August 22nd, 2025: Something Brewing

Welcome to Relay, the new weekly newsletter from We Distribute! Here, we attempt to round up the latest news, think pieces, and interesting finds from around the Social Web. This is a new experiment for us, but the goal is to help provide quick links and information about stuff you might've missed, that we might not have had the time to cover.

From We Distribute

First, let's focus on some of the things we've been working on with our publication. Think of this as a quick way to catch up, before venturing out into the rest of the network!

News Updates

Here's a quick summaries of articles we wrote over the past week that you may have missed. The big sea changes we're noticing involve monetization and payments, Meta scraping the Social Web to train their AI models, and some welcome updates to platforms in the space.

CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse

A new, open source, self-hostable fundraising system for the Fediverse has been released. The project is very young, but there’s a huge amount of promise.

We DistributeSean Tilley

Is Meta Scraping the Fediverse for AI?

Is a large corporate entity scraping a community-run open social network to train AI models for profit?

We DistributeSean Tilley

Big Updates Are Coming to Loops

Loops, the open source Tiktok alternative for the Fediverse, is continuing to evolve. Here’s what’s new for the video platform.

We DistributeSean Tilley

The Decentered Podcast

In case you weren't aware, we run our own in-house podcast show called The Decentered Podcast, where we interview people from across different branches of The Social Web to talk about interesting things they're working on. We focus on their background and experience, how they came into the space, what their doing, and their visions for the future.

S2E3 – Rabble from Nos.Social

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!

We DistributeSean Tilley

We had the great pleasure to interview Evan Henshaw-Plath from Nos.Social, who has an extensive background involving the intersection of activism and technology. It's a fascinating conversation that delves into the early era of online social media, and the evolution of decentralized communication networks.

Around the Network

Every week, we search the Fediverse far and wide to find interesting things written within the community. This space serves as a bird's eye view as to what's going on, what people are thinking about, and cool things people are working on in their spare time.

FediCon-Related

With the wrap-up for the first ever FediCon in-person event, a lot of members of the Fediverse community went to work, sharing their thoughts, experiences, and ideas about how to move the network forward. Additionally, almost all of the talks have finished the editing and encoding process, and are now available on PeerTube.

Patches, paths & The Matrix: FediCon thoughts Part I

The after hours Fediverse session at FOSDEM 2025 was held at HSBXL - Hackerspace Brussels. A cool, cyberpunk hangout. Wires everywhere, old computers, a fridge full of beer, Belgian goth-punks, and an old fashioned telephone receiver, hanging by its wire from the ceiling. We were in The Matrix.* In one

Paths & PatchesMichael Foster

The Fediverse in Real Life

What happens when you get a bunch of Fediverse people in a room together?

deadsuperheroSean Tilley

There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.

Over the past several years I’ve listened to admins, mods, and community managers from across the decentralised social media landscape. I’ve been in the chats, attended the conferences,…

jaz-michael kingFollow this Blog on Fediverse

Introduction to AT Protocol

Walkthrough of the various parts and concepts in Bluesky’s AT Protocol (ATProto), the types of servers involved and how it all fits together

Kuba Suder

Trust & Safety

The 2025 Fediverse Needs Assessment is Open: Have Your Say

Every year, IFTAS asks the people who keep our communities safe to tell us what they need.The Fediverse Needs Assessment gathers input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across…

IFTAS BlogFollow

Mark W.rites - Being a Mastodon Moderator

People ask me what it’s like to be a moderator. Our discussions reveal that a lot of what we do is a mystery. So, I’m gonna lay it out for you. Specifically ab…

Mark W.ritesMark Wyner

Mastodon Defence Command: The Scam Wave

It’s not a sci-fi blockbuster, it’s a serious issue. The Online Safety Act was passed into UK law in October 2023. Its roll-out is a slow process which has been taking place behind the scenes for a long time. Only now are we seeing the effects as various pieces of

FORbetterSaskia

The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

Aphyr

New Developments

Bridging the gap

The fediverse aims for a truly decentralized, interoperable social web, yet the landscape is still fragmented. Bridgy Fed helps close those gaps by letting ActivityPub-enabled WordPress sites form …

ActivityPub for WordPressMatthias Pfefferle

Bridging identity with account links

One of the most common questions we get here is, “can you help me connect all my different accounts?” You’re on Bluesky, and Instagram, and Mastodon, you make a video series on YouTube, you have a blog, sometimes you post on Reddit, and a while back you set up

A New SocialRyan Barrett

Exploring a Bonfire Geosocial Extension

Overview This issue explores implementing a basic geosocial extension for Bonfire that enables location-based social interactions without the privacy concerns, gamification and corporate overhead of foursquare. \ Relevant resources --------…

New Apps and Projects

There's always really cool things in development that most people don't know about. We don't always have time to get into detail about every project or application. However, we still want to take the time to share these treasures with you.

• DiveDB is an ActivityPub-powered platform for sharing data from undersea divers. The fact that this even exists blows my mind.
• Wanderer is a self-hosted privacy-first trail database for hikers to record their trail routes, and share it with friends through ActivityPub. You can import existing data from Strava and Komoot!
• Manyfold is an open source and federated alternative to Thingiverse, an online hub of STL files used for 3D printing.
• Bridge Browser is a fork of Mozilla Firefox that aims to bring Fediverse integration into the browser experience. Currently, it integrates with Mastodon and Lemmy.
• The Social Web Foundation has been developing some ongoing services and projects intended to bolster new capabilities in ActivityPub platforms. These include ap-components, a Web Components collection for showing ActivityPub Objects in the browser, Places.Pub, an effort to bridge OpenStreetMap location data to ActivityPub objects, a GeoSocial Activities client that uses Places.Pub, and an early draft for Messaging Layer Security over the ActivityPub protocol.

That's it for this week! Thanks for joining us, and we'll catch you within the next seven days.

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