Fediverse Report – #144
The News
The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.
WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.
Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.
I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.
FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!
The Links
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- The Fireside Fedi show talks with Ryan Barrett and Anuj Ahooja from A New Social and Bridgy Fed.
- The WordPress-focused podcast The PublishPress talks with Evan Prodromou about how the fediverse and WordPress can be better connected.
- Owncast Newsletter November 2025.
- Mastodon has some new merch in store.
- Mastodon partners with WE AID to offer donors tax-deductible contributions in Germany.
- A demonstration of Emissary’s upcoming data migration tool using the LOLA data portability spec.
- Loops has published a roadmap of their planned and in-progress features.
- Bridgy Fed now has expanding blocking capabilities.
