Social media’s impact on society and citizens clearly shows the need for change. Europe has a strong ecosystem of social companies and a deep well of expertise in designing and operating social protocols. We are building on this to move away from large monopolistic platforms with their authoritarian governance and editorial positions, and are joining forces to establish a diverse and resilient information infrastructure in Europe. Together, we will protect people and institutions from interference by these platforms. What’s more, we will bring thousands of jobs and billions of euros that social media generates to our continent, to circulate that revenue in our own thriving business ecosystem.

From this perspective, open European platforms and protocols such as the Fediverse (Mastodon, PeerTube, or Mobilizon), the Atmosphere (Eurosky, Flashes, Tangled, or Web Tiles) and Private Messaging systems (like Matrix or XMPP) are complementary solutions for Europe, with shared common goals.

I feel that it is time to have an honest discussion on the state of the fediverse.

Mastodon was founded a decade ago, and since then has roughly 1 million monthly active users. That is 0.25% of the MAU of twitter/X currently (which has itself seen declines over the years).

Pixelfed has 250k monthly active users, which is 0.008% of Instagrams 3 billion MAU.

Friendica has 5000 MAU which is essentially 0% of the 3.1 billion MAU that Facebook has.

Overall, even if you combine every fediverse platform together, and count bluesky as a part of the fediverse as well, it's still less than 1% of the MAU of X.

Which is all to say, alternatives to corporate owned platforms does not exist at this point in time, on a statistical basis. Not in any meaningful way.

So why is this do we think? Why does the most popular social media site in the world not even have a decent competitor out there, when we have the technology to build one? It's certainly not from a lack of user interest. Search terms like "facebook alternatives" have absolutely skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the last couple years, as the realities of corporate oligarchy have become to hard for the average person to ignore. Governments and organizations around the world have started discussing the alternatives to American owned tech companies. And yet, growth of the fediverse platforms is essentially flat. People try a platform, and then quickly bounce off, either returning to old platforms or quitting social media all together.

That second one is not a problem in my mind, but let's dive a bit deeper into the first point. Why do people not tend to stick around on the fediverse? Here are some potential root causes I can think of:

• The choices are overwhelming. There are dozens of fediverse platforms that provide every function under the sun. Even within a single platform, users are asked to pick a server, which is an instant friction point for users.

• Functionality on the fediverse is subpar compared to larger platforms, and the functionalities that do exist are disjointed between multiple platforms. We have events, but no standard event functionality integrated into mastodon. What does exist is a hack/workaround, rather than an actual implementation. Pixelfed does not have stories. There is a marketplace website for the fediverse (Flohmarkt), but no marketplace integration for friendica. Etc, etc.

• Users are afraid of losing their history and friends on other platforms. Every social media platform is required by law to provide a GDPR export of a users social media data, but no platform that I am aware of is using this to integrate a users post history or subscriptions to rebuild users social graph and profile on the fediverse. There are technical hurdles there for sure, but there are a lot of opportunities being left on the table.

So those are, imo, the biggest stumbling blocks to the growth of users on the fediverse, and why 99% of users bounce off when they try it. I am building some solutions to these problems myself, but I'm curious to hear what others think about this, and the honest state of the fediverse. Any issues I overlooked? Should we care about user growth at all? What do we think?

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/foss/p/1548253/we-are-trying-to-grow-a-new-foss-collaboration-community

A few of us have put together a forum and wiki in the hopes to build a community focused on collaboration for various open source and creative commons projects. We build the platform a few months ago, but haven't done the greatest job of actually spreading the word and building up the active members, so I'm posting in another attempt to try and spread the word to establish some activity for our community.

In short, the idea behind our website is to:

1. Build a community that is based on genuine connections and collaboration. Our community is a forum and wiki, and hopes to steer towards a slower (and possibly more old school) type of internet - and away from some communities that are mostly article reposts and memes.
2. Libre/foss/creative commons/etc - we want to help generate community that can come together to work on projects that benefit everyone, and in a way, push back against some of the urges of capitalism.
3. Involvement - we want to welcome everyone, but the idea is to eventually create a culture where people are not afraid to contribute small things to many projects. We want to motivate individuals to grow the foss ecosystem without feeling like they need to commit heavily to any one project. Projects can get rekindled and improved on even if others have abandoned it.

Overall, we have a big vision for the community - but at this point we are just trying to get it off the ground and are looking for members to sign up and start some discussions to help us grow.

The goal is to create a community that is able to stand on its own, and outlast myself or any of the other admins. And essentially become a commons space, with the current admins simply acting as a steward that can be replaced if they need/want to step down. In that respect, we hope to get some members and allow the community to grow and evolve the platform to fit the needs of the community.

While modern social media has its place, we felt that the current standing of online collaborative spaces were limiting and often highly niche. We hope that maybe we can grow a space for people of various skills, backgrounds, and ideas can come together to create a creative and productive space - and make some lasting connections as well.

I know this post got a bit lengthy, and many will probably skim over it, but if it's something that sounds interesting to you I would really appreciate it if you came over and checked it out, signed up, and maybe help us get some discussions going to help us grow our community. And of course, if you would be so kind as to helping us spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated - as we spent so much time working on building the site, but none of us are all that great at actually "marketing" the community to actually find new members.

Our forum is: forum.UnfinishedProjects.net

And our wiki, where we hope people will actually build out various projects together is located at:

UnfinishedProjects.net

Loops vs. PeerTube for video host

Hey friends, I'm thinking of starting up an ActivityPub compatible server to host and share my own train videos with the Fediverse, and wondering: Of the two video-oriented softwares, which would be a better fit for my use case and easier to work with? The videos would be between 15 seconds and 10 minutes long.

Comparisons, pros and cons, and your experiences working with either would be appreciated. Thanks. @fediverse

Is there any public instance, where I could use function “import from instagram”?

Im looking for general instance, preferably hosted in Europe

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/51288619

Hi All,

Due to some ongoing issues with harassment campaigns, we've had to setup a rudimentary monitoring system for all new users.

• When a user's signup is accepted, they will be automatically enrolled into the monitoring system. The admins team may also add accounts manually if they have been given a strike.
• The system will monitor all posts, comments and DMs sent by new users, and bring them to the attention of the admin team if it appears suspicious. In egregious cases, it will auto-remove posts and comments if required, but a human admin will always review and reverse any false positives as soon as required.
• Once we have validated that the user is not a spammer, they will be removed from the system.

We don't want to go into too much detail on how it all works, but we can say that all the processing is being done locally on the instance server. For most of you, this wont have any impact, but some of you have been impacted by the systems false positives. It is also a good time to point out that DM messages are not private, and should not be used for anything that requires strong privacy.

There will likely be teething problems, but we are actively working on improving the bot to minimize impact and we are always open to feedback.

I want to migrate my photos from instagram to pixelfed. Is it possible to modify post addition date? Or only way is to self host own instance and modify on database?

If it the only way, I would be happy to donate to existing one and ask admins to change dates… I dont see the point of creating new one

@evan@cosocial.ca
https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Prodromou
https://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page
https://elgg.org/profile/bwerdmuller
https://gnusocial.rocks/
https://mediagoblin.org/

This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.

i see a lot of news about australian politics, news of seattle, darmstadt, brazil, ... all places where i don't live, where the posts aren't relevant to me. it would be cool to be able to tag posts/communities with a geographical location so i can easily filter which posts are / aren't probably relevant to me. in one setting in my profile, instead of having to block each community individually (there's hundreds of them at this point)

I wanted to announce that I'm going to be speaking with Evan Prodromou, co-author of ActivityPub the protocol that powers the Fediverse, today 1400 US Eastern (UTC-4).

Livestream powered by Owncast.

VODs will be posted on https://tubefree.org/@firesidefedi for those interested in watching it later. Powered by Peertube. :)

Hi!

While I really enjoy seeing many of my fellow man being accommodating to people with disabilities. I find manually transcribing every image I post to be very tiring.

I thought that I could at least use some sort of AI to help with image transcripts, tho, that could probably be better used by the actual person with the disability.

So thats the question, should I skip the transcribing of an image or let an AI do it?

generally , what do you use ?

Not looking to debate or stir up anything. But, I will say despite anyone’s thoughts the anti-meta fedi pact at least allowed people to have some information on where instances and people stood on federation with Threads. Some decisions were able to be made based on that information. I think if it doesn’t exist there should be one also regarding AI, which is a polarizing topic especially on fedi. I believe similar to the Threads issue it would allow people to make somewhat informed decisions one way or the other. Are there current lists, sites dedicated to this? If not what are you guys thoughts?

I want to host a fediverse instance but I need it to be light (limited system resources). Mastodon seems to be kinda heavy. GotoSocial is supposedly very light? (but limited on functionality?) is Pixelfed much heavier? Bonfire is built on elixir so should also be light? Akkoma? Pleroma?

Also, I need it to be engaging to people migrating mostly from IG, so I do need some bells/whistles I guess

thanks!

EDIT: The instance is supposed to be hosting a community of 100-200 people. Maybe even more in the future (in which case we would probably migrate to another server)

Having a "facebook pages" / mini website / pixelfed portfolio is very functional for the people I plan to invite.

Experimental thought, but something I want to do in near future.

Basically admins and mods are selected sortitionally( randomly) from people who apply.

All admins and mods have fixed term limits.

Existence of Mod or Admin trials where a public chat(court) decides consequences for their actions, if they misbehave, could lead to

Ever since I learnt about the sortition system, I was incredibly curious how it would work irl, hence this idea.

Look, I am not going to claim this is a solution to anything, till ones actually up and running I think it's hard to say which direction it will go. But still, I want your opinion on it.

On How to encourage people to mod a community?

By making mod duty easy for them, have small term limits, and in those term limits they only have to work for 4/3 days a week. Term could be just few weeks. Also get lot more mods and give them specific time slots beyond which they are vastly not needed unless an emergency.

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

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.

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 👀

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 ?