Sean Tilley

I was excited to see a new Fediverse-adjacent posting tool come out. Then, I looked at the repo...

Just an update: with the new school semester starting, I am reevaluating how I make use of my time, and intend to double down on my #Fediverse work. This includes breathing new life into We Distribute, and spinning off a few related projects that I believe will be beneficial for the network.

A lot of things are in flux right now. A big thing we're looking to do this year is to start paying people to write with us, and put a bigger effort into promoting Fediverse events and community voices.

Stay tuned!

I'm feeling the pain, and need to make some hard decisions about Spectra. I'm currently shoveling like $600 per month into the furnace to keep this thing going, and I can't do it for much longer. Most of the pain stems from a handful of accounts absolutely abusing our "unlimited storage" offering.

Hey, this is kind of an informal announcement, but my budget is tight and I'm a full-time student. I figured that I'd post here that I'm looking to do some freelance work, particularly when it comes to writing. Most of what I specialize in is open source, exploring technology, how-to guides, interviews, and media production. I also have experience with brand voice, and wouldn't mind helping with community engagement.

For a sample of my stuff, check out either We Distribute or my blog.

I'll make a formal blog post about it later today.

#GetFediHired #Freelancing

The ActivityPub For WordPress project is, in a lot of ways, one of the most impressive projects in the space for what it has accomplished. Every release gets better and better, and there's a robustness to the project that I can't help but admire.

Making ActivityPub federation work with the myriad of WordPress configurations out there is nothing short of a miracle, and I'm forever grateful for the work

and the team put in.

If there's any #Godot developers out there making 3D games, I could kind of use some help / advice on how to fix this weird issue I'm having.

Camera is basically attached to a SpringArm and mounted on a pivot, the pivot rotation is what's used for camera rotation. When switching perspectives, a piece of code is supposed to line up the pivot rotation to the player_mesh rotation. Except it seems to be flipped when I face certain directions?!

https://codeberg.org/deadsuperhero/godot-hybridcam/issues/1

Once again, I humbly come to you to ask: do you know of any bloggers that write regularly about the #Fediverse, #ActivityPub, #ATproto, or anything of that nature?

As the network grows, it feels like it's harder and harder to find individual voices and perspectives. If you're writing stuff about the network, its evolution, the culture, and the people on it, I'm interested in following you.

The #ActivityPub for #WordPress team is just crushing it. They just released 8.0.0 of the integration. It's getting better all the time.

Huge thanks to

for amazing work!

https://activitypub.blog/2026/03/05/8-0-0-smash-that-like-button/

I think the #ActivityPub client-to-server API is extremely important and underrated. I'm glad to see the SWF and W3C group prioritizing it, because I think it has the potential to fix something that's kind of broken on the #Fediverse: too many accounts, on too many platforms that really ought to be clients.

Here's the rub, though: you need the big players in the space to support it. Mastodon needs to support it. Pixelfed and PeerTube need to support it.

So, how do you get the big existing projects to all implement it? How do you justify it?

One pain point here is the fact that Spectra has more than 1,000 users, but about a dozen or so accounts use the most storage space. The biggest offender takes up over 1TB of our object storage quota.

I'm tempted to start setting data caps, maybe to sell an additional allocation of storage space, but I'm only really comfortable with doing this after addressing the community and reaching out to the people who use Spectra the most.

Man, I forgot what a nightmare headache it is to try and work with the Twenty-TwentyFive theme for WordPress. It's something that can make decent-looking websites on the surface, but requires mental gymnastics to figure out.

"Here's some template examples to work with", great, but you give no insight into how to work with Query Loop blocks!

"Here's some example layouts for this part of a page", nice, but I have no idea on how to make a similar layout when I build it from scratch!

The longer I look into Blender and all the different things you can do with community plugins, the more amazed I am. The depth of this tool is astonishing.

A lot of professional-grade #GameDev tools for Linux are kind of in this weird half-implemented state, where some version of the software kind of exists, but there's a lot of hoops to jump through.

I've been playing with the MetaHuman Creator plugin that exists in the native Linux builds of Unreal Engine for funsies. The plugin itself actually works pretty decently, but editor support for Wayland is kind of half-broken, with menus and popups working in some very weird ways.

After doing some research on supplemental tools, like Marvelous Designer, it seems that a Linux version actually exists, but only exists for an Enterprise-Grade plan at an eye-watering $2,000 per year.

Why does GitHub require you to sign in just to look at a public repo now? That sucks!

Huh, does #PeerTube no longer rely on the infobox banner feature? I'm a little surprised at not seeing it anywhere, was really useful for letting people know about stuff.

I've been thinking a lot recently about #PeerTube, #Loops, #Bandwagon, and other platforms in the #Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you're welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

Not "Big Capitalism" commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.

https://deadsuperhero.com/the-fediverse-and-content-creation-monetization/

Took a quick look at my monthly expenses, and it's not looking great. My #PeerTube instance @spectra is getting into the $400 per month range, accounting for overages in Object Storage and Network transfer.

My first thought is that it may be time to look at more sustainable hosting options. Alternatively , I might have to start setting caps on how much storage any account can use before being required to pay for more. Neither prospect feels great. 😞

The community has been amazing for monthly donations, but our rate of growth has rapidly outpaced contributions...

I've been thinking for a while about writing a simple app, because I haven't done app development before. The first thing I would love to make is a social bookmarking app for posts, that lets you save stuff into different categories.

Basically what Firefish had back in the day.

Hey! Are you a CEO or project lead of a decentralized, open source communication platform or protocol? Are you tired of dealing with negative responses to your misinterpreted posts?

Hire me to be your comms person! I can be your community punching bag that keeps everyone happy and excited!

Two apps I'd love to see for #NextCloud: a Pinterest clone, and a MovieDB app that can keep track of things I want to watch.

There's some open source, self-hostable versions of both of these things, but nothing that integrates into my existing private cloud.

Procrastinated and stayed up way too late editing our latest podcast video @decentered, but it's really good, and I think you'll enjoy it.

I sat down with

and

, and had a really great conversation. The unedited recording is more than two hours. 🤯

I procrastinated on this way too much, feel apprehensive about my ability to sum up all my thoughts and feelings on a page, but I finally wrote about #FediCon: https://deadsuperhero.com/the-fediverse-in-real-life/

Hey

and

, I'm a big fan of the concept of Surf, but still kind of frustrated at some of the limitations around feed curation.

What would it take to get a proper Fediverse / ActivityPub / Social Web topic tag to filter stuff by? Having random cooking recipes in my feed's "Read" tab kind of brings down the experience a bit.

It would be nice if there was a #PeerTube plugin to add social account fields to user profiles. Even if it were just a drop-down of various Fediverse platforms and a text field for URLs, that would be great!

Huh, I like the way #Piefed displays #PeerTube channels. Here's how the #FediCon videos look from there:

https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]

is looking so freaking good. I'm super excited about the new updates coming in. #Fediverse

https://wedistribute.org/2025/08/big-updates-are-coming-to-loops/

Just an FYI: If you missed #FediCon, or just want to see the talks, they are being edited and uploaded to #PeerTube. There's only three talks up so far, but I am helping

to add more of them, and ensure that there are accurate captions and nice little thumbnails.

You can see a playlist of all #FediCon2025 talks, sorted in order, here: https://spectra.video/w/p/52g7HzMoUCxEm9nU339mPf

These are the people I want to spend the rest of my life working with.

#Fediverse #FediCon

Question about corporate brands came up on the #Fediverse.

The answer is brands.town.

#FediCon

"Here's a topic I know which will excite all of you: governance. Will the governance of the #Fediverse become more democratic, shift to benevolent dictatorship, or the classic open source model of 'Rage, Fork, Repeat'?"

#FediCon

"Will the Fediverse remain niche forever, or will we inevitably reach the moment where we get the notification about Mom joining the network, and everything getting turned upside down?"

#FediCon

We are losing a human connection when we see so much AI slop flooding our timelines and invading our spaces. The hope is that this will decrease over time as the novelty wears off, but who knows?

#FediCon

is hosting today's panel. I love his sense of humor and bombastic delivery.

#FediCon

"The #Fediverse itself is not a third space. It is a landscape, where third spaces may occur. And your third space may be different than my third space."

Damn, that's really good insight.

#FediCon

I love the idea of local governments having Fedi accounts. It sounds silly, but the idea of a bunch of local departments being able to get their messages out can actually be really useful. Think about how many municipal accounts post updates on Twitter to keep people informed about local events or developments.

#FediCon

What kind of organizations would align well to the Social Web? News, Science, Education, Democratic Governments.

We're seeing seeds being planted for all of these things, but these benefit the network as well as befitting from it. Being able to openly distribute truth, knowledge, and information are crucial in an era where big platforms can alter the narrative and suppress knowledge for political gain.

#FediCon

"We need to go beyond donations and volunteering. Beyond anti-capitalism. From established organizations and upstarts, while abolishing overlords and avoiding becoming overlords themselves."

—Johannes Ernst

#FediCon

Oh no, I'm 35 today! 😩

Look, I think AI can hypothetically be "useful" in certain specific limited contexts, but relying wholly on AI-generated code for a project is profoundly stupid. I think it's fine for rubber-ducking ideas or exploring a pool of information, but some people use it wholesale without knowing basic fundamentals.

I know learning to code can seem difficult. There's a lot of trial and error, a lot of failure, and sometimes the problem you're trying to solve is way more difficult than you thought it was. This is normal, and part of learning. It's okay if it takes longer, or if you have to struggle with certain stumbling blocks. That's how you get good!

Not everything has to be about maximizing output for productivity, especially if that output has issues that you have no insight or capability of fixing. It is in fact okay to go at a gradual pace.

Nice! There's still a fair amount of jank, that jump animation is appalling, and part of his hair does culling at random camera angles. But, I took my custom character and made him move! #GameDev #Godot

If I were to make a small game about the Fediverse, it would probably be about project management. It might look like Civilization or another political management game, but also have an insane amount of WarioWare-like mini games. If you fail them, your approval ratings go down.

A question for #Fediverse devs: I'm thinking about better ways to document development of the #ActivityPub stack. This would include explanations, demo code, example snippets, and various sections explaining how to build a fully working Fediverse server, with consideration for all of the FEP documents as well.

What do you, as a developer, feel is currently missing? What information would make your life a lot easier?

This is a really great read by the

team. As someone who has done all kinds of experiments with long-form articles and publishing directly on the #Fediverse, there are a number of headaches and hurdles we still need to figure out.

My overall philosophy is this: rather than adapting existing content management systems to use ActivityPub federation, it's preferable to build a CMS for the Fediverse, with explicit considerations for how the instance and the network should interact with each other. Everything, from the dashboard to side-effects of interaction, should be designed with federation considerations in mind.

https://bonfire.cafe/post/01JYRX7HCGME693BGCZF6AGGK1#

I've been writing a long, long response to the excellent article by

about the Seven Deadly Sins of Fediverse UX design. It's taken me almost a month, and I'm just trying to get through the last few sections.

Hopefully, I'll be able to post it tonight. 😅

I'm kind of tempted to try setting up a

instance for We Distribute. Could be interesting to have a bunch of little badges for exploring the network or learning about it? 🤔

In case you're just tuning in, we're covering Day 2 of #FediForum.

giving the opening keynote about Spritely, and it's great.

https://wedistribute.org/2025/06/fediforum-june-2025/

Hey, go check out our latest episode of Decentered! @damon and I are really excited to be making this again.

Hey, listen. #Codeberg is being spammed with LLM bots right now. They started like an hour ago. Each bot is opening up one issue in a random tracker every minute.

I have no idea what the spread is, but each individual bot has like seven pages full of issues now. PieFed and FEP are both starting to see issues piling up because of this.

Hey

team? It looks like you have a problem with LLM bots spamming repos with issues.

This is really bad: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/issues It's spreading to a bunch of different projects.

Cross-platform Threadiverse stuff is weird. It mostly works really well, but there's tiny quirks between systems sometimes.

One thing I really want to explore is group synchronization. That is, federating topics between different groups on different instances.

In NodeBB, it's possible to make a forum category follow groups on Lemmy, PieFed, and Discourse. However, it sometimes only partially works, and debugging isn't always straightforward.

It's a worthy experiment, though.

Hey #FediMusic folks! 👋

Two things worth mentioning here:

1. Our forum now federates with The Social Music Network's forum, allowing members on each to seamlessly communicate. We hope that this will give us better insight to what's going on with the art and music community, and help us get better at reporting what's going on in the space.

2. I'm compiling a list of resources available to the FediMusic community. Does anyone have things that ought to be added to the list? See here: https://forum.wedistribute.org/topic/16/current-fediverse-resources-for-musicians

My favorite thing about this space is that there's so many brilliant people building incredible things for the Web. Truly radical, revolutionary stuff.

I said I would publish this week, I guess it happened earlier than expected. This is a high-level overview of Postmodern, the #Fediverse platform I hope to someday build. It is the culmination of years of study as the network has continued to evolve.

https://deadsuperhero.com/my-dream-fediverse-platform/

This is Postmodern, my concept for a #Fediverse platform. This mockup is a builder interface for making your own UI, timelines, and pages visually. It's a weird and ambitious concept, but this is what I've been dreaming about for years.

Blog post dropping this week.

Kind of a weird thought I've been kicking around...

So, it's possible to use the Mastodon API for sign-in and authentication, right?

Would it be possible to leverage a remote Mastodon account as a user account in a Web app, then give it the ability to create an Activity within the app, without creating a Note on Mastodon?

I've been kind of thinking about having an app where people can sign in and submit Event activities to a Group. I don't want to create a bunch of Actor accounts, but I don't mind the idea of having a Group Actor delegate on behalf of signed-in users with MastoAPI.

If this sounds like "Poor Man's c2s", yeah, that's basically it.

I wrote up an article on my personal (Ghost-powered!) blog about some of the work I've been doing to integrate our news publication at We Distribute into the #Fediverse.

This is the culmination of years and years of experiments, and we're almost to a point where most of our ideas have been realized.

https://deadsuperhero.com/integrating-a-news-publication-into-the-fediverse/