If you run a WordPress-powered blog, either on wordpress.com or on an independent hosting service, you can turn it into a Fediverse account that people can follow from Mastodon etc. More info about how to do this (and lots of questions answered) at:

➡️ https://fedi.tips/wordpress-turning-your-blog-into-a-fediverse-server

You can follow the official account for the plugin that enables this at:

➡️ @activitypub.blog

You can also follow its lead developer at:

➡️ @pfefferle

#FediTips #WordPress #Fediverse #ActivityPub

🫣 Ghost это платформа для блогов, которую можно Self-hosted развернуть, так вот её не просто локально можно развернуть, а ещё и
Settings (Настройки) → Growth (Рост) → Network (Сеть)
Активировать тумблер включения сети Fediverse!
После этого ваш блог сгенерирует ActivityPub-адрес (например, @yourusername@yourdomain.com), который можно будет найти через поиск в Mastodon.

Да, блог платформа, которая использует Fedify чтобы делать контент доступным для Fediverse! 🫣

Для пользователей WordPress
Блогер заходит в админку WP → Плагины → Добавить новый → ищет «ActivityPub». Нажимает «Установить» и «Активировать»
（Это официальный плагин от команды WordPress）

Плагин автоматически генерирует для сайта или конкретных авторов Fediverse-аккаунты. Выглядеть они будут привычно (например, @yourusername@yourdomain.com) 🫣

Следующим шагом хочется какой-нибудь хаб написать, который будет проходить пауком по всем бложикам добрых людей и finally свой крутой и децентрализованный Хабр где ты себе цензор! 🫣🫣🫣

Делаем?

#selfhosted #wordpress #ghost #fediverse #activitypub

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На фоне глубокого космоса с россыпью звёзд в центре сияет большая фиолетово-синяя туманность, символизирующая ядро децентрализованной сети. Вокруг неё парят уникальные летающие острова и небольшие планеты, соединённые множеством светящихся пунктирных линий, образующих сложную сетевую паутину без единого центрального узла. Каждая планета выглядит как отдельный мир со своим характером. На одной возвышаются раскалённые вулканы и потоки лавы. Другая представляет собой футуристический кибергород с неоновыми небоскрёбами. Есть ледяное королевство с сияющим замком, зелёный лесной остров с огромным деревом, индустриальный стимпанк-город с паровыми механизмами, уютная деревня с мельницей, остров с водопадами и густыми лесами, тропическая лагуна с пальмами, древние пустынные руины, фиолетовый кристальный мир и небольшие средневековые поселения. На некоторых планетах заметны узнаваемые символы популярных блоговых платформ, например логотип WordPress на футуристическом городе и логотип Ghost на другом острове, что подчёркивает разнообразие независимых блогов в одной сети. Между всеми мирами протянуты десятки светящихся синих, голубых и фиолетовых маршрутов. Они пересекаются во множестве точек, создавая ощущение настоящей распределённой сети, где каждая планета связана сразу с несколькими соседями. Ни одна из них не выглядит главной или центральной — вся композиция передаёт идею равноправного взаимодействия множества независимых узлов. Общее настроение изображения — фантастическое, вдохновляющее и немного напоминающее карту мира из видеоигры, где каждый остров является уникальным уровнем, а вся галактика вместе символизирует свободный, открытый и децентрализованный интернет.

»Discovery Week 2026: What we learned, and what we’re doing next« https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/08/discovery-week-2026-what-we-learned-and-what-were-doing-next/?Fedizen.EU #Fedizen #Fediverse #ActivityPub #News

If you're into photography, there is a free open Flickr-style photography platform which you can host yourself called Vernissage. It also has Fediverse compatibility so people can follow Vernissage accounts from Mastodon, Pixelfed etc. More info at:

🌱 https://joinvernissage.org

You can follow at:

🌱 @vernissage

For techy people who want to install their own Vernissage manually, docs are at:

🌱 https://docs.joinvernissage.org/documentation/vernissageserver

#SelfHosting #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Flickr #Alternatives #Photography

@django honestly, struggling between publishing semantic ActivityPub Articles, and the limited display that mastodon does with what could be displayed inline as a Note

#ActivityPub #Article #UI

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Screenshot of the previous post showing the article as a title, summary and link.

You are looking for a way to increase your instances visibility and have more Inbox? Look no further, check out https://rel.re our state of the art selfmade #activitypub #relay in #golang. Its incredibly fast, stable and feature rich.

I've been pouring quite a bit of time and energy into running my own #Decentralized instance, and this is only the beginning! My current #Pleroma instance is essentially a test environment, I'm planning to migrate to other platforms down the road.

But the real challenge lies elsewhere. If you read my previous post, you know I've been struggling to get my friends and family on board. I can still convince my parents and grandmother to try #Matrix, but pulling my friends over is a whole different story. They seem open to the idea of an #ActivityPub + Matrix combo, yet they're dragging their feet. The most active person on my instance (aside from me) hasn't even bothered to set a profile picture.

So I wanted to ask everyone who's active in the #Fediverse — how did you bring your friends here? What got them interested? 🤔

#SelfHosted #OpenSource #Federation #SocialMedia #Community

Seeking beta testers for a new opt-in Fediverse service - FediAdhan
https://fediadhan.org/

Have you ever felt your #Mastodon timeline was missing something? You get regular updates about the weather, the bongs of Big Ben on the hour; perhaps even that one account that toots like a chicken. But you've been missing timely updates about the Islamic call to prayer.

No longer: with FediAdhan, simply pick your location on the map and you'll get an account you can follow from your #ActivityPub client, which will drop a toot in your timeline when any of the five Islamic prayer times rolls around (and optionally for sunrise as well). And you get a neat pie chart of daylight/twilight for your location, as a bonus.

Explicitly opt-in, privacy focused, #HumanMade with no LLMs used at any stage in development. Try it out, let me know if you have thoughts, feedback, issues you run into.

What’s the best convention for multiple #ActivityPub accounts for the same person?

I’ve got @si@ramblingreaders.org for my reading tracking.
There’s also @si@truefans.social for podcast engagement.
This one for manual updates.

Are other folks aggregating feeds into one?

Still pretty happy with what we did here for #p2p #ActivityPub https://distributed.press/2023/12/05/announcing-distributed-press-social-inbox-1-0/

After the flourishing of Web 1.0 all the action was a return to centralization (and #enshittification ). It wasn't all bad: #wikipedia and #openstreetmap are products of this era. But it doesn't help with our mental models to call this era "Web 2.0".

In fact we'll know the Web 2.0 when we see it: It will mean standard and readily usable (by *almost* everyone) software will boot and connect to the Web in seamless bidirectional ways.

#activitypub (or its evolution) might deliver this 🖖

2/2

@nicd @Oleksii

Looks like it is self-hostable: https://github.com/ente/ente/tree/main/server#self-hosting

Might also shoot an issue to them to add #ActivityPub support.

@gabboman @jcm

In theory you can do anything you want, and in practice people do that too. As long as you don't break anything that #ActivityPub specs prescribe, the #ActivityStreams vocabulary is just a 'toolbox' of #SocialWeb primitives you can use as building blocks in your solution. The only issue arises if you want your mechanism to have #interoperability with other #fediverse solutions. They should either ignore, or understand it, and not break. Writing a #FEP is the best-practice way to walking the path of adoption of your approach.

Another random #ActivityPub question:

Is it possible to like an activity? Could I like a like?
Based on my understanding of the spec it should be possible (but I could be wrong, I find it very confusing how the ActivityPub Vocabulary spec lists multiple Object types and multiple Activity types, despite an Activity also being an Object)…

Is there any software supporting this? :D

I added a list of recommended libraries to the ActivityPub developer guide:

https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/guide.md#libraries

- activity (Go, used in GoToSocial)
- Fedify (JavaScript, used in Hollo and Ghost)
- Fedipub (Ruby, used in Manyfold)
- activitypub_federation (Rust, used in Lemmy)
- APx (Rust, used in Mitra)

This list only includes libraries that are actually used somewhere. Libraries that are not used, or used in projects with too few users are not included.

#fedidev #activitypub

BizzFed does it differently: a federated professional network built on ActivityPub. A chronological feed instead of an algorithm, your account is yours, your instance is yours (or whoever you trust), and your profile is portable. #Fediverse #ActivityPub #LinkedInAlternative

@evan @klml

#ForgeFed is an #ActivityPub extension that is developed as an open standard. It forms a protocol in itself: specifications for #forge federation.

In the poll above it should've been listed. It might replace 'Git', because that is not a protocol for forge federation. Git is a protocol for distributed version control systems (DVCS).

ActivityPub is more a framework than something you can use out-of-the-box. Arguably ForgeFed might even replace ActivityPub in the poll.

AP is a protocol for developing interoperable social networking solutions. It has no knowledge at all about code forges. It is based on Linked Data.

ForgeFed is a protocol for federating code forges. It is based on ActivityPub.

Btw, active ForgeFed projects:

- https://codeberg.org/activitypub-rs/activityforge

- (on roadmap) https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation

@evan

And in Activitypub I'm sure there are a lot of features specific to code handling that likely aren't supported. That's why it seems to me that unless either protocol has a major rewrite with this specific usecase in mind, that we're going to have to Frankenstein this.

#Activitypub #Git #Coding #Decentralization #Fediverse

Thanks #Fediverse, Thanks #ActivityPub, Thanks all the hackers that make my social network the only social network I want.

I have never wanted to have a social network account owned by a company. I have never understood who would?? Which, to this day, has taught me so very much about how little I understand people.

Nevertheless. I woke up grateful this morning to have a social network I can feel good about after all.

It's not perfect. Nothing is perfect, but I can participate openly here. Thx

The wiki reveals even different timeline:

To me, it seems, that Gargon simply was not as colossal nerd, as others, and somehow managed to create cult following of sufficient number of users, which were not really techies.

I think it was in 2016 already that German tech media got interested in decentralised alternatives to corporate silos. Mastodon caught their interest, being developed in Germany and all. Pleroma didn't, in spite of being developed in Germany, too, not to mention more feature-rich than Mastodon. Friendica was developed in Germany back then already, too, but it seemed like either tech media weren't interested in alternatives to something that needed alternatives much more than Twitter, or Friendica managed to continue to fly under the radar even then.

Anyway, Mastodon got media coverage, and nothing else did.

In 2017, right-wingers started attacking furries and queers on Twitter. They had to escape somewhere. Tumblr wasn't it, having been pretty much killed by being bought out and G-rated. But someone happened to know Mastodon due to the media coverage whereas nobody happened to know Pleroma due to no media coverage at all. So those furries and queers escaped to Mastodon. "Awoo" was briefly part of Mastodon's culture in the late 2010s due to the high furry-to-non-furry rate.

From then on, Mastodon had the two advantages of past media coverage and more users. The rest was like a snowball, essentially. The more users something has, the more users something gains by inviting them.

I guess Friendica and Hubzilla, both of which already existed back then, suffered from the same choice of mindsets: "If you build it, they will come," "We'll first need to get this and that fixed before we're ready for prime time," "Can't someone else take care of that? I'm bad at advertising stuff!" Plus, of course, people who really were bad at advertising stuff to anyone who's neither a developer nor a server admin.

I was thinking about need for decentralized social media since at least 2009, as I was watching the old web to slowly loose any relevance. (My Facebook account was canceled without any explanations as soon as perhaps sometimes like 2010?).

By the way, what killed StatusNet was when Identi.ca changed its backend from StatusNet to pump.io and its protocol from OStatus to ActivityPump, thus becoming incompatible with the rest of StatusNet. What remained was largely unable to stand alone. What kind of helped Identi.ca (OStatus as a profile sucked so badly that Evan and Erin themselves had to whip up ActivityPump) did the opposite to StatusNet. A bit later, the FSF scooped it up, forked it to GNU social and eventually merged what was left of StatusNet into GNU social. It got ActivityPub support later on, but it's gone now, too.

Also, in 2010, Mistpark was around, and so was diaspora* (or what already existed of it at that time). diaspora* had tons of advance publicity due to its crowdfunding stunt, but then the four devs didn't manage to deliver before public interest had faded away, even with Mike's help on the protocol (not even kidding here). And speaking of Mike, he built Mistpark, but almost nobody came because he did nothing in terms of advertising. Even though Mistpark of May, 2010 was more powerful than diaspora* is today. Even though Mistpark took two months for a public alpha and four for a stable point release whereas it took diaspora* years to go beyond alpha, not to mention the entire development team being replaced.

I guess you would have been a prime Friendica user candidate. Particularly, you would have been one of those who were happy on a Friendica node without the performance-hogging Facebook connector in times when everyone was seeking out and piling onto the nodes with that connector, just to see them close registration at not even 150 accounts.

I was thinking about basing it on bunch of combined RSS feeds, the publicly compatible vs. the activity stream, which is not so different from from like ActivityPub is made today, except that signing of content with public keys is more advanced concept, that what I was able to imagine.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Pleroma #StatusNet #Identi.ca #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #OStatus #ActivityPump #ActivityPub

Slowly developing the in depth testing of the same functionality at different levels in the #GoActivityPub stack.

I have just finished the collection pagination integration test as exposed in the reference server implementation for the library. So we now have the same pagination functionality covered in unit-tests in the different storage backends, also covered by the storage conformance suite, and now, through an integration test in the server application itself.

#ActivityPub #ActivitypubDev #fedidev

Also, ALT text translates with the rest of the post, which can be helpful for images which contain only foreign language text.

Hubzilla is the most incompatible ActivityPub software in Fediverse. You do just lot of things wrong, to put it mildly.

Here are the facts:

Mastodon was launched in January, 2016.

Hubzilla was launched in March, 2015. Counting an earlier incarnation named Red, it was created in May, 2012, when Friendica's creator re-wrote his own fork of a Friendica fork of his own.

Mastodon implemented ActivityPub in September, 2017, when the spec wasn't finalised yet.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub in July, 2017. Two months before Mastodon. Hubzilla was the first software to ever implement ActivityPub.

Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub strictly by the book. It has always tried to stick as close to the official W3C ActivityPub spec as possible.

Mastodon, in stark contrast, has always been stretching the ActivityPub spec until it broke. Not only that, but it has always been adding stuff outside the spec. First it did so to take over certain features from StatusNet which was its original protocol. More recently, it did so with the very intention to break compatibility with the rest of the Fediverse and make everything that isn't Mastodon look broken. And people like you keep falling for it because they think they know for a fact that Mastodon is the ActivityPub reference implementation.

The whole Fediverse has to break the ActivityPub spec just to be able to federate with Mastodon.

yes, the Hubzilla author is writing Streams, with nomadic identity, but it also means, that he understands, that Hubzilla approach is kind of dead-end.

Mike Macgirvin, creator of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte created his post-Hubzilla server applications because he kept advancing the Zot protocol. And he couldn't implement these advancements into Hubzilla because they bore the chance of breaking compatibility with what already existed.

(streams) is not a completely new development, nor is it a straight Hubzilla fork.

(streams) is a 2022 fork of Roadhouse.
Which was a 2022 fork of either the third Osada or Mistpark 2020 or Redmatrix 2020.
Which were 2020 forks of Zap (or each other, but at least one of them was forked from Zap).
Which was a 2018 fork of either Hubzilla itself or the first Osada, which was a 2018 fork of Hubzilla.

Osada and Zap were created to develop Zot6. In its early stages of concept, Mike expected Zot6 to be incompatible with everything else. Mind you, he didn't see that as something bad. Advancing Zot was necessary because the then-current version of Zot was less than optimal. And Mike's vision was a decentralised, nomadic network named the "Grid", entirely based on Zot. The Grid would have been vastly superior to the existing Fediverse in every way possible.

So the issue with his early draft of Zot6 was that it was quite incompatible with non-nomadic protocols. Nomadic Zot6 content could not be translated into non-nomadic protocols like the diaspora* protocol or ActivityPub.

Thus, developing Zot6 on Hubzilla was out of question. Zot6 would have broken too much on Hubzilla. Besides, Hubzilla was bad as a platform to experiment on due to its wealth of supported protocols and other features, all of which would have had to be made compatible with Zot6.

And this is the real reason why Mike created Osada and Zap. From how I see it, and how I remember what he talked about back in the day (I was there, yes), he first forked Osada from Hubzilla. Then he ripped everything out that he didn't need, including support for all protocols except for Zot itself, ActivityPub, RSS and Atom, including the CMS stuff like articles, planning cards, notes, wikis and webpages, etc. Then he modified what was left against his early version of Zot6.

Then he discovered that a cloned Osada channel couldn't properly send content via ActivityPub.

Then, shortly afterwards, he forked Osada into Zap. He removed nomadic identity from Osada which kept ActivityPub and ActivityPub support from Zap which stayed nomadic.

The idea was to have a nomadic, cloned channel on Zap as your main channel that would only connect to Hubzilla, Osada and Zap, and to have an additional, non-nomadic channel on Osada that would serve as a "gateway" between nomadic Zap and the non-nomadic ActivityPub Fediverse.

Of course, this was highly impractical. But by 2019, Mike found a way to make Zot6 compatible with non-nomadic protocols. So, in early 2019, Mike discontinued Osada and forked a new Osada from Zap which only differred from Zap by having ActivityPub support while still being nomadic. This enabled Mike to have one development platform for Zot6 in conjunction with non-nomadic protocols and another one on which ActivityPub did not stand in the way.

Later in 2019, both Osada and Zap got stable releases. At that point, Osada and Zap were identical in code. Both had ActivityPub support. It was included into their cores now and no longer an add-on like on Hubzilla. They only had two differences. One was the branding. The other one was that Osada servers had ActivityPub activated by default, and Zap servers had ActivityPub disabled by default. Keeping Osada around was unnecessary now, so ActivityPub was activated by default on Zap, and Osada was discontinued. Zot6 was so stable that it was soon backported to Hubzilla.

Mike wasn't done yet, though. He now wanted to develop Zot8. Again, he did not want to develop protocol changes on stable production software that people potentially daily-drove.

Thus, three new forks emerged in 2020: another Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 (named after the Red Matrix, the name that Hubzilla bore from late 2012 to early 2015 between being created as Red and being re-branded into Hubzilla). Mike used them to develop Zot8. They were identical in all but brand identity.

This was fully intentional on Mike's part to confuse the hell out of the brand fetishists that were growing more and more numerous in the Fediverse. His goal was for people to declare Osada or Misty or Redmatrix the best Fediverse software and superior to everything else, just for him to tell them that Osada, Misty and Redmatrix are absolutely identical. In fact, the three remained identical to Zap in features.

Zot8 never got stable because Mike kept advancing it further and further. In early 2022, he was at Zot11. But Zot11 was so incompatible with everything else, including previous Zot versions, that Mike declared it a new protocol of its own and renamed it Nomad. In order to test-drive it, he forked Osada or Misty or Redmatrix into Roadhouse. After all, there were people who were daring enough to daily-drive production channels on Osada, Misty and Redmatrix, albeit only few. Roadhouse was still identical in features to Zap, Osada, Misty and Redmatrix.

It was now possible to crossgrade between Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse by simply rebasing the server code.

Later in 2022, he created a new fork of Roadhouse itself. The reason for this was not further protocol advancement. No, this time, it mostly had branding and licensing reasons.

First of all, he wanted to make that fork as easy for others to fork and adopt as possible. Everything he had developed so far was under the MIT license (he himself had relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3 in 2011, but he didn't actually develop on Friendica; he developed on a fork named Free-Friendika that was still MIT-licensed and then backported the changes to the Friendica repository, and Red was a Free-Friendika fork). This new repository was released into the public domain. At first, the whole thing was never primarily intended to be installed on servers as it was, but rather to be forked as the base of something new.

At least the core and Mike's own add-ons were. What third-party add-ons from Hubzilla times were still there got to keep their maze of licenses. This was intentional on Mike's part, too. It would make it impossible for commercial players to scoop up the whole thing and relicense it into something non-free and commercial without breaking any licenses, or without pumping tons of money into their legal department to work around that maze of licenses.

Also, Mike removed any and all naming and branding from the software. He absolutely intentionally made it nameless. You've read that right. He did this for two reasons. One, whoever wanted to fork it would have to give the fork an individual name and an individual branding. Two, this was to mess with brand fanbois and brand fetishists even more: This thing had no brand to gush over to begin with.

Furthermore, Mike removed all nodeinfo code that he could possibly get away with removing. Again, this was intentional. One intention was to stop this software from automatically joining the "my Fediverse project is bigger than yours" and "my server is bigger than yours" rat races. He intentionally did everything he could to keep this software away from The Federation, Fediverse Observer, FediDB and the like.

The other intention was for the case of commercial players looking for free code to steal. If this software had really taken off and left its stats proving its popularity everywhere, some big commercial player would have been likely to try and steal this software, make it commercial and non-free and release it as their own original creation. So his intention was for them to not even be able to find it in this case. (This, by the way, was the reason why he relicensed Friendica under the AGPLv3, and why he hardly ever spoke about Free-Friendika: Now that Friendica was growing popular, he didn't want big commercial players to scoop up code of his under a license that they could change to non-free.)

This server application became the first and only one in the Fediverse with no fixed server type identifier, in fact, with none at all by default. It has one text field for the server name, just like Mastodon and Friendica and Hubzilla and the like. But it has an additional field where the server type, i.e. the identifier for the software, can be entered. If none is entered, it's derived from the server name. Mike used to have a server that identified as "Y" because, as he said, "Y is not X."

While the application itself is nameless (for it still is), the code repository did require a name of sorts. Mike named the repository "streams".

Now, the community needed something to call that nameless software when they spoke about it. So they unofficially established "(streams)", complete with parentheses that make sure that this is not actually the name of this software. Those who say, "Streams," with a capital S and no parentheses, and who use that term as if it's an official name, usually sincerely believe that this is the official name.

Mike himself uses "streams" without the parentheses because even he needs something to call his own software by. Before Forte was made, he preferred talking about the streams repository without directly mentioning the software. And he himself denied that (streams) is even a project. It's just a bunch of code that runs.

As far as I know, it was now possible to freely crossgrade between six different server applications because they were still identical in features. Only that Mike also had six server applications to take care of now.

So on December 31st, 2022, Mike discontinued Zap, Osada, Misty, Redmatrix and Roadhouse. Admins who ran either of these on their servers were recommended to rebase their servers to the streams repository. In this case, by the way, the old branding was kept. I've seen a server that still had "zap" as its subdomain which indicated that it was set up as a Zap server, that had Misty branding, but that actually ran (streams).

From then on, Mike dedicated his time to maintaining and developing only the streams repository. He still occasionally helped Hubzilla out, though.

In 2023, the Mitra creator and developer silverpill approached Mike. The goal was to make Mitra nomadic. I guess earlier attempts using a blockchain and crypto technology didn't come to fruition, so it had to be Mike's way which had proven itself stable for more than a decade. However, Mitra was to remain based on ActivityPub.

It was in this exchange that Mike realised that ActivityPub could indeed be used for nomadic identity if a few things were added to it. One outcome was FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" which introduced decentralised IDs (DIDs) that would not be bound to any one server domain.

Instead of creating a whole new server application to play with, Mike simply made a "nomadic" branch in the streams repository (even though the software was already nomadic) in which he implemented support for nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Support as in (streams) understanding it while internally still using Nomad for nomadicity.

In June, 2024, Mike considered the "nomadic" branch reliable enough and merged it into the "dev" branch.

In July, 2024, Mike merged the "dev" branch into the "release" branch which caused DIDs as per FEP-ef61 to be rolled out to existing production servers. On accounts created on this new version, channels would have a DID internally. On accounts greated on any previous version, even new channels would keep the old ID system for the time being. This way, existing accounts and channels weren't messed with.

However, what had worked under supervised and restricted lab conditions completely blew up under real-life conditions. Again, I was there on (streams) with a pre-DID account and two channels on it. I still have them. (streams) channels wouldn't federate with anything anymore. It had become impossible to send anything anywhere. What Mike was facing was nothing short of an enigma because not even he knew what was going in.

So he started tinkering. In mid-August, Mike forked the streams repository into something named and branded Forte. He did so so he could rip the Nomad protocol out while still keeping the entire functionality. He had to get rid of Nomad because he had discovered that (streams) got confused juggling all the many IDs it had to deal with, so he had to weed out the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to make things easier. But he couldn't possibly have done that on (streams) proper.

This way, Mike created the very first Fediverse server software that uses ActivityPub for full nomadicity, including cloning.

By the end of August, things got back to normal. But Mike, having spent every free minute in the last few weeks to get (streams) back into working condition, was burned out. He sent an open message around in which he declared that he would completely retire from Fediverse development, and both the streams repository and Forte were up for grabs.

But nobody was found who could take over either. (streams) and Forte probably had way fewer than 100 users combined. Those few who would have been able to maintain either didn't have time. One did have time and was willing to do so, but he didn't know how to code. He eventually did start teaching himself, and he occasionally contributes merge requests, but there was no way he could take over as the only dev for either, much less both. So Mike had to go on, whether he wanted or not, albeit at a somewhat slower pace.

This is why Mike is still developing (streams) and Forte to this day.

By the way: The reason why Mike "abandoned" his old software was because he needed to invest all his time into protocol development and advancement. Mike isn't the one to constantly maintain stable server software unless he absolutely has to.

In 2011, he handed Friendica over to two new developers so that he had time to create the Zot protocol.

In 2015 already, he handed Hubzilla over to two new developers so that he had time to explore the advancement of the Zot protocol. He still contributed to Hubzilla's development.

In 2019, he wanted to hand Osada and Zap over to the community, now that they were stable, so he had time to develop Zot8. But the Osada/Zap community was so tiny that he couldn't get a new dedicated developer team together.

In 2024, he wanted to hand (streams) and Forte over to the community because fixing (streams)' huge identity bug, which led to Forte's creation, had burnt him out. He wanted to quit. But, again, he couldn't because (streams) didn't have a single user who had both the time and the knowledge to take over as the new main dev.

Consider this: Gargron was a young man when he made Mastodon. I think he was still at university. Mike Macgirvin made Friendica, he had some three decades of professional work in IT and software under his belly. Gargron was at the beginning of his career. Mike had quit and moved from the USA to the western Australian outback where he has been living as a farmer ever since. He might actually be older than Gargron's parents.

while nomadic identitity would be cool thing, currently it does not exist

Nomadic identity does exist. Not as a vague idea, not as a concept on paper, but as a stable, production-grade feature that has been used to its full extent for well over a decade now. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean the Fediverse doesn't have it. And just because Mastodon doesn't recognise it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The Fediverse has loads of features which Mastodon users want "the Fediverse" to have. It has features which many Mastodon users have never wanted "the Fediverse" to have such as quote-posts, introduced by Mike Macgirvin on Mistpark in 2010. It even has features that are completely and utterly unimaginable for Mastodon users, and it has had even these since as early as 2010, 2012 or 2015.

Nomadic identity was invented by Mike Macgirvin in 2011 with the Zot protocol.

It was first implemented by him in mid-2012 when he rewrote Red against Zot. This means that Hubzilla itself has been offering full-blown nomadic identity since 2012, almost four years longer than Mastodon has existed.

This very Hubzilla channel that I'm commenting from right here, right now, is actually nomadic. It is cloned across two servers: hub.netzgemeinde.eu and hub.hubzilla.de. And it has been since before Elon Musk announced to take over Twitter in early 2022. When I sent you this comment, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. When you sent the comment that I'm replying to, it was automatically sync'd over to hub.hubzilla.de. The clone has actually been of great help at least once.

Unfortunately, non-nomadic software identifies cloned channels as fully separate accounts with fully separate identities. But rest assured: @Jupiter Rowland on hub.hubzilla.de is my clone. It's the live, hot, real-time, bidirectional backup of the main instance of my channel, @Jupiter Rowland on hub.netzgemeinde.eu that you're following now. They're both one and the same channel with one and the same identity, jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu, even though Mastodon is unable to see it as such. Go check both. You'll see they've got all the same content in them, including comments from others. Including your comment. How else can jupiter_rowland@hub.hubzilla.de possibly have one of your comments under a post if you've only sent that comment to jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu if it weren't for nomadic identity?

Even nomadic identity via ActivityPub is available as a stable, production-grade feature in stable, production-grade software right now as we speak. Forte was the first to be fully nomadic via nothing but ActivityPub, as of mid-August, 2024. Tootik, based on Gemini instead of the World Wide Web, is fully nomadic at server level, too. Mitra is fully nomadic by means of the Minimitra client.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #QuotePostDebate #QuoteTootDebate #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #Friendica #Red #RedMatrix #Hubzilla #Osada #Zap #Mistpark #Mistpark2020 #Misty #Redmatrix2020 #Roadhouse #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Tootik #Mitra #Minimitra #NomadicIdentity

Welcome to Prismo revived!

Not so long ago, after a bit of encouraging from @dansup, I decided to revive this project using more modern stack. Apart from it being more modern, it is also way lighter than before and that's my main goal when working on it: everything should be as simple, light and independent as possible.

Technical stuff

New Prismo only depends on Ruby and sqlite. JS layer is minimal and based on importmaps so no heavy build step is needed anymore. CSS is being generated by native tailwind binary so produced stylesheet files are as small as possible and generation footprint is tiny.

When it comes to federation, old Prismo was based on a code extracted from Mastodon which was both messy and far from optimal to be used by such a small and simple website. Now we're using an excellent ruby library called Fedipub instead.

Why another link aggregator?

While other projects are focused on supporting multiple groups with massive amount of people in them, Prismo is more about small cozy federated single-topic instances. Being small and simple will let us perfect our feature set more easily.

What's next?

There is no any roadmap as of yet but, for starters, i will try to bring back original feature set (as you might feel like new Prismo is a downgrade from the old one - i just brought back the essentials for now). After that - we can discuss on what's needed and what would be good to have :)

There are obviously plenty of rough edges and issues but we will get there eventually. Let me know in the comments and, as usual, boosts highly welcome! :)

Let's talk!

• Mastodon
• Matrix

9.0.0 — Growing Up https://activitypub.blog/2026/06/12/9-0-0-growing-up/ #ActivityPub, #BlurHash, #Fediverse, #Moderation, #StarterKit, #StarterPack, #WordPress

“Building a Free Internet of the Future”, monthly interviews with individuals and communities supported by #NGIZero (#NGI0) grants, as well as members and stakeholders of the NGI0 consortium. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports projects related to #freesoftware, open data, #openhardware and #openstandards.
#DrFed is a web-based platform for developing and #debugging implementations of #ActivityPub– an open standard and protocol for decentralised networking.”
https://www.apc.org/en/news/drfed-reducing-complexity-and-enabling-more-people-shape-fediverse

It's a strange feeling, building something with no one to answer to but the people using it.

No walls to raise. No data to harvest. No quarter to hit.

Just a network of communities that actually belong to the people in them.

#ActivityPub #SocialWeb #Fediverse #AtProto

Week in Fediverse 2026-07-31

Servers

- Mastodon v4.6.4
- yukimochi/Activity-Relay v2.0.11
- Iceshrimp.NET v2026.1.2-beta
- Mitra v5.8.0
- ActivityPub for WordPress v9.2.0
- Misskey v2026.7.0
- NeoDB v0.17.4
- NodeBB v4.14.5
- Announcing Bonfire for communities: groups and tools to organise together
- bandwagon.fm: July 2026

Clients

- Fedilab v3.43.0
- Pachli v3.8.0
- PleromaFE v2.11.2
- Aria v1.5.10
- Photon v2.4.3
- Rocinante v1.2.0
- FediSuite: Manage all your Fediverse accounts in one place

For developers

- Masto.js v8.0.0
- activitystreams-vocabulary: ActivityStreams 2.0 Vocabulary data structures (Rust)

Protocol

- FEP-2345: fediverse:creator

Articles

- Pelago: The Old Man, The Sea, and The Island
- Cooperative Software
- Cacheable Requests for Remote Content
- A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up)

-----

#WeekInFediverse #Fediverse #ActivityPub

Previous edition: https://mitra.social/objects/019f95f5-5736-7753-8aaa-83f9c26fa07e

I wonder whether there are any opportunities (for me) to work with #activitypub and #fediverse. My background is in #PHP (decoupled #Drupal), but I am keen to diversify into other languages. I also have solid experience with #REST, #bash and CLI tools.

#Fedihire

27 slides and counting... going to dive into some technical stuff as usual!

I keep saying I should generalize my talks, but alas, here I go again...

I'm looking for a freelancer or org who can help me set two Ghost instances in one virtual server, with ActivityPub. Only setting up the instances and the server, I can handle the web administration.

I'm almost there with the first instance but at every step there is something, I'm not a sysadmin, and I'm losing my patience. 😅 I bet this is straightforward for someone with experience.

I can give you more details -- and see https://the.socialmusic.network/t/a-music-selection-idea-welcomes-your-feedback/854

#sysadmin #freelancer #ghost #activityPub

https://www.thefulcrum.dev/the-programmers-fulcrum-31-july-2026/

#ActivityPub

Happy to announce that federation bit is complete! Next step is purchasing a domain and spinning up a flagship instance which should happen in upcoming days :)

#fediverse #fedidev #activitypub #prismodev

Open-source and federated software isn't enough. We need ownership, governance. And this don't need to be something big, a small server-lab for your building is enough. If these words had hit you, give a read:

https://jeferson.me/blog/2026/07/31/cooperative-software

#Activitypub #Capitalism #Cooperative #Democracy #Fediverse #Freedom #Mastodon #OpenSource #Ownership #PlatformCoop #SelfHosting

🏠 FediHome v1.24.0 is out.

🔒 Two security fixes — worth updating for
🔔 Checks for updates on its own now
🔐 Offers a real password, not a 64-char key
🧹 Notifications clear themselves

Self-hosted. MIT. Yours.
https://github.com/TemujinCalidius/FediHome

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #SelfHosted

When I started the work on ActivityPub projects I fully embraced Maslow's Hammer adage. I wanted as much as possible in my services to go through the #ActivityPub vocabulary and I fully embraced the client to server API.

But there are elements of a web application that require custom functionality no matter what, say changing a password. So for those I just added the capability of running commands through ssh.

#ActivityPubDev #fedidev

My catch-all email address is getting spam emails for accounts on my self-hosted Mastodon instance. The spam scrappers must be confusing federation email-like user@instance account handles as email. #Mastodon #Spam #ActivityPub #Federation #MastoAdmin Anyone with a catch-all box seeing this? Interested if another instance with two or three dozen or more users on their instance is...

@Bonfire

I'm so excited by the possibilities of Bonfire. In many ways it seems like a natural extension of one of the key strengths of the Fediverse itself - that different communities can be set up to match the needs and values of those communities, rather than a monolith deciding how everyone should interact.

Now Bonfire extends that beyond just the community rules or basic settings like post length, and into major functionality of instances such as groups, events, videos, you name it. The possibility to expand even further into mutual aid, group decision making, misinformation protection and more is amazing!

Looking forward to playing with Bonfire more and contributing where possible. ❤️

#Bonfire #Fediverse #Activitypub

Thinking of fully federating Discourse
#Discourse #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Forums