On the convergence towards private data on social networking protocols, and the connection to Matrix

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/14012800

https://canvas.fediverse.events/

July 18th (4am UTC) to July 20th (also 4am UTC)

Canvas 2026 is in roughly 60 days!

Canvas is an annual event hosted for the Fediverse, allowing everyone to contribute to a pixel canvas, one pixel at a time

Check out the website for a live countdown, login testing, chat room (matrix/discord), and what last year's Canvas was!

If you are a developer, check out the source, and if you're a Fediverse app dev check the docs to add Canvas functionality to your app 👀

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/50677034

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for recommendations for an Android Fediverse client that does not send user-agent information (device or client details) to servers. Ideally, it should support both Mastodon and Lemmy, or other Fediverse platforms as well.

hey, how has your experience in those federated platforms been?

I’ve tried Mastodon but feel more attracted to Pixelfed’s simplicity, however I tried to sign up to test but my email was flagged as “invalid” despite it being non-temporal lol so I’d like to hear some opinions so I wouldn’t mind trying with another provider if it catches my attention

regarding NeoDB, I track my media on text notes, and while it’s fine it’s easy to forget what those titles actually were only by their names after some time

however, I know not every item in my lists will be available in NeoDB catalogue and porting it whole would take a lot of time also, I’ve read that NeoDB doesn’t have a “delete account” button for users, is it true?

Can I use a chatmail account as an alternate email address ?

• Two new themes, Groovebox and Quokka (Incorrectly listed as Quack) from the PyLova fork
• Allow cross-posting of images - from the PyLova fork
• Back button in header on iOS - good for PWA when browser controls are hidden
• Improve Irix theme

It's great to see PieFed is starting to implement some of the improvements being bought about by PyLova. We hope in the future they will adopt some of the other current improvements towards moderation report viewing and adding the custom instance emojis into comment bodies.

cross-posted to help users see what is happening in the fediverse: https://quokk.au/c/yepowertrippinbastards/p/904933/rimu-mass-bans-users

Rimu Mass Bans Users

Which mods/admins were being Power Tripping Bastards?

@rimu@piefed.social

What sanction did they impose (e.g. community ban, instance ban, removed comment)?

Mass instance bans

Provide a screenshot of the relevant modlog entry (don’t de-obfuscate mod names).

Done

Provide a screenshot and explanation of the cause of the sanction (e.g. the post/comment that was removed, or got you banned).

Explain why you think its unfair and how you would like the situation to be remedied.

He has abused the modlog to claim 'harassment', which I have never engaged in. I have not even interacted with Rimu in any way for days prior to getting kicked from the PieFed developer Matrix channels.

He has decided to mass ban 20 users because they have spoken out against his erratic and hostile behaviour as of late.

The European Commission has decided not to extend the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules to social media, closing off a potential pathway for adoption for open social networks.

Since the morning today, l had been unable to access my feddit.online account. It's only in the evening that things are slowly coming back to normal.

Did such a thing happen primarily due to a traffic jam in the fediverse ??

Over the past two years or so, we’ve managed to cut our serving costs 5x, from ~$0.15 per active user per month to ~$0.03.

For who never heard Bridgy Fed before (source: The GitHub repository)

Bridgy Fed connects different decentralized social network protocols. It currently supports the fediverse (eg Mastodon) via ActivityPub, Bluesky via the AT Protocol, and the IndieWeb via webmentions and microformats2.

I've been a PixelFed user for a few years now after having binned off Instagram a long time ago, but I've always kept an eye on Vernissage's development. Pixelfed has had very little in the way of updates in several months despite having the far larger user base, whereas Vernissage has been steadily releasing updates for its comparatively tiny set of users, and not long ago released an iOS app which I thought I'd try out, which turned out to be superb - it's so much better looking and performant than the official Pixelfed app. The downside for most (I imagine) would be the lack of an Android app.

Whereas Pixelfed is geared towards being an Instagram replacement, Vernissage seems to be tailored more to the Flickr/500px proper-photographer type crowd. While I was in the market for an Instagram replacement, Vernissage is the platform I've found myself increasingly using simply because of how well presented it is.

I was wondering if anyone else who is interested in photo sharing has tried both, and what their opinions are of them. There's tons of chatter on Mastodon around Pixelfed, but a lot less about Vernissage.

Links to the main instances:

https://pixelfed.social/
https://vernissage.photos/

I want to try asking more questions online since it has become so difficult to find things with search engines.

But I don't really know where to post my questions?
How do you decide what community to post to?

For example:
I have a question about meditation.
This looks pretty straightforward, I search for 'meditation' under all communities.
I find 2 communities called Meditation. (I can find more if I search on another lemmy instance, but they don't seem to show up on my current instance)
Both of them look rather inactive.

Do I just post to both of them? Is it possible to post to multiple communities simultaneously?
Should I look for other communities, what to search for?

I know lots of folks are talking about Monthly Active Users when it comes to health of the Fediverse.

We use that to compare social medias and even ourselves, a social network, to each other.

I argue we should be focused on user engagement. I know LinkedIn has "impressions", but idk what that means.

So I wonder if there's a good way to generate this. Someone posting is the highest, commenting, subscribing, liking, disliking, and follow on down. I guess that would be a statistical model? But with diminishing returns. One SUPER ACTIVE ANNOYING poster does not a network make, but "media" it does.

I don't have a clue how this would work statistically. But I theorize, that while we're smaller MAU, our user engagement is significantly higher when population size is accounted for.

Is there any data anyone knows of to back this up or disapprove it? I'm pro small.social though, so maybe I'm wrong. Any data scientists in the Fediverse? :-D

I'm not sure if the federation will work well but here are the handle for the threadiverse:

• !fedilab@forum.fedilab.app
• !holos@forum.fedilab.app
• !fedle@forum.fedilab.app
• !castlab@forum.fedilab.app

There is one category per project:

• Holos: mobile Fediverse client where your phone is the ActivityPub server.
• Fedle: daily ActivityPub word game in the spirit of Wordle and Sutom.
• Fedilab: Android Fediverse client.
• CastLab: cast media to DLNA, FCast, and USB-C displays.

It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

$ date -u
Sat May  9 10:15:48 AM UTC 2026

Hi all, it looks like discuss.online's automatic SSL juju didn't work right and the existing cert expired just a bit ago:

$ curl -vI https://discuss.online/
...
* Server certificate:
*   subject: CN=discuss.online
*   start date: Feb  8 06:59:01 2026 GMT
*   expire date: May  9 06:59:00 2026 GMT
*   issuer: C=US; O=Let's Encrypt; CN=E8

I'm sure it'll get fixed, but ... this is where the Far Side comics are hosted. 911 yall break glass beep the pagers we've got a code 2319 people. Save the cows.

Update awhile later: SSL cert was replaced. The cows have tools, which leads to engineering degrees and rapid repairs.

Self-hosting Wafrn behind another Caddy, with BlueSky support

I've wanted to self-host a way to post in one place and reach BlueSky, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc… for a while. Wafrn is it, but hosting can be fussy. Here's what I did.

The recommended deployment is probably easy; it's just a Docker container, and if given a whole server, or at least control of the whole web frontend there shouldn't be much to it. I wanted to run it on my existing VPS, which has a bunch of services running behind Nginx. The deployment instructions explain why that won't work easily; Wafrn relies on Caddy's automatic HTTPS for ATProto accounts.

Using the Caddy from Wafrn's container as a proxy is an option, but I really wanted the main web server to be separate. Fortunately, I had nothing against Caddy itself, and converting the Nginx config was a one-shot for an LLM tool.

Updating Wafrn to run in that configuration was not. I did use such a tool in that process, though it made enough errors along the way I think I may have been faster without it. I put the resulting fork up on Gitlab in case anyone else wants to do the same.

@fediverse

@fediverse@lemmy.world

#wafrn #atproto #bluesky #fediverse #blog

How the conferences FediForum and 2mr.social this week show how fediverse is trying to build connections with European politics, as well as with the atmosphere.

How can you measure the popularity of a social network site? Perhaps by counting the number of active accounts, or the quality of the discourse, or even how many people reply to your witty memes. Me? I prefer to look at how many people visit my blog from each site. It is an imperfect measure - and a vain one - but lets me know where I should be spending my time. No point posting on a network…

I've been wanting to have a blog/personal website on the fediverse for a while, something close to neocities and I was wondering if you know of some platforms.

I see a lot of people recommend WordPress but recently I just discovered Hubzilla which seems like a good option but I don't see anyone talk too much about it.

What's the opinion on Hubzilla? and any other ideas? thanks :)