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Over the last few months I've shifted Connected Places more towards analysis articles, and away from the weekly 'here's what happened in the fediverse this week' articles. I like doing the more in-depth analysis, and I think its working well. However, I think that it is important that my analysis stays grounded in what's actually happening in the fediverse and the atmosphere. So that's why I don't want to skip over news updates. I'm still experimenting with what the best format and style for this is. This time, I'm trying a monthly overview of what stood out to me in the fediverse for the last month.
While writing this, the European Commission published their Tech Sovereignty Plan. It is light on plans that have an impact on open social protocols or open socials in general, because who needs sovereignty for your social communications infrastructure anyway. Mastodon does get a mention however:
"To support the uptake of existing open source solutions as sovereign technology solutions, the
Commission will carry out the following measures: Strengthen the open source social media space by supporting open and decentralised social media solutions and platforms. The Commission currently runs a Mastodon instance, which hosts the Commission’s presence and plans to extend the users basis to EU institutions."
While it is good to see the European Commission reiterate on their commitment to the fediverse, it's not actually anything new, the European Commission has had their own Mastodon server for years now. Clicking the 'create account' button on your own Mastodon server is not actually particularly hard thing to do. And the grand strategic plan for Europe to become more sovereign in tech is to just, click the button that could have been clicked for years? Ambition is alive and well in Europe, clearly.
In numbers: The EC's Tech Sovereignty Plan allocates 120 billion euros for chips, 200 billion euro for data centers (mostly private sector), and 100 billion euro for cloud and AI leadership. The Open Source Strategy will get 2 billion euros. The money in the Open Source Strategy that goes towards the Open Internet Stack (where social communication stuff seems likely to live) is 41.3 million euro via three Horizon calls, that will be used for forward-thinking and futuristic plans like 'the Web 4.0 architectural framework and Open Internet Stack applications for virtual worlds.'
So now that the plan is out, it is pretty clear that Tech Sovereignty for Europe does not actually mean social networking sovereignty in any meaningful sense, judging by how the EC is allocating the money.
Meanwhile, what actually happened on the actual fediverse that people use last month:
Lemmy has been around for a long time in the fediverse, and it is gearing up for an 1.0 launch. The new version is available in open beta, and comes with a bunch of major new features. There's a new UI, new features such as post tags, grouping communities into a custom feed (similar to what PieFed has, and it's one of my favorite features there), better filtering, and the ability to lock comments. The standout feature is Private Communities, where "Only approved followers can view the content (plus other community visibilities)." I recently already flagged this private community feature as an example of how the open social web is moving towards bounded spaces when I wrote about Matrix. People's perception of fediverse and the atmosphere is largely dominated by microblogging, but Lemmy (and PieFed) has been going strong for years now, and the monthly active users have stayed consistent around 40k for multiple years. While this side of the network did not see the large spike of new people that Mastodon and Bluesky saw with people leaving Twitter, it also did not see the drop-off in activity either. Lemmy has found a stable group of users, and I'm very curious to see how new features such as private communities will change the community and culture.
The WordPress integration with the open social web continues to expand, in multiple directions. The WordPress ActivityPub plugin started as a way to distribute your WordPress articles natively via ActivityPub. Over the last few months, it has grown into a full social networking platform in itself: The WordPress.com Reader has existed as an RSS reader for years, but is now natively connected to both ActivityPub and atproto, and has support for tags.pub as well, allowing you to more easily follow hashtags. A few months ago WordPress also added full two-way integration with the fediverse, so people can interact with a WordPress post directly from the post as well, and more recently added statistics as well, giving people insight in how their blogs perform. There's also support for the ActivityPub API, which means 'third-party Fediverse apps can now create, edit, and delete posts on your blog directly, the same way they would on a Mastodon account.' Finally, the same team also released a separate plugin for atproto, which allows you to distribute WordPress posts directly into the atmosphere as well. Supporting both protocols makes using WordPress for distribution more attractive: writers aren't interested in the nuances of the different protocols (except me I guess), and just that people can find and follow them.
IFTAS has been tracking how a Russian botnet called Portal Kombat has been using the fediverse for misinformation and propaganda. They report having found over 2500 accounts so far. They report every one of these accounts to the server admins, but only 60% have been suspended. Part of the problem seems to be that the botnet makes use of fediverse servers with open signups that are not actively being moderated, allowing the bots to continue even after being reported. IFTAS also shared a new deny list, an 'aggregated list reflecting the domain blocks in place on the Mastodon communities that host roughly 50% of all Mastodon accounts.' This gives new server admins a baseline denylist to use, and IFTAS notes that this deny list would block the bulk of the Portal Kombat botnet accounts that are not being taken down.
Flipboard's Mike McCue interviewed Mastodon Executive Director Felix Hlatky, as part of Mastodon existing 10 years. In it, Hlatky says that most people who joined Mastodon as part of the 2022 spike have left, and that new users "don't really find their crowd", as it is "hard to stumble upon people by accident", a consequence of "our decision, like product decision, not to have an algorithmic feed". Mastodon not having an algorithm is often seen as a selling point by its users, and I find in interesting to see the Executive Director here also pointing out that there is a real cost for Mastodon to not have an algorithmic feed.
Short-form video platform Loops have gotten some new updates: Starter Kits, compatible with Mastodon, allow people to create a curated set of accounts for other people to follow when they sign up. There is now also the option for curated onboarding, where admins can create an onboarding form with questions, and approve or deny new accounts based on that. As open registration servers run a risk of getting abused by bad actors (see IFTAS's observations above), curated on-boarding is an effective way of fighting this. Loops can now also show you analytics for your videos with a new dashboard. Loops videos can now also be embedded on any other page (provided the creator has opted-in), for easier sharing the videos. Finally, with Loops can you can now also create (and share) playlists of videos.
FitPub is a new 'federated social fitness platform and Strava alternative' that just launched. It lets you upload workouts, with detailed metrics and maps, if so desired. It is open source and self-hostable, with the creator also running an instance at fitpub.social.
Upcoming conferences: next FediForum will be October 6-7, 2026 (online), and FediCon will be at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly in Vancouver, BC, Canada on August 6th–9th, 2026.
Jaz-Michael King is worth reading in a blog "There Are a Million Fediverses. Some of Them Are Louder than Others." where King describes how chronological feeds on social networks like the fediverse can distort people's perception of the zeitgeist and culture, with some ideas on how to better tools that allow online social places to better represent out communities.
Some reading and other links:
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