Fediverse Report – #146
The main news in the world of social networking was regarding the DSA’s decision to level a 120M EUR fine at X. Mastodon wrote a blog post in response, saying how the event indicated that the world needs social sovereignty. Meanwhile, I wrote an analysis of how the European Union actually thinks about digital communications, how their words don’t align with their actions. But also, how a potential move of the EC to put their social media on a sovereign fediverse server also represents a loss of power: from a position of regulating the entire network to a position of one-among-equal participants.
https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/
The News
PeerTube released version 8 with “a redesigned video player, an improved experience for importing videos and the ability to share channel management with other accounts” as the headline features.
Multiple users can now edit a single channel, handling uploads, deletions, and channel settings without granting full administrative access. This feature ties in with PeerTube’s focus on institutions and organisations who are running their own video server, and that have multiple staff members to manage the video content of a single account.
The update also includes a redesigned video player called Lucide, with simplified controls and finer iconography, with the previous theme still being available. Video import functionality now allows manual retry of failed imports, with automatic retry built into channel synchronisation workflows.
Framasoft framed the release as part of a year focused on institutional adoption, supported by NLnet funding. This strategic positioning fits for PeerTube: competing directly with platforms like YouTube is extremely difficult, and requires support for creators to make money. Creators are also strongly incentivised to focus reach as much as possible. PeerTube’s integration with the fediverse promises technical support that could in a hypothetical future support further reach, but in practice this cannot remotely compete with YouTube. For institutions these demands have less of a priority, while at the same time, data control and showing videos without advertisements are much more important. This fits well with what PeerTube has to offer, and their feature prioritisation reflects this.
Regarding the mobile app for PeerTube, Framasoft says that they are working “to finalize the features promised during the crowdfunding campaign , including background video playback, live streaming, and TV apps. If all goes well, background video playback should be available in early 2026 !”
For 2026 they will be working on improving the experience for newcomers, making it easier to find their first PeerTube platform. This project is still in the planning phase, but there is a lot of potential here, as it is currently also still quite daunting for people who are familiar with decentralised platforms and the fediverse to find your way around the PeerTube network.
Framasoft is also hosting their annual fundraiser for the organisation, which builds a variety of open software projects beyond just PeerTube, and they are aiming to raise 250k EUR to finance the non-profit organisation for 2026.
Bonfire has crossed their goal for their crowdfunding campaign, raising 30k for maintainance and support for the software. The next goal for Bonfire is for adding Group support, and in a blog post they explain why this matters. Bonfire frames groups as a way to build communities, and the software in itself is big on building online communities, so this fits well together. They position groups as different from forums, explaining: “Groups in Bonfire are inspired by the best of forums (community-run with clear topics and findable archives) while being portable and interconnected across the fediverse from the start.”
One thing worth addressing is that Bonfire struggles to explain what their platform is exactly. They lean heavily into the ‘we’re a different kind of software’, but this does lead to people to not fully understand what it is however. I pointed this out a few weeks ago, where I wrote that “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 saw another comment on PieFed raise the same point of confusing again, so I think it’s worth addressing, where the user squirrel said: “I see Bonfire mentioned a lot on the fediverse report and elsewhere, but I still don’t understand what it is. I went to their website and it’s a wall of text that sounds like marketing. I don’t see a demo or a flagship instance.”
So to keep things simple: Bonfire is a software similar to Mastodon, Misskey or Akkoma, that allows for microblogging just like you would on the Mastodon server mastodon.social or the Misskey server misskey.io. Each of these microblogging platforms already have different features from each other, and the distinguishing feature for Bonfire Social is that it has a concept called circles (similar to the old Google+), allowing you to define a preset group of accounts (a circle) that your message gets send to.
The second different thing about Bonfire is that the software design is highly modular, which allows servers admins to install extensions that make each Bonfire server more unique. The best example of this is an extension that allows for integration with various Academic institutes such as DOI, allowing people to better integrate and comment on academic papers.
The Bonfire team focuses heavily in their communications on this modular extensibility part, which is why the marketing can sound quite confusing to people who are not intimately familiar with Bonfire already. But for regular fediverse people it is as simple as: Bonfire is another fediverse server software in the list of Mastodon, Misskey, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Friendica and more. Each software does mostly comparable things (microblogging) but gives their own interpretation to it and adds additional features.
PieFed is working on two major features for their upcoming 1.4 release, a Stack Overflow-like answering system, and turning remote fediverse links into local links. The answering system gives the post author the ability to select a reply as the answer to the post. This feature will only be available to communities who have turned it on, as this question-answer approach will not fit with every community. As for federation, if this answer is viewed on Lemmy, it will simply be displayed as a normal post and comments, without the additional question and answer highlighting features.
Turning remote fediverse links into local links remains one of the fediverse’s pain points. As PieFed creator Rimu describes: “One of the long-standing issues we have in/on the fediverse is that when I have a link in my post that goes to another post on my instance, people on other instances will click that link and be taken to MY instance, where they can’t comment, don’t have an account, aren’t logged in, etc and they will try to log in using their login credentials for their home instance then wonder why it doesn’t work.” In the upcoming PieFed version, “links like that will automatically be converted to link to the local copy of the post, where ‘local’ is whatever is local for the reader.”
Nodes on a Web: The Fediverse in/for Public Institutions is a new fediverse unconference that will be held in 19/20 March 2026, Amsterdam: “Our goal is to unite individuals involved in these initiatives and the wider Fediverse developer community. We want to share insights and ideas on how the Fediverse can thrive for public institutions in the long term.” The conference is organised by the SABOA Foundation (FediVariety) with support from the Dutch Government (CIO-Rijk) and the City of Amsterdam.
The Links
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunk & Tidbits, for November 2025
- Fedify developer Hong Minhee wrote about their 2025 year with the fediverse.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-146/
