Yesterday, there was a post on
@fediversenews@venera.social that went viral. Since a few people are wondering what
@fediversenews@venera.social is, it's a Friendica group. It's a group that's been active since December 2022. Functionally, it works similarly to a Lemmy or Kbin community.
Or, in Fediverse parlance,
@fediversenews@venera.social, is a group actor. Its purpose is for people on the Fediverse to congregate together to speak about a given topic. In
@fediversenews@venera.social's case, that topic is about news pertaining to the Fediverse.
@fediversenews@venera.social is not the originating profile for messages. Rather, it hosts messages and then boosts them to subscribers of the group. If you are not subscribed to
@fediversenews@venera.social, you will not receive boosts.
However, it's also important to know that because message do not
originate from
@fediversenews@venera.social, it is still possible to receive messages from there even if you are not subscribed. For example, if you follow the original post's author or receive boosts from other accounts.
Unsubscribing to
@fediversenews@venera.social does not prevent you from seeing posts sent there, it just prevents you from receiving boosts specifically sent from the group actor -- if you are already subscribed to
@fediversenews@venera.social. Likewise, blocking
@fediversenews@venera.social does not prevent you from seeing posts that are tagged with
@fediversenews@venera.social. However, blocking
does prevent
@fediversenews@venera.social from hosting and boosting replies to the originating post.
If you want to block that topic from your timeline, I highly suggest applying a filter to "Bluesky" and "bridge".
It's important to remember that Mastodon does not yet support group actors. For this reason, not all features of
@fediversenews@venera.social are rendered ideally on Mastodon.
For more information on Fediverse group actors, here's a helpful link:
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-1b12-group-federation/2724
