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
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- Mastodon is looking for feedback on their upcoming Collections feature, their own interpretation on Bluesky’s Starter Packs.
- Mastodon has enabled their Wrapstodon feature, giving you a short overview of your account over the last year.
- The schedule for FOSDEM 2026’s Social Web Devroom is now live.
- Announcing Key Transparency for the Fediverse.
- The Social Web Foundation talks about implementing E2EE over ActivityPub.
- An exploration of using ActivityPub’s Client-to-Server part of the protocol (some context on C2S here).
- Fedify Developer Hong Minhee made a new logging library.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-147/
X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem
Happy 2026 everyone. The world’s richest man runs a subscription service to remove the clothing from photographs of children, and I don’t know how to write about it. It’s been just over a week and the global order has already drastically changed, in ways that affect everything, including how open social protocols understand themselves.
Remember 2023 and 2024? When every time Musk did something bad, people got excited because that would lead to Elon Musk Events, with signup waves to Mastodon and Bluesky? And when ‘bad’ was understood be frivolous things like DMs not working? Now in 2026, when ‘bad’ means generating CSAM and NCII on-demand at industrial scale, it’s crickets, and there is no initiative at all to leave the platform anymore. Society is going through the motions of vocal condemnation, pointing at agencies who should enforce something, but then not enforcing anything. It is clear now that actually leaving X is a step too far and unthinkable.
On January 3rd, US forces bombed Caracas, captured Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people. Trump posted photos from a makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago showing the raid being monitored in real time. In the situation room photos, visible on the big screen behind Defense Secretary Hegseth, was an X feed showing search results for ‘Venezuela’. Another photo showed the OSINTdefender account on the screen. Few things illustrate the current role of X in our society as well as the heads of the most powerful military in the world, monitoring the X account of OSINTdefender while the CIA director sat next to them in the room.
Grok’s latest update allows people to generate sexualized images of women and children on demand, at industrial scale, generating multiple such images per second. Everyone is aware that this is happening, and continues to happen, as nobody is willing to stop it. Musk’s attitude is to use the crying-laughing emoji on complaints is an indication of how serious he takes the issue. Politicians have universally condemned it in words, calling it unacceptable. What is so maddening, however, is that their actions say otherwise. Governments all around the world are very clearly afraid of picking a fight with Elon Musk and a belligerent US regime.
This fear by politicians is further accentuated by the raid on Venezuela and Maduro’s kidnapping, which shows that the US is now a rogue state that does not care in the slightest about adhering to any forms of law. With realistic further threats being made to annex Greenland by the US, it is in fact understandable why politicians are afraid to take actions against the richest man in the world. When the UK said it might potentially think about enforcing its own laws against X, a US congresswoman threatened to sanction not just Starmer but ‘Britain as a whole,’ calling enforcement ‘a political war against Elon Musk.’ X is both protected by US state power, as well as being a source of US state power.
This widespread societal resignation of ‘guess our government communications now happens on a deepfake porn site’ is maddening, but also points to a deeper issue. We’re used to describing X as a platform, and analyse X accordingly. The photos of X being on the big screen while coordinating the Maduro raid is an indication that X acts as the infrastructure for power, the glue that connects the neo-royalty.
But the refusal of governments around the world to do anything about the CSAM and NCII generation machine, and how other countries get bombed and their leaders kidnapped because it creates content for X, shows that X is about power, and less about a platform.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter late 2022, alternative open social networks gained prominence, and platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky presented themself as alternatives to Twitter’s function as the digital public square. Both networks understood that there was an issue with the idea of having a single platform as a public square, and thus did not copy Twitter fully, but put their own spin on it.
The fediverse and Mastodon focused on there not being a single public square at all, but instead many digital places and communities that interconnect with each other. For Bluesky the solutions were aimed at giving users more control, with composable moderation and custom algorithmic feeds.
What this framing missed however is that Twitter also stopped being the digital public town square, in the years since Musk’s acquisition. Instead, it became the internal coordination space for a political faction that now controls state power. People still treat X as if it is still 2015, pretending it is the town square and using it for everything from talking about sports news to keeping up to date on pop culture. This lends validation and legitimation to X’s new role, facilitating the power of the neo-royalty.
The neo-royalty is the small network of political, capital, and tech elites centered on Trump, and X is their coordination infrastructure. Because they are rapidly gaining power around the world, and are in full control of the world’s military hegemon, you cannot separate yourself from this power infrastructure that X has become. Leaving X does not insulate or protect yourself from the warping effects it has on global power. This goes for both the large geopolitical aspects (see Greenland), and the local impacts, as the Somali families in Minnesota who lost their childcare funding because of a viral X video weren’t on X.
The implicit theory behind the alternative social web was that platform quality would determine outcomes. Build something that’s better, and in combination with the incumbent getting worse, this would lead to such difference in quality, user experience and safety that at some point people would switch from X to alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky. This theory held up for a while in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 it started to falter, as Musk aligned himself with Trump, the signup waves to the alternative platforms effectively stopped. In early 2026, this theory is now really over, because X has fundamentally changed. Mastodon and Bluesky are not in competition anymore with the platform X, because X has changed. It changed from being a platform to the power structure for the neo-royalty, with the public square shambling along as a zombie, animated by everyone who still treats X like it’s 2015.
You cannot out-compete ‘where the ruling faction radicalizes and coordinates’ by having better moderation policies or algorithmic choice. X is not a platform problem anymore, it is a power problem, and building a different platform does not solve the power problem.
Other countries will need to leave the platform to untangle themselves from this dependency, and reduce its legitimacy. But the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.
We’re now at a strange stand-off, where it is extremely clear it is unacceptable what X is doing, and governments make a lot of noise about how upset they are, without daring to pull the trigger on taking action. Everyone is waiting on everyone else to take the first move.
This leads to three possible outcomes:
- no government dares to take action, and they keep to calling things “completely unacceptable” while accepting the actual situation. Things stay as they currently are, and the world keeps sliding into a more dangerous and harmful place.
- One government takes action against X, and the US regime retaliates so hard that no other government will dare to do meaningful enforcement against the massive harms created by X.
- One government takes enforcement action against X, creating a permission structure for other governments to also take actions.
All three options have a meaningful impact on the open social web. For the first two outcomes, it further cements X as the place of power for the neo-royalty, further cementing its dominance in the political sphere. This position of power is also what prevents the alternative open networks to become a place of political power in it’s own right. The third option, of mass enforcement, is what creates an opening for open social networks to not just be an alternative, but to be a source of political power as well.
I do not know what the outcome will be, and with how rapidly the world has been changing I do not know which option is likely either. It’s easy to be highly cynical, and that point of view has been extensively validated over the years, but I do choose to hold to hope that we can build a better, more ethical, social internet out of the toxic waste ground of the current state of the internet.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/a-power-problem-not-a-platform-problem/
FR#152 – The DSA needs Big Tech
Last week was the FOSDEM conference, where my time was mostly spend chatting with people so I had little time actually listen to all the talks at the event itself. I want to spend some time on one panel in particular, because while rewatching the panel I realised it surfaced some pretty deep structural issues between the fediverse and the DSA.
The panel “The Fediverse and the EU’s Digital Services Act” brought together Alexandra Geese, a Member of the European Parliament and one of the lead negotiators of the DSA; Felix Hlatky, the recently appointed Executive Director of Mastodon; and Sandra Bartels, founder of the Alliance of Open Networks. The title of the panel suggested this was about complementary approaches to the same problem of how Europe can protect democratic discourse online, but turns out there’s a bit more to it.
Geese laid out the DSA’s most powerful provision clearly. Article 34 requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs, defined as platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users) to assess systemic risks, and allows the Commission to mandate changes to algorithms, targeting systems, and business models. This, Geese argued, is what makes the DSA meaningful. It gives Europe the ability to intervene in how platforms shape public discourse, without having to become a “ministry of truth” that decides what content is or isn’t allowed.
Hlatky then described the fediverse as a fundamentally different kind of network. “It’s a network of a lot of small networks. In fact, in the fediverse there’s around 30,000 active small servers.” He went on: “From a regulatory point of view, it’s very attractive because they all of them default under the SME exemption, small medium enterprises, so all of these servers are very small so they fall under this exemption.” When asked what makes the fediverse a nicer place than mainstream social media, Hlatky pointed to design and culture: “Polarizing content on Mastodon and the broader fediverse, it will never be amplified in the same way as in other networks, simply because of design choice, that this content doesn’t have this strong amplification. But the second thing that is probably more important is that trust and safety is not an afterthought, something that is bolted on later because we need this for regulatory compliance, but it’s part of the initial product design process.”
These are both reasonable statements on their own, but positioned next to each other it is visible that both Geese and Hlatky describe projects that work against each other. Geese’s entire model depends on VLOPs actually existing, as without a platform that crosses the 45 million monthly active users article 34 of the DSA has nothing to act upon. The DSA’s power to force algorithmic changes, to mandate risk assessments, to reshape business models, all of it requires a centralized platform large enough to qualify. Without a VLOP, the DSA actually does very little. On the other hand, Hlatky, as the Executive Director of one of the largest software developers building the alternative, is explicitly celebrating the fact that nothing in the fediverse qualifies for the DSA, and that the structure of the network makes it likely that nothing will ever qualify. The network architecture of the fediverse creates the possibility for the large majority of participants (if not everybody) to avoid DSA regulation via the SME exemption.
During the panel, Geese was remarkably candid about the geopolitical pressure the European Commission faces when trying to enforce the DSA against US-based platforms. She described how US government threats, including tariff escalation and NATO posturing, are actively deterring the Commission from enforcement. In her framing, DSA enforcement is no longer just a regulatory question, and she sees it as one of three fundamental geopolitical conflicts facing Europe, alongside defense against Russia and economic competitiveness, and argued that enforcing the DSA requires political courage at the highest levels of European leadership.
This problem of political will only matters if VLOPs exist to enforce the DSA against. In a network of 30,000 small servers, there is no entity for the Commission to pressure, and no platform for the US government to shield through diplomatic coercion. The fediverse sidesteps the geopolitical vulnerability that Geese described, but does so by eliminating the regulatory lever entirely.
The very geopolitical pressure that makes DSA enforcement difficult is itself an argument for the fediverse. If the Commission can be coerced into not enforcing against US-based VLOPs, then a network architecture without VLOPs is more resilient, not just technically but geopolitically. But that resilience comes at a cost to both sides of the current power dynamic. For the US, a world without VLOPs removes the ability to fuse state power with platform power, the dynamic that currently allows the US government to shield companies like X and Meta from European regulation. For the EU it removes the regulatory lever that the Commission has spent years building, and with it the role the EU has carved out for itself as the global counterweight to Big Tech. The EU’s position in digital governance, as well as the way the EU understands itself, is built around being the entity that regulates platforms. Without platforms large enough to regulate, that position loses its foundation.
For Hlatky, this avoidance of the DSA is not a big problem, as he sees many positive traits for the fediverse, such as polarizing content not being amplified and trust and safety being integrated into product design. However, these traits can better be described as how Hlatky views Mastodon, as those are not characteristics that are intrinsic to an ActivityPub network, and the claim that trust and safety is integral to Mastodon’s product design is contested within the community as well. While other ActivityPub software also proclaims these traits, it might just be an emergent property that flows from the type of people and their interest who are the early adopters and new builders of of open social platforms. In a potential world where open social protocols gain mass adoption, I’m not sure these characteristics will hold up, especially if it becomes a hyped new technology that attracts a very different user base with other priorities.
This is something I have written about before: one of the reasons the European Commission actually needs platforms like X to exist is that it has built its entire regulatory infrastructure around the assumption that VLOPs exist. Open social networks don’t just offer an alternative to Big Tech, they undermine the assumptions that European digital regulation is built on. The panel at FOSDEM was collegial and constructive, and everyone agreed that the fediverse is good and the DSA is necessary. But nobody asked the harder question: if the fediverse succeeds in replacing centralized platforms, what regulatory framework takes over from the DSA?
Some other news
For Protocols For Publishers I gave a presentation on the state of the open social web, explaining to publishers how both ActivityPub and atproto have different visions for how a social network can function. In my opinions these visions can be complementary to each other, with atproto well suited for the distribution of news, and ActivityPub creating new primitives for community building. The slide deck can be downloaded here.
PieFed has seen a sustained growth of new users over the last week, increasing it’s total user base by 50% in a week. The main driver of growth for PieFed, created by New Zealand based developer Rimu Atkinson, is a popular post on the BuyFromEU subreddit that describes the platform as an European Reddit Alternative. While impressive growth in relative terms, in absolute terms the entire network is still small, with some 8k monthly active users (MAU) for PieFed and 36k MAU for Lemmy.
Mastodon has announced that they are beginning work on a new onboarding experiment, where they’ll recommend “the closest server geographically that is in the correct language during the sign-up flow.” Mastodon using the mastodon.social as a default server for signup has been a point of critique for years within the community, and the organisation is now addressing this feedback.
Holos continues to be one of the most interesting projects moving ActivityPub forward. It runs an ActivityPub servers on your mobile phone, with a relay that handles your identity, as well as data forwarding for the periods when your phone is inaccessible. The latest update allows you to set your identity based on a domain name you own, fairly similar to atproto. Once the project launches as a 1.0 I’ll write a more detailed explainer about it and why I think it matters, for the protocol-minded people I already recommend taking a look.
FediMTL is a conference about digital sovereignty and the social web, that will be held on February 24, 2026 in Montreal (streaming options also available).
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr152-the-dsa-needs-big-tech/
