Laurens Hof

Consultant and writer on decentralised social media

Blog: https://connectedplaces.online/
Profile: https://connectedplaces.online/author/laurenshof/

Last Notes

2026-02-27 17:51:25 UTC

**FR#155 – Where Does Community Live – updates**
Last week I [wrote an analysis article](https://connectedplaces.online/where-does-community-live/ ) about how communities get built on open protocols, and how the architecture of both ActivityPub and atproto steer into different directions with what types of communities are possible, while at the same time giving people a significant amount of flexibility in what they are building. It is easy to let the major players determine the narrative for what the networks are for: when Mastodon saying their goal is to build a [network of sovereign communities](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/12/the-world-needs-social-sovereignty/ ), to understand the entire fediverse and ActivityPub that way. Or when Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee says that the purpose of open protocols is “to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities”, to take this rights-based vision to understand the atmosphere more broadly.
But my interest is not only in describing general structures (“the fediverse is for networked communities, the atmosphere is a social infrastructure”), but also finding how specific news items fit in framework as much as it complicates it. So this week’s Fediverse Report is a collection of news items that relate to this framework.##
Fediverse NewsTwt Cymru, Wales’ longest-running independent fediverse node, announced a mobile app launching on St David’s Day, built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation as part of their “Apps for Change” programme. The app wraps the toot.wales Mastodon server into a branded experience with its own onboarding flow, bilingual Welsh/English interface, and curated community feeds, designed to feel like a Welsh social app rather than a generic Mastodon client. Twt’s founder Jaz-Michael King describes it as “a digital lifeboat for Wales and the Welsh, a space that cannot be bought, sold, or broken by the whims of a single billionaire.” Twt Cymru is one of the clearest examples networked communities: a culturally specific community (Welsh language users), running their own infrastructure (a Mastodon server since 2017), now with their own branded app, federating into a much wider open social network. The Newsmast Foundation is pushing into this direction more broadly, with their partnership with the [Bristol Cable](https://goodcommons.world/casestudies/bristol-cable-newsmast-foundation-uk-news-coop ) as another example of how they’re building social apps that are predominantly for their own community, and the integration with the wider fediverse network as a secondary feature.
In Montreal, the first [FediMTL](https://betakit.com/can-canada-find-digital-sovereignty-in-the-fediverse/ ) conference was held, featuring keynotes from Cory Doctorow and two creators of the ActivityPub protocol, Christine Lemmer-Webber and Evan Prodromou. The conference had two intertwined motivations, that of sovereignty and of community. For sovereignty, with themes such as Canadian digital autonomy, escaping dependence on American platforms, and Doctorow arguing that Canadian technologists should “hack emergency exits” into existing platforms. The other is community, with Qlub, a Quebec-based ActivityPub platform with over 3,500 users, building a social space rooted in Quebec identity. These overlap but they are not quite the same thing: sovereignty asks who controls the infrastructure, and community asks what people build inside it. Both need bounded and self-governed digital spaces, but for different reasons.
The Netherlands swore in the new Jetten cabinet this week, and [several](https://social.overheid.nl/@stasdigi ) [ministers](https://social.overheid.nl/@MinisterBZK/116121603934478665 ) have begun posting on social.overheid.nl, the Dutch government’s Mastodon server running since 2023. A small item on its own, but maybe the clearest example of the sovereignty side: a government treating fediverse infrastructure as sovereign communications infrastructure.
[The Forkiverse](https://theforkiverse.com/explore ), the Mastodon server launched in January by podcast hosts PJ Vogt (Search Engine), Kevin Roose, and Casey Newton (Hard Fork), has now been running for nearly two months and grown to around 10,000 registered accounts with roughly 3,600 monthly active users. It remains one of the largest new fediverse servers since the 2023 post-Twitter migration wave. That the biggest new fediverse server in years grew out of an existing audience and not from scratch tracks with what the architecture implies: the networked community model works best when the community already exists before the server does. Moderation challenges arrived almost immediately: sexual harassment from federated users, encounters with the Portal Combat propaganda network, and the general discovery that running a server means running a community with real governance responsibilities. As the Hard Fork hosts found out, and as Mastodon’s Executive Director Felix Hlatky described in his recent interview about Mastodon operators, most people who start servers underestimate what moderation actually requires.
A [fediverse take](https://hachyderm.io/@mapache/116139171460877859 ) on the “link in bio” is being built, designed as a decentralized, privacy-respecting alternative to Linktree. Each profile is itself an ActivityPub actor: it can be followed, it boosts posts from all your other fediverse accounts, and it has its own inbox. The problem of the networked communities model is that this results in having a large number of different fediverse accounts: I had 26 different fediverse accounts last time I counted. The linktree approach turns that fragmentation into a feature by giving you one followable persona that aggregates all your fediverse activity. The challenge is that if your identity is tied to specific communities, each with their own server, you need some way to be visible as a single person across all (or at least some) of them. Atproto solved this by making identity portable and separate from any particular service. The fediverse has not solved this yet, but this is an interesting take on it.
A technical [deep dive](https://rmendes.net/articles/2026/02/26/deep-dive-wafrn-dual-protocol-federation/ ) into Wafrn’s dual-protocol architecture, examining how the Tumblr-like platform implements both ActivityPub and atproto natively in a single codebase. From the perspective of networked communities a server can participate in both networks simultaneously is highly relevant. Wafrn is one of the more technically ambitious projects in the ecosystem, but that can be hard to see behind the deliberately unserious facade of the project (Wafrn stands for We Allow Female Representing Nipples, a reference to the Tumblr ban of adult content).##
Atmosphere NewsIf the fediverse side is building networked communities, the atmosphere side is building the infrastructure those communities could run on. This week, that infrastructure got a lot busier.”
Multiple PDS providers are now explicitly positioning themselves as community infrastructure. Eurosky, the European atproto project, [launched its PDS](https://bsky.app/profile/eurosky.social/post/3mfttdbem322n ) and crossed 1,000 users, releasing EU-HAUL, a migration tool available in 26 European languages. Northsky, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community PDS, [published](https://northskysocial.com/posts/beginning-phase-2-of-northsky ) a Phase 2 roadmap covering their own app, moderation labeler, independent appview, and private data infrastructure. They have sent out over 1k invites with a 26% migration rate and 6k more people on their waitlist. The roadmap shows what it takes to turn a PDS into a community home on atproto: PDS hosting is only the first step, and everything else has to be built deliberately. Smaller PDS providers are also growing: npmx.social, run by developers behind a new npm registry browser that integrates with atproto, now hosts hundreds of people and is offering European PDS hosting as a side project alongside their main registry work. Blogging platform pckt also [announced](https://devlog.pckt.blog/building-our-corner-of-the-open-social-web-pcktcafe-and-more-21wfbg2 ) their own PDS.
The main development this week are three separate approaches to permissioned data on atproto, with Blacksky, Bluesky and Northsky all working on it.
Blacksky is close to launching private posts and community-scoped visibility. Rudy Fraser [announced](https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mfsecltzms2r ) that their appview goes live next week, with the explicit note that this lets members interact with each other even if Bluesky has banned them, followed by the launch of Blacksky-only posts. Two proposals for community moderation approaches, peer-based communal moderation versus machine-learning image classification, will go to a community vote. Northsky is developing Stratos, their own private data solution that targets what they call “true data privacy rather than hiding in plain sight by using a different lexicon”. They plan to build Stratos for the broader atproto ecosystem, allowing anyone to run their own Stratos service. And Daniel Holmgren, Bluesky’s engineering lead, [published the second entry](https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3mfrsbcn2gk2a ) in his permissioned data design diary, introducing “buckets” as a potential new protocol primitive.
Holmgren’s post is worth attention because it shows the protocol-level design problem in full. He works through two approaches that fail. App-controlled access (which he calls “realms”) solves the authorization problem but centralizes power in applications, because users in the same group using different apps cannot see each other’s content without individually authorizing every app. Granular per-record access control gives flexibility but creates a coordination problem: every time someone joins a group, every member’s access control list on every record needs updating. His solution, buckets, is a shared container with a single authoritative access control list that all content within it inherits. A bucket is, in protocol terms, a bounded space with governance: “permissioned data needs a shared context with a perimeter.” How buckets interact with the community-built solutions from Blacksky and Northsky, and whether these converge into shared infrastructure or remain parallel approaches, is worth watching.
Beyond microblogging, the application layer on atproto continues to thicken. A selection of what launched or updated recently:<li>Skyreader, the atproto RSS reader, now <a href="https://skyreader-dev.leaflet.pub/3mfmuhvwoos2g">supports</a> subscribing to standard.site publications directly, meaning blogs published on Leaflet, pckt.blog, Offprint, and other standard.site-compatible platforms show up alongside traditional RSS feeds. The same update adds read-it-later functionality with highlights, read progress tracking, and inbox/archive management, all stored on your PDS. The developer notes that read-it-later apps have an annoying habit of getting shut down (I’m still mad about Omnivore), and that storing your reading data on a decentralized protocol is one way to stop losing your library every few years.</li><li><a href="https://semble.so/">Semble</a>, a social bookmarking app, added social following. What makes this interesting is the granularity: you can follow specific collections rather than entire users, what developer Ronen Tamari described as “faceted following.” This means following someone’s collection on protocol governance without also getting their cooking bookmarks.</li><li><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/beaconbits.app">BeaconBits</a> is a a Foursquare-style location check-in app, added <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/beaconbits.app/post/3mfkiyan5fc27">explicit</a> Blacksky integration: users on Blacksky’s PDS now see “View on Blacksky” and “Post to Blacksky” options throughout the app, with a visibility toggle for public or community-scoped check-ins. While a small feature, I think this is one worth tracking for how the concept of community continues to be developed in the atmosphere.</li><li>Popfeed <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/popfeed.social/post/3mezd2x5w6c2c">officially</a> launched as a pop culture tracking app for films, books, shows, games, and music reviews. The app has been around for a bit, and also features quite some integration with both other tracking apps like Bookhive.buzz as well as with Bluesky.</li><li>Hypha Co-op <a href="https://hypha.coop/dripline/we-built-you-a-garden/">published</a> spores.garden, a digital garden platform on atproto where each garden gets a unique visual identity generated deterministically from your DID. Gardens can pull in content from other atproto apps, and navigation happens through collecting and planting flower identicons in other people’s gardens rather than algorithmic feeds. It is a deliberately weird and playful project, and a good example of using atproto for entirely different modes of communication.</li><li><a href="https://tangled.org/did:plc:2hgmrwevidwsxundvejdeam5/wp-wireservice">Wireservice</a> is a new WordPress plugin that syncs posts and pages to standard.site records on your PDS. This is notable as a bridge between the existing web publishing ecosystem and the atproto data layer, meaning a WordPress blog can now be a standard.site publication without migrating away from WordPress. I’ll be enabling this soon for this website as well.</li><li>The new Ecosystem Action Research project <a href="https://ecosystemaction.leaflet.pub/3mf324gisgc2e">launched a call for participation</a>, a volunteer-led pilot program addressing five shared challenges across the atproto ecosystem: user experience, brand awareness beyond Bluesky, trust and safety readiness, economic sustainability, and contributor enablement.</li>
Finally, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee published “[Practical Decentralization,”](https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/practical-decentralization ) a blog post that articulates what he sees as the purpose of open protocols: “to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet.” A deeper analysis will follow in a separate article. It is valuable to see protocol leadership put a specific thesis on paper, and I hope others will do the same.
#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr155-where-does-community-live-updates/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/20250719-02--1024x293.jpg

2026-02-18 18:01:19 UTC

**Where Does Community Live?**
What’s always interested me about Ostrom’s work is that she showed how governance of communities is very diverse, with rules that look chaotic on the surface but share deep structure underneath. What’s more, her understanding of how communities self-organize and govern themselves is relevant to the social web today. Across the open social web there are new types of communities being built, and people actively experimenting with how governance works in these communities.
At the Eurosky conference in Berlin in November 2025, technologist Robin Berjon made a statement that referenced Ostrom, and tied to protocols: “The properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same.” I think that’s largely true, but I also think we can be even more specific.
The open social web today consists primarily of two protocols, ActivityPub and ATProto, each with very different ideas about how to organize social life online. Neither prescribes a single network topology, and both leave fundamental choices about how social space should be structured to the people building on top of them. But their architectural decisions are not neutral: they shape and constrain the topologies that can emerge, the kinds of communities that can form, and the governance tools available to those communities.
That specificity matters because what’s actually happening across ActivityPub and ATProto right now looks, at first glance, like chaos. There are dozens of different applications, community experiments, and governance arrangements, each making different choices about where boundaries fall and who controls what. But just as Ostrom found that the diversity of community governance systems can be generalized into a number of shared structural rules, the diversity of the open social web also has a common set of questions: where does membership begin and end, who sets the rules, how are violations monitored, and what happens when someone breaks the agreement. Protocols don’t answer these questions, but they do determine which answers are even possible.
The simplest way to understand ActivityPub is that servers send messages to each other. A person on one server can follow a person on another server, and when either of them posts something, their server delivers that message to the other. That simplicity hides a deeper question though: what is a server actually for?
The answer that dominated for most of Mastodon’s history is that a server is infrastructure. In a 2023 [interview](https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter ) with The Verge, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko described the product in terms that made servers sound like an implementation detail. “Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.” When users complained about having to choose a server at signup, Rochko’s response was to make the choice disappear: sorting the server list to show larger servers first, adding a “pick for me” button, and keeping mastodon.social open as a default funnel. He acknowledged this moved Mastodon closer to the Gmail problem he said he wanted to avoid, but framed it as necessity, saying: “However, I’ve learned over the years that there is no replacement for having a default, right?”
In this model, the server boundary is administrative rather than social. Users experience a single network where the fact that their account lives on one server rather than another is, ideally, something they never have to think about, with the server handling uptime, storage, and moderation enforcement. The social graph extends freely across server boundaries and the home feed pulls in content from everywhere, making it feel like a single network.The topology is functionally centralized even though the infrastructure is distributed. This solves some problems regarding engineering and the distribution of power, but does so without creating distinct social spaces.
Mastodon’s current leadership is trying to move away from this. Their new community director, Hannah Aubrey, describes Mastodon as “a front door, not the whole house,” and talks about surfacing and supporting other servers rather than funneling everyone into mastodon.social. Director Felix Hlatky has made distributing users away from mastodon.social an explicit priority, noting that concentrating users on one server is “not the purpose of building a social network.” The target is ambitious: going from roughly 10,000 servers to 100,000, which Hlatky says “needs a mindshift in what it means to start a server.”
In this newer model, the server boundary becomes a social boundary, and your experience of Mastodon is supposed to be shaped by the community you joined rather than just by who you follow across the wider network. Aubrey envisions server starters as “leaders and organizers” who want to build something for their community, whether that community is defined by language, identity, geography, or shared interest, framing the value proposition in terms of belonging: “you can still be in community with people in a safe and healthy way.”
Instead of one network with distributed infrastructure, it is a network of networks where each node has meaningful social coherence. Newsmast, a UK-based organization building ActivityPub infrastructure for publishers and communities, is pushing this further by creating branded apps on top of individual server communities that combine community feeds with a publisher’s content. The logical conclusion of their approach is one app per community, with federation as the connective tissue between them.
Lemmy and PieFed, the Reddit-style link aggregation platforms on ActivityPub, complicate this further. Communities (the equivalent of subreddits) exist on servers but are accessible from other servers, creating a double layer of social boundaries: a community has its own topic, its own moderators, and its own norms, but it also lives on a server that has its own administrators and its own moderation policies. When users from one server participate in a community hosted on another, it is genuinely unclear whose norms apply. The server boundary and the community boundary overlap without aligning, producing a topology of mixed jurisdictions that nobody has fully figured out how to govern.
(PieFed also has a feature called ‘Topics’, which aggregates posts from multiple communities into a single feed around a single theme, making jurisdiction a truly joyful mess: a single post can be made by someone on server A, posted into a community hosted on server B, and then aggregated into a Topic hosted on server C. What happens when rules between servers A, B and C conflict is anyone’s guess.)
The point here is that ActivityPub does not prescribe a single topology. The protocol is flexible enough that each application makes a fundamentally different choice about how much the server boundary matters socially. Mastodon circa 2023 treated servers as invisible plumbing; Mastodon in 2026 wants servers to be communities. PeerTube treats them as institutional containers for self-hosted video libraries, with federation as a secondary feature. Lemmy layers communities on top of servers, creating overlapping boundaries.
In ATProto, every user has a Personal Data Server (PDS) that stores their content as structured records, and applications don’t host this data but read from it. The mental model is something like a shared lake of public data: every PDS contributes its stream, and every application draws out the subset relevant to its purpose. A microblogging app reads posts, while a video app reads video records and a code hosting platform reads repositories, all from the same pool of data, through different lenses. Where ActivityPub organizes around the server as the social unit, ATProto organizes around data.
Bluesky is the dominant application built on ATProto, and for most users it is simply a Twitter-like social network. Community formation in Bluesky is supposed to happen through custom feeds, and Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has framed these as the platform’s core innovation. “The algorithm, more than the content type or the app’s appearance, is the core of social media because it directs how you spend your attention there,” she [wrote](https://bsky.social/about/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice ) in 2023, describing Bluesky’s goal as replacing the “master algorithm” controlled by a single company with an open “marketplace of algorithms.” The language is consistently about individual choice and control: what you see, what you scroll, what you subscribe to. Bluesky’s own FAQ makes the contrast with Mastodon explicit: “On Mastodon, your instance, or server, determines your community… On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation.”
But community is not an attention problem. Feeds organize what individuals see without creating shared spaces, shared governance, or shared membership. In Bluesky’s default implementation, you scroll a feed but you don’t belong to it. The absence of community infrastructure at the feed level follows directly from what feeds were designed to do: they solve for individual curation, not collective organization. This is not a protocol-level constraint, though, as the case of Blacksky demonstrates: a feed can carry community infrastructure when it is deliberately built to do so, with dedicated moderation and explicit membership. But Bluesky’s affordances push toward the passive-consumption model rather than the community-building one.
This is a problem for anyone trying to build actual community on ATProto. Blacksky, which serves the Black community on Bluesky, shows what it actually takes. Their approach was to construct community identity first, starting with a custom feed that created a sense of shared space, then progressively building their own PDS hosting, their own moderation system, and their own relay, their own appview. Their moderation relay is particularly significant because it means any application on the network can plug into Blacksky’s moderation rather than relying solely on Bluesky’s, and their recent work on private posts represents the most explicit departure from ATProto’s default assumption that all data is public, carving out enclosure where the protocol assumes openness.
Other community-oriented applications face similar tensions. Gander (Canada), Eurosky (EU), and Northsky (queer community) each target specific populations while maintaining a full-network view, and it remains unclear how these will develop in practice: whether the community identity or the full-network access becomes the primary experience. They are attempting to create bounded social spaces on top of a protocol that was designed to be boundaryless.
Then there are applications that don’t focus on creating social community spaces at all, and these may be where ATProto’s architecture is most naturally suited. Tangled is a code hosting platform with social features, more comparable to GitHub than to Twitter. Margin.at allows users to write annotations on web pages that are visible to other users, an interesting reversal where the application layer spans the entire web and ATProto functions as invisible plumbing underneath. Germ, a messaging app, uses ATProto’s identity system (DID:PLC) for user identity but builds its actual messaging infrastructure off-protocol entirely. Blento allows you to create a personal websites, with the data stored on your own PDS.
While ATProto’s architecture trends towards a flat social topology with global data, this is not a hard constraint, and it can be used to create distinct social spaces as well.
The two protocols create mirror-image problems for community formation: ActivityPub provides boundaries but makes them difficult to experience from the outside, while ATProto makes the entire network navigable but provides no natural boundaries at all.
In ActivityPub, servers are supposed to be communities, but the architecture does not support the social mechanics through which communities actually form. You can’t visit another server or browse a different community’s conversation the way you might walk into a neighborhood bar. And while you can follow individuals across server boundaries, you can’t be present in a space without committing your identity to it. Communities, as sociologists have long observed, tend to form through encounter, through showing up at the same place at the same time and discovering shared interests through proximity. ActivityPub supports following but not presence, and the server boundary, while it matters in theory, is not something a user can experience in practice.
Another challenge with a ‘server as community’ is that the person running a server is simultaneously the infrastructure administrator and the community leader, and these are fundamentally different roles requiring different skills. Hlatky is frank about the reality: most people who start servers “have no idea what moderation means”. They come from tech background, experience a spam wave, and gradually find out what responsibilities come with running a server. Aubrey’s vision of server starters as “leaders and organizers” building something for their community describes a different population than the people who actually run servers, and the overlap between sysadmin skills and community stewardship skills is small. Mastodon’s plan to make server hosting technically easier may widen this gap rather than close it, because the bottleneck is not the technical complexity of running Docker but the social complexity of cultivating a community.
Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, server operators are potentially regulated entities with compliance obligations around content moderation, transparency, and user protection. Mastodon’s own recent strategy [announcement](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/02/connecting-the-world-through-thriving-online-communities/ ) acknowledges this tension, committing to a regulatory audit for “our own servers” and exploring “how this knowledge can be shared with the community,”. The person running a Mastodon instance is now expected to be a sysadmin, a community steward, and a legally compliant service provider.
The cross-server interaction problem shows the limits of the server-as-community model. When someone from server B replies to someone on server A, and server A has cultivated specific norms around content warnings and topic sensitivity, the person on server B has never encountered those norms. Server A’s admin can react after the fact by deleting the reply, blocking the account, or defederating from server B entirely, but there is no mechanism for communicating norms before the interaction happens. There is no door to walk through, no house rules posted at the entrance. In Ostrom’s framework, functioning institutions require that participants understand the rules before they act, that monitoring is possible, and that graduated sanctions exist for violations. An ActivityPub server-as-community has sanctions but lacks the prior steps: rules aren’t visible to outsiders and monitoring is purely reactive, which means the institution has enforcement powers but not constitutive ones.
The standard counter-argument is that visiting other servers is narrowly possible: you can browse a local timeline through the web interface and follow people from a specific community. There is a difference, though, between technical accessibility and social experience. A local timeline is a raw chronological feed with no context about what the community is, what its norms are, or what makes it distinct. Compare this to Reddit, where arriving at a subreddit immediately presents the community’s identity as a first-class interface element: its name, description, rules, moderators, visual identity. The community is a navigable object that you can encounter, evaluate, and choose to join. In ActivityPub, the community is metadata on a username, and even when you follow a cluster of people from one server, their posts appear in your home timeline mixed with everything else, the community context stripped away by the presentation layer. Community does not survive aggregation, because the interface does not preserve it.
None of this means ActivityPub servers cannot function as communities. Some do, particularly when the community existed before the server: a podcast audience, an existing forum, a professional network that migrated together. But in those cases, the community coheres despite the architecture rather than because of it, with the server providing infrastructure for something that was already socially real. Building community through encounter, the way most communities actually form, is much harder when the architecture provides no mechanism for encounter.
For ATProto, where community lives is an even more open question. In ActivityPub, the answer is at least clear: community lives on the server. That answer may be structurally difficult to realize, but everyone in the ecosystem shares a common understanding of where community is supposed to be. In ATProto, different projects are testing fundamentally different answers, and the protocol itself is agnostic between them. Applied through Ostrom’s lens, the question becomes: which of these answers can actually produce functioning institutions with clear rules, meaningful monitoring, and graduated sanctions?
The first candidate is the feed. Bluesky’s own framing positions feeds as the primary mechanism for user agency: a marketplace of algorithms replacing the singular Algorithm, giving individuals control over their attention. But as Bluesky’s FAQ itself makes clear, the design priority is participation in the “global conversation,” with feeds as personalization layers on top of that global view rather than as bounded spaces. In institutional terms, a feed has no rule-making capacity, no monitoring function, and no sanctions. It organizes attention but does not organize people.
The second candidate is the appview, which aggregates network data and presents it as a coherent application, making choices about indexing, display, moderation, and features. This is why Blacksky building their own appview is significant: it created a fully independent social space governed by community-chosen moderators and presenting community-curated content. If community lives in the appview, then the appview operator is the place-maker, and ATProto communities form around whoever is willing to build and maintain that aggregation infrastructure.
The third answer is the full infrastructure stack. Again Blacksky provides the example, building not just an appview, but also PDS hosting, a relay, a moderation system, and eventually private posts. Community, in their model, is not a single layer but an assembly data hosting, moderation, application experience, and boundary enforcement. This is the most institutionally complete answer, the one that comes closest to satisfying Ostrom’s full framework, while it is also the most demanding for community builders.
It is also worth noting that this approach looks somewhat similar to the ActivityPub server model, where a single operator controls data storage, moderation, and application experience. The difference is in easier data portability and interoperability, as well as keeping identity separate from data, that ActivityPub’s server-bound architecture lacks. The implication is that the demands of community governance may impose their own architectural requirements, regardless of what the underlying protocol provides.
The last option is to focus on ATProto as a digital identity system, where your identity and data persists across applications, and your data lives on your PDS. This works as a kind of portable individual place: a blogger’s “place” follows them, with software being swappable while identity and data remain stable. Here, communities only become emergent and ephemeral, defined by your social connections. In Ostrom’s terms, this is the weakest institutional answer: it provides continuity of identity but no mechanism for collective rule-making, monitoring, or enforcement. Community becomes something that happens to you through your connections rather than something you participate in governing.
Each of these answers implies a different topology. If community lives in feeds, ATProto is flat: one network, many lenses, no boundaries. If community lives in appviews, the topology resembles ActivityPub’s server model but with explicit role separation and data portability. If community lives in full infrastructure stacks, the topology fragments into a small number of heavily invested community platforms surrounded by a large number of lightweight applications that don’t attempt community at all. If community lives in identity, there is no collective community topology at all, only individual nodes.
After several years of development, the ATProto ecosystem has produced exactly one fully realized community (Blacksky) and a collection of promising projects that have not yet demonstrated they can sustain the institutional demands that community requires.
ActivityPub and ATProto are not two implementations of the same idea. They represent two different shapes of answers to the questions how should social life be organized online, where should boundaries fall, who should govern what happens within them, and what does it mean to belong? Ostrom spent a career studying how communities develop institutions to manage shared resources, and one of her central findings was that the most resilient arrangements evolved through local experimentation rather than external imposition. The successful communities she documented did not adopt a single governance template, instead they tried things, failed at most of them, and arrived at rules fitted to local condition. What worked in one context did not necessarily transfer to another, even when the resources and stakes were similar.
The open social web is in this experimental phase, and different projects are testing different answers. But these answers are not equally viable, and topologies that concentrate institutional functions, that combine rule-making, monitoring, and enforcement in a coherent operator, produce more resilient governance than those that distribute these functions across layers or leave them to emerge organically. This holds whether the starting point is an ActivityPub server or an ATProto infrastructure stack. The protocol shapes the available answers, but community governance has its own structural demands, and those demands are not infinitely flexible.
But experimentation is not the same as success, and neither protocol has yet demonstrated a scalable, repeatable model for community formation. ActivityPub has a clear answer to where community lives that turns out to be structurally difficult to realize. ATProto’s architecture suggest a more individualised and global network, but projects like Blacksky also show that building communities is possible, even if it requires extending the protocol.
Robin Berjon, speaking in Berlin, observed that the structural properties of a protocol and the structural properties of an institution are the same. If he is right, and the evidence increasingly suggests that he is, then the question facing the open social web is not which protocol wins, but whether either ecosystem can produce the institutional designs that the communities forming within them actually need.
#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/where-does-community-live/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/20250718-08-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2026-02-07 18:03:15 UTC

**FR#152 – The DSA Needs Big Tech**
Last week was the [FOSDEM](https://fosdem.org/2026/ ) conference, where my time was mostly spend chatting with people so I had little time actually listen to all the talks at the event itself. I want to spend some time on one panel in particular, because while rewatching the panel I realised it surfaced some pretty deep structural issues between the fediverse and the DSA.
The panel “[The Fediverse and the EU’s Digital Services Act](https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/W8RCMT-the_fediverse_and_the_eus_digital_services_act_solving_the_challenges_of_modern_/ )” brought together Alexandra Geese, a Member of the European Parliament and one of the lead negotiators of the DSA; Felix Hlatky, the recently appointed Executive Director of Mastodon; and Sandra Barthel, founder of the Alliance of Open Networks. The title of the panel suggested this was about complementary approaches to the same problem of how Europe can protect democratic discourse online, but turns out there’s a bit more to it.
Geese laid out the DSA’s most powerful provision clearly. [Article 34](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng ) requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs, defined as platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users) to assess systemic risks, and allows the Commission to mandate changes to algorithms, targeting systems, and business models. This, Geese argued, is what makes the DSA meaningful. It gives Europe the ability to intervene in how platforms shape public discourse, without having to become a “ministry of truth” that decides what content is or isn’t allowed.
Hlatky then described the fediverse as a fundamentally different kind of network. *“It’s a network of a lot of small networks. In fact, in the fediverse there’s around 30,000 active small servers.”* He went on: *“From a regulatory point of view, it’s very attractive because they all of them default under the SME exemption, small medium enterprises, so all of these servers are very small so they fall under this exemption.”* When asked what makes the fediverse a nicer place than mainstream social media, Hlatky pointed to design and culture: *“Polarizing content on Mastodon and the broader fediverse, it will never be amplified in the same way as in other networks, simply because of design choice, that this content doesn’t have this strong amplification. But the second thing that is probably more important is that trust and safety is not an afterthought, something that is bolted on later because we need this for regulatory compliance, but it’s part of the initial product design process.”*
These are both reasonable statements on their own, but positioned next to each other it is visible that both Geese and Hlatky describe projects that work against each other. Geese’s entire model depends on VLOPs actually existing, as without a platform that crosses the 45 million monthly active users article 34 of the DSA has nothing to act upon. The DSA’s power to force algorithmic changes, to mandate risk assessments, to reshape business models, all of it requires a centralized platform large enough to qualify. Without a VLOP, the DSA actually does very little. On the other hand, Hlatky, as the Executive Director of one of the largest software developers building the alternative, is explicitly celebrating the fact that nothing in the fediverse qualifies for the DSA, and that the structure of the network makes it likely that nothing will ever qualify. The network architecture of the fediverse creates the possibility for the large majority of participants (if not everybody) to avoid DSA regulation via the SME exemption.
During the panel, Geese was remarkably candid about the geopolitical pressure the European Commission faces when trying to enforce the DSA against US-based platforms. She described how US government threats, including tariff escalation and NATO posturing, are actively deterring the Commission from enforcement. In her framing, DSA enforcement is no longer just a regulatory question, and she sees it as one of three fundamental geopolitical conflicts facing Europe, alongside defense against Russia and economic competitiveness, and argued that enforcing the DSA requires political courage at the highest levels of European leadership.
This problem of political will only matters if VLOPs exist to enforce the DSA against. In a network of 30,000 small servers, there is no entity for the Commission to pressure, and no platform for the US government to shield through diplomatic coercion. The fediverse sidesteps the geopolitical vulnerability that Geese described, but does so by eliminating the regulatory lever entirely.
The very geopolitical pressure that makes DSA enforcement difficult is itself an argument for the fediverse. If the Commission can be coerced into not enforcing against US-based VLOPs, then a network architecture without VLOPs is more resilient, not just technically but geopolitically. But that resilience comes at a cost to both sides of the current power dynamic. For the US, a world without VLOPs removes the ability to [fuse state power with platform power,](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/a-power-problem-not-a-platform-problem/ ) the dynamic that currently allows the US government to shield companies like X and Meta from European regulation. For the EU it removes the regulatory lever that the Commission has spent years building, and with it the role the EU has carved out for itself as the global counterweight to Big Tech. The EU’s position in digital governance, as well as the way the EU understands itself, is built around being the entity that regulates platforms. Without platforms large enough to regulate, that position loses its foundation.
For Hlatky, this avoidance of the DSA is not a big problem, as he sees many positive traits for the fediverse, such as polarizing content not being amplified and trust and safety being integrated into product design. However, these traits can better be described as how Hlatky views Mastodon, as those are not characteristics that are intrinsic to an ActivityPub network, and the claim that trust and safety is integral to Mastodon’s product design is contested within the community as well. While other ActivityPub software also proclaims these traits, it might just be an emergent property that flows from the type of people and their interest who are the early adopters and new builders of of open social platforms. In a potential world where open social protocols gain mass adoption, I’m not sure these characteristics will hold up, especially if it becomes a hyped new technology that attracts a very different user base with other priorities.
This is something I have [written about before](https://connectedplaces.online/the-digital-services-act-and-theories-of-power/ ): one of the reasons the European Commission actually needs platforms like X to exist is that it has built its entire regulatory infrastructure around the assumption that VLOPs exist. Open social networks don’t just offer an alternative to Big Tech, they undermine the assumptions that European digital regulation is built on. The panel at FOSDEM was collegial and constructive, and everyone agreed that the fediverse is good and the DSA is necessary. But nobody asked the harder question: if the fediverse succeeds in replacing centralized platforms, what regulatory framework takes over from the DSA? ##
Some other newsFor Protocols For Publishers I gave a presentation on the state of the open social web, explaining to publishers how both ActivityPub and atproto have different visions for how a social network can function. In my opinions these visions can be complementary to each other, with atproto well suited for the distribution of news, and ActivityPub creating new primitives for community building. The slide deck can be downloaded [here](https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/state-of-open-social-web-deck.pdf ).
PieFed has seen a [sustained growth](https://piefed.social/c/fediverse/p/1739314/piefed-users-surge-continues#post_replies ) of new users over the last week, increasing it’s total user base by 50% in a week. The main driver of growth for PieFed, created by New Zealand based developer [Rimu Atkinson](https://rimu.geek.nz/portfolio/ ), is a [popular post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1quso40/european_reddit_alternative_piefed_users_surge/ ) on the BuyFromEU subreddit that describes the platform as an European Reddit Alternative. While impressive growth in relative terms, in absolute terms the entire network is still small, with some 8k monthly active users (MAU) for PieFed and 36k MAU for Lemmy.
Mastodon has [announced](https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115989801184595302 ) that they are beginning work on a new onboarding experiment, where they’ll recommend “the closest server geographically that is in the correct language during the sign-up flow.” Mastodon using the mastodon.social as a default server for signup has been a point of critique for years within the community, and the organisation is now addressing this feedback.
Holos [continues](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-145/ ) to be one of the most [interesting](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-147/ ) projects moving ActivityPub forward. It runs an ActivityPub servers on your mobile phone, with a relay that handles your identity, as well as data forwarding for the periods when your phone is inaccessible. The latest [update](https://mastodon.social/@HolosSocial/116030364450087566 ) allows you to set your identity based on a domain name you own, fairly similar to atproto. Once the project launches as a 1.0 I’ll write a more detailed explainer about it and why I think it matters, for the protocol-minded people I already recommend taking a look.
[FediMTL](https://fedimtl.ca/#about ) is a conference about digital sovereignty and the social web, that will be held on February 24, 2026 in Montreal (streaming options also available).
#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr152-the-dsa-needs-big-tech/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-15-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2026-01-29 18:20:17 UTC

**FR#151 – TikTok Won’t Be Another Twitter**
The identities of both the fediverse and the [atmosphere](https://bsky.app/profile/laurenshof.online/post/3mdi3ly27ps24 ) have been strongly influenced by Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Bluesky’s growth trajectory, Mastodon’s cultural identity, and the entire discourse and self-understanding of making social platforms resistant to billionaire purchase are all downstream of that transfer of ownership of Twitter. Three years after Twitter changed hands, we now have a second case study, with TikTok’s transition from the Chinese Bytedance to a majority American ownership last week. The culture of ActivityPub and ATProto are shaped by what it means to watch a dominant Big Tech platform become owned by a fascist oligarch, and the question now is whether TikTok will leave a similar mark. Early signals of the impact of the transfer of ownership is how [users claim ](https://connectedplaces.online/wp-admin/post.php?post=5510&action=edit )that TikTok is now blocking mentions of Epstein and ICE, or Emmy-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda [reporting](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/29/palestinian-journalist-bisan-owda-with-1-4m-followers-reports-tiktok-ban ) a permanent ban from her 1.4 million follower account.
The standard story about why X is hard to leave centers on network effects, the idea that the network is valuable because everyone else is there. This isn’t exactly wrong, but misses a nuance in what makes a platform sticky. People don’t make individual choices based on the user count of the entire network, they make choices based on their perception of the network effects. People perceive which accounts matter to them, and are making their platform choice based on that. Crucially, this perception is shaped by the platform’s architecture.
Twitter and X’s chronological timeline (and even to an extent their algorithmic feed, more so for Twitter than for X) make the network legible. You can see who of your follows is actually there, and who is posting. This also makes it visible when prominent accounts go quiet or announce their departure. This legibility is what made coordinated migration possible: you could see others leaving, which gave you permission to leave.
Beyond this legibility, Twitter had also accumulated a particular political significance, it had created the common knowledge that it was the place where public discourse happened, where news broke, and where politicians and journalists gathered. This common knowledge was never fully accurate, but accurate enough to make Twitter feel like the agreed-upon stage for public political life.
Together, this created a unique set of circumstances for the case of staying or leaving Twitter: leaving means abandoning the agreed-upon place for public political life. Moreso, it was a visible act that others could see you do. This move of people towards Mastodon and Bluesky was as much about joining a new platform as it was about making a collective political starement.
TikTok’s structure differs from X in two meaningful ways. The first is that its TikTok’s architecture makes the network much more invisible to its own users. The For You Page algorithm is not strongly influenced by the accounts you follow, instead it responds instantly to the videos you most recently watched and liked. This makes it very hard for people to build a mental model of what their network on TikTok actually is. TikTok’s algorithm selects from a pool so vast that individual departures are virtually undetectable by people. You cannot see who has left, because it is very hard to build a stable sense of who was there in the first place. The ban of Bisan Owda got the attention of Al Jazeera, but not every ban will get that attention. Most followers might never notice her absence, with the algorithm simply serving them a never ending supply of other videos.
This creates a coordination problem for migrating to other platform. While Twitter and X were not great for coordinating collective actions to join other platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, it was in fact possible, as both platforms did experience such spikes in people joining. This pattern has died down in the last year for people going from X to either Bluesky or Mastodon, suggesting that collective actions to join other platforms are both possible but not guaranteed to happen and can be disrupted.
The second way that a migration away from TikTok might look different than X, is that where Twitter and X are the centers of political discourse, TikTok is the center of culture. When journalists and politicians left Twitter, they were making a statement about the public political sphere. When creators leave TikTok, they are making a career decision about where their audiences are. These actions have different motivations, with different symbolism, and will likely not create the type of collective identity that has developed on Bluesky and Mastodon as a result of people leaving Twitter and X. The fediverse and Bluesky both carry the imprint of being “the place people went when they refused to stay on Musk’s platform.” This does not mean that TikTok users won’t move to differrent platforms. It means that this move, if it happens, likely won’t follow the same “leaving” narrative that has shaped open social’s current identity.
There’s a lesson here from what actually happened with the moves away from Twitter. In raw numbers, Meta won, as Threads has now [overtaken](https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-daily-mobile-users-new-data-shows/ ) X in daily active users, and has around 140M daily active users on mobiel, compared to Bluesky’s [3 million](https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3mdinjdne5k2o ) total daily active users. Bluesky, although much smaller than both other platforms, does hold outsized political impact already, especially for politicians on the left side of the political spectrum. While Threads did win the ‘number-go-up’ game, it’s political and cultural relevance is surprisingly low in Western countries.
Meta is well-positioned to repeat this numerical victory with TikTok, and Instagram Reels already competes directly for the same attention and the same creators. If TikTok users move away due to privacy concerns or content moderation frustrations, Reels is the lowest-friction alternative option, together with YouTube Shorts. But this tells us little about whether open social will benefit, because open social platforms select heavily for early adopters and the type of people who want to built the future of social platforms.
There’s a another structural difference worth noting, beyond the nature of the migration itself, namely that video is harder than text when it comes to running independent social networking platforms. Text-based social media is relatively cheap, and accessible for self-hosting. You can run a Mastodon or GoToSocial instance on a cheap VPS, especially if the server is only for a few people, same with self-hosting a ATProto PDS. Video is in an entirely different category, with storage costs, bandwidth costs, transcoding costs, CDN costs that are both much larger than text, and scale superlinearly with usage. Then there is moderation, and where the moderation of text is already diffecult and expensive, video moderation either requires massive (and expensive) compute for automated systems, as well large-scale human labor for manual review.
Skylight, the ATProto-based TikTok alternative, crossed 380,000 users this week with around 95,000 monthly active users. The pattern of signups is arguably just as interesting as the numbers itself, with CEO Tori White says that compared to previous signup waves, this one is more sustained, with continuing elevated signups of around 4k new people per day, whereas previous waves had a more spike-and-crash pattern. What makes this possible for Skylight is ATProto’s infrastructure model. Skylight does not need to set up their own complete infrastructure stack, instead it uses Bluesky’s relay, CDN and AppView.
This model, where an app on ATProto can start out as a client, grow its own user base, and gradually built out infrastructure later is a genuine novel pattern that we’ve not really seen before. It does create dependencies however, where Skylight’s existence is contingent on Bluesky’s continued funding and moderation.
ActivityPub has it’s own TikTok-style video platform with [Loops](https://joinloops.org/ ), which has a different path to viability. The fediverse model assumes instances run by independent operators, which are largely hobbyist volunteers. This works well enough for text-based platforms, where costs are manageable. For video at scale, the question of ‘who is going to pay for this’ becomes unavoidable however. Loops cannot bootstrap on shared infrastructure the way Skylight can, and each instance must bear its own costs from the start. This means for Loops to become a meaningful TikTok competitor, someone needs to commit serious money to operate a video platform at scale.
Twitter’s ownership transfer has become an integral part of the story for both the fediverse and the atmosphere. It established the concept that growth for these networks happens as a result of people ‘leaving’ Big Tech platforms, and that decentralised open protocols are a recognisable alternative. TikTok’s ownership transfer is unlikely to produce the same dynamic. The structural differences, namely the lower visibility of what your ‘network is’, the lower presence of political signals and the much higher cost of video infrastructure all suggest that the dynamics will be different. This does not mean that platform migrations won’t happen, but does mean that it will be driven by different forces, and produce different kinds of communities as well. Skylight’s sustained growth indicates that people are aware of the issue and looking for alternatives. TikTok will likely not produce another Twitter effect for the open social networks for structural reasons, and video on open social networks might have to grow without one.
#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr151-tiktok-wont-be-another-twitter/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-16-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2026-01-23 16:53:42 UTC

**FR#150 – On ICE, Verification, and Presence As Harm**
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, became one of the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky within days of receiving its verification badge handed out by Bluesky PBC. The account itself has not posted anything, because it does not need to, with the presence being the point. ICE joining Bluesky was part of a moment in November 2025 where the US regime decided to antagonize the ATProto network by having multiple organisations, including the White House, join the network. They quickly lost interest again however, and most accounts have not posted anything over the last two months.
The decision by Bluesky PBC to verify the ICE account, two months after registration and without the account being active, lead to quite different responses for the fediverse and for the ATmosphere. On the fediverse, the choice by Bluesky PBC to lend legitimacy to ICE was a final nail in the coffin, with loud declarations to disconnect from Bluesky and block the bridge between these two networking protocols. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko was the most notable account, who publicly declared to disconnect from the bridge.
Within the ATmosphere, the response focused on two parts, both a frustration with Bluesky PBC verifying the ICE account, as well as a call to block the account en-masse, which led to the ICE account quickly becoming one of the most-blocked accounts on the network.
The difference in response between the networks provide an insight in how both the ActivityPub network and the AT Protocol network have very different underlying assumptions, where these obscure difference in network architecture lead to diverging outcomes in social structure and behaviour.
In the ActivityPub model, servers are understood as opinionated communities or places, that choose to connect with other communities. Federation is optional and based on a match in values between the connecting servers. This value-question is baked into it’s network structure, and makes it clear that every individual server is a non-neutral place.
(As a side-note, the fediverse as-it-exists struggles with this model, with Mastodon being uncomfortably stuck between the marketing material promoting a network-of-communities with shared values, but the software having a deeply ingrained mental model of ‘lets-federate-with-everyone’, which in itself explains a fair amount of conflict in the fediverse over the years).
ATProto takes a different approach, by separating the base layer of data storage from the application layer. The base data storage layer is designed to be neutral infrastructure, where data lives in Personal Data Servers. This data is ‘neutral’, in the sense that it is permisionless and anyone can set up a PDS without permission. The applications built on top of that infrastructure are assumed to be opinionated and not neutral. Every ATProto application takes a subset of the entire network of data, and can be opinionated about what they surface and to whom they present this.
This creates a sense of ‘neutrality’ at the base layer (hello to all the people whose eyes start twitching every time they read the claim that social software can ever be neutral), with value-based and opinionated apps build on top of this base layer.
When fediverse users say they don’t want to be bridged to Bluesky, they’re applying an ActivityPub mental model to ATProto infrastructure. In one sense this is a bit of a category error, the bridge connects to networking infrastructure, not the application. This way your’e not just refusing to federate with the Bluesky-the-app but with the entire ecosystem, including apps with different values, such as Blacksky or Leaflet.
But in another sense, this shows the issue with bridging between these two networks, and how this is not just a matter of networking architecture, but of how network architecture leads to different mental models that are not always compatible with each other.
The choice by Bluesky PBC to give ICE a verification checkmark shows that while the company has built systems that enable the ‘neutral infra, opinionated apps’ model, their operational choices fall back to a 2010s mental model where the platform itself is the neutral ground, where everyone, [including Trump](https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-jay-graber-bluesky/ ), is welcome.
Bluesky’s Community Guidelines lists the two major principles as ‘Safety First’ and ‘Respect Others’. It is somewhat unclear how the presence of a fascist police force that is actively working to instigate civil war aligns with the principles of safety and respect that Bluesky supposedly champions.
When it comes to actual rules in the guidelines, it is all about user behaviour and the content on Bluesky. The problem is that it is the presence of ICE itself that is already causing the harm. The intimidation of ‘we are here, you cannot escape us’ is the point, and the accounts by the regime are deliberately trying to provoke an outrage. The account doesn’t need to post anything that violates the rules because the intimidation is the presence itself. Bluesky’s Community Guidelines emerged from a moderation paradigm that moderates content (its called content moderation for a reason), and has a structural blind spot for presence-as-speech. Fascists intuitively understand this difference, and are skilled at exploiting it.
The problem is that there is no easy fix for this either. Bluesky board member Mike Masnick formulated this as [Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well](https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/ ). And if content moderation on a platform is already impossible to do well at scale, it is even more impossible to do well at scale when off-platform behaviour were to be considered. Which makes it understandable why a Trust & Safety team would not want to consider off-platform behaviour when enforcing rules.
But Bluesky’s own open protocol makes this all the more difficult the further the network grows. If a fascist publishes a nazi blog under the standard.site lexicon on their own self-hosted PDS, should Bluesky PBC let this account use their Bluesky app? According to the current Community Guidelines the answer is yes: “*These Guidelines only apply to social networking that happens on Bluesky. If you’re using another social networking application on the AT Protocol that isn’t Bluesky Social (a “Developer Application”), the terms and conditions of that Developer Application will govern your experience. We are not responsible for the content or practices of Developer Applications.”*
The fundamental problem is that the way Bluesky is set up, both the company and the app, it is virtually impossible to do moderation that takes off-platform behaviour into account. But if you don’t take off-platform behaviour into account, your principles in the Community Guidelines of Safety and Respect lose their meaning.
The second issue here is that not only let Bluesky have ICE have an account, but that they felt the need to verify this account, after the account had been dormant for a while. Verifications via checkmarks are ostensibly to prevent against misinformation and impersonation, but in practice their main use case is to signal social status, endorsed by the verifier.
Bluesky’s verification system was explicitly designed to distribute trust rather than concentrate it. When launching the system in April 2025, the company [wrote](https://bsky.social/about/blog/04-21-2025-verification ) that trust “emerges from relationships, communities, and shared context,” not just top-down from platforms. The Trusted Verifiers feature allows independent organizations to issue verification badges directly.
This design of the verification system is a good example of the infrastructure/application separation of ATProto, where verification doesn’t have to be a network-wide decision made by Bluesky PBC. Instead the system allows for multiple verification sources with different values and criteria, letting users decide which verifiers they trust.
For government accounts, Bluesky had options. They could have delegated verification to a news organization, a government accountability group, or some other entity willing to take on that role. They could have let ICE exist as an unverified account, authenticated only by its domain handle. Instead, after nearly two months of apparent deliberation, Bluesky PBC verified ICE directly.
Bluesky PBC built a system designed precisely for moments like this, where verification decisions could be distributed and delegated to other actors, rather than centralized. And then, the first time it could have meaningfully applied that distinction, the company defaulted to acting like the platform that decides who gets legitimacy, where they themselves wanted to be the ones that verified ICE.
Let’s be clear here: ICE is conducting a reign of terror, committing excessive violence and murder, with the blessing of the state for its officers to not be bound to the law, with the explicit purpose of baiting people into committing violent responses and stoke the flames and possibility of civil war. The very presence of ICE is to cause terror.
And if your social networking guidelines say “sorry we can’t do anything about this”, something has gone pretty wrong somewhere, in a way that goes beyond just this individual decision itself.
So when fediverse people apply an ActivityPub-style mental model of networked communities to an ATProto model that separates infrastructure from application, how wrong exactly is that, when the company that has built the tools for that distinction does not operate according to them when the pressure is on?
The case of ICE shows two unresolved problems that will only intensify as the ecosystem grows: how to deal with abusive behaviour that happens outside of the app (and especially if it happens outside of the app but on-protocol) but causes harm on it, and how in a world where fascism is a real and existential threat, harms on social networks have evolved from not only being content-based but also being presence-based.
#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr150-on-ice-verification-and-presence-as-harm/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/20250412-11-detail-of-a-building-in-Brugge-Belgium-1024x293.jpg

2026-01-16 16:28:26 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #149 – On Protocol Governance**
The W3C has [announced](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-socialweb/2026Jan/0000.html ) a new Social Web Working Group, starting January 15, 2026, to maintain and update the ActivityPub protoocol. The group will be chaired by Darius Kazemi, who created [Hometown](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown ) Mastodon fork and the [Fediverse Schema Observatory](https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/fediverse-schema-observatory/ ). The aim of the Working Group is to release updates to ActivityPub, and its specifications such as Activity Streams and Activity Vocabulary. Most of the work on the protocol is scheduled to be done by Q3 2026, with the Working Group running until January 2028.
To understand why this matters, some context on how the W3C operates is necessary. The standards organisation distinguishes between Community Groups and Working Groups. Community Groups are open to anyone and serve as incubation spaces for ideas. Since 2018, the Social Web Incubator Community Group (SocialCG) has been the steward of ActivityPub. While Community Groups serve as a grass-roots place, they are very limited in publishing official documentations and formal updates to protocol standards. Working Groups, by contrast, are the bodies that can actually publish official W3C Recommendations, meaning formal standards. Participation in Working Groups is restricted to representatives of W3C member organisations (which pay membership fees on a sliding scale) and invited experts approved by the chair.
ActivityPub became a W3C Recommendation in January 2018, and the protocol work was done by a Working Group. After ActivityPub became an official W3C specification, this Working Group disbanded, and the SocialCG was formed. Since then, the specification has not been formally updated, despite significant implementation experience revealing ambiguities and missing features. The SocialCG has maintained an errata document and developed extensions through the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process, but these carry no official W3C status. The new Working Group changes this by providing a formal path to update the core specification.
Fediverse advocates regularly point to ActivityPub being a W3C standard as a mark of legitimacy, but for the past seven years the organisational structure that created the protocol has also prevented necessary updates to it. The W3C has done a massive service to the community by holding space for the creation of the protocol in 2018. But since then, the same organisational structure that allowed the protocol to be created also slowed down necessary further work on ActivityPub. This shows up both in errata documents not becoming part of the formal documentation, but also larger work on the Client-To-Server part of the ActivityPub needing more work in order to be suitable for larger adoption.
The new Working Group for ActivityPub changes this situation, and there now a formal path to update the core specification, incorporate errata, and potentially advance new work like LOLA (Live Online Account Portability) to official status. LOLA is a proposal for server-to-server account migration that would allow users to move between ActivityPub servers while retaining both their posts and their social graph. Unlike the current Move activity that only migrates followers, LOLA would enable full content portability. The charter includes LOLA as a potential deliverable, which means it could become an official W3C specification rather than remaining a community proposal.
The are some major complicating factor however, and that is about who actually gets to make decisions. The Community Group lacked power to make official chances to ActivityPub, but it did provide an open place for anyone to participate. In contrast, the Working Group requires participants to either be a paid W3C member or to be an Invited Expert. There are only two organisations that are active in the fediverse that are a paid member of the W3C: Meta and the Social Web Foundation. With the Social Web Foundation also receiving funding from Meta, the company that built Threads now has more institutional standing in ActivityPub governance than any of the organisations actually building open fediverse software. Mastodon gGmbH, Framasoft, and others are not W3C members and cannot participate in the Working Group unless they are invited.
This is by all accounts an extremely funny outcome for a network that aims to be independent of Big Tech’s power.
A few nuances to this. It is unclear if Meta will actually participate in the Working Group, and considering they recently put their Threads<>fediverse integration on[ maintenance mode](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-147/ ), there is a good change that Meta has no interest in actually participating. The Working Group also has yet to communicate who the Invited Experts will be. It could theoretically be that Meta is absent from the group, while Mastodon and Framasoft employees are invited to be part of the Working Group.
Another challenge for the W3C Working Group is that there has long been a disconnect between ActivityPub protocol development and the people creating ActivityPub software. While the above makes it sound that fediverse developers are excluded from the protocol development process, the practical reality is also that the developers of the main fediverse platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy have shown very little interest in engaging with the process when it was openly accessible under the SocialCG. This is illustrated by the [meeting](https://github.com/swicg/meetings/tree/main/2025-02-07 ) last year in which the SocialCG voted to charter a Working Group, where no member of any of the fediverse platform developers was actually present. There has long been a disconnect between the people who develop ActivityPub software and the people who maintain the ActivityPub protocol, with only a few notable exceptions.
This matters because of how W3C standards work. The charter’s success criteria states that updating the Recommendation requires “at least two independent implementations of every feature defined in the specification, where interoperability can be verified by passing open test suites.” The Working Group can propose whatever changes it wants, but for those proposals to become part of the official ActivityPub standard, they need to be implemented in actual software.
LOLA, the proposal to improve account portability, is a clear example of this challenge. Already in fall 2024, Lisa Dusseault, the author of the proposal, said that the specification was ready for developers to start testing implementations. The main bottleneck since then has been getting organisations like Mastodon interested in actually building it. The protocol work is largely done, but what remains is the persuasion and coordination to get implementers interested in using it.
The importance of protocol maintenance and further development of ActivityPub points towards responsibilities for software implementors, especially Mastodon as the dominant ActivityPub implementation. Mastodon’s choices become de facto standards whether or not the project engages with formal standardisation processes. The most clear example is how the Mastodon API has effectively taken over from ActivityPub’s Client-to-Server as the dominant protocol that other softwares have to implement. That position comes with obligations, and when Mastodon doesn’t participate in protocol governance, it creates a vacuum where the largest implementer (in this case also Mastodon) is able to set standards for the rest of the network, but without the governance or formal documentation. When protocol development and maintenance in the Working Group happens disconnected from the largest implementations, the specifications that may not reflect implementation realities.
What this situation reveals is that using network architecture to solve issues of power distribution simply shifts bottlenecks rather than eliminating them. A decentralised protocol does not automatically produce decentralised governance, it also moves power to different, less visible places. The W3C membership structure concentrates formal power in ways that don’t reflect the fediverse’s values, while the implementers who could counterbalance that power have largely opted out of the process. The new Working Group creates an opportunity to address both problems, but who gets to shape the specifications of ActivityPub depends on both who is allowed to participate, as well as who is willing show up and do the work.
#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-148-on-protocol-governance/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/20241129-09-Detail-of-building-in-Amsterdam-North-1024x293.jpg

2025-10-31 15:44:54 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #141**
Mastodon is working towards making one of the longstanding pain points of the fediverse a thing of the past, with the new ability to show all replies to a post. Bonfire is making strides with their Open Science Network platform, and Ghost is now the most popular server software on the fediverse.##
The News
Mastodon is [talking about their latest 4.5 update](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/mastodon-4-5-for-devs/ ) and what that means for developers. One important feature is for Mastodon servers to find missing replies, one of the longstanding pain points of the fediverse. When you view a conversation on Mastodon, you don’t always see all the responses because posts are unevenly spread across different servers.Mastodon 4.5 tackles the missing replies problem with an automatic background fetch system. The feature was introduced in 4.4 but is now enabled by default with UI support. Since this background process takes time, Mastodon introduces a new feature for developers called AsyncRefresh. This tells apps that the server is still gathering replies, and apps can then refresh the conversation once everything’s loaded.
The [Bonfire project](https://bonfirenetworks.org/ ) allows for various types of fediverse platforms to be build. Bonfire can be used to build social platforms, this is called the Bonfire Social part. But Bonfire is also working towards an Open Science version of the platform, called [Open Science Network](https://openscience.network/ ). The platform connects to various scientific integrations, such as persistent researcher identifiers (ORCID), archival repositories and DOIs, and federated open-science infrastructure so discussion can become formalised, creditable and preserved. A demo video of what that looks like can be seen [here](https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/115337763879300622 ). Bonfire says they expect to have a 1.0 release candidate ready before the end of the year. In other science-to-fediverse connections: [Encyclia](https://fietkau.social/@encyclia/115396388388861622 ) is a bridge that connects ORCID records to the fediverse, and they started [bridging](https://encyclia.pub/alpha ) the first few researchers ORCID’s accounts to the fediverse.
In the three months since Ghost has launched their fediverse integration, around [10k Ghost servers](https://bsky.app/profile/johnonolan.bsky.social/post/3m4fwcrzku227 ) have turned on federation. This makes Ghost now the most popular server software on the fediverse, if you’re counting the number of servers, with around 30% of total fediverse servers now Ghost servers. In terms of server software is long-form writing highly popular in general, the second most popular software is WordPress , with 28% of servers running the WordPress. When it comes to active accounts it is quite a different story however, with Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy together making up 90% of active accounts on the network.
A new [research paper](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3757688 ) that looks at how people on Mastodon curate their feeds. They write: “In summary, we found that while most participants clearly preferred chronologically ordered feeds, they were not completely against algorithms. In fact, we learned that people find chronological ordering most valuable when they check their feeds frequently, as it provides a timely overview of activities during their absence. However, they identified some scenarios in which algorithm intervention can be useful. For example, when they haven’t checked their feeds for longer, they express a desire for algorithmic recommendations to highlight missed content tailored to their interests. They disliked the machine learning algorithmic recommendations due to the lack of agency and transparency.” To me there is a large space for the fediverse to further evolve regarding feeds. While it largely depends on a single chronological following feed, even within that space there is lots of room for innovation and new ideas (see Phanpy’s Catchup). It feels to me that many people are placing value on only having a chronological following feed due to their bad experiences with algorithmic recommendation feeds. While the harms of these kinds of algorithmic feeds are clear, there seems to be little interest in the fediverse to explore what other versions of healthy feeds would look like.
IFTAS’s Jaz-Michael King [writes](https://jaz.co.uk/2025/10/30/there-is-one-fediverse-there-are-a-million-pickleball-courts/ ) about the fediverse and how we can create better social networking places. King: “That’s why the fediverse shouldn’t be chasing migrations. We don’t need to become the next Twitter. We need to be the first of something else.Growth will come, but not by chasing the habits of a declining model. Growth will come when we fully embrace what makes the fediverse distinct.”
Loops is continuing to get closer to being a fully federated short-forum video platform. The loops.video flagship server is now [federating](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/115450290809716223 ) with the rest of the network. However, the Loops apps for Android and iOS can are still incompatible with this latest version, so for now the Loops.video server cannot be used via the apps. Creator Daniel Supernault [says](https://loops.video/pages/beta-mobile-app-update-10-28-25 ) that these updates will be “soon”, a term for which he holds a fairly wide definition of, historically.
Hilda Bastian wrote a blog about how ‘[A Mastodon Migration From Bluesky Would Be Different’](https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/10/30/a-mastodon-migration-from-bluesky-would-be-different/ ), that got popular on the fediverse. Many people highlighted the quote ““I’m going back to the Fediverse. Back to Mastodon. To the nerds, the hobbyists, the idealists. The people who don’t talk about reach, but about relevance. To those who understand that decentralization isn’t nostalgic, it’s the future. That digital sovereignty isn’t a gimmick, it’s a survival strategy. Yes, the Fediverse is sometimes clunky, nerdy, uncomfortable. But it belongs to us. It’s not over-regulated, not driven by capital, not buggered up by algorithms. It’s what social media once aspired to be: A network of people, not brands.“
What I find interesting about the quote is that it describes the self-identification of the fediverse very well. The fediverse is indeed clunky and nerdy, operated by hobbyists and idealists. It’s one of the main powers that allows the network to sustain itself for so long. But I do feel that people who highlight this in an approving manner do not really grapple with the extent these same characteristics interfere with goals to make the fediverse a mainstream platform. What makes the fediverse appealing for it’s current user base is not what makes it appealing to a wide audience. There’s an uncomfortable tension here: growth and mainstream appeal of the fediverse might just make it lose what people enjoy. Or even stronger: these same characteristics of nerdy clunkiness is also what it prevents from mainstream growth.##
The Links<li>A <a href="https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2025/10/27/a-minute-from-the-moderators/">blog post</a> by the Hachderm.io server moderators on “How can you use mental health to protect yourself online?” as a fediverse moderator.</li><li>Fediverse marketplace platform Flohmarket is <a href="https://mastodon.xyz/@Profpatsch/115453765333062690">working</a> on the ability to log into the platform with any fediverse account.</li><li><a href="https://framapiaf.org/@peertube/115457577086395939">PeerTube is now 10 years old!</a></li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/objects/019a17cf-e370-2278-c196-713c73e5cdea">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li>A <a href="https://furry.engineer/@soatok/115429079922221582">currently-in-development project</a> to add E2EE to the fediverse.</li>#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-141/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-15-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2025-10-14 16:37:31 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #138**##
The NewsWeDistribute has [published an extensive overview](https://wedistribute.org/2025/10/wafrn-chaotic-good/ ) and review of [Wafrn](https://app.wafrn.net/dashboard ), the Tumblr-like platform that is both on the fediverse as well as on ATProto. Wafrn is a unique platform in the open social web, and it is the first and only platform that fully integrates both protocols. The name Wafrn explains the tone of the project well: it stands for ‘We Allow Female Representing Nipples’, which is a reference to the language Tumblr used when they banned porn. Because Wafrn natively integrates both protocols, there is no bridging involved like there is with Bridgy Fed, and a Wafrn account connects with all accounts on both networks, although the ATProto features are somewhat limited and not all implemented. Wafrn also recently released a new feature to [migrate your Bluesky account](https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/61a60b96-2937-49fd-811c-60c923d8b18b ) to a Wafrn server. This gives another option for people who are looking to move away from Bluesky and are interested in the fediverse, without having to give up their connection to the rest of the Bluesky network.
Short-form video platform Loops has [announced](https://blog.joinloops.org/loops-joins-the-fediverse/ ) it is joining the fediverse. In an announcement post, creator Daniel Supernault explains that Loops has now implemented support for ActivityPub. The [marketing](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks ) on Loops and the fediverse was always a bit fuzzy, while it was advertised as a fediverse platform, the actual fediverse integration was still in development. With this update, Loops is now using ActivityPub. However, this does not go for the main Loops server, Loops.video, just yet, as Supernault [says](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/115372103940864789 ) that he is “working on an updated app build that supports the new APIs and other servers besides just the hardcoded loops.video server!” Supernault [says](https://loops.video/ ) that this will happen ‘this week’, although the project has missed deadlines before. Still, for those people who are self-hosting a Loops server, the code for federation is now indeed available.
In the update, Supernault also talks about some of the technical design choices that he’s made for federation with Loops. Loops servers use the ‘Note’ content type to send out the videos. This means that a Loops video is effectively quite similar to a microblog made on a platform like Mastodon or Misskey, which also use the ‘Note’ type. Most platforms indeed use ‘Note’, as this allows for compatibility with Mastodon. ActivityPub allows for a wide variety of content types (called Activities, which is where the protocol gets its name from), but in practice most platforms fall back to ‘Note’, even when other types (like ‘video’ for Loops) would make more sense. It indicates one of the challenges of the open-ended nature of how ActivityPub works: the protocol allows for a diverse set of Activities, but in practice it is more beneficial for most platforms to fall back to a single type, that all other platforms also use.
[An excellent overview of last week’s FediForum](https://thenewstack.io/everything-big-starts-small-building-open-social-web-apps/ ) by Richard MacManus for The New Stack. MacManus covers the keynote speech, as well as some of the products that were demoed at the event: alternative app store AltStore, how you can now move your Mastodon account to Bluesky with Bounce, as well as two platforms currently in development that are getting close to release: the privacy-focused photo sharing app Frequency, and the monetisation platform CrowdBucks.
Pandacap is a single-user artwork gallery and feed reading platform, that supports a wide range of protocols. It supports ActivityPub, ATProto, RSS. It also has the option to crosspost your image posts and text posts to attached DeviantArt, Fur Affinity, or Weasyl accounts. Pandacap does not have a timeline like most platform, instead opting for a design that centers around an inbox, similar to feed reading apps for RSS. Pandacap has been around for a bit, but I had completely missed it and don’t think I had ever covered it before.
PeerTube is now [officially](https://framapiaf.org/@peertube/115366743864181446 ) recognised as a [Digital Public Good](https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/r/peertube ). A digital public good recognized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance is an open-source resource that uses approved open licenses and demonstrably supports at least one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). For PeerTube this means that it contributes to SDG 9, which aims to “significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries. PeerTube also contributes to the SDG for developing “effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels” and ensuring “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.”
Fedify, the ActivityPub server framework that [secured two sources of funding last week](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-137/ ), has a major new [update](https://hollo.social/@fedify/0199e1ef-5007-7465-b784-de987439f98c ), with security enhancements, improved DX, and expanded framework support.
An [extensive interview](https://www.projets-libres.org/en/podcast-en/open-source-publishers-mobilizon-sharing-the-events-of-its-communities-in-the-fediverse/ ) with the creators of event planning app Mobilizon. Mobilizon got created by Framasoft, the organisation who also builds PeerTube. Framasoft saw the project as completed, and handed the further development over to Kaihuri, a small French organisation who also runs one of the most active Mobilizon instances. The Project Libres podcast interviews Alexandra, one of the two people behind Kaihuri, in French, but a transcript in English is available. ##
The Links<li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/0199cfeb-216a-fe8c-33b9-014862b4405a">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://video.fedihost.co/w/gt2QJzod4UKHQ8Z9jb3USB">The Solo Instance Problem</a> – a PeerTube video by FediHost in which they talk about some of the challenges for self-hosting a solo instance for the fediverse.</li><li>The Social Web Foundation <a href="https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/10/10/interview-with-john-onolan-about-ghost-6/">talks</a> with Ghost CEO John O’Nolan about Ghost 6 and ActivityPub.</li><li><a href="https://discoverfedi.app/">DiscoverFedi.app</a> is a new site that lets you explore other instance’s timelines in various manners, with an <a href="https://mkultra.monster/social-media/2025/10/13/discover-fedi/">accompanying blog post</a> explaining the project.</li>#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-138/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-08-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2025-10-09 14:17:37 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #137**##
The NewsAltStore, an alternative app store for iOS, is [joining](https://rileytestut.com/blog/2025/10/07/evolving-altstore-pal/ ) the fediverse. The store launched early last year as an alternative to Apple’s own App Store, thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. AltStore has been growing over the last year, and is now taking the next steps. AltStore is now connecting to the fediverse via their own Mastodon server. The integration that AltStore has build consists of every app on the store automatically also becoming a fediverse account, hosted on their [AltStore Mastodon server.](https://explore.alt.store/about ) They explain: “Using ActivityPub, we plan to federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web. Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore.” For now, they are using the microblogging format (ActivityPub ‘Notes’), but AltStore plans to publish new native ActivityPub objects specifically for software releases, that can be used by other fediverse app market places.
The organisation also has raised 6M USD in VC funding for further development. They believe that the long-term success of the AltStore is tied closely to the success of the open social web, and they are donation 500k USD to various fediverse projects. AltStore is donating 300k USD to Mastodon, and the other 200k USD is split across various fediverse projects: the bridging software Bridgy Fed (which AltStore uses to also connect their store to Bluesky), the fediverse clients Ivory, Phoenix and Tapestry, the mastodon server mstn.social (as operator Stux is also a regular publisher to the AltStore), and the platforms Akkoma, PeerTube and Bookwyrm, as well as the Fedify ActivityPub software framework.
Recently I [wrote](https://connectedplaces.online/blueskyism-political-violence-and-open-social-networks-under-authoritarianism/ ) about how the app stores are the most likely choke point that authoritarian governments will use to apply pressure to force open social web platforms into compliance. Alternative ways of distributing apps that fall outside of the control of two Big Tech platforms is a crucial part of keeping the open social web open. AltStore connecting their marketplace to the fediverse is a great step into taking back control from these two gatekeepers, although much more work remains to be done. Over on ATProto people are also experimenting with distributing apps and software packages via the protocol, and the space of app distribution via open protocols is primed for more experimentation and projects.
Mastodon has shared more [information](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/ ) on their upcoming plans to introduce ‘Packs’ to Mastodon. The design is based on Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which is a list of accounts you can create and share for other people to easily follow. Mastodon is taking a careful approach to designing the feature, and is actively soliciting feedback from the community. The main change that Mastodon is making is in giving people control over if and when they can appear in a Pack, as well as giving people the ability to easily remove their account from a Pack if they so desire.
One of the pain points for Starter Packs on Bluesky is that people got included on Starter Packs with no easy way to remove them from the list. When the Starter Pack got popular, that resulted in an account getting lots of new followers, but in a way that collapsed the context of the account, resulting in conflict. One of the [challenge](https://bsky.app/profile/old.ruffruff.party/post/3m2mlrosqf22r ) points with Starter Packs is that the identity of an account does not always match with what they are actually posting about. For example, if someone has a PhD in philosophy and sometimes posts about that, they might get added to a philosophy Starter Pack. But in practice they might mostly post about US politics, or reposts anime, which creates a mismatch in expectation and friction between the original account and the new follower from a Starter Pack.
Bluesky’s Starter Pack have gotten a lot of praise for their effectiveness in onboarding entire communities at the same time during migration waves, when entire communities move from one platform to another all at once. This seems to be one of the major reasons for Mastodon to also adopt a similar feature with Packs. But for Bluesky, the feature has turned out to be a mixed bag, with the developer who created Starter Packs being decidedly [mixed](https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2mldbsmys2t ) on the feature herself. She [says](https://bsky.app/profile/hailey.at/post/3m2mlvt4jtc2c ) that Starter Packs are indeed highly valuable during migration waves, but that in other times they are susceptible to abuse for engagement-hacking, as well as the context collapse earlier. Mastodon is taking a careful approach with their Pack feature, and they are [actively engaging](https://bsky.app/profile/jenson.org/post/3m2ntqrfm7k2j ) with the learnings from Bluesky, so it’ll be interesting to see how the feature will turn out in Mastodon.
You can soon [transfer](https://blog.anew.social/bounce-mastodon-to-bluesky/ ) your social graph from Mastodon to Bluesky, with the new version of Bounce. [Bounce](https://bounce.anew.social/ ) is a tool by A New Social, the organisation behind the bridging software that connects various open social web protocol. With Bounce, you can move your account from one social networking protocol to another. The organisation [earlier released a version](https://blog.anew.social/bounce-beta-now-live/ ) which allows you to port your Bluesky account to the fediverse. With the new update, which will be available on October 20, you can now do the same in reverse: move from the fediverse to Bluesky.
The projects by A New Social, both Bounce and Bridgy Fed, represent an effort to give people more control over their own digital identity and social graph. Both ActivityPub and ATProto give people the option to move their account to a different platform on the same protocol. With tools like Bounce, this capability is enhanced even more, with the ability to move an account to a different protocol as well. For people more interested in moving from Bluesky to the fediverse, the tool [Slurp](https://github.com/VyrCossont/slurp?tab=readme-ov-file#downloading-and-importing-a-bluesky-archive ) now allows you to import your Bluesky posts into your fediverse account.
Fediverse podcasting platform Castopod now has a [repository](https://blog.castopod.org/official-castopod-plugin-repository/ ) for plugins for the platform. With [plugins](https://plugins.castopod.org/?page=1 ) people can customise their Castopod instance to their own needs. As anyone can create plugins, this allows for greater diversity in development of the software. Castopod also announced during this week’s Fediforum that there are now over [1000 podcasts](https://index.castopod.org/ ) using Castopod.
A pro-Russian propaganda network has [targeted](https://about.iftas.org/2025/10/05/coordinated-pro-russian-propaganda-network-targeting-activitypub-and-atproto-services/ ) the fediverse and Bluesky, “promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations”, IFTAS reports. Their findings are based on the work of the [antibot4navalny research team](https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3m22256476k25 ), which notes that the campaign makes use of the Bridgy Fed to get their accounts that impersonate news organisations into Bluesky.
The ActivityPub framework Fedify has gotten a [192K EUR grant](https://hollo.social/@fedify/0199a579-adb3-7bf5-a8ea-970c8fa91f09 ) by the Sovereign Tech Fund to further strenghten the ecosystem. The grant will be used for further development of the framework. Fedify is already in use by Ghost, and is also supported by Ghost.
Mastodon is [soliciting](https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115328251385808942 ) feedback for their new Terms of Service for their mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers. The organisation originally proposed a new ToS in June, but retracted those after criticism from the community. ##
The Links<li><a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/10/getting-started-with-mastodons-quote-posts-technical-implementation-details-for-servers/">Getting started with Mastodon’s Quote Posts – technical implementation details for servers</a></li><li><a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/37159433">Lemmy development update for September 2025.</a></li><li><a href="https://openchannels.fm/how-decentralized-social-platforms-grew-from-identica-to-modern-day-mastodon/">How Decentralized Social Platforms Grew from Identica to Modern-Day Mastodon</a> – a podcast interview with Evan Prodromou by WordPress-ActivityPub developer Matthias Pfefferle.</li><li><a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/trunk-tidbits-september-2025/">Trunks & Tidbits, Mastodon’s monthly engineering blog, for September 2025.</a></li><li>A new <a href="https://fediversobr.org/">forum</a> for the Brazilian fediverse community.</li>#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-137/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-07-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2025-10-02 16:47:59 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #136**##
The News[Newsmast](https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/ ), the UK organisation that helps news organisations create their own social media places on the fediverse, has taken a new direction. In a [blog post](https://www.blog-pat.ch/building-apps-for-social-spaces/ ) founder Michael Foster describes how news organisations do not gel well with the original approach of either Mastodon servers or the channel.org communities. The finding of Newsmast is that this is too confusing and tech-centric for news organisations to really grasp. Instead, Newsmast is now going in the direction of apps, as “independent news publishers and campaigning organisations love the idea of having an app.” The product offering is that Newsmast creates a white-label of an app that uses their (fediverse-enabled) backend, which the news organisation can theme and customise to their needs. This gives news organisations an app, which is what they want and conceptually relate to, while also giving them a community that can connect to the wider open social web if they want to. Newsmast has already rolled out one of such apps, for the Media Revolution campaign. Foster says that they are about to start working with a UK-based Fediverse community for another such project, where the Newsmast white-label app will be used to create a customised app for the community.
A new [paper](https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/6644/6411 ) by [Christina Dunbar-Hester](https://assemblag.es/@inquiline/115255339883075174 ) about her experiences dealing with targeted harrassment on Mastodon, describing what some of the moderation practices in a decentralised system actually looks like. She writes: “As currently configured, Mastodon values noncentralization, but it stops short of rewriting power relations to encodeheterogeneity (Suchman, 2002). FLOSS universalism and FLOSS relations of domination pervade both the user base and many (certainly not all) “power users” who assume control of and take responsibility for many of the parts of the network through moderationand administration roles.” The entire paper is worth reading, Dunbar-Hester concludes: “a possibility for a more accountable decentralized social media network might *resemble* Mastodon, but prioritize intentional, self-organized choices about *equitable* online sociality that foreground social power”.
[ActivityPub Fuzzer](https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/2025/10/01/introducing-the-asml-activitypub-fuzzer-improving-testing-in-the-fediverse/ ) is a new tool to help ActivityPub developers test their interoperability with other fediverse projects. Fuzzer is a program that runs locally, and emulates how other fediverse projects structure their messages. This allows a developer to test interoperability against a large array of fediverse platforms. The open nature of ActivityPub makes it so that interoperability between platforms is trickier than it might be assumed, with various platforms all having their slightly different interpretations of the protocol. Fuzzer is created by Darius Kazemi at the Applied Social Media Lab.
IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust And Safety organisation has [announced](https://about.iftas.org/2025/09/29/sunsetting-iftas-connect/ ) they are shutting down the IFTAS Connect community at the end of the month. The IFTAS Connected community was a place for fediverse moderators to come together and have conversations about moderation, share resources and more. IFTAS also runs their yearly moderator [Needs Assessment survey](https://about.iftas.org/2025/08/11/the-2025-fediverse-needs-assessment-is-open-have-your-say/ ), and one of the consistent [findings](https://about.iftas.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Fediverse-Trust-Safety-Needs-Assessment-Report-2024.pdf ) is that fediverse moderators often struggle with guidance, toolings and burnout. Such a community was meant as a place for moderators to connect with each other and help towards those issues. However, IFTAS found that after 18 months of operating the place, usage remained low. It indicates one of the persistent challenges for fediverse moderation: moderation is largely done by each server independently, with little cooperation between communities which have a lot in common. There is a large potential in the fediverse for collaboration between communities, but making this collaboration happen has proven to be challenging.
WordPress is continuing towards becoming a full fediverse platform with their ActivityPub plugin. The latest update of the plugin now [supports](https://activitypub.blog/2025/10/01/7-5-0-follow-the-feed-quote-the-lead/ ) following a ‘reader timeline’, showing all the posts of accounts you follow from your WordPress account. There is now also support for Mastodon’s new quote posting feature, allowing you to quote post the WordPress post from Mastodon.
Matthias Pfefferle, developer of the WordPress ActivityPub integration, also talked on his [podcast](https://notiz.blog/podcasts/exploring-wordpress-textcasting-and-open-web-standards/ ) to Dave Weiner, creator of the RSS standard, about WordPress, textcasting and open web standards.
Bandwagon, the fediverse platform for music sharing, discovery and sales, shares their [updates](https://bandwagon.fm/2025-september ) of the last few months, with various improvements to the platform across the board. Developer Ben Pate says that the next big priority is to add account migration. Elsewhere in fediverse music, a [blog post](https://nham.co.uk/2025/09/how-indie-video-killed-the-spotify-star/ ) on how to revive indie music videos on the fediverse.
A selection of [tools](https://lemmy.lvanrem.com/ ) for Lemmy, which gives you the option to view trends, threadiverse statistics, a leaderboard of most active users, stats on individual users, and more.
Fediverse advocate Elena Rossini has published an extensive [fediverse starter guide](https://news.elenarossini.com/my-fediverse-starter-guide/ ). The guide explains what the fediverse is ([via her excellent video](https://videos.elenarossini.com/w/64VuNCccZNrP4u9MfgbhkN )), the various types of software that are available, the values of the fediverse, and why it matters. It is these last two points I think are noteworthy: the fediverse is inherently a political project, and it is important to understand the values of the network as a context of why the network exists and why people care about it.##
The Links<li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/019987c8-484d-f913-d511-5e8329f9741f">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li>A <a href="https://rasterweb.net/raster/2025/09/26/mapping-bike-rides-part-iv/">blog post</a> on how to map your bike rides using the fediverse <a href="https://wanderer.to/">wanderer.to</a> platform.</li><li>A blog post reflecting on the <a href="https://destructured.net/labeling-politics-mastodon">Labeling politics on Mastodon.</a></li><li>The Fireside Fedi livestream had episodes talking about <a href="https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/hetrYEY5ZBYFNjKtdyEBhS?start=3s">ActivityPub, the W3C and more with Ben Goering</a>, and with <a href="https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/osXBTapZ1ocYoyYwkXEzgi">Reiver about FediCon and CrowdBucks.</a></li><li>Utrecht University (shout-out to my alma mater) <a href="https://dub.uu.nl/nl/nieuws/directie-its-wil-dat-uuers-mastodon-gaan-gebruiken">wants their students to use Mastodon.</a></li><li>Fediverse advocate Chris Trottier is in the process of setting up a <a href="https://atomicpoet.org/objects/2289eb47-0f39-463d-a056-8568e12e70f3">PeerTube co-op</a>.</li>#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-136-2/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-03-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2025-09-23 16:19:54 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #135**
Last week I wrote an article about Bluesky, political violence and how language is actively being shaped in a way that sets up for a potential future crackdown on Bluesky by the authoritarian regime. The article is on the surface about Bluesky, but I think it is relevant to the fediverse as well. The main idea is that the open social networks are actively being framed as a place for ‘left’ people and democrats, while at the same time there are louder calls for the US government to crack down on all left and democratic spaces. Furthermore, an [article](https://thefederalist.com/2025/09/15/we-can-give-no-clemency-to-the-assassination-left/ ) by the Federalist lays out what strategy might likely be used: leverage the control over the app stores.
https://connectedplaces.online/blueskyism-political-violence-and-open-social-networks-under-authoritarianism/##
The NewsMastodon is [launching](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/09/service-offerings-from-mastodon/ ) paid services to make money beyond donations and grants. The company will now offer hosting, moderation, and support services for organisations that want their own servers on the fediverse. The new services target organisations that want their own presence on the fediverse, but lack the operational capacity to manage a Mastodon server. Mastodon will handle server setup and maintenance, and optionally provide moderation services as well. The organisation says this will create steady income while keeping their donation-based model.
This new service is mainly targeted at institutions, and so far, Mastodon has onboarded three government agencies. The most high profile is the European Commission’s Mastodon server, as well as a German state and a French city. In the announcement post, the organisation is clearly aware of the potential criticism of how this might interfere with goals of decentralisation. But with the number of fediverse servers in the tens of thousands, the fediverse is in a state where onboarding a additional institutions via managed servers will likely increase, not decrease, the resilience of the network. My personal observation working with the onboarding of governmental organisations in the past is that one of the main barriers is that of institutional capacity. Even when a government organisation has decided they want to have a presence on the fediverse, a significant amount of the challenge in getting there is figuring out internal responsibilities and capabilities. Virtually no (government) organisation has experience with handling these new types of questions, like how to handle moderation for example. As the fediverse grows and it becomes normalised for organisations to run their own fediverse server to handle their social networking presence, organisations can build up institutional capacity to easily run their own server. In the meantime, Mastodon’s new service can bridge the gap for organisations who want to build their own independent social networking presence, but does not have the capacity to manage everything that this entails.
[Gaza Verified](https://gaza-verified.org/ ) is a grassroots initiative in the fediverse to verify the accounts of Palestinians in Gaza. The ongoing genocide in Gaza has lead to Palestinians to internet platform for fundraising and donations. This in turn has also caused scammers to take advantage of the situation by creating fake accounts pretending to be Palestinians and create [scam fundraisers](https://sakurajima.moe/@s/115250159033335278 ). This creates a challenge for moderation teams, for whom it is [challenging](https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/115253133115411433 ) to figure out how to know if you are dealing with a real or scam fundraiser. Gaza Verified aims to help by having people known within the fediverse community have Signal video calls with the accounts of Palestinians on the fediverse, as well as keeping regularly in touch with them. In turn they use the Mastodon verification system to provide credibility. The Gaza Verified project also held a general fundraiser for all the Gaza Verified people, [raising more than 22k USD](https://gaza-verified.org/emergency/ ).
PieFed 1.2 [update](https://piefed.social/post/1279106#post_replies ) includes a variety of new features, including support for events and the ability to be reminded about a post in the future. It also allows admins to restrict NSFW content in certain countries. This helps with compliance for age verification laws, such as the UK’s OSA.
[Best-o-Masto](https://birchtree.me/blog/introducing-best-o-masto/ ) is an alternative Mastodon client with a limited and specific purpose: “When you open the app, it shows you the 20 most popular posts from accounts you follow in the last few hours. You can favourite those posts, boost them, or open them in a real Mastodon client, and that’s about it.” Best-o-Masto is available for iOS and iPadOS for free.
[Flare](https://flareapp.moe/ ) is a new open source client that combines all open social networks into a single client. Flare supports Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey, and RSS. It cannot yet combine all those post into a single unified timeline, a feature that is still on the roadmap. This compares to a similar app like [Openvibe](https://openvibe.social/ ), which also supports Nostr and Threads. Flare also has a local history, where it saves posts from your feeds locally, which can then be searched by you later. This feature, of saving posts locally for search, caused a great amount of in early 2023 in the fediverse with [Searchtodon](https://searchtodon.social/Adventures-in-Mastoland.html ). How this feature in Flare will be perceived now, 2,5 years later, might be a good indication if values have shifted on the fediverse.##
The Links<li>The German minister of Digitalisation <a href="https://social.bund.de/@BMDS/115231008702916101">addresses the Mastodon community</a> in a short video.</li><li>The <a href="https://catodon.social/notes/acw8haqar91a1s9d">Catodon project is shutting down</a>. Catodon was a fork-of-a-fork of Misskey, and the announcement post has more details on the background of the project as well.</li><li>PeerTube latest app <a href="https://framapiaf.org/@peertube/115247835478732259">update</a> allows you to download videos.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/01996401-5448-91c3-6b99-781bc3b76916">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://hackers.pub/@cocoa/2025/how-to-build-a-simple-activitypub-reminder-bot-in-python">How to Build a Simple ActivityPub Reminder Bot in Python</a>.</li>https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-135/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-04-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2025-09-16 15:59:52 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #134**##
The NewsMastodon is finally [introducing](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/09/introducing-quote-posts/ ) quote posts to their software, with the feature rolling out next week to the servers managed by Mastodon itself, and becoming available in Mastodon 4.5 soon after. Mastodon always had a significant worry that quote posts would lead to ‘dunking’ behaviour, where people would quote post someone else for clout. This is visible in how Mastodon has implemented the feature, and how their blog posts introduces the feature: it sees quote posts as a powerful tool that can easily be misused. That is why Mastodon has focused on giving users control over who can quote their posts; you can select per post if you want nobody, everybody, or only your followers to be able to quote your posts. You are also able to change this after you’ve made a post and somebody quotes your post in a manner you are do not want. In that case you can remove your original post from the other person’s quote post.
Giving people more control over how their data can be used is a great thing, and Mastodon adding quote posts in a manner that allows for people to determine how and if their posts can be quoted is a good implementation choice. Mastodon’s concern regarding the potential for harm with dunking does need some context however, researcher Hilda Bastian has a [highly detailed overview](https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/01/12/quote-tweeting-over-30-studies-dispel-some-myths/ ) of over 30 studies on quote posts on Twitter and their impact. Bastian notes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.” Bluesky added a[ similar feature for quote posts](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/29/24231414/bluesky-anti-toxicity-features-detach-posts-from-quotes ) in summer 2024, also allowing people to select when their posts can be quoted, and also described them as anti-toxicity features. I’m not aware of any study on how this feature on Bluesky affected toxic behaviour.
Bridgy Fed, the software that connects ActivityPub with Bluesky’s AT Protocol, has gotten a new [feature](https://blog.anew.social/launch-dm-notifications/ ) where you will get notified of interactions from non-bridged accounts. When you ‘bridge’ your account, it allows people on the other social network to interact with your posts. When someone replies to you on the other protocol, and they also have your account bridged, the replies show up on your posts, as if you were interacting with each other over the same protocol. But if the other person on the other network replies to a post, and they have not bridged their account, these replies are not visible, as they’ve not consented to getting their data send out on the other protocol. As such it becomes easy to miss interactions with your post that happen on the other protocol.
A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, has launched an update where you will now get an hourly digest DM with links to the interactions on the other network. And if you do not want to receive the DMs, you can alter this in the [Bridgy Fed settings page](https://fed.brid.gy/login ), or with a simple ‘mute’ as a reply.
The .world cluster is a group of fediverse servers all managed by FediHosting Foundation. The cluster contains servers such as the mastodon.world server and the lemmy.world server, which makes it one of the largest admins of fediverse users. The organisation shared an [update](https://blog.mastodon.world/september-2025-updates-for-the-worlds-and-call-for-donations ), where they announced that they’ve expanded with a new piefed.world server. They also gave an update on their finances, with costs around 2000 USD per month, but income having dropped to around 1300 USD due to less donations. As the .world cluster of servers represents a significant portion of the fediverse, and contains the largest threadiverse server with lemmy.world, the financial health of the cluster is worth paying attention to.
A small piece of news that I think is worth highlighting: the iOS client IceCubes will [not have support](https://mastodon.social/@dimillian/115151813462684558 ) for the GoToSocial software, because the GoToSocial Code of Conduct prohibits contributions that are generated by AI. Every software is political in some form, and fediverse software makes the political aspect of software much more explicit. The fediverse talks about the plural politics of people often in terms of servers and moderation. By having many different servers, people can join the community that they align with. What’s interesting to me about this disagreement between GoToSocial and IceCubes is that this can extent to software itself as well. There is value in having multiple different clients that all offer roughly the same function, and having multiple different microblogging platforms that all do the same thing of posting. Software is political, and that people can express their politics via the software they choose is a good thing about the fediverse.##
The Links<li><a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/09/trunk-tidbits-august-2025/">Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks & Tidbits, for August 2025.</a></li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/01993fe3-2dac-3533-6a81-9e653c9d94e0">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li>An <a href="https://pc.cafe/@fedicat/115186898466034123">updated list</a> of all 37 Mastodon iOS apps that are currently actively maintained on the Apple App Store.</li><li>The Fireside Fedi show t<a href="https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/q3z3C6JrpitEUxwFmwiTUo">alks with NodeBB creator Julian Lam</a>.</li><li><a href="https://joinpeertube.org/news/release-7.3">PeerTube v7.3 is out</a>, and it adds additional customisation features for admins, as well as the ability to schedule live streams.</li>#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-134/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/20250718-02-Detail-of-the-city-Luik-1024x293.jpg

2025-08-12 16:24:19 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #129**##
The News[SocialHub](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ ) is a Discourse forum that has served as the main ActivityPub discussion forum for a long time. The platform might shut down on September 10th, as the current platform operators have stated that [unless](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-community-values-policy/1391/106 ) they can find a community that is willing to take over the infrastructure, they will shut down the platform. SocialHub has been run since 2019 by the small organisation called [Petites Singularités](https://ps.lesoiseaux.io/ ), although in effect the administration of the platform came largely down to a [single](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/step-down-considerably/5474?u=laurens ) administrator. The current administrator Hellekin is also [explicit](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-community-values-policy/1391/106 ) in looking for a team of multiple people to take over, not a single individual, and other requirements for the new team are [implied](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/step-down-considerably/5474/4 ) as well. There have been offers from individuals to take over the technical aspect, but there is less interested in the community management type of work.
A number of fediverse developers also [question](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-developer-community-reboot-or-shutdown/5445/44?u=laurens ) the value that SocialHub still can bring, who see that most fediverse developers have already left SocialHub, or were never even a part of it in the first place. It is easy to [hypothesise](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-developer-community-reboot-or-shutdown/5445/46?u=laurens ) a ActivityPub developer platform that contains reference material, documentations and lively discussions. But as Arnold Schrijver [points](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-developer-community-reboot-or-shutdown/5445/47?u=laurens ) out, it is “much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.” Other efforts such as [fedidevs.org](https://fedidevs.org/ ) have largely petered out, and it is unclear if there is enough interest from developers to collaborate on maintaining such a place.
Reading the conversations about SocialHub makes it clear that people can point to the various issues with how SocialHub functioned and what potential improvements could look like. But any changes to SocialHub beyond “a forum used by a sub-section of the community where people occasionally ask questions” requires community building, which takes significant time and effort by skilled people to do so. While there are people willing to contribute technical admin skills as well as financial support, it is the community management part that is more challenging to find.
The challenge remains that SocialHub, even though most ActivityPub developers do not participate in that forum, is the primary forum for discussing ActivityPub, by virtue of no other prominent other forum existing as a place for developer conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub. It leads to a challenging situation:<li>Most <a href="https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialhub-developer-community-reboot-or-shutdown/5445/69?u=laurens">conversations</a> about the fediverse and ActivityPub do not take place on SocialHub.</li><li>There is value in having a place for conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub that is focused on longer conversations and not dependent on one’s social graph.</li><li>For a number of reasons a significant number of fediverse developers see SocialHub as not a great place for such conversations.</li><li>There is no consensus on what a different place would look like, what its purpose is, and who should run such a place.</li><li>Even if someone where to start a new place, or take over SocialHub, it is unclear if developers would actually participate in such an effort.</li><li>The current administrator of SocialHub is looking for a group of multiple people with a coherent idea of how to create SocialHub into a community platform, but with most developers acting as individuals all with slightly different ideas, it is unclear if such a group can be found.</li>
As of right now it is unsure if a solution can be reached, either by rebooting SocialHub or by creating a new place for conversations about the fediverse. Last week I [wrote](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/ ) that FediCon shows that there is value in having fediverse developers meet together. While it’s good to see this happening offline, having spaces for conversations online is important as well.
A list published by [Drop News Site](https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/meta-facebook-tech-copyright-privacy-whistleblower ) contains over 100k websites that Meta allegedly has scraped for their data to train their AI, and the list also [contains](https://cyberpunk.lol/@FediPact/114999480874284493 ) a number of fediverse servers. A communications representative for Meta [says](https://x.com/andymstone/status/1953253675217854633 ) that the list is ‘bogus’. While it is difficult to verify the correctness of this specific news story, that Meta is scraping fediverse data for AI training is certainly plausible: the data is publicly accessible and Meta so far has shown an insatiable hunger to ingest as much data as possible for AI training purposes. Meta has shown a willingness to acquire data via methods that seem [legally questionable](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ ) in the most optimistic reading possible. While collecting fediverse data for AI training may potentially fall within legal boundaries, it goes against the clear wishes of the fediverse community.
The story points to how difficult it has been to evolve the fediverse to a network where people can actually publish their consent on how their data can be handled by others. The privacy policy of a significant number of fediverse servers, including some servers on the published list above, explicitly state: “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” However, [public](https://cyberpunk.lol/@FediPact/114999480874284493 ) [response](https://piefed.social/post/1128182#post_replies ) to this news makes it clear that for a significant number of people, they do not want Meta to be handling their public social networking data to be used for AI training.
There has been some effort by the Mastodon organisation to update the their Terms of Service (ToS) to prohibit the use of that server’s data for AI training purposes, but Mastodon had to [retract](https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-122/ ) that new ToS due to various criticisms. It is unclear however if such a ToS would be binding to third parties who have not signed the ToS. What’s more notable for me is that there is still no easy way for fediverse users to indicate their consent how their data can be handled on a per-post level that is also distributed via ActivityPub and is machine-readable. A significant group of fediverse users do not want their data to be used for AI training, but so far their options are mainly limited to being on a server who prohibits this via regulation, and there are no easy ways to set consent on a per-user level.
Mastodon shared in their monthly engineering update, [Trunks and Tidbits](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/08/trunk-tidbits-july-2025/ ), that the organisation is working on adding Starter Packs. Starter Packs were first launched by Bluesky, and found great popularity late last year. It allows people to create lists of accounts, and other users can follow all these accounts with a single click of a button. The feature allowed new Bluesky users to rapidly on-board the platform and get a timeline full of content. However, the feature also had some major drawbacks, such as being used for spammy engagement-bait accounts to build large following networks. People also could not opt-out of being included on other people’s Starter Packs, which caused some people to get a large number of followers that they did not want or ask for, leading to clashes and context collapse. Mastodon has the advantage of being a second-mover, and being able to iterate on Bluesky’s implementation. The organisation already has said that they will let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack.
A new research paper on the lemmygrad.ml Lemmy instance, called “[Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml](https://arxiv.org/html/2507.23699v1 )“. Within Lemmy there exists a subculture of various instances, most notably Hexbear and Lemmygrad, that self-describes as Marxist and/or leftist, and partially intersects with the developers of Lemmy. There is interesting research to be done on how that sub-community impacts the wider culture of the Threadiverse. This published paper limits itself to data from 2019 to 2022, which misses out on how these communities and cultures have developed over the more recent years. For example, the Hexbear instance was not federating with the rest of the network for a while, only to turn federation back on over a year ago, and it would be interesting to explore how that has impacted other Lemmy servers.##
The Links<li>IFTAS has opened their yearly <a href="https://about.iftas.org/2025/08/11/the-2025-fediverse-needs-assessment-is-open-have-your-say/">Needs Assesment</a>, where they “input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web” to find the needs of the people who are building communities on the social web. </li><li>All of the video’s of the <a href="https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/">recent</a> <a href="https://fedicon.ca/">FediCon</a> conference have now been published on <a href="https://spectra.video/c/fedicon_videos/videos">PeerTube</a>.</li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@openvibe/114983163912608593">Openvibe</a>, a client that combines Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads into a single timeline, now also supports RSS, to be both a <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/08/openvibe-combines-news-and-social-media-in-one-app/">news and social</a> app at the same time.</li><li>Ghost CEO John O’Nolan writes some <a href="https://john.onolan.org/reflections-on-the-social-web/">reflections</a> about Ghost’s recently <a href="https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/">launched</a> ActivityPub integration, and how people have perceived it.</li><li>The WordPress ActivityPub team <a href="https://activitypub.blog/2025/08/07/bridging-the-gap/">explains</a> how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed.</li><li>The ‘<a href="https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experience/#fediversity">delightful fediverse experience’ list tracks</a> a large amount of fediverse-related projects, and has been <a href="https://social.coop/@smallcircles/115008779290680972">expanded</a> with some new categories around tools and extensions.</li>#nlnet
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-129/
https://connectedplaces.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/20250112-03-Detail-of-the-city-of-Gouda-1024x293.jpg