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The good news is that on Mastodon you can use “filters” to reduce how much of this discussion you see on your timelines by telling the software not to show you any posts that include specific keywords. It’s similar to Twitter’s “muted words”, although better in several ways.
While Funkwhale has supported Subsonic clients for a few releases now, one developer has decided to invest time in building a beautiful mobile app specific for Funkwhale users. Antoine Popineau, known by his developer handle as apognu, has been hard at work developing Otter. In his own words: This project started out because I listen to music primarily on the go, and I was accustomed to have native players for my previous music services.
One really cool feature of the Funkwhale platform lies in its ability to stream media directly to mobile devices. This is made possible through its partial adoption of the Subsonic API, which is supported by a handful of different mobile clients on Android and iOS.
MissKey is a newer microblogging platform for the fediverse, developed largely by an individual developer named Syuilo. Billing itself as “a completely open source, ultimately sophisticated professional microblogging software”, the project has been in active development for about four years and has a dedicated following.
There's a bit of a conceptual disconnect at the moment with how channels are supposed to work. At first glance, the hierarchy takes some getting used to. Let's untangle this! The user account you create when registering for PeerTube is an Account. From a technical perspective, every video you upload is referred to through it, because technically it's an ActivityPub Actor object. What this means in practice is that people can subscribe to it directly on Mastodon...
Eugen Rochko, known online by his handle Gargron, maintains and develops Mastodon full-time. His employment is entirely sustained through thousands of donations to an ongoing Patreon campaign.
In May of 2011, Christine Webber announced the GNU Mediagoblin project — a publishing platform focused on images, audio, and video. It can be compared to the likes of Flickr, Soundcloud, DeviantArt, or Instagram. As it developed, Chris became instrumental in pushing the W3C ActivityPub Protocol forward.
Many newcomers to the federated web may hear of a casual reference to the fediverse, and may be curious about what that term means. A simple explanation might be that it's a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe", but it's actually a little bit more complicated than that. Let's dive into the nature of this beast, along with some of the history that comes with it...