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Bandwagon, the music-sharing platform built on Emissary, has seen a lot of success over the past few months. The site has grown to a catalogue of over 300 different musicians, spanning a wide range of different sounds and genres. After refining search and discovery features, project lead Ben Pate has decided to focus on introducing a payment system for music sales.

What’s Coming

This new payment system allows for ways to financially support artists on the Fediverse, and the levels of support resemble a hybrid of what both Bandcamp and Patreon offer. Not only does this feature include line items for digital media, but a new mechanism for access and distribution. Additionally, the flagship instance of Bandwagon.fm will be taking 0% of any money musicians make.

Premier Plans

To support development, Bandwagon’s flagship instance will be offering a $10 per month Premier plan that allows musicians to sell their music and offer their tracks at a higher bit-rate, among other features. To support the artist community, a number of Fediverse musicians will likely be gifted a lifetime Premier membership for free.

Album and Track Purchases

Once this feature becomes available to musicians, they will be able to configure a Merchant account to dictate what items they want to include for purchase. This could cover individual tracks, EP’s, or entire albums. It’s also possible to configure Support Levels with monthly billing.

Managing products and exclusive media in a merchant account.

When someone buys music through Bandwagon, their purchases get added to a profile. If you’re a native Bandwagon user, those live in your account. If you’re visiting from another platform, purchased items instead live in a special Guest Profile that can be connected to a Fediverse identity.

Special Access

Another new feature unique to Bandwagon is the concept of Circles. These are special, privileged collections of followers who can pay to access exclusive content: special album drops, rare tracks, secret shows, and private “behind the scenes” posts can all be accessed by premium followers.

What’s remarkable about this system is how things are tied together: this mechanism checks for payment, recognizes a Fediverse handle, and grants access on that basis. Previously, other systems needed to provision this kind of thing manually: you might have been able to pay for something through Stripe or PayPal, but there wasn’t always a way to account for a user’s Fediverse identity afterwards. Instead, that all had to be dealt with by hand.

Posts, Events, and Media can now be scoped to specific audiences with Circles

This also means that it’s possible to create multiple kinds of support levels, which could give a Bandwagon musician profile almost Patreon-like functionality. Different support tiers could receive access to different things, allowing rewards to stack with the level of donations. One level might receive private blog posts, whereas another might have access to a monthly track plus access to private blog posts.

Alternate Payment Methods

For the time being, Bandwagon will support Stripe and PayPal when the feature launches. However, Ben has stated an interest in supporting many more payment processors, in the hopes of providing choice to artists and buyers:

Bandwagon will build integrations with private companies (lots of them, actually) but we will never depend on any one specific company. Open APIs are best, but when those are unavailable, we’ll connect directly to Stripe, PayPal, or anyone who can deliver benefits for indie artists. But If I have to integrate with one merchant provider to accept payments, then I’ll integrate with two, or seven, or as many as we can to guarantee that the companies we work with cannot abuse their position with monopoly power.

The project has also stated having zero interest in implementing support for cryptocurrencies. However, given that Bandwagon is an open source project, it wouldn’t be that surprising to see third parties build in support for various crypto payments for their respective communities.

A demonstration of a check-out purchase through Stripe, which also supports Apple Pay.

Looking at the Big Picture

On the surface, these new features are big milestones for supporting the Fediverse music community. If we dig a little deeper, we’ll find that everything powering this new experience is part of the underlying Emissary platform. This is one more tool in Emissary’s arsenal for developers to build distinct services with donations, payments, and commerce in mind. Maybe in the future, we’ll see new kinds of Emissary apps that could act as replacements for DeviantArt, Nebula, or GameDev Market.

There’s a reason this development is so important: the Fediverse today lacks any kind of commerce. While it’s possible to support people out-of-band through things like Patreon or OpenCollective, the reality is that the experience is pretty fragmented. Being able to support artists, musicians, game designers, open source developers, and instance admins are a necessity for growing a healthy Fediverse. If we could build standardized support for this kind of market commerce across different platforms, it could have a huge impact on the network’s ability to sustain itself.

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For the last few months, A New Social has been working hard to support and improve Bridgy Fed, a popular tool for connecting different Bluesky and IndieWeb platforms to the Fediverse. While it does some impressive work under the hood, the team behind it is looking at a new tool to help people seamlessly move across networks, while keeping most of their contacts. This is the core premise behind Bounce.

The Purpose of Bounce

Bounce aims to tackle a distinct problem for the open Social Web: providing an easy way to get onto the network, or move from one to the other.

Starting on a new platform is tedious, and it often makes us hesitant to try something new, even if we know it could be a better experience for us. It’s how we become locked into experiences that, over time, are no longer ideal for us.

Bounce Announcement

“We want to make this process as easy as possible,” says Anuj Ahooja, Executive Director of A New Social, “it shouldn’t have to be rocket science to join a network and find all of your friends.”

Trying to move platforms or, heck, even move instances has historically been a tedious process. Within the Fediverse, a handful of platforms support Mastodon’s “move action”, but the process tends to be tedious and sometimes prone to failure.

How Bounce Works

The main idea behind Bounce is fairly simple: connect two different accounts, and click “Move” to migrate from one place to the other. Under the hood, Bounce uses the ActivityPub and AT protocol to handle migrating contacts. If you’re on Bluesky and move to Mastodon, or vice versa, Bounce handles the accounts on the other network by providing you with your contacts through Bridgy Fed.

Source: A New Social

Obviously, there are some caveats. The opt-in nature of Bridgy Fed means that your followers only need to enable Bridgy Fed for themselves, if they want their replies to make it back to you. People that you’re following will need to have Bridgy Fed enabled for you to see their posts from across networks. Not every Mastodon or Bluesky user wants to be connected to the other network, so it’s reasonable to assume that some contacts won’t be carried over. Bounce anticipates this by showing just who exactly you’re able to stay connected with.

Future Potential

There are a few areas where Bounce could have a significant impact for the Social Web. One might involve migrating ActivityPub data from one Fediverse platform or instance to another. A more interesting area for opportunity might be to import data and contacts from a proprietary social network, and help people easily find their friends in a new space.

What’s important to understand is that Bounce could end up providing critical infrastructure for user account migration between different networks and services. If the project can make the process of joining the Fediverse or Atmosphere easier for new people, it could have a significant impact on growing both networks as a whole.

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Welcome back! We’re here to talk about all things happening at FediForum for the next three days. Look at the space below to see our updates!

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After controversy and the difficult decision to postpone back in March, the FediForum project has put in the hard work to make things right. The organization held multiple town halls, calls with community leaders, soliciting feedback, and establishing a new advisory board consisting of a diverse background. After taking the extra time to get things right, the Fediverse Unconference is back on track.

“We are expanding and broadening Fediforum,” Johannes Ernst explains, “not just with an international advisory board that helps us connect with communities we didn’t involve before, but by providing more room to discuss the larger societal context of the Open Social Web.”

The event will include keynotes from Ian Forrester, Christine Lemmer-Webber, and Cory Doctorow. After presentations, attendees will decide which discussion topics are of interest to them, then break out into discussion groups. Here’s a large list of things talked about at prior events.

Mark Your Calendars!

The new Fediforum event is scheduled to take place from June 5th to June 8th, from 8am to 1pm PST each day. We hope to once again provide live coverage of the talks and demos, and demo recordings will be uploaded to the organization’s PeerTube channel. If you’ve missed demos from previous events, you can check out the playlist for each past conference.

Ticket pricing is as follows:

General Admission: $40.00 + $3.29 fee**(Almost) Free Ticket:** $0.67 + $1.32 feeContributor Ticket (support the community): $100.00 + $6.29 feePlatform Employee Ticket: $250.00 + $13.79 fee Register Now

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Mastodon’s work to highlight their platform to journalists led to the opportunity to host an aperitivo, with special guests Save Social, at the International Journalism Festival (April 9th – 13th, 2025) in Perugia, Italy.

IJF brings together people from across the news industry to talk about the issues they face and celebrate the work they are doing. This year, Big Tech was one of the topics that dominated the panel discussions.

Bonjourno Mastodon

Andy Piper speaking at the event. Source: Saskia Welch

Mastodon, represented by Andy Piper, Head of Communications, Felix Hlatky, CFO, and Philip Schröpel, Head of Staff, brought together supporters of the open social web, Big Tech-disbelievers, and curious locals to a small bar nestled in the old walls of Perugia.

Understanding that many in the audience were unfamiliar with Mastodon, Piper introduced the social platform to the room, highlighting the benefits for journalists. This included the work to highlight article authors, using the byline feature that rolled out in July last year, and emphasis on the value of links to external publications.

Mastodon promised new tools to track referrals through links would be rolling out across the network soon but were already live on mastodon.social – the server run by the Mastodon team.

Looking Ahead

Hlatky spoke of Mastodon’s future as an organisation and their ongoing work to transition from a German gGmbH to a new European nonprofit. He acknowledged internal work to restructure and remove single ownership from Mastodon claiming, “No one gives you money if one owner can run away with it.”

There was a strong message that Mastodon wanted what is best for their users, rather than their pockets. A stark contrast to the Big Tech platforms that had been discussed across the Festival.

To echo the sentiment, Mastodon then invited Björn Staschen from Save Social to speak.

Save Social

Björn Staschen presenting Save Social at the event. Source: Saskia Welch

Save Social is a predominantly German-speaking effort to turn away from Big Tech social media platforms and strengthen alternatives. In less than three months, their petition has reached 200,000 signatures.

“We, as a society, have to be part of the solution,” said Staschen. “We want to strengthen alternative platforms. Ensure freedom of expression by creating diversity and transparency.”

Converting Attendees

When it came to joining Mastodon, Schröpel admitted there are “multiple ways”, but that the Mastodon team are able to support individuals and organisations in setting up their own instance or offer advice on the network.

Philip Schröpel presenting ways to join Mastodon. Source: Saskia Welch

However, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use.

Alongside presenting Mastodon as an alternative platform, the aperitivo offered one of the only opportunities to take tangible action against Big Tech at IJF – attracting doers, rather than the commentators that lined the panels of the main event.

Wrapping Up

“There’s a mix of people in this room right now with the same instincts we have to save democracy,” Piper said in his closing remark, encouraging collaboration and action.

Based on the panels at IJF 2025, journalists are more worried than ever about the role they play in democracy. Witnessing the actions of the White House, many journalists are now calling for an “EU alternative” to Big Tech platforms.

Mastodon now has the opportunity to present themselves as the EU alternative and help journalists protect democracy.

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