuttering of services in US States that have age and identification laws for social media services.
This has led to some conversations about how decentralized Bluesky really is, and whether the Fediverse might be subject to the same problems.
Jon
New Developments
There's been a few interesting platform updates around the Social Web. Most notably is Mastodon 4.4, which will finally bring Quote Posts to the federated microblogging platform, along with lots of UX improvements.
The WordPress-ActivityPub integration continues to push forward with new improvements and updates, this time with better moderation controls, improved following systems, and support for federated deletion.
Konstantin Obenland
Pixelfed recently revamped their Stories feature, and this re-imagining adds a ton of new functionality for creating interesting, layered images with text and media.
pixelfed
BadgeFed is a wild project that aims to create federated achievement badges that can be conditionally assigned to profiles for a variety of things, like participating in events or completing a task. Now, more instances are cropping up!
Maho Pacheco
Loops has released their server backend's source code as part of v1.0.0-alpha1, and a handful of instances have started taking off.
joinloops
New Apps and Projects
- Oeee.Cafe is a federated doodle board where people can share their pictures with each other. It's cute, fun, and simple! The dev talks about it a little bit here.
- fedinspect-gtk is a tool for the Gnome desktop written by Andy Piper. You can use it to inspect instances!
- chatfed is an experimental application that aims to fit a real-time chat interface onto Fediverse groups.
That's all for this week! Thanks for reading Relay, and be sure to support your local instance admins, developers, and community members as they work to keep the network great.
Before you go!
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