Laurens Hof

Consultant and writer on decentralised social media

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Last Notes

2025-03-27 22:01:12

ATmosphere Report – #109
The ATmosphereConf was last weekend, independent relays are starting to appear, and more.Conference
This weekend was the first ATProto conference, the ATmosphereConf, in Seattle. Over two days there were a large number of speakers and sessions, with over 150 people in attendance, and a significant number watching the live streams as well. I could not make it to the US, so for a full overview of the event, I recommend this extensive article by TechCrunch’ Sarah Perez, who was present at the event. The entire event was livestreamed, and all talks can be viewed via this YouTube playlist.
Some assortment of thoughts I had while watching the livestream and VODs over the last few days:
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave a short speech, about her background as a digital rights activist, and how she is now “holding the door open, so people can see another world is possible”. Graber is clearly aware of her position, where she is seen as a figurehead of the network, while also wanting to build a decentralised network where there is place for competing platforms. Being a figurehead of a network, without becoming the de facto leader of the network, while also holding the leadership position of by far the largest organisation in the network, is a challenging position to balance.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee talked about where Bluesky came from and where it is going. One of the things he talked about is the consideration of why Bluesky decided on their own protocol and not ActivityPub. His answer focuses on practical considerations, especially how ActivityPub handles identity and account migration. Watching the ATProto Ethos talk by Bluesky protocol engineer Daniel Holmgren it struck me that the question could also be framed as a matter of lineage. Holmgren talks about how ATProto takes inspiration from the Web, Peer to Peer systems as well as Distributed Systems. Placing it in such a context makes it clear that ATProto has quite a different background and other ways of thinking than ActivityPub has.
Ændra Rhinisland talked about how community projects can become load-bearing for the network, without adequate support structures for the people who run such projects. She also runs the popular news feeds using Graze. Graze has been adding support for advertisements, and Ændra is one of the first to take advantage. In her talk she walked through how at current usage rates, the feeds could generate over $20k per month in ad revenue. She plans to use this revenue to support the queer communities building on ATProto, and showed early plans for a self-sustaining fund powered by Graze’s feed revenue, to support initiatives such as Northsky.
The talk by Ms Boba is a great indication of how much under-explored design space there is on Bluesky and ATProto. Her talk focuses on labelers and fandom communities, and has some great examples of how they can be used outside of moderation.
Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser gave an excellent talk, describing Bluesky as a skeuomorphism, meaning that it imitates the design of the product it’s replacing. This phase is a part of the adoption cycle for new technologies, but Fraser does not to stop at imitation but instead explore the new ways that communities can be build online. Fraser is specifically interested in building platforms that can serve mid-sized communities, ranging from hundreds of thousands to a few million people. The Blacksky community is an example of this, and Fraser hopes that Blacksky can inspire other communities to do the same. His framing of content moderation as community care and not a cost of business also resonated with me.
Erin Kissane’s talk goes into detail about vernacular institutions, local and grassroots organisations and practices that are often illegible to outsiders but deeply embedded in local communities. This allows them to be close to the needs of their community members, but makes them hard to see and understand from the outside. This outside illegibility is a double-edged sword: IFTAS served a crucial role for trust and safety in the fediverse ecosystem, but had to shut down to a lack of funding as a result of being illegible to financiers.
Some more articles on the events:
The under-the-radar tech revolution that could change how the internet works – Marcelo Calbucci/GeekWire
Things That Caught My Attention – Dan Hon
What’s next for ATProto, the protocol powering Bluesky and other apps – Sarah Perez/TechCrunchOn relays
Bluesky PBC has been working on a new version of the relay that makes it easier and cheaper to host, under the Sync 1.1 proposal. This new version is now starting to roll out, showing a significant drop in resource usage. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shared some statistics here. Independent ATProto developer @futur.blue set up his own relay as a speedrun. He shows that a full network relay can be run on a 50USD Raspberry Pi, with an easy-to-follow tutorial here.
That full network ATProto relays are cheap to run has been known for a while within the ATProto developer community, but that knowledge has not spread much yet. One reason for this is that independent developers have set up relays primarily for their own use, sharing access with a few friends, but no other publicly accessible full-network relays exist yet1.
Upcoming short-form video platform Spark is building their own complete infrastructure. Spark’s relay will publicly accessible, and hosted in Brazil. Having ATProto infrastructure outside of US jurisdiction is a conversation that has come up regularly, and often followed by the assumption that the alternative is to have infrastructure like a relay hosted in Europe. Spark is bringing in a slightly unexpected twist here, by having the first publicly accessible relay that is not owned by Bluesky PBC being hosted in Brazil instead.
Having other relays that are not owned by Bluesky PBC has been the subject of a lot of conversation, and the Free Our Feeds campaign was founded on the idea that a significant financial investment is needed to do so. Furthermore, it assumes that such a relay is not only expensive, but that it requires an extensive governance infrastructure to manage it. The current developments regarding relays call both of these assumptions into serious question: relays are cheap, not expensive. Furthermore it seems that there is enough incentive that organisations that are serious about building their own ATProto platforms are willing to run their own relays.In Other News
Bluesky PBC has published a proposal on how they want to handle OAuth Scopes. OAuth Scopes is one of the main projects on the roadmap for the first half of this year. Currently, logging into an ATProto app via OAuth requires you to give that app permission to access all the data for your account. OAuth Scopes allows an app to only ask for the permissions that are necessary, and not the entire account. There are two problems that need to solve: the technical part of making it work, as well as the handling the UX to communicate clearly to people what data an app wants to access. The challenging part of the UX is how to handle the translation from the technical description of the data that is requested (stylised like ‘app.bsky.feed.getFeed’, for example), into a way that is understandable for the everyday user. The second challenge is that apps require permission not for one, but for many types of this lexicon data. A third-party Bluesky client that is restricted to only Bluesky data will still have to request a dozen of these Lexicons. A long list of technical lexicon names makes it impossible for regular people to have an informed opinion on what data is and is not being accessed. Bluesky PBC’s proposal is to group different lexicons into bundles, and create new lexicons that reference these bundles. Scoped OAuth can then request access to a bundle of lexicons, with a description that is legible for regular people.
Git repository platform Tangled is working on news ideas how a GitHub alternative might do things differently, and one of their first proposals is defining two types of pull requests. For another look at Tangled, this blog post experiment with what the platform allows.
One of the talks at the ATmosphereConf was by independent developer Rashid Aziz, who is the co-founder of basic.tech. Basic is a protocol for user-owned data, and seems to be fairly comparable to the PDS part of ATProto, with the major difference that Basic allows for private data on their version of a PDS. Aziz used the combination of these two protocols to create private bookmarks for Bluesky.
The new Record Collector labeler automatically displays if someone has been using other apps in the ATmosphere outside of Bluesky.
Rocksky is a new music scrobbler service on ATProto, that is currently in closed beta testing. It allows people to connect their Spotify account and automatically ‘scrobble’ (track) the music they are listening to.The Links
Some tech-focused links for ATProto:
ATCryptography is a package with cryptographic utilities for the ATProto, written in Swift.
A blog post by independent ATProto developer Mary about ‘AT Protocol, OAuth, and well, decentralization’. Mary also published a repository car file explorer this week.
A Python API library for Bluesky.
Independent ATProto developer Kuba Suder writes about database optimalisation and speeding up the process of firehose processing.
‘this website is hosted on bluesky (for real this time)’ is a blog post about hosting your website data on an ATProto PDS, with a ‘thin AppView layer’ for easier to parse URLs.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.Cerulea.blue is a publicly accessible relay, using a custom implementation, but it is limited to non-Bluesky PDSes. ↩︎
#bluesky
https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-109/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20240922-12-Waterdrops-on-a-green-bench-1024x293.jpg

2024-10-31 18:02:16

On Bluesky and enshittificationEditor’s note: this is a slightly modified and extended version of the analysis I wrote in the Last Week in the ATmosphere newsletter.
Last week, Bluesky announced their series A funding round, raising $15M in a round that is led by a venture capital fund Blockchain Capital. The seed round already had investors from the crypto world, but this drew much more attention with the series A, as the headline of Blockchain Capital as a lead investor made the connection loud and clear. Bluesky is aware of the negative connotations that many people have regarding blockchains and crypto, explicitly stating that “the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).”
The negative associations that people have with both blockchains and venture capital made that a common response to the news was that “the enshittification has started”. This response was dominant on the fediverse, and less so but still present on Bluesky. It’s been such a common response that I think it deserves a closer look at ‘enshittification’ and how it relates to Bluesky taking investment from a blockchain VC firm. The meaning of the term enshittification has shifted over time, and both meanings provide an interesting lens to look at the news.
When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, he used it to describe a process of platform decay. A platforms subsidises growth by operating at a loss, and places themselves in between the suppliers and customers on a two-sided marketplace. Once suppliers and customers are locked in on the platform and cannot easily leave, the enshittification cycle happens: the platform uses their control of the marketplace to take an ever increasing part of the value while while making the experience on the platform worse, for both suppliers and consumers.
What is interesting here is that in earlier interviews, Jay Graber has mentioned the idea of building marketplaces on Bluesky as a way to make money. If enshittification is used to describe platform decay, it stands out that a marketplace is not present in the Series A announcement as a way for Bluesky to monetise. For a platform to become enshittified in this meaning of platform decay, a platform needs to have exclusive control of a marketplace on the platform. However, Bluesky is currently not taking the direction of a marketplace for monetisation, instead opting for subscriptions and payment processing. This is still open to change at a later point, as Graber has expressed interest in it before.
Doctorow also mentions two principles to combat platform enshittification. Platforms should be interoperable, allowing users to switch to a different provider. Users should also have the ability to control the content they see, and not be dependent on an opaque algorithm owned by the platform. As both of these principles are deeply embedded in the design of ATProto, Bluesky is an interesting case study if the principles that Doctorow mentioned are indeed good enough to stave off enshittification.
The meaning of the term enshittification has drifted and expanded over time. Enshittification is now commonly used to refer to any business practice that makes the company or product, well, shit. There is a fairly widespread negative attitude towards both venture capital as well as blockchains and crypto. People perceive that these systems have not brought benefits they promised, and enriched a small elite instead, all the while degrading the experience of using the internet. This is not a newsletter to deconstruct blockchains or VC (I’m sure you can find your own sources for that), but I do want to point out that public perception of both venture capital and blockchains matter here. Bluesky is in an active growth phase, and part of the sales pitch to get people to join the network is that Bluesky is a ‘better’ place, for various interpretations of ‘better’.
Getting people to join Bluesky while also being associated with technologies and organisations that many people perceive as ‘not better’ is much harder. People want to join a new network because they hope that the new network is a better experience for them. Judging from the outside if a network is a suitable place is hard, so people tend to fall back to simple heuristics to determine if a network is a good place for them. BlockChain Capital might provide valuable support to Bluesky, but this hard to see as an outsider that is considering joining Bluesky. Instead, it is more likely that they will fall back on their preexisting opinions about startups that take VC money or affiliated with blockchains.
Neither the crypto industry or venture capitalists have build up a track record over recent years that make it easy for people to trust them to deliver technology that meaningfully improves people’s lives. A skeptical assessment of why (crypto-based) VCs are investing into a company is warranted. Blockchain Capital’s investment thesis is clear about why they are investing into Bluesky: their interest is in an expanded ecosystem, where developers can build new products, while leveraging the social graph that ATProto provides. Their investment thesis falls far outside the framework of enshittification, both as a way to describe platform decay as well as a more generic ‘products gets bad’. Critically evaluating the positive and negative impacts that Blockchain Capital can have on Bluesky and the ATmosphere, might just require a different framework than ‘enshittification’ can provide.
https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230718-Fediverse-report-The-polish-series-05-1024x410.jpg

2024-10-16 18:21:13

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 3
Chatting comes to the ATmosphere with Picosky, X is unbanned in Brazil, and a significant group of Brazilians moved back, and a deeper dive into aviary.domains.Picosky
Picosky is a new chatting service build on top of atproto. Picosky was created by Juliet, and started as an experiment with building an simple chatting app on atproto, originally limited to just 12 characters per message. It was a demonstration of making an AppView for chatting on atproto that utilises the existing infrastructure of the network: You log in with your Bluesky/atproto account, messages are stored on your PDS, and the PicoSky AppView listens to all the messages on the Relay and displays them. The direct connection of your Bluesky account made it a fun place for atproto hackers to hang out, which expanded the scope of Picosky quickly to a serious project.
Over the last week or so Picosky has undergone rapid changes by the developers Juliet and Elainya: you can log in with OAuth, the character limit got increased multiple times, now at 2048, you can edit and delete your posts, and UI updates where it is now a clear and minimalist proper chat UI.
The simple structure of Picosky, and the way that it integrates with the atproto infrastrucuture, makes Picosky an attractive place to further build on by other developers: one of the first Picosky-compatible projects to make it available via IRC. This is a separate AppView, that reads the same posts as the Picosky AppView does, and that can fully interact (federate) with each other. Other projects in the works are an iOS client or one for the terminal.
Meanwhile, the Lexicon structure (which determines the format of the messages) has had a major update the other day: there is now support for creating separate rooms on Picosky. Anyone can create rooms, and the owner of the room can set moderation to be based on a deny-list or an allow-list. The frontend has not been updated yet to take advantage of this however, but I’m sure we’ll get back to Picosky next week.The News
It is now a week since X has been unbanned in Brazil, and a significant part of the Brazilian user base that joined Bluesky has gone back to X. Daily Active User count dropped by half, from 1.2M to 600k. This number was around 300k before the ban, indicating that a large number of Brazilians did stick around: Portuguese is still the most popular language of the platform; 45% of posts are in Portuguese, compared to 32% English posts. It shows that social networks are extremely sticky, and people have very high switching costs. In that context, Bluesky has done well with the number of Brazilian who stayed around after X became unbanned.
Bluesky is hiring, and they are looking for a Feed Algorithmics Engineer. The job is to “design and implement machine learning models to improve personalized content recommendations, spam detection, labeling, and more.” As the network grows, so do the challenges of providing algorithmic recommendations for feeds and spam detection.
Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.
Altmetric, which tracks online engagement with academic research, is looking for people that are willing to help with feedback sessions for their Bluesky attention tracking roll-out.
Bluesky has updated their app (v1.92), with some new features: you can now pin a post to your profile. There are also design improvements, including new font options. You can also now filter your searches by language.
TOKIMEKI, an alternative client for Bluesky, now supports showing your atproto-powered Linkat and WhiteWind profiles.
Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.
Frontpage, a link-aggregator platform build on atproto, is now open and available for everyone to use. The developers say that they’ll work on notifications first, and that decentralised and self-sovereign sub-communities are coming later.
For the protocol-people: what happens when there are clashing lexicon fields? Nick Gerakines publishes his thoughts on how the Lexicon system can evolve, with some additional thoughtsby Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold.Deep dive: Aviary.domains
Aviary.domains is a new service that helps managing domains for Bluesky and the ATmosphere, that recently launched in early access. Aviary makes it easy for people who have a domain name to share that domain name with other people as their handle.
To place Aviary in a larger context, a short explanation: It helps to understand as the central offering of the ATmosphere being a single digital identity. When you first sign up for Bluesky, two things happen:
You join the ATmosphere, by creating a digital identity (a DID) that works with all other products that are build on atproto.
You log in with this newly created identity into Bluesky, and use Bluesky with this digital identity.
This digital identity, a DID (Decentralized IDentifier) is a unique string of letters and numbers that can never change, which is good for computers because it is unique, but very unpractical for humans to use. That’s why you have a handle, which corresponds behind the scenes with your DID. The idea of atproto is to use a website domain name as your handle. You can always change your handle to a different handle if you want, as long as you have a website domain you can use. Most people do not have their own website domain, so when you first join the ATmosphere and your DID gets created, Bluesky also gives you one of their sub domains you can use: yourname.bsky.social.
The goal for Bluesky is that people use their website domains as their handle, as it gives an easy way to verify ownership: the owner of the website is also the owner of the account. One problem however, is that many people do not have their own website domain. This is both an opportunity for Bluesky (which now sells domain names to people), but also still a challenge: a significant group of people are simply not interested in paying money for what amounts to a better user name. Even if you have your own website domain, having to change DNS settings is still a technical barrier that is too high for a large group of people.
This is the part where Aviary.domains comes it, as it tries to find an audience for people who have a domain name, that they want to share with their community. It has created a system where an owner of a domain name can invite other people to use a version of that domain as their handle on Bluesky. So as the owner of laurenshof.online, I can log in with Aviary, and generate a subdomain for, lets say my cat. Aviary generates a link that my cat can click; they log in on Aviary with Bluesky’s OAuth, type in their name, press accept, and their handle is now changed, without them having to change settings.
What makes this different from projects like swifties.social, which also hand out subdomains for people to use as handles on Bluesky, is that it does not require the final step, changing settings in the app. It also gives the owner of the domain control over each subdomain, with the ability to subtract subdomains as well. This makes Aviary more useful for people who want to have more control over who identifies with the domain, and can show they are part of the community.The Links
A new FAQ for Blacksky.
A minimal OAuth browser client implementation for atproto.
Post to Bluesky with PHP.
Post to Bluesky with the date of the post set to any arbitrary date in the past.
Lexicon design techniques (in Japanese).
Introduction to the AT Protocol: Understanding the ideas behind the protocol (also in Japanese).
Audio spaces app Bluecast now can show your broadcasting history.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
#atmosphere #bluesky
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-oct-24-week-3/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20220107-Fediverse-report-bark-of-an-old-douglas-tree-04-e1681301193852-1024x511.jpg

2024-10-16 16:32:47

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 88
A quieter news week: self-hosted 3d printing app Manyfold joins the fediverse, and write.as now offers paid subscriptions for fediverse accounts with sub.club.The News
Manyfold is a self-hosted open source web app for organising and managing your collection of 3d files, and in particularly 3d printing. With their latest update, Manyfold has now joined the fediverse by adding ActivityPub support. With the new integration, you can now follow a Manyfold creator from your fediverse account of choice, and get notified when the Manyfold account uploads a new 3d file. New Manyfold uploads appear as short posts with a link in the rest of the fediverse. To demonstrate, here is the Manyfold account from the creator Floppy as visible from Mastodon, and here is the profile on their Manyfold instance itself. The Manyfold server also has a button to follow the account on the fediverse.
Manyfold implementing ActivityPub support is an illustration of how ActivityPub can be viewed as a form of ‘Social RSS’: it allows you to follow any Actor for updates, and adds social features (sharing/liking to it).
Sub.club is a service that lets people create paid subscription feeds on the fediverse. The service recently launched with the ability to monetise Mastodon feeds, and has now expanded to also include long-form writing, by collaborating with write.as. Write.as is the flagship instance of fediverse blogging software WriteFreely. With this update, blogs on write.as can now set on a a per-blog basis if a blog is a premium blog, and where the cut-off is. People who follow the blog from a fediverse account will see an option to subscribe and view the full post; this post by the sub.club account shows how a premium blog will look like from various perspectives. Adding sub.club to a write.as blog is as simple as following this three-minute PeerTube video.The Links
How to buy shoes in the fediverse – Erin Kissane.
“We can have a different web, if we want it” – Newsmast’s Michael Foster.
Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, is out for September 2024.
Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom – Soatok, who is working on implementing E2EE for ActivityPub.
ForgeFed is continuing to work on adding Actor Programming.
Positioning Micro.blog.
How to join Mastodon – Stefan Bohacek.
Mastodon has started selling a plushy.
Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 2) – Elena Rossini.
‘I for one (cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses, but we really need to talk about the big elephant in the federated room’ – The Nexus of Privacy.
The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability – bengo.
Echo is a new iOS app for Lemmy.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
We Distribute Is On Temporary Hiatus.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-88/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230719-Fediverse-report-The-polish-series-10-1024x410.jpg

2024-10-16 16:32:47

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 88
A quieter news week: self-hosted 3d printing app Manyfold joins the fediverse, and write.as now offers paid subscriptions for fediverse accounts with sub.club.The News
Manyfold is a self-hosted open source web app for organising and managing your collection of 3d files, and in particularly 3d printing. With their latest update, Manyfold has now joined the fediverse by adding ActivityPub support. With the new integration, you can now follow a Manyfold creator from your fediverse account of choice, and get notified when the Manyfold account uploads a new 3d file. New Manyfold uploads appear as short posts with a link in the rest of the fediverse. To demonstrate, here is the Manyfold account from the creator Floppy as visible from Mastodon, and here is the profile on their Manyfold instance itself. The Manyfold server also has a button to follow the account on the fediverse.
Manyfold implementing ActivityPub support is an illustration of how ActivityPub can be viewed as a form of ‘Social RSS’: it allows you to follow any Actor for updates, and adds social features (sharing/liking to it).
Sub.club is a service that lets people create paid subscription feeds on the fediverse. The service recently launched with the ability to monetise Mastodon feeds, and has now expanded to also include long-form writing, by collaborating with write.as. Write.as is the flagship instance of fediverse blogging software WriteFreely. With this update, blogs on write.as can now set on a a per-blog basis if a blog is a premium blog, and where the cut-off is. People who follow the blog from a fediverse account will see an option to subscribe and view the full post; this post by the sub.club account shows how a premium blog will look like from various perspectives. Adding sub.club to a write.as blog is as simple as following this three-minute PeerTube video.The Links
“We can have a different web, if we want it” – Newsmast’s Michael Foster.
Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, is out for September 2024.
Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom – Soatok, who is working on implementing E2EE for ActivityPub.
ForgeFed is continuing to work on adding Actor Programming.
Positioning Micro.blog.
Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 2) – Elena Rossini.
‘I for one (cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses, but we really need to talk about the big elephant in the federated room’ – The Nexus of Privacy.
The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability – bengo.
Echo is a new iOS app for Lemmy.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-88/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230719-Fediverse-report-The-polish-series-10-1024x410.jpg

2024-10-09 18:06:53

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87
Mastodon has officially launched a new version, a new Reddit-like with ClubsAll has launched, and IFTAS has started rolling out their content classifier system.Mastodon launches version 4.3
Mastodon has released version 4.3, and the update comes with a better notification system, design improvements, displaying follow recommendations in the following feed for new accounts, and the ability to highlight the fediverse profile of the authors of shared articles.
There are two updates to the notification system: notifications are now grouped, and the ability to filter notifications. Grouped notifications means that you’ll see a summary of the number of people who liked and boosted your post, instead of getting each notification individually. This is especially helpful for posts that go viral, as your notifications become unusable without grouping. Third party clients also support grouping notifications of new followers, which Mastodon does not do. With notification filters, you can limit specific types of notifications, for example from people who are not following you, from new accounts, or to filter out unsolicited private mentions.
With the new carousel that displays follow suggestions for new accounts, Mastodon leaned on transparency. For each suggestion it is also displayed why an account is suggested. It seems there are four different reasons for an account to be suggested: ‘Popular on your server’, ‘Popular among people you follow’, ‘Similar to profiles you recently followed’ and ‘Handpicked by your server admins’.
For future plans Mastodon mentions three parts: working on adding quote posts, the ability for server admins to subscribe to managed deny-lists and improving how long-form text is displayed in Mastodon. Mastodon also features a request for donations at the end, noting that they are supported by donations and operate on less than 500k per year. It showcases the difficult spot that Mastodon is in: as the post highlights, their competitors have access to significant capital, which allows them to ship features significantly faster. While it is remarkable what Mastodon has accomplished with their budget, the small team also means that it has taken a year to ship this update 4.3, while the competition can move significantly faster. Not taking venture capital, not selling ads, and not selling data are great things to do, but the update cadence of Mastodon versus that of Bluesky or Threads shows that not doing so puts a significant limit on what the organisation can accomplish during this period of protocol wars.ClubsAll has launched
ClubsAll is a new fediverse project, a Reddit-alternative similar to Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. ClubsAll main goal is to provide a clean and easily-accessible UI, and explicitly positions itself as a Reddit alternative. The other focus is on live comments and live chat, where new comments that are made on a post flow in directly visible. The comment section includes both the traditional threaded view as well as a chatbox to invite more chat-like realtime reactions. Other features are easy cross-posting of new posts to up to three communities, and having multiple profiles under a simple login.
With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the fediverse community on lemmy.ml and the fediverse community on lemmy.world. PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘topics’, which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.The News
IFTAS has been working on a Content Classification System, and the first classifier is now active. A few select server are working together with IFTAS, where all the media of these servers now get scanned for CSAM. In case of a hit, IFTAS handles the mandatory requirement and record-keeping, and issues a takedown. CSAM moderation is a difficult task for server admins to keep track of, both of the toll it takes on the humans, as well for the complex legal requirements that come with it.
NLnet has been a major sponsor of fediverse projects over the years. They announced the results their latest funding round this week in which they sponsor a large variety of open source project. The fediverse project that got funded is Loops, a TikTok-like short video platform by Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault. Loops was scheduled for a public beta launch on Wednesday the 9th, but this has been delayed for 11 days. Supernault attributes the delay to the rumour that Threads is working on a Communities feature that is also supposedly called Loops, as well as to further polish the app and platform.
The SocialCG, the W3C Community Group for ActivityPub has agreed on starting work to form a charter to transition towards a Working Group. The details require some knowledge of W3C processes (that I don’t fully grok either), but the very short summary is that a Working Group has more impact on making changes to the ActivityPub protocol.
FediMod FIRES is both a protocol for distributing moderation advisories and recommendations and a reference server implementation. Emelia Smith, who is behind the project, has updated the website with more information as well as a general timeline for when work on the project happens.
ActivityPods is a project that combines the Solid protocol with ActivityPub, and they have released their 2.0 version. ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple different apps; with ActivityPub you need a separate accounts for Pixelfed and Mastodon, for example. ActivityPods gives you one place to store your data, your Pod, based on the Solid protocol, and the Inbox and Outbox system of ActivityPub. This update of ActivityPods gives the ability to set granular permission levels for the access to data than an app has that is build on top of ActivityPods. The Links
IFTAS September 2024 Connect Community Round-Up.
Prototyping Our First Native Components with LiveView Native – Bonfire app dev diary.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Lemmy Development Update for the past 2 weeks.
Minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force meeting.
Sub.club is teasing premium (for paid subscribers) blogs coming soon
The two Fediverses – Ben Werdmuller.
A proposal to enable portability of identity and object storage within ActivityPub through the use of DIDs.
Event Organizers’ Needs for Publishing to the Fediverse via WordPress.
The FediJam is a month-long game jam for users of the fediverse, and the results of the September jam our now available.
Pixelfed has been working on adding push notifications, and other Pixelfed servers can now apply for access as well.
An interview with Silverpill, who builds fediverse platform Mitra.
Ghost’s latest update shows some more of their ActivityPub-powered reader.
Tangerine is a custom UI for Mastodon servers, and v2 is now available for Mastodon servers on 4.3.
The Author bylines feature is now also available for all Mastodon servers, with an explanation on how to set it up here.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
#fediverse
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2024-10-02 17:14:24

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86
Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.Threads delays posts for 15 minutes before federating
Threads’ latest update has degraded the value of their fediverse integration. Posts made on Threads will now always be delayed by 15 minutes before they are delivered to the rest of the fediverse, if fediverse sharing is turned on. The 15 minute delay is added for the purpose of post editing; posts on Threads can now be edited for 15 minutes after they are created. This used to be 5 minutes, both as a window for editing posts as well as the delay to be send out to the rest of the fediverse.
A 15 minute delay is a long time in microblogging, and significantly impacts things like breaking news, and live-posting sports events. It also meaningfully impacts the ability to have a back-and-forth conversation with people in a comment section. The delay itself is already an issue, but things get even more problematic when taken into consideration that during live events, Threads posts with a 15 minute delay are now mixed with fediverse posts without a delay and presented as happening during the same time. This was already noticeable during yesterday’s U.S. VP debate, an event where people use microblogging for the real-time reaction. But part of the real-time reactions was actually 15 minutes delayed, while another part was not, which creates even more confusing experience. A Threads engineer says that they will want to solve this problem ‘eventually’, but that it will probably come after Threads has implemented full bi-directional interoperability.
This news is not a great start for the Social Web Foundation either, which launched last week with criticism from the wider fediverse developer community for having Meta as one of their supporting members. There is a distrust of Meta’s intention within the fediverse, and them degrading their fediverse integration is likely not helping.Website League
The Website League is a new social networking project that has arisen out of the demise of Cohost. Cohost was a social media site for the last 2 years, that has shut down, and on October 1st the website entered read-only mode. Cohost had a dedicated user base who appreciated the community that they’ve build on the site. Website League is a new project by users of Cohost (the Cohost staff is not involved) to build a successor network in Cohost’s place.
What makes Website League stand out is that it is a federated Island Network, described by Website League themselves as ‘a bunch of smallish websites that talk to each other’. This federated social network is using ActivityPub, but deliberately does not connect to the rest of the fediverse. Instead, it is an allowlist-based form of federation, where only websites/servers who agree to the Website League’s central set of rules can join.
The Website League has a big focus community organisation and governance. Even though the project is very young, and launched under time pressure of the deadline of Cohost closing, there are already multiple systems in place with an active Loomio for Stewardship, a wiki and more. The Website League provides a different vision of what a federated social network build on top of ActivityPub can look like, and I’m very curious to see where the project will go.Ghost and Fedify
Ghost published their latest update on their work on adding ActivityPub, with more information about their upcoming beta. Ghost is slowly starting their beta process soon, making it clear that this is indeed a testing program, and data loss should be expected for people who are participating. They also said more about the performance and scaling of Ghost and ActivityPub. Sending out a newsletter over ActivityPub to 5000 subscribers turned out to need 10 servers, which indicates how resource-intensive and expensive ActivityPub can be. As a result, ActivityPub followers will count towards Ghost Pro billing, as Ghost Pro charges based on the number of members an account has.
Fedify, an open-source framework that simplifies building federated server apps, is now officially in version 1.0. Ghost’s ActivityPub integration is build on top of Fedify, and Ghost is sponsoring the Fedify developer as well.The Links
Flipboard is connecting another 250 accounts of publishers to the fediverse.
Bonfire is building a native app, and a series of developer diaries with it.
The first release candidate for Mastodon 4.3 is now available.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 1) – Elena Rossini.
Mastodon Announces Fediverse Discovery Providers – WeDistribute.
fedi vs web – on the distinction between social network and social web, where activitypub straddles both.
Mallory Knodel, the Executive Director for the new Social Web Foundation, writes about the new foundation.
The Mastodon server strangeobjects.space will shut down, and in the announcement post the admins explain the emotional cost and impact that comes with being a server admin.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
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2024-03-24 17:13:04

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 61
A busy week in the fediverse, with Threads launching their open beta, as well as Fediforum happening this week.Threads has entered the fediverse
Threads has officially entered the fediverse, by entering an open beta where people in the US, Canada and Japan can now opt in to connect their profile to the fediverse. The feature was first demoed on the Fediforum this week by Threads employees, who were there to show the feature and participate in the discussions. A video of the demo can be seen here, which showcases how the connection between Threads and the fediverse works.
Threads accounts that opt-in to the connection will get a few popups that explain what the fediverse is, and what it means to be connected.Source.
In the announcement post, Meta goes into more detail, explaining how this open beta is part of their phased approach to the fediverse. In the current phase of this open beta, only public posts are federated out towards other servers that connect with Threads, with Meta saying:
“Certain types of posts and content are also not federated, including:
Posts with restricted replies.
Replies to non-federated posts.
Post with polls (until future updates).
Reposts of non-federated posts.“
The blog also goes into more detail on how Threads has approached quote posts, by adopting both the Misskey-style of quote posts as well as the FEP-a232 style of quote posts. I wrote about this in more detail a while ago. It indicates the impact that Threads has on the entire fediverse by participating with ActivityPub. The status of how the FEP process relates to the formal specification of the protocol has never been fully formalised, but the participation of Meta in this process changes the dynamics.
On Instagram, Adam Mosseri posted a story where he explains why Threads is joining the fediverse, listing multiple reasons. He states that it is an ‘interesting way for social networks to operate’, and the ‘direction the internet is going’, calling it a paradigm shift that he wants Threads to lean into. He also describes Threads as the challenger to Twitter, and thus willing to take on more risk.
Threads’ phased approach to federation is as much a technical challenge as it is a regulatory challenge. Currently, Threads accounts do not see individual likes on their federated posts, instead getting a notification that says ‘4 fediverse users from 3 servers liked this post’. According to Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput, Threads cannot use profile info from fediverse accounts on Threads yet because they are not allowed to do so yet by their Legal department.
With Threads and the fediverse being a main topic of conversation again, some short bits of news:
Threads does not connect to all servers in the fediverse either, and they published their guidelines on which servers Threads will not connect to here.
FediDB has also added support for Threads to the database that tracks the fediverse, and now Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed account on the fediverse.
The developer of GoToSocial wrote about the social and power dynamics of when a large corporate implementation of a protocol is incompatible with the implementation by a small independent group.
Threads uses a their own logo to denote the fediverse, not the coloured 5-pointed one. Whether or not a server federates with Threads is a major mark of separation within the fediverse, and @wakest uses the different logos to distinguish between an ‘open fediverse’ and a ‘corporate fediverse’.Fediforum
Fediforum was this week, a 2-day digital unconference where everyone could call sessions, as well as a variety of speed demos at the beginning. The event consists of speed demos of 5 minutes, and sessions that anyone could convene.
The speed demos were a good showcase in the incredible projects that people are building on top of the fediverse. It also indicated a need for better ways for people to share what they are building with the rest of the fediverse, as there are some amazing projects that have not gotten the attention yet that they deserve. I don’t have the space (nor time) for this edition of the newsletter to go over all of the demos, but you watch them on the Fediforum Youtube channel. TheNewStack has a good write-up of the event as well, and if you are really interested you can scroll through WeDistribute’s liveblog of the event. I’ll give one sneak peak, that I was impressed by Emissary, a stand-alone fediverse server and RSS reader, which easily allows you to build custom apps on top as well. To understand what that really means, I’ll recommend you check out the demo video. I’ll go over the demo videos some more in a separate article, as I want to say more about how Fediforum highlighted the need for more ways for the fediverse to showcase itself.
Threads has been a significant presence at this edition of Fediforum as well, with the first public demo of how the Threads’ fediverse integration, ahead of their open beta launch a few days later, as well as multiple employees who participated both days in the sessions as well. The employees talked about that they understand the widespread skepticism about Threads joining the fediverse, with one employee saying: “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
There has been a clear interest in collaboration projects on the fediverse as showcased by the various sessions held during Fediforum. A session on the Threadiverse led to the start of a Threadiverse working group. As a side note, the Thread on NodeBB about the Threadiverse working group is a great showcase for the integration of ActivityPub into NodeBB as well.
There were sessions about the Fediverse Developer Network as well as Evan Prodromou organised a session about a potential Fediverse Advocacy Group. It is clear that the interest is there, with the more difficult next step being to put this into practice.In other news
IFTAS has been hard at work behind the scenes, and with it some of the things that they will release this month:
FediCheck, a Moderation-as-a-Service app that can monitor denylists from your trusted sources and automatically update your server. This was also demoed at Fediforum, but a video is not yet available.
DSA Guidebook for Micro Services. Everything you wanted to know about the EU’s Digital Services Act and were too afraid to ask.
A moderation community portal
Moderation Documentation Support
Moderator Advisory Council
It is a massive list, and something I’ll certainly cover more when things are released.
Two podcasts episodes (one, two) on the work of connecting ActivityPub and ActivityStreams in the podcasting specification. Some fascinating things are happening in the podcasting space that I have not really been able to fully check out and report on yet, but for people interested in the topic, this is definitely something that is worth diving deeper into.The links
Donald Trump’s Truth Social runs a forked version of Mastodon, and it seems that it has not patched the vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Mastodon.
WeDistribute has written about the state of ActivityPub, and the efforts to extend the protocol.
The Mastodonusercountbot reported that Mastodon now has 15 million accounts. This bot is likely not accurate, with other sources listing somewhere between 7 and 9 million Mastodon accounts.
@Box464 has written an extensive walkthrough for completing a Bonfire installation. For more information about the upcoming platform, check out this article by WeDistribute, or my recent reporting on how they are involved with the launch of a new Open Science Network.
Pixelfed developer Dansup is working on Loops, a federated platform for short form vertical video. A video demonstrating how Loops will look like is available here.
A blog by the European Broadcasting Union with a call for all public broadcasters to join decentralised social networks, based on the experiences by Deutsche Welle on Mastodon.
Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media.
Last week I reported about Fedify, a fediverse server framework. They released another demo of what is possible with Fedify, this time with fedi badges. Fedify also released a tutorial, here.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
The latest update on NodeBB’s fediverse implementation.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
#fediverse
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2024-03-17 15:59:57

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 60
The fediverse stays in the theme of announcing projects that are a copy of a well-known platform, but with ActivityPub added to it. This week its a proof-of-concept of a federated version of Wikipedia, as well as the announcement that Dansup will now work on creating a Loops, a federated version of TikTok.The news
Lemmy developer Nutomic has announced Ibis, a federated wiki platform. Ibis is a proof-of-concept that allows anyone to run their own wiki, and connect them via ActivityPub. In the announcement post, Nutomic frames Ibis explicitly not just as any wiki, but as a Wikipedia alternative specifically, outlining some of the problems that he sees with the way that Wikipedia is run. Nutomic’s solution is for different places to host their own wiki, where articles and edits can be shared across different wiki instances via ActivityPub. The problems that Nutomic sees with Wikipedia are mainly regarding the moderation policies of Wikipedia and how they are executed. Ibis does not have any moderation tools yet, nor a vision of how moderation policies and privileges will be federated across different instances.
Commenters in the announcement post point out that Ibis might have a target audience with the Wikia/Fandom wikis, wikis for specific/niche topics that are heavily ad-driven. What personally surprised me is Ibis does not have any connection with Lemmy communities, in the same way that Reddit has wikis for subreddits. Nutomic says that Ibis in a very early stage of development, and will not be able to work on in it the near term as his daughter will soon be born, and hopes that other developers will help contribute to the project.
Pixelfed developer Dansup has announced that he is working on Loops, a new fediverse platform for sharing short videos. Dansup says that Loops is based on an old web UI for videos for Pixelfed that is getting repurposed into a new app. Not much other information is known about the project, expect that Dansup expects that the project will ship ‘soon’.
A paper on hashtag activism on Mastodon, titled ‘Showing your ass on Mastodon’. It is an autoethnographic narrative about how a fight about a hashtag used to show pictures of donkeys highlights issues with hashtag activism on decentralised social networks. The article is fun to read, and there is also a good commentary by Robert W. Gehl.
There is some tensions brewing below the surface at Lemmy. This blog by @db0 explains the issues and gives a good overview. The Beehaw community is actively thinking about moving away from Lemmy to a different fediverse platform, and with the upcoming platform Sublinks as well as Piefed there are now new intereresting options to choose from.
The San Francisco International Airport museum has joined the fediverse, and they have put some serious effort into the project. They published an extensive blog post explaining their thinking, and how this has been a long time in the making. The SFO museum had thought about years earlier about possibilities of making every museum object into a social media presence, either on Twitter or on FourSquare. Their fediverse presence starts calmer, with only a few accounts, build with their own custom code.The Links
Hatsu is a new self-hosted bridge that interacts with Fediverse on behalf of your static site.
Streams developer Mike Macgirvin has started work on adding Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub. Fediverse platform Streams already has Nomadic Identity, but Streams internally uses a different protocol to handle this.
Fedify is a fediverse server framework that’s currently in development. This week the creator showed a demo of what it can do.
Micro.blog leans into the Indieweb and adds blogrolls.
Mozilla has recently scaled down their involvement with the mozilla.social server, and now they have ditched the custom front-end based on Elk for their server.
Manyfold is a place to organise your 3d-printing files, is actively thinking about adding ActivityPub.
Piefed has added the ability to opt-out of search.
Owncast’s newletter for March.
Piefed showcases how their ’tile’ interface is a great way to browse memes on the treadiverse.
Social address instead of handle.
The Lemmy developer’s bi-weekly update.
A simple fediverse subscribe feature for static sites.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
#fediverse
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2024-03-10 17:47:33

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 59
It’s been a quiet news week in the fediverse overall, but Phanpy’s new Catch-up feature is one of the most innovative features released in the fediverse in a long while, so that more than makes up for it.Phanpy releases Catch-Up
Phanpy, one of the most innovative third-party clients for the fediverse, has released a major new feature: catch-up. Catch-up allows you to simply, well, catch-up with your timeline by showing all the posts of the last X amount of hours by the accounts you follow in a few different ways.
You can scroll through the list of people who have posted, select their avatar and only see their posts they have made, allowing you to quickly see what your close friends and mutuals have posted.
You can sort to see only all the boosted posts, and order them by the most boosts or likes, to get a quick update on the most popular posts have been boosted by the people you follow.
You can select to only show posts (not boosts and replies) by the people you follow, and then group them by author.
After using the feature for a while, I can say that this has completely changed the way I interact with the fediverse for me, and has allowed me to be much more mindful with the time I spend on here. It has made it much easier for me to limit my time on the feeds to only specific moments, in which I can spend more focused time on finding the posts I want. And if I’m in the train with just a few minutes to kill, it is much nicer to use catch-up to quickly read only the posts made by my mutuals and friends, instead of just scrolling in reverse-chronological order and never see the posts by mutuals that live in different time zones. One major downside of only having a reverse chronologically ordered feed is that it gets really difficult to read posts by people you follow who post in different time zones, and even more so if they are not a particularly prolific poster. This feature has made it significantly easier for me to actually read those posts and make sure I don’t miss them, which is a major contributing factor as to why I love it so much.
Phanpy is available at phanpy.social on web, and works great on mobile as a PWA as well.The News
Threads has expanded their testing of ActivityPub, and now some Threads accounts that are not Threads employees are starting to federate as well, as part of a beta program. Spotted accounts that are federating are of Snarfed, Tim Chambers and Evan Prodromou.
Newsmast is looking for Community Curators.
An extensive conversation with Marcia X, creator of the fediblock hashtag, about Blackness in the fediverse.
Kilogram.makeup is a bridge between Instagram and the fediverse that is currently in development.
Fedify is a fediverse server framework that is currently in development, making it easier for people to develop fediverse platforms.
The Fediverse Developer Network had a show-and-tell for FediTest this week, recording here. The plan is to reinstate regular meetups again for the developer network.
Pixelfed has released their latest update, implementing account migrations and curated onboarding. Pixelfed also released the documentation for their implementation of ActivityPub.
Lemmy does not provide a way to delete pictures, which has some significant privacy implications. WeDistribute has taken a closer look at the situation.
Sublinks is a link-aggregator for the fediverse that is currently in development, and this week some work on their front-end was showcased.
NodeBB developer Julian Lam was on the FLOSS Weekly podcast to talk about NodeBB’s implementation of ActivityPub.
Piefed published a blog post on moderation and design.
ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou is working on a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media, and some chapters are available for people with access to O’Reilly Media Learning Platform for feedback.
IFTAS wrote about ‘Open Social for the Common Good’, explaining how government agencies can embrace the fediverse.
An overview of all server and clients updates of the last week.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
#fediverse
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2024-03-05 15:55:09

Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024
Welcome to the overview of all the news that has happened in the ATmosphere for February 2024. For those who don’t know me; I’m Laurens, and I write weekly updates about what happened in the fediverse. Last year I also started writing monthly updates summarising the news for Bluesky (here, here and here). I had to skip a few months due to time restrictions, but now I’m back with regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.
The main stories of this month is Bluesky dropping the invite code requirement, opening up the network for federation, and Bluesky’s appeal in Japan.Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere
Bluesky has opened up the network for federation, allowing people to host their own data. This means that now anyone can set up their own Personal Data Server (PDS) and connect to the main network. Bluesky frames the opening of the network in the context of website hosting, making a direct comparison between how anyone can host a website on the internet. By hosting a website, you are in control of your data, and move to a different hosting provider without any noticeable change for the visitors. Bluesky says that they “think social media should work the same way”; by hosting your own PDS you are in control of your own data, able to move to a different host, without your followers noticing anything.
The update Bluesky released this week is an early version, which changes coming later, with Bluesky saying:
The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.
In the announcement post, Bluesky also makes a comparison with Mastodon, and explains how some of the differences in the approaches: Bluesky focuses on a global conversation and a global network, which can be fine-tuned to individual preferences with composable feeds and composable moderation. This is in contrast with most fediverse implementations, where network view and moderation are dependent on the instance or server you are on. Bluesky also has full account portability, where you can keep your data and identity when you move to a different server. Over 260 people have since set up their own Personal Data Server.
Bluesky also crossed the 5 million account mark this week, gaining almost 2 million accounts in the last few weeks since the network dropped the invite code requirement. A significant part of this inflow comes from Japan, where Bluesky turns out to be hugely popular; Japanese is now the dominant language on the network. With this inflow the Bluesky network (colloquially also called the ATmosphere) has become more significantly active than the fediverse (~1.1M MAU); with close to double the amount of Monthly Active Users. A new website for reliable statistics on Bluesky recently started tracking data, but for the MAU to be a reliable number a few more weeks of datapoints are needed. The current Weekly Active Users for the Bluesky network is around 1M, and the MAU is around 1.9M.Potential bridge between fediverse and Bluesky
Developer Ryan Barrett has been working on a bridging service between the fediverse (Mastodon and other platforms) and Bluesky. This month, he announced that the to-be-released project will be opt-out, meaning that people on either network that do not want to be able to be followed by people on the other network, will have to manually opt-out of the service. This lead to a backlash and drama on the fediverse, as there is a significant group of people that do not want their public posts to be visible on the Bluesky network. Some media covered it as drama between Mastodon and Bluesky, but it seems more accurate to say that Mastodon and the fediverse has been in conflict for a longer time with itself about network boundaries and consent, while the role of Bluesky in this all is more of a confused bystander.In the media
As Bluesky opens up, the team has been more visible in the public. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber appeared on the Hard Fork podcast, as well as Chris Messina’s podcast. She also participated in a conversation with Mike Masnick and Yoel Roth, video replay here.
In an interview with The Verge, Jay Graber also talked a bit more about how Bluesky plans to make money:
While the AT Protocol is being opened up soon, the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.
In another interview with Wired, Graber says that Bluesky ‘won’t enshittify the network with ads’.In other news
Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbald held a technical talk on the technology behind AT Protocol that makes account portability possible: the decentralised identifier DID PLC. Newbald also goes into more detail on how Bluesky is thinking about governance for this decentralised identifier. You can watch the replay here.
Bluesky has hired a head of Trust & Safety, Aaron Rodericks. The community has voiced their demands for a head of Trust & Safety for a while. Rodericks has previously co-leading the Trust and Safety team at Twitter.Bluesky App updates
Some major updates have launched on the official app for Bluesky: the latest update brought hashtags and the much-requested ability to mute certain words (or hashtags). Another update is that your Bluesky handle url is now a direct link to your profile as well.Other app updates
deck.blue, a spiritual successor to TweetDeck, has added a Gallery mode.
iOS app Skeets has added the ability to edit posts. It is still an experimental feature as it depends on a workaround, the ability to edit posts is not officially yet part of the protocol. Skeets also added the ability to register and log in to a third party PDS.
Graysky added notifications, and feeds now respond to your content languages.
People have created over 40k custom feeds, the large majority (34k+) coming from third party feed generator skyfeed.The links
Comic-driven software development.
A complete guide to Bluesky.
A high-level explanation of how the AT Protocol works.
Adding comments on your blog with ATProto.
Bluesky handle directory.
Bluesky has given the documentation website a major update.
A list of the most influential scientists on Bluesky, based on their network centrality.
A proposal for OAuth 2.0 for ATProto.
That’s all, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online and @fediversereport.com, on the fediverse, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter:
#bluesky
https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-februari-2024/
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2024-03-03 16:29:57

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 58
The fediverse has long had the struggle that the wider network consists of a huge variety of product types, but that in most people’s conceptualisation it mainly consists of microblogging. The news this week is another indication of the need for a broader understanding of what the fediverse is, with the announcement of an Open Science Network, as well more and more tighter integration of forum software into the fediverse with both NodeBB and Discourse.Open Science Network announced
The Open Science Network is a new fediverse project, based on the to-be-released Bonfire project. Bonfire is a modular platform for the fediverse, for more information on that I wrote about it recently, as did WeDistribute. Bonfire aims to be modular and customisable and allow for a variety of extensions to be build on top of it. The Open Science Network project takes the Bonfire platform, and is working on adding a variety of features for building an open science network. The Open Science Network will have the ability to sign in with ORCID, automatically import publications, the ability to work collaboratively on papers, and more. Bonfire and the Open Science Network have not given an estimation for when the project launches.Forum Federation
Forum software NodeBB now connects to the fediverse! In the February update, developer Julian Lam shows that the forum for NodeBB itself is now connected to the fediverse. You can see the post made on NodeBB on Mastodon for example. The project is still under development, but major functionality is now available, with both accounts and public posts now bi-directionally federating. This means you can follow NodeBB accounts from the rest of the fediverse, and posts by NodeBB accounts you follow show up in your fediverse. Comments you make with your other fediverse account also show up in the comment section of the NodeBB posts. The announcement posts shows some examples, with some replies being made by Mastodon accounts that show up in the NodeBB forum topic.
Meanwhile, Discourse has also made progress with their ActivityPub plugin, so that Discourse forums now also are able to follow fediverse accounts. It is unclear at this point how federation between these forums will interact. One thing is clear though, with the development of ActivityPub integrations for NodeBB, Discourse coming online, as well as platforms like PiedFed and Sublinks, is that innovation and change in the fediverse is not happening in the space of microblogging, but of forums instead.In other news
Newsmast has released a new update, allowing anyone to log into their platform with their current Mastodon account. This way, you can experience their curated community feeds on their platform, without having to make a new account at all. The ability to log in with your Mastodon account sidesteps one of the issues that the fediverse currently has, namely the need for a new account for every new project. For more information on Newsmast, TechCrunch published an extensive article on the project, which is worth checking out.
Funkwhale is working towards a version 2.0, and in their latest update they talk about how to ‘make Funkwhale a truly interoperable and social platform for audio enthusiasts and content creators everywhere’. Funkwhale is still early in the process, and shows how much unsolved the concept of federation is. People have some understanding of what federation means in the context of microblogging, but federation of platforms that serve other functions that microblogging is still an under-explored space.
Benjamin Bellamy, who is behind the Castopod project, joined the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, to talk about Castopod and ActivityPub. In the episode, Bellamy says that currently somewhere between 300 and 500 people have installed their own version of Castopod, up from a couple dozen a year ago.The Links
Threativore is an automoderator bot for the threadiverse by @db0.
A blog exploring the bridging between the fediverse and the ATmosphere from the perspective of GDPR.
Mona, a Mastodon client for iOS and MacOS has a major update, v6, and MacStories has an extensive review of the update.
A study on ‘User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms’.
The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group is restarting a schedule of monthly group calls.
Mastodon updated their Android app, allowing you to share your profile via a QR code.
The Decentered Podcast’s latest episode is an interview with @jaz from IFTAS.
For Dutch-speaking people: PublicSpaces is organising a workshop to help guide public organisations in The Netherlands to make a transition towards Mastodon.
A blog by Codeberg reflecting on the recent spam wave in the fediverse.
Regular meetups for the FediDevs group are restarting, with the first one being March 7th, with a show-and-tell of FediTest.
Friendica has a script to make Friendica user nicknames function as Bluesky user handles.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
#fediverse #nodebb
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-58/
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2024-02-25 16:00:17

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 57
Two major news stories in the world of decentralised social networks this week: the fediverse is hit with spam wave, which showcases some of the vulnerabilities of the network. Bluesky has opened up the network to third parties for federation, which means that we now seem to enter a new chapter the development of decentralised social networks. Advanced Persistent Teenagers hit the fediverse with spam wave
The fediverse is currently experiencing an persistent ongoing spam wave. The source of the spam is from a dispute on a Japanese Discord server. This post has an in-depth timeline and collection of all the information about the groups and people behind the spam attack that is known at this point. TechCrunch has a good article that explains the situation, as well as how Discord has not been able to handle the source of the harm that originated on their servers.
The fediverse has been ‘lucky’ that the content of the spam messages is relatively harmless, even though it still has a real impact on all the labor by the admins and moderators. As last summer’s attack on Lemmy showed, this is certainly not a guarantee. It does give the fediverse an opportunity to respond and build better defense tools against spam, as these attacks have showcased how vulnerable the network is to attacks.
Mastodon has taken some actions and updates, mainly focusing on making servers less suspectible to be used by malicious actors. If you set up a new Mastodon server, the default will be that all registrations now require approval. Admins can still set the registrations to be open to everyone, but it is not the default setting like it is now. Mastodon servers that are updated to the latest version and do have open registrations will now also automatically switch to approval mode if there has not been any action by the mod and admin accounts. These updates are helpful, but not in the near future. They require new and updated servers, while the problem is the very long tail of unmaintained servers that are currently out there. And that these servers are currently used for spam, makes it likely they will not be updated anytime soon either.
The spam wave forced admins to work together, such as the work by Erik Uden to maintain and share a list of servers that are the source of the spam wave. The interesting question that is worth watching is if and how the fediverse adopts these practices for even more coordination on shared deny lists. There are projects in development that help with deny list coordination, such as IFTAS’ CARIAD and The Bad Space, but these have not available yet. What I do find striking is that there seems to have been little interest in the Mastodon community to use the Fediseer project to help deal with the spam wave. Fediseer was started last summer to help with the spam wave on Lemmy, and allows server admins (including Mastodon server admins) to classify other servers as spam.Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere
Bluesky has opened up the network for federation, allowing people to host their own data. This means that now anyone can set up their own Personal Data Server (PDS) and connect to the main network. Bluesky frames the opening of the network in the context of website hosting, making a direct comparison between how anyone can host a website on the internet. By hosting a website, you are in control of your data, and move to a different hosting provider without any noticeable change for the visitors. Bluesky says that they “think social media should work the same way”; by hosting your own PDS you are in control of your own data, able to move to a different host, without your followers noticing anything.
The update Bluesky released this week is an early version, which changes coming later, with Bluesky saying:
The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.
In the announcement post, Bluesky also makes a comparison with Mastodon, and explains how some of the differences in the approaches: Bluesky focuses on a global conversation and a global network, which can be fine-tuned to individual preferences with composable feeds and composable moderation. This is in contrast with most fediverse implementations, where network view and moderation are dependent on the instance or server you are on. Bluesky also has full account portability, where you can keep your data and identity when you move to a different server. Account portability in the fediverse is a subject of many discussions and something people want to implement, but with limited progress so far.
Bluesky also crossed the 5 million account mark this week, gaining almost 2 million accounts in the last few weeks since the network dropped the invite code requirement. A significant part of this inflow comes from Japan, where Bluesky turns out to be hugely popular; Japanese is now the dominant language on the network. With this inflow the Bluesky network (colloquially also called the ATmosphere) has become more active than the fediverse; the fediverse has stayed around roughly 1.2M Monthly Active Users for the last half year. A new website for reliable statistics on Bluesky recently started tracking data, but for the MAU to be a reliable number a few more weeks of datapoints are needed. The current Weekly Active Users for the Bluesky network is around 1.2M, and the MAU is above 1.5M.The links
Pixelfed has made some updates to their server directory. Pixelfed also added curated onboarding, meaning the ability for server admins to have people apply for an account instead of being able to register directly.
A video that goes in-depth on all of the features of Sharkey. For a complete overview of all the feature comparisons between the Forkeys, check out this comparison table.
A new update for Akkoma, with some throwback to the MySpace-period of the internet: Both Akkoma and Sharkey now allow you to set a background image on your profile, and this background image also federates.
WeDistribute has a podcast with Oliphant, who is behind a shared blocklist project for the fediverse.
Lemmy bi-weekly development update.
Funkwhale has a blog about their process of making a new app for the project.
The Mozilla.social project was also developing their own Android and iOS apps for the project. Now that the project has significantly been down-scaled in size, these projects seem to be abandoned. Firefly.social is a continuation of the Mozilla.social Android app, but it is not affiliated with Mozilla anymore.
Write.as has added the ability for people to turn off federation for their public blogs, if they so desire.
PieFed explores how much difference it makes to add a Content Delivery Network. It also added support for audio posts.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
#bluesky #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-57/
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2024-02-18 13:57:58

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 56
Quite a dramatic week in the fediverse; with a lot of discussion about a potential bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse, some security issues, and spam overrunning the network. Good news as well, in the form of the BBC extending their Mastodon trial and Flipboard expanding their fediverse integration.Bluesky Bridge announcement drama
Ryan Barrett, who is behind the bridgy.fed project, announced the opt-out policy for his upcoming bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. Barrett had earlier posted about his considerations on opt-in versus opt-out, and with this post decided to go for an opt-out policy. This led to a major backlash across the fediverse, as people felt that this is not appropriate and should have been opt-in to properly account for people giving consent to having their post appear on the Bluesky network. In a follow-up post, Barrett says that he is working on a proposal to make it appeal to the opt-in demand by sending a DM asking for a confirmation the first time a fediverse account is followed by a Bluesky account.
This lead to some news covering it as a fight between the Mastodon and Bluesky, but the attitude of Bluesky seems to be mainly one of confused on-looking as Mastodon is fighting with itself. Beyond that, the article in TechCrunch does provide a good overview of the debate. I agree with the framing that the debates about the bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse are as much a debate about the Bluesky network itself as it is a debate about the specific implementation of the bridge as worked on by Barrett.
The blowback also is a debate about the nature of the fediverse, and what it is, exactly. People have been debating what they have consented to, when they joined a Mastodon server, and what they have opted into. This is illustrated with the Privacy Policy for mastodon.social, which says “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” What exactly is ‘the network’? Is Bluesky part of ‘the network’? Is a bridge to bluesky part of ‘the network’? It is unclear, and people have different definitions and expectations about what they have consented to.
There is a significant group of people for whom the answer is a clear ‘no, I do not view Bluesky and bridges to Bluesky as part of the network’. Bluesky represents ideals about corporate ownership and data indexing that they do not want to be a part of. This viewpoint clashes with Mastodon’s CEO Eugen Rochko, who gave an interview with Platformer this week. In this, Rochko says that he still hopes that Bluesky will switch to using ActivityPub someday, so that there is a native integration between the networks. The News
The BBC is extending their Mastodon social media trial for another 6 months, after finishing their first 6-month trial run. The BBC states that it has been a valuable learning experiment, and it has been effective in the technical, financial and cultural needs of running a presence in a decentralised space. The BBC also says that they are exploring to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub directly, and not just hosting a Mastodon presence, but not much more is known beyond that. They also find that Mastodon has a relatively large engagement numbers, taken the smaller user base into account, and that they find they have had to do very little moderation so far.
Flipboard has extended their ActivityPub integration, and is bringing in even more curated feeds into the fediverse. Flipboard describes it as another step towards fully federating Flipboard, a process that started in December 2023 when a small number of accounts where brought to the fediverse. With this week’s update, over 1000 magazines now have native ActivityPub feeds, which allow them to be followed from fediverse apps.
Mozilla is scaling back their investments into various products, including their social fediverse platform mozilla.social. Mozilla.social got announced in Spring 2023, with a focus on content moderation that makes it a nice platform to use. Over the year, the product stayed in invite-only beta, and has slowly grown. In an internal memo (courtesy of TechCrunch), Mozilla says “Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order to effectively shape the future of social media.” Mozilla says that with a much smaller team they will focus on more launching smaller experiments more rapidly.
Ivory is adding some basic support for quote posting in their Mastodon app in their upcoming release. What this means in practice is that if a link to a Mastodon post is part of the body of a post, it will get rendered as if it is a quote post. Other apps like Ice Cubes and Phanpy also have this feature.
The announcement prompted Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput to post a thread to reiterate that Mastodon is working on a full implementation of quote posting. The goal of Mastodon’s implementation is to give people granular control, allowing them to determine on per-post basis whether they want the post to be quote posted or not. Mastodon’s approach to implementing quote posting means that it’ll be incompatible with the current implementations of Threads, all the forkeys, and the Hubzilla-lineage. Chaput says that they will be publishing Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) to document their implementation, hoping that the publication ensures that Mastodon’s implementation becomes the standard in the fediverse. However, with the imminent arrival of Threads (who already have decided on implementing quote posting with ActivityPub), Mastodon’s ability to set standards for the fediverse might just be significantly more difficult.
Forgejo is a self-hosted git forge for software (git forges are online platforms for managing and collaboration on repositories, of which GitHub is the most well-known), and up until now it has been a soft fork of Gitea. Forgejo now has become a hard fork, meaning that they are no longer bound to Gitea. Forgejo says that they have now enough people contributing to it’s main mission to be an independent project.
Two weeks ago Mastodon had a major security vulnerability. The details of the vulnerability have now been disclosed. The author who found the vulnerability has an extensive write-up of the proces, timeline and impact of the vulnerability. The impact of unpatched servers is major, as it allows attackers to impersonate posts and accounts on the vulnerable servers. Meanwhile, Mastodon has disclosed another vulnerability, bringing the total to 3 vulnerabilities in two weeks.
The entire fediverse is also dealing with a major spam wave attack. The source seems to be from a Japanese Discord server which seems to have misgivings with Misskey. I could not verify this allegation due to cultural and language barrier, but Misskey.io admins indicated this weekend that they are talking to the police about it, as their server seems to suffer the brunt of it. The attack also showcases the vulnerability of the fediverse to spam attacks. The links
‘Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?‘ by @db0, who also is behind the FediSeer initiative, a project that helps deal fediverse server admins with spam.
A video that explains in detail the history of Misskey fork Sharkey, and reviews the features.
WeDistribute takes a look at upcoming project Bonfire.
Major tech sites cannot resist a good headline, to write about the shutdown of the queer.af mastodon server.
FediTest has a blog post on some of the design considerations for writing a testing suite for the fediverse.
Micro.blog adds private notes.
A call to internationalise the fediverse, meaning in this case that Mastodon will support Unicode usernames.
Terence Eden has written an ActivityPub ‘which can be deployed as a *single* PHP file. No databases, no libraries, no dependencies, no frameworks. Also, no advanced features!’ M
An experiment in using the private notes on your own Mastodon profile as a storage place for settings data.
Self-updating lists of official & verified media accounts on Mastodon.
A blog post by Funkwhale explaining their own on a new API.
Lemmy is working on implementing Private Communities, and is looking for comments on the proposal.
Nootti is a new cross-posting app for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and got a closer look in TechCrunch.
SoraSNS, the iOS app for Forkeys, Mastodon and Bluesky, is adding AI detection to the app. OpenAI and Adobe add a tag to the metadata of images that are generated using their software. SoraSNS checks for these tags, and displays that the image is generated with AI tools.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
#bluesky #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-56/
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2024-02-04 20:05:44

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 54
This week saw a large variety of smaller news items, so a short experiment with a slightly different format. I just came back from FOSDEM, and it was great to talk to so many fediverse people, gives me great energy to keep working on all of it. Next year I hope there will be more of an organised ActivityPub and fediverse presence though, lots of opportunity there.The news
NodeBB has provided update on their work on implementing ActivityPub. As part of their update, they detail their vision on which parts of the forum gets federated, and in which manner. As federated forums are mostly new to the fediverse, this provides some insights in how the developers are thinking which parts of forum software can get federated, and how that can be implemented into a user interface.
PieFed has made some improvements to new account sign-up flow, and as a part of that, different communities are now aggregated into ‘Topics’. Once you sign up, and select a few Topics you are interested in, you automatically follow multiple communities related to the topic.
Over on Lemmy, the conversation on how to provide the best experience for handling multiple communities about similar subjects that live on different servers come up regularly, including in Lemmy latest AMA. Developer Rimu says that one future direction he is thinking about is using the Lemmy Explorer (which indexes all public Lemmy communities) to aggregate communities into Topics.
The Lemmy developers held an AMA this week, and I wrote up an article some of my takeaways from the comments that stood out to me.
IFTAS is working together with GLAAD to help platforms ‘update their policies to add express prohibitions against targeted misgendering and deadnaming’, similar to how platforms like Discord have explicitly banned deadnaming and misgendering trans people. IFTAS explains that “not about accidentally getting someone’s pronouns wrong. Rather, our concern centers on deliberate and targeted acts of hate and harassment rooted in gender identity discrimination”. IFTAS provides a sample Code of Conduct for admins to use, as well as the possibility for admins to sign a pledge that they included rules in their policies against targeted misgendering and deadnaming.
Video creator TechAltar has a new video explaining the fediverse. It frames the fediverse as a new internet, and as a way around the walled gardens from the current Big Tech platforms. Over on video platform Nebula, TechAltar also provided the videos with the full interviews with EMastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Automattic’s (company behind Tumblr and WordPress) Matt Mullenweg, Matej Svancer, who is building a multi-network platform Openvibe, as well as the admins of mastodon server sfba.social.
Some more developers are tinkering with building minimal ActivityPub implementations to serve their needs. Julian Fietkau wrote an ActivityPub server to host a single bot, Daily Rucks. The implementation shows the value of building something beyond just a Mastodon bot, as the home page for the bot shows a beautiful customised landing page for the bot. Fietkau also posted a blog explaining the How and Why of the project.
Terence Eden also build a minimal ActivityPub server, with the sole purpose of posting messages to your followers. It is a part of a longer project to work on building a FourSquare-like service on the fediverse.
Project Tapestry is a new Kickstarter project by The Iconfactory company that just reached their funding milestone. The goal of the project is to release an iOS app that pulls feeds from various sources, such as Mastodon, Bluesky as well as RSS feeds into one single chronological timeline. It will allow people to plug in their own data sources as well, provided the APIs are accessible. Iconfactory says that it will be anywhere between 9 to 12 months to release the app. The idea of aggregating multiple data sources into a single app or feed seems to be popping up in various places recently, such as with Openvibe and Agora.
A quick personal take from this year’s FOSDEM: I can echo Jaana Dogan’s observation that all the speakers at FOSDEM seem to have switched from Twitter handles to using their fediverse handles on their slides. It seems there is more than enough interest to make sure there will be a fediverse devroom next year as well.The Links
Some reverse engineering shows how Threads is working on their fediverse integration.
Eugen Rochko was on the Software Engineering Podcast to talk about Mastodon.
The Firefish project has been deemed dead by the community for a bit now, but now the lead developer has officially stepped down.
A small demo by micro.blog on all their cross-posting options.
‘Betula is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web’. Their latest update added federation, and now people from across the fediverse can follow your bookmarks, similar to Postmarks.
Fediverse Test Suite is a new testing project that just got underway with funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund.
Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.
#fediblog #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-54/
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2024-01-31 16:25:14

Lemmy ask you anything (again)
The Lemmy developers Dessalines and Nutomic hosted their another AMA this week. The conversations ranged from decentralisation, the developer roadmap and funding to platform identity, and I’ll go over some of the responses that stood out to me
Lemmy is applying for a new funding round from NLnet, and with their proposed project they will add 2 extra (paid) developers to the team if it gets approved. Their detailed planned milestones are laid out here. For the current developers, they’ll be focusing on a replacement web UI, as well as their Android app Jerboa, API and performance improvements, as well as transitioning to a donation-funded co-op.
In response to a question about interoperability with other platforms, Nutomic notes the difficulty working with other fediverse developers, especially Mastodon, and a describes a lack of interest of other platforms to become interoperable with Lemmy. These issues with interoperability and a lack of cooperation mainly concern platforms that are of a different nature than Lemmy; newer link aggregators like Sublinks are explicitly working on interoperability with Lemmy.
Dessalines’ comment on the identity of a platform is worth reading in full, where he says:
“At the same time, it was clear that we weren’t making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth’s sake.”
The association of the Lemmy developers with tankies has been criticised within the broader fediverse community before. However, in those conversations this viewpoint by Dessalines is rarely mentioned, in how it helps in keeping “free speech” bigotry away.
The developers are also thinking about how to avoid centralisation around a few larger servers. Part of their approach is with making sure random instances get offered to new people who join Lemmy, and they are actively looking at other ideas to combat centralisation. In another comment, Dessalines links the issue of centralisation with the problems he views with social media, saying:
“The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy’s users who don’t really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.”
Overall, lets hope that more platforms join Lemmy and PeerTube in holding regular AMA’s with their communities.
#fediblog #fediverse #lemmy
https://fediversereport.com/lemmy-ask-you-anything-again/
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2024-01-28 17:18:12

Last Week in Fediverse – episode 53
A grab-bag of updates this week, where I spend some more time looking at Bonfire, the technical aspects of how Threads implemented quote posting, and how that impacts the fediverse, as well as a whole variety of other updates.An update on Bonfire
The upcoming Bonfire project describes itself as a social networking toolkit, that allow communities to create and shape their own digital spaces, and have released some new information about some parts of their upcoming project. Bonfire is a fediverse server project in development, with its own take on the microblogging format, and tools to customise it for your community.
Bonfire Classic has been in development (and available for testing) for a while, and the new information is on the other apps that can be build with Bonfire. The team is working on an Open Science version of Bonfire, as well as a Communities version. For the Open Science version, features like integration with your ORCID (‘Open Researcher and Contributor ID’), and better embedding of scientific papers are a part of it. For the Communities version, the team is collaborating with Radio Free Fedi, and the features centre around public and private groups, and topical discussions.
In another update this week, the Bonfire team also released more information on how their extension system works. The Prosocial Network Design community designed a feature that allowed moderators to add labels to posts, with the goal of adding extra context, and help reduce misinformation. Bonfire then took this design, and packaged it as a separate extension that could easily work together with the main Bonfire codebase. This modular design of Bonfire creates a lot of space for experimentation and new ideas, and it is even better to see it being used to work on safety in online spaces.
The Bonfire team is also working towards a cooperative hosting network, to make the hosting of a Bonfire more accessible to communities. In September 2023 the Bonfire team indicated to be working towards a 1.0 release in the upcoming months.Threads and Quote Posting
Threads is adding quote posting to their implementation of ActivityPub. Interestingly, a Threads engineer confirmed that Threads implemented two versions of quote posting, to account for the multiple ways that quote posting is handled in the fediverse.
For context: Misskey (and its forks, aka ‘Forkeys‘) have implemented quote posting, although the implementation is not according to an official ActivityPub specification, and not really used outside of the ‘Forkeys’. There is a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to standardise the Object Links (which include quote posts), which has wide agreement in the developer community, but again few projects have implemented. Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning on adding their own version of quote posting, with the extended functionality that allows people to set permissions per post on whether they can be quote posted or not.
What is notable about Threads’ implementation of quote posting is that they added both Misskey’s implementation of quote posting, as well as the proposed extension of ActivityPub with the FEP. The Threads engineer described their reasoning as follows:
We implemented both FEP-e232 as well as the _misskey_quote field (which usually gets checked alongside quoteUrl). This was intentional so we can get some immediate product adoption off the ground (with the unofficial key) and also be somewhat future-proof when the FEP gains more traction.
What stands out to me here is that Threads is aware of the develop community’s work on extending the ActivityPub specification, and is open to implementing proposals. How the interaction between the developer community and Meta will develop is something that is certainly worth watching.In other news
Newsmast has made their custom and curated feeds more accessible, and launched them as a separate service, that can be accessed via newsmast.community. There are over 60 custom feeds, that ‘are hand built through a mix of hashtags, follows, filters and mutes’. By placing the custom feeds on a separate (Mastodon) server, they are easily accessible, and a great way for new accounts to populate their timeline with interesting content from the network. Their about page goes into more detail on how they build their own custom feeds.
Ryan Barrett, creator of the Bridgy Fed project, has a detailed blog post about moderation and network bridges, that is worth reading. It is an interesting analysis of the tradeoffs and complexities of the new generation of social networks. Bridges between networks and protocols can create context collapse. At the same time the networks are diverse enough in both people who use them, as well as the types of use cases they support, that context boundaries cannot be easily drawn on protocol or platform lines anymore either.
Sublinks is a new link-aggregator platform for the fediverse that is currently in development and got announced this week. Sublinks was created because creator Jason Grim found it difficult to contribute to Lemmy, and had issues with the roadmap, development speed and quality. For now, Sublinks stands out by using a different technology stack than Lemmy, which makes it easier to attract developer contributions. In the first version of Sublinks, it will still use the front-end of Lemmy, and only later will there be space for new features. The project has found major support within the community, with contributions from admins from the lemmy.world server, as well as the ‘involvement of the creators of two major Lemmy themes, Pangora & Photon‘.
A new study on the Lemmy migration that happened last summer was published this week, titled ‘User Sentiments and Dynamics in the Decentralized Web: Reddit Migration’s Impact on Lemmy’, by Thatiany Andrade Nunes. It is an extensive study, with both a sentiment analysis and survey, that together ‘depicts a predominantly positive sentiment towards Lemmy and criticisms of Reddit’. For those interested in the transition of decentralised social networks the entire paper is worth reading. Lemmy developer Dessalines writes that his own main takeaways from the paper are Lemmy needs to continue focusing on prioritising the needs of third party app developers, as well as keeping transparant communications with the community. Lemmy has focused already on community communications by giving bi-weekly developer updates, and hosted their second AMA this week as well (write-up of that coming next week).
GoToSocial is a fediverse project currently in development, that describes the features of being ‘lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused’ to stand out from comparable projects such as Mastodon or Pleroma. In their latest update they indicate to reach the beta stage of their project in the first quarter of 2024. They also give a short history of the project and how it came into being.
Mastodon is testing out a new version of the composer (only available on mastodon.social for now). It features a visual redesign, and more controversially, it renames the setting of posting as ‘Unlisted’ to ‘Quiet Public’. The feature of setting post as ‘Unlisted’ has always been difficult to explain in what it does, as the impact is different than people regularly expect. Personally I think it is good that more attention is brought to explaining to what specific settings do in Mastodon, but I’m unsure yet if they have stuck the landing here.
Finally, I wrote about why I like Phanpy as my fediverse client, and the value of adding a horizontally scrolling feed into the normal vertically scrolling reverse chronological feed.The links
The Washington Post gives a shout-out to Bookwyrm as an alternative to Goodreads.
‘What is the ‘fediverse,’ and why does Meta want to join it?’, asks the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Castopod Podcasting Index has made following podcasts directly on the fediverse even easier.
Happy birthday ActivityPub!
IFTTT adds support for the mastodon.social server. It is unclear if this limitation is because of technical reasons, or because the concept of decentralisation is simply not well understood by IFTTT.
Forgejo’s monthly update, and it may become a hard fork of Gitea.
A design concept for a specific UX to asks questions on Mastodon, highlight good answers, and mark a question as ‘answered’.
Suggestions on how Lemmy can work on its community separation problems.
An exploration of the idea of rebuilding FourSquare using ActivityPub.
Fediverse Space Vibes.
#activitypub #fediblog #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-53/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20220107-Fediverse-report-bark-of-an-old-douglas-tree-04-e1681301193852.jpg

2024-01-23 16:18:16

An update on Bonfire
The upcoming Bonfire project describes itself as a social networking toolkit, that allow communities to create and shape their own digital spaces, and have released some new information about some parts of their upcoming project. Bonfire is a fediverse server project in development, with its own take on the microblogging format, and tools to customise it for your community.
Bonfire Classic has been in development (and available for testing) for a while, and the new information is on the other apps that can be build with Bonfire. The team is working on an Open Science version of Bonfire, as well as a Communities version. For the Open Science version, features like integration with your ORCID (‘Open Researcher and Contributor ID’), and better embedding of scientific papers are a part of it. For the Communities version, the team is collaborating with Radio Free Fedi, and the features centre around public and private groups, and topical discussions.
The Bonfire team is also working towards a cooperative hosting network, to make the hosting of a Bonfire more accessible to communities. In September 2023 the Bonfire team indicated to be working towards a 1.0 release in the upcoming months.
#bonfire #fediblog #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/an-update-on-bonfire/

2024-01-21 16:36:26

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 52
Welcome to another episode, with quite some news about the fediverse that goes beyond just microblogging; Owncast’s struggles with explaining decentralisation and self-hosting to Apple, and the fediverse is apparently now enough of a buzzword to get metaverse companies interested. How Bluesky works – the network components
The network design of Bluesky is fairly complicated, and different from how ActivityPub and the fediverse works. The design decisions that Bluesky has made has impact on how content moderation hows, as well as on federation and decentralisation. Many people have thoughts and feelings on Bluesky, but detailed information on how the network functions is hard to come by. In this new short series I explain how it works, take a look at the link below.
How Bluesky works – the network components
Owncast releases app for iOS and tvOS
Gabe Kangas, creator of the fediverse-connected streaming software Owncast, has announced the release of an iOS and tvOS app for Owncast. This comes some months after Kangas said that the development of the app had been halted due to Apple’s App Store policies. Getting the app approved has been a challenge, and Kangas details the wide variety of ‘reasons’ that Apple has given to reject the app. It took help of a legal firm and persistence from Kangas to get the app in the App Store.
The fact that Owncast did manage to publish an app to the App Store is good news for PeerTube, who are in a process of their own to create their own mobile apps for PeerTube. In PeerTube’s roadmap Framasoft said that publishing a PeerTube app might be tricky, citing Owncast’s experiences.
In the blog Kangas also talks about the identity of the platform, coming right out of the gate by reiterating that Owncast is simply server software to run ‘independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams’. Building social features such as chat, helping with discovery with the Owncast Directory and now building an app, all help with the awareness of the project. But in the end, Kangas sees Owncast as ‘server software. That’s it’.Open metaverse platform Viverse announces fediverse support
Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.
What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.
My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.Dutch State Secretary urges Threads to quickly implement federation
Nu.nl is one the largest news sites of The Netherlands, and they published an article on the fediverse. As part of the article, they interviewed Dutch State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen, who also spearheads the Mastodon server for the Dutch government. In it, she urges Threads to quickly implement ActivityPub so that Mastodon and Threads can fully interoperate. She also states that the comments she gets on posts on Mastodon are differ strongly in a positive way from the comments she gets on X.Fediverse client Agora launches with For You algorithm and bridges
Agora is a new fediverse client that has some interesting opiniated ideas for what a fediverse client can do. The project is a fork of Phanpy, and adds a ‘For You’ algorithm, integration with bridges to Bluesky, Nostr and X, as well as connections to Lemmy. The For You feed, which is based on the open-source algorithm fedialgo. Fedialgo allows anyone to run their own algorithm and fine tune it on the client side. Another content integration that Agora does, is that if you follow a hashtag, it’ll automatically populate your feed with posts made in the corresponding Lemmy community as well. It also supports natively supports bridges to Bluesky and Nostr, but personally I had trouble to actually get these to properly run.The links
Two articles explaining the fediverse; Stephan Bohacek with an article about the fediverse for government agencies, and Ben Werdmuller with an article about the fediverse for media organisations.
The Decentered Podcast by WeDistribute interviewed Hoshida, who makes the Sora app. Sora is an iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky and most Misskey forks, with interesting takes on algorithmic feeds.
Where is all of the fediverse?
Mastodon Near Me, a way to find Mastodon servers by country, region, and language.
One year of StreetPass, the browser extension that lets you find people on the fediverse when you visit their website.
The owners .world fediverse servers (such as Mastodon.world and Lemmy.world) will form a non-profit foundation together with @stux, who owns and operates the mstdn.social servers.
A detailed explanation by Castopod for their new Castopod podcasting index.
A paper called ‘Creating a city for all of us: a role for the Fediverse in archiving civic urban memory‘ was published this week.
Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.
#fediblog #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-52/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/20230429-Fediverse-report-Snapshot-from-Brussels-02.jpg

2024-01-19 15:48:18

Open metaverse platform Viverse announces fediverse support
Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.
What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.
My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.
#activitypub #fediblog #fediverse #metaverse
https://fediversereport.com/open-metaverse-platform-viverse-announces-fediverse-support/

2024-01-19 15:46:09

Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.
What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.
My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.
#activitypub #fediblog #fediverse #metaverse
https://fediversereport.com/1642-2/

2024-01-18 16:04:39

How Bluesky works – the network components
Welcome to a new short series on Bluesky and how the network works. Bluesky recently released more information on their plans for third party moderation services. While writing about their plans, I realised that to properly explain how it works, I first needed to explain how the network is designed to function.
Most people understand the fediverse in terms of separate instances. Every instance can be a social network in itself, and by connecting with other instances form a larger network, the fediverse. This makes it easier to understand where content moderation happens: every instances has their own content moderation, own moderators and their own rules.
The Bluesky network and the AT Protocol function differently. There are different types of servers; servers for data storage, servers for data aggregation, etc. As such, content moderation happens in different places on the network. To properly explain how it works, the benefits and tradeoffs, as well as the unknowns, I am publishing a short series on Bluesky, how the network functions, and how and where content moderation happens.
In this first episode: the parts that make up the network and allow it to work.The basic components
The Bluesky network consists of the following parts:
A Personal Data Server (PDS) that hosts all account data. It contains information about your accounts, and is where all your personal data is stored.
A Relay looks for all the PDS’s in the network, takes in all their data, and merges it together to outputs one big stream that is used by other parts of the network. The Relay puts out the data in a machine-readable format, which is often called a firehose.
AppView takes the data from the Relay, and processes it so that it is more meaningful for apps. Examples of the processing that AppView does: counting the amount of likes that a post gets, collecting all replies to a post and organising them into a thread. It also generates your “following” feed, by creating a reverse-chronologically ordered feed of posts made by the accounts that you follow.
An app, whether that is the official Bluesky mobile app or a third party website like deck.blue. The app takes the data from AppView and presents it in a nice format for people read on their preferred device.
With these four components we can imagine a basic social network:
If you open the official Bluesky app on your phone and look at the “following feed”, the data flows as follows:
All PDS’s => Relay => AppView => App.
If you then create a post and hit send, data goes from your app directly back to the PDS where your account is hosted.Custom feeds and moderation
There are four more components to the Bluesky network: feed generators, labellers, the moderation service, and the Identity Directory.
A feed generator creates the custom feeds, using some form of algorithm. These custom feeds can be anything from a feed with the posts with the most likes in the last 24 hours, a feed of posts that contain specific terms, or anything else.
A feed generator takes data from a Relay, performs the calculations to take the raw data into a custom feed, and sends it to the AppView. The AppView then performs some final steps and sends it to your app so you can see the custom feed.
Labellers. Labelling services perform moderation activities by applying labels to a post. People can determine how they want to handle labelled content. An example of a label can be ‘Sexually Suggestive’, and people can determine if they want their app to either show, hide or warn about posts that contain the label.
A Labelling service takes data from the AppView, processes it, and then sends it back to the AppView
The moderation system, called Ozone, that allows moderators to take moderation action, such as taking down posts or accounts. This tool has the least amount of information on it, and it is not visible Federation Architecture documentation. The update this week by the Bluesky organisation shows that the system is called Ozone, and that they are in the process of making it open-source and available for others to use.
The tool at least allows moderators to alter data in the PDS, as that is where account data lives.
Every account on the Bluesky network has a unique identifier, called a DID. A DID is a unique string of random numbers and letters, and cannot change. Every account also has a handle, which is your username. New accounts start with youraccountname.bsky.social as a handle. The network also allows you to change your handle to a domain name that you own, which allows for easy verification. The information about which DID corresponds to which handle is stored in the DID PLC Directory.
Now we have all the components that together make up the Bluesky network. In the next part, I’ll take a look at decentralisation and federation, explaining for every part how it will play a role in decentralisation and federation.
Thanks to Kuba Suder for feedback on a first draft.
#atproto #bluesky #fediblog
https://fediversereport.com/how-bluesky-works-the-network-components/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/JAH_20230831_2561_schiermonnikoog_58.jpg

2024-01-16 15:59:08

Owncast releases app for iOS and tvOS
Gabe Kangas, creator of the fediverse-connected streaming software Owncast, has announced the release of an iOS and tvOS app for Owncast. This comes some months after Kangas said that the development of the app had been halted due to Apple’s App Store policies. Getting the app approved has been a challenge, and Kangas details the wide variety of ‘reasons’ that Apple has given to reject the app. It took help of a legal firm and persistence from Kangas to get the app in the App Store.
The fact that Owncast did manage to publish an app to the App Store is good news for PeerTube, who are in a process of their own to create their own mobile apps for PeerTube. In PeerTube’s roadmap Framasoft said that publishing a PeerTube app might be tricky, citing Owncast’s experiences.
In the blog Kangas also talks about the identity of the platform, coming right out of the gate by reiterating that Owncast is simply server software to run ‘independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams’. Building social features such as chat, helping with discovery with the Owncast Directory and now building an app, all help with the awareness of the project. But in the end, Kangas sees Owncast as ‘server software. That’s it’.
#fediblog #owncast
https://fediversereport.com/owncast-releases-app-for-ios-and-tvos/

2024-01-14 13:37:17

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 51
The contours of the fediverse as the open social web, in a vision that goes beyond decentralised microblogging, are starting to become more visible, with more bridges, connections and other types of media getting pulled into the fediverse. It also raises the question of expectations and boundaries, with different visions of the fediverse arising: that of a highly interconnected space, or with many more insular communities and groups that are loosely connected.WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:
“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”
This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.
Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.Podcasting news
Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.
In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.Bluesky has 3 million accounts
Some news from Bluesky: yesterday the network reached the milestone of 3 million accounts. This milestone comes 2 months after hitting the 2 million mark. While there are no official numbers for Monthly Active Users (MAU), Kuba Suber estimates around 500k MAU, based on the daily and weekly active users. For comparision, Mastodon has between 1 million and 1.5 million MAU, depending on the source.
Bluesky’s growth is far from over, as Bluesky said that that ‘invite codes are going away soon’. This is different from opening up the network for federation, which is also planned for early 2024.
Bluesky is explicitly positioning itself as a place that is welcoming and suitable for news organisations. Bluesky team member Emily published an explainer how newsrooms can use Bluesky for the upcoming election season. Not everyone is convinced the network is ready yet though, as ændra explains some features that the network needs to be fit for purpose.In other news
Another write-up of the meeting that Meta held last December to discuss the fediverse, by Tom Coates. It contains some more details about the planned roadmap, and how the integration is planned to happen in separate steps. What strikes me is that both this report, and the notes by Johannes Ernst, mention that they feel they have not gotten a clear answer to the most important question: ‘Why is Meta doing this?’. Tom Coates writes: “I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find [Meta’s explanation] enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it”. And Johannes Ernst: “Personally I believe this question needs a better answer than has been given publicly so far”.
An OpenAccess article in Cell Press for researchers that are considering to switch their research from X to Mastodon, by Robert W. Gehl and Roel Roscam Abbing. It describes key differences between the fediverse and X, and how Mastodon is quite different from X and Twitter from the perspective of researchers. It focuses on the expectations of privacy that people in the fediverse have, and one of the main recommendations for researchers is to shift from studying individuals to studying instances.
ActivityPods, the project to combine ActivityPub with the Solid protocol to create data ‘pods’, has been updated to version 1.5. With the new version it becomes easier to invite new people to your network, as well as better organisation of your contacts. ActivityPods tries to solve the problem that currently in the fediverse, you need to have a separate account for every fediverse service. With ActivityPods, applications can connect to your own Pod, so that your data and connections all live in one place.
The new link aggregator PieFed ‘emphasise trust, safety and happiness‘, and as part of that they have added extra notifications for commenting on posts made on servers with higher standards of moderation, such as Beehaw.org.
Fediseer, the project that provides a public space to crowd-source approval and disapproval of instances, has added a ‘rebuttals’ feature. Creator db0 noticed that instances were issuing ‘counter-censures’ (a censure is a negative judgement from one instance to another for any reason) just to reply to the original censure. Rebuttals provide an outlet for instances to explain their perspective or reasoning.
Bridgy Fed, the bridging project to connect the indieweb, fediverse (and Bluesky and Nostr in the near future) has expanded support for non-indie websites as well. Similar to RSS-Parrot, you can now follow websites and their RSS-feeds directly in your fediverse account. The links
Pixelfed is building their spam filtering feature into a dedicated service, and working on adding parental controls.
PeerTube is building a mobile app, and is looking for people to help better understand their needs.
The research project by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi has kicked off as The Federalist Papers.
Designing a fediverse application with Bovine.
Updating your Mastodon status from a Kindle.
Mastodon client Oliphaunt for MacOS launches in beta.
radio free fedi is at a crossroads.
Short update by Write.as, saying they are working on post imports from WordPress and Substack.
The new Firefish fork Catodon moves towards the other Firefish fork, Iceshrimp. It’ll stay a separate project however.
A deeper look at one of the stand-out features of Misskey and it’s forks: Pages.
If you want to receive this weekly update directly in your inbox, subscribe below!
You can also follow this blog directly on the fediverse:
#fediblog #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-51/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230718-Fediverse-report-The-polish-series-01.jpg

2024-01-10 15:16:26

WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:
“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”
This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.
Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.
#activitypub #fediverse #wordpress
https://fediversereport.com/wordpress-activitypub-plugin-updates-to-v2-0/

2024-01-07 16:29:02

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 50
Welcome to the second year of Fediverse Report! This edition has: everyone is excited about RSS, a new link-aggregator platform, PieFed, launches in beta, major issues with blocking security in the fediverse, and more!Everyone loves RSS
RSS Parrot is a new tool that allows you to turn your fediverse feed into a RSS feed. What was intended to be an ‘under-the-rader late night launch’ turned about to be massively popular hit in the fediverse. The tool is simple: mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the address you want to follow, and the bot replies with an account that you can follow. Every website is one account, and it posts a link every time the website has a new post.
The responses show the demand for RSS feeds that easily integrate into social networking feeds. RSS Parrot is a great workaround for websites that have not set up their own fediverse presence yet. But for people who do own websites and prefer to have direct control over the relationship with their audience, RSS Parrot’s popularity is a great reminder to set up your own fediverse presence.An uncertain future for Firefish
The Firefish project has been on a decline for a while now, with the flagship server firefish.social experiencing severe technical problems over the last months. Another Firefish server, firefish.tech is now also shutting down, partially due to the problems with Firefish. Panos Damelos, who was the community manager for the Firefish project, explains his perspective on how the project declined here, attributing it to severe technical problems, combined with a lack of attention and communication of the lead developer Kainoa.
Together with Firefish developer Namekuji, Panos Damelos have started the Catodon project, a fork of Firefish. In the announcement blog post Catodon dives deeper into what makes the project stand out, noting the community driven aspect of the project. Catodon joins IceShrimp and Sharkey as recent Misskey fork projects that are all gaining popularity as small-scale fediverse servers.A new link aggregator platform with PieFed
The link-aggregator part of the fediverse has grown, with the launch of PieFed’s beta test. PieFed joins platforms like Lemmy and Kbin who all have the ability to share links, and comment and vote on them.
PieFed focuses on making the platform easy to manage, maintain and develop for, and uses Python. Developer Rimu is also emphasising Trust and Safety, and healthy community interactions. One way PieFed does this is by adding the ability for authors to add a ‘I’ve changed my mind’ setting. It draws inspiration from Nick Punt’s work on de-escalation on social media. Another feature is adding a warning on posts made by accounts with low reputation, meaning that their posts get downvoted a lot.
PieFed has launched as a beta test, and comes with the warning that there will be ‘probably many bugs’. You can try PieFed for yourself at piefed.social.Authorized Fetch circumvented
Alex Gleason announced that Authorized Fetch has been circumvented. Authorized Fetch (in-depth explanation here) makes sure that a blocked server is fully blocked, and cannot access posts. Alex Gleason, behind fediverse platform Soapbox and currently working on the bridge Mostr (which connects the fediverse with Nostr), found out that Threads already blocked a few servers, such as Spinster, Poast, and the Mostr bridge, some of which he is involved with.
The Nostr community actively promotes the idea of adverse interoperability. In that spirit Alex Gleason reimplemented a method first used in Pleroma that circumvents Authorized Fetch. The blocked servers can now connect to Threads again. This is accomplished by spoofing the domain name from which the request came from.
There is a lot more to be said about this, and warrants an extensive follow up. I fully agree with WeDistribute’s concluding remarks: “Look, Mastodon has been providing a half-measure to its users for years. Now it’s the time to make things right: going into 2024, I think it’s going to absolutely be a requirement to develop more robust forms of privacy options and access controls to empower users”. The links
This week’s award for most esoteric fediverse implementation goes to DiveDB, the online scuba diving blog site, which has recently added ActivityPub support. This allows you to follow scuba divers and their dives directly from fediverse feeds.
Micro.blog creator Manton Reece is publishing a book Indie Microblogging. The entire book is available as a text site as well, on book.micro.blog.
The blog Nexus of Privacy has a five-part series about ‘Strategies for the free fediverses’.
YouTuber MKBHD talks about Threads and the fediverse on his podcast Waveform.
More RSS: Goblin is a fediverse platform currently in development that is strongly inspired by Tumblr. They showed the ability to follow Tumblr blogs in Goblin via RSS this week.
Bookwyrm has been updated with full account migration.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe below to receive the update via email, or follow @npub142x…mxlh in your favourite fediverse app.
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-50/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20230125-06.jpg

2024-01-07 12:49:37

RSS feeds in the fediverse a huge hit
RSS Parrot is a new tool that allows you to turn your fediverse feed into a RSS feed. What was intended to be an ‘under-the-rader late night launch’ turned about to be massively popular hit in the fediverse. The tool is simple: mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the address you want to follow, and the bot replies with an account that you can follow. Every website is one account, and it posts a link every time the website has a new post.
The responses show the demand for RSS feeds that easily integrate into social networking feeds. RSS Parrot is a great workaround for websites that have not set up their own fediverse presence yet. But for people who do own websites and prefer to have direct control over the relationship with their audience, RSS Parrot’s popularity is a great reminder to set up your own fediverse presence.
https://fediversereport.com/rss-feeds-in-the-fediverse-a-huge-hit/

2024-01-05 14:30:53

Fediverse link-aggregator PieFed launches in beta test
The link-aggregator part of the fediverse has grown, with the launch of PieFed’s beta test. PieFed joins platforms like Lemmy and Kbin who all have the ability to share links, and comment and vote on them.
PieFed focuses on making the platform easy to manage, maintain and develop for, and uses Python. Developer Rimu is also emphasising Trust and Safety, and healthy community interactions. One way PieFed does this is by adding the ability for authors to add a ‘I’ve changed my mind’ setting. It draws inspiration from Nick Punt’s work on de-escalation on social media. Another feature is adding a warning on posts made by accounts with low reputation, meaning that their posts get downvoted a lot.
PieFed has launched as a beta test, and comes with the warning that there will be ‘probably many bugs’. You can try PieFed for yourself at piefed.social.
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-link-aggregator-piefed-launches-in-beta-test/

2024-01-04 15:18:08

An uncertain future for Firefish
The Firefish project has been on a decline for a while now, with the flagship server firefish.social experiencing severe technical problems over the last months. Another Firefish server, firefish.tech is now also shutting down, partially due to the problems with Firefish. Panos Damelos, who was the community manager for the Firefish project, explains his perspective on how the project declined here, attributing it to severe technical problems, combined with a lack of attention and communication of the lead developer Kainoa.
Together with Firefish developer Namekuji, Panos Damelos have started the Catodon project, a fork of Firefish. In the announcement blog post Catodon dives deeper into what makes the project stand out, noting the community driven aspect of the project. Catodon joins IceShrimp and Sharkey as recent Misskey fork projects that are all gaining popularity as small-scale fediverse servers.
#catodon #firefish
https://fediversereport.com/an-uncertain-future-for-firefish/

2023-12-23 15:33:30

Peer into the future: PeerTube’s plans for 2024
Framasoft has released their plans for PeerTube for 2024, and I hosted the livestreamed AMA to learn more. Framasoft talks about apps, being an alternative, new features, and so much more. Let’s dive right in.Being an alternative
Framasoft explains that PeerTube is an alternative to YouTube and Twitch, and not a rival. The size of the Big Tech platforms cannot be seen independently from the values that are embedded into the software. To be a rival that can compete in size with YouTube and Twitch would mean abandoning the values of PeerTube. In the blog post they describe how their values such as transparency and autonomy directly influence the features and design of PeerTube.Sepia against the Videoraptor – illustration David Revoy – Licence : CC-By 4.0
The massive size difference between the Big Tech platforms and Framasoft is also visible in the size of the teams that work on the products. Up until now, most of the work on PeerTube is done by one paid developer. For the next year, Framasoft is proud to have a second person join the team. It is clear that this means a lot to the team, as they try to balance all PeerTube’s needs with the culture of a small organisation.
During the AMA, Pouhiou talks about the size and growth of PeerTube, and mentions that a sudden burst of growth and attention can be a great risk as well, especially for a platform where not all moderation features are completed. The consistent growth, without moments of intense virality, is a positive for Pouhiou.
New features that got released for PeerTube in the latest update, such as password protection, also benefit the the small groups and creators that Framasoft sees as their audience. During the AMA, Pouhiou said that the team did not realise how impactful the password protection feature can be to creators, until creators told them how important the feature was. This is an indication that PeerTube still has work to do in really growing into the role of being their own product that has their own specific audience.Sepia – illustration David Revoy – Licence : CC-By 4.0Plans for 2024
PeerTube will build a Mobile App, as mobile has become the main way of watching videos. While there are unofficial apps, having an official app can be helpful for adoption of the platform. The plan is to publish the app for both iOS and Android, with AndroidTV as an extended goal. As Owncast however has found out recently, Apple can be restrictive on publishing apps on iOS. How this works out for PeerTube remains to be seen.
Content moderation is getting another look in 2024. PeerTube will work on a comment moderation system for both instance admins, and video uploaders. Another aspect is the ability for instance admins to scan all video metadata for specific keywords, that present a list that the admins can than decide on whether and how to take action on. Framasoft will also work with designers to rethink the NSFW/SFW labels into more specific tags for sensitive content.
Framasoft is also putting a big focus on the user experience. As the software has grown and developed over the years, features are not always in logical places anymore. They’ll work with designers to rethink the interface from the ground up.
Framasoft is a non-profit organisation funded by donations. You can find out more about their yearly donation drive, and how to support PeerTube, here.
#peertube
https://fediversereport.com/peer-into-the-future-peertubes-plans-for-2024/
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https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/PeerTube.png

2023-12-06 16:16:27

Bridging Nostr and the fediverse
Mostr, the bridge that connects Nostr to the fediverse, has gotten some upgrades recently. With the latest update, the homepage of the bridge, Mostr.pub, allows people to enter a fediverse handle, and open the link in their Nostr client of choice. Here is the Nostr page for my Fediverse Report account as a demonstration. Finding people on the fediverse and connect to them from Nostr has become significantly easier with this update.
For some context to this news, Nostr is another social network based on an open-source protocol. I explain a bit more how it works here. In the context of Mostr, two things are important to know: one of the core values of the network is anti-censorship, and there is no intermediary for creating an account.
In a talk (available on PeerTube here) at the Nostr conference Nostrasia, Mostr.pub creator Alex Gleason about his history with Nostr and the fediverse. He explains how he worked on fediverse software Soapbox, and then got hired as the head of engineering for Trump’s Truth Social, and now has quit that job to work fulltime on Nostr.
The Mostr bridge has been available for a bit, which allows Gleason to present some interesting statistics about it’s usage: 70% of the usage is from people on Nostr following people on the fediverse, with over 10k unique users across the bridge.
One part of Gleason’s presentation that stands out is his claim that Nostr is now part of the fediverse. I wrote about the multiple definitions of the term fediverse here, talking about how fediverse can be defined by protocol, by culture, or by interoperability. Although people can argue about which definition is correct, and whether or not Nostr should be included, Gleason’s remarks do indicate that Mostr makes the boundaries of what the fediverse is fuzzier, and harder to define.
Gleason also talks about content moderation and blocking, saying: “One thing that has been holding the ActivityPub protocol back from achieving even more, is the blocking culture”. But if Mostr wants to see itself as just another server among many in the fediverse, content moderation happens to it in the same way that it happens to other servers: by simply blocking the server you do not feel like connecting with. Any justification for it is only necessary between the admin and their users, and not anyone beyond that.
#fediverse #nostr
https://fediversereport.com/bridging-nostr-and-the-fediverse/

2023-11-28 15:06:57

NLNet has announced 55 new projects that are awarded a NGI Zero grant. NGI Zero is the Next Generation Internet program from the European Commision, that funds projects that work on what they call the next generation internet. For more info in NLnet and NGI Zero, check out this interview I did with NLnet this summer. The latest round of grants has quite a few projects that connect to the fediverse in some way. An overview:
NodeBB is a popular forum software platform. They got funding to add ActivityPub integration to NodeBB, allowing interoperability with both other NodeBB forums as well as the fediverse at large. NodeBB says that the “hardest part of starting a community is gaining a critical mass of adoption in order to sustain interest and content”, and integrating with the fediverse is seen as a way to overcome their biggest hurdle.
The loosely connected group of developers at fedidevs.org got a grant to build an automated test framework and test cases. It is currently hard for fediverse developers to build fediverse software that properly federates with the rest dof the network, as a consistent test suite for ActivityPub is lacking. This new test framework hopes to make it easier for developers to start building for the fediverse.
Bonfire is a federated social network that’s currently in development, with most of the work now on getting the platform ready for release. Their grant will go towards improving the performance, as well releasing their version of the ActivityPub library they are using as open-source.
GoToSocial is a lightweight, customisable, and safety-focused entryway into the fediverse, and is currently in Alpha development. With this grant, the team will add two factor authentication, and improve interoperability and scalability.
Mobilizon is a federated event planning tool, originally developed by Framasoft. Framasoft recently announced that they have completed their vision of Mobilizon. The project is not over however, as another group got funding to further improve the UX of Mobilizon.
PeerTube got funding for further improving the adoption, accessability and popularity of the platform, as well as to develop a mobile app. Framasoft has quite a few announcements in the pipeline, I’ll talk more about Framasoft, PeerTube and Mobilizon in the near future with more information.
Commune is social networking build on Matrix instead of ActivityPub, with a focus on creating communities. The project has interesting ideas about how to build social spaces, and is looking to add fediverse integration as well.
Overall there are a lot of cool and interesting projects that NLnet has funded, with a mix of supporting and scaling existing projects, as well as funding new ideas. For other projects that are interested, you can find more information about their grant process here. The deadline for the next round is December 1st 2023.
https://fediversereport.com/a-fediverse-look-at-nlnets-latest-grant-round/
#fediverse
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