It’s time to go back to the roots of Connected Places and Fediverse Report for a bit, with an overview of the software updates that happened in July, August and September. Ofcourse, a lot more happened in this period, and you can also expect more analytical articles and explainers on the cultural/social/governance aspects. But for now I’ve enjoyed just taking a look at the fediverse softwares itself. It took some piecing together to go through 3 months of software update history and figure out what happened, but I think I got most of it. So here’s what stood out the most to me about what’s been happening in the fediverse, explained in an accessible manner. Three changes that stood out to me the most:
- PeerTube has added shared moderation lists, and server admins can subscribe to blocklists and lists with keywords.
- Catodon can now be used with accounts on other fediverse services, and when you sign in with a Mastodon, Pixelfed, or other compatible accounts, it can be combined into a single timeline in Catodon.
- Owncast added recommendations between streams, where streamers can feature each other’s broadcasts and show when they are live, once the featured streamer has opt-ed into it.
So in no particular other:
Link-aggregator platform PieFed has added the ability to follow people directly, in addition to following communities. With this new update, someone’s posts can appear in your Subscribed feed, even if you don’t follow the community they are posting into. So if you find someone whose contributions you like, you can keep following them when they post about another subject elsewhere.Following Mastodon accounts is part of this too, and there is now the option bulk following, improved people search, and the option to approve followers manually.
There’s also support for using RSS feeds to automatically create posts in communities, with labels to distinguish the sources. For a community about local news or a particular hobby, this means relevant publications can appear as posts without someone having to submit each link by hand.
Manyfold is software for managing and sharing 3D models. Its July update added previews from FreeCAD thumbnails, making models easier to recognise in a library, and it’s September brought an API for writing changed content back to the same file. Developers can use this to let connected tools save edits directly into Manyfold, without a separate manual upload.
Catodon, a social platform based off the Misskey-lineage, added a blogging system in July. Blogs get their own pages and RSS feeds, with support for drafts and scheduled publishing, and posts federate as ActivityPub Articles, including edits and inline images. So you can publish an essay or a longer project update alongside your regular conversations, while still giving it a page people can visit and an RSS feed they can subscribe to. The September update for Catadon expanded this even more, with content warnings and privacy settings for individual blogs.
The other big update for Cataon is multi-server accounts, where Catodon’s interface can now act as a client for accounts on servers that use Mastodon or Pixelfed or other compatible software. You can arrange timeline tabs around your accounts, lists, RSS feeds and other sources, and that setup syncs across devices. This separates the choice of interface from the question of where your accounts are hosted.
Other fediverse interoperability updates for Catodon include quote posts compatible with Mastodon’s implementation, and remote PeerTube videos can now play directly in Catodon. The quote posts is notable since it already had support for quote posts via Misskey’s implementation (I love interoperability and standards).
Wafrn is a blogging platform inspired by Tumblr that connects to both the fediverse and the atmosphere. Its August updates added an option during registration to request a Bluesky account or bring your own later. It also added support for following custom feeds from atproto within Wafrn.
In the September update Wafrn released a first version of Articles. As Wafrn already allowed for longer posts, this distinction is a bit different than a 500character microblogging post. For Wafrn, Articles are posts with a title and a readable URL. Another interesting new feature is a queue for your posts that spreads them out over time. So when you create a bunch of posts, boosts or reply in a short time period, Wafrn will spread these out over time, so a burst of activity does not take over your followers’ timelines.
Wafrn also added fediverse-only and Bluesky-only posting, so you don’t have to send out posts to both networks if you don’t want to. Another helpful feature is that it also now lets you hide someone’s replies without muting or unfollowing them from your timeline, which is useful if you follow someone who makes good posts but also has a tendency to get into arguments in comment sections.
Streaming software Owncast lets people run their own live-streaming service, and the new version 0.3 added Featured Streams, which lets an Owncast site display other Owncast streams and show when they are live.
This means streamers can recommend each other’s broadcasts while continuing to run their own servers. This is an opt-in feature, that is built using ActivityPub, where being featured requires accepting a request, so the streamer gets to decide whether they want to be listed.
NeoDB is a social catalogue for tracking and discussing what you read, watch, listen to and play. A major part of adopting another reading tracking service is to important your reading history, and NeoDB has added reading progress and improved imports from StoryGraph, using ISBN and OpenLibrary lookups to match books, as well as support for MyAnimeList and MangaUpdates.
The import options now go beyond reading histories, and you can import your Mastodon or Twitter/X archive as local posts, (meaning they don’t get send out to your followers again), and you can even important and export articles from WordPress.
And discoverable NeoDB accounts can appear in Mastodon’s profile Collections, letting people include an account focused on books or films in their recommendations of whom to follow.
PeerTube 8.3 added the ability to subscribe to external blocklists, which gives admins a way to share ongoing moderation work. So when the list changes or gets updated, listed accounts and servers are automatically muted or unmuted as a result. These shared moderation lists are not only for accounts and servers, there are also subscriptions to watched-word lists. Another moderation feature is that admins can set rules to block videos which have particular labels or tags. Instances can also publish their own blocklist for others to subscribe to.
Forum software NodeBB added a bunch of new features for smoother interoperability. With hashtag following forum categories can interact with the fediverse more broadly. There is also support for for content warnings on posts from the rest of the network. And there is now more options to delegate powers as operator, without giving someone full administrator rights, such as for user management and post-editing permissions.,
Mastodon 4.7.0 can now recognise a remote account that changes its handle by using its underlying ActivityPub identifier. This does not mean Mastodon’s own users can change their handles yet, but it means that Mastodon can better work with software where that is already possible.
The release also expanded support for newer message signatures and verifiable ActivityPub objects. Private signing keys are now encrypted in storage, with groundwork for changing those keys in future. These are less visible changes, but they matter for other projects that need to stay compatible with Mastodon as they develop their own software.
The official Android app can now display Collections on servers that support them. These are the consent-based lists of accounts that people can share to help others find whom to follow.
FediHome is new self-hosted software for running a personal website that connects to the fediverse. It is designed for a single user, with support for publishing blog posts, photos, video and audio on your own domain via ActivityPub.
There’s also a built-in feed for following other people, so the site is both a place to publish and a way to participate in conversations. Bluesky integration brings Bluesky posts into the web timeline alongside fediverse posts, with support for liking, reposting and replying back to Bluesky.
It supports drafts and scheduled publishing, and you can export your writing and media if you want to take them elsewhere.
Let me know how you enjoy these kinds of updates. I’m planning to do these every month going forward, so if you want to see something different or if you feel I’ve been missing important updates, let me know!
