@RaccoonForFriendica This weekend I took some time to investigate how much work would be needed to build an iOS version of the app, and it turned out that at least building and running a basic version of the app is doable with some minor changes (see here).

What do you think about it? Would you like to see a Raccoon on iOS too?

#friendica #friendicadev #androidapp #androiddev #fediverseapp #raccoonforfriendica #kotlin #multiplatform #kmp #compose #cmp #opensource #foss #procyonproject

Fediverse Report – #115

PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more.

The News

• PeerTube has officially launched their apps as a v1, some four months after the apps became available in beta. Some new features include the ability to log in with an existing PeerTube account (up until now you’d log in with a local account that only existed in the app itself), commenting from the app, and playlist and channel management options.

• Mastodon announced some updates on how their team is evolving. The organisation is currently in the process of setting up a Foundation in Europe. Mastodon is also growing their team, and the organisation now consists of 15 employees. Mastodon’s news update is a followup on their announcement from January 2025, in which Mastodon said that current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down. A new CEO has not been announced yet by Mastodon. In the previous update, Mastodon also said that they would need a €5 million annual operating budget. There are some new team members related to fundraising, but Mastodon has not made a clear statement yet on how exactly they will raise the money needed for this budget.

• Evan Prodromou of the Social Web Foundation has published a first version of places.pub. It is a service that “makes OpenStreetMap geographical data available as ActivityPub objects.” The goal is for other fediverse software to integrate with places.pub to have a standardised way to refer to geospatial objects via ActivityPub.

• A follow-up on last week’s news regarding the Fosstodon server: the server administration will be taken over, with an update and introduction by the new admin here.

The Links

• A recommendation algorithm for PeerTube videos. It is a browser extension that records your PeerTube viewing history, and uses that to generate recommendations to watch.
• PieFed development updates for April.
• The fediverse statistics site FediDB is getting an update, and can now be self-hosted as well.
• Talking Protocols With Evan Prodromou – FediHost Podcast.
• How To Make Your Mastodon Feed More Algorithmic – FediHost Tutorial.
• Ghost now gives blog authors the ability to block users.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

fediversereport.com/fediverse-…

Evan Prodromou

2025-04-29 16:56:55

places.pub

I’m making an initial version of places.pub available today. places.pub is a collection of Place objects suitable for use in geosocial applications on the ActivityPub network.

Part of my work in the Social Web Community Group at the W3C has been participation in the GeoSocial Task Force. This is a sub-group of the SocialCG that focuses on implementing user stories in ActivityPub related to the intersection of geographical systems and social networking, for example, tagging an image with the place it represents, or checking in to a location.

One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as their id property, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.

Using the service

So, I worked on making places.pub for geosocial hackers to experiment with. It’s a service that exposes places from the amazing OpenStreetMap collection of data as AS2 objects on the Web. So, given an OpenStreetMap object like the Rogers Centre Ottawa, it provides an AS2 version suitable for use in geosocial activities in ActivityPub. It also has a rudimentary search mechanism, although I think most users will want to use the Nominatim service for searching the OpenStreetMap database, and then map the IDs onto places.pub.

Once you know the places.pub ID for a place, you can use it for geotagging objects, people, activities, or using special geosocial activity types like check in, check out, and travel. There is a good list of examples on the places.pub home page, but obviously this is not an exhaustive list!

How it is built

This wasn’t my first time trying to build places.pub; I’d done two earlier versions with different architectures and the same interface. The first time out, about 7 years ago, I created a full NodeJS server that used a full mirror of the OpenStreetMap database, so I didn’t need to hit the OSM API to fetch data. It worked pretty well, but it was really expensive — hundreds of dollars per month to keep a database server of that size running and synched.

I tried a second version a few months ago, which did batch generation of AS2 Place objects from the OpenStreetMap exports, and then uploaded them to the S3 service at Amazon Web Services. This was a whole lot cheaper, but it took a long time to download, convert, and re-upload the data.

This third implementation, with source code available on GitHub, is a little bit easier than both. Instead of sloshing the huge OSM dataset back and forth, I used the version of the data stored in the Google Cloud Public Datasets system on BigQuery. This let me ignore the effort of moving data, and just focus on giving it a good ActivityPub-compatible interface using a Google Cloud Run function. It seems to work pretty nicely.

Next steps

I’d love to see some experimentation with using places.pub for geosocial activity in the social web. I’m going to work on some implementations in my own ActivityPub software. If you find problems with the software, please add an issue on GitHub or let me know on the Fediverse at @evanprodromou.

GitHub - swicg/geosocial: Geosocial Taskforce

Geosocial Taskforce. Contribute to swicg/geosocial development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Hey Fediverse friends 👋

We're happy to help make the web a little more connected and open.

With our ActivityPub plugin you can connect your Discourse community to Mastodon and the wider Fediverse

Check out all the details in our latest blog post:
blog.discourse.org/2025/04/dis…

Discourse and the Fediverse!

Two years ago, we started working on a plugin that brings Discourse and the Fediverse closer together. Discourse communities are online spaces that facilitate open collaboration and communication.

^{Penar Musaraj (Discourse)}

📢 abra v0.10.x is finally here 📢

TLDR; "abra upgrade" 👍

Upgrade docs:
docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgra…

Migration guide:
docs.coopcloud.tech/abra/upgra…

A huge thanks to everyone who helped get this release done ❤️‍🔥 Happy Hacking 🫂

-- d1

Black holes swallow all information you feed into them. But information can't be destroyed, instead the information is slowly emitted as hawking radiation, impossible to reconstruct in practice but technically there.

This makes them just like Atlassian Confluence

An @OSM #OpenStreetMap contributor wrote : "Updating railway stations tagging diagrams."

🎋 Read their awesome diary 👉🏼 openstreetmap.org/user/darkonu….

Find your Flow with Nextcloud's new data automation tools!

Discover how Nextcloud Flow streamlines your business processes, improves customer interactions, and enhances digitalization efforts in your organization

See #NextcloudFlow in action!

youtu.be/CX8aPmoJlGo

Mastodon.me.uk is an open, user-supported, corporation-free Mastodon server for the UK:

➡️ mastodon.me.uk

This server has been operating since April 2017.

You can find out more at mastodon.me.uk/about or contact the admin @Floppy

#FeaturedServer #UK #UnitedKingdom #Britain #England #Scotland #Wales #NorthernIreland #GreatBritain #Mastodon #Fediverse #FreeFediverse

mastodon.me.uk

Open, user-supported, corporation-free social media for the UK.

^{Mastodon hosted on mastodon.me.uk}

From that one time I saw the most perfect window scene and felt obligated to capture it.

I was inside the capital building of Antigua #Guatemala and as I walked up the stairs I looked out the stairwell window to see this gorgeously framed flower pot. Someone had to have put it there on purpose! I particularly enjoy the effectively black canvas created by the dark interior behind.

#WindowFriday #feinsterfreitag #fineartphotography #artphotography #photography #fujifilm #FensterFreitag

Something I stumbled upon recently. Considering the number of book lovers around Mastodon, this seems like a must-share.

"Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost."

standardebooks.org/

#ebook #bookstodon #kirjamastodon