It’s been a quiet news week in the fediverse overall, but Phanpy’s new Catch-up feature is one of the most innovative features released in the fediverse in a long while, so that more than makes up for it.
Phanpy releases Catch-Up
Phanpy, one of the most innovative third-party clients for the fediverse, has released a major new feature: catch-up. Catch-up allows you to simply, well, catch-up with your timeline by showing all the posts of the last X amount of hours by the accounts you follow in a few different ways.
- You can scroll through the list of people who have posted, select their avatar and only see their posts they have made, allowing you to quickly see what your close friends and mutuals have posted.
- You can sort to see only all the boosted posts, and order them by the most boosts or likes, to get a quick update on the most popular posts have been boosted by the people you follow.
- You can select to only show posts (not boosts and replies) by the people you follow, and then group them by author.
After using the feature for a while, I can say that this has completely changed the way I interact with the fediverse for me, and has allowed me to be much more mindful with the time I spend on here. It has made it much easier for me to limit my time on the feeds to only specific moments, in which I can spend more focused time on finding the posts I want. And if I’m in the train with just a few minutes to kill, it is much nicer to use catch-up to quickly read only the posts made by my mutuals and friends, instead of just scrolling in reverse-chronological order and never see the posts by mutuals that live in different time zones. One major downside of only having a reverse chronologically ordered feed is that it gets really difficult to read posts by people you follow who post in different time zones, and even more so if they are not a particularly prolific poster. This feature has made it significantly easier for me to actually read those posts and make sure I don’t miss them, which is a major contributing factor as to why I love it so much.
Phanpy is available at phanpy.social on web, and works great on mobile as a PWA as well.
The News
- Threads has expanded their testing of ActivityPub, and now some Threads accounts that are not Threads employees are starting to federate as well, as part of a beta program. Spotted accounts that are federating are of Snarfed, Tim Chambers and Evan Prodromou.
- Newsmast is looking for Community Curators.
- An extensive conversation with Marcia X, creator of the fediblock hashtag, about Blackness in the fediverse.
- Kilogram.makeup is a bridge between Instagram and the fediverse that is currently in development.
- Fedify is a fediverse server framework that is currently in development, making it easier for people to develop fediverse platforms.
- The Fediverse Developer Network had a show-and-tell for FediTest this week, recording here. The plan is to reinstate regular meetups again for the developer network.
- Pixelfed has released their latest update, implementing account migrations and curated onboarding. Pixelfed also released the documentation for their implementation of ActivityPub.
- Lemmy does not provide a way to delete pictures, which has some significant privacy implications. WeDistribute has taken a closer look at the situation.
- Sublinks is a link-aggregator for the fediverse that is currently in development, and this week some work on their front-end was showcased.
- NodeBB developer Julian Lam was on the FLOSS Weekly podcast to talk about NodeBB’s implementation of ActivityPub.
- Podnews Weekly Review had Evan Prodromou on to talk about ActivityPub.
- Piefed published a blog post on moderation and design.
- ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou is working on a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media, and some chapters are available for people with access to O’Reilly Media Learning Platform for feedback.
- IFTAS wrote about ‘Open Social for the Common Good’, explaining how government agencies can embrace the fediverse.
- An overview of all server and clients updates of the last week.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
