FediForum has a new date and a new board

The fifth edition of FediForum has been rescheduled, and will be held on June 5-7. The event was originally planned for early April, but got cancelled at the last-minute after transphobic posts by one of the co-organisers of the event were surfaced. FediForum held two sessions in the meantime with the community on how the event should move forward. One of the outcomes is that there is now an advisory board for FediForum with people from the community. For this edition of FediForum, I will be hosting a session on what's been going on in the fediverse in 2025. The network is constantly changing and evolving, and this session is intended to get you up to speed on what's been happening in the last half year. More information on that soon.

Bandwagon talks about monetisation and sustainability

Bandwagon is a fediverse music sharing platform that's currently in development, where artists can share their music. They are currently working on online album sales, and Bandwagon is committed to making this feature available without taking any transaction fees. In order for the project to be sustainable, Bandwagon is a paid 10$/month paid premium plan which will enable online album sales and higher bitrate streaming. At the same time, creator Ben Pate is also committed to keeping the software open source, and says that the project needs other Bandwagon servers to exist if the project is to be successful. - Bandwagon.fm

Discourse and the fediverse

Forum software Discourse has posted a blog talking about how they have integrated ActivityPub into their forums. They explain how Discourse forums can now select per category if it is federated, and thus followable by other fediverse software. It also shows what Discourse-to-Discourse federation looks like, allowing 2 forums to cooperate with each other. Federated forums require a mindset shift as have to get used to seeing forum posts in their microblogging timelines. Forum software like Discourse and NodeBB have made great strides in the technological capabilities regarding what's possible with federated forums. Now people have to find out and experience what these technological features enable in practical use cases for people.

Bonfire slowly moves towards a 1.0 release

Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform, with a core functionality of microblogging with a focus on extensibility. In their latest update about how the platform is moving to a 1.0 release, Bonfire talks about the values and intentions of the platform, writing: "In a world of 'move fast and break things,' we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale."

Bonfire has taken a deliberate and mindful approach to software development, but their own description of "Slow Software" seems fairly accurate as well, as the team has talked about getting ready for a 1.0 release in the next few months since at least September 2023.

FediDB onboarding

Fediverse statistics site FediDB, operated by PixelFed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, now has an onboarding tool to help people get started with the fediverse. It asks the user a few simple questions: first to select the type of content they are interested in, such as microblogging, video or forums. Based on that choice, it recommends various platforms. Based on the platform choice it asks for a few simple filters, such as region and community size, before presenting the user with a list of servers to choose from for registration.

The onboarding tool is sleekly designed, and streamlines the signup process by boiling it down to a few essential questions that the user needs to answer. However, this also showcases the issues that the fediverse has with onboarding new users: picking a platform and picking a server are meaningful choices that are hard to fully grasp the impact from as a new user. When it comes to picking a platform, the tool lists a few features for each platform, but comparing the relevance of these features is hard to do as an outsider. And when it comes to picking servers, the challenge is that servers themselves often do not publish relevant information that is needed to make an informed choice of which server to pick.

Mastodon: Giving Journalists Options Away From Big Tech

Saskia Welch from Newsmast writes about Mastodon and the fediverse at the recent International Journalism Festival. A consistent challenge remains to put all the lofty ideals about healthy social networks into practice, with Welch noting: "However, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use." - WeDistribute/Saskia Welch

Owncast turns 5

The fediverse streaming platform Owncast turns 5 years this month, with a new merch store. One of the challenges of FOSS projects such as Owncast is the sustainability, and Owncast creator Gabe Kangas "at one point exhausted his personal savings so he could work on Owncast full-time." Kangas says that now "people want to be around in meaningful ways. From the newsletter, core code contributions, the Roku app, people answering questions in chat, people brainstorming in GitHub, it’s important for it to be bigger than myself". - Owncast Newsletter/Kit Rhett Aultman

The Links

• Test your knowledge of ActivityPub with this quiz.
• Search engine Kagi now has the option to find and filter for PeerTube videos.
• Mastodon's monthly engineering update, Trunks & Tidbits for April 2025, where the organisation announces that they've hired another front-end developer.
• Lemmy development update for April 2025.
• Domain blocking and notification improvements for Ghost.
• FediAlgo, a self-hosted algorithmic timeline for Mastodon, is now available as a web app as well.
• Flohmarkt is a fediverse market place, and Flohra is a new Android app for the platform.
• The Social Web Foundation released their first annual report.
• An interview with Christine Lemmer-Webber about the future of decentralised networks.