While Ghost, Mastodon, and Bluesky currently lead the fediverse in reach and presence, this section describes additional platforms, tools, and resources worth exploring for journalists.
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Bluesky/Mastodon/Ghost-affiliated Platforms:
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Graze.social is a no-code custom feed builder for Bluesky. It lets users design, deploy, and grow custom feeds using a visual editor, giving individual “curators,” brands, publishers, and developers full control over how content is discovered without relying on Bluesky’s algorithm. Feed curators can earn revenue from their feeds directly, while brands and publishers can reach audiences through targeted feed sponsorships, bypassing the unpredictability of the algorithm. Users range from individual curators to larger media organizations.
Blacksky is a platform built on the AT Protocol, the same protocol as Bluesky. Started as a community space rooted in “Black Twitter” culture on Bluesky, it runs its own technical stack, with the overarching goal of allowing communities to “create safe spaces on their terms, pool resources democratically, and govern collectively.”
Trustfnd is a platform built for collaborative growth among independent journalists and newsletter publishers. Its core feature is bundling: Independent journalists can connect their newsletters to their Trustfnd accounts and team up with others to create shared subscription packages, allowing readers who subscribe to one publication to automatically subscribe or gain exposure to the others in the bundle. It offers full support to Ghost publishers, and is currently free to use.
Bridgy Fed is a free service that acts as a bridge between decentralized social networks on different protocols, connecting platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and personal websites and blogs. For instance, Bridgy Fed allows users on Mastodon to follow, like, reply to, and repost content from a Bluesky user, and vice versa, without either person needing an account on the other platform. This enables individual users to reach audiences across multiple networks simultaneously.
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Other Fediverse Platforms:
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Pixelfed is a free, open-source, and decentralized photo-sharing platform that draws similarity to Instagram. It offers a familiar photo-feed experience, including albums, filters, stories, and profile grids, without advertising, an algorithm, or data harvesting. Built on the ActivityPub protocol, it connects with other Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube, uses chronological timelines free of algorithmic interference, and prioritizes user privacy with no third-party tracking. With around 1.1 million users across over 2,000 independent servers and 63 million photos and videos shared to date, it remains an alternative especially appealing to photographers, artists, and anyone looking to share photos without worrying about data privacy.
PeerTube is a free, open-source, and decentralized video-sharing platform that is essentially a community-funded alternative to YouTube. Rather than centralizing videos on a single server, PeerTube's model is to create a network of small, interconnected video hosting providers, allowing anyone to build and run their own video platform in complete independence, free from algorithms, ad tracking, and corporate moderation policies. Built on the ActivityPub protocol, it connects with other platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed. The network currently hosts over 1 million videos across 1,600 platforms, with features for viewers like playlists, chapters, and watch history, and tools for creators including live streaming, analytics, channel synchronization from YouTube or Vimeo, and video editing capabilities.
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Featured Articles/Podcasts:
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https://cnti.org/guest-essay/what-independence-really-means-for-indie-journalists/
https://www.404media.co/maddy-myers-mothership-interview/ (404 Media)
https://www.journalismfestival.com/programme/2026/managing-the-open-social-web-for-media-companies
https://dot-social.simplecast.com/episodes/tori-white-bSny1J4v Why Open Social Matters for Creators, with Skylight’s Tori White
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/
https://www.theverge.com/press-room/617654/internet-community-future-research