**Fediverse Report – #136**## The News[Newsmast](

A social media charity The Newsmast Foundation is an educational charity, supporting the use of social media for good. We’re at the forefront of ...

), the UK organisation that helps news organisations create their own social media places on the fediverse, has taken a new direction. In a [blog post](

Paths & Patches

Building apps for social spaces

The Newsmast team was in Rome last week, working through our messaging and branding with a non-profit agency. It was hot, hard work, ending up with...

) founder Michael Foster describes how news organisations do not gel well with the original approach of either Mastodon servers or the channel.org communities. The finding of Newsmast is that this is too confusing and tech-centric for news organisations to really grasp. Instead, Newsmast is now going in the direction of apps, as “independent news publishers and campaigning organisations love the idea of having an app.” The product offering is that Newsmast creates a white-label of an app that uses their (fediverse-enabled) backend, which the news organisation can theme and customise to their needs. This gives news organisations an app, which is what they want and conceptually relate to, while also giving them a community that can connect to the wider open social web if they want to. Newsmast has already rolled out one of such apps, for the Media Revolution campaign. Foster says that they are about to start working with a UK-based Fediverse community for another such project, where the Newsmast white-label app will be used to create a customised app for the community. A new [paper](https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/6644/6411 ) by [Christina Dunbar-Hester](

Assemblag.es

tools for commensality 🧿 (@inquiline@assemblag.es)

Oops I did it again... published another paper about #Mastodon through the lens of the asstodon hashtag This one's not very rosy, it's about how ...

) about her experiences dealing with targeted harrassment on Mastodon, describing what some of the moderation practices in a decentralised system actually looks like. She writes: “As currently configured, Mastodon values noncentralization, but it stops short of rewriting power relations to encodeheterogeneity (Suchman, 2002). FLOSS universalism and FLOSS relations of domination pervade both the user base and many (certainly not all) “power users” who assume control of and take responsibility for many of the parts of the network through moderationand administration roles.” The entire paper is worth reading, Dunbar-Hester concludes: “a possibility for a more accountable decentralized social media network might *resemble* Mastodon, but prioritize intentional, self-organized choices about *equitable* online sociality that foreground social power”. [ActivityPub Fuzzer](

Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University

Introducing the ASML ActivityPub Fuzzer: Improving Testing in the Fediverse - Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University

The ActivityPub Fuzzer is a small program to help developers build social media software on the Fediverse by emulating known Fediverse software.

) is a new tool to help ActivityPub developers test their interoperability with other fediverse projects. Fuzzer is a program that runs locally, and emulates how other fediverse projects structure their messages. This allows a developer to test interoperability against a large array of fediverse platforms. The open nature of ActivityPub makes it so that interoperability between platforms is trickier than it might be assumed, with various platforms all having their slightly different interpretations of the protocol. Fuzzer is created by Darius Kazemi at the Applied Social Media Lab. IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust And Safety organisation has [announced](

Sunsetting IFTAS Connect – IFTAS

) they are shutting down the IFTAS Connect community at the end of the month. The IFTAS Connected community was a place for fediverse moderators to come together and have conversations about moderation, share resources and more. IFTAS also runs their yearly moderator [Needs Assessment survey](

The 2025 Fediverse Needs Assessment is Open: Have Your Say – IFTAS

), and one of the consistent [findings](📄.pdf ) is that fediverse moderators often struggle with guidance, toolings and burnout. Such a community was meant as a place for moderators to connect with each other and help towards those issues. However, IFTAS found that after 18 months of operating the place, usage remained low. It indicates one of the persistent challenges for fediverse moderation: moderation is largely done by each server independently, with little cooperation between communities which have a lot in common. There is a large potential in the fediverse for collaboration between communities, but making this collaboration happen has proven to be challenging. WordPress is continuing towards becoming a full fediverse platform with their ActivityPub plugin. The latest update of the plugin now [supports](

7.5.0 — Follow the Feed, Quote the Lead – ActivityPub for WordPress

) following a ‘reader timeline’, showing all the posts of accounts you follow from your WordPress account. There is now also support for Mastodon’s new quote posting feature, allowing you to quote post the WordPress post from Mastodon. Matthias Pfefferle, developer of the WordPress ActivityPub integration, also talked on his [podcast](

notizBlog

Exploring WordPress, Textcasting, and Open Web Standards

On Open Web Conversations on OpenChannels.fm https://openchannels.fm/exploring-wordpress-textcasting-and-open-web-standards/ In this episode of the...

) to Dave Weiner, creator of the RSS standard, about WordPress, textcasting and open web standards. Bandwagon, the fediverse platform for music sharing, discovery and sales, shares their [updates](

Bandwagon.fm - September 2025

) of the last few months, with various improvements to the platform across the board. Developer Ben Pate says that the next big priority is to add account migration. Elsewhere in fediverse music, a [blog post](

NHAM

How Indie Video Killed The Spotify Star

How Indie Video Killed The Spotify Star By @limebar@mastodon.social In January 2024, I became aware of the Fediverse music subculture phenomenon ca...

) on how to revive indie music videos on the fediverse. A selection of [tools](

LemmyStat home

Check out awesome tools for the Threadiverse. Analyze user activity, trends and more! Works for Lemmy, piefed and more.

) for Lemmy, which gives you the option to view trends, threadiverse statistics, a leaderboard of most active users, stats on individual users, and more. Fediverse advocate Elena Rossini has published an extensive [fediverse starter guide](

The Future Is Federated: My Fediverse Starter Guide

). The guide explains what the fediverse is ([via her excellent video](https://videos.elenarossini.com/w/64VuNCccZNrP4u9MfgbhkN )), the various types of software that are available, the values of the fediverse, and why it matters. It is these last two points I think are noteworthy: the fediverse is inherently a political project, and it is important to understand the values of the network as a context of why the network exists and why people care about it.## The Links<li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/019987c8-484d-f913-d511-5e8329f9741f">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li>A <a href="https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/09/26/mapping-bike-rides-part-iv/">blog post</a> on how to map your bike rides using the fediverse <a href="https://wanderer.to/">wanderer.to</a> platform.</li><li>A blog post reflecting on the <a href="https://destructured.net/labeling-politics-mastodon">Labeling politics on Mastodon.</a></li><li>The Fireside Fedi livestream had episodes talking about <a href="https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/hetrYEY5ZBYFNjKtdyEBhS?start=3s">ActivityPub, the W3C and more with Ben Goering</a>, and with <a href="https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/osXBTapZ1ocYoyYwkXEzgi">Reiver about FediCon and CrowdBucks.</a></li><li>Utrecht University (shout-out to my alma mater) <a href="https://dub.uu.nl/nl/nieuws/directie-its-wil-dat-uuers-mastodon-gaan-gebruiken">wants their students to use Mastodon.</a></li><li>Fediverse advocate Chris Trottier is in the process of setting up a <a href="https://atomicpoet.org/objects/2289eb47-0f39-463d-a056-8568e12e70f3">PeerTube co-op</a>.</li>#nlnet

connectedplaces.online

Fediverse Report – #136

White-label fediverse apps for news organisations with Newsmast, a paper exploring how harrassment on Mastodon works, and a new tool for easier fed...