Last Week in the Fediverse by Laurens Hof is a newsletter detailing everything going on in the Fediverse within the prior week. Laurens posts to his own site, The Fediverse Report, on Sundays, but we have started syndicating his newsletter the day after. You can follow The Fediverse Report directly via ActivityPub: @LaurensHof — Editor

NLnet Funding the Fediverse

The NLnet foundation provides grants to an open information society, and over the years they have provided most projects on the fediverse with funding. This week NLnet announced their latest grant round, with a significant number of fediverse projects being supported. For more background on NLnet, read my interview with them. In this article I take a look at all the different projects that NLnet has funded this round.

Looking at NLnet’s Latest Grant Round

The EU’s Next Generation Internet grant continues to support innovation in the Fediverse, funding the Inte

PeerTube released their latest version

The latest version of PeerTube comes with a variety of cool new features. Two of them stand out to me, as they allow PeerTube to be used in ways that Youtube can’t. For content creators that want to give their subscribers exclusive access to content, the ability to password protect your PeerTube videos might just be a game changer. There is a lot more coming up next year with PeerTube as well, stay tuned for the announcement very soon!

It’s The Fediverse Reports’ Weekly roundup! Here’s a bunch of really interesting things that happened on the network last week!

Misskey 2023 Recap

Misskey has had a busy year. Developer Syuilo provided an update of the year, describing the new features and how the project went from 500 daily active users in January of the year to 28.000 now. One thing that interests me is how Misskey keeps developing into it’s own unique identity within the fediverse. As it is largely Japanese, there is little overlap with the Western fediverse community.

Misskey 2023 recap

Misskey has grown and changed a lot in the past year. Developer Syuilo wrote a recap of the year.

In Other News

• Mike McCue interviewed Evan Prodromou for his podcast Dot Social. The episode can be found here, Johannes Ernst wrote a thread while listening through the episode to get some of the highlights, here.

• Bridgy Fed is a project to bridge the different protocols that power the open social networks. Creator Ryan Barrett is working to expand to include Bluesky, so that you can connect to accounts from Bluesky with your fediverse account (and visa versa). As work is progressing, he wrote a reintroduction to the project that explains some more background information about the project.

• A longread article on the recent situation with The Bad Space, placing it in a larger historical context.

• An essay that argues that scholarly societies should embrace their role as a society more than a publisher, and build upon the digital commons in the fediverse.

• WeDistribute wrote a list of the 10 biggest misconceptions about Mastodon.

• Radio Free Fedi is working towards a New Years day 24 hour stream party. Go check it out, it looks like there will be a ton of great content. If you stream on Owncast or PeerTube, you can also participate!

• Lemmy gives their developer update on the work they have been doing in the last 2 weeks. Lemmy is preparing for their new release, v0.19, and the lemmy.ml server is already running the update. One of the changes is a new sorting algorithm, scaled sorting, that gives more visibility to smaller communities on Lemmy.

• MarsEdit, a blog editing application for Mac, now has direct support for Mastodon.

• An overview of all the other software releases for fediverse software this week.