As the year ends, thought this would be a good time to list some of the projects and group efforts relating to the Fediverse I’m very jazzed about. Some I’ve helped advise, some I’ve just applauded them from a distance.

I think there has been more innovation that benefits user experience inside the larger Fediverse in the last year or so, than in some of the giant closed silos of Social Media in ten years.

Some key ones that I’m involved in helping move downfield as a formal or informal advisor:

  • ActivtyPub Test Suite: crucially important as big players enter the Fediverse to have a toolset to define what “ActivityPub compliant” means and doesn’t. nlnet.nl/project/F…

  • BlueSky/AT and Mastodon/ActivityPub Bridge - am giving some recommendations and will be testing its important project linking these two protocols of the open social web. Watch this space lots happening there soon.

  • IFTAS - Distributed Trust and Safety Effort- am advising this critically important group. Helping fortify and up the distributed moderation of the 20,000+ Fediverse servers. Few efforts for maturing the Fediverse are more important than this one: about.iftas.org

  • Mammoth Browser - latest release with Smart lists - a mix of curated lists and basic algorithms to surface the best of them. I’m curating some smart lists for this, very worth checking out. getmammoth.app

Projects I’m applauding from a distance:

  • All the efforts innovating at Fediverse UI/UX: this includes MastodonBirdUI - which we have implemented on our server at Indieweb.social, Tangerine UI, Elk, and Phanpy. All are great, and Phanpy I think actually may be my favorite social UX of ANY social service, decentralized or any of the siloed commercial services. phanpy.social

  • New server communities: Fascinated at all the efforts at creating new servers and services: Obviously including Flipboard ( Flipboard.social) Medium (http://me.dm) and fascinating to watch Mozila what they are quietly building at the very bespoke version of their Mastodon server at mozilla.social

  • The deep commitment of WordPress into the ActivityPub space is inspiring to watch Matthias and the team’s work building out a whole new blogging and web publishing space integrating into the Fediverse. Will be doing all I can to help organize efforts to move that into a canonical plugin status.

  • Another key Open Web Platform - Wikipedia (@wikipedia@wikis.world) and Wikimedia (@mediawiki@wikis.world) - embraced the Open Social Web and the Fediverse this year. Bringing with them lots of different Wikipedia accounts, but also launching a whole server devoted to Wiki creators of all types. (https://wikis.world/about)

What I wish for all of these projects, may they thrive and may their gene pool increase.

  • And of course, looking forward I now do predict we see Threads Federating

I say this as I’ve seen breadcrumbs of code surfacing in the apps, and early features such as rel=me support in Threads, and that at every chance they have had to reaffirm their commitment to joining the open social web, they have voiced that commitment and not watered it down.

We will see. It’s still almost all talk until they deliver. But am hopeful now, and also remain on the same strategy as I voiced before on this blog.