Fediverse Report #107
Pixelfed raises 138k Canadian dollars for their project, and a new way to connect researchers to the fediverse with an upcoming ORCID bridge.
The News
The Pixelfed Kickstarter campaign has concluded, and the project has raised 138k Canadian dollar (88k EUR/95k USD). The campaign raised money from over 2100 backers, and reached far past it’s original goal of 50k CAD. The campaign has grown significantly in scope, and indicates that the Pixelfed campaign is much more than just about the image-sharing platform Pixelfed. Pixelfed itself has also grown, and there are now reportedly 8 people joining the team. With the money, the team is working on the following:
- Further development of Pixelfed, as well as supporting the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art servers
- Development of Loops, and getting it to a state where it can be made available as open source. In the most recent update Pixelfed says that this will be “once it is ready in 2025”.
- Building a dedicated server environment around the world, that can handle “the 1000s of TBs of video traffic (plus storage requirements)”.
- Building Fedi-CDN to host and serve Loops videos, as well as offering “excess compute/bandwidth to other fediverse platforms as a collaborative shared service.”
- Building an E2EE messaging platform Sup, with the near future focused on development planning.
- The latest update of the Kickstarter also notes that Pixelfed has started another side project, FediThreat, for fediverse admins to share information about lower-risk harmful actors such as spam accounts. This project is currently in the proof-of-concept stage.
- Launching a Pixelfed Foundation. Setting up a foundation was originally put behind to a 200k CAD stretch goal, but it seems like this will still happen, even though the goal is not met. The latest Kickstarter update notes that a Pixelfed Foundation is currently being worked on, as a non-profit under the government of Alberta, Canada.
The amount of money that Pixelfed has raised is significant, especially by fediverse standards. At the same time, this is a lot of different types of projects that the team is undertaking. Pixelfed has a history of overpromising and underdeliving, for example the Groups feature has been announced to be released “soon” for over 2 years now, and this is a feature that they have gotten an NLnet grant for. The new projects that Pixelfed is working on, such as a shared CDN are definitely valuable for the fediverse. But with the attention of the Pixelfed team being pulled in so many different directions, and a lack of clarity on which projects will get focus, it is unclear on which timeline Pixelfed can deliver the planned features.
Encyclia is a newly announced project to make ORCID records available on the fediverse. ORCID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a unique identifier for researchers and scientists. Every researcher can have their own unique ORCID, and with it, every publication become records connected to that ORCID. With Encyclia, all these ORCIDS can be followed from your ActivityPub account, meaning that you can always keep up to date with research, even when the researcher does not have a fediverse account. Encyclia is currently still in pre-alpha, and not yet available for use by the public.
This weekend was the SXSW festival, and Flipboard hosted the Fediverse House, with quite some well-known names within the fediverse community, as well as representatives from Bluesky and Threads, as well. There does not seem to be recordings available, but Jeff Sikes was there and had a good live blog if you want to also experience some FOMO.
In my recent updates on Bluesky and ATProto I talk about how Bluesky is increasingly becoming a political actor, due to the presence of various high-profile people who are actively speaking out against the Trump/Musk regime. This impact so far is less visible on the fediverse, as there are no politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the platform to speak out. But resistance does not only come from high-profile individuals, it comes from people on the ground that organise themselves. To that end, Jon Pincus wrote two articles on organising on the fediverse: If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next has an overview of the current state of the networks in relation to organising. Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere has a lot more practical details, examening various softwares that can be used in practice. Both articles are great sources of information to get more practical details for people who are considering using decentralised social networks.
The Links
Decentralized Social Networks & WordPress with Alex Kirk. The Open Web Conversations has a new Fediverse series, hosted by WordPress ActivityPub plugin creator Matthias Pfefferle. They discuss talk about how a WordPress blog can be build into a full decentralised social networking node with the Friends plugin by Kirk and the ActivityPub plugin by Pfefferle.
Standards War? – Robert W. Gehl. Gehl compares IFTAS’ funding struggles with the Free Our Feeds campaign, who are raising money to build alternative ATProto infrastructure, and describes it as an illustration of the emerging standards war between ActivityPub and ATProto.
A Long-Shot Bet to Bypass the Middlemen of Social Media – John Markoff/New York Times. The NYT interviews Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue to talk about how the company is using building a new decentralised social web with Flipboard and timeline app Surf.
The Software Sessions podcast did an interview with Hong Minhee. Hong is the developer for ActivityPub framework Fedify, as well as Hollo, a single-user microblogging platform.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:
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