Laurens Hof

I write Connected Places, a news site to help you understand the new social web.

This is my personal account, where I share and comment on anything I find interesting.

I care about an ethical internet.

He/they. From the Netherlands 🇳🇱.

Connected Places: connectedplaces.online
Personal website: https://laurenshof.online
Bluesky: @laurenshof.online
Matrix: @wisdomchicken:matrix.org

Public Key

npub17m8z9gfl0t3x69ux50mfawyrpt4w5rkxsfaz9ckgvhp8y75t429q8drsw8

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0dn3z5ylh4cndz7r28a57hzps46h2pmrgy73zutyxtsnj02964zspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dspj4ju6

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub17m8z9gfl0t3x69ux50mfawyrpt4w5rkxsfaz9ckgvhp8y75t429q8drsw8

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Last Notes

2026-04-06 15:34:25 UTC

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the core problem is that the software he wrote is premised on the idea of puppylovers and puppykillers both being able to join the network, and giving people tools so that they dont have to see the puppykillers, even though they are active on the network

2026-03-19 20:14:57 UTC

the problem with writing about 'the purpose of a system is what it does' is that it makes you realise that the purpose of open protocols is to have protocol wars, people fucking love to argue about their protocol as a teamsport

2026-03-10 21:58:18 UTC

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i think it will be good for the collective safety model in this space because while vibe coding brings it to the foreground that you cannot assume on remote software being safe, that assumption was never valid to begin with
theres some pretty high profile fediverse software with some pretty serious safety issues, and thats all handcoded not vibecoded

2026-03-09 12:02:08 UTC

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im pretty sure this isnt a funny coincidence but actually a structural factor on how epistemology functions and an indicator of how you can know that things are indeed really bad now

2026-03-09 11:59:43 UTC

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its so funny that the wider public is always looking for the 'were doomed' stories on any news thats slightly bad, and when things are indeed apocalyptically bad everyone's like 'eh whatever, itll blow over'

2026-03-09 11:54:22 UTC

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like have we lost our connection with physical reality that much that we cannot even process anymore what a single-day 30% rise in gas prices means?

2026-03-09 11:53:36 UTC

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fucking losing my mind

2026-03-09 11:53:01 UTC

absolutely wild that the news that dutch gas prices rose by 30% in a single day did not even manage to crack the top 5 most read stories
like, how? how did we fuck up our information ecosystem this badly?
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/199/074/799/154/825/original/8b7f367951bafa01.png
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/199/074/799/700/015/original/ce9ef9cf643e7789.png

2026-03-04 17:49:35 UTC

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ai usage has been normalised in most of the atproto dev ecosystem for a while now. just as some recent other examples,
tangled's seed round also explicitly mentions ai agents for coding as a use case (https://blog.tangled.org/seed) , and semble also targets ai agents as a use case (https://blog.cosmik.network/updates-february-2026)

2026-02-27 16:31:00 UTC

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there isnt any. its bascially the same question of why phanpy doesnt have a button to view a post in ivory.
difference is that phanpy does have a button to view the post on the home instance. but there is no home instance on atproto in that same sense. like it would mean opening the raw record on your pds

2026-02-27 16:22:10 UTC

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easiest way is to just replace witchsky with bsky in the url, the data structure is all exactly the same so this trick tends to work mostly

2026-02-27 16:08:40 UTC

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im waiting for the truly cursed day when someone decides to stuff a lexicon into activitypubs @context field

2026-02-27 16:05:01 UTC

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the quote post of the original question also give some good insight
https://witchsky.app/profile/did:plc:rmct3veqrvijr6xwugpucbqw/post/3mfqfc36r3k22/quotes
like yeah part of it are the cultural issues, but there are some pretty clear dev-ux points as well why people build on atproto
json-ld, and more specifically, the implicit ideal of data being open ended vs lexicon's being structured is a major part to it imo

2026-02-20 14:58:35 UTC

sure this is all very bad for activitypub but this is truly amazing content
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/103/545/728/599/692/original/2464874e0edb7547.png

2026-02-18 09:41:08 UTC

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i love protocol wars

2026-02-18 09:39:14 UTC

jack dorsey discourse hitting the timeline

2026-02-17 16:12:19 UTC

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on an abstracted level is ap well suited for building networked communities while atproto is great at global distribution. in that context its painful that the atproto network has run a lap around ap when it comes to dev ecosystem network

2026-02-17 16:11:02 UTC

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i think one factor the ap ecosystem could do a lot better at is finding nodes for ap devs to aggregate around. part of atproto ecosystem dev speed is technical, but other important part is how atproto has a much more legible dev ecosystem that constantly interacts with each other. ap dev ecosystem is much more fragmented, with very little interaction between the devs

2026-02-10 22:13:40 UTC

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one scream please

2026-02-10 22:13:24 UTC

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guess ill have something to write about again for this week's fediverse report, because, well, lol

2026-02-10 22:08:52 UTC

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did you get negative feedback on this except for that single person, who's a known bad actor?

2026-02-10 22:07:36 UTC

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this is the context btw
https://toot.fedilab.app/@apps/116048586595247326
#note135y…0j0z

2026-02-10 22:02:57 UTC

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basically two options now: ignore the issue that for some instances 'indexable' is enabled by default so people might not have consented proactively, or we need a new separate 'indexable_v2' flag

2026-02-10 22:01:44 UTC

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like, if you care about consent and cannot know for certain if the button 'i consent to being indexed' actually means that someone deliberate gave their consent to being indexed, then it means something has gone very wrong in some pretty fundamental ways

2026-02-10 21:59:54 UTC

RE: https://toot.fedilab.app/@apps/116048181884367592
the meta-problem, that a well-meaning actor does not feel comfortable in the knowledge the 'indexable' flag can actually be treated the way it says on the label actually a massive problem for fedi
#note1m3j…gahy

2026-02-04 12:14:52 UTC

@npub1akm…wns5 is one of the coolest activitypub projects, and shows that the network has an incredible amount of growth potential still by exploring new primitives
https://holos.social/how-it-works

2026-01-14 13:08:10 UTC

mastodon has dropped the ball so hard on supporting local-only posting that atproto is inventing this concept now from first principles
https://chipnick.com/a-model-for-addressing-privacy-on-atproto/

2026-01-13 19:42:23 UTC

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yeahh very instructive conversation in the quotes of what user expectations are

2026-01-08 15:25:34 UTC

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to also give a serious answer: i think it is a much bigger problem that it is very unclear to people what the advantage of joining mas.to or mastodon.world over mastodon.social is
way to fix the size discrepancy between m.s. and the rest is to make the rest more attractive and distinct imo, and focusing on the promotion of m.s. feels like it detracts from deeper problems

2026-01-08 15:20:27 UTC

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now youre just reinventing bluesky

2026-01-08 15:16:40 UTC

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i dont think having m.s. as the default matters at all tbh

2026-01-08 15:15:36 UTC

mastodon should keep mastodon.social as the default on joinmastodon.org and their apps, as it is an amazing strategy to maximise engagement on the fediverse

2025-12-18 18:06:15 UTC

JGAO is such a crazy good channel about current chinese culture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC1QYAe1SK4

2025-12-17 13:36:07 UTC

lmao, Meta is considering a change to charge for sharing links on Facebook. Under the change, page and professional mode profiles can only share 2 links per month, and you can share more links if you pay for Meta Verified
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-considering-charging-business-pages-to-post-links/808099/
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/115/735/171/152/685/645/original/9002f014c238e57a.png

2025-12-15 14:35:47 UTC

slop

2025-12-04 16:22:05 UTC

I was interviewed about how media can use new social platforms
Happy that they explicitly mention why I do this work: sure, big tech bad, but the main point is that social media are collective sense making tools, and thats what makes them so extraordinarily valuable
https://www.svdj.nl/nieuws/stapje-voor-stapje-de-controle-terugpakken-hoe-media-hun-publiek-kunnen-heroveren-op-big-tech/

2025-11-07 09:03:19 UTC

is there an opensignup bonfire server thats updated to 1.0? would like to check it out but dont see any server for it

2025-10-30 11:08:31 UTC

turns out that federating forums by ingesting microblogs with hashtags is an absolutely disastrous idea
even worse, while forum<>forum federation might work, as soon as one forum ingests microblogs it ruins the ecosystem for the other forums who are connected to it

2025-09-08 16:09:31 UTC

that the main way people use groups for microblogging is suddenly defunct because one person forgot to renew their domain might be a good indication that decentralisation and network resilience includes more than counting the number of servers

2025-08-26 11:06:26 UTC

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"I was able to join Pokemon through blorp" is a 10/10 sentence

2025-08-23 09:43:47 UTC

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with respect, you are a CEO that operates a subsidiary organisation in the US, caring about laws in the country your organisation operates in seems like a pretty good idea to me

2025-08-16 14:52:38 UTC

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hey cory, question for clarification: when you say that your sysadmin is going to be running Bluesky servers, what part(s?) of the atproto infrastructure are you talking about? I have a sense that this impacts whether or not you can avoid bsky's ToS

2025-08-08 11:47:53 UTC

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honestly the whole presentation was super weird, first year grad students have better stage presence than the gazillion randos openai called on stage

2025-08-08 08:49:35 UTC

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openai made agi for chart crimes

2025-08-07 20:26:55 UTC

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I love openai man, can’t make this shit up

2025-08-07 20:26:24 UTC

GPT 5 everybody! Screenshots from the livestream
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/114/989/359/582/271/056/original/7dccc3597f7b2bfd.jpeg
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/114/989/359/576/128/853/original/329730ef2ad4e505.jpeg

2025-06-30 19:10:27 UTC

i dont even recall people on fedi talking about this as if this would ever even happen lol
https://www.theverge.com/news/695124/tumblr-wordpress-automattic-fediverse-integration-on-hold-decoder

2025-06-24 12:32:55 UTC

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ok fine on a constructive note: the policy people keep falling into the trap of thinking that interoperability is a tech and policy issue. but thats a sideshow to the actual challenges of implementing interoperability, which is cultural. if you dont have a fedi account you sure as hell dont know the cultural challenges when it comes to interoperability

2025-06-24 11:58:33 UTC

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why are people who dont even have a fediverse account talking about interoperability on the fediverse? literally the only thing they do is whitewash meta. fuck this

2025-06-24 11:57:50 UTC

listening in on #igf2025 on the session Privacy Preserving Interoperability and the Fediverse and its absolutely maddening. the speakers are literally hallucinating worse than an LLM on what the interoperability for threads actually looks like
https://igf2025.sched.com/event/246Ho/ws-

2025-06-19 12:50:57 UTC

@npub1et6…crr7 lol just checked your peertube video, and im immediately connected to 21 peers for it🥹

2025-06-18 15:48:20 UTC

these are the top posts I see on Threads' new fediverse feeds
10/10 no notes
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/114/705/150/671/888/928/original/44845cc9f70a17df.png

2025-06-06 09:24:01 UTC

https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/114/635/691/711/197/498/original/284abc88abc8a9fd.png

2025-05-07 15:07:44 UTC

You can catch me live on stream on the @npub16k9…2nry in a few hours!
https://social.firesidefedi.live/@firesidefedi/statuses/01JTJWFV78QDBCS9AE4ZQQBCCW

2025-04-18 15:48:00 UTC

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also, actually, why did the comment even show up on mastodon.social in the first place?
i know the case of missing replies how that usually works between different mastodon servers, but its this combination between wordpress and discourse thats new to me. does that mean someone on m.s. followed something on discourse? but can you even follow something from discourse from mastodon? how does that even work? i dont think the accoutn was followed, so likely someone followed a category?

2025-04-18 15:39:55 UTC

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mastodon <> wordpress <> discourse federation is weird

2025-04-18 15:38:07 UTC

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I go to my personal mastodon account. I search for my wordpress article. It shows up. The comment i want to react to is not visible. I search for the comment url. nothing shows up. I search for the commenters Discourse profile. It does show up, but with no comments visible.
How on earth can i get the discourse comment to show up on mastodon?

2025-04-18 15:34:55 UTC

federation challenge: how does this work?
i made a post (note) on my wordpress account. its enabled with activitypub, and thus gets send out to the fediverse. My wordpress account gets followed by a Discourse forum. Someone on the Discourse forum replies with a note. I open the wordpress article with my main mastodon account. I see the discourse reply. I want to react, but with my personal mastodon account.
(cont)

2025-04-16 21:19:18 UTC

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both the german and the brazil labeler have been active since october 2024

2025-04-16 11:17:10 UTC

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Thats absolutely true from the network perspective. easy to make an account on another instance, and indeed much harder to impossible to control the presence of people on the fediverse.
But people have a presence on an individual server. Would mastodon.social thus simply say to the threatened account "sorry, we have to comply with the law, so please move your account to a different server"?
Thats what I wanna know, what would mastodon.social do in this case?

2025-04-16 11:00:04 UTC

Considering this post is going viral here and boosted by Mastodon's ceo:
What is mastodon.social's policy if it had received the same takedown request?
Meaning if an account on mastodon.social was ordered to be taken down by a Turkish judge 'under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, citing “national security and public order.”'
More context on the request: https://bianet.org/haber/x-users-in-turkey-migrate-to-bluesky-amid-censorship-306189
cc @npub1vl7…f6g0 @npub13za…8j89
https://mas.to/@osma/114346166890552471

2025-03-12 13:24:10 UTC

i think the eu should invite Canada to be part of Eurovision
participation is already famously apolitical anyway so having our friends from across the pond join would be a nice bonus

2025-02-01 17:13:30 UTC

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finally!

2025-01-22 20:37:16 UTC

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omg he actually posted that jesus
also you cut to the core very well, it is fundamentally about the story
*insert baudrillard picture here*

2025-01-22 19:25:33 UTC

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some of the best scholars on digital governance are on fedi, with people like nathan schneider. the problem is not about knowing what to do, but about admitting that this means relinguishing control
also it is fully about him, pixelfed and loops are just pretty much completely dan's projects. i believe him to be serious when he says that he wants them to be projects with a billion users. Platforms that big, and those that strive to be that big, should be accountable!

2025-01-22 18:54:15 UTC

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i mean, a simple first step towards becoming more accountable would not be to post that you'll not do any interviews with any media
(think he deleted the post now(talking about accountability lol))

2025-01-22 18:28:56 UTC

the unaccountable leadership of the big tech platforms is bad! Please join our network with unaccountable leadership instead!

2025-01-22 17:10:42 UTC

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thanks!
yeah totally agreed with you. Its quite disheartening to see fedi promote itself as a network with better governance and be completely uncritical about the governance on their own platforms
ill try to get a confirmation from dansup on mod team after growth, that is very concerning

2025-01-22 10:34:57 UTC

anyone have any idea what happened here?
5.6k servers shutting down in a month is a lot, but it is not reflected in other stats. im not convinced yet that there were 5k servers out there being actively used by real people that could all shut down without people noticing it in other ways
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/871/555/480/224/937/original/2579282fd51ba397.png

2025-01-15 09:27:06 UTC

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I think you are vastly overindexing the amount of people who selfhost or run their own small servers via hosting companies. Your experience and cost for your server is an extreme outlier. Nothing wrong with that, you've got a cool setup, happy for you.
But I strongly doubt that the 5.5M/month cost number is even remotely close to being accurate

2025-01-15 08:59:08 UTC

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I find the idea that people are donating 5.5M per month to fedi stuff incredibly hard to square with the observation that Mastodon only managed to raise 12k in their latest fundraiser for a trust&safety lead
https://givebutter.com/givingmastodon

2025-01-13 14:30:22 UTC

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👀👀
It wasnt super clear from the blog announcement itself, but this implies that some form of community ownership is for consideration for the toplevel holding org?
also, great work, very important step for masto regardless, awesome you could help them push in this direction

2024-12-06 15:06:07 UTC

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that is, I am strongly convinced that the direct opposite is the case, and that Bluesky having Posters on their dev team is a hugely underappreciated impact to the success that Bluesky is now seeing

2024-12-06 15:04:38 UTC

A quick comparison between how people like Paul and Hailey can Post, versus how Eugen or the Lemmy devs post, as well as the active user numbers between these platforms make me just ever so slightly doubtful of this claim
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113602196673345224

2024-12-03 22:44:47 UTC

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yeah this is correct, they get suspended on both the bsky appview and pds.

2024-11-22 12:19:49 UTC

This is why I included a section on Mastodon in my article on how Bluesky is not distributed in a social sense. Its much easier to deal with on Bluesky because of the explicit nature of the centralisation points.
The fediverse is absolutely failing at decentralisation here: we are clearly centralised on one of the aspects that actually matter, and handed power over to a dictator-for-life who refuses accountability
https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-decentralisation-and-the-distribution-of-power/
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113524158302790957

2024-11-17 19:57:14 UTC

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im not sure on how likely it is either, but it absolutely is what im hoping for.
the advantage of having bluesky around is that it can make it much clearer in what direction fedi should not go in

2024-11-14 14:03:01 UTC

I think the core question for the fediverse is now how the community will regroup and reorient itself now that its becoming clear that it will not be the new destination for people looking for an alternative to X
The fediverse does not have to be a public-global townsquare twitter-like, instead we can built new types of networked communities

2024-11-13 12:38:31 UTC

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Sure, human curation is awesome and should be promoted. Its the current tendency to use extremely few curators here on fedi that I'm concerned about.
I care about decentralisation as a way to combat the aggregation of power, and that can happen with both technology (algos) as well as with human systems

2024-11-12 15:05:50 UTC

People saying things like 'this large account is our Algorithm' or 'this big account is our Starter Pack' does not exactly bode confidence in the whole decentralisation thing tbh
No shade to these accounts, they do impressive and hard work and have massively contributed to the community.
Its just that promoting single accounts for a specific purpose of either content or account discovery is hugely centralising around them?

2024-10-29 20:29:10 UTC

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its truly such a bummer :(

2024-10-23 08:58:11 UTC

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but its different again for the PLC Directory, of which there is one main one, hosted by Bluesky, which feels super centralised. But as the DID is selfcertified, and there are independent PLC dirs, its less big of a deal. If Bluesky org turns bad, its just a matter for the AppViews to change the reference location to a new plc dir.
So again, counting the plc dirs would seem super centralised, but its reasonably resilient against the bluesky org turning bad

2024-10-23 08:55:20 UTC

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for resilience against the bluesky org turning bad I think its a better metric how easy it is to switch away from bluesky-powered infra in case you want to, than measuring how many people have done so while bluesky org is (still?) not bad
So yeah there are 1k+ PDSes, and you can switch from a bluesky-operated PDS to another operator, but that requires some technical skill and is not a 1-button click currently. So counting PDS numbers doesnt really show that

2024-10-23 08:52:09 UTC

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For ecosystem diversity I think its helpful to distinguish between 2 different reasons why its important: resilience against large actors turning bad, and as a sign of a healthy dev community to build upon
For a healthy dev ecosystem Id count different non-microblogging AppViews as a good metric, which is somewhat comparable to software implementations that there are in fedi

2024-10-23 08:27:23 UTC

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Thats because atproto server is the wrong conceptualisation of how atproto works.
activitypub takes all the individual components (data storage, identity, aggregation, rendering) into a single server monolith. atproto takes all the components apart (pds, plc directory, relay, appview) and makes them individually available.
there are quite some (1k+) independent PDS's, a few backup plc dirs, ~20 relays, and 5+ appviews for other products

2024-09-03 17:06:13 UTC

i think over time 'fediverse' will come to include bluesky:
simple reason, it makes everyone mad:
- from the activitypub side for recognising a different protocol
- from the atproto side because they want to push 'ATmosphere' instead
- from the branding and marketing side because its a bad name
so everyone agrees that its bad, but any alternative cannot find consensus since it'll end up in a fight about power and definitions. so it'll end up defaulting to fediverse including bluesky

2024-08-30 22:17:26 UTC

fucking brutal lol
like i said, that fedi was not paying attention matters
https://indieweb.social/@laurenshof/113045668161154399
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/053/286/054/573/781/original/5065b9793da9c98f.png
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/053/286/050/308/235/original/0d60367bdcda9842.png

2024-08-29 14:00:04 UTC

i just dont understand why fedi does not seem to be talking about brazil potentially banning twitter in the next 12 hours

2024-08-28 17:12:24 UTC

latest update for #bluesky is legit:
- detaching quote posts
- disable quote posting per post
- hide replies for everyone
bluesky is moving fast, and in the current phase the space of decentralised social network is in this matters
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-28-2024-anti-toxicity-features

2024-08-27 13:21:12 UTC

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tagging @npub1vwf…95aa for this, since piefed is probably the closest as theyve already got aguppe group support. So building support for a group that is currently seeing very active use might be interesting as well

2024-08-26 17:37:38 UTC

official french press release with charges against #telegram ceo Durav
https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files/2024-08/2024-08-26%20-%20CP%20TELEGRAM%20.pdf
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/029/536/601/040/130/original/d67549535a43c7c2.png
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/029/536/580/090/774/original/f5263db0a03b4bcb.png

2024-08-15 09:02:48 UTC

public group chats on #nostr
https://groups.nip29.com/
https://primal.net/e/note1qlh36usgj8wupzafy6vhxclwez80qk22mvntlwp6cj28q2a9krgqh4ghxt

2024-08-14 19:17:57 UTC

Linux is such an unserious ass OS

2024-08-14 07:57:47 UTC

Piefed is considering getting good interop/federation working with mobilizon. Posting events into link-aggregator communities would be cool!
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/291

2024-08-13 14:49:50 UTC

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list with the MPs joining bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.team/post/3kzkd42yjn62b

2024-08-13 14:47:20 UTC

"Now, Bluesky says it has seen a 60% jump in general activity from accounts in the UK, with several MPs also joining the platform recently."
https://news.sky.com/story/bluesky-social-media-site-reports-surge-in-new-uk-users-after-elon-musks-riot-comments-13196374

2024-08-13 10:00:43 UTC

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also interesting that neither the @npub1m96…ag4y nor https://bsky.app/profile/thierrybreton.bsky.social posted about it on masto or bsky

2024-08-13 09:58:59 UTC

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much bigger source of discussion on both nostr and farcaster, where people frame it as gov overreach/censorship, and iterate it as a need for anti-censorship platforms

2024-08-13 09:58:22 UTC

Social web observations:
On both bsky and fedi the decision by the EU to send a warning to X about misinformation and the DSA does not get a whole lot of traction anymore, and does not seem to have entered Discourse. Def used to be different in that people viewed such a thing as a potential migration wave towards either masto or fedi. Seems that people do not have that hope anymore.

2024-08-12 07:30:50 UTC

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i swear to god phanpy must have a NPS of over 10 lol, which it fully deserves
simply everyone i see it use turns into a phanpy promoter