Laurens Hof @laurenshof@connectedplaces.online
Public

Fediverse Report -#147

This will be the last report for 2025, with a break over the holidays. It seems fitting to end the year with an effective end to the Threads <> fediverse integration. The interaction of Threads with the fediverse was a major part of the conversations on the fediverse in 2024, dominating the mind share and people’s understanding of what the risks to the network are. In 2025 those conversations died down, as it turned out that marginally few people actually made use of the connection. With the year at the close, it also means closing the chapter on the fediverse-Threads story for now (although it might be back some day, you never know).

Thank you so much for all your support and reading Connected Places this year, it’s been much appreciated, and I wish you all happy holidays!

-Laurens

The News

Threads’ integration with the fediverse is on maintenance mode, says head of Threads Connor Hayes in an interview by Alex Heath. Hayes said about the fediverse: ““It’s something that we’re supporting, it’s something that we’re maintaining, but it’s not the thing that we’re talking about that’s gonna help the app break out”. In October 2023, Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview with Alex Heath, who asked him about decentralisation and open protocols, with Zuckerberg saying he “always believed in this stuff“. With the fediverse integration for Threads now in maintenance mode, this must surely be a big blow for Zuckerberg’s belief in decentralised social networking.

Threads’ integration with the fediverse was never popular, especially from the side of Threads. In January 2025 the mastodon.social knew about 25k Threads accounts which had turned on federation. But while that number is already low considering the total number of Threads users, the interest in actually following an account on Mastodon from Threads was even lower: in January 2025, only 800 Threads users followed at least one account on mastodon.social. Threads deliberately made it difficult to follow fediverse accounts, and later updates deprioritised the fediverse feed even more. Regardless, it is not particularly hard to understand why a platform that now boasts about having 400M monthly active users is not putting in much effort to maintain a complex system that only a few thousand people at best make use of.

My take is that Meta and Threads have played the game well. They immediately capitalised on the moment in 2023 when decentralisation and Twitter-alternatives got large-scale attention, and knew how to say the right buzzwords to ride the wave. It got them in the right light for regulators, and gave them something tangible to point out to say ‘hey we’re doing interoperability now!’. The fediverse turned out to be highly vulnerable to such a strategy, a sitting duck for Big Tech companies to pluck some good PR from. That it turned the fediverse against itself, resulting in vicious and endless arguments about whether servers should block Threads, and whether Threads joining the fediverse validated the movement, was only a nice bonus. By slowly rolling out an implementation over the years Threads built their own positive-PR machine, every slight update worthy of a new article that put ‘Meta’ and ‘Interoperability’ in the headlines again. That nobody ever really used the integration between Threads and the fediverse never really seemed to matter, only the hypothetical future mattered. Nor did the press seem particularly interested in reporting on the fact that marginally few people seemed to be using the connection between the fediverse and Threads. Still, the company found itself a place at the table for protocol conversations about ActivityPub, which might pay dividend in the future if the need arises.

GGWP to Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, for the skillful execution that helped Meta significantly, nestled themselves into the fediverse were it ever to become useful again, and taking some of the wind out of Bluesky’s sails as well as a bonus.

The WordPress ActivityPub integration has some interesting updates, with better moderation tooling support. You can now subscribe to shared blocklists, where the blocklist of your site will automatically sync with the source blocklist. This is an easy way to keep the moderation process automatic, provided you trust the source of the shared blocklist. The team also shared a sneak peek at a new upcoming feature, an ActivityPub reader. This is a client that turns your WordPress admin dashboard into a simple reader client, where you can see posts from the other fediverse account that your WordPress account follows. This feature is still in development, but the team is looking for feedback. It further cements the move of a WordPress site as a full-featured native fediverse server, that includes not only the technical backend part, but also the frontend of using the site as a fediverse platform.

This move also brings further competition to Ghost. WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley wrote an extensive overview of the current state of Ghost, saying it feels half-baked. One of the main standout features that Ghost has over WordPress is their reader client, but it seems like that it won’t stay that way for long.

Holos continues to be one of the most interesting projects on the fediverse from a technological perspective. The goal of Holos is to run an ActivityPub server on your phone. Because mobile devices are traditionally not particularly suitable for this (changing IP address, not always online), Holos adds a Relay service that mitigates these issues. The project posted an explainer of how it all works here. Holos also changes some long-standing dynamics in the fediverse: in this project, your data lives on your phone, which does mean owning and control over your data is more tangible than when you are dependent on your local friendly fediverse server admin. At the same time, it creates a new form of dependency, where the Relay operator manages your identity. This new type of implementing ActivityPub also introduces new unknowns regarding how account and data portability are handled. Still, experimentation is cool to see, and as mobile phones are the primary and often sole device for the majority of the population, it’s good to see fediverse projects that are even more directly mobile-first.

Speaking about mobile development: PeerTube has updated their app with a new creator mode. This allows people to manage their PeerTube channel, as well as uploading and editing new videos. During an crowdfunding earlier this year, which raised over 75k EUR, one of the specific goals of the campaign was to build a creator mode for the apps. Framasoft, the organisation behind PeerTube, promises even more features for the app, and says they are working on the ability for videos to play in the background, live streaming support, and a tablet version of the app. Publishing apps that allow for video streaming from a decentralised network on the app stores is quite a challenge however, as Framasoft found out: both Apple and Google are restrictive here, which forced PeerTube to limit the number of servers that could be accessed via the app.

Bonfire has completed their crowdfunding campaign, raising 32k EUR for the maintenance of the software. They describe putting maintenance of the software first as a matter of care. With the first implementation of the software, Bonfire Social, now ready and launched as a full version 1.0, there is now space to build and maintain the software for the long run. Bonfire does have a lot of plans (and unmet stretch goals) for growing the project, such as by adding support for groups. However, the first challenge is more practical: convince communities to start running and operating a Bonfire server. While some people are slowly testing out the software, nobody has committed yet to running a Bonfire server in production.

Mastodon says that they have plans to address a long-standing criticism within the community, namely that the mastodon.social server is too large in size compared to all other servers. Mastodon.social has 270k monthly active users, with virtually all other servers having 10k MAU or lower. The only exception behind pixelfed.social, with 60k MAU. This also ignores the two really bad places in the fediverse, Baraag and Pawoo, who are the second and third-biggest Mastodon servers with 40k and 18k MAU respectively. It is not yet known how Mastodon plans to handle this situation

Loops has added a For You feed, an algorithmic recommendation feed for the short-form video platform. While most of the microblogging side of the fediverse focuses on not having algorithmic feeds, short-form videos have different user expectations, leading to creator Daniel Supernault implementing such an algorithm. An infographic describing how the algorithm works is available here.

The Links

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