Current Number of users on the threadiverse in August 2026.

Source : https://fediverse.observer/

Mastodon

• Active user per month : 830 932
• Half year active users : 1 714 185
• Number of users : 10 244 434

Lemmy

• Active user per month : 35 095
• Half year active users : 62 804
• Number of users : 755 828

Mbin

• Active user per month : 915
• Half year active users : 2 132
• Number of users : 10 188

Nodebb

• Active user per month : 55 246
• Half year active users : 305 110
• Number of users : 19 171 709

Piefed

• Active user per month : 7 048
• Half year active users : 14 115
• Number of users : 19 473

Piefed chat • Fediverse wiki
• Guide and tutorial

!communitypromo@lemmy.ca • !newcommunities@lemmy.world • !fedigrow@lemmy.zip • !newcomers@piefed.zip

Hi ! I hope you are well ! Here is our weekly thread 😎

The fediverse is big ! Let’s share our small gold nugget found in the fediverse. :)

It could be :

• A new peertube channel
• An interesting mastodon account to follow
• Your new community ! Yes ! Why not ?
• An cool gallery of picture from pixelfed
• A playlist from funkwhale
• A text that moved you

Let’s dig together ! 😁

Two weeks ago, we shared insights from Mastodon’s first Discovery Week and how it’s informing our roadmap. Today, we’re offering a deeper dive on what’s in store for Mastodon 5.0 – not an exhaustive list of changes, but a glimpse into major decisions and the thoughts behind them.

Here is a quick sneak peak of the article :

Composing posts in 5.0

• The composer breaks free.
• The visibility selector is a dropdown again.
• ‘Quiet public’ leaves the chat.
• Quote settings also have a new look.
• The visibility selector label also adapts to context.

Messaging in 5.0

• Private mentions are now ‘messages’.
• DMs are distinguished from posts in the composer.
• DMs are also removed from confusing places in the UI.

Changes to navigation in 5.0

• Navigation is now single-column.
• We’re de-emphasising the Mastodon logo, and letting the fediverse take the spotlight.
• Custom feeds now have greater prominence.
• Followed hashtags have less prominence (for people not already using them).
• Page headings are updated for clarity and consistency.

PieFed has a bevy of great and unexpected features to help moderators run their communities!

Fork of ActivityPub underway?

For two weeks, a client from China's state-run academic network queried our Mastodon instance for who follows whom. Not content — relationships. No project description exists anywhere. Here is what we found, and how to check your own instance.

Blog post:
https://www.martinmuc.de/blog/crawler-who-follows-whom/

Mastodon post:
https://muenchen.social/@martinmuc/117144806957574027

This release of Mastodon focuses entirely on technical improvements that are not necessarily visible on the user side, ahead of the ambitiously user-focused Mastodon 5.0 release later this year. Our goal is to improve compatibility with other fediverse platforms, improve performance, and fix various bugs that we’ve found. So this post will be very technical. If you’re into that, read on.

This release features multiple long-running database migrations, as we tackled several long-standing issues in our database structure that made some features difficult or even impossible to implement, and made some migrations unnecessarily complicated. Zero-downtime migration from Mastodon 4.6 to 4.7 is supported, as will be zero-downtime migration from 4.7 to the next version. However, Mastodon 4.7 will be a required stop for zero-downtime migrations.

I just noticed this and realised that I never read anyone talk about this.

https://fedihood.social/about

FediHood is a social network built around the place where you live. You choose a city and the topics you care about, then read what neighbours are saying and join in.

It stays a normal fediverse app. Your posts can reach Mastodon, PixelFed, Misskey and the rest, and posts from those servers reach you too.

Source code: https://git.holos.social/tom79/FediHood

There's only one instance so far: https://fedihood.social/

If new instances are created, they should show up here: https://fedihood.fediverse.observer/list

Piefed chat • Fediverse wiki
• Guide and tutorial

!communitypromo@lemmy.ca • !newcommunities@lemmy.world • !fedigrow@lemmy.zip • !newcomers@piefed.zip

Hi ! I hope you are well ! Here is our weekly thread 😎

The fediverse is big ! Let’s share our small gold nugget found in the fediverse. :)

It could be :

• A new peertube channel
• An interesting mastodon account to follow
• Your new community ! Yes ! Why not ?
• An cool gallery of picture from pixelfed
• A playlist from funkwhale
• A text that moved you

Let’s dig together ! 😁

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50855395

I (and a lot of other people, I'd guess) read and write fanfiction.

But as far as I know, there's never really been a federated fanfic platform — nothing that plugs into the fediverse the way Mastodon does for microblogging or PeerTube/Loops does for video.

---

Then I stumbled upon SquidgeWorld Archive (SQWA), an AO3 alternative that actually runs on the same codebase as AO3 otwarchive.

It's got way fewer users than AO3, which honestly gives it a cozier, more small-town vibe.

The devs/maintainers behind it, squidge.org, even run both Mastodon and Bluesky accounts.

The catch: people have posted that fics pulling thousands of views on AO3 get little to none on SQWA. Makes sense — it's just a much smaller pond.

---

So, two half-formed ideas that I wanted to possibly toss out:

Suggestion #1 — "colonize" SQWA.

What if fediverse-native fanfic folks just started actually posting there? Cross-link your fediverse socials, bring your existing following over, treat it like planting a flag. It already exists, the maintainers are clearly fediverse-friendly, it just needs bodies.

---

Suggestion #2 — fork it (and ao3) and actually federate it.

AO3's otwarchive code is open source, which is exactly what SQWA is running on. What if someone forked it and built out real federation — ActivityPub support, the whole deal — instead of just being a second standalone AO3 clone? That feels like the "real" long-term fix, but it's a genuine software undertaking, not a weekend project.

---

I'd love to take a crack at #2 myself but I don't have the time or the technical bandwidth for something that size right now, so I'm just putting it out there in case it resonates with anyone here.

Curious what this community thinks — is #1 realistic, or does fanfiction just need a ground-up federated archive to actually work?

---

Edit: Sorry for any mistakes, I'm currently at work.

---

Edit Edit:*** There are also these Ao3 mirror sites and alternatives:

Mirror sites:

https://archiveofourown.gay/

https://archive.transformativeworks.org/

https://insecure.archiveofourown.org/

Redirects:

https://archiveofourown.com/

https://archiveofourown.net/

https://archiveofourown.site/

https://ao3.gay/

https://ao3.org/

Other Alternatives:

https://sunset.femslash.club/

https://www.cfaarchive.org/

https://www.adastrafanfic.com/

Several months ago I finally deleted reddit but i havent check on any new developments over at Lemmy/Piefed or any of the million instances so I’m wondering: what’s been going on recently? Anything that I missed? Is it still worth my time to engage with these communities? Lmk the history. Last time i checked, Piefed split from lemmy because of the drama between the developers iirc? But what else has been happening?

Features and changes

Big improvements to finding and adding people to follow, including from Mastodon:

• bulk follow of people, using a CSV file exported from Mastodon
• improve layout of people list info cards
• add people navigation elements to Explore menu
• search for people in the main search tool

Go to https://piefed.social/instance/people/interesting to check it out. Sorting is based on average number of upvotes received per post or comment.

Option to manually approve followers rather than just automatically accept all. You can turn this on in your user settings and then look for 'Follow requests' on the Account menu.

RSS feeds which automatically create posts in communities, with flair to distinguish multiple feeds in same community. Admins need to set the RSS_FEEDS environment variable to enable this. Currently testing this in these communities !bbc_rss@crust.piefed.social and !aljazeera_rss@crust.piefed.social. When there are multiple feeds in a community, each gets it's own flair which people can subscribe to independently by clicking 'Membership' in the community sidebar (recent v1.7.x versions only).

Admins can see a list of unmoderated communities, so they know where the liabilities are. Go to Admin -> Communities -> Unmoderated.

Misc features

Fix removepaywall link.

Stop spammers from sharing links in their bio.

'Mark as read' icon on post teasers.

API: filter post/list endpoint for user languages - thanks to wjs018

API: add unread comment counts to postview result.

Remove annoying blogspot.com url filter.

Better instance chooser search that finds more things.

Updated translations. Filipino languages coming along well.

To upgrade from earlier 1.7.x

./deploy.sh or ./deploy-docker.sh

Donations

PieFed is free and open-source software while operating without any advertising, monetization, or reliance on venture capital. Your donations are vital in supporting the PieFed development effort, allowing us to expand and enhance PieFed with new features.

Donations can be made via Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi.

When we talk about free and open source software it’s usually in technical terms - the source is available, anyone can inspect it, fork it, change it or contribute. But all those things only work and make sense in the context of a minimum level of honesty, good faith, reciprocity, patience and mutual recognition of each other’s humanity.

It has happened several times already: I notice that a comment or post of mine got deleted, or that I'm banned from a community or even whole instance (It's probably my profile pic). So I try to find why and when that happened by looking at the modlog of both my own instance and the instance where "it" happened. Also the community modlog. Entering my username@instance.

Some of the things I really need to know is if a ban is instance-wide or community-wide, permanent or temporary... or if it's indeed a ban and not some other glitch.

And I never get an answer.

Usually I get some older log entries, so I know I'm doing this correctly.

Is this just a "feature" of the fediverse: completely opaque mod actions? Or am I missing something?

Does it work better on Lemmy? Apparently not since the originating instance usually runs on Lemmy.

Or Kbin?

In the long run, this becomes a serious problem for me.

Ideally, I'd love to get a notification every time some mod/automod/admin takes some action against me. Just saying.

Good morning !

Today is the Camp CHATONS 2026, 70 people are regrouped in Troyes, in France.

What are kittens ?

CHATONS – kittens in french – is the Collective of Hosters Alternative, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Solidarity.

This collective aims to bring together structures offering free, ethical and decentralised online services in order to allow users to quickly find alternatives that respect their data and privacy to the services offered by GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft).

CHATONS is a collective initiated by the association Framasoft in 2016 following the success of its campaign De-google-ify Internet.

Some may already know that i'm part of the CHATONS. My kittens S2S, sign to sign, we purpose free software service to deaf community : https://peertube.s2s.video/

You may already know some Kittens : yunohost, framasoft (peertube), zaclys, tedomum...

I hope i can share some of our french meeting related to the fediverse. We will probably have to translate them in english.

The kittens will celebrate their 10 years birthday. We will present several free software, share our ideas against big tech, talk about technical stuff and party !

See ya !

This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.

PieFed has a dizzying array of settings and options that instance admins can tweak. Most of them have obvious and sensible default values but some of those have been a bit controversial, especially to do with what gets blocked by default. In this post I explain what those are and how they can be configured.

Piefed chat • Fediverse wiki
• Guide and tutorial

!communitypromo@lemmy.ca • !newcommunities@lemmy.world • !fedigrow@lemmy.zip • !newcomers@piefed.zip

Hi ! I hope you are well ! Here is our weekly thread 😎

The fediverse is big ! Let’s share our small gold nugget found in the fediverse. :)

It could be :

• A new peertube channel
• An interesting mastodon account to follow
• Your new community ! Yes ! Why not ?
• An cool gallery of picture from pixelfed
• A playlist from funkwhale
• A text that moved you

Let’s dig together ! 😁

Talk to people nearby without revealing who you are.

from creator of Fedilab app for Mastodon, PeerTube, etc.

Hi,

A little while back we introduced old.retrolemmy.com. This is not really interesting on its own, but I wondered if we could also get it running on Retrofed. And this was successful by way of a proxy. The cool side effect the proxy had is that lemmy-only apps now also work if you enter old.retrofed.com in your preferred app.

This made the idea of preservation come up, and @Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com wondered if the proxy could be modified to also work on lemmybb and translate to older API versions. And after a while I got forum.retrolemmy.com to work with lemmybb - an old software for lemmy last updated 3 years ago - that makes the fediverse look and work like an old phpbb forum of older days. Most functions are working and functioning as intended, but there can still be some bugs here and there. Some we could probably fix, but some can also be attributed to the older software and it's quirks.

If you notice any bugs, you can message me, or reply here.

Also, this project got pretty big, but if you want to use it yourself, its at Github. It has full 0.17, limited 0.18 and full 0.19 support for the frontend, and lemmy(current) or piefed for the backend.

This thread is posted via forum.retrolemmy.com

Edit: Known limitations:

• No 2fa. As this was only added in lemmy version 0.18.x
• No last reply date/time. This can be enabled, but will call a ton of API calls for every page load, making the site unusable.
• 500: Internal Server Error -There is a real, pre-existing bug in lemmyBB's own code, where it makes a direct fetch, but doesnt handle a missing header gracefully. Unfortunately unfixable without changing the lemmyBB code (and that's against the idea of this project)
• Old posts are at the top instead of new ones - This is because the posts are stickied in the community, making them always be on top. This is especially visible in the "General" community. The new posts are under the stickied posts.