Moin! Ich bin letztes Jahr #Mastodon beigetreten, hatte damals keine Ahnung über's #Fediverse und bin zum bekanntesten mastodon.social gegangen. Dann war der acc erstmal ziemlich stillgelegt, bis ich Ende des Jahres mich mehr ins Fedivers gefuchst hab. Als ich die Seite auf @FediTips bezüglich "großen #Servern und warum sie ein #Problem sind" gelesen habe, hatte ich schon ca 150 Posts und wollte ungern umziehen. fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-ide… Nach erneuter #Recherche aber herausgefunden, dass der alte Account beim #
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Moin! Ich bin letztes Jahr #Mastodon beigetreten, hatte damals keine Ahnung über's #Fediverse und bin zum bekanntesten mastodon.social gegangen. Dann war der acc erstmal ziemlich stillgelegt, bis ich Ende des Jahres mich mehr ins Fedivers gefuchst hab. Als ich die Seite auf @FediTips bezüglich "großen #Servern und warum sie ein #Problem sind" gelesen habe, hatte ich schon ca 150 Posts und wollte ungern umziehen. fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-ide… Nach erneuter #Recherche aber herausgefunden, dass der alte Account beim #Umzug nicht gelöscht wird und auch eine redirect Funktion hat. Bei nun 300 Posts war's mir doch etwas mulmig, aber na ja, hab's doch getan.
Der Server hat zwar ein paar Server blockiert, wie zb den #newsmast, die ich gern mochte, aber nun ja. Ist nicht sooo schlimm. Hingegen sind die 5000 Zeichen viel besser als die 500. x3
Ich mach noch n richtigen #Vorstellungspost … irgendwann … wenn ich's nicht vergesse. Aber hier erstmal die kleine #Story, warum ich umgezogen bin.
Could not be happier with #newsmast as the new stewards of our community here. I give monthly to support this server, if it’s your social home and don’t yet, even $1 a month really helps! #Indiewebsocial
Here I want to mention one last development of #Ibram-#Museus experiments with #theFediverse, which emerged as a very interesting opportunity: The App as an Adoption Strategy.
@michael, from #NewsMast, says the Fediverse is still a tech determined environment, where everything starts with a server or a protocol. But this is not the case for people in general or communities in general. For communities & people in #Brazil, #socialspaces start with an app." josemurilo.com
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Here I want to mention one last development of #Ibram-#Museus experiments with #theFediverse, which emerged as a very interesting opportunity: The App as an Adoption Strategy.
@michael, from #NewsMast, says the Fediverse is still a tech determined environment, where everything starts with a server or a protocol. But this is not the case for people in general or communities in general. For communities & people in #Brazil, #socialspaces start with an app." josemurilo.com/2025/12/05/muse…
Museums in the Fediverse: Experiments with Tainacan, ActivityPub, and WebSocial
Below, we present the slides and the text of José Murilo’s presentation, representing Ibram-Museus at the 1st WebSocialBR in Brasília, on December 3, 2025.
Slide 1 – Museums in the Fediverse: Experiments by Ibram-Museus with Tainacan, ActivityPub, and WebSocial
It is a pleasure to participate in this event, and I want to thank everyone involved in making it happen. This will be an opportunity to present the reflections and experiments that Ibram-Museus is conducting on the topic of decentralized social networks. We also want to listen to all the initiatives presented here and make ourselves available for effective dialogue around ideas, strategies, and applications to develop this environment of decentralized social networks within public policy.
Slide 2 – Why the Fediverse?
Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2023, experts and politicians in Brazil and abroad have recognized that the free services provided by Big Tech social networks—tainted with aggressive surveillance schemes for customized advertising—are harming the health and well-being of users, especially young people. The problem of misinformation, on the other hand, poses threats to democratic regimes.
This undesirable scenario in the social media environment, combined with Brazilians’ special preference for this mode of online communication, led us to imagine that a public policy for this field, in a country as large as Brazil, could have a significant demonstrative effect. Therefore, Ibram believes it is timely to conduct an experiment with federated social networks and museums—memory institutions.
Slide 3 – Why Museums in the Fediverse? Tainacan…
Since 2016, Ibram has been in an important partnership with public universities to develop the Tainacan Project. It is a digital repository application in open-source software, specialized in the online publication of digital collections, which Ibram presents as an integral part of the Networked Collection Program—a public policy based on open-source software.
In the management that began in 2023, especially with the administrative restructuring of Ibram, we managed to expand the scale of digital services offered by Ibram to the museum field. To achieve this, it was necessary to accelerate the institute’s capacity to operate Digital Culture public policies autonomously, and for this, cooperation with Information Science departments at public universities was crucial.
The institutional design proposed for this Ibram-University cooperation favored the involvement of young museologists, archivists, and librarians in the formulation and implementation of applications and in activating networks for the museum field.
In these 10 years of development, a measure of Tainacan’s performance and its community in the field of digital memory is the fact that the software already has versions in 12 languages, with more than 2,000 active instances and over 40,000 downloads.
Slide 4 – The First Step: Brasiliana Museus
To inaugurate the initiative of Brazilian Museums in the Fediverse, in January 2024, we activated the ActivityPub plugin on the Brasiliana Museus WordPress site and published the first post from a gov.br domain on the web social, i.e., in the Fediverse. Comments on this post, originating in the Fediverse, were also recorded in the comments section of the post on the Brasiliana blog, demonstrating the possibility of integrating institutional websites with the Fediverse.
It is important to mention that Brasiliana Museus is a service for aggregating museological collections developed from Tainacan, which became the basis for developing new applications, as we will see later.
It was a beginning, a simple experiment, but we consider that the initiative had great significance. Our hope was that it would be the start of a transformative process in how we, as people and institutions, connect online, and that it could provide an improvement in our fundamental relationship with the digital and the web.
Slide 5 – Tainacan + WordPress + ActivityPub Technical aspects: The Tainacan Project is developed as a plugin for WordPress, just like the ActivityPub plugin, which connects WordPress to the Fediverse. WordPress, in turn, is used on 43.4% of all websites on the internet, being the most popular content management platform in the world. The ecosystem expands as the community increases the library of available plugins.
As soon as we experimented with the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, we realized how we could immediately choose, in the plugin interface, the type of Tainacan post we could select for posting in the Fediverse.
In other words, Tainacan, as if by magic, began to have a direct channel for segmented dissemination of cultural heritage content to subscribing users. At that moment, the Tainacan team at Ibram was impacted by what we could imagine in terms of new applications of Tainacan for decentralized social networks.
From there, we defined the initiative’s objective as providing museums and other memory institutions with a tool that facilitates exploring decentralized social networks as an environment for disseminating their collections.
From other experiments with museums in the Fediverse, such as the San Francisco Airport Museum (SFO Museum – ActivityPub Services), we realized that in the case of museum collections published in Tainacan, each item could become a post or even a new profile in the Fediverse—in the case, for example, of museum items of broad interest.
Slide 6 – Online Audience Management
From the support and development teams’ work on Tainacan at Ibram, we have been adapting the core application for developing other functionalities beyond aggregation, such as event registration on the “Visit Museums” site, and for registering memory institutions in the “MuseusBR” service. Another planned initiative is developing the module of public notices that would complete, along with Tainacan, what we consider a package of useful applications for public institutions. The most interesting aspect is that these new applications, developed within the WordPress ecosystem, like Tainacan, immediately integrate into the Fediverse.
For this reason, we understand that the moment is opportune in the Tainacan community to embrace the connection with the Fediverse and effectively explore how memory institutions can make the most of the open social web. The goal is to provide institutions that promote access to knowledge with updated tools for managing their online audiences.
Slide 7 – On the Role of Universities
When I think about the challenge of launching a strategy to popularize the Fediverse in Brazil, I cannot help but think of universities as institutions best positioned for leadership. It is impossible not to remember the mobilization period for Eco-92, where universities entered into a healthy competition in terms of diligence in installing their first institutional email servers. At that time, the internet was born under the auspices of institutionalization.
The problems of the Internet certainly have multiple causes and ingredients, but from the perspective of the Brazilian Institute of Museums, they present the contours of an institutional crisis. This is because technologies that mediate social relations, like the Internet, intrinsically create institutions.
A coordination mechanism that enables collective action, with the capacity to process information to solve increasingly complex problems, regardless of whether it is supported by information technology, is an institution.
Slide 8 – Public Policy vs. Monopoly Logic
In the early days of the Internet, there was a group of ‘hackers’ who advocated for the total absence of government action in the digital environment. This happened with the publication of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. The last 20 years seem to indicate that the absence of public policy only favored the takeover of the web by speculative capital interests and transnational monopolies.
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. In the name of the future, I ask you from the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Davos, Feb / 1996)
The crucial decision is between the policy that defends the common interest and deliberately favors the emergence of new digital institutionalities on the network, and the blind policy that, through inaction, allows the evolution of the digital environment to occur randomly, at the whim of the interests of large foreign technology companies.
We could perhaps imagine a “Declaration for a Public Interest Cyberspace” to counter John Barlow’s declaration in the 90s.
Slide 9 – The App as an Adoption Strategy
Here I want to mention one last development of Ibram’s experiments with the Fediverse, which emerged as a very interesting opportunity.
The great challenge is how to guide the transition from the centralized, proprietary environment to the decentralized environment, which establishes distributed responsibilities and an expanded role for institutions that promote access to knowledge.
In the last 2 years, we have conducted some experiments, and recently we have been in contact with Michael Foster from the NewsMast Foundation. It is an organization dedicated to developing the WebSocial, offering the possibility of creating community apps for organizations interested in exploring the Fediverse.
The app works integrated with WordPress and promotes community engagement based on a Mastodon instance. In other words, through the partnership with the NewsMast Foundation, Ibram plans to boost the strategy of occupying the Fediverse by Brazilian museums.
Michael Foster, who is part of the project, often says that the Fediverse is an environment determined by technology, where everything starts with a server or even a protocol. However, this is not the case for people in general or communities in general. For communities and people, especially in Brazil, social spaces start with an app.
The Ibram app is born from the set of users of the Forum (WordPress) that developed the National Sectorial Museums Plan – PNSM in a participatory manner and is coupled to the Fediverse instance (social.museus.gov.br) where we intend to offer Brazilian museums the opportunity to create institutional accounts. If everything goes as planned, at the beginning of 2026, we will launch the “Museums in the Fediverse” app in the Android and Apple stores.
Slide 10 – Summary
The network technology that mediates much of our lives is social engineering—which means that deciding how it works is (or should be) a political issue. If we want to have any hope that these collective digital spaces will result in a world worth living in, we need to build our Internet policies based on solid institutional principles.
It matters to museums, for example, that if there is a social network service willing to host memory institutions of public interest, the data of the museums’ interaction with their interested public is also preserved as a digital collection and for research.
Ibram understands that Brazilian museums have a contribution to make in reflecting on the future of the digital environment, especially concerning the issue of digital memory.
The Entry Guide to the Fediverse
O “Guia de Entrada para o Fediverso” lançado pelo Ibram por ocasião de evento, em 03/12 As a result of this internal reflection by Ibram-Museus, and in support of the 1st WebSocialBR, the Brazilian Fediverse Forum was an opportunity for the launch of the ‘Entry Guide to the Fediverse.’ It is a digital booklet with basic information for anyone interested in exploring the universe of decentralized social networks. We invite you to discover this alternative to the capture promoted by centralized platforms and their algorithms — download the Guide and take your first steps into the Fediverse.
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 a lot of mosquito bites, some fabulous memories and a clear plan to take forward.
"The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month."
"The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month."
The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.
WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.
Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.
I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.
FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!
In This Issue
* A Note From The Editor
* Technical Updates
* Owncasts For Roku Updated
* Features
* Kit On Fireside Fedi
* Featured Streamer: Fireside Fedi
* Closing Remarks
A Note From The Editor
Did you miss me? This July-November …
We're thrilled to officially welcome @benparker to the Newsmast Foundation team!
Co-founder of The New Humanitarian and a former international aid worker, Ben joins us as Editor. He'll be helping keep our Channel experience looking good across the Social Web through careful curation 🧹
Please give him a warm welcome and keep an eye out for all the exciting things we're working on 👀
Trying out the @newsmast client! Adds another layer to picking a server and making an account, as an additional tailoring of the ways I consume, interact with and create content.
Hi again, ich bin eben auf die #NewSocial -Kampagne der #Newsmast Foundation gestoßen, die im Jan. '25 gestartet wurde – mittlerweile gibt es wohl keine Neuigkeiten: newsmastfoundation.org/new-soc… – New Social könnte den Kriterien der Sammlung entsprechen.
An improvise as you go classic.
Once there were three adults whose names were Michael, Freddie, and Saskia. This story is about something that happened to them when they decided to do something to help raise awareness for New Social in the UK.
We're really excited to meet a community of people passionate about free software and, specifically, those who are making the trip to Bolzano for the Fediverse track, sponsored by #FediForum 🎉
On Friday, at 4pm in Seminar 4, we'll be talking about what we've been building, how we're growing the Open Social Web, and why we think now is more important than ever to join decentralised social media.
Three years ago today, the idea of the Newsmast Foundation was born 🎂
Born from the pieces of what Twitter was, our founders knew that they needed to take action to help online communities come together to inform one another once again.
As we prepare to launch a world-first app we've run into a problem. What is it?
Apps are similar to books or music. They have genres. Strict rules that define who they are for, helping us, the consumer, not only discover them but share them.
We might be a small team but we're the right team.
Using our past experiences, we're propelling the Newsmast Foundation forward, helping social media pioneers make the move away from Big Tech towards owning their community.
"So I think one of the answers to that could be a collective effort. If we help each other out, and kind of have a combined front as we go out to the outside world."
Bang on. The challenge here is to agree on the nature and the boundaries of this collective identity. Eg Do we promote projects that are technically useful, even if some people associate the lead devs with politics they strongly demand we disassociate from?
Welcome back! This episode acts as a bookend for last week's episode, where we reflect on the June 2025 FediForum event. Joining us is Saskia Welch from the Newsmast Foundation, here to share her pers
"I think one of the big barriers that a lot of organisations [have] - even we have at the @newsmast Foundation [and] we have fulltime employees ... - it's spreading yourself across the platforms, and maintaining the heavy [publishing] schedule you need to actually be seen on some of them. It's so much work, and for individual projects, I can understand why they can't do that."
Welcome back! This episode acts as a bookend for last week's episode, where we reflect on the June 2025 FediForum event. Joining us is Saskia Welch from the Newsmast Foundation, here to share her pers
![Por que Museus no Fediverso? Tainacan...Em 2023: construção de capacidade para operar políticas públicas de Cultura Digital de maneira autônoma no IbramDesenho institucional:- Sistemas de informação museal iluminados pela Ciência da Informação- Envolvimento ativo de museólogos, arquivistas e bibliotecáriosResultados em 10 anos:- Versões em 12 línguas- +2.000 instâncias ativas- +40.000 downloads[(]](https://social.trom.tf/photo/link/308270 "Por que Museus no Fediverso? Tainacan...Em 2023: construção de capacidade para operar políticas públicas de Cultura Digital de maneira autônoma no IbramDesenho institucional:- Sistemas de informação museal iluminados pela Ciência da Informação- Envolvimento ativo de museólogos, arquivistas e bibliotecáriosResultados em 10 anos:- Versões em 12 línguas- +2.000 instâncias ativas- +40.000 downloads[(]")
