Hey Fediverse!

We just wrapped up an amazing FediForum June 2025 a week ago, and BadgeFed was right in the thick of it! Here’s a recap of what we did, what we learned, and what’s next for decentralized badges.

BadgeFed at FediForum: Unconferences & Speed Demos

BadgeFed had the honor of presenting and hosting two unconference sessions and showing off our work in one speed demo slots (watch the demo). The energy was fantastic; lots of curiosity, sharp questions, and a real hunger for open standards in the credentialing space.

Community Feedback: Standards, Docs, and Openness

A big theme at FediForum was specs and open standards. We’re right there with you! That’s why we’ve enhanced our technical documentation to explain exactly how BadgeFed uses ActivityPub and OpenBadges together:

• Issuers are ActivityPub actors, each instance can federate and follow others.
• Badges are ActivityPub Notes with OpenBadge 2.1 attachments for maximum compatibility and verifiability.
• Strict linking between issuer and badge, and between badge and recipient, to prevent spoofing.
• Signature validation for both ActivityPub and OpenBadge data.
• Federation: badges propagate via follows, and a special announcer actor helps with discoverability.
• Comments and interactions: badges can be discussed and shared across the Fediverse.

Read more in our DETAILS.md.

Making BadgeFed Easier to Try

We heard you: people want to try BadgeFed! Right now, it’s a solo setup (one admin, one Docker container), but we’re working hard to make it easier for others to deploy, configure, and even federate their own instances. Stay tuned for updates on multi-admin support and streamlined onboarding.

Feedback: Discoverability vs. Spam

One of the most important pieces of feedback we received was about badge discoverability vs. timeline spam (see the issue). We want badges to be easy to find and share, but we also don’t want to flood the Fediverse with unwanted posts. This is now our top priority, we’re rethinking how verbose BadgeFed should be, and exploring opt-in/opt-out models for badge visibility and hashtag use.

What’s Next: Embedding & Profile Badges

We’re also working on ways to let you embed badges in your blog or add them to your Mastodon profile. More news on that soon!

FediForum was a fantastic experience, huge thanks to everyone who attended, gave feedback, and showed interest in decentralized credentials. Let’s keep building a more open, verifiable, and user-empowered Fediverse!

Badge up, and see you in the timeline!

You can read the article "BadgeFed @ FediForum June 2025: Unconferences, Demos, and Community Feedback" by @mapache here as well.

Visual Studio 2025 is very close!

When Visual Studio 2022 version v16.14 was released, a blog post that was related to the release has teased the next major version of Visual Studio as follows:

Lastly, we’ve started work on the next major version of Visual Studio, planned for release later this year. We’ll be sharing more details here soon—follow the blog to stay up to date with the latest Visual Studio news.

This is especially true, since Visual Studio 2025 will be announced very soon later this summer to introduce major features and to introduce a redesigned UI that matches the Windows 11 aesthetics.

This is one hint, but we have two more hints to talk about.

Usually, Microsoft releases a preview of the next Visual Studio minor version at about the same time as the final official release of the minor version that was previously in the preview stage. For example, when Visual Studio v16.13 was released this February, the first preview of v16.14 was also released at the same day of the former version release. An interesting hint has been pointed out when Microsoft decided not to release Visual Studio v16.15 Preview 1 at the same day of the v16.14 release, because the Visual Studio 2022 preview release notes says this:

Visual Studio 2022 v17.14 is now generally available (see release notes). However, we recommend that all current Preview Channel users stay on Preview to continue receiving the latest updates and early access to upcoming features. This is especially important if you’re using the .NET 10 SDK, as some preview SDK features are not yet supported in the stable release.

Stay tuned for more details later this summer about what’s coming next for Visual Studio…

Another hint mentions that we are approaching closer to the Visual Studio 2022 mainstream support ending date, which is assigned to January 12th, 2027, and there are no announcements of the next major version of Visual Studio made until now. This is interesting, considering that Visual Studio 2022 went globally available as version v17.0 was released on November 8th, 2021, after a five-month preview that started June 19th, 2021.

This means that we are heading towards a major milestone four years after the last major milestone, and that Visual Studio 2025 v18.0 will undergo many major changes, which will improve developer experience. We expect the first preview to be released this summer, with the final release being on November 2025 with the airing of .NET 10.0 LTS.

This follows a similar pattern with the release of Visual Studio 2022 with .NET 6.0 LTS together on November 8th, 2021.

We are very excited about the release of Visual Studio 2025 v18.0 and .NET 10.0.

What does it mean for our apps?

Our applications will be migrated to .NET 10.0 days after the final release to ensure that all systems can get this version of .NET easily, while we’re monitoring the rollout of this version of .NET across several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.

Our applications, once migrated to .NET 10, will experience improved performance and better support for various features. This is part of our goal to provide better user experience across releases of projects like Nitrocid KS.

The next major version of Nitrocid, which will be released early next year, will use this version of .NET and will require at least Visual Studio 2025 to build, to ensure that we use this version of .NET at its maximum potential.