Welcome to the second year of Fediverse Report! This edition has: everyone is excited about RSS, a new link-aggregator platform, PieFed, launches in beta, major issues with blocking security in the fediverse, and more!Everyone loves RSS
RSS Parrot is a new tool that allows you to turn your fediverse feed into a RSS feed. What was intended to be an ‘under-the-rader late night launch’ turned about to be massively popular hit in the fediverse. The tool is simple: mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the address you want to follow, and the bot replies with an account that you can follow. Every website is one account, and it posts a link every time the website has a new post.
The responses show the demand for RSS feeds that easily integrate into social networking feeds. RSS Parrot is a great workaround for websites that have not set up their own fediverse presence yet. But for people who do own websites and prefer to have direct control over the relationship with their audience, RSS Parrot’s popularity is a great reminder to set up your own fediverse presence.An uncertain future for Firefish
The Firefish project has been on a decline for a while now, with the flagship server firefish.social experiencing severe technical problems over the last months. Another Firefish server, firefish.tech is now also shutting down, partially due to the problems with Firefish. Panos Damelos, who was the community manager for the Firefish project, explains his perspective on how the project declined here, attributing it to severe technical problems, combined with a lack of attention and communication of the lead developer Kainoa.
Together with Firefish developer Namekuji, Panos Damelos have started the Catodon project, a fork of Firefish. In the announcement blog post Catodon dives deeper into what makes the project stand out, noting the community driven aspect of the project. Catodon joins IceShrimp and Sharkey as recent Misskey fork projects that are all gaining popularity as small-scale fediverse servers.A new link aggregator platform with PieFed
The link-aggregator part of the fediverse has grown, with the launch of PieFed’s beta test. PieFed joins platforms like Lemmy and Kbin who all have the ability to share links, and comment and vote on them.
PieFed focuses on making the platform easy to manage, maintain and develop for, and uses Python. Developer Rimu is also emphasising Trust and Safety, and healthy community interactions. One way PieFed does this is by adding the ability for authors to add a ‘I’ve changed my mind’ setting. It draws inspiration from Nick Punt’s work on de-escalation on social media. Another feature is adding a warning on posts made by accounts with low reputation, meaning that their posts get downvoted a lot.
PieFed has launched as a beta test, and comes with the warning that there will be ‘probably many bugs’. You can try PieFed for yourself at piefed.social.Authorized Fetch circumvented
Alex Gleason announced that Authorized Fetch has been circumvented. Authorized Fetch (in-depth explanation here) makes sure that a blocked server is fully blocked, and cannot access posts. Alex Gleason, behind fediverse platform Soapbox and currently working on the bridge Mostr (which connects the fediverse with Nostr), found out that Threads already blocked a few servers, such as Spinster, Poast, and the Mostr bridge, some of which he is involved with.
The Nostr community actively promotes the idea of adverse interoperability. In that spirit Alex Gleason reimplemented a method first used in Pleroma that circumvents Authorized Fetch. The blocked servers can now connect to Threads again. This is accomplished by spoofing the domain name from which the request came from.
There is a lot more to be said about this, and warrants an extensive follow up. I fully agree with WeDistribute’s concluding remarks: “Look, Mastodon has been providing a half-measure to its users for years. Now it’s the time to make things right: going into 2024, I think it’s going to absolutely be a requirement to develop more robust forms of privacy options and access controls to empower users”. The links
This week’s award for most esoteric fediverse implementation goes to DiveDB, the online scuba diving blog site, which has recently added ActivityPub support. This allows you to follow scuba divers and their dives directly from fediverse feeds.
Micro.blog creator Manton Reece is publishing a book Indie Microblogging. The entire book is available as a text site as well, on book.micro.blog.
The blog Nexus of Privacy has a five-part series about ‘Strategies for the free fediverses’.
YouTuber MKBHD talks about Threads and the fediverse on his podcast Waveform.
More RSS: Goblin is a fediverse platform currently in development that is strongly inspired by Tumblr. They showed the ability to follow Tumblr blogs in Goblin via RSS this week.
Bookwyrm has been updated with full account migration.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe below to receive the update via email, or follow Laurens Hof (npub142x…mxlh) in your favourite fediverse app.
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https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-50/
