Fediverse Report #101
Its another massive week for Pixelfed, growing by another 100k active users and doubling their Kickstarter goal, raising over 100k CAD.
The News
Pixelfed continues to grow rapidly, adding almost 100k monthly active users in a week, and has now almost 300k monthly active users. Just over a month ago, Pixelfed had around 20k monthly active users. Developer Daniel Supernault launched a Kickstarter this week for Pixelfed,Loops and Sup. The Kickstarter proved popular, raising 100k CAD, double its 50k CAD goal. The Kickstarter is mainly for to fund the continuous development of the platforms, with the primary goals listed as ‘acceleration development’ for Pixelfed and Loops, and starting the development of messaging platform Sup. Sup is a planned encrypted messaging app that is supposed to compete with WhatsApp and Snapchat. Supernault has mentioned working on the project in the past, but it is unclear how far along the project is.
Supernault says that the operational costs for running all of his projects is now over 4000 USD per month. The large majority of people joining the flagship servers pixelfed.social and loops.video, which are both run by Supernault. Still, it seems like Supernault is not particularly interested in sharing out the load of users to other servers, saying that people unfamiliar with the fediverse want to join a a flagship instance. He also says that “using random servers to register on is very dangerous, because not all of them are as dedicated to this as I am, some of them don’t update frequently or handle mod reports as fast as we do.” Supernault is currently the only moderator for both the pixelfed.social server as well as the pixelfed.art server. He also says that Pixelfed.social needs to establish a mod team. One barrier to adding extra moderators is that Pixelfed does not have a specific ‘moderator’ role in the software, there is only the possibility to give someone full admin rights. Supernault says that he is working on adding such a feature.
The Pixelfed Kickstarter also lists a Pixelfed Foundation as its stretch goal. It is not particularly clear what such a Foundation would entail: the Kickstarter describes it as both a foundation and a corporation, as says that it “hopefully” would be a not-for-profit. Some of the potential work of the Pixelfed foundation would be to grow the Pixelfed and Loops social networks, and also support other developers in the wider fediverse ecosystem.
Tumblr has reconfirmed that it is working on connecting to the fediverse. In late 2022, Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the site was going to add ActivityPub support ‘soon’. Plans changed for Tumblr, including staff layoffs, and for a long time it was unclear if this plan was actually going to happen. In summer 2024, Tumblr announced that they would be working on moving the backend of Tumblr to WordPress. In an AMA this week, the company said that this migration of Tumblr to WordPress means that Tumblr can also use the plugins of WordPress, including the ActivityPub plugin. This means that people will be able to add ActivityPub to their Tumblr blogs. Not much is known about how this would work in practice.
The Analysis
Editor’s note: I wrote the section below before Supernault published his latest update on Kickstarter a few hours ago. In the latest update the Pixelfed Foundation is now moved towards a new stretch goal of 200k CAD. This changes my analysis, but I currently do not have the time to properly analyse and write about it before this newsletter will go out. I’ll write more about this next week.
Some more thoughts on Pixelfed:
I worry about the moderation side for Pixelfed, and specificially the flagship pixelfed.social. Pixelfed.social is now a server with over 200.000 monthly active users, and Supernault is the only moderator for the server. 1 moderator for over 200k active accounts is not a whole lot, to put it mildly. One of the main goals of the Kickstarter is to “expand the moderation, security, privacy and safety platforms”, and my hope is that the financial success of the Kickstarter can help get a bigger moderation team for the servers as quickly as possible.
One of the consistently most difficult aspects of fediverse platforms is the governance of the software. Mastodon has gotten a lot of pushback for its ‘Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life‘, and correspondingly, a lot of praise when Mastodon recently moved away from this model. For Pixelfed and Loops the power concentration into a single person is even more pronounced, with a single developer running two different platforms, two flagship servers as well as various other prominent fediverse projects such as fedidb. It shows the incredible amount of work that Supernault has contributed to the fediverse, but it also indicates the centralisation of power that has resulted from this. The Kickstarter promises a Pixelfed Foundation, but it does not say anything about how the Foundation will deal with governance. The short description of the Foundation mainly seems to be focused on financial sustainability and growth of fediverse projects. The section on the Pixelfed Foundation ends with a quote from Mastodon’s blog post: “The people should own the town square”, but it does not explain in any way how “the people” will get to “own the town square”.
Over on Bluesky, the short-lived TikTok ban in the US has put video front-and-center. As a response, people are starting to take Bluesky posts that contain video, and build a TikTok-like UI around it. Bluesky launched video feeds in their app last week, and SkyLight is a high-profile project to build a video-only UI for Bluesky posts. I’m curious if Pixelfed’s renewed prominence will lead to more interest in similar image-viewing fediverse clients that less bound to server platforms, whether that is Pixelfed, Mastodon or other fediverse platforms.
The dominance of Mastodon and microblogging over the wider fediverse has led to a situation where Mastodon and the fediverse get equated as mostly the same in coverage of larger news outlets. The growth of Pixelfed, and the mainstream attention that it brings now changes this dynamic. This Forbes article about Pixelfed is a good example, where the fediverse gets introduced from the perspective of Pixelfed instead of from a perspective of Mastodon.
The Kickstarter states an “Commitment to open source and open principles”, and says that “all of the source code for Pixelfed is licensed under the AGPL license and is publicly available on GitHub”. I am not clear why Loops is not mentioned here for a commitment to open source. Loops is not currently neither open source nor federating, according to the official Pixelfed account. While Supernault also says that he is “working on that”, I find it strange that Loops is not mentioned under the commitment to open source.
Building an encrypted messaging app is difficult, to put things mildly. Building an encrypted messaging as a solo developer, while also building an Instagram competitor as well as a TikTok competitor is just wildly optimistic. I fear that Supernault is spreading himself too thin here, committed to too many different products. Supernault’s shifting attention makes it difficult for him to ship features he has promised. Notable example of this is the Groups feature for Pixelfed, which Supernault has promised as coming “very soon” since summer 2023. His latest estimation for groups is now for Q2 2025.
Tumblr saying that they are working on their fediverse integration is great news for the fediverse. For a quite a while it seemed that Tumblr would not actually follow through on early announcements by CEO Mullenweg. The answer by Tumblr that ActivityPub support will depend on a plugin makes it plausible to me that Tumblr blogs will likely have to opt-in to connecting themselves to the fediverse by adding the plugin. So based on the limited information available it seems likely to me it will not be a situation where the fediverse instantly grows by millions of active users.
The Links
In the media:
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy – Jason Koebler/404Media
Meta and X are going rogue. Here is what Europe should do now. – EDRi/EDRi
The Challenge of Upward Momentum – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
Forum software NodeBB joins the fediverse – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch
Teaching Mastodon Through Practical Interactions – Lety Does Stuff
Tech links:
A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website) – Part 8 – Maho Pacheco
Hosting a new ActivityPub Relay for the Fediverse including Mastodon and snac – gyptazy
Lemmy bi-weekly development update.
Running GoToSocial on your car.
Upcoming fediverse music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information on how discovery will work on the platform.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-101/
