Laurens Hof

https://fediversereport.com/author/laurenshof/

Consultant and writer on decentralised social media

Blog: [fediversereport.com](https://fediversereport.com/ )
Profile: [fediversereport.com](https://fediversereport.com/author/laurenshof/ )

Public Key

npub1hyzwtgmcsskxjw003cc8wthuyzkvzheadyw7yg25yn6ldw07rc2smchmgs

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstjp895duggtrf88hcuvrh9m7zptxptu7kj80zy92zfa0kh8lpu9gpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsz9rhwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjmcfx59k5

Publishing to

nostr.wine

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1hyzwtgmcsskxjw003cc8wthuyzkvzheadyw7yg25yn6ldw07rc2smchmgs

Show more details

Last Notes

2025-05-20 16:27:14 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #117**
Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.##
The News
PieFed, a link aggregator platform for the fediverse, has made some interesting updates recently. It is one of the first (if not the first) platform to add [support](https://piefed.social/post/762082 ) for Passkeys to the platform. It has also added [flair](https://join.piefed.social/2025/05/10/how-piefed-federates-flair-on-posts-and-comments/ ) (community-specific tags) to posts, that are federated as well. PieFed has also made a [image hashing service](https://piefed.social/post/759065 ) available that can be used by any fediverse platform. This service generates a unique fingerprint of every image, and that fingerprint can be used to identity other posts that use the same or fairly similar images. This can be used for content moderation, PieFed has a [demo video available on PeerTube](https://peertube.wtf/w/8b6wa113MuekvbFez1ARis ) showcasing how it can find and take down multiple posts that all contain a similar image.
FediForum has announced three keynote speakers and published a tentative [agenda](https://fediforum.org/2025-06/ ). On Thursday, June 5, Ian Forrester will give the opening keynote. Forrester has been a driving factor for the BBC R&D department to get the broadcaster to experiment with a Mastodon server. Later on Thursday, Cory Doctorow will give a keynote. On Friday June 6, Christine Lemmer-Webber will give the opening keynote. On Thursday, I will be hosting a session on Whats New at the Open Social Web, where I’ll be going over all the news and events that have happened since 2025.
The branch of fediverse software that consists of Friendica, Hubzilla and more, is now [15 years old](https://fediversity.site/channel/mikedev?mid=https://fediversity.site/item/0d8c963e-b262-4154-9b00-141962917e7d ). The main developer Mike Macgirvin lists the large number of features that the platforms have, including groups, nomadic identity, comment controls, and much more. When it comes to the large variety of features, no fediverse platform comes anywhere close to what this branch of platforms offer. The software platforms have managed to create their own small self-sustaining communities. While a number of the software platforms such as Streams do not publish any statistics, extrapolating data from what some servers running Hubzilla and Friendica publish, together I would estimate the active accounts to be less than 10k MAU. Still, these communities have managed to find long-term sustainability, exisiting over 15 years in various forms is no mean feat. As Macgirvin says: ‘if you think that this “alternative fediverse” is going away any time soon, you must be new here.’
The United States has [signed](https://www.theverge.com/news/661230/trump-signs-take-it-down-act-ai-deepfakes ) the Take It Down Act into law, which criminalises the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images, and requires social media platforms to remove them when notified within 48 hours. IFTAS has written a [guide](https://connect.iftas.org/library/legal-regulatory/take-it-down-act-2025-usa/ ) with more information, focused on fediverse server administrators. IFTAS notes that “even small, volunteer-run instances will be expected to comply if they are based in or hosted in the US, host US user accounts, or federate content that reaches US audiences.”##
The Links<li><a href="https://flipboard.video/w/0c6ebba6-7a72-4d23-9ad0-fc8a35ce36ee">Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser</a> – Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast</li><li><a href="https://deadsuperhero.com/my-dream-fediverse-platform/">My Dream Fediverse Platform</a> – <em>Sean Tilley/WeDistribute</em></li><li>Ben Werdmuller has been writing a four-part series on strategies for the open social web, with articles on product strategies for <a href="https://werd.io/2025/if-i-ran-mastodon">Mastodon</a>, <a href="https://werd.io/2025/if-i-ran-bluesky-product">Bluesky</a>, <a href="https://werd.io/2025/if-i-started-fresh">starting fresh</a>, and now his most recent <a href="https://werd.io/2025/lets-fund-the-open-social-web">article</a> on various funding strategies for the open social web.</li><li>A <a href="https://gist.github.com/helloyanis/c201908666b2c6341e05f7e77b2fbca2">detailed overview</a> of how federation between Lemmy and Mastodon works in practice. It is a good indication that using the same protocol does not automatically guarantee good interoperability. Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look like.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/0196da9a-e025-140d-921e-0fe8c41656c8">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li>Ghost’s weekly <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/moderation-preferences/">update</a> on their fediverse integration, mentioning that ActivityPub is now also available at another vendor who offers Ghost hosting.</li><li>Flipboard is <a href="https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/flipboard-expands-publisher-federation-with-international-partners/">federating</a> another 124 accounts, this time from international publishers. Flipboard now federates over 1200 accounts of publishers.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-117/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20240922-13-Autumn-leaves-of-the-horse-chestnut-1024x293.jpg

2025-05-19 16:34:04 UTC

**Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework**
*Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay that has been not been published elsewhere yet. This is a republication of last week’s essay I send out. If you’re interested, subscribe below to get all the updates directly in your inbox every week!*<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.
The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.
Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.
A network like the fediverse has an architecture that is easy to recognise as being decentralised: there are multiple independent servers that are all talking to each other, without one central entity. But there are other ways to create social networks that are decentralised, using a different architecture. Nostr is a good example of a decentralised social network that operates in a significantly different way, while also being clearly decentralised.
For the fediverse community, the mental model of decentralised networks such as the fediverse itself, but also email, became more dominant. There was less space to consider other ways to design a social network that is also decentralised. The size difference between the fediverse and the much smaller Nostr network made other alternatives easy to brush aside. But the growth of Bluesky and the ATmosphere network changed this dynamic.
The goal of Bluesky and ATProto is to create a decentralised social network, but with different characteristics and goals than the fediverse and ActivityPub have. For people on the fediverse, decentralisation became the main way how they analysed this competing network. As Bluesky is by far the largest app on the ATProto network, by multiple orders of magnitude, Bluesky not actually being decentralised became a common criticism. I made a similar argument in fall 2024, about how Bluesky has not meaningfully distributed power due to how clustered the people are around a single app. However, that is something different than the technological network architecture being (de)centralised. These criticisms became intertwined with each other, especially from the fediverse side.
In recent weeks, people have made some significant progress in using Bluesky (in technical terms: engaging with posts with Bluesky’s lexicon) with infrastructure that is entirely independent from the Bluesky company. This demonstrates the network being decentralised in a meaningful way. But as the term ‘decentralisation’ has become so intertwined with other meanings, both regarding other network architecture as well as the spread of the user base, that conversations around these developments became hopelessly confusing. The achievement of using Bluesky without using infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC became solely analysed through the frame of “is the network decentralised”.
In all this discourse, it has become lost that decentralisation is a description of a network topology, and not an intrinsic Good. People do not actually care about decentralisation itself. Decentralisation is valuable because it enables other properties, such as network resilience, and are more resistant to capture by oligarchs.
Within the ATProto developer community, the discourse that essentialised decentralisation led to a counter reaction, where decentralisation is not seen as a useful term anymore. Instead, other descriptors should be used, to consider specific features that the network enables. While the community seems largely in agreement that decentralisation has lost a lot of its usefulness as a way to analyse the network, there is less consensus on what other factors the network should be judged on.
As an observer of both networks this makes the current situation particularly interesting. One developer community seems to come to an agreement that one mental framework has lost some of its use, while the other developer community has not done so. Furthermore, it is not clear yet what framework should take its place instead. Is it a framework of analysing a network by its possible failure modes, or something else entirely?
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/decentralisation-as-a-shifting-mental-framework/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20240811-05-the-fruits-of-the-linden-1024x293.jpg

2025-05-06 17:11:50 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #115**
PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more.##
The News<li>PeerTube has officially <a href="https://joinpeertube.org/news/app-v1">launched</a> their apps as a v1, some four months after the apps became available in beta. Some new features include the ability to log in with an existing PeerTube account (up until now you’d log in with a local account that only existed in the app itself), commenting from the app, and playlist and channel management options.</li><li>Mastodon <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/evolving-the-team/">announced</a> some updates on how their team is evolving. The organisation is currently in the process of setting up a Foundation in Europe. Mastodon is also growing their team, and the organisation now consists of 15 employees. Mastodon’s news update is a followup on their announcement from January 2025, in which Mastodon said that current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down. A new CEO has not been announced yet by Mastodon. In the previous update, Mastodon also said that they would need a €5 million annual operating budget. There are some new team members related to fundraising, but Mastodon has not made a clear statement yet on how exactly they will raise the money needed for this budget.</li><li>Evan Prodromou of the Social Web Foundation has <a href="https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/04/29/places-pub/">published</a> a first version of <a href="https://places.pub/">places.pub</a>. It is a service that <em>“makes OpenStreetMap geographical data available as <a href="https://activitypub.rocks/">ActivityPub</a> objects.”</em> The goal is for other fediverse software to integrate with places.pub to have a standardised way to refer to geospatial objects via ActivityPub.</li><li>A <a href="https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-114/">follow-up on last week’s news</a> regarding the Fosstodon server: the server administration will be taken over, with an update and introduction by the new admin <a href="https://hub.fosstodon.org/update-from-gina">here</a>. </li>##
The Links<li>A <a href="https://github.com/solidheron/peertube_recomendation_algorythm">recommendation algorithm</a> for PeerTube videos. It is a browser extension that records your PeerTube viewing history, and uses that to generate recommendations to watch.</li><li>PieFed development <a href="https://piefed.social/post/709384">updates</a> for April. </li><li>The fediverse statistics site FediDB is getting an <a href="https://new.fedidb.org/">update</a>, and can now be <a href="https://mastodon.social/@dansup/114426635377316950">self-hosted</a> as well. </li><li><a href="https://video.fedihost.co/w/os8cetziL1mDQHby2gxbny">Talking Protocols With Evan Prodromou </a>– <em>FediHost Podcast. </em></li><li><a href="https://video.fedihost.co/w/dCAM2gVDtRTWh3UD9CppFD">How To Make Your Mastodon Feed More Algorithmic</a> – <em>FediHost Tutorial</em>.</li><li>Ghost now gives blog authors the <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/blocking-users/">ability</a> to block users. </li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-115/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20241129-10-Detail-of-building-in-Amsterdam-North-1024x293.jpg

2025-04-17 19:11:51 UTC

**Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation**
On 19 March 2025, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested by the Turkish police. İmamoğlu is the presidential primary candidate for the Republican People’s Party, which is the opposition party for the ruling AKP party. The arrest of İmamoğlu sparked widespread protests across Turkey. The Turkish government cracked down on the protests in various ways, including by applying censorship on social media. A few days after the arrest, the government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts that are associated with the protests. X announced that it had filed an individual application with Turkey’s Constitutional Court challenging local court orders to block accounts. Bianet, an independent news agency in Istanbul, [reported](https://bianet.org/haber/x-users-in-turkey-migrate-to-bluesky-amid-censorship-306189 ) that X has not yet enforced the bans on the accounts.
In response to the censorship requests, users on X started to move towards Bluesky, to avoid the restrictions. The censorship requests from the Turkish government quickly extended to Bluesky, and Bianet reported on April 5th that 44 Bluesky accounts had been ordered to be blocked by the Turkish judicial system, citing concerns over national security and public order. Bianet noted that at that time, Bluesky PBC (the company behind Bluesky) had not yet blocked any of these accounts, and that they remained accessible from Turkey.
I [reported](https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-111/ ) last week that Bluesky PBC was in the process of setting up a Turkish moderation labeler, but that it was not active yet. Such a moderation layer allows Bluesky (the app) to apply moderation decisions that are only experienced by people currently geolocated in a specific country, more on that below. A few days ago, the Turkish moderation labeler became active, and the labeler started hiding accounts, making the accounts invisible for people in Turkey. Between April 14 and 17, Bluesky PBC made 18 accounts and 2 posts invisible in Turkey.
The decision by Bluesky PBC to adhere to the orders by the Turkish government to censor certain accounts in Turkey lead to criticism, ranging from the Turkish online community ([1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Turkey/comments/1k057fu/bluesky_da_sans%C3%BCre_ba%C5%9Flad%C4%B1/ ), 2), as well as the fediverse community. The language used is in the criticism notable, with many people describing Bluesky PCS’s action as “account takedown” and “ban”. That is not actually what happened here. Bluesky PBC hid the accounts, making them invisible in Turkey but visible outside of the country. Still, the impact is largely the same: the vast majority of people within Turkey are not able to see the accounts, and the reach and impact of these accounts is severely limited.
There is a technical story, of how Bluesky and the AT Protocol (ATProto) do composable moderation for specific countries. But this is not just an interesting technology, it has implications of government censorship more broadly. Not only is the Turkish censorship of accounts even easier to sidestep, it also allows for new ways to highlight and create visibility for the content that the Turkish government wants to be hidden. To explain how that all works, first a closer look at how moderation works on Bluesky.##
How Bluesky does moderationFor those who want it, a quick refresher on how ATProto works, with this simplified explanation:
– A Personal Data Server (PDS) stores all account data in a publicly accessible database
– A relay gathers all events (posts, likes, etc) from all the PDSes in the network, and outputs a continues stream of all events that happen on the entire network.
– An AppView takes in the data from the relay, and processes the data (such as creating a Discover feed and putting all the post for the feed in the right order, and calculating the number of likes on a feed).
– Labelers apply a label to posts. This label contains information on what an app should do with this post (hide a post entirely or put a warning sign on the post)
– A client or app takes the processed data from the AppView, as well as the labelers, and displays it to the user.
For clarification on language:
– Bluesky PBC refers to the company which makes the Bluesky network and the AT Protocol
– Bluesky PBC runs the Bluesky AppView. This is a large software that does all the technical stuff so some 35 million accounts can access the network.
– Bluesky PBC operates 3 clients/apps. There is Bluesky on the web (bsky.app), as well as the app on Android and iOS. Both the AppView, the clients, as well as the entire network can be referred to as ‘Bluesky’. In this article when I refer to ‘Bluesky’ I’m referring to the entire network. If I mean the specific AppView or client this is clarified.
Bluesky PBC employs three<a href="#db5eb1d0-7f14-4896-b807-cc24f64ab120" id="db5eb1d0-7f14-4896-b807-cc24f64ab120-link">1</a> main forms of moderation:<li>Bluesky PBC takes down a post or account, meaning removing the content/account from the PDS. This usually occurs in cases of significant rule violations with major impact. Bluesky PBC can only do this when the account in question is located on one of the PDSes owned by Bluesky PBC.<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>When this happens, the Bluesky moderation labeler applies a ‘takedown’ label to the account or post as well.</li></ul></li><li>Bluesky PBC uses their <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/moderation.bsky.app">moderation labeler</a> to apply a label to the post or account. This moderation layer applies to everyone who uses Bluesky. This happens in three cases:<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>The rules violation is less significant. For example when people are being rude, Bluesky PBC can apply the ‘rude’ label to a post. Users can adjust their settings to show, warn, or hide posts with this label.</li><li>The post or account creates content that is allowed, but needs to be able to be hidden in order to comply with user preference. Most notably this is for sexual content. Sexual content and nudity are allowed on Bluesky, but Bluesky PBC applies a label such as ‘porn’ or ‘sexual’ to the content so people can filter it out if they so desire.</li><li>the account that violated Bluesky’s ToS is not located on PDS owned by Bluesky PBC. As such, Bluesky cannot take down the post or account. The moderation labeler does apply a ‘takedown’ label to the post.<sup data-fn="690e6057-4c51-443c-8e82-6540dd725e17" class="fn"><a href="#690e6057-4c51-443c-8e82-6540dd725e17" id="690e6057-4c51-443c-8e82-6540dd725e17-link">2</a></sup></li></ul></li><li>Bluesky PBC uses their geographic moderation labelers to apply a ‘hide’ label to posts or accounts. This makes the content invisible to the people who subscribe to labeler. The content is still visible to accounts who are not subscribed to the geographic moderation labeler.<ul class="wp-block-list"><li>Bluesky PBC uses these geographic moderation labelers to comply with local regulations. It only applies these labels if content is in violation of local laws, while it would be legal in other jurisdictions. An example of this is Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, which requires platforms to remove all illegal content within 7 days. Bluesky PBC has taken down 20 posts in Germany in 2025, and no posts before that.</li><li>Bluesky PBC currently operates geographic labelers for <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/moderation-de.bsky.app">Germany</a>, <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/moderation-br.bsky.app">Brazil</a>, <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/moderation-tr.bsky.app">Turkey</a>, and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/moderation-ru.bsky.app">Russia</a>. There are also references to labelers for various other regions and countries on the network, but they are not active as of writing.</li></ul></li>
For this news about the government of Turkey requesting accounts being taken down, it is these geographic moderation labels that are relevant. These were first launched in September 2024, and. Head of Trust & Safety Aaron Rodericks [explains](https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-update ) the feature:
*“In some cases, content or accounts may be allowed under Bluesky’s Community Guidelines but violate local laws in certain countries. To balance freedom of speech with legal compliance, we are introducing geography-specific labels. When we receive a valid legal request from a court or government to remove content, we may limit access to that content for users in that area. This allows Bluesky’s moderation service to maintain flexibility in creating a space for free expression, while also ensuring legal compliance so that Bluesky may continue to operate as a service in those geographies. This feature will be introduced on a country-by-country basis, and we will aim to inform users about the source of legal requests whenever legally possible.”*
The implication of what Rodericks writes is that Bluesky PBC judges a government’s request to remove content on its legal validity, and not on an ethical, moral, or other framework. If it is legally valid, Bluesky PBC will comply and limit access to that content in the applicable jurisdiction.##
Moderation labels are (not) optionalIn ATProto, labels applied by a labeler serve as recommendations for how clients should treat content. This is a direct result of all data on ATProto being public and locked open. Clients and apps are expected to follow a labeler’s output (hiding a post from the users when they have subscribed to the labeler that gave the ‘hide’ label), however clients can potentially deviate from this if they want to.
The Bluesky apps made by Bluesky PBC make their own moderation labeler mandatory. When using the official Bluesky apps, the Bluesky’s moderation labeler gets applied automatically, with no way to opt out of this. Thus, users of the official Bluesky app cannot opt out of Bluesky PBC’s moderation decisions.
Additionally, the Bluesky apps enforce a mechanism where the client checks the user’s current IP address. When the user is in one of the regions with a geographic labeler, these labelers are also applied automatically and compulsory. When someone uses the Bluesky app while they are on a Turkish IP address, they will be automatically subscribed to the Turkish moderation labeler. Posts made by accounts that the government of Turkey has mandated to be removed are not visible. If the same account logs in from outside Turkey, it is no longer subscribed to the Turkish moderation labeler. Content that the government of Turkey has mandated to be removed is now visible.<a href="#eeb3f498-144d-4ef6-8e80-2c5cdeca1342" id="eeb3f498-144d-4ef6-8e80-2c5cdeca1342-link">3</a>
However, other clients can make other decisions on using the moderation labelers. Clients will (almost) always also apply the main Bluesky moderation labeler. Getting a client app into the Google and Apple App Stores requires social media apps to have moderation integrated into their apps. Clients could build their own moderation labeler and use that in their app. However, moderation for a network of 35 million accounts is difficult and expensive, and reusing the Bluesky moderation labeler is free. As a result, almost all third-party client apps use the Bluesky moderation labeler.
Things are different when it comes to the geographic moderation labelers. This step is optional for clients, and most clients do not implement support for geolocating their users and mandating the geographic moderation labelers. As a result, using a different client is a simple way to bypass the geographic content restrictions. Using Bluesky with a Turkish IP address on most<a href="#0ecd142e-8892-4bc4-af16-ac6ba776216f" id="0ecd142e-8892-4bc4-af16-ac6ba776216f-link">4</a> other clients does show content that the government of Turkey has mandated to be taken down.##
The impactGovernment censorship of social media can best be understood as a way to minimise reach and virality, rather than a 100% effective way to prevent literally everyone from seeing the content. The practice of governments requesting content on social networks to be taken down is not new, and has happened on Big Tech platforms for a while. The Big Tech platforms usually take a similar approach, restricting access to posts and accounts only within the relevant jurisdiction. This means that VPNs allow people to sidestep these restrictions. Governments are largely fine with this, as the goal of the censorship is still reached: there are now meaningful barriers to viewing said content, and the large majority of people will likely not see it.
What makes Bluesky and ATProto different is two aspects:<li>Restrictions on content can now be bypassed via other clients. There is not even a need for a VPN anymore, simply using a different client is enough.</li><li>The content that governments want to censor is now easily accessible for the rest of the world. The output of the geographic moderation labelers is easily publicly accessible. Scanning services like <a href="https://pdsls.dev/">PDSls</a> or a tool like the <a href="https://labels.bunnynabbit.com/">Query Labeler Service</a> give a complete and publicly accessible list of all content that is taken down according to the respective jurisdiction. For example, The Query Labeler Services tool shows that the moderation-tr.bsky.app account (the handle for the Turkish moderation labeler) has hidden 18 accounts and 2 posts, at the time of writing.</li>
It is this new dynamic of being able to see which content governments wants to be hidden is most interesting to me. “The government does not want you to see this!!1!” is one of the most successful clickbait titles of all time, for good reason. And now we’re in a new situation where this is not necessarily clickbait anymore. Indeed, it is publicly visible which accounts and posts a government does not want people to see. Even more so, ATProto and Bluesky allow other people to build custom feeds and list, based on this information. I would not be surprised if before we will see a custom feed specifically with the accounts that the government wants to be censored. How that changes the dynamic of Bluesky and this new generation of social networks remains to be seen.
The ways that how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, government requests for takedown, and the ways that these government censorship demands can be sidestepped also shines some more light on the concept of decentralisation. Decentralisation, in the meaning of a technical description of a network that consists of multiple different interacting software platforms, is often lauded as a way to combat censorship. But how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, and the way that it can be sidestepped, show that this is not a hard requirement. Avoiding the censorship and being able to see the content that governments do not want to be seen turns out to only need open data, a compartmentalised moderation system and an open API to have third party client apps.
However, focusing on that it is technically possible to see the censored content misses that the censorship is still effective. The large majority of people will not actually use this option, if they are even aware of it. In order to build a network that does not have a single chokepoint where governments can apply pressure for censorship requests, it is that people have to be spread out over different services. How ATProto and Bluesky handle moderation show that this spread of people over different services does not have to mean multiple different platforms, having people meaningfully spread out over different clients would also be effective in this specific case. It shows that the value of a decentralised social network is less dependent on the technical capabilities, and more on the distribution of people and power. It matters less what the protocol and technical features of a network are capable of, and more to what extend people are clustered in single group, whether that is a single service, platform or client.
For now, it seems that Bluesky PBC and the Turkish government both have reached a situation that is acceptable. The Turkish government has significantly restricted the visibility of accounts they deem unwanted. Sidestepping these restrictions remains an option, with new and easier ways to do so. But considering how powerful the default apps are and how few people use other apps, this seems likely to be an acceptable tradeoff. For Bluesky PBC it seems to be an acceptable outcome as well. Not complying with the government order would risk the app to be banned in the entire country. Using geographic moderation labelers gives compliance with the government order, while at the same time minimising the impact: the accounts in question are still visible outside of the country, and people within Turkey have fairly accessible ways of sidestepping the ban.
*Note: the regularly scheduled weekly Bluesky Report will be released tomorrow instead of today. This article was originally intended as part of the Bluesky Report, but I felt it was relevant enough to be released separately.*<li id="db5eb1d0-7f14-4896-b807-cc24f64ab120">This is not exhaustive. Bluesky PBC can also ban third-party PDSes from the relay that Bluesky uses. This is intended for preventing network flooding spam and DDoS types of attacks. It is unclear if/when Bluesky PBC has actually used this option. <a href="#db5eb1d0-7f14-4896-b807-cc24f64ab120-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 1">↩︎</a></li><li id="690e6057-4c51-443c-8e82-6540dd725e17">Violating accounts can also already be banned on the AppView level in this case. I’m unclear which option Bluesky PBC usually uses here, and I think it is actually both, but I might be wrong on that. <a href="#690e6057-4c51-443c-8e82-6540dd725e17-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 2">↩︎</a></li><li id="eeb3f498-144d-4ef6-8e80-2c5cdeca1342">Users can also voluntarily subscribe to a geographic labeler. <a href="#eeb3f498-144d-4ef6-8e80-2c5cdeca1342-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 3">↩︎</a></li><li id="0ecd142e-8892-4bc4-af16-ac6ba776216f">I actually have not found an example yet of a third party client which does mandate the geographic moderation labelers. <a href="#0ecd142e-8892-4bc4-af16-ac6ba776216f-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 4">↩︎</a></li>
#bluesky
https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-censorship-and-country-based-moderation/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/20241129-04-Detail-of-building-in-Amsterdam-North-1024x293.jpg

2025-03-18 18:12:17 UTC

**Fediverse Report #108**
Newsletter publisher Ghost is now connecting to the fediverse in public beta, updates about the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, and more.##
The NewsThe public beta for connecting [Ghost to the fediverse](https://activitypub.ghost.org/social-web-beta/ ) is here, and the ActivityPub integration is now available for Ghost Pro subscribers. Ghost is a publishing platform for sending out blogs via email. With this latest update, Ghost now has another method of distribution, namely via the fediverse. Ghost’s integration with the fediverse consists of [two parts:](https://ghost.org/help/social-web/ ) sending out long-form articles published on Ghost into the fediverse, and a reader app to the fediverse from Ghost.
Publishing Ghost articles on ActivityPub makes them accessible to the rest of the fediverse, similar to how WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin works. For users of Ghost this is an easy sales pitch, it is simply another free and automatic distribution channel for their blog. The second part of Ghost’s integration with the social web is a reader app. This app allows Ghost users to browse and read posts on the fediverse. It is split up into two parts: an inbox for reading other long-form posts from Ghost or WordPress, and a feed for all other types of posts. This allows accounts on Ghost not only to send out posts via the ActivityPub integration, but also to connect, respond and follow their audience. It even allows you to post short-form microblogs (notes), just like you’d use on Mastodon, that do not show up on the Ghost website. This makes the Ghost integration a full fediverse experience.
[A New Social](https://blog.anew.social/breaking-ground/ ) is the non-profit organisation that builds and manages [cross-protocol tools for the open social web](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-97/ ). The organisation currently manages [Bridgy Fed](https://fed.brid.gy/ ), the connector that allows accounts to ‘bridge’ between both ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr and more, and is currently in the process of setting up and launching the organisation. In their first update they shared this week, A New Social shared that they have a board of directors, consisting of Erin Kissane, Ben Werdmuller and Susan Mernit. Bridgy Fed Config is the first upcoming launch that they announced, scheduled for early April. To bridge their account, Bridgy Fed currently requires people to follow the Bridgy Fed account on their platform, which can be confusing and opaque for people as to what is actually happening and if it is working. The upcoming Config settings page allows people to log in with their social web account (Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed) and turn the bridging on with a simple switch. A New Social also mentions supporting Threads with the new Bridgy Fed Config update, which is currently not supported by Bridgy Fed.
[Forte](https://fediversity.site/channel/mikedev?mid=https://fediversity.site/item/b69ce5a0-0c22-4933-8393-dce7100f4584 ) is a new fediverse platform, that comes from the lineage of Hubzilla and Streams, created by the same developer Mike Macgirvin. Forte’s major feature is that it has Nomadic Identity over ActivityPub. Nomadic Identity means that you can port your entire account, including your posts, settings, social connections, etc. It is slightly different than the account migration that Mastodon has, which transfers your social graph to a new account. With Nomadic Identity, you create a single identity that can be connected to multiple different servers, so when one server becomes unavailable, all your personal data can be transferred and accessed from another server linked to your account. Forte, as well as Hubzilla and Streams, remain on the bleeding edge on what’s possible with ActivityPub. However, Forte also suffers from the same issue that its predecessors have, namely that getting to use the software is surprisingly difficult. By design there is no way to see a list of Forte servers. Forte mainly targets people with technical know-how, as the code repository does not include guide on how to setup your own Forte server. It leads to the funny situation where I would like to give Forte a try because I’m interesting in trying out the new features, but I legitimately do not know how.
[Myo](https://mastodon.social/@box464/114158622297516532 ) is a new image-focused client for the open social web, and allows you to connect your Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr accounts into a single timeline. Combining multiple accounts into a single timeline is similar to OpenVibe, but Myo instead focuses media, in a design that is more reminiscent of Instagram than Twitter. Myo is made by the same developer as [SoraSNS](https://mszpro.com/sorasns ), which is also a multi-protocol app that focuses on microblogging instead. Myo and SoraSNS are both available for iOS.
[ActivityPub badges](https://hachyderm.io/@mapache/114169421621857524 ) is a new project that is currently in development to build a badges/credential system similar to [Credly](https://www.credly.com/earner/dashboard ) on ActivityPub. The project is currently at the proof-of-concept phase, where badges can be created and send over ActivityPub.
IFTAS, the non-profit for collaborative work on trust & safety on the fediverse, recently had to [shut down](https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-106/ ) various of their services due to a lack of funding. In their latest update, the organisation talks about how they are rescoping and moving forward, as the organisation itself is not shutting down. IFTAS will continue with various community support projects, such as their community platform IFTAS Connect. They will also continue providing insight into commonly blocked domains, in a scaled down version of the shut-down FediCheck program.
A new form of spam/scam has recently emerged on the fediverse, and it involves private messages from an account that identifies itself as ‘Nicole the fediverse chick’. So many people have gotten a variation of this message that it is quickly becoming a meme on the fediverse. It is [unclear](https://transmom.love/@elilla/114178587075613485 ) what the exact purpose of this spam is, with either a [doxing ex](https://mkultra.monster/social-media/2025/03/17/youve-been-nicoled ) or an elaborate 4chan troll as [likely](https://feddit.org/post/9044527 ) explainers. <li><a href="https://deeplyhacked.com/research/files/blueleaks.pdf">Keeping Watch Over the Fediverse: Mass Surveillance in Non-Centralized Social Media</a> – <em><a href="https://sciences.social/@Fassbender">Eric Fassbender</a></em></li>
This article by Fassbender examines how state surveillance treats federated and decentralised social networks, focusing on the [BlueLeaks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueLeaks ) dataset, which contains a large amount of internal documentation of state surveillance organisations. Fassbender writes: *“[…] surveillance actors are less interested in understanding decentralization within platforms, but rather look at organizations first, then take an interest in all platforms that they spread to. This means that any platform (or in the case of the fediverse, grouping of platforms that share a method for interconnecting) can become suspect.”*##
The Links<li><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-fediverse-promises-social-media-without-big-tech-if-it-can-avoid-familiar-pitfalls-247178">The fediverse promises social media without Big Tech – if it can avoid familiar pitfalls</a> – <em>Aram Sinnreich and Robert W. Gehl/The Conversation</em>.</li><li>PeerTube’s latest <a href="https://joinpeertube.org/news/release-7.1">update</a> revamps the about page and brings better podcast support.</li><li>The Fireside Fedi livestream <a href="https://audio.firesidefedi.live/@firesidefedi/posts/2fcb538e-b371-497c-9201-ebde369b36a7">interviewed</a> Laurin, the developer of <a href="https://activitypods.org/">ActivityPods</a>, as well as PieFed developer <a href="https://piefed.social/post/547613">Rimu</a>.</li><li>Piefed makes <a href="https://piefed.social/post/531611">community discovery easier</a> by integrating with the <a href="https://lemmyverse.net/">Lemmyverse</a> community dataset.</li><li>Sneak peek: Mastodon’s upcoming <a href="https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615">update</a> will finally include the ability to show all replies on a post.</li><li><a href="https://fep-search.glitch.me/">FEP Search Tool</a> is a small web tool to search all the FEP’s.</li><li>Forum software Flarum got funding by NLnet in 2023 to implement ActivityPub, but recently <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@luceos/114155354297349447">decided</a> that this effort would be postponed for the foreseeable future.</li><li><a href="https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2025-03/12-mastodon_to_gotosocial_migration">Notes</a> on migrating an account from Mastodon to GoToSocial.</li><li>A Manyfold <a href="https://3dp.chat/@manyfold/114160446378845640">3D viewer</a> directly in a Mastodon timeline.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/01959655-f2a7-6172-cb8c-8d6c51cebb2d">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://video.fedihost.co/w/ff646f55-9a06-4541-bdae-44ebe64f8a57">Setting Up A New Mastodon Instance</a> – a PeerTube tutorial by FediHost.</li><li><a href="https://icosahedron.website/@halcy/114162499329644711">Mastofuse</a> is a Mastodon file system client.</li><li><a href="https://bovine.codeberg.page/roboherd/">Roboherd</a> is a tool to build automated Fediverse actors.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-108/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250112-14-Detail-of-the-city-of-Gouda-1024x293.jpg

2025-02-18 18:41:02 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #104**
Mastodon has announced it will add quote posts to the platform, and some more news.##
The NewsMastodon has announced it is adding [quote posts](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/ ) to the platform, a long-awaited feature. Mastodon got a [grant by NLnet](https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon-Quoting/ ) in 2024 to add quote posts, and they are now sharing an update on their work. Mastodon is adding a variety of features to quote posts, such as giving people the ability to opt out of being quote posted. They will publish the technical work to support quote posts as Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, and Mastodon is currently in the process of writing these proposals. The organisation does not say when quote posts will be added, only noting that it ‘*will still take more time to develop.’*
For a long time, Mastodon had not implemented quote posts because CEO Eugen Rochko saw them as bad. His main concern is that quote posts lead to ‘dunking’ and toxic behaviour. Dunking refers to the behaviour where people use quote posts to ‘dunk’ on other people’s post, often with the intent that this mocking will lead to their followers to also mock and harass the original poster. Dunking was a visible part of Twitter’s culture, and in popular belief dunking and toxicity became linked together. Research showed a more complicated picture. [Hilda Bastian analysed](https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/01/12/quote-tweeting-over-30-studies-dispel-some-myths/ ) over 30 studies on quote tweeting, and concludes: “*There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs [quote Tweets] increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.*“
In 2023 Mastodon changed their opinion, and first started saying that the organisation was open to implementing quote posts. Still, toxic behaviour via dunking continued to be a main concern. This is visible in the [accompanying design research](https://github.com/mastodon/specs-background/blob/main/quote-posts/quote-posts-research-and-goals.md ) that Mastodon has done in their work on quote posts. Mastodon’s view seems to be that quote posts are toxic at it’s core, saying that *“the team started out with a shared view that Quote Posts can be misused.”*
Mastodon takes a technical approach to dealing to the purported problem of toxicity of quote posts, and the blog posts lists three features to mitigate it: people can choose if their posts are able to be quoted, people get notified if they are quoted, and there will be the ability to withdraw your post from the quoted context. Bluesky also has these features for quote posts, and they’re generally received well. What I find missing here is a take by Mastodon on the effect of these features on Bluesky. Mastodon sees quote posts as being dangerous, and that is why they will implement some features to mitigate the risk. But do they think that quote posts are being used well on Bluesky? Is Bluesky’s behaviour and culture around quote posts something that Mastodon is striving towards? I’m not clear to me what Mastodon’s answer is here.
Mastodon’s design research also says that they will display quotes in a different way to ‘*[steer away from dunk culture”‘](https://github.com/mastodon/specs-background/blob/main/quote-posts/quote-posts-research-and-goals.md )*, a feature not mentioned in Mastodon’s announcement blog post. Mastodon is planning to display a quote post by first showing the quote, and showing the reply below it. This is similar to how Tumblr does quote posts. But it differs from how all other platforms that interoperate with Mastodon display quote posts: fediverse native platforms like Misskey, Akkoma and Streams, as well as connected networks like Bluesky and Threads, all display quote posts by showing the reply at the top, and the quoted post below.
Mastodon’s position is that quote posts are a risky feature invite misuse, and thus need a variety of safety features. But Mastodon is not an isolated platform, it is connected to various other platforms that all have their own ideas about quote posts. If displaying quote posts Tumblr-style (quote above, comment below) is preferred over displaying them Twitter-style (comment above, quote below), what is the expectation on how other platforms should interact with Mastodon quotes? Is Misskey expected to display Mastodon’s quote post differently? Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning to display quotes that originate from Misskey not in the way that Misskey does (Twitter-style), but in their own manner (Tumblr-style), saying that it has [“very little impact on the semantics”](https://github.com/mastodon/specs-background/blob/main/quote-posts/quote-posts-research-and-goals.md ).
I find these statements hard to square: on the one hand, Mastodon says it how quote posts are displayed has little impact on the semantics of a post, but at the same time it is assumed to have enough of an impact in that it can reduce “dunking culture”. But if the manner a quote post is displayed can impact people’s behaviour, it automatically follows that the manner a quote post is displayed impacts its semantics, as otherwise there would be no impact on people’s behaviour either. But if the semantics of a post are altered by using a different display method for quote posts, than it means that Mastodon is taking an active decision to alter the semantics of posts made on other networks like Misskey and Bluesky.
Mastodon’s choice to use a different way of displaying quote posts than the other platforms in their network opens up a new interesting avenue for federated diplomacy. We’ve seen both ways of displaying quote posts be successful, the way posts are quoted is a significant part of how conversations flow on Tumblr. But what is new here is Mastodon is part of a federated network, and that means that their decisions impact other players, and their decisions have impact on Mastodon as well. This interaction between different display types of quote posts is something we have not really seen before, leading to some interesting new types of negotiations: how Mastodon expect Misskey to display Mastodon quote posts on Misskey? How does Threads feel about having their quote posts being displayed differently on Mastodon? What is the expected behaviour of Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects Bluesky with Mastodon? All those questions are still open, and I’m curious what the answer will turn out to be.
Tumblr is still planning to join the fediverse. I reported this [recently](https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-101/ ), and now TechCrunch got a [followup](https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/11/tumblr-to-join-the-fediverse-after-wordpress-migration-completes/ ) and a confirmation from Automattic, saying that ‘Automattic declined to share a time frame as to when the migration would be complete, given its scale, but a rep for the company called the progress so far “exciting.”’
The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has announced they are now a formal member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C tends to favour institutional membership, but the W3C Social Community Group that concerns itself with ActivityPub is open to everyone. The SWF is working on various improvements to ActivityPub, such as adding end-to-end encryption and supporting data portability.
[Event Federation](https://event-federation.eu/wordpress-activitypub-event-extensions/ ) is a WordPress [plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-bridge-for-activitypub/ ) that extends the ActivityPub support plugin for WordPress by adding support for WordPress events. The plugin is now [officially released](https://event-federation.eu/2025/02/11/event-bridge-for-activitypub-1-0-0/ ) as a 1.0 version.
[Hexbear](https://piefed.social/post/471768#post_replies ) is a controversial Lemmy server that let domain expire. The Hexbear domain is now for sale, and an avid bidding war has driven up the price for the domain to over 2300 dollar at time of writing.
[ForgeFed](https://floss.social/@forgefed/114002790388336170 ) is an ActivityPub extension that adds federation support to software forges such as Forgejo. It has gotten a new NLnet grant, with the project now [focusing](https://forgefed.org/blog/networked-actors/ ) on user research and documentation.
A few weeks [ago](https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-102/ ), Fedidb removed fediverse platfrom GoToSocial from the database after refusing to honor robots.txt, and the GoToSocial developer spoofed data as retaliation. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault later decided to properly add support for robots.txt, but stopped crawling for the entire fediverse in the meantime while it was implemented. Supernault now [confirms](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/114023239339067181 ) that Fedidb honors robots.txt and has [added](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/114023569148179068 ) GoToSocial back to the data set.
The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has set up their own [Mastodon server](https://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-epfl-community-gets-a-mastodon-server/ ) for all community members, including students. ##
The Links<li><a href="https://spectra.video/w/9ff57c3e-97c1-4c7a-a580-a4fae1433d64">An experiment with social media handles </a>– <em>Doctor Popular</em></li><li><a href="https://gregmorris.co.uk/2025/02/12/micro-social-the-launch.html">Micro Social</a> is a new third-party app for Micro.Blog</li><li>A <a href="https://theconversation.com/decentralised-social-media-offers-an-alternative-to-big-tech-platforms-like-x-and-meta-how-does-it-work-podcast-249758">podcast by The Conversation</a> about how decentralised social media platforms work, interviewing Robert Gehl</li><li><a href="https://video.fedihost.co/w/2fdb8e23-6ef1-4cac-853d-a5e104ba82cb">Five Confusing Fediverse Things</a> – <em>FediHost Podcast</em></li><li>ActivityPods <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@activitypods/114001347124122772">shared</a> their presentation from FOSDEM, about how the project compares to ATProto and their work with NextGraph.</li><li>Another FOSDEM presentation that was uploaded recently was by Davide Eynard, about ‘<a href="https://mastodon.social/@npub1xas…j5pq/113967540629736306">Building your own Timeline Algorithm’.</a></li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/019505e9-69b3-ca9f-3b11-869a95dc3430">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://alex.kirk.at/2025/01/24/wordpress-as-a-self-hosting-platform/">WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform</a> – <em>Alex Kirk</em></li>#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-104/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250112-05-Detail-of-the-city-of-Gouda-1024x293.jpg

2025-02-04 21:37:32 UTC

**Fediverse Report – #102**
FOSDEM and the fediverse match well together, some issues regarding data privacy and consent, and multi-network client Openvibe gets 800k in funding.##
The News[FOSDEM](https://fosdem.org/2025/ ), the free event for open source software was this weekend in Brussels, with a large presence for the fediverse and the social web. There were three [events](https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/social-web/ ), presentations by various fediverse software developers in the SocialWeb Devroom, an extra smaller event on Sunday for more presentations, and a more casual event on Sunday evening at Brussels Hackerspace. All the events were fully packed, showing the large amount of interest from the community for the fediverse and the social web. The [Social Web Foundation](https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/31/social-web-at-fosdem/ ) has been the main initiator of these events.
Some thoughts and observations:<li><a href="https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep">Fediverse Enhancement Proposals </a>(FEP) are documents with the goal to improve applications on the fediverse. People can write proposals, and developers can decide to support and implement proposals as they see fit. There are some great technical FEPs, but one of the challenges of such a grassroots system is getting buy-in from developers to support specific FEPs. NodeBB developer Julian Lam held a presentation <a href="https://spectra.video/w/xwCSYfZh1mJY64zJ9GngbE">‘The Fediverse is Quiet — Let’s Fix That!’</a> as an advocacy for a specific FEP. The <a href="https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/7888/fep-7888.md">proposal</a> Lam talks about is about fixing the problem of missing replies, where people do not see all replies on a post. What I think is noteworthy about Lam’s presentation is that it frames a FEP not only as a technical document, but as a process that needs community buy-in for other developers to support and implement a FEP. Hopefully, more of such advocacy might help see more FEPs implemented as well.</li><li>Mastodon presented the progress on their <a href="https://www.fediscovery.org/">Fediverse Discovery Provider</a> project. The project builds an opt-in decentralised service for better discovery and search. In the presentation (and on the <a href="https://www.fediscovery.org/#project-goals">website</a>), Mastodon stressed that the project is not only a Mastodon project, but is intended to be used by the entire fediverse. Mastodon developer David Roetzel said that he hoped that the goal is that many servers will run a “Fediverse Auxillary Service Provider”. Personally I think that it is instructive to look at Bluesky here. While the AT Protocol is decentralised, in practice everyone uses infrastructure owned by the Bluesky company. I’m not convinced yet that the Fediverse Discovery Provider project will not run into the same problem, as I’m unclear on what the incentives are for people to run competing Fediverse Discovery Provider projects.</li><li>Some of the more interesting presentations I saw were about the integration of different types of protocols with ActivityPub. The <a href="https://activitypods.org/our-roadmap-for-2025">ActivityPods</a> project combines ActivityPub with <a href="https://solidproject.org/">Solid Pods</a>, which shows quite some similarities with how the PDS system of ATProto works. All your data is stored on your Pod, multiple types of apps can connect to your Pod, and communicate via ActivityPub. It allows you to have a single account that is used for multiple platforms, similar with how your ATProto account can be used for multiple types of apps.</li><li>One of the most valuable parts of a conference like FOSDEM is getting developers together in a room to meet and build relationships. Fediforum has provided such a place for people to gather digitally, but meeting people in real life remains one of the best ways to build trust and relationships. Some practical ways this was visible this FOSDEM was by getting the NodeBB, WordPress ActivityPub plugin, WriteFreely and Ghost developers together and recognising themselves as the ‘longform’ people. This group of developers getting together this way helps with the various projects becoming more interoperable, and better support for longform content in the fediverse.</li>
Two issues regarding consent and data processing this week. The first is with GoToSocial and fediverse statistics sites like fedidb.org and fediverse.observer. Some GoToSocial servers have blocked statistics sites from indexing their platforms via robots.txt, but the crawlers of fedidb.org and fediverse.observer ignore those. In response, the main GoToSocial server [decided](https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@dumpsterqueer/statuses/01JK5PXHCHWP58172Y40QKE2ZZ ) to serve up randomised numbers, messing up the statistics of these sites. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault removed GoToSocial altogether from the statistics site, but does not [seem to be willing](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113927318904294735 ) to respect the opting out of crawling via robots.txt. The second is regarding the [shutdown](https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/fedionfire-shutdown/ ) of FediOnFire, that displayed public posts from a relay in a format similar to one of Bluesky’s [firehose visualisation tools](https://firesky.tv/ ).<li>How the fediverse treats consent for public posts is unusual, and make it stand out from other networks. For a significant group of people, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-out bases if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a full 2-way interacting fediverse server. In contrast, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-in basis if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a crawler. The line between these two situations is hard to draw, even more so in an internally coherent way. Still, this line clearly exists, and ignoring it leads to high-profile blowups such as with <a href="https://searchtodon.social/">Searchtodon</a> and <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-are-having-a-fight-that-could-shape-the-next-generation-of-social-media/">Bridgy Fed</a>. Defining the permissions clearly for posts would help here, and it is frustrated to see that the situation has not meaningfully improved in years. Furthermore, that fediverse stats sites have ignored the opt-out on a server level via robots.txt indicates that servers setting permissions is not a panacea either.</li>
The [Pixelfed Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks/posts/4297871 ) has seen some updates this week. First was the [update](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks/posts/4297871 ) that setting up a Pixelfed Foundation is now moved to the stretch goal of $200k CAD, and that for $300k CAD the stretch goal is to expand the team to hire additional developers. A few days later, developer Daniel Supernault [said](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113939533710652321 ) that the $300k CAD stretch goal is now to build a Tumblr alternative. That brings the goal of the Pixelfed Kickstarter to build four platforms: Pixelfed, Loops, Sup (an encrypted messaging platform) and an unnamed Tumblr alternative, as well as building a foundation and a developer testing kit with Pubkit. Moving the foundation to a stretch goal that has not been met yet does not feel great to me, as good governance of such large platforms is highly important. Adding a Tumblr alternative to another later stretch goal also makes me concerned that Supernault is taking on too much here, as that is a lot of products to build and maintain.
Openvibe, a client that combines your Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads account into a single feed, has [raised 800k USD](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/28/automattic-and-others-back-openvibe-an-app-thats-unifying-the-open-social-web/ ) in outside investment, with Automattic among the investors. Openvibe is an early mover in the space, and it’s a name I regularly see pop up when people recommend clients. However, open networks and open APIs means that it is hard to build a competitive moat. Still, most apps are hobby projects, and I’m curious how far Openvibe can push their app with the new funding.##
The Links<li>ActivityPub server framework <a href="https://hollo.social/@fedify/0194b112-b604-7d03-84e0-4faaf4ab46cd">Fedify is now on Open Collective</a>.</li><li>Hosting a fedi instance on a <a href="https://1.6.0.0.8.0.0.b.e.d.0.a.2.ip6.arpa/@domi/statuses/01JJS6BMXVDJTQFTRVX4ZKR2GW">.arpa</a> domain.</li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/supporting-the-fediverse-one-small-act-at-a-time/">Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time</a> – <em>Elena Rossini</em>.</li><li>Flipboard and Surf are planning an event, <a href="https://flipboard.social/@surf/113942287838094785">Fediverse House</a>, in Austin, Texas, on March 9 and 10, with more information available soon.</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/radio-free-fedi-shuts-down/">Remembering Radio Free Fedi</a> – <em>WeDistribute</em>.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-102/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250112-01-Detail-of-the-city-of-Gouda-1024x293.jpg

2025-01-28 18:49:09 UTC

**Fediverse Report #101**
Its another massive week for Pixelfed, growing by another 100k active users and doubling their Kickstarter goal, raising over 100k CAD. ##
The NewsPixelfed continues to grow rapidly, adding almost 100k monthly active users in a week, and has now almost 300k monthly active users. Just over a month ago, Pixelfed had around 20k monthly active users. Developer Daniel Supernault launched a Kickstarter this week for Pixelfed,Loops and Sup. The Kickstarter proved popular, raising 100k CAD, double its 50k CAD goal. The Kickstarter is mainly for to fund the continuous development of the platforms, with the primary goals listed as ‘acceleration development’ for Pixelfed and Loops, and starting the development of messaging platform Sup. Sup is a planned encrypted messaging app that is supposed to compete with WhatsApp and Snapchat. Supernault has mentioned working on the project in the past, but it is unclear how far along the project is.
Supernault [says](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113887622931474663 ) that the operational costs for running all of his projects is now over 4000 USD per month. The large majority of people joining the flagship servers pixelfed.social and loops.video, which are both run by Supernault. Still, it seems like Supernault is not particularly interested in sharing out the load of users to other servers, [saying](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113888319278965997 ) that people unfamiliar with the fediverse want to join a a flagship instance. He also says that “using random servers to register on is very dangerous, because not all of them are as dedicated to this as I am, some of them don’t update frequently or handle mod reports as fast as we do.” Supernault is currently the only moderator for both the pixelfed.social server as well as the pixelfed.art server. He also says that Pixelfed.social needs to establish a [mod team](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113899829859761221 ). One barrier to adding extra moderators is that Pixelfed does not have a specific ‘moderator’ role in the software, there is only the possibility to give someone full admin rights. Supernault says that he is working on adding such a feature.
The Pixelfed Kickstarter also lists a Pixelfed Foundation as its stretch goal. It is not particularly clear what such a Foundation would entail: the Kickstarter describes it as both a foundation and a corporation, as says that it “hopefully” would be a not-for-profit. Some of the potential work of the Pixelfed foundation would be to grow the Pixelfed and Loops social networks, and also support other developers in the wider fediverse ecosystem.
Tumblr has [reconfirmed](https://wip.tumblr.com/post/773574776721702912/about-a-year-ago-wordpress-ceo-matt-mullenweg ) that it is working on connecting to the fediverse. In late 2022, Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg [said](https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/tumblr-to-add-support-for-activitypub-the-social-protocol-powering-mastodon-and-other-apps/ ) that the site was going to add ActivityPub support ‘soon’. Plans changed for Tumblr, including staff layoffs, and for a long time it was unclear if this plan was actually going to happen. In summer 2024, Tumblr [announced](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/28/24230587/tumblr-move-blogs-wordpress-automattic ) that they would be working on moving the backend of Tumblr to WordPress. In an AMA this week, the company said that this migration of Tumblr to WordPress means that Tumblr can also use the plugins of WordPress, including the ActivityPub plugin. This means that people will be able to add ActivityPub to their Tumblr blogs. Not much is known about how this would work in practice. ##
The Analysis*Editor’s note: I wrote the section below before Supernault published his latest update on Kickstarter a few hours [ago](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks/posts/4297871 ). In the latest update the Pixelfed Foundation is now moved towards a new stretch goal of 200k CAD. This changes my analysis, but I currently do not have the time to properly analyse and write about it before this newsletter will go out. I’ll write more about this next week.*
Some more thoughts on Pixelfed:<li>I worry about the moderation side for Pixelfed, and specificially the flagship pixelfed.social. Pixelfed.social is now a server with over 200.000 monthly active users, and Supernault is the <a href="https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113899829859761221">only</a> moderator for the server. 1 moderator for over 200k active accounts is not a whole lot, to put it mildly. One of the main goals of the Kickstarter is to “expand the moderation, security, privacy and safety platforms”, and my hope is that the financial success of the Kickstarter can help get a bigger moderation team for the servers as quickly as possible.</li><li>One of the consistently most difficult aspects of fediverse platforms is the governance of the software. Mastodon has gotten a lot of pushback for its ‘<a href="https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter">Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life</a>‘, and correspondingly, a lot of praise when Mastodon recently <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/">moved away</a> from this model. For Pixelfed and Loops the power concentration into a single person is even more pronounced, with a single developer running two different platforms, two flagship servers as well as various other prominent fediverse projects such as fedidb. It shows the incredible amount of work that Supernault has contributed to the fediverse, but it also indicates the centralisation of power that has resulted from this. The Kickstarter promises a Pixelfed Foundation, but it does not say anything about how the Foundation will deal with governance. The short description of the Foundation mainly seems to be focused on financial sustainability and growth of fediverse projects. The section on the Pixelfed Foundation ends with a quote from Mastodon’s blog post: “The people should own the town square”, but it does not explain in any way how “the people” will get to “own the town square”.</li><li>Over on Bluesky, the short-lived TikTok ban in the US has put video front-and-center. As a response, people are starting to take Bluesky posts that contain video, and build a TikTok-like UI around it. Bluesky launched video feeds in their app last week, and SkyLight is a high-profile project to build a video-only UI for Bluesky posts. I’m curious if Pixelfed’s renewed prominence will lead to more interest in similar image-viewing fediverse clients that less bound to server platforms, whether that is Pixelfed, Mastodon or other fediverse platforms.</li><li>The dominance of Mastodon and microblogging over the wider fediverse has led to a situation where Mastodon and the fediverse get equated as mostly the same in coverage of larger news outlets. The growth of Pixelfed, and the mainstream attention that it brings now changes this dynamic. This <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/esatdedezade/2025/01/25/open-source-and-ethical-tiktok-whatsapp-and-instagram-alternatives-could-transform-social-media/">Forbes article</a> about Pixelfed is a good example, where the fediverse gets introduced from the perspective of Pixelfed instead of from a perspective of Mastodon.</li><li>The Kickstarter <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks/description">states</a> an “Commitment to open source and open principles”, and says that “all of the source code for Pixelfed is licensed under the AGPL license and is publicly available on GitHub”. I am not clear why Loops is not mentioned here for a commitment to open source. Loops is not currently neither open source nor federating, <a href="https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed">according</a> to the official Pixelfed account. While Supernault also says that he is “working on that”, I find it strange that Loops is not mentioned under the commitment to open source.</li><li>Building an encrypted messaging app is difficult, to put things mildly. Building an encrypted messaging as a solo developer, while also building an Instagram competitor as well as a TikTok competitor is just wildly optimistic. I fear that Supernault is spreading himself too thin here, committed to too many different products. Supernault’s shifting attention makes it difficult for him to ship features he has promised. Notable example of this is the Groups feature for Pixelfed, which Supernault has promised as coming “<a href="https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/pixelfed-groups-coming-soon/">very soon</a>” since summer 2023. His latest <a href="https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113900394316222179">estimation</a> for groups is now for Q2 2025.</li>
Tumblr saying that they are working on their fediverse integration is great news for the fediverse. For a quite a while it seemed that Tumblr would not actually follow through on early announcements by CEO Mullenweg. The answer by Tumblr that ActivityPub support will depend on a plugin makes it plausible to me that Tumblr blogs will likely have to opt-in to connecting themselves to the fediverse by adding the plugin. So based on the limited information available it seems likely to me it will not be a situation where the fediverse instantly grows by millions of active users.##
The LinksIn the media:<li><a href="https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/">Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy</a> – <em>Jason Koebler/404Media</em></li><li><a href="https://edri.org/our-work/meta-and-x-are-going-rogue-here-is-what-europe-should-do-now/">Meta and X are going rogue. Here is what Europe should do now.</a> – <em>EDRi/EDRi</em></li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2025/01/upward-momentum/">The Challenge of Upward Momentum</a> – <em>Sean Tilley/WeDistribute</em></li><li><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/21/forum-software-nodebb-joins-the-fediverse/">Forum software NodeBB joins the fediverse</a> – <em>Sarah Perez/TechCrunch</em></li><li><a href="https://notes.doesstuff.social/teaching-mastodon-through-practical-interactions/">Teaching Mastodon Through Practical Interactions</a> – Lety Does Stuff</li>
Tech links:<li><a href="https://hachyderm.io/@mapache/113869203661044864">A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website) – Part 8</a> – Maho Pacheco</li><li><a href="https://gyptazy.com/hosting-a-new-activitypub-relay-for-the-fediverse-including-mastodon-and-snac/">Hosting a new ActivityPub Relay for the Fediverse including Mastodon and snac</a> – gyptazy</li><li><a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/25151370">Lemmy bi-weekly development update.</a></li><li><a href="https://masto.doskel.net/@doskel/113884312225881269">Running GoToSocial on your car.</a></li><li>Upcoming fediverse music sharing platform Bandwagon <a href="https://bandwagon.fm/2025-01-22-Search-Engine">shared more information</a> on how discovery will work on the platform.</li>
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-101/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/20241130-10-frozen-water-on-a-small-pond-1024x293.jpg

2025-01-07 18:16:23 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 98**
Welcome back to Fediverse Report! I’ve had a great holiday break spending time with family and friends, and that has given me some more time to think about why I care about the fediverse, the open social web and why I spend all this time writing Fediverse Report. Explaining to family members what I do was helpful to make this clear: telling an uncle that I write about decentralised technology mainly leads to confusion. But even extremely offline family members easily understand and agree with the idea that having all of our big social platforms being owned by billionaires leads to significant social problems.
As such, it has helped for me to make it more explicit that I care about decentralisation insofar it is a tool to get somewhere else: I care about better forms of governance and ownership of the social web. I want a social web where people are in control, not a few billionaires (nor nationstate governments, for that matter). Building social networks with decentralised technology is a way to get there.
The idea that the value of alternative social networks is in governance is far from new. I’ve regularly posted hot takes on my Mastodon to the same effect as well. But for 2025 I want to bring this more into focus for this newsletter. Writing a newsletter that is a weekly update tends to amplify shiny new software that has recently been released. In contrast, explaining how governance works on the fediverse does not align well with ‘this happened in the last 7 days’, as it involves more structural and slower moving forces. I’m experimenting with ways to bring coverage of governance in the fediverse better into focus. Expect more like this newsletter, where I zoom in on an offhanded comment by Misskey developer Syuilo as an illustration of the issues that come with interoperability between different places on the open social web.##
The NewsMastodon has belatedly published their [Annual Report for 2023](https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%202023.pdf ). The organisation acknowledges the delay, and says that the Annual Report for 2024 is planned to be released in Q1 of this year. Mastodon had a total of 545k euro in donations in 2023, with 476k in costs. The large majority of costs go to personnel expenses, in total 343k was spend on salaries, 72% of the total budget. The popularity of Mastodon’s own servers also come with significant costs, in 2023 they spend 75k on servers and hosting. With a rough estimate of averaging around 250k active users on mastodon.social, this means mastodon.social costs roughly 30 cents per active user per year. The Annual Report also looks at the updates Mastodon has made to the site and apps. Mastodon also shares more about their hiring process, and in a great move for transparency, also published all the salaries of everyone in the organisation.
Back in the present, Mastodon is [hiring again](https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/113782664417082619 ), this time for a senior front-end developer. The organisation also held a [crowd-funding campaign](https://givebutter.com/givingmastodon ) in late last year to fund and hire a Trust and Safety lead. The community seemed to have had little appetite for funding such an endeavour, with funding barely pushing past the 12k after a month. It is an indication of the difficult spot the organisation is in; the community has been asking for more safety features in Mastodon, but is not funding a Trust and Safety Lead. The organisation could clearly use someone who writes clear policy and design goals for the direction the software should go in. Currently, not even a Mastodon employee can explain why a [safety feature](https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/18468 ) for Mastodon that is fully developed and waiting to be approved has been waiting for approval [for over 2.5 years](https://social.coop/@graue/113523873101355124 ). It turns out that writing the code is often the easy part of making changes in the fediverse, and navigating the social structures to get the code used by people is much harder, and a dedicated Trust and Safety Lead could have certainly helped here. Instead, even after large community outcry we still do not know why Mastodon has not merged this safety feature developed by their own employee.
[Surf](https://about.surf.social/ ) is a new app by Flipboard for the open social web. It is a beautifully designed app that allows people to build their own custom feeds. The power of Surf is in that it supports many networks, and you can combine posts from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, YouTube and Flipboard all into a single custom feed. How Flipboard markets Surf is interesting, describing it as a ‘browser for the social web’. The way Flipboard CEO Mike McCue [sees](https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/18/24323903/flipboard-surf-fediverse-social-web-app ) it, Surf pulls in content from the social web, and gives you the possibility to display that content in custom feeds of your choice. Surf also allows you to filter a custom feed by content: for example, you can scroll through an entire feed, or switch over to a different tab that shows only videos in that feed, for example.
For more info on Surf, [WeDistribute](https://wedistribute.org/2024/12/surf-social-browser/ ) has a closer look at all the features, and [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/18/24323903/flipboard-surf-fediverse-social-web-app ) has more context and comments by McCue. Custom feeds on Bluesky have mainly gone in the direction of the power user and community builder: tools like [Graze](https://www.graze.social/ ) offer an huge potential in programmability and flexibility. This is especially useful for those who want to build custom feeds that other people will also use. Surf takes a different approach, by instead prompting people to build their own feeds as much as possible. It’ll be interesting to see which approach will gain traction, and if there is space for both ways of building custom feeds.
Misskey developer Syuilo made some [comments](https://misskey.io/notes/a2o2aj7zb81f05g3 ) contemplating breaking federation with Mastodon. Misskey is mainly used in Japan, and has a wide feature set that differs notably from Mastodon. The main reason that Syuilo gave is that she feels Misskey development is constrained by having to meet the needs and requirements of maintaining federation with other (types) of software. That Misskey is considering letting federation between Mastodon and Misskey break is an indication of one of the downsides of how ActivityPub is designed: You can send out anything you want with ActivityPub, but it is exceedingly difficult to know how other software will actually receive and display the things you send out with ActivityPub. There is a significant freedom for fediverse software in how they implement and support even more basic functions. For example, see this comparison table for how the different platforms support [hashtags](https://funfedi.dev/support_tables/generated/hashtags/ ), and how many variations there are.
Personally, I think it would be healthy for the fediverse as a whole if more fediverse software would start publishing what they deem as necessary for other software to federate with them. The fediverse mainly currently works on the assumption that any form of federation between projects is fine, even if that means that another federated platform will stripping out all markup and images of a post. It might be healthy for a platform to state minimum functional requirements, such as ‘we only want to federate with software that also shows the emoji reactions as we view this to be an integral part of a message’. For now, Syuilo’s post mainly seems to be to vent some frustrations, so it remains to be seen where any of this will actually go.##
The Links<li>A <a href="https://russ.garrett.co.uk/2024/12/17/online-safety-act-guide/">guide</a> for small websites regarding the UK’s Online Safety Act, with some extra clarification for fediverse sites.</li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@mizkirsten/113760653630014273">TheIndieBeat.fm</a> is a new radio station for showcasing indie music from the fediverse, that picks up where <a href="https://radiofreefedi.net/">radiofreefedi</a> left, and will use upcoming fediverse audio platform <a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/bandwagon-music/">Bandwagon</a>.</li><li><a href="https://blog.castopod.org/castopod-first-12-plugins/">The first 12 plugins of Castopod</a>.</li><li><a href="https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/113758416011174664">FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse</a>.</li><li><a href="https://event-federation.eu/2025/01/04/event-bridge-for-activitypub-plugin-released-on-wordpress-org/">“Event Bridge For ActivityPub” plugin released on WordPress.org</a>.</li><li><a href="https://rdfpub.org/index_en.html">rdf-pub – generic Activity-Pub Server</a> that focuses on using C2S.</li><li>Manyfold got a new round of NLNet funding, and <a href="https://manyfold.app/news/2025/01/01/manyfold-nlnet.html">published a roadmap</a> of what they’ll be working on.</li><li><a href="https://piefed.social/post/394576">PieFed development update for December 2024.</a></li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/019437a2-a2e5-ed6f-ebff-dcbb6bc6aba4">Fediverse tech roadmap reflection on developments in the past year</a>, by Mitra developer Silverpill.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-98/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/20241105-03-the-canopy-of-a-birch-tree-against-a-blue-sky-1024x293.jpg

2024-12-17 18:11:23 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 97**
A new non-profit for governance of Bridgy Fed, PeerTube releases their yearly update with a complete redesign, and the organisation behind Mammoth and sub.club winds down due to a lack of funding.
*Editors note: I’ll be on holiday break for the next two weeks. The next edition of Last Week in Fediverse will be out on January 7th. Thank you for reading and supporting me in 2024!*##
The News####
A New SocialA New Social is a new non-profit that [launched today](https://www.anew.social/hello-social-web/ ). The goal of A New Social is to build cross-protocol tools and services for the open social web. The organisation consists of [Anuj Ahooja](https://anujahooja.com/ ) (CEO) and [Ryan Barrett](https://snarfed.org/about#been+around ) (CTO). The main project that they will be focused on is [Bridgy Fed](https://fed.brid.gy/ ), the service that lets people connect their social accounts across a variety of networks and protocols.
Barrett [wrote](https://snarfed.org/2024-11-01_53932 ) in early November about the possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Up until now, Bridgy Fed was his personal one-man side project. Conversations with other organisations like Flipboard and Meta gave Barrett a sense of urgency that the project was quickly trending towards becoming critical infrastructure for the open social web. Heated conversations earlier this year about how people should interact with the bridge (opt-in versus opt-out) also made it clear that such a tool should have cohesive governance, where Barrett writes: “it is about who makes those decisions, and how they should be made.”
Ahooja has come in as the new leader, to help build a structural organisations that can deal with the conversations around governance and decision making. Ahooja describes his vision as that of the [‘last network effect](https://www.augment.ink/bridges-the-last-network-effect/ )‘, which is worth reading in its entirety. In his view, the current state of the open social web is that of the exploratory phase, where neither ActivityPub nor ATProto have yet fully proven themselves at mass scale yet. Protocol bridges such as Bridgy Fed can bridge the gap: not only allows it for compatibility between platforms, it also bridges the gap in time. It allows us to commit to a platform now, without knowing for certain it the protocol that platform uses will be an important protocol in the future. This is possible because with bridged platforms and networks, you can take your own social graph with you.
In a conversation with Ahooja and Barrett, they say that people have rallied around A New Social very quickly, and that people have been very supportive of the organisation. The organisation has the support of Mastodon, Meta, Bluesky, IFTAS, SWF and Flipboard. It shows that there is a broader awareness that the open social web needs more organisations that are concerned with governance. The ATProto project of [lexicon.community](https://github.com/lexicon-community ) (not affiliated with A New Social) is another such example of people starting to work towards governance of internet infrastructure.
A New Social is looking to recruit a Board of Directors, as well as reaching out to developers to collaborate on tools and services that are needed for cross-protocol platforms. For development work, the main focus is on making the bridge more accessible and easier to understand: Barrett and Ahooja will be working on making the bridge easier to user with a cleaner UX, as well as on awareness and education what Bridgy Fed actually does. Ahooja is also clear on separating a protocol network from the platforms that make up a network. Each platform has its own culture and policies, and A New Social will be working with each individual platform on what approach to bridging fits their specific platform best.
Personally I think the fediverse has struggled for a while to make a clearer distinction between the fediverse as a single place and the fediverse as a network of different platforms. For me, the value of the fediverse is in the ability to build connecting platforms that each have their own culture, governance, moderation, and sense of place. A New Social is aware and mindful of this, and their approach of treating each platform as its own space can help further the fediverse towards a true super-network of interconnected digital places.####
PeerTube v7[PeerTube v7 has officially been released](https://framablog.org/2024/12/17/peertube-v7-offer-a-complete-makeover-to-your-video-platform/ ), and the update brings a major redesign. Framasoft has been working on two major projects this year for PeerTube: mobile apps for Android and iOS ([released last week](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-96/ )), and a complete remodeling of the PeerTube interface. Framasoft has worked with designers for a thorough UX research, with tests and user interviews. Based on this the interface of PeerTube has been redesigned from the ground up. Framasoft has prioritised accessibility, they completed a full accessibility audit and used the findings to create the improvements and changes to the interface. Menus and pages have also been remodeled and simplified, to counteract some of the organic growth of all the options that has been build up over the years. The interface also looks a lot cleaner and calmer, with a more modern look.
As a sidenote: Framasoft says that they now refer to PeerTube servers as platforms, not instances. They give inclusion as a reason, saying that this term is easier to understand for people who are less well-versed in technology and the fediverse. I think this is a great change, and something that other fediverse software should consider as well. Platforms better communicates that each fediverse server is its own social network, that can have its own culture and governance. The value of the fediverse is that each platform can be its own separate digital space, and I find that the term platform communicates this better than instance does.####
Shutdown of Mammoth and sub.clubThe BLVD, the organisation behind three fediverse projects, has announced that they are shutting down due to a lack of funding. The BLVD has created the Mastodon iOS app Mammoth, fediverse creator payment platform sub.club, and the moth.social Mastodon server. All three projects will be shut down at the end of January 2025. The BLVD [depended](https://moth.social/@mammoth/113550544058629618 ) on Mozilla for their funding, and Mozilla announced in September that they are shutting down their fediverse projects. In November the organisation already [said](https://moth.social/@mammoth/113550544058629618 ) that they were now operating without any funding. Any community member that is interested in taking over the maintainance of one of the projects can get in touch. Bart Decrem, the founder of BLVD, [said](https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/16/24322574/sub-club-mastodon-mammoth-fediverse-shutting-down ) to The Verge that sub.club had more than 150 creators on the platform.####
Nomadic IdentityNomadic Identity is a mechanism that allows people to have their fediverse identity to be separate from the fediverse platform that they are using, which results them in being able to seamlessly switch their fediverse account to a different platform. The mechanism has been available in fediverse software Streams for multiple years, but it uses the fediverse protocol Nomad. The Nomad protocol has undergone some renaming (orginally Zot) over the years. Recently a [new documentation website](https://opennomad.net/page/nomad/home ) was launched for the Nomad protocol, which gives some more background information. The site also published an [article](https://opennomad.net/page/nomad/concepts ) explaining the concepts of Nomadic Identity.
There has been a [Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for bringing Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub](https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md ), and that proposal is now seeing it’s first implementation: fediverse software Mitra and Streams recently [announced](https://mitra.social/post/01939dc9-51d3-155f-fe1d-5dfcf243ed7b ) the first form of communications between them using the new nomadic implementation of ActivityPub. Account portability is a feature that is regularly used as an example of the valuable features that an open protocol such as ActivityPub enables, but using the actual implementation currently comes with [frictions](https://erinkissane.com/notes-from-a-mastodon-migration ). Early adopters like the new product [Weird](https://a.weird.one/ ) are already [thinking](https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113658801135974395 ) about offering Mitra as their fediverse platform of choice due to the new abilities that Nomadic Identity bring.####
IFTAS needs assesmentIFTAS just [published](https://about.iftas.org/2024/12/17/the-2024-iftas-needs-assessment-report-is-here/ ) their Needs Assesments report, that gives a detailed overview of the state of moderation on the fediverse. They published this report just before I send out this article, but I want to include it because I think it’s important. So here are the key findings, in IFTAS’ own words:<li>Resource gaps – only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage, and nearly half of moderator teams lack formal guidance. That said, we see roughly one moderator for every 1,200 active accounts.</li><li>Top ranked priorities – moderators need tools for CSAM detection, spam prevention, and legal guidance for compliance with regulations like GDPR.</li><li>Burnout is a persistent issue – one in five moderators report experiencing trauma or burnout this year, underlining the need for wellness and resilience resources.</li><li>Financial struggles – most communities operate on donations, and overall our survey participants are not generating enough money to cover costs. Very few moderators are receiving any compensation for their labour.</li>##
The Links<li><a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/12/trunk-tidbits-november-2024/">Trunk & Tidbits for November 2024</a>, Mastodon’s monthly engineering update.</li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/sharkey-a-fediverse-project-that-is-beautiful-inside-out/">Sharkey: a Fediverse project that is beautiful inside & out</a> – Elena Rossini</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/12/make-loops-video/">How to Make Your First Loops Video</a> – WeDistribute.</li><li><a href="https://www.wrecka.ge/what-people-in-the-global-majority-need-from-networks/">what people in the global majority need from networks</a> – wreckage/salvage</li><li>A proposal for a working group for <a href="https://forum.solidproject.org/t/integrating-activitypub-within-solid-specs/8355">Integrating ActivityPub within Solid specs</a>.</li><li><a href="https://event-federation.eu/2024/12/17/event-bridge-for-activitypub-upcoming-1-0-release/">Event Bridge for ActivityPub: Upcoming 1.0 Release</a>.</li><li>IFTAS December <a href="https://preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webview/454975/139703583531598974">update</a>.</li><li><a href="https://thelettertwo.com/2024/12/15/behind-flipboard-fediverse-embrace-mike-mccue-interview/">Why Flipboard Looks to the Fediverse for Its Next Big Evolution</a> – thelettertwo</li><li>Mastodon now gives server admins the <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent/113630403024860565">possibility to opt-in</a> to adding referrers to links. This allows other websites to see the traffic that a Mastodon server is sending.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/@weekinfediverse">Weekly fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/alt-text-health-check-image-accessibility-report-2/">Alt Text Health Check image accessibility report #2.</a></li><li><a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/12/creating-a-generic-log-in-with-mastodon-service/">Creating a generic “Log-in with Mastodon” service</a>.</li><li><a href="https://akkofe.w.on-t.work/notice/a1rumsky1sd2m9mj">ActivityPub in Minecraft.</a></li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113665304695257743">Loops ‘Unwrapped’</a> with some statistics about how Loops has been growing since launch.</li><li><a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/the-reader-experience/">Ghost’s weekly development update</a> shares more about the reader client as well as their database design.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#2 #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-97/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/20241105-01-green-moss-on-a-tree-trunk-1024x293.jpg

2024-11-26 18:29:20 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 94**
Keeping up with links shared on your feeds with Sill, a new open protocol with Leaf, and PeerTube is starting to test their mobile app. ##
The News[Sill](https://sill.social/links ) is a new app that aggregates the most popular links that are posted in your network. Sill connects to both your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and gives a combined overview of all the networks, as well as the option to filter the links. It not only shows you the links, but also shows you what people you follow have posted about these links, and sends you a daily email update. Creator Tyler Fisher [describes](https://www.tylerjfisher.com/blog/post/2024/11/20/introducing-sill ) Sill as an open-source passion project, and says he wants to make it sustainable, and is thus thinking about potential ways to make revenue. Fisher also says that he is ‘committed to always keeping the basic Sill web client free’.
The [Leaf Protocol](https://zicklag.katharos.group/blog/introducing-leaf-protocol/ ) is a newcomer in the space of decentralised protocols, a peer-to-peer federation protocol. The Leaf protocol is working towards what they [call](https://zicklag.katharos.group/blog/introducing-leaf-protocol/ ) an ‘agentic fediverse’. The Leaf Protocol is developed in tandem with the product named [Weird](https://blog.muni.town/digital-homeownership/ ), which provides people with a simple homepage on the internet. Underneath this website is Leaf, which provides the possibility of federation with other versions of Weird, as well as other potential products. The team has written [here](https://blog.muni.town/leaf-atproto-activitypub/ ) on how Leaf compares to ActivityPub and ATProto, as well as about [capabilities and identity](https://blog.muni.town/capabilities-and-identity-with-leaf/ ) to see how it holds up to Christine Lemmer-Webber’s [‘recipe for making the “Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)”‘](https://social.coop/@cwebber/113528858061852192 ).
One of PeerTubes [main goals](https://joinpeertube.org/news/peertube-future-2024 ) for 2024 is to release a mobile app. PeerTube has now started [testing](https://framaforms.org/peertube-mobile-application-release-candidate-1731599644 ) the first versions of the app, available for both Android and iOS. They note that the app is still under active development, with some features missing.
Ghost’s latest [update](https://activitypub.ghost.org/inboxes-feeds-articles-notes/ ) on their work on implementing ActivityPub shows that they are working on two different types of readers: an inbox for long-form content, and a feed for short-form.##
The Links<li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-new-way-to-describe-the-fediverse-and-its-opposition-to-big-tech/">A new way to describe the Fediverse and its opposition to Big Tech</a> – Elena Rossini.</li><li><a href="https://soatok.blog/2024/11/21/key-transparency-and-the-right-to-be-forgotten/">Key Transparency and the Right to be Forgotten</a> – Soatek, as part of their series on E2EE in the fediverse.</li><li><a href="https://stfn.pl/blog/53-starting-gotosocial-instance/">How I started my GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse</a>.</li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113536944778595665">Loopless.app</a> is a third-party Android app for short-form video platform <a href="https://loops.video/">Loops.video</a>.</li><li><a href="https://dbzer0.com/blog/this-blog-is-now-federated-natively-to-lemmy/">This blog is now federated natively to lemmy</a> – db0.</li><li><a href="https://poliverso.org/display/0477a01e-7967-436d-12c8-1b3699371761">Raccoon for Friendica</a> is a new mobile Android app for Friendica and Mastodon.</li><li>This week is <a href="https://mattwiebe.blog/2024/11/24/support-week-for-activitypub-for-wordpress/">Support Week for ActivityPub for WordPress</a>.</li><li>Discord is <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/discordpreviews.com/post/3lbfrdcmh7c2m">working on</a> profile connections for Mastodon and Bluesky.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/0193553b-c77c-7bff-9394-60b52cd166c6">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-html-discovery/">ActivityPub Discovery</a> is a new (draft) report by the SocialCG Discovery Task Force.</li><li><a href="https://subscribeto.me/w/d3686f67-3c04-4277-bdf1-c76835b8f36f">‘I spent the last year working on the Fediverse. Here’s what I’ve learned.’</a></li><li>OpenVibe’s latest <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/openvibe.social/post/3lbhtk5bd7s2v">update</a> supports for tagging users on multiple platforms.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-94/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20241005-07-Roof-of-a-building-against-a-blue-sky-1024x293.jpg

2024-11-18 19:11:47 UTC

**Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power**
Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and a significant amount of media attention as well. All that attention to Bluesky has also led to a renewed conversation around the question of whether Bluesky is decentralised or not.
The terms decentralisation and federation are used in multiple ways: to describe the technological architecture details of an internet protocol, but just as often as a shorthand to describe whether or not a (digital) network is open and not under the control of a central authority. The second definition is the one I care about: I write about decentralised social networks because I care about an internet that is open, accessible, and not under the control of a few tech oligarchs. My interest in federation and decentralisation is pragmatic; I view it simply as the most likely option of getting there.
Once you view decentralisation and federation as tools to achieve a more equal power structure of the social web, conversations about Bluesky and decentralisation can become clearer, as there are multiple dimensions at play.####
Technological decentralisationThe first dimension is technological, and the questions here relate to the architecture that the network uses. The concerns here are around the implementation of ATProto, the protocol that powers the network that Bluesky is a part of. This network is called the ATmosphere, and it includes Bluesky as well as other apps that use ATProto, such as [Frontpage](https://frontpage.fyi/ ).
Technological details matter, as small decisions can have large impact on power and authority, but I’m not looking to hash out all of the details in this post. What I do want to point out is that even on the matter of technology there are multiple aspects to it:<li>Are we talking about Bluesky the microblogging app, or the larger ATmosphere network?</li><li>Are we concerned about whether decentralisation has happened, or whether it is possible?</li>
It turns out that once you start peeling back the layers of the technological side of decentralisation, more and more questions start to arise. This is because ATProto splits up the network into separate components, and makes each component open and accessible for others to use and run. This is good for making the network more decentralised, but funnily enough it makes understanding decentralisation all the more difficult.
Taking control of your own data on ATProto is possible by hosting your own PDS. Building and hosting your own app on ATProto is possible. Streaming data from the entire network is possible by running your own Relay. Verifying digital identities and owning one yourself is possible.
All of these options are possible, and people are doing them to a varying extent. But a single, agreed-upon definition of ‘once ATProto conforms to these specifications it counts as decentralised’ is not available.####
Social DistributionDecentralisation is a way to distribute power, and power is gained by people bestowing it on you. Technology changes the ways power can be distributed, but it is a sideshow to the thing that matters: where are the people, and on whom are they distributing power.
The above conversation about the technological side of ATProto matters much less than how people actually use the network. Here it becomes clear that for any meaningful way to describe distributed power, the ATmosphere is not decentralised at all: over 99% of people exclusively use infrastructure that is owned by Bluesky PBC.
The technology allows for decentralisation, and there are other parts of the network. But the user count for the other apps is in the thousands at best, compared to the tens of million for Bluesky. Even the other apps that do exist reuse infrastructure owned by Bluesky. While they could run their own relay instead of using Bluesky’s relay, why would they spend money when they can also not spend money?
Furthermore, what the protocol affords is not equal to what the average person can actually use. ATProto allows people to take full control of their own data by either self-hosting their PDS or using a hosting provider.<a href="#88b720c3-cfc1-4ca4-a788-92979e429284" id="88b720c3-cfc1-4ca4-a788-92979e429284-link">1</a> Doing so currently requires technical knowledge: easy from the perspective of an experienced programmer, but out of reach from the majority of the population. ####
Structure and structureless Control and authority in decentralised and distributed systems is a hard problem to solve. In the [Tyranny of Structureless](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm ), Jo Freeman writes:
*“This apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.” *
I took Freeman’s quote from [this essay about systems design](https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227 ), which adds<a href="#5b0dd620-11ef-4ed0-81de-0b060f09ab44" id="5b0dd620-11ef-4ed0-81de-0b060f09ab44-link">2</a>:
*“‘Informal, unacknowledged, and unaccountable’ control is just as common in distributed computing systems as it is in human social systems. The truth is, nearly every attempt to design a hierarchy-free, ‘flat’ control system just moves the central control around until you can’t see it anymore. Human structures all have leaders, whether implicit or explicit, and the explicit ones tend to be more diverse.”*
Decentralised social networks are capable of distributing power to a certain extent, but control does pop up in other places. The fediverse is very decentralised with over 30k servers, but virtually all software is dependent on the Mastodon API, and every Mastodon competitor quickly realises that implementing the Mastodon API is mandatory in order to be part of the fediverse. The Mastodon API is not part of the ActivityPub protocol, and the code is owned by a self-styled dictator for life. Every human structure has leaders after all, and in the case of the fediverse, it is more implicit.
ATProto has chokepoints too, but what stands out to me about them is that they are so much more explicit:<li>There is the development of ATProto itself: the protocol is open-source, but it is clear that it is the Bluesky company who is doing the development work</li><li>Within the protocol there is the PLC.Directory, which is effectively a giant address book of everyone on the network.</li>
These two chokepoints show that Bluesky PBC has some centralised control over the ATmosphere. But the explicit nature of the control points also makes it easier to deal with them by recognising them for what they are. It also indicates that technological decentralisation might not always be the answer, and that we can look for other ways to make sure that control over critical infrastructure is done in an democratic manner. Bluesky PBC is working towards bringing the PLC.Directory under control of a different organisation. Although it is not clear yet that which organisation that will be, Bluesky PBC is [looking](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AVUAUDC2A&t=13s ) for an ‘ICANN-style’ consortium.####
IncentivesNetworks do not become decentralised purely by having a technical architecture that enables decentralisation. The people who together constitute a network need to have incentives to organise themselves in a manner that results in a distribution of power. On this front, Bluesky has an attractive value proposition for start-ups that are looking to launch a social product: Bluesky comes with a multimillion user social graph that new apps can plug into and build on top of.
This makes the ATmosphere much more likely to become decentralised the more the network grows in popularity and Bluesky becomes a household name. Building Instagram on ATProto is just such an obvious idea that every techbro is going to try it once the realisation starts to settle in what ATProto actually enables. <a href="#d5325cc4-bb1c-4c59-8304-4cdc4e926acd" id="d5325cc4-bb1c-4c59-8304-4cdc4e926acd-link">3</a>
Assuming (still an if!) this comes to pass, conversations about decentralisation and the distribution of power in the ATmosphere will start to look quite differently. In a situation where there are multiple apps in the network, power is decentralised and distributed between the owners of these apps. That would create some type of decentralised power structure of the broader network, but not necessarily one where the power of Bluesky the microblogging app is concerned.
So while competitive incentives might lead to a decentralised network, it might not necessarily lead to decentralised microblogging within that network. Not everything needs to be left to market forces however. We can built other, cooperative structures that lead to an even better distribution of power on the ATProto network, and fully intend to pursue that direction further.<li id="88b720c3-cfc1-4ca4-a788-92979e429284">A Personal Data Server, which stores all your data on the ATProto network. <a href="#88b720c3-cfc1-4ca4-a788-92979e429284-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 1">↩︎</a></li><li id="5b0dd620-11ef-4ed0-81de-0b060f09ab44">I found out about this article via <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3lav4hon67c24">this post</a> by Bluesky developer Jaz, which seems relevant here. <a href="#5b0dd620-11ef-4ed0-81de-0b060f09ab44-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 2">↩︎</a></li><li id="d5325cc4-bb1c-4c59-8304-4cdc4e926acd">I use a custom feed on Bluesky to count how many people have posted this idea as a suggestion, and it’s a lot. Wish I had kept screenshots. <a href="#d5325cc4-bb1c-4c59-8304-4cdc4e926acd-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 3">↩︎</a></li>
#bluesky
https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-decentralisation-and-the-distribution-of-power/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20241027-02-Mushrooms-in-the-woods-1024x293.jpg

2024-11-12 17:43:52 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 92**
Simple bots, updates to Loops, and Flipboard takes over some automated RSS accounts.##
The NewsThe upcoming shutdown of the botsin.space server has lead to some renewed experimentation and development work around bots on the fediverse. Terence Eden has [built a bot](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/11/introducing-activitybot-the-simplest-way-to-build-mastodon-bots/ ) to be as simple as possible, needing only 2 files to run. This bot can be [bridged](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:i6misxex577k4q6o7gloen4s/post/3laoqctnu2k26 ) to Bluesky as well.
Some more [updates](https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/113434869514480392 ) on Loops, with some crucial missing features now being added: tapping the Home button brings you to the top of the feed, a pull to refresh, and tabs for notification, search and explore. Loops is also taking a decidedly [different approach](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113453219972444315 ) from other fediverse platforms; while many fediverse platforms pride themselves on not having an algorithmic feed, developer Daniel Supernault is [working](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113468973040948592 ) on placing For You Page is becoming front-and-center for Loops. In turn this makes it difficult for new Loops servers to set up and compete, and Supernault is actively [considering](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113468922190419882 ) having the flagship loops.video server function as the centralised service for the For You algorithm.
Flipboard is taking over the accounts on the press.coop server. Press.coop was a fediverse server that mirrors the RSS feeds of news organisations, and republished them on an unofficial press.coop account. In the [press release](https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/flipboard-takes-over-press-coop-accounts/ ), press.coop owner Dick Hardt says that he noticed that now that Flipboard is part of the fediverse, these news organisations already have a more official presence on the fediverse via Flipboard. ActivityPub allows for an easy transfer here, if you followed a press.coop account you are now automatically following the corresponding Flipboard account instead.
The fediverse has tied up user names quite strictly to fediverse servers: your username handle contains the server name itself, following the convention of @[email protected]. This means your account is tied up to the server and server domain, which does occasionally lead to issues with servers disappearing because the domain is not available anymore. This convention is not in fact mandated by ActivityPub, and the ‘[WebFinger Split-Domain Canary](https://correct.webfinger-canary.fietkau.software/ )‘ is a showcase that it is possible to have an account where the domain in the username is different from the server that the account is on. For developers interested in experimenting what is further possible in the fediverse this might be an interesting direction to look at.
Heise.de has consistently been sharing [statistics](https://social.heise.de/@mho/113464109110981210 ) on the sources of traffic to their news site, and for the last two weeks Mastodon has overtaken X in traffic, with Bluesky and Threads far behind.##
The Links<li><a href="https://elenarossini.com/2024/11/the-rebellion-will-be-federated/">The rebellion will be federated</a> – Elena Rossini.</li><li><a href="https://www.augment.ink/bridges-the-last-network-effect/">Bridges & The Last Network Effect</a> – Anuj Ahooja.</li><li><a href="https://makertube.net/w/425d9267-2bb9-48bf-ac60-eeecfb78ab5d">Fighting Enshittification with ActivityPub</a> – A presentation by Manyfold developer James at the London Ruby User Group.</li><li><a href="https://docs.castopod.org/main/en/user-guide/">Castopod has updated their new user guide.</a></li><li>Fediverse Tumblr clone <a href="https://app.wafrn.net/">Wafrn</a> is <a href="https://app.wafrn.net/fediverse/post/b9a4f74c-cd55-46cb-88de-a2d39d60cfbd">working</a> on a Bluesky integration.</li><li>Letterbook is a fediverse platform that is currently in development, and it has <a href="https://letterbook.com/blog/post/2024/11/6/contributing.html">published an overview </a>the current state of development.</li><li>Ghost’s weekly <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/queue-theory-post-offices/">update</a> is about how they are working on performance improvements with queues.</li><li><a href="https://owncast.ghost.io/owncast-newsletter-november-2024/">Owncast Newsletter November 2024</a>.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-92/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20240922-12-Waterdrops-on-a-green-bench-1024x293.jpg

2024-11-05 18:10:59 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 91**
Loops has finally launched, Radio Free Fedi will shut down, and governance for Bridgy Fed.##
The News[Loops.video](https://loops.video/ ), the short-form video platform has finally launched, after weeks of delays. There is now an iOS app on TestFlight available, as well as an Android APK, and it there is [no waitlist](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113423640423794421 ) anymore. In some [statistics](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113423729281029853 ) shared by Loops developed Daniel Supernault, Loops now has more than 8000 people signed up and close to a [1000](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113426644736997173 ) videos posted. The app has the bare minimum of features, with only one feed that seems to be algorithmic, and there is no following feed. Supernault [says](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113429032747448116 ) that he is currently working on adding discovery features as well as notifications to the app. The app currently loads videos smoothly and quickly, and Supernault has already had to [upgrade](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113423459557251882 ) the server to deal with traffic. Loops is currently not federating with the rest of the fediverse, and you cannot interact with Loops from another fediverse account. This feature is [planned](https://loops.video/help-center/federation ), but there is no estimation when this will happen. Third party clients are already possible with Loops, and one is already [available](https://loops.gay/ ).
Radio Free Fedi has [announced](https://musician.social/@radiofreefedi/113406513837978275 ) that it will shut down in January 2025. Radio Free Fedi is a radio station and community that broadcasts music by people on the fediverse. The project has grown from a simple stream into multiple non-stop radio streams, a specialty channel and a channel for spoken word, and build up a catalogue of over 400 artists who’s art are broadcast on the radio. Running a project requires a large amount of work, and was largely done by one person. They say that this is not sustainable anymore, and that the way that the project is structured make handing the project over to someone else [not an option](https://musician.social/@radiofreefedi/113406520633927973 ). Radio Free Fedi has been a big part of the artist’s community on the fediverse, which has contributed to a culture of [celebrating](https://musician.social/@radiofreefedi/113406525853709825 ) independent art, and the sunset of Radio Free Fedi is a loss for fediverse culture.
In an [update](https://snarfed.org/2024-11-01_53932 ) on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.
The Social Web Foundation will organise a Devroom at FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a yearly conference in Brussels for free and open source software, and will be on February 1-2, 2025. The Social Web Foundation is [inviting](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/social-web-devroom-at-fosdem-2025/4709 ) people and projects to give talks about ActivityPub, in the format of either a talk of 25 minutes for bigger projects, or a lightning talk of 8 minutes.
OpenVibe is a client for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and has now added [support](https://mastodon.social/@openvibe/113403233930516186 ) for cross-posting to Threads as well. OpenVibe also offers the [ability](https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/01/cross-posting-social-app-openvibe-now-supports-threads-too/ ) to have a combined feed, that shows posts from your accounts on all the different networks into a single feed, which now can include your Threads account, as well as your Mastodon, Nostr and Bluesky accounts.
The [shutdown](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-90/ ) of the botsin.space server lead to some new experiments with bots on the fediverse:<li>Ktistec is a single-user <a href="https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec">ActivityPub server</a> that added support for bots in the form of <a href="https://epiktistes.com/objects/MhEitOe99Jo">scripts</a> that the server itself periodically runs.</li><li>A super <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent/113402755271517191">simple server scripts</a> for bots.</li>##
The Links<li><a href="https://subscriptions.boricua.style/fediblock-a-tiny-history-2/">Fediblock, a Tiny History</a> – Artist Marcia X.</li><li><a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/flatness/">A faux “Eternal September” turns into flatness</a> – The Nexus of Privacy.</li><li><a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3646547.3689027">Fediverse Migrations: A Study of User Account Portability on the Mastodon Social Network</a> – a paper for the Internet Measurement Conference.</li><li>IFTAS is <a href="https://mastodon.iftas.org/@iftas/113398619372421886">collaborating</a> with Bonfire on building moderation tools into the upcoming platform.</li><li>Another <a href="https://social.heise.de/@mho/113392427580330186">update</a> on how traffic from different platforms compare to the German news site heise.de</li><li>Lemmy development <a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/22023532">update</a> for the last two weeks.</li><li>An <a href="https://sciences.social/@Fassbender/113408951766550292">infographic</a> and <a href="https://connect.iftas.org/news/connect/mastodon-discovery/">blog</a> on how account recommendations work in Mastodon.</li><li>Ghost’s weekly <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/replies-get-an-upgrade/">update</a> on their work on ActivityPug.</li><li>For Mastodon admins: a <a href="https://mastodon.scot/@gunchleoc/113412566071061877">script</a> to ‘restart delivery to instances that had some technical difficulties a while ago but are now back online’.</li><li>Letterbook is a social networking platform build from scratch, currently under development, and is <a href="https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/113420773796860320">holding office hours</a> for maintainers.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-91/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20240918-15-Fruits-of-Clematis-vitalba-also-known-as-old-mans-beard-1024x293.jpg

2024-11-04 19:51:27 UTC

**A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub**
If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? What would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?
This article is not a deep technical explanation about how either ActivityPub or ATProto work. Instead I want to explain to you have these two protocols have different conceptual models of what an open social network looks like. These conceptual models differ much more from each other than people expect, leading people to apply concepts that come from the ActivityPub world to the ATProto world, in a way that does not fit with the conceptual model that ATProto has.
One of the main subjects of [discussion](https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/ ) recently has been whether Bluesky is decentralised and if it is federated. I think answering these questions requires a clarity on how ATProto differs conceptually from ActivityPub. Decentralisation and federation are valued for how they impact power structures, but there are multiple ways to build other power structures in open social networks.
A bit of the summary at the top, since that might help during reading: <li>The conceptual model of ActivityPub resembles that of email: independent servers sending messages to each other. </li><li>The <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3la4wq6ku3k22">conceptual model</a> of ATProto resembles that of the web: independent sites publish data, and indexers aggregate this data into different views and apps.</li>##
A conceptual model of ActivityPub and the fediverseThe fediverse<a href="#5583e2f5-4c00-4d49-bda3-105e55d2e7b8" id="5583e2f5-4c00-4d49-bda3-105e55d2e7b8-link">1</a> is a network of independent social networking sites that use the ActivityPub protocol with each other. The conceptual model of the fediverse is that each social networking site, often called a server or instance, is it’s own network that can exist independently. You can set up your own Mastodon server, not connect to any other server, invite some of your friends, and have a fully functional social networking site.
Because each server is its own independent and complete social networking site, it means that each fediverse server is a monolith, that puts all components together in a single place. A fediverse server:<li>Owns your identity.</li><li>Stores your data.</li><li>Transforms protocol data into a site with a timeline that you can look at.</li>
Most people run a fediverse server because they want their independent social networking site to join a super-network of interconnected social networking sites; the fediverse. This ‘anyone can run a fediverse server’ is the ‘decentralised’ part of the fediverse. In order for the server to communicate with the rest of the fediverse it does a fourth thing:<li>Communicates with the rest of the network. In ActivityPub terms: the server gives you an inbox and outbox, and messages flow between these inboxes and outboxes on other servers.</li>
This communication between servers is the ‘federation’ part of the fediverse.##
Decentralisation and Federation in the fediverseThe reason to create a super-network of independent social networking sites is one of governance. The fediverse is in many ways a response to the centralised governance under a single billionaire of the current Big Tech platforms, and creates a governance structure where each social networking site is it’s own authority; it has authoritative control over the users on their site, but no authority over any of the other ~30k independent servers.
Decentralisation and federation are crucial for the functioning of the architecture of the fediverse. Decentralisation means that anyone can set up their own social networking site, and federation means that all these independent sites can connect with each other without a single central authority. While these terms often get used as being valuable in itself, I think they should be seen as technical solutions to solve a governance problem: how can we build a social network without a single central authority? Human nature is a funny thing however, and technical solutions to limit authoritative control usually means that chokepoints simply pop up in other places; whether that’s the software that’s used 75% of users being governed by a [self-styled](https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter ) ‘benevolent dictator for life’, or server admins having full centralised control over the users on their server.##
A conceptual model of ATProto and the ATmosphereBluesky PBC<a href="#65a141ab-859c-4dab-a4fa-8249476281b8" id="65a141ab-859c-4dab-a4fa-8249476281b8-link">2</a> is also building an open social network with the [explicit goal](https://bsky.social/about/faq ) that the network should not be owned by a single company. The protocol they use is called AT Protocol, often called ATProto. The network that is build on top of ATProto is called the ATmosphere. The approach they take to get there is quite different than the one the fediverse takes, however. The conceptual model of ATProto is that every account is it’s own independent place in the ATmosphere<a href="#8fdd63e6-6314-461d-af26-2783a7821fa6" id="8fdd63e6-6314-461d-af26-2783a7821fa6-link">3</a>, and every app is an aggregator that takes data from all the places in the ATmosphere and uses them to create their own service.
Every account has its own place to store their data, a Personal Data Server<a href="#c6a638c6-a427-436d-aab1-d314e33005ee" id="c6a638c6-a427-436d-aab1-d314e33005ee-link">4</a>. This PDS is a simply a database that contains all your own data on ATProto: the posts you made on Bluesky, as well as your RSVP to an event on [Smoke Signal](https://smokesignal.events/ ).
In turn, every application is an aggregator, similar to how Google is an aggregator of the web. An ATProto app (like Bluesky) takes the data from all the PDSes in the network<a href="#8bdb1fcd-5a3d-4982-84e3-c50b2cdf8ac7" id="8bdb1fcd-5a3d-4982-84e3-c50b2cdf8ac7-link">5</a>. The ‘app’ processes that data, and provides the end-user with a ‘view’ on that data. As such, these applications on ATProto are called AppViews.
In the case of Bluesky, they take all the microblogging posts stored on all the PDSes in the ATmosphere, aggregate them together. This aggregation allows Bluesky to give users the Discover feed, count the number of likes on a post, among other things. It is then presented (the ‘view’) to the user in a format that resembles Twitter<a href="#7b082335-9523-466a-8365-80f381ec7686" id="7b082335-9523-466a-8365-80f381ec7686-link">6</a>. But other AppViews are also possible: [WhiteWind](https://whtwnd.com/ ) is a blogging platform build on ATProto: it allows you to write blogs, and if you use WhiteWind to write a blog posts, these posts are also stored in the same PDS that stores your Bluesky data. The WhiteWind application (AppView) aggregates data from the entire ATmosphere, and takes both WhiteWind-style blog posts, as well as Bluesky’s microblogs. The View WhiteWind presents on their site is blog posts, and with Bluesky’s microblogs functioning as a sort of comment section<a href="#8b607838-7e9b-4a95-955e-113f7da7dd40" id="8b607838-7e9b-4a95-955e-113f7da7dd40-link">7</a>.
In short, the conceptual model of ATProto is has some resembles to how the web works. The web has many independent websites, and indexers such as Google aggregate the websites and present it back to users in their own ‘view’. Similarly, the ATmosphere has contains of many PDSes, and AppViews aggregate this data into a product for users.##
Independence, openness and power on ATProtoAs the question ‘Is Bluesky decentralised and federated’ is the greatest thread in the history of forums, and the discussion is still not locked by moderators after [12,239](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-greatest-thread-in-the-history-of-forums-locked-by-a-moderator-after-12239-pages-of-heated-debate ) pages of debate, it’s worth taking a step back at what these concepts are meant to accomplish. Decentralisation and federation in the fediverse mean an open network that anyone can join without any without centralised control.
Anyone can run their own PDS and be a full part of the network, without needing any centralised permission. Anyone can run their own AppView<a href="#a0c82894-0744-48d0-88c3-df8cc499ae76" id="a0c82894-0744-48d0-88c3-df8cc499ae76-link">8</a>, and build their own product in the ATmosphere, without needing permission by any centralised authority. They can even reuse Bluesky’s data for their own purposes, like WhiteWind does. On first glance, this seems pretty decentralised.
The question of federation becomes more complicated: who can communicate with what exactly? Any AppView can communicate with the PDSes, is that federation? The PDSes cannot communicate with each other directly (so no federation?) but do so via AppViews (so maybe federation?) What about AppViews communicating with each other? [Picosky](https://psky.social/ ) and IRCsky are two different AppViews that both allow you to chat over ATProto, and see the same chat messages. Are these two AppViews federated? And how many individual parts of the system need to federate before you can describe the entire ATmosphere as federated? I don’t know the answer to all of this, but I’m personally trending towards: are we even asking the right questions here?
To make matters even more complicated; many people are not asking the question ‘is the ATmosphere decentralised’, but are wondering ‘is Bluesky decentralised’? Here the ATmosphere take a different direction than the fediverse. The answer for the ATmosphere is not: ‘there should be many versions of the Bluesky app so users can switch to another app’. Having many instances of the Bluesky app provides no real additional benefit to making the network more open and less controlled by a single point of authority.<a href="#46d6fdbe-296b-4f4c-a9d2-1e5016a4ae4c" id="46d6fdbe-296b-4f4c-a9d2-1e5016a4ae4c-link">9</a> Instead, the conceptual model of how the ATmosphere is defending itself against an AppView turning ‘bad’, is to have competing different AppViews where people can switch to instead. Bluesky PBC hopes that there will be a hypothetical GreenCloud AppView, which does microblogging slightly differently than Bluesky. This way, people have a different app they can use, in case the Bluesky app does not suffice.
The hypothetical GreenCloud microblogging app build on ATProto does not actually exist. But the code for the Bluesky app is available as open source<a href="#cc305e22-84dc-44b5-9552-1e9993b2ca9d" id="cc305e22-84dc-44b5-9552-1e9993b2ca9d-link">10</a>, anyone can run their own Bluesky if they want to. The interesting problem here is that nobody has done so: running a competing service to Bluesky is totally possible, but why would you? It costs money, time and expertise to do so, and there is little gain to doing so.
How applicable the concepts of decentralisation and federation are to the ATmosphere is debatable, but they are used as an approximation for the core question: how is power distributed in the network? And Bluesky and the ATmosphere make it clear that technological architecture can only help so much here: Sure, you can be completely independent of Bluesky PBC on the ATmosphere, as everything is open. But in the end, 99% of users are exclusively on infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC. No technological architecture can compensate for that kind of the power distribution.
This is not lost on Bluesky PBC and their investors either. Blockchain Capitol, lead investor in the series A, has the investment thesis that the value is in growing the ATmosphere, [writing](https://www.blockchaincapital.com/blog/bluesky-13m-users-and-growing-our-investment-in-blueskys-re-imagined-social-network ) that they are “investing in more than a product but rather a vision of what social infrastructure could be”. ##
On IdentityTechnological solutions to prevent control of chokepoints usually mean that these chokepoints simply pop up in different places, and the ATmosphere is no different than the fediverse in this regard. This explanation of how the ATmosphere works, is missing a crucial part: how Decentralised Identity works on ATProto. Explaining how the system in detail is the subject of my next article. And that system might just be both more centralised than people expect, more decentralised than people think, and it’s most centralising aspect might just be… a clock.##
Notes<li id="5583e2f5-4c00-4d49-bda3-105e55d2e7b8">The fediverse is defined here by the Mastodon-dominant supernetwork that mostly uses ActivityPub and is mostly is used for microblogging, with some link-aggregators on Lemmy, some video on PeerTube on the side. I’m aware that this definition does not cover the entirety of the network, as well as that you can contest every word in that definition. But its a close enough approximation for how the word is used in casual day-to-day life. <a href="#5583e2f5-4c00-4d49-bda3-105e55d2e7b8-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 1">↩︎</a></li><li id="65a141ab-859c-4dab-a4fa-8249476281b8">For clarity, ‘Bluesky PBC’ refers to the Bluesky Public Benefit Company, while ‘Bluesky’ refers to the microblogging app made by Bluesky PBC. <a href="#65a141ab-859c-4dab-a4fa-8249476281b8-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 2">↩︎</a></li><li id="8fdd63e6-6314-461d-af26-2783a7821fa6">See also Paul Frazee’s <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l6xwi52zti2y">thread</a> on how every user is basically a website. I hesitate to use the term website here, as that comes with certain preconceived notions of what a website is, and a PDS repository is different in some manners. Maybe over time it will turn out that the equivalence of ‘PDS repo’ with ‘website’ will makes sense to people however, I’m unsure. <a href="#8fdd63e6-6314-461d-af26-2783a7821fa6-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 3">↩︎</a></li><li id="c6a638c6-a427-436d-aab1-d314e33005ee">Technically, a repository on a PDS, a PDS can contain the repositories for many different accounts. <a href="#c6a638c6-a427-436d-aab1-d314e33005ee-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 4">↩︎</a></li><li id="8bdb1fcd-5a3d-4982-84e3-c50b2cdf8ac7">This is mostly done via a Relay. Relays are an optional part of the network, and can best be seen as an extension of an AppView. This extension is in itself also flexible, multiple AppViews can use the same Relay. <a href="#8bdb1fcd-5a3d-4982-84e3-c50b2cdf8ac7-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 5">↩︎</a></li><li id="7b082335-9523-466a-8365-80f381ec7686">The extra step here is that the AppView sends data to your client, such as the bsky.app website, the official mobile clients or a third-party client like deck.blue <a href="#7b082335-9523-466a-8365-80f381ec7686-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 6">↩︎</a></li><li id="8b607838-7e9b-4a95-955e-113f7da7dd40">Example of a WhiteWind blog that combines Bluesky’s microblogs <a href="https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes%20on%20Running%20a%20Full-Network%20atproto%20Relay%20(July%202024)">here</a>. <a href="#8b607838-7e9b-4a95-955e-113f7da7dd40-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 7">↩︎</a></li><li id="a0c82894-0744-48d0-88c3-df8cc499ae76">And/or run their own Relays, which multiple people are in fact doing. <a href="#a0c82894-0744-48d0-88c3-df8cc499ae76-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 8">↩︎</a></li><li id="46d6fdbe-296b-4f4c-a9d2-1e5016a4ae4c">This is the problem that the fediverse has; there are 10k Mastodon servers, accounting for 80% of active users, but the software is controlled by a single person. Many concurrent deployments of the same software does not reduce the amount of control that this software has, it arguably increases the control instead. <a href="#46d6fdbe-296b-4f4c-a9d2-1e5016a4ae4c-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 9">↩︎</a></li><li id="cc305e22-84dc-44b5-9552-1e9993b2ca9d">The core functionalities all are, some parts are not. <a href="#cc305e22-84dc-44b5-9552-1e9993b2ca9d-link" aria-label="Jump to footnote reference 10">↩︎</a></li>https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-and-activitypub/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20241027-01-A-lot-of-mushrooms-in-the-woods-1024x293.jpg

2024-10-31 18:02:16 UTC

**On Bluesky and enshittification**
Editor’s note: this is a slightly modified and extended version of the analysis I wrote in the [Last Week in the ATmosphere newsletter](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-oct-wk-5/ ).
Last week, Bluesky [announced](https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a ) their series A funding round, raising $15M in a round that is led by a venture capital fund Blockchain Capital. The seed round already had investors from the crypto world, but this drew much more attention with the series A, as the headline of Blockchain Capital as a lead investor made the connection loud and clear. Bluesky is aware of the negative connotations that many people have regarding blockchains and crypto, explicitly stating that “the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).”
The negative associations that people have with both blockchains and venture capital made that a common response to the news was that “the enshittification has started”. This response was dominant on the fediverse, and less so but still present on Bluesky. It’s been such a common response that I think it deserves a closer look at ‘enshittification’ and how it relates to Bluesky taking investment from a blockchain VC firm. The meaning of the term enshittification has shifted over time, and both meanings provide an interesting lens to look at the news.
When[ Cory Doctorow coined](https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456 ) the term enshittification in 2022, he used it to describe a process of platform decay. A platforms subsidises growth by operating at a loss, and places themselves in between the suppliers and customers on a two-sided marketplace. Once suppliers and customers are locked in on the platform and cannot easily leave, the enshittification cycle happens: the platform uses their control of the marketplace to take an ever increasing part of the value while while making the experience on the platform worse, for both suppliers and consumers.
What is interesting here is that in [earlier](https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-graber-federation-social-media-decoder-interview ) [interviews](https://www.theverge.com/23686778/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-interview-decentralized-social-media-twitter-mastodon ), Jay Graber has mentioned the idea of building marketplaces on Bluesky as a way to make money. If enshittification is used to describe platform decay, it stands out that a marketplace is not present in the Series A announcement as a way for Bluesky to monetise. For a platform to become enshittified in this meaning of platform decay, a platform needs to have exclusive control of a marketplace on the platform. However, Bluesky is currently not taking the direction of a marketplace for monetisation, instead opting for subscriptions and payment processing. This is still open to change at a later point, as Graber has expressed interest in it before.
Doctorow also mentions two principles to combat platform enshittification. Platforms should be interoperable, allowing users to switch to a different provider. Users should also have the ability to control the content they see, and not be dependent on an opaque algorithm owned by the platform. As both of these principles are deeply embedded in the design of ATProto, Bluesky is an interesting case study if the principles that Doctorow mentioned are indeed good enough to stave off enshittification.
The meaning of the term enshittification has drifted and expanded over time. Enshittification is now commonly used to refer to any business practice that makes the company or product, well, shit. There is a fairly widespread negative attitude towards both venture capital as well as blockchains and crypto. People perceive that these systems have not brought benefits they promised, and enriched a small elite instead, all the while degrading the experience of using the internet. This is not a newsletter to deconstruct blockchains or VC (I’m sure you can find your own sources for that), but I do want to point out that public perception of both venture capital and blockchains matter here. Bluesky is in an active growth phase, and part of the sales pitch to get people to join the network is that Bluesky is a ‘better’ place, for various interpretations of ‘better’.
Getting people to join Bluesky while also being associated with technologies and organisations that many people perceive as ‘not better’ is much harder. People want to join a new network because they hope that the new network is a better experience for them. Judging from the outside if a network is a suitable place is hard, so people tend to fall back to simple heuristics to determine if a network is a good place for them. BlockChain Capital might provide valuable support to Bluesky, but this hard to see as an outsider that is considering joining Bluesky. Instead, it is more likely that they will fall back on their preexisting opinions about startups that take VC money or affiliated with blockchains.
Neither the crypto industry or venture capitalists have build up a track record over recent years that make it easy for people to trust them to deliver technology that meaningfully improves people’s lives. A skeptical assessment of why (crypto-based) VCs are investing into a company is warranted. Blockchain Capital’s [investment thesis](https://www.blockchaincapital.com/blog/bluesky-13m-users-and-growing-our-investment-in-blueskys-re-imagined-social-network ) is clear about why they are investing into Bluesky: their [interest](https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3l7c5i7q4422b ) is in an expanded ecosystem, where developers can build new products, while leveraging the social graph that ATProto provides. Their investment thesis falls far outside the framework of enshittification, both as a way to describe platform decay as well as a more generic ‘products gets bad’. Critically evaluating the positive and negative impacts that Blockchain Capital can have on Bluesky and the ATmosphere, might just require a different framework than ‘enshittification’ can provide.
https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230718-Fediverse-report-The-polish-series-05-1024x410.jpg

2024-10-30 18:58:19 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90**
The Fediverse Schema Observatory helps to improve interoperability, the botsin.space server will shut down, and more.##
The NewsThe [Fediverse Schema Observatory](https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/fediverseobservatory/ ) is a new project by Darius Kazemi, who runs the [Hometown fork](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown ) of Mastodon as well as co-wrote to [Fediverse Governance](https://fediverse-governance.github.io/ ) paper this year with Erin Kissane. The Observatory collects data structures from the fediverse; it looks how different fediverse softwares use and implement ActivityPub. It explicitly does not gather any personal data or posts; instead it looks at how the data is formatted in ActivityPub. ActivityPub and the fediverse has a long-standing problem in that the selling point is interoperability between different software, but every software has their own, slightly different implementation of ActivityPub, making good interoperability difficult to pull off. Kazemi has posted about the Observatory as a Request for Comments. The Observatory is explicitly not a scraper, but considering how sensitive the subject can be in the fediverse community, Kazemi has taken a careful approach of informing the community in detail beforehand about the proposed project, and how it deals with data. The easiest way to see and understand how the Observatory is works is with this [demo video.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o24CotvuRzE )
The botsin.space Mastodon server for bots will [shut down](https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/ ) in December. The botsin.space server is a server dedicated to running bots, with a few thousand active bots running. The server is a [valued part](https://botsin.space/@muffinista/113392588900840218 ) of the community, with the wild variety of bots running on the server contributing to the Mastodon in both useful and silly ways. The admin states that over time running the servers has become too expensive over time, and that is was not feasible to keep the project going. The shutdown of botsin.space showcases an ongoing struggle in the fediverse, running a server is expensive and time-consuming, and every time a server shuts down the fediverse [loses a block of its history](https://mastodon.social/@mcc/113392928083335306 ).
[Sub.club](https://sub.club/ ) is a way to add monetization options to fediverse posts. Sub.club started with being able to add paywalls to Mastodon posts, [recently](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-88/ ) expanded to long-form writing with support for Write.as, and now has [added support](https://mastodon.social/@subclub/113357742067724010 ) for WordPress blogs as well. Sub.club has posted a tutorial on how to add the [plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/sub-club/#installation ) to WordPress, making it an easy system to set up.
Bridgy Fed, the bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto has gotten some [updates](https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://snarfed.org/2024-10-29_53910 ), with the main new feature is that you can now set custom domain handles on Bluesky for fediverse accounts that get bridged into Bluesky. This brings the interoperability between the networks closer to native accounts, and makes having a bridged account more attractive.
Upcoming fediverse platform for short-form video, Loops, got some press by [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/26/24280075/fediverse-tiktok-alternative-loops-pixelfed-mastodon-activitypub-signups-open ) and [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/25/the-fediverse-is-getting-its-own-tiktok-competitor-called-loops/ ). Creator Daniel Supernault said that there are now 5k people on the waiting list, and that a TestFlight link will go out [soon](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113389987690554349 ) for the first 100 people. An Android APK will be made available at [some point](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113390051216314609 ) as well.
GoToSocial is [working on](https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@dumpsterqueer/statuses/01JAWVD8E2QG7RF2Z0D42S70QA ) the ability to for servers to subscribe to allowlists and denylists. This makes it [easier](https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@dumpsterqueer/statuses/01JAWVD8E2QG7RF2Z0D42S70QA ) to create clusters of servers with a shared allowlist, such as the [Website League](https://websiteleague.org/ ). As I recently [wrote](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-86/ ) about Website League, it is a cluster of federating servers that uses ActivityPub but exists separately from the rest of the fediverse, and it is started by people who build a new shared space after Cohost shut down. Website League servers predominantly use GoToSocial or Akkoma, and have been actively working on tuning the software to meet their needs.##
The Links<li>Flipboard is <a href="https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/flipboard-expands-federation-in-brazil-canada-germany-and-u-k/">now</a> federating accounts of publishers in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the UK.</li><li><a href="https://shelraphen.com/on-content-warnings/">A long read on Content Warnings</a>, that extensively touches on the culture on using Content Warnings in Mastodon and the Website League as well.</li><li><a href="https://kiko.io/post/Diving-Into-the-World-of-Lemmy/">Diving Into the World of Lemmy.</a></li><li><a href="https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/blog/one-year-after-x-embracing-open-science-on-mastodon">One year after X: Embracing open science on Mastodon</a> – a reflection by the University of Groningen Library.</li><li><a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-two-years-later/">Mastodon, two years later</a> – a continuation of the article ‘<a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/">Mastodon – a partial history</a>‘, by The Nexus of Privacy.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/objects/0192c4f8-a18b-911e-3605-83248ab4737b">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li>The <a href="https://event-federation.eu/">Event Federation project</a> has <a href="https://event-federation.eu/2024/10/27/fediverse-enhancement-proposal-in-progress/">drafted</a> a <a href="https://codeberg.org/linos/fep/src/branch/fep-8a8e/fep/8a8e/fep-8a8e.md">Fediverse Enhancement Proposal</a> for a common way to use the ‘event’ type in the fediverse.</li><li><a href="https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/10/setting-up-my-federated-fleamarket-with-flohmarkt/">Setting up my federated fleamarket with flohmarkt.</a></li><li><a href="https://preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webview/454975/136447741437936672">IFTAS October update.</a></li><li>Ghost’s <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/bugs-breakthroughs-and-bluesky-2/">weekly update</a> on their project to implement ActivityPub, mentioning that they have bridged their ActivityPub-based Ghost account to Bluesky as well.</li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-fediverse-has-empowered-me-to-take-back-control-from-big-tech-now-i-want-to-help-others-do-the-same/">The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same. </a>– Elena Rossini.</li><li><a href="https://lifehacker.com/tech/what-is-the-fediverse-the-potential-future-of-social-media">How the ‘Fediverse’ Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media)</a> – Lifehacker.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-90/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20240918-14-Wall-of-a-stone-quarry-1024x293.jpg

2024-10-23 17:46:43 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 89**
Shortform video platform Loops opens a waitlist for signups, Mosaic is a service to help organisations create their custom version of upcoming platform Bonfire, and the new owners of event planning platform Mobilizon release a big new update.##
The NewsLoops is an upcoming fediverse platform for short form video, build by Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault. On the [loops.video](https://loops.video/ ) site there has been a countdown over the last month that ended this Monday, and with it, people can now sign up for Loops. Loops is currently still being worked on, with Supernault working on getting the apps out to release. The Android app will be made available as an APK, and the iOS app is waiting [approval](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113350085948474400 ) for TestFlight. Loops is currently developed as a mobile-first platform, and does not have a webUI yet, with Supernault [saying](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113350612153639047 ) that a webUI will come later. He also reports that emails welcoming people after they have signed on are rate-limited by the email provider, resulting in a long delay before people can be onboarded. Moderation services for Loops are currently being worked on as well, and Supernault is [looking](https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113356214510097275 ) for moderators to help moderate the platform.
[Mosaic](https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/mosaic/ ) is a new service by the Bonfire team, where the Bonfire team will help organisations build and set up their own digital federated spaces. [Bonfire](https://bonfirenetworks.org/ ) is an upcoming fediverse platform that focuses on customisation and extensibility, that people and organisations can customise to meet their needs. Mosaic is a way for the Bonfire team to help onboard organisations and customise the platform to their needs. Extensions and other improvements made with Mosaic are then available for the rest of the community to use as well, as part of their AGPL license, so that everyone benefits from contributions made by others. Bonfire is currently available for testing, but not for official release yet. The main blocker seems to be slow performance of Bonfire, and the developers have put out a [bounty](https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/camp/ ) for other developers to help them improve performance.
An [update](https://www.blog-pat.ch/a-different-web/ ) by Newsmast on what they are working on with Channels.org. They relate Newsmast’s Channels to Bluesky’s custom feeds (as DYI algorithms) and Farcaster’s channels (‘Cozy corners’). For Newsmast, Channels are a way to onboard public organisations, giving them their own place (the channel) to distribute their content, where the space is clearly their own, but still part of the larger fediverse network. Newsmast also notes that they’ll focus on Channels for now, and that Patchwork, the plugin system for Mastodon servers is postponed to early next year to prevent the team from stretching themselves too thin. Newsmast’s Michael Foster also [blogged](https://www.blog-pat.ch/addition-magic-community/ ) about how we can build a different web together as well, reiterating my point that the current trend seems for AT Protocol to be used for public and global conversations, and ActivityPub for (semi)-private networked communities.
IFTAS held a 2024 Survey among fediverse moderators, and while they are preparing a full report they give some [early highlights on the results](https://about.iftas.org/2024/10/16/2024-survey-early-highlights/ ). Based on their survey data IFTAS estimates that there are 5500 users per moderator on the fediverse, which is between three and ten times as many moderators compared to other Big Tech platforms.
An [article](https://www.techpolicy.press/online-safety-and-the-great-decentralization-the-perils-and-promises-of-federated-social-media/ ) by Techpolicy.press goes into detail on ‘The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media’. It draws attention to pravda.me as an example of the expanding thread landscape on decentralised social networks; a large Mastodon server that bears all the hallmarks of inauthenticity, but is barely blocked on or on the radars of the larger fediverse community. The article also makes a distinction between moderation questions where decentralisation empowers communities (often related to political or sexual content), and issues where centralisation is more beneficial, such as spam and CSAM. Accompanying the article is also a [podcast interview](https://player.captivate.fm/episode/aaf1f847-89df-4a72-8bef-9c828876b2d0 ) with Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi about their [fediverse governance report](https://fediverse-governance.github.io/ ).
Fediverse event planning platform Mobilizon got transferred from developers Framasoft to a new organisation, Kaihuri, who have gotten a grant from NLnet to further expand the platform. They have now released [v5 of Mobilizon](https://joinmobilizon.org/en/news/#24-10-11 ), with new features such as a homepage redesign, a monthly calendar view, better management of recurring or ongoing events, and more. You can test out the new version of Mobilizon [here](https://beta.keskonfai.fr/ ).##
The Links<li><a href="https://www.wrecka.ge/revealing-the-gifts/">revealing the fediverse’s gifts</a> – Erin Kissane.</li><li><a href="https://flipboard.video/w/r7z6QY3dm5EqrFmDFkAgPY">How Decentralization Benefits Publishers, with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and ProPublica’s Ben Werdmuller</a> – Dot Social Podcast.</li><li><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zonepane">ZonePane</a> is an Android app that supports Mastodon, Misskey and Bluesky, and remembers your last place on the timeline.</li><li>A <a href="https://trwnh.com/responses/bengo.is/blogging/2024-10-03-the-challenge-of-activitypub-data-portability/">blog post</a> by a in response to Bengo’s ‘<a href="https://bengo.is/blogging/2024-10-03-the-challenge-of-activitypub-data-portability/">The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability’</a>.</li><li><a href="https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/a-fediverse-invitation-for-artists/">A fediverse invitation for artists</a> – Stefan Bohacek.</li><li><a href="https://blackqueer.life/@tillshadeisgone/113312617711895513">A new allowlist-only instance for Black folks.</a></li><li><a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/21528627">Lemmy development updates for the last two weeks.</a></li><li><a href="https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/113330870955673267">A fediverse musicians starter pack.</a></li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/0192a124-e90c-93c4-a440-99271a2cec4c">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://write.as/blog/re-opening-free-accounts">Write.as is reopening itself to free accounts.</a></li><li><a href="https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@bitbraindev/113336249574726632">An app to discover other accounts to follow based on hashtags you both like.</a></li><li><a href="https://werd.io/2024/helping-to-build-the-open-social-web">Helping to build the open social web</a> – Ben Werdmuller.</li><li><a href="https://blog.coship.fyi/blog/lemmy-comments/">Adding Lemmy comments to a blog.</a></li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
Subscribe to our newsletter!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-89/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/JAH_20230830_2475_schiermonnikoog_35-1024x256.jpg

2024-10-16 16:32:47 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 88**
A quieter news week: self-hosted 3d printing app Manyfold joins the fediverse, and write.as now offers paid subscriptions for fediverse accounts with sub.club.##
The News[Manyfold](https://manyfold.app/ ) is a self-hosted open source web app for organising and managing your collection of 3d files, and in particularly 3d printing. With their latest [update](https://mastodon.me.uk/@npub1wfk…zv38/113300503145826963 ), Manyfold has now joined the fediverse by adding ActivityPub support. With the new integration, you can now follow a Manyfold creator from your fediverse account of choice, and get notified when the Manyfold account uploads a new 3d file. New Manyfold uploads appear as short posts with a link in the rest of the fediverse. To demonstrate, [here](https://dev.phanpy.social/#/mastodon.social/a/113209764594244083 ) is the Manyfold account from the creator Floppy as visible from Mastodon, and [here](https://manyfold.floppy.org.uk/models?creator=G2cKh294 ) is the profile on their Manyfold instance itself. The Manyfold server also has a button to follow the account on the fediverse.
Manyfold implementing ActivityPub support is an illustration of how ActivityPub can be viewed as a form of ‘Social RSS’: it allows you to follow any Actor for updates, and adds social features (sharing/liking to it).
[Sub.club](https://sub.club/ ) is a service that lets people create paid subscription feeds on the fediverse. The service [recently launched](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/ ) with the ability to monetise Mastodon feeds, and has now expanded to also include long-form writing, by [collaborating](https://write.as/blog/write-as-x-sub-club ) with write.as. [Write.as](https://write.as/ ) is the flagship instance of fediverse blogging software WriteFreely. With this update, blogs on write.as can now set on a a per-blog basis if a blog is a premium blog, and where the cut-off is. People who follow the blog from a fediverse account will see an option to subscribe and view the full post; this [post by the sub.club account](https://mastodon.social/@subclub/113283978439935527 ) shows how a premium blog will look like from various perspectives. Adding sub.club to a write.as blog is as simple as following [this three-minute PeerTube video](https://video.everythingbagel.me/w/ofFGPUqtQDBCSheESbrNZs ).##
The Links<li><a href="https://www.wrecka.ge/fediverse-shoes/">How to buy shoes in the fediverse</a> – Erin Kissane.</li><li><a href="https://www.blog-pat.ch/a-different-web/">“We can have a different web, if we want it”</a> – Newsmast’s Michael Foster.</li><li>Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/trunk-tidbits-september-2024/">Trunks and Tidbits,</a> is out for September 2024.</li><li><a href="https://soatok.blog/2024/10/12/ambition-the-fediverse-and-technology-freedom/">Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom</a> – Soatok, who is working on implementing E2EE for ActivityPub.</li><li><a href="https://forgefed.org/blog/actor-programming/">ForgeFed is continuing to work on adding Actor Programming.</a></li><li><a href="https://njr.prose.sh/positioning-microdotblog">Positioning Micro.blog.</a></li><li><a href="https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/how-to-join-mastodon/">How to join Mastodon</a> – Stefan Bohacek.</li><li>Mastodon has started selling a <a href="https://shop.joinmastodon.org/products/mastodon-plushie">plushy</a>.</li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/beyond-technical-features-why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-values-of-the-fediverse-part-2/">Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 2) </a>– Elena Rossini.</li><li><a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/swf-and-the-elephant/">‘I for one (cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses, but we really need to talk about the big elephant in the federated room’</a> – The Nexus of Privacy.</li><li><a href="https://bengo.is/blogging/2024-10-03-the-challenge-of-activitypub-data-portability/">The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability</a> – bengo.</li><li><a href="https://mstdn-social.com/@echo/113290117207540140">Echo</a> is a new iOS app for Lemmy.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/objects/01927d0a-35f7-3994-5862-0c43d821fb63">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/10/on-hiatus/">We Distribute Is On Temporary Hiatus.</a></li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-88/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/20230719-Fediverse-report-The-polish-series-10-1024x410.jpg

2024-10-09 18:06:53 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87**
Mastodon has officially launched a new version, a new Reddit-like with ClubsAll has launched, and IFTAS has started rolling out their content classifier system.##
Mastodon launches version 4.3Mastodon has released [version 4.3](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/ ), and the update comes with a better notification system, design improvements, displaying follow recommendations in the following feed for new accounts, and the ability to highlight the fediverse profile of the authors of shared articles.
There are two updates to the notification system: notifications are now grouped, and the ability to filter notifications. Grouped notifications means that you’ll see a summary of the number of people who liked and boosted your post, instead of getting each notification individually. This is especially helpful for posts that go viral, as your notifications become unusable without grouping. Third party clients also support grouping notifications of new followers, which Mastodon does not do. With notification filters, you can limit specific types of notifications, for example from people who are not following you, from new accounts, or to filter out unsolicited private mentions.
With the new carousel that displays follow suggestions for new accounts, Mastodon leaned on transparency. For each suggestion it is also displayed why an account is suggested. It seems there are four different reasons for an account to be suggested: ‘Popular on your server’, ‘Popular among people you follow’, ‘Similar to profiles you recently followed’ and ‘Handpicked by your server admins’.
For future plans Mastodon mentions three parts: working on adding quote posts, the ability for server admins to subscribe to managed deny-lists and improving how long-form text is displayed in Mastodon. Mastodon also features a request for donations at the end, noting that they are supported by donations and operate on less than 500k per year. It showcases the difficult spot that Mastodon is in: as the post highlights, their competitors have access to significant capital, which allows them to ship features significantly faster. While it is remarkable what Mastodon has accomplished with their budget, the small team also means that it has taken a year to ship this update 4.3, while the competition can move significantly faster. Not taking venture capital, not selling ads, and not selling data are great things to do, but the update cadence of Mastodon versus that of Bluesky or Threads shows that not doing so puts a significant limit on what the organisation can accomplish during this period of protocol wars.##
ClubsAll has launched[ClubsAll](https://clubsall.com/ ) is a new fediverse project, a Reddit-alternative similar to Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. ClubsAll main goal is to provide a clean and easily-accessible UI, and explicitly [positions](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/clubsall-2 ) itself as a Reddit alternative. The other focus is on live comments and live chat, where new comments that are made on a post flow in directly visible. The comment section includes both the traditional threaded view as well as a chatbox to invite more chat-like realtime reactions. Other features are easy cross-posting of new posts to up to three communities, and having multiple profiles under a simple login.
With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the [fediverse community on lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.ml/c/fediverse ) and the [fediverse community on lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse ). PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘[topics’](https://piefed.social/topics ), which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.##
The NewsIFTAS has been working on a [Content Classification System](https://about.iftas.org/activities/moderation-as-a-service/content-classification-service/ ), and the first classifier is now [active](https://about.iftas.org/2024/10/03/iftas-update-content-classification-moderation-tooling/ ). A few select server are working together with IFTAS, where all the media of these servers now get scanned for CSAM. In case of a hit, IFTAS handles the mandatory requirement and record-keeping, and issues a takedown. CSAM moderation is a difficult task for server admins to keep track of, both of the toll it takes on the humans, as well for the complex legal requirements that come with it.
NLnet has been a [major sponsor of fediverse projects](https://fediversereport.com/meet-nlnet/ ) over the years. They [announced](https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20241003-announcing-Core-call.html ) the results their latest funding round this week in which they sponsor a large variety of open source project. The fediverse project that got funded is [Loops](https://loops.video/ ), a TikTok-like short video platform by Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault. Loops was scheduled for a public beta launch on Wednesday the 9th, but this has been [delayed](https://pixelfed.social/p/loops/749181422627243289 ) for 11 days. Supernault attributes the delay to the [rumour](https://mastodon.xyz/@chrismessina/113268347002059791 ) that Threads is working on a Communities feature that is also supposedly called Loops, as well as to further polish the app and platform.
The SocialCG, the W3C Community Group for ActivityPub has [agreed](https://hedgedoc.socialweb.coop/8FE-I-h_SuCZDu8JRzH1ZQ ) on starting work to form a charter to transition towards a Working Group. The details require some knowledge of W3C processes (that I don’t fully grok either), but the very short summary is that a Working Group has more impact on making changes to the ActivityPub protocol.
[FediMod FIRES](https://fires.fedimod.org/ ) is both a protocol for distributing moderation advisories and recommendations and a reference server implementation. Emelia Smith, who is behind the project, has updated the website with more information as well as a [general timeline](https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/113245904576835763 ) for when work on the project happens.
ActivityPods is a project that combines the [Solid](https://solidproject.org/ ) protocol with ActivityPub, and they have [released](https://activitypods.org/activitypods-2-0-is-out ) their 2.0 version. ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple different apps; with ActivityPub you need a separate accounts for Pixelfed and Mastodon, for example. ActivityPods gives you one place to store your data, your Pod, based on the Solid protocol, and the Inbox and Outbox system of ActivityPub. This update of ActivityPods gives the ability to set granular permission levels for the access to data than an app has that is build on top of ActivityPods. ##
The Links<li><a href="https://connect.iftas.org/news/connect/september-2024-connect-community-round-up/">IFTAS September 2024 Connect Community Round-Up</a>.</li><li><a href="https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/dev_diary_lvn_2/">Prototyping Our First Native Components with LiveView Native</a> – Bonfire app dev diary.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/019257ef-60b9-8669-582d-c5c54eda938f">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/21018364">Lemmy Development Update for the past 2 weeks.</a></li><li><a href="https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18328/minutes-from-3-october-2024-wg-meeting">Minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force meeting.</a></li><li><a href="https://sub.club/">Sub.club</a> is <a href="https://moth.social/@bart/113251949564870939">teasing</a> premium (for paid subscribers) blogs coming soon</li><li><a href="https://werd.io/2024/the-two-fediverses">The two Fediverses</a> – Ben Werdmuller.</li><li>A <a href="https://arcanican.is/excerpts/did-method-fedi/">proposal</a> to enable portability of identity and object storage within ActivityPub through the use of DIDs.</li><li><a href="https://community.nodebb.org/category/31/forums-and-threaded-discussions-task-force"></a><a href="https://event-federation.eu/2024/10/03/event-organizers-needs-for-publishing-to-the-fediverse-via-wordpress/">Event Organizers’ Needs for Publishing to the Fediverse via WordPress</a>.</li><li>The FediJam is a month-long game jam for users of the fediverse, and the <a href="https://itch.io/jam/fedi-jam">results</a> of the September jam our now available.</li><li>Pixelfed has been working on adding push notifications, and other Pixelfed servers can <a href="https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/113267876703835722">now apply </a>for access as well.</li><li>An <a href="https://libresolutions.network/articles/mitra/">interview with Silverpill</a>, who builds fediverse platform Mitra.</li><li>Ghost’s latest <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/scottish-refinements/">update</a> shows some more of their ActivityPub-powered reader.</li><li>Tangerine is a custom UI for Mastodon servers, and v2 is now available for Mastodon servers on 4.3.</li><li>The Author bylines feature is now also available for all Mastodon servers, with <a href="https://rknight.me/blog/setting-up-mastodon-author-tags/">an explanation on how to set it up here</a>.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-87/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20240825-04-fruits-of-the-broad-leaved-helleborine-1024x293.jpg

2024-10-02 17:14:24 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86**
Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.##
Threads delays posts for 15 minutes before federatingThreads’ latest [update](https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/threads-users-can-now-see-who-follows-them-from-other-fediverse-servers/ ) has degraded the value of their fediverse integration. Posts made on Threads will now always be delayed by 15 minutes before they are delivered to the rest of the fediverse, if fediverse sharing is turned on. The 15 minute delay is added for the purpose of post editing; posts on Threads can now be edited for 15 minutes after they are created. This used to be 5 minutes, both as a window for editing posts as well as the delay to be send out to the rest of the fediverse.
A 15 minute delay is a long time in microblogging, and significantly impacts things like breaking news, and live-posting sports events. It also meaningfully impacts the ability to have a back-and-forth conversation with people in a comment section. The delay itself is already an issue, but things get even more problematic when taken into consideration that during live events, Threads posts with a 15 minute delay are now mixed with fediverse posts without a delay and presented as happening during the same time. This was already noticeable during yesterday’s U.S. VP debate, an event where people use microblogging for the real-time reaction. But part of the real-time reactions was actually 15 minutes delayed, while another part was not, which creates even more confusing experience. A Threads engineer [says](https://bsky.app/profile/quillmatiq.bsky.social/post/3l5k52sujzp2h ) that they will want to solve this problem ‘eventually’, but that it will probably come after Threads has implemented full bi-directional interoperability.
This news is not a great start for the [Social Web Foundation](https://socialwebfoundation.org/ ) either, which launched [last week](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-85/ ) with [criticism](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/socialwebfoundation-what-do-people-think/4564 ) from the wider fediverse developer community for having Meta as one of their supporting members. There is a distrust of Meta’s intention within the fediverse, and them degrading their fediverse integration is likely not helping.##
Website LeagueThe [Website League](https://websiteleague.org/ ) is a new social networking project that has arisen out of the demise of Cohost. Cohost was a social media site for the last 2 years, that has shut down, and on October 1st the website entered read-only mode. Cohost had a dedicated user base who appreciated the community that they’ve build on the site. Website League is a new project by users of Cohost (the Cohost staff is not involved) to build a successor network in Cohost’s place.
What makes Website League stand out is that it is a federated [Island Network](https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/islands-an-opt-in-federated-network ), [described](https://websiteleague.org/ ) by Website League themselves as ‘a bunch of smallish websites that talk to each other’. This federated social network is using ActivityPub, but deliberately does not connect to the rest of the fediverse. Instead, it is an allowlist-based form of federation, where only websites/servers who agree to the Website League’s central set of rules can join.
The Website League has a big focus community organisation and governance. Even though the project is very young, and launched under time pressure of the deadline of Cohost closing, there are already multiple systems in place with an active [Loomio for Stewardship](https://consensus.websiteleague.org/stewardship/ ), a [wiki](https://information.websiteleague.org/ ) and more. The Website League provides a different vision of what a federated social network build on top of ActivityPub can look like, and I’m very curious to see where the project will go.##
Ghost and FedifyGhost published their latest [update](https://activitypub.ghost.org/beta-plans/ ) on their work on adding ActivityPub, with more information about their upcoming beta. Ghost is slowly starting their beta process soon, making it clear that this is indeed a testing program, and data loss should be expected for people who are participating. They also said more about the performance and scaling of Ghost and ActivityPub. Sending out a newsletter over ActivityPub to 5000 subscribers turned out to need 10 servers, which indicates how resource-intensive and expensive ActivityPub can be. As a result, ActivityPub followers will count towards Ghost Pro billing, as Ghost Pro charges based on the number of members an account has.
[Fedify](https://hollo.social/@fedify/01924698-e62e-7db2-815c-5fabe84f95df ), an open-source framework that simplifies building federated server apps, is now officially in [version 1.0](https://github.com/dahlia/fedify/releases/tag/1.0.0 ). Ghost’s ActivityPub integration is build on top of Fedify, and Ghost is sponsoring the Fedify developer as well.##
The Links<li>Flipboard is <a href="https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/flipboard-federates-250-publishers/">connecting another 250 accounts</a> of publishers to the fediverse.</li><li>Bonfire is building a native app, and a <a href="https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/dev_diary_lvn/">series of developer diaries with it.</a></li><li>The first <a href="https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/113226244798035645">release candidate for Mastodon 4.3</a> is now available.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/01923528-3fb5-77ad-286d-a75a1c736b09">This week’s fediverse software updates</a>.</li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-values-of-the-fediverse-ethical-social-media/">Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 1) </a>– Elena Rossini.</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/fediverse-discovery-providers/">Mastodon Announces Fediverse Discovery Providers</a> – WeDistribute.</li><li><a href="https://trwnh.com/unstable/fedi-vs-web.html">fedi vs web – on the distinction between social network and social web, where activitypub straddles both.</a></li><li>Mallory Knodel, the Executive Director for the new Social Web Foundation, <a href="https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/social-web-foundation/">writes about the new foundation.</a></li><li>The Mastodon server strangeobjects.space will shut down, and in the <a href="https://blog.strangeobject.space/posts/2024-09-23-shutting-down.html">announcement post</a> the admins explain the emotional cost and impact that comes with being a server admin.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
Subscribe to our newsletter!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-86/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20240818-01-leave-of-a-northern-red-oak-1024x293.jpg

2024-09-25 18:12:50 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85**
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!##
Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut downThe Swiss Government will [shut down](https://www.admin.ch/gov/fr/accueil/documentation/communiques.msg-id-102585.html ) their [Mastodon server](https://social.admin.ch/explore ) at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a [pilot](https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-97696.html ) that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.##
The Social Web Foundation has launchedThe [Social Web Foundation](https://socialwebfoundation.org/ ) (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large [grant](https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/24/as-the-open-social-web-movement-grows-a-new-nonprofit-launches-to-expand-the-fediverse/ ), and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.
The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now: <li>adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a <a href="https://summerofprotocols.com/research/sop2024">grant</a> for.</li><li>Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.</li><li>A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.</li><li>Working on long-form text in the fediverse. </li>
The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they [state](https://socialwebfoundation.org/2024/09/24/launch/ ) that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend [this article](https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/ ) for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.
Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the [SWF will become a W3C member](https://w3c.social/@w3c/113193482727735523 ), and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.
As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?##
Software updatesThere are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:
GoToSocial’s [v0.17 release](https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01J8HX2W7EZW7CVYXZ2ZMP0G4K ) brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”
Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as [game engine Godot found out this week](https://mastodon.social/@emi_cpl/113180931834159120 ). It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.<li>Peertube 6.3 <a href="https://joinpeertube.org/news#release-6.3">release</a> brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.</li><li>The latest <a href="https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/nodebb-v4-0-0-beta/4540">update</a> for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing. </li><li>Ghost’s latest <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/they-say-conversation-is-the-music-of-the-mind/">update</a> now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.</li>##
In Other NewsIFTAS [has started with a staged rollout](https://preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webview/454975/133380467425543352 ) of their [Content Classification Service](https://about.iftas.org/activities/moderation-as-a-service/content-classification-service/ ). With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also [demoed](https://spectra.video/w/p/q1BXeNF5PWFipFy5f44v9h?playlistPosition=2&resume=true ) the CCS during last week’s FediForum. ##
The Links<li>All the <a href="https://spectra.video/w/p/q1BXeNF5PWFipFy5f44v9h?playlistPosition=1">speed demo videos</a> of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.</li><li>Evan Prodromou’s book about ActivityPub, ‘<a href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/activitypub/9781098162733/">ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web</a>‘ has <a href="https://cosocial.ca/@evan/113178394512126953">officially launched</a>.<a href="https://lemmy.ml/post/20509588">Lemmy Development Update.</a></li><li><a href="https://piefed.social/post/248560">PieFed’s Development update</a> for September 2024.</li><li><a href="https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113162314742576737">A tool </a>to make sure you see all replies on a fediverse posts (and <a href="https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113164105707584993">an explanation</a> on how it differs from <a href="https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher">FediFetcher</a>).</li><li>A <a href="https://mitra.social/post/01920750-c828-c3bd-890c-593a9cde0b76">work-in-progress Rust library</a> for ActivityPub.</li><li>The German Data Protection Office <a href="https://social.bund.de/@DS_Stiftung/113164416753075059">updated their Data Protection Guidelines</a> for running a Mastodon server.</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/the-revolution-will-be-federated/">The Revolution Will Be Federated</a> – WeDistribute.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/01921076-085b-7aed-8f7f-0a4265c091aa">This week’s updates for fediverse software.</a></li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-85/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20240811-05-the-fruits-of-the-linden-1024x293.jpg

2024-09-18 18:34:11 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 84**
Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, I’ve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into it’s own separate newsletter, [Last Week in the ATmosphere](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere/ ). I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.##
The newsThe fourth edition of FediForum happened this week, a three-day unconference with speed demos of fediverse projects as well as some 40 open sessions about anything related to the fediverse. There were 14 demos, of which the video recordings should be available soon. Two demos stood out to me, showing products that have not been seen before, with Newsmast with channel.org, and Darius Kazemi’s ActivityPub Data Observatory. While there were lots of other great demos as well ([Bandwagon](https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/bandwagon-music/ ) for example), these mainly featured existing products.
[Channel.org](https://home.channel.org/ ) is the latest project by [Newsmast](https://www.newsmastfoundation.org/ ), and is a way for organisations, nonprofits, and news publishers to build their own channel for outreach. It is fully connected to the fediverse with the front-end providing a clear and simplified interface that simply shows the latest posts by a channel. This can be seen with the demo Channel for the [Kamala Harris Group](https://kamalaharriswin.channel.org/public ), which recently got switched over to use [Patchwork](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/ ), Newsmast other fediverse project. Channel.org is based on Patchwork, which is a plug-in architecture that Mastodon server admins can run on top of their Mastodon server. Patchwork is getting close to being released, and Newsmast is currently looking for admins who are willing participate. Patchwork is free and publicly available, while Channel.org will require a paid membership and targets larger public organisations.
The [ActivityPub Data Observatory](https://friend.camp/@darius/113136373027751021 ) allows fediverse developers to scan the structure (not the content!) of data that gets send around on the fediverse, allowing developers to easily compare how different sofware structures their ActivityPub data. For example, you can easily compare how Misskey structures the ActivityPub code of a note, versus how Mastodon sends the ActivityPub code for a note. The open-ended nature of ActivityPub allows developers to give their own spin on implementing ActivityPub
As for the sessions, one recurring theme I noted is the need and demand for spaces to discuss the governance and social side of the fediverse and fediverse developments. While there are spaces for the technical aspects of the discussion of the fediverse and the protocol with the [SocialCG](https://www.w3.org/community/socialcg/ ), the [SocialHub](https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ ) and the [Fediverse Developer Network](https://fedidevs.org/ ), these communities are less accessible to the technical inclined people. This is a conversation that also has come up during previous FediForum sessions. The [Fediverse Governance Report](https://fediverse-governance.github.io/ ) also notes a lack of formal channels for Federated Diplomacy. While the need and demand is clearly there, it seems to be hard to figure out a way to establish such communications channels in a way that also establishes them as legitimate places for discussions and diplomacy.
Another aspect that stood out to me is the lack of discussions that I noticed about Bluesky during FediForum, and what lessons can be learned that can be applied to the fediverse. Bluesky has managed to grow significantly bigger than the fediverse at this point, with around 5 times as many monthly active users, as well as onboarding the Brazilian community. It seems to me that it is worth reflecting on why that is, and how the fediverse can better show itself as a good, ethical social network that people would like to join.##
Fediverse Discovery ProvidersThe organisation behind Mastodon (Mastodon gGmbH) has announced a new project, [Fediscovery](https://www.fediscovery.org/ ), that explores decentralised search and discovery for the fediverse. The project got funded by [NGI Search](https://www.ngisearch.eu/ ), and “explores the possibilities for better search and discovery on the Fediverse in the form of an optional, pluggable service. This service should be decentralized, independent of any one specific Fediverse service and respect user choice and privacy.” Mastodon gGmbH is explicitly not building only for Mastodon, they make it clear that they intend Fediscovery to be used by the wider fediverse, not only Mastodon.
What Mastodon gGmbH is building here is what they [call](https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/09/13/overview-of-the-fediverse-discovery-providers-project/ ) a ‘Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers’. These auxiliary service providers can potentially do a variety of different services. The Fediscovery project is about building one of these service providers, *a* disovery provider, as a minimum proof of concept and as a demonstration what types of services other people can build as well. The plans are currently still in the very early stages, and more information expected at the end of September. For my own understanding I think of a Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider as pretty much a Relay, with some minor yet-to-be-announced differences.
Mastodon gGmbH is also explicit in focusing on opt-in consent for the service, stating that it will “only ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place. Instances sending content to discovery providers should make sure to only send such content in the first place as well. All other information a discovery provider gathers should be anonymous.”
During a FediForum session about Fediscovery, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed that between 8% and 10% of active accounts have opted into Mastodon’s search, a year after it has been released. It indicates one of the fundamental challenges of any design that is opt-in: very few people will change the default settings, irregardless of what the settings are about. As Discovery and Search systems gain value by covering a bigger network, it shows the fundamental tensions that Mastodon gGmbH will have to grapple with while building Fediscovery.##
Mozilla shuts down mozilla.social fediverse serverMozilla has announced that they will shut down the mozilla.social server in December 2024. The server was announced in December 2022 as a way to [‘explore healthy social media alternative’](https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launch-fediverse-instance-social-media-alternative/ ). The project was originally quite big in scope, with planned integrations to log in with Firefox, and the GitHub repo showed their own mobile clients, and a custom front-end based on [Elk](https://elk.zone/home ). In 2023 Mozilla started to very slowly open up in a private beta, but the number of people getting access has been low. In February 2024 Mozilla [downsizes](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/ ) as it refocuses on Firefox, scaling back their investments in various products, including their mozilla.social fediverse server. In an accompanying memo Mozilla [stated](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/ ) at the time: “The actions we’re taking today will make this strategic correction, working through a much smaller team to participate in the Mastodon ecosystem and more rapidly bring smaller experiments to people that choose to live on the [mozilla.social](http://mozilla.social/ ) instance.”
It seems like these more rapid smaller experiments never came, nor did it seem that Mozilla was particularly interested in growing the server. I honestly cannot find out if the server ever opened up for open registrations after they ran a waitlist for a long time, but it seems like it they have not. At any rate, the experiment stayed small, and mozilla.social currently has just below 300 active users.
The shutdown of Mozilla.social does raise questions about the server-centric model that the fediverse is based around: are there organisations that are willing to run large general-purpose fediverse servers, and have the ability to handle the infrastructure costs and moderation requirements that come with it. Mozilla seemed like it would be a good organisation to potentially do that. With Mozilla now pulling back, focusing on smaller servers might be a more logical direction going forward.##
In Other News<li>Threads has figured out how <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/12/threads-makes-it-easier-to-evangelize-the-open-social-web-with-a-new-direct-link-feature/">maximise publicity</a> by making minimal incremental updates to their ActivityPub implementation, <a href="https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/">edition 501</a>.</li><li>Threaded is a Mastodon client that advertised a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTcVGTC1v6I&t=8s">‘Threads-like’ interface</a>. Meta got in touch and <a href="https://darnell.day/instagram-to-threaded-for-mastodon-lawyer-up-or-change-your-name">threatened legal action</a>, and now the app is renamed to <a href="https://apps.lumaa.fr/app/bubble">Bubble</a>.</li><li>Bonfire <a href="https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/113119033667590487">showcases</a> how with third-party extensions scientists can display ‘relevant data about their work and research topics directly on their profiles.’ Bonfire does not yet know when the platform will launch.</li><li>The client <a href="https://kaiteki.app/">Kaiteki</a>, which focused on being a client for all the different microblogging platforms in the fediverse, <a href="https://social.kaiteki.app/@kaiteki/statuses/01J7BPZJ7N04W8M4WQGT5K8KK0">stops development</a>.</li><li>The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research had stopped using their Mastodon account in October 2023, and after not posting for most of the year they said they’d <a href="https://social.bund.de/@bmbf_bund/113079108198680952">close</a> the account. After a large pushback from the community they reconsidered the decision and <a href="https://social.bund.de/@bmbf_bund/113119341624530634">said</a> they’d continue using the account again.</li><li>Mastodon’s new <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/">author byline</a> feature is now <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/113120764083302915">available</a> for everyone.</li><li>Goblin is an Tumblr-like platform for the fediverse, that <a href="https://goblin.band/notes/9y3fl4mjbsgx6vzc">recently opened up for signups</a>. Someone also made a <a href="https://goblin.band/@goblin/this-is-fantastic-if-you-want-to-use">Cohost</a> user style.</li><li>The new Trust and Safety Taskforce with the SocialCG has <a href="https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/113131897632015933">set up</a> an issue tracker for protocol level and/or specification changes to improve trust and safety on the fediverse.</li><li>mastodon adoptions article <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-024-01341-7">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-024-01341-7</a></li><li>The <a href="https://berlinfedi.day/en/">Fediverse Berlin Day</a> had multiple sessions about, well, the fediverse. Full live stream available <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ieihyq3JbWs">here</a>, with the German publisher ARD talking about their fediverse experience and strategy. Evan Prodromou also gave a talk about a ‘bigger, better fediverse’, which you can watch <a href="https://evanp.me/2024/09/16/a-bigger-better-fediverse/">here</a>. I do want to note that I find it very hard to square Prodromou’s estimation of 10 million federated Threads account with the fact that Mastodon.social (which accounts for a quarter of the entire fediverse’ monthly active users) currently knows about <a href="https://indieweb.social/@laurenshof/113126250082710213">18000</a> federated Threads accounts.</li>##
The Links<li><a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/is-bluesky-part-of-todays-fediverse/">Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse?</a> (and the <a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/">previous article</a>) – by The Nexus of Privacy.</li><li><a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/09/trunk-tidbits-august-2024/">Trunk & Tidbits</a>, Mastodon’s engineering update, for August 2024.</li><li><a href="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423">A map of 2000+ Lemmy communities.</a></li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/fediverse-summer-3-lessons/">My Fediverse summer & the top 3 lessons I learned</a> – Elena Rossini.</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/bandwagon-music/">Bandwagon is Emissary’s Bandcamp Alternative</a> – WeDistribute.</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/subclub-paid-subscriptions/">sub.club Emerges to Offer Paid Fediverse Subscriptions</a> – WeDistribute.</li><li><a href="https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy">New NLnet funding for Lemmy.</a></li><li><a href="https://snarfed.org/2024-09-12_53693">Bridgy Fed update</a>.</li><li><a href="https://mitra.social/post/0191ed15-e22d-4c34-1e4b-070a805e86cb">This week’s fediverse software updates.</a></li><li><a href="https://owncast.ghost.io/owncast-newsletter-september/">Owncast Newsletter September 2024</a>.</li>That’s all for this week. You can also check out my post with the weekly news on atproto [here](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere/ ).<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-84/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20240602-03-the-yellow-flowes-of-the-common-cow-wheat-1024x293.jpg

2024-09-08 18:23:42 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 83**
Bluesky and Brazil continues to be a great match, and lots of other smaller news items.
*Programming note: I’m switching the release day for this weekly newsletter to a Wednesday. Over the last year and a half I’ve spend my free Sundays writing this, and this is not sustainable in the long term. So look for the next edition to arrive on Wednesday the 18th.*##
Bluesky and BrazilBluesky remains highly popular among Brazilians as an alternative to X, that got [banned in the country](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/ ) last week. Bluesky has added [3 million accounts](https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l3jewuiszf2l ) since the ban went into effect just over a week ago. When I reported on it last week Bluesky had added 1 million accounts. Of these new accounts, around [85%](https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l3dtuznw7p22 ) are from Brazil. The popularity of Bluesky in Brazil also shows up in both politics and the media: [President Lula](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:a5o5pa6imrd52s627zq63zgz ), his party [PT Brazil](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3zb6cejpu3xtpvgk4q5vsvzh ), the [Supreme Court](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ftzfqqac3illc5mqhdtkw2zr ), and [House of Representatives](https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ndqm4sqxiroxdx5aik2dk2ig ) all have their accounts validated by using their domain as their handle. The media is also paying attention, one of the [most popular](https://bsky.app/profile/mary.my.id/post/3l3epd32dy52e ) news programs in Brazil, Jornal Nacional, [showed](https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l3eog5g5s227 ) their Bluesky handle during the show. Some of the biggest newspapers such as [Folha de S.Paulo](https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/blogs/hashtag/2024/09/o-que-voce-precisa-saber-apos-uma-semana-de-bluesky.shtml ) and [Correio Braziliense](https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/brasil/2024/09/6932486-bluesky-e-a-promessa-de-respeitar-totalmente-as-leis-e-autoridades-do-brasil.html ) covered Bluesky as well.
What stands out to me about both articles is that they do not mention Threads. Threads have not made any data available regarding the impact of the Brazilian ban on X on the platform. While Threads is likely to still get a large number of signups simply due to its massive size, it is not part of the conversation in the way that Bluesky is for Brazil.
The inflow of new people also shows up for the Trust and Safety team. In an [update](https://bsky.app/profile/aaron.bsky.team/post/3l3geqs6cyv2w ) Bluesky’s head of Trust and Safety, Aaron Rodericks, shares that the team normally receives about 20k reports per week, a number that skyrocketed to 270k reports, predominantly in Portugese. ##
The NewsFirefish has died [another death](https://mastodon.social/@npub1exp…aal7/113085022503264184 ). This February, the original creator of Firefish Kainoa transferred ownership to the maintainer naskya, without naskya being informed beforehand. Naskya has been maintaining Firefish alone for the last 7 months, while noting that this them taking over the project as unwillingly. Naskya says that this is unsustainable, putting the project in maintanance mode. IceShrimp provides [migration instructions](https://iceshrimp.dev/iceshrimp/iceshrimp/src/branch/dev/docs/migrate.md ) for server admins who want to transfer from Firefish to IceShrimp. I’ve got fond memories of the time period during which Firefish worked well, which is sadly a while ago now. It enabled me to build a community in a way that I’ve found much more difficult to do on Mastodon, and the community that I’ve build during the Firefish period is still one that feels like my closest community on Mastodon.
[Truefans](https://truefans.fm/ ) is a podcasting app that is [building](https://podcastindex.social/@samsethi/113092353412244464 ) ActivityPub integration. It gives you the possibility to create a fediverse account as well (truefans.social), and activities that you take in the Truefans app (listen/comment/follow) are broadcasted into the fediverse.
The [IFTAS Moderator Survey for 2024](https://mastodon.iftas.org/@jaz/113057562142892413 ) is live. Last year’s survey led to an [extensive report](https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/HUMlMUxbIF0BjNIxEtUI0O8X/ ) on the actual needs that fediverse moderators have.
Forgejo’s monthly [update](https://forgejo.org/2024-08-monthly-update/ ): “Federation is getting useful. There is now more than preliminary background work, and the first exciting things could be tried out by users. The work is not near the goal yet.”
The [SocialCG](https://hedgedoc.socialweb.coop/xU1cAcWQRy-wZF4DpRmxAw?both ) held their monthly meeting, and decided on two new Task Forces: a task force to update the website activitypub.rocks, and a Trust and Safety Task Force. The goal for the website task force is to make sure that the [activitypub.rocks](https://activitypub.rocks/ ) website is a better entry point, as it is badly out of date, with the last post from January 2021. The Trust and Safety team from Threads has already [expressed interest](https://www.threads.net/@andrs.svds/post/C_d-JxrMfI5 ) in participating in the task force.
Trending topics are a feature that is highly sought after by the Brazilian community, and the community has build two versions themselves: as a [browser extension](https://bsky.app/profile/nemtudo.me/post/3l3jf3yqejc2t ) and as a [separate site](https://trending.notx.blue/ ).
Peertube continues to make inroads with livestreaming, especially via the livechat plugin, which got a significant [upgrade](https://framacolibri.org/t/livechat-plugin-v11-0-0-is-out/22460 ) again.
Bluesky continues the tradition of 3rd party clients implementing features before the official clients does: this time the [Skeets app already supports displaying videos](https://bsky.app/profile/skeetsapp.com/post/3l3egbbc7t22w ), even though the feature is not released yet and only the developers can post (otherwise invisible) videos.
The developer’s site [atproto.com](https://atproto.com/ ) got a major overhaul, including a [Quick Start guide](https://atproto.com/guides/applications ) that showcases how to build a complete and different type of application on atproto, an extensive article ‘[ATProto for distributed systems engineers](https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers )‘ and more.
A research paper – [An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises](https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15383 ) – provides a critical analysis of the extend that the fediverse can deliver on the promises of decentralisation. Worth checking out, I also find the framing of ‘techno-romanticism’ as to explain the gap between what is promised and what is actually happening in the fediverse.
The Dutch coalition of public organisations PublicSpaces is starting [PeerTube Spaces](https://publicspaces.net/project/peertube-spaces/ ) to promote the usage of Peertube as as suitable alternative for public organisations.
The (unofficial) atprotocol.dev community held a talk with the creator of event planner [Smoke Signal](https://smokesignal.events/ ), the video recording is available [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD0UXnJPO5I ). The [recording](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvoLfGzjmPc ) from the previous talk, by the creator of [frontpage.fyi](https://frontpage.fyi/ ) is available as well. This Thursday is the next [event](https://smokesignal.events/did:plc:lehcqqkwzcwvjvw66uthu5oq/3l37gtngy7p2p ), ‘From Feeds to Labelers with Ændra Rininsland’##
The Links<li>WeDistribute – <a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/09/history-fediverse-symbol/">A Brief History of the Fediverse Symbol</a> </li><li><a href="https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/making-a-mastodon-bot-with-google-sheets-and-apps-scripts-part-2/">Making a Mastodon bot with Google Sheets and Apps Scripts.</a></li><li>Email platform Buttondown has <a href="https://buttondown.com/changelog/2024-09-01">added the option</a> to automatically cross-post to Bluesky.</li><li><a href="https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2024/09/01/hachyderms-introduction-to-mastodon-moderation-the-report-feature-and-moderator-actions/">Hachyderm’s Introduction to Mastodon Moderation</a>: The Report Feature and Moderator Actions.</li><li><a href="https://www.aendra.com/thoughts-on-the-news-feed/">Thoughts on the 📰 News Feed</a> – by <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/xblock.aendra.dev">XBlock</a> and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/aendra.com/feed/verified-news">News feed</a> developer Ændra Rininsland.</li><li>This week’s ActivityPub software <a href="https://mitra.social/post/0191c9dd-e298-8704-376b-acf65079e5ec">updates</a>.</li><li><a href="https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/09/02/fediverse-for-government-organisations-a-follow-up/">Fediverse for government organisations, a follow-up.</a></li><li>Nostr somehow managed to get a <a href="https://primal.net/e/note1lh520xasrnpks30wl909l6erav06shzp6wh4r6gdngp02fsstfaqxt8wvq">billboard</a> advertising Nostr close to where I live.</li><li>A <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/domi.zip/post/3l3lkreyr6a2e">Bluesky client</a> that makes Bluesky look like the old phpBB forums.</li><li><a href="https://www.blog-pat.ch/brazil-bluesky-fediverse/">Brazil, Bluesky & the Fediverse</a>, by Newsmast’s Michael Foster.</li><li>Brazilian Tech YouTuber Gabs Ferreira did a long <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuVAdH5OHOk">interview</a> with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-83/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/20240526-02-fallen-flowers-of-a-Rhododendron-shrub-1024x293.jpg

2024-09-01 18:04:28 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 82**
1 million new accounts on Bluesky as Brazil bans X, and premium feeds with Sub.club, and much much more.##
Brazil bans X, and a signup wave to BlueskyThe Brazilian supreme court has [banned](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-x-could-face-ban-in-brazil-after-failure-to-appoint-legal-representative ) the use of X in an ongoing legal fight with Elon Musk. The ban follows after a long trajectory of legal issues between the Brazilian government and Musk’s X. In April 2024, the Brazilian court ordered X to block certain X accounts that were allegedly related to the 2023 coup attempt, which Musk refused to do. In that same time period, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva [opened](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-64/ ) an account on Bluesky, and there was already an inflow of a Brazilian community into Bluesky. Now, the legal fight has further escalated over X’s refusal to appoint a legal representative in the country, and Musk’s continuing refusal to comply with Brazil’s laws and regulation has resulted in the supreme court banning the use of X in the country altogether.
The ban on X has caused a massive signup [wave](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/30/24232561/brazil-x-ban-sending-people-bluesky ) to Bluesky, with over [1 million](https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l3277gkjjc2y ) new accounts created in just three days, of which the large majority are from Brazil. The user statistics shot up [even more](https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html ) than that, suggesting that there are a lot of people with an existing account logging back in as well.
The new inflow of people to Bluesky is having some significant effects on the network, as well as on the state of decentralised social networks more broadly:<li>President Lula is putting actual focus on Bluesky. In one of his final posts on X, Luala listed in non-alphabetical order all other platforms that he is active on, and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mundinho.bsky.social/post/3l2v2l4e54s2i">placed</a> Bluesky at the top of the list. <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mdjhvva6vlrswsj26cftjttd/post/3l2ztcql73j2c">Posts</a> by Lula that are placed on Bluesky (134k followers) as well as on Threads (2.4m followers) get more than 5 times as much likes on Bluesky. Today, Lula <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/lulaoficial.bsky.social/post/3l33sj4zycs2x">explicitly asked</a> people on Bluesky what they thought about the platform, in a post that got over 30k likes and counting. It is hard to imagine that the Brazilian government is not paying attention to this all, and is looking which platform(s) the Brazilian community is moving towards in the wake of the ban on X.</li><li>Brazilians are a very active community on the internet (see Orkut), and bring with them their own unique culture to Bluesky. The current decentralised social networks are heavily focused on US politics, judged by top posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky, and beyond shitposts and memes there is surprisingly little space for mainstream pop culture and sports. The Brazilian community does seem to bring a large number of pop culture and sports to Bluesky, significantly diversifying the topics of discussion, and in turn, creating more space for other people who are interested in that in the future. The activity of Brazilians on microblogging can also be seen in the like counts on popular posts of Bluesky: before this week, the most popular posts of any given day usually got around 3k likes, this has sprung up to 30k to 50k likes. Brazilians are so chatty in fact, that currently <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3l32kvoyon62d">81%</a> of the posts on the network are in Portugese, and the amount of accounts of people who post on a given day has gone up from a third to over <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3l32354lyzg2l">50%</a>. </li><li>The Bluesky engineers have build a very robust infrastructure system, and the platform has <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3l2yc7y5psf2l">largely cruised along fine</a> without issues, even when faced with a <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3l2zpatdkjx2f">15x increase</a> in traffic. This all without <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3l2zvcgb5gi2u">having</a> to add any new servers. For third party developers, such as the <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/redsolver.dev/post/3l33uhsiplj2x">Skyfeed developer</a>, this increase in traffic did came with downtime and more hardware requirements however. It shows the complications of engineering an open system, while the Bluesky team itself was prepared with their core infrastructure, third party infrastructure, on which a large number of custom feeds rely, was significantly less prepared for the massive increase in traffic.</li>
In contrast, the ban on X in Brazil has made little impact on Mastodon, [with 3.5k new signups](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/30/24232561/brazil-x-ban-sending-people-bluesky ) from Brazil on Mastodon.social. I’d estimate that this week has seen 10k new accounts above average, with 15k new accounts the previous week and 25k in this week. That places Mastodon two orders of magnitude behind Bluesky in signups from Brazil. There are a variety of reasons for this, which deserve their own analysis, this newsletter is long enough as it is. One thing I do want to point out is within fediverse community there are two sub communities that each have their own goals and ideas about the fediverse and growth. Some people responded with the news that most Brazilians went to Bluesky with type of response that indicated that they appreciate the small, quiet and cozy community that the fediverse currently provides, and a distrust of the growth-at-all-costs model for social networks. For other people however, their goal of the fediverse is to build a global network that everyone is a part of and everyone uses ([‘Big Fedi’](https://evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-small-fedi/ )), a view of the fediverse that is also represented in the latest episode of the Waveform podcast (see news below). And if the goal is to build ActivityPub into the default protocol for the social web, it is worth paying attention to what is happening right now in the Brazilian ATmosphere.##
The News[Sub.club](https://sub.club/ ) is a new way to monetise feeds on the fediverse, with the [goal](https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/29/sub-club-aims-to-fund-the-fediverse-via-premium-feeds/ ) of bringing the creator economy to the fediverse. It gives people the ability to create premium feeds that people can only access via a subscription. People can follow this feed from any Mastodon account (work on other fediverse platforms is ongoing). Sub.club handles the payment processes and infrastructure, for which they charge 6% of the subscription fee (compared to 8-12% Patreon charges). Sub.club also makes it possible for other apps to integrate, both IceCubes and Mammoth have this option. Bart Decrem, who is one of the people behind Sub.club, is also the co-founder of the Mastodon app Mammoth. Sub.club also explicitly positions itself as a way for server admins to fund their server. Most server admins rely on donations by their users, often via services like Patreon, Ko-fi, Open Collective or other third party options. By integration payments directly into the fediverse, Sub.club hopes that the barrier for donations will be lower, and more server admins can be financially sustainable.
Newsmast has build a [new version of groups](https://newsmast.social/@newsmast/113034056496476114 ) software for the fediverse, and the first group is dedicated to the [Harris campaign](https://newsmast.social/@KamalaHarrisWin ). There are few types of groups available that integrate with Mastodon, such as with Friendica or [a.gup.pe](https://a.gup.pe/ ). These groups function virtually identical to hashtags, by boosting out posts where the group account is tagged in to everyone who follows the group account. As there is no moderation in these types of group accounts, it allows anyone to hijack the group account. A group account dedicated to a political campaign is especially vulnerable to this. On Mastodon a volunteer Harris Campaign group used a Friendica group for campaign organising, but the limited moderation tools (blocking a user from following the group) that are available are not working, which allowed blocked users to still get their posts boosted by the group account. Newsmast’s version of [Groups](https://kamalaharrisnewsandorganizing.simple.ink/ ) gives (working) moderation tools, and only boosts top level comments and not replies, to cut down on the noise. For now, the new Group is only available to the Harris Campaign group for testing, but it will come [later](https://newsmast.social/@newsmast/113034057713455378 ) to Mastodon servers that run the upcoming [Patchwork](https://www.blog-pat.ch/patchwork-progress/ ) plugin.
Bluesky added quite a number of new [anti-toxicity features](https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-28-2024-anti-toxicity-features ) in their most recent app [update](https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l2s5luwyg22t ). Bluesky has added quote posting controls, allowing people to set on a per-post basis if people can quote the post or not. There is also the option to remove quotes after the fact as well: if you’ve allowed quote posts on a post you’ve made, but someone made a quote post that you do not feel comfortable with, you have the possibility to detach your post. Another update is the possibility to hide replies on your posts. Bluesky already hides comments under a ‘show more’ button if the comment is labeled by a labeler you subscribe to. You now have the option to do so on all comments that are made on your posts, and the hidden comment will be hidden for everyone. Finally, Bluesky has changed how replies are shown in the Following feed, which is an active subject of discussion. I appreciate the [comments](https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3l2ydh6engg2r ) made by Bluesky engineer Dan Abramov here, who notes there are two different ways of using Bluesky, who each prioritise comments in conflicting ways. As new communities grow on Bluesky, prioritising their (conflicting) needs becomes more difficult, and I’m curious to see how this further plays out.
The WVFRM (Waveform) podcast of popular tech YouTuber MKBHD has a special show about the fediverse, ‘[Protocol Wars – The Fediverse Explained!’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R9CWq5CBlk ). It is partially a discussion podcast, partial explainer, and partial interview with many people within the community. They talk with Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Bluesky’s Jay Graber, Threads’s Adam Mosseri, and quite some more people. It is worth noting for a variety of reason. The show is quite a good introduction, that talks to many of the most relevant names within the community. MKBHD is one of the biggest names in the tech creator scene, and many people are paying attention to what he and his team is talking about. Furthermore, I found the framing as ‘protocol wars’ interesting, as the popularity of Bluesky in Brazil as an X replacement indicates that there is indeed a race between platforms to be build on top of the new dominant protocol.
Darnell Clayton has a very interesting [blog post](https://darnell.day/meta-math-calculating-how-many-non-threads-fediverse-followers-a-threads ), in which he discovers that there is a discrepancy in follower count for Threads accounts that have turned on fediverse sharing. Clayton notes that the follower count shown in the Threads app is lower than the one shown in a fediverse client, for both Mastodon and Flipboard. He speculates that this difference is the number of fediverse accounts that follow a Threads account. It should be noted that this is speculation and has not been confirmed, but if this is true, it would give us a helpful indication of how many fediverse accounts are using the connection with Threads. While we’re talking about Threads accounts, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko [confirmed](https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-01-at-16.38.20.png ) that the mastodon.social server has made a connection with 15.269 Threads accounts who have turned on fediverse sharing. ##
The Links<li>Threads has <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/28/threads-deepens-its-ties-to-the-open-social-web-aka-the-fediverse/">figured out how maximise publicity</a> by making <a href="https://www.threads.net/@pcottle/post/C_OGoCttX0n">minimal incremental updates</a> to their ActivityPub implementation, edition 500. </li><li><a href="https://thenewstack.io/a-developers-guide-to-activitypub-and-the-fediverse/">A Developer’s Guide to ActivityPub and the Fediverse</a> – The New Stack interviews Evan Prodromou about his new book about ActivityPub.</li><li><a href="https://zotum.net/channel/fentiger?mid=5fe032ef-6360-4089-be97-78a66866570f">FedIAM</a> is a research project where people can use fediverse and Indieweb protocols for logging in.</li><li>You can now test <a href="https://social.meissa-gmbh.de/@meissa/113043937261551585">Forgejo’s federation</a> implementation.</li><li>This week’s <a href="https://mitra.social/post/0191a523-e1e8-1e49-174d-d7fa26db48ba">fediverse software updates</a>.</li><li>Ghost’s latest <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/i-like-the-way-you-like-it-like-that/">update</a> on their work on implementing ActivityPub: “With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond.”</li><li><a href="https://github.com/suvam0451/dhaaga">Dhaaga</a> is a multiplatform fediverse client that adds unique client-side functionalities.</li><li><a href="https://dev.narwhal.city/posts/15944">Lotide</a>, a experimental link-aggregator fediverse platform, ceases development.</li><li>A <a href="https://fietkau.social/@julian/113055759198127054">custom QR code generator</a>, which some pretty examples of custom QR codes for your fediverse profile.</li><li>Custom decentralised badges on atproto with <a href="https://badge.blue/">badges.blue</a>, a <a href="https://docs.smokesignal.events/blog/blue-badge-released/">new work in process </a>by the create of atproto event planner Smoke Signal.</li><li><a href="https://smokesignal.events/">Smoke Signal</a> will be presenting at the next version of the (third party organised) <a href="https://atprotocol.dev/tech-talk-smoke-signal-events/">ATproto Tech Talk.</a></li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading.<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-82/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240724-03-White-Beakrush-in-water-in-a-nature-reserve-1024x293.jpg

2024-08-25 18:39:40 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 81**
A busy news week, with a major report on governance on the fediverse, conversations about public or private votes on the content-aggregator side of the fediverse, ⁂ as a symbol for the fediverse and more.##
The NewsErin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have been working on a massive research project about governance of fediverse servers, and they released their [findings](https://write.as/fediversalist-papers/releasing-our-findings ) this week. The entire [report](https://fediverse-governance.github.io/images/fediverse-governance.pdf ) is worth reading, as well as the two additional documents that they published:<li><a href="https://fediverse-governance.github.io/images/quick-start.pdf">A Quick-Start Guide to Fediverse Governance Decisions</a>, which is especially valuable for people who are considering starting a fediverse server for their community.</li><li><a href="https://fediverse-governance.github.io/images/opportunities.pdf">Fediverse Governance Opportunities for Funders & Developers</a> for individuals and institutions interested in building and supporting stronger infrastructure for Fediverse governance.</li>
Kissane and Kazemi explain that “whole swathes of knowledge about the aspects of server management that extends beyond the more purely technical concerns of hosting, provisioning, and technical upkeep exists only as *insider knowledge*.” This research paper is a great counter, and documents many of the cultural intricacies of the fediverse that have not been easily accessible before.
There are a great number of insights in the paper, and I want to comment with my own observations on one of them. Kissane and Kazemi write “we think the diverse and robust conversations and
viewpoints on Threads federation could serve as a useful jumping-off point for server teams to
even informally document their philosophies of federation and the policies that flow from those
philosophies” (p87). From my observations, when federation with Threads was a frequent topic of conversation in spring 2024, there was a potential within the fediverse for servers to talk about and publish their federation policies, as well forming diplomatic blocks for servers with similar federation policies. The conversation about federation was top of mind for everybody, and it was clear that there was a need for clear understanding of federation policies. This opportunity for better server governance simply did not happen, the conversation has moved on, and it feels like the moment has passed. I still think this is one of the larger missed opportunities and ‘what ifs’ that I keep thinking about regarding how the fediverse could have turned out better.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has been arrested in France, with [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/telegram-messaging-app-ceo-pavel-durov-arrested-france-tf1-tv-says-2024-08-24/ ) reporting that ‘the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram’. For more information about Telegram and the situation with Durov I recommend any news source that is not this blog, but I do want to point out the responses on Nostr to the arrest. Nostr’s culture is strongly focused on censorship resistance and leans culturally rightwing and libertarian. There are two aspects to understanding a network that preaches censorship resistance: the types of posts that such a network actually facilitates, which is not surprisingly posts that many people prefer not to show up in their feeds (or exist at all really). But the other aspect is how people who use such network and value censorship resistance understand themselves and think about what is important in the world. And in that framework, the arrest of Durov is seen as a huge validation of the viewpoint that censorship resistance is important and people should be wary of authoritarian behaviour of government. To be clear, this is not a viewpoint I am endorsing. What I am observing is that Nostr sees itself this way [([1]](https://primal.net/e/note1fwnwqm4e8n5jlnt97tu4rn330vrnej832jq057u3x365ks3ul53sc495js ), [[2]](https://primal.net/e/note19ykg6ksdc8cqnmz47ec27afqzpmxrka5042ve5q3qv6vf8s9a8rsrjx0sz ), [[3]](https://primal.net/e/note10mvaymfw0ceyn4099etvq2gx2xe4kuygcp4e6wqndlv3z6ycjdaq8fxdqh ), [[4]](https://primal.net/e/note1pqeszsvcvtyu95ar22lzn5qkejaacc6dnaswwjzq3ykc25jfazrs6ksau5 )), and how Nostr frames the event as an indication of the importance of Nostr and Nostr’s values. With a significant part of the rightwing internet ecosystem speaking out against the arrest, it’s worth noting if Nostr can take this opportunity to grow.
The Lemmy developers have opened a [conversation](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967 ) on whether votes should be displayed publicly, which turned into a [major](https://piefed.social/post/203735 ) topic of [discussion](https://piefed.social/post/203948 ) on Lemmy. To understand the situation, a short bit of context: there are three platforms on the content aggregator side of the fediverse: Lemmy, the biggest platform, Mbin, the successor of Kbin, and Piefed. How you voted is visible to Lemmy moderators, but not to regular Lemmy users. How people voted is visible to everyone on Mbin, including if that vote was made with a Lemmy account.
Responses on the threads indicates that a majority of Lemmy users prefers their votes to be private. This demand for privacy is understandable and should be encouraged, but runs into the practical limitations of the way the current fediverse works, with the limitations being both of governance as well as technical. Upvotes on Lemmy get translated to Stars on Mastodon, which are public. The most straightforward implementation of ActivityPub for vote/like/favourite support assumes that this information is public. As interoperability between the fediverse content aggregators is already a hilariously chaotic mess (shout-out to Elena Rossini who [documents](https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-4-lemmy-piefed-mbin/ ) it all in painstaking detail in her latest newsletter), changes to more privacy are not likely to make the interoperability situation any better. Still, Piefed gave it a shot and did [implement](https://piefed.social/post/205362 ) private votes this week in response, by creating shadow accounts in the background that do the voting on your behalf.
The situation also indications the limitations of governance as it currently is in the fediverse, especially between fediverse software developers. Lemmy developer Dessalines talks on [Github](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967#issuecomment-2297589277 ) about Lemmy is dependent on other implementations for votes to stay private. The problem is that none of the developers of any of the projects appear to be in any form of communication or conversation with each other about this, which makes good governance between the different implementations slightly difficult, to put it mildly.
⁂ is a new proposed symbol for the fediverse. In a [manifesto](https://symbol.fediverse.info/ ), the authors explain the need for a unicode symbol that represents the fediverse. The fediverse already has two symbols: a coloured pentagram and an icon by Meta. The authors state that the coloured pentagram is a great logo, but that it not being available as a typographical unicode character limits it’s usage. Getting people to voluntarily adopt to a new logo is never easy, and even more so in a decentralised network. Personally, I think the proposal hits on an important theme: there is value in a unicode symbol that can be used to denote that something is federated. Meta already does this by putting their own fediverse logo next to Threads profiles that are federated. This is a good innovation by Meta, and I think there is value in adopting this idea without having to adopt Meta’s (centralising) logo for the fediverse. The comment made [here](https://typo.social/@FediverseSymbol/113023209188899110 ) by the authors gives an illustration of what this means. It also helps push the proposal for the ⁂ symbol as an addition to the current logo instead of a replacement.
[Bluesky Feed Creator](https://blueskyfeedcreator.com/ ), an external tool for people to build their own custom feeds without having to code, has a major [update](https://bsky.app/profile/blueskyfeedcreator.com/post/3l2h43lzj6t2q ) with a new [automod](https://blueskyfeedcreator.com/help/automoderator ) system. Moderation of custom feeds and groups is not a solved issue so far, neither on ActivityPub nor on Atproto, and this takes a step in the right direction.
[BrowserPub](https://browser.pub/ ) is a browser for debugging ActivityPub. Creator John Spurlock [explains](https://podcastindex.social/@js/113012013300968322 ) that the goal is to make it “a bit easier to see how well the various players in the fediverse support the C2S side of the ActivityPub spec. You can punch in any ActivityPub discoverable web url or fediverse handle, and BrowserPub will discover and display the underlying AP.”
Newsmast showed a [preview](https://newsmast.social/@newsmast/113011570978389372 ) of Patchwork, their upcoming plugin system for Mastodon. As the research by Kissane and Kazemi indicates, there is a lot of potential for better moderation tooling for the fediverse. However, Mastodon is slow to update, with [11 months](https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/113012338363435978 ) between it’s two latest updates. Enabling servers to get additional moderation and federation tools via a plugin can significantly improve the ecosystem.
Robert W. Gehl is writing a book about the fediverse, ‘*Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Ethical Social Media*‘, and make an [overview of the draft ](https://fossacademic.tech/2024/02/11/Move-Slowy-Preview.html )available.
A practical demonstration of how Bluesky’s starter packs can significantly help with community migration: the small [Spanish community on Bluesky grew by 20%](https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3l235mvm7632g ) due to [one](https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3l235mvm7632g ) successful [starter pack](https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3l2dgatyksq2g ).##
The Links<li><a href="https://m.ai6yr.org/@ai6yr/113001679587930513">The first post</a> to the fediverse from space via the International Space Station.</li><li>Nostr held an IRL event this week, Nostriga. You can watch Rabble’s presentation, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUsk7cqZyKU">‘Nostr Past, Present, and Future’</a> here. </li><li>WeDistribute: <a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flohmarkt-federated-market/">Flohmarkt is a Fediverse Marketplace</a>.</li><li>PressGazette: <a href="https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/platform-profiles/platform-profile-news-publishers-bluesky-twitter-alternative/">Twitter alternative? News publishers see potential in Bluesky</a>.</li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Edent/112984729999598513">Turn any Mastodon post into a single line of embeddable HTML + CSS.</a></li><li><a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.12449">Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky</a> – a new research paper on Bluesky that does quantitative network analysis.</li><li>The fourth <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DhK8uSKIdE">episode</a> of WordPress.com’s Youtube series on the fediverse, this time with an interview with Matthias Pfefferle, creator of the WordPress-activitypub plugin.</li><li><a href="https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/19/mastodon-on-your-wrist/">Mastodon – on your wrist</a>.</li><li>This weeks’ <a href="https://mitra.social/post/0191808a-5231-b9bf-a8f2-0b7308e06753">fediverse software updates</a>.</li><li><a href="https://soatok.blog/2024/08/21/federated-key-transparency-project-update/">Federated Key Transparency Project Update.</a></li><li><a href="https://www.convivial.tools/PapersPublic/PoPETS-2024-mastodon-privacy.pdf">Privacy Policies on the Fediverse: A Case Study of Mastodon Instances</a>.</li><li><a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-4-lemmy-piefed-mbin/">The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 4: Lemmy, PieFed & Mbin).</a></li><li><a href="https://tomkahe.com/@tom/113002635717096742">Adding Mastodon search results to DuckDuckGo.</a></li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@box464/112992262296357677">Fread</a> is a new Mastodon Android app that merges your Mastodon timeline with RSS feeds. </li><li>An <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5WVK7KfTAk">interview</a> with Bluesky engineer Dan Abramov about building on atproto.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-81/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240724-02-Blunt-flower-Rush-in-an-nature-reserve-1024x293.jpg

2024-08-18 14:46:52 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 80**
A British migration wave from X to Bluesky, Flipboard expands their fediverse integration, and more.##
The NewsBluesky has seen a new migration wave away from X towards Bluesky, which consists [predominantly](https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3kzpfgea34k26 ) of people from the UK. The move comes as Labour MPs begin quitting X, as [The Guardian reports](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/12/labour-mps-begin-quitting-x-over-hate-and-disinformation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other ), as Musk feuds with the UK government over recent riots in the UK, [per Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bluesky-signups-surge-uk-amid-musks-row-with-government-over-riots-2024-08-13/ ). Quite a few MPs have signed up for Bluesky, [here](https://bsky.app/starter-pack/lewisatkinson.bsky.social/3kzs4xebito22 ) is a starter pack with all MPs that are on Bluesky. In the [UK](https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/08/i-will-mourn-twitter-obituary ) press issues with X have become a subject of [conversation](https://www.ft.com/content/3edd3caf-05f5-4e65-a8ba-f86481ddc0e9?accessToken=zwAAAZFgBEvbkc8-3TyvBfVOZdOouvhkgd3A6Q.MEYCIQCTt5368THnIDHGX5BhuPCUhvO-t6WXUICJUPltdh1NSgIhAO4uUPA4XYpW6Xj8Bcr5QCcZSEw2yA9cvm5ILhZKteSi&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareType=enterprise&shareId=7e756b6b-514e-4f28-bdb2-ecbd7f402c31 ) again. It is clear that in the perspective of the UK press there are two alternatives to X, either Threads or Bluesky. Mastodon mostly does not get mentioned at all, and neither has Mastodon experienced any meaningful change in signup numbers during this period. The [FORbetter](https://forbetter.ghost.io/the-x-odus-that-was-2/ ) newsletter takes a look at Google trends data which also shows that it is all Threads and Bluesky, with Mastodon missing the boat. What is also notable about this Bluesky migration wave is that it is spread out quite far in time, and less spiky. Previous waves (such as when an Indonesian community or the BTS ARMY joined Bluesky) tend to have a very big spike at the beginning which then quickly dies down: in this case, an increase started almost two weeks ago, which plateaued a week later with multiple days staying at the same level. This all indicates a more steady and consistent interest from the UK in Bluesky.
Flipboard has [expanded](https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/follow-anyone-in-the-fediverse/ ) their fediverse integration, and with the latest update you can follow people from the rest of the fediverse in the Flipboard app. Flipboard is now getting close to full two-way federation, as some accounts can also like and reply to other fediverse posts with their Flipboard account. Some more reporting by [WeDistribute](https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/flipboard-fediverse-following/ ) and [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/13/24218868/flipboard-fediverse-inside-app ) on the feature. Flipboard is heavily leaning on federated Threads accounts for the new feature: 80% of the accounts that were recommended to me by Flipboard are Threads accounts. On the flip side, Flipboard does not seem to be particularly focused on Bluesky, with no (bridged) accounts recommended, and the account for [Bluesky board member](https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-79/ ) Mike Masnick is his Mastodon account, and not his more active Bluesky account.
An observation about Bluesky: one thing that interests me about Bluesky is how some of the experimental new features that are implemented find traction not in their original intended use case, but get repurposed by the community for another goal instead. Third party labeling is implemented by Bluesky as a way to do community labeling, but as good moderation is hard to do (and the most prominent labelers have [called it quits](https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-june-2024/ )). Instead, a different use case for labeling is emerging: self-labeling: setting your [pronouns](https://bsky.app/profile/pronouns.adorable.mom ), [country flags](https://bsky.app/profile/labeler.renahlee.com ), or your [fursona](https://astrabun.com/projects/sonasky/ ). Another emergent use case is for [starter packs](https://bsky.social/about/blog/06-26-2024-starter-packs ), which have gotten low usage during regular periods (with more use during migration sign-up waves), which seem to be more used as a [Follow-Friday list](https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3kzudbuafna2x ). ##
The Links<li>WeDistribute writes about ‘<a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/fediverse-publishing/">The Untapped Potential of Fediverse Publishing’</a>.</li><li>Mastodon’s <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/08/trunk-tidbits-july-2024/">monthly engineering update,</a> Trunk & Tidbits. Andy Piper, Mastodons Developer Relations Lead, writes a personal <a href="https://andypiper.co.uk/2024/08/13/the-trunk-line/">blog post</a> on the series as well.</li><li><a href="https://about.iftas.org/2024/08/13/fediverse-trust-and-safety-the-founding-and-future-of-iftas/">Fediverse Trust and Safety: The Founding and Future of IFTAS</a>.</li><li>Piefed’s monthly development <a href="https://piefed.social/post/201977">update</a>, with an indication that the software is almost ready for an official 1.0 release.</li><li>Ghost’s weekly <a href="https://activitypub.ghost.org/the-slow-march-of-progress/">update</a> says that they are still working on having the posts show up on Mastodon reliably.</li><li><a href="https://dhaaga.app/">Dhaaga</a> is a cross-platform app for both Mastodon and Misskey.</li><li>Altmetric is a product to track academic research being discussed online, and they <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/altmetric.bsky.social/post/3kzqwxpyyqf2p">announced</a> that they are working on adding Bluesky support.</li><li>Bluesky engineer Brian Newbold <a href="https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/">wrote an update</a> on the current state of atproto and how much progress is made regarding reaching the goals and values of atproto.</li><li>A <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.03146">research paper</a> that looks at the impact of Bluesky’s opening to the public on the community.</li><li>The third episode of WordPress.com’s video series on the fediverse, on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JKszCKZxqQ">how the fediverse can make social media fun again</a>, talking with Mammoth’s co-creator Bart Decrem.</li><li>A new <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@shollyethan/112954603192706613">app directory</a> dedicated to ActivityPub platforms, clients, and tools for easy browsing and discovery.</li><li>A new <a href="https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2024/08/12/hachyderms-introduction-to-mastodon-moderation-part-1/">blog series</a> by the mod team of the hachyderm.io server to explain Mastodon moderation tooling.</li><li>Hubzilla, Streams and Friendica creator Mike Mcgirvin continues his <a href="https://fediversity.site/display/?mid=https://fediversity.site/item/22abcd18-387b-4d38-9a67-1fee59197b23">tradition</a> of forking his own projects; with <a href="https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte">Forte</a> being a new fork of his Streams project. Not much is known yet about what makes Forte different than Streams.</li><li>‘<a href="https://privacy.thenexus.today/start-making-the-fediverse-less-toxic/">5 things</a> white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people’.</li><li><a href="https://indieapps.space/@pipilo/112964998464429227">Pipilo</a> is a fediverse iOS app with a timeline that scrolls horizontal instead of vertical.</li><li>A <a href="https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18239/explaining-the-fediverse-is-a-hard-problem./2">first federated instance of NodeBB</a> that is not run by NodeBB themselves, and the difficulty of explaining the concept to people outside of the fediverse.</li><li>A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu3hGjjQzQM&t=5317s">presentation</a> by Robert W. Gehl on how ActivityPub became a standard.</li><li>This week’s <a href="https://mitra.social/post/01915c74-9501-5dd1-1104-925876a0417c">fediverse software updates</a>.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-80/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240724-01-White-Beakrush-in-water-in-a-nature-reserve-1024x293.jpg

2024-08-11 17:09:02 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 79**
While we’re busy enjoying the summer (or the Olympics), here is this week’s fediverse news.##
The NewsMike Masnick, author of the ‘[Protocols, not Platforms](https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech )‘ paper has [joined](https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-06-2024-board ) Bluesky’s Board of Directors. There has been a seat available since Jack Dorsey suddenly [left](https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-may-2024/ ) the board a few months ago. In his personal announcement [post](https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/06/why-im-joining-the-bluesky-board-to-support-a-vision-of-a-more-open-decentralized-internet/ ), Masnick says that ‘Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to[ making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality](https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/13/bluesky-is-building-the-decentralized-social-media-jack-dorsey-wants-even-if-he-doesnt-realize-it/ )‘. Masnick also explains that one of the key aspects that excites him about Bluesky is how ‘they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat.’
With the current implementation of Bluesky, two parts of the architecture (the Relay and the AppView) are theoretically decentralised, but with no incentive structure for other people to also run an alternative part of the infrastructure, nobody actually has done so. Furthermore, the Identity part of Bluesky is still fully centralised and under control of Bluesky, with no clear path to change this. This places Bluesky significantly behind other major fediverse software, who are all already fully resistant to future self-harm. As Masnick values this principle, it is worth seeing how his position on the board will influence the direction of the development of the AT Protocol.
Two new fediverse projects that stand out to me for a similar reason; they both shift away from ‘microblogging about anything you want’ to a community that is clearly defined by interests or topics. [CollabFC](https://www.collabfc.com/ ) is a football-based social network, that creates a specific network for football clubs. When you join a hub for a club, such as [Liverpool](https://liverpool.collabfc.com/ ) for example, you have the possibility for a ‘local’ feed dedicated to Liverpool, as well as a feed for all other football instances. [Gush](https://codeberg.org/gush/gush ) is a platform that is in development for talking about video games. Part review site similar to BookWyrm and NeoDB, it focuses on posting about specific games. What is different about it is that each game ‘a first-class object that you can reference and share across the fediverse’. Both of these platforms are early in their lifecycle, but point in a direction of more focused discussion on fediverse platforms.
Bonfire shared some more information about their upcoming [platform Mosaic](https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/112908829747492392 ). Full details will be available in September, but it looks like a front-end UI for displaying posts as a website instead of the regular feeds. Something similar is [Servus](https://github.com/servuscms/servus ), a CMS for Nostr, or [Npub.pro](https://npub.pro/ ), which are both experiments for Nostr to display posts not as a feed but a website as well. Meanwhile, the main aspect that is holding up the release of the ‘main’ version of Bonfire is a slow performance, and the Bonfire team put out [two bounties](https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/camp/ ) for developers to help them fix this issue.
Threads held an [AMA](https://www.threads.net/@threads/post/C-TPGFLxa5D ) about the fediverse with Flipboard’s Mike McCue and Blockparty’s Tracy Chou. It seems relevant that Threads wants to promote their fediverse connection by hosting an AMA on their main account, but there were little answers that stood out or provided new information, with most answers talking more about a conceptual understanding of what the fediverse could be, more than what the actual rest of the fediverse outside of Threads actually looks like.
[Manyfold](https://manyfold.app/ ) is an open source self hosted platform for sharing your 3d printer files. They have been working on adding ActivityPub support, and the latest [update added experimental early stage support](https://manyfold.app/news/2024/08/06/release-v0-75-0.html ) for ActivityPub.
Link aggregator platform Kbin is getting [closer and closer](https://lemmy.zip/post/20570491 ) to being completely dead, with the main flagship instance kbin.social now also being offline. The lead developer could not keep up with work on the platform due to personal reasons for a while now. The project has been superseded by the hard fork Mbin, which has been around for a while now, and got another [update](https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/releases/tag/v1.7.0 ) this week.##
The Links<li>Newsmast’s Michael Foster <a href="https://www.blog-pat.ch/enter-the-fediverse/">writes about</a> ‘how can we persuade organisations and creators that it makes sense to federate using tools they already have in place’.</li><li><a href="https://mastodon.social/@benpate/112910851796619173">Bandwagon</a>, the upcoming fediverse music sharing platform, is expanding their beta test.</li><li>Buffer <a href="https://buffer.com/bluesky">recently</a> added support for Bluesky, and the Buffer CEO wrote a <a href="https://joel.is/bluesky/">blog post</a> about the significance of Bluesky and decentralised social networks.</li><li>Elena Rossini’s newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ does an <a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-3-friendica/">extensive deep dive</a> into Friendica.</li><li>WeDistribute takes <a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/mastodon-for-harris/">a closer look</a> at the successful ‘Mastodon for Harris’ campaign, which raised over half a million USD.</li><li>Bluesky is <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/emilyliu.me">summoning</a> a community marketing manager.</li><li>The new video series Fediverse Files by WordPress.com has a second <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLqwKph7Sxk">episode</a> in which they interview Evan Prodromou about ActivityPub.</li><li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/08/decentralized-social-icons/">Font Awesome for the fediverse</a>, with Decentralised Social Icons, by WeDistribute.</li><li>A <a href="https://docs.smokesignal.events/blog/for-communities/">blog by Smoke Signal</a>, an upcoming event platform build on top of atproto, about building communities with atproto.</li><li>Mastodon <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/big-first-half-109607953?post_id=109607953&token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyZWRpc19rZXkiOiJpYTI6Y2I4MTNiYjktOTIyMS00NjkyLTllYmMtZjhhNTc5NmQ3NmM0IiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTA5NjA3OTUzLCJwYXRyb25faWQiOjY5MjUxMTV9.VQxc3QnnN-xerHT_goDHKDYV4MSc2KAYZoKUTsRugTg">posted an update</a> about the first half of 2024 for their Patreon supporters.</li><li>A closer <a href="https://forbetter.ghost.io/all-about-community-newsmast-3-1-0/">look</a> at the new features in Newsmast latest update.</li><li>For the <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/tom-sherman.com/post/3kyzuylde3k24">atproto devs</a>: an atproto browser.</li><li>Owncast <a href="https://owncast.ghost.io/owncast-newsletter-august-2024/">Newsletter</a> August 2024.</li><li>TechLinked discusses the fediverse and how the web is different now in their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGr3dTK9oAU&t=1338s">podcast</a>.</li><li>IFTAS Connect July 2024 <a href="https://connect.iftas.org/news/connect/july-2024-connect-community-round-up/">roundup</a>. IFTAS is also <a href="https://mastodon.iftas.org/@iftas/112916130639426519">looking for admin support</a> while they are seeking funding to continue their work on building an opt-in content classifier to detect CSAM.</li><li>A <a href="https://github.com/MarcT0K/Fediverse-Spam-Filtering">proof of concept</a> for fediverse spam filtering.</li><li>This week’s fediverse software <a href="https://mitra.social/objects/01913802-2bfe-da50-aacd-258558dfe1c6">updates</a>.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!<input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-79/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240710-04-Sharp-flowered-rush-in-an-nature-reserve-1024x293.jpg

2024-08-04 18:07:25 UTC

**Last Week in Fediverse – ep 78**
Welcome back to another edition of the weekly-ish news of the fediverse. This edition contains the news of last week, as well as some news items from the previous few weeks that I’ve spotted while I was on holiday break. My holiday was indeed fully offline out of the feeds, but I could not resist afterwards to dig in to find out what happened while I was offline.
As a teaser: I’ve started working behind the scenes to launch something new with Fediverse Report, that will be in addition to the weekly newsletters. Stay tuned!##
The NewsGoToSocial’s latest [release](https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01J3ZM6N4VQ1NS60RHGAVVWMFC ) adds comment-controls, which allows people to determine who can reply to their posts. GoToSocial explains: ‘you’ll be able to configure your account so that new posts created by you will have an interaction policy set on them, which determines whether your instance drops or accepts replies, likes, and boosts of your posts, depending on the visibility of the post, and whether or not an account trying to interact with you is in your followers/following list.’
Safety has been a major conversation on the fediverse feeds recently, especially with Black people [pointing](https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112860037633719411 ) out the lacking safety tools and major [harrassment](https://dair-community.social/@KimCrayton1/112854600825016604 ) they experience on the fediverse. One aspect that facilitates the harassment is the default opt-out approach to federation; where racists and other bigots will simply spin up a new fediverse server and send (semi)-private messages with hate speech to Black people. This is why ‘just switch to a server with better moderation’ is such a problematic response; it does not actually fix one of the main ways Black people experience on the fediverse, while placing the onus on them to solve the problem. One interesting [response](https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/islands-an-opt-in-federated-network ) is in building a [separate network](https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/islands ) with ActivityPub based on allow-list federation, and I’m keeping a close eye on how this evolves.
PeerTube’s latest [update](https://framapiaf.org/@peertube/112794938237368262 ) adds ‘automatic video transcription using Whisper , a new comment policy “requires approval first”, auto-tagging/labelling of videos and comments based on specific rules and a comment moderation page for video publishers’. This blog [post](https://write.tedomum.net/lutangar/transcription-in-peertube ) provides more details about the development story on adding the transcription feature.
Patchwork is an [upcoming plugin system](https://www.blog-pat.ch/patchwork-progress/ ) for Mastodon that is developed by Newsmast, that is tentatively scheduled to be released next month. The latest update by Newsmast showcases the variety of plugins that they’ll offer, including setting local-only posts, changing post length, and scheduling posts. The bigger part is also the addition of Channels, custom timelines that will allow external parties to hook into as well.
Some statistics that relate compare the different platforms. A [comparison](https://bsky.app/profile/fingolas.bsky.social/post/3kxd24yza7p2p ) of sources of traffic to news site heise.de, showing how Bluesky has surpassed Mastodon in clicks. A new [comparison by Kuba Suder](https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3kygiib224f23 ) shows the different ways people post on Bluesky that is not done via a PDS that is hosted by Bluesky company. In February this year, Bluesky started support for having people self-host their own Personal Data Server (PDS) that is not managed by their company. The amount of people who do so is small, with less than 100 active account. Significantly more people post onto Bluesky via their bridged ActivityPub account. Speaking of bridged accounts: Eugen Rochko has now [bridged](https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.team/post/3kyqzkwblh72f ) his Mastodon account to Bluesky. Rochko has been outspokenly critical of Bluesky in the past, saying that they should adopt ActivityPub instead of building their own protocol.
Some [more](https://activitypub.ghost.org/we-now-deliver-settings-posts/ ) [updates](https://activitypub.ghost.org/we-follow-you/ ) by Ghost, who is getting along further with their ActivityPub implementation. The newsletter is now getting better connected to the fediverse, allowing you to follow it directly from your Mastodon account.
Mastodon moves their iOS app development in-house, and is [recruiting](https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/112875546269005188 ) a full-time iOS app developer. Up [until now](https://oisaur.com/@renchap/112876243214228170 ), the Mastodon iOS app was developed by two freelance developers.
A slightly obscure news update because I love interoperability: [Guppe Groups](https://a.gup.pe/ ) have been around for a while, and are a way to get some semblance of Groups added onto microblogging platforms, functioning similar to hashtags. Now link-aggregator platform PieFed has added [support](https://piefed.social/post/167045 ) for these types of groups, you can see an example [here](https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] ). I’m mentioning this news here because I think there is a lot more space to experiment with different platform designs that take inspiration from both microblogging, link-aggregators and forums, and this is a small example of it. PieFed added support for community wikis as well.
Bluesky [released](https://bsky.social/about/blog/06-26-2024-starter-packs ) Starter Packs a month ago as a way to easy the onboarding process, and reactions on the rest of the fediverse were that this was a good idea that could potentially be copied. Statistics [show](https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3kyjxc367bb2x ) however that the feature has not been actively used by the community. Part of the reason could be that signups to decentralised social networks in general have mostly stopped.
WeDistribute [wrote](https://wedistribute.org/2024/07/neodb-review-culture/ ) about NeoDB, calling it ‘a review system for culture’. NeoDB is one of the more interesting platforms available in the fediverse, with an incredible wide variety of features. NeoDB themselves describes by drawing comparison to other platforms, [saying](https://neodb.net/ ) ‘NeoDB integrates the functionalities of platforms like Goodreads, Letterboxd, RateYourMusic, and Podchaser, among others.’ NeoDB’s own pitch is taking fediverse platforms tendency to be ‘centralised platform concept + ActivityPub’ to the extreme, and I enjoy the simplicity of NeoDB is a fediverse review platform for culture more.
What is the fediverse? This question is answered by a tech-free [explainer video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upEHFtO9vrI ) by Newsmast, a new [video series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzYozbNneVc ) by WordPress.com, or a podcast [episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzoVGUdYhvQ ) by TheNewStack with Evan Prodromou.
The latest [update](https://floss.social/@forgejo/112876098550549147 ) for software forge Forgejo has foundational parts of ActivityPub based federation, and the first forgejo instances that have federation in some alpha form are [starting to appear](https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/112898336426846925 ).##
The Links<li><a href="https://wedistribute.org/2024/07/fediverse-privacy-and-consent/">Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide</a> – by WeDistribute.</li><li>‘<a href="https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/samantha-lai-and-jaz-michael-king/">Rethinking Trust and Safety in the Fediverse, with Samantha Lai and Jaz-Michael King’</a> – the latest podcast episode by Flipboards dot social podcast.</li><li>An <a href="https://snarfed.org/2024-07-17_53382">update</a> on the Bridgy Fed, the bridge between the fediverse, Bluesky and the web, and websites can now be bridged directly onto Bluesky.</li><li>A <a href="https://bunnynabbit.com/tool/querylabels">tool</a> to view all labels applied on your Bluesky. posts and account.</li><li>Replies from the fediverse can <a href="https://mastodon.xyz/@chrismessina/112889178408670977">now</a> be read on Threads.</li><li><a href="https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/the-history-of-the-fediverse-logo/">The history of the fediverse logo.</a></li><li>The third party app for Pixelfed Vernissage has been <a href="https://mastodon.social/@vernissage/112868452923963788">renamed</a> to Impressia. Vernissage is now exclusively the name for the fediverse photo sharing platform that is currently in development by the same developer.</li><li>A <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/ripperoni.com/post/3kyopmpvuzb2y">tool</a> to temporarily mute words in Bluesky.</li><li>An experimental <a href="https://zotum.net/channel/fentiger?mid=855ad721-1911-4a85-8ebd-afb73f2519fe">demo</a> of how a “Sign in with the Fediverse” mechanism might work.</li><li>IceShrimp originally started as a Misskey fork, but they have changed so much it is starting to make more sense to see it as their own project: a full rewrite of the backend, and now the added support for plugins.</li><li>Smoke Signal is a new event planner platform that is in development and build on top of atproto.</li><li>The newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ has a <a href="https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-part-2-wordpress-fediverse/">showcase</a> of the interoperability between Mastodon and WordPress.</li><li>An extensive <a href="https://lemmy.world/post/18159531">comparison</a> how different apps for Lemmy display content correctly.</li><li>This week’s <a href="https://mitra.social/post/0191141b-f558-57f8-0c0c-fa0f64396a92">overview</a> of fediverse software updates.</li><li>Activitypub.academy is ‘a modified Mastodon instance that allows you to study the ActivityPub protocol in real life’ that has gotten <a href="https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/new-features-for-activitypub-academy/">some new features</a>.</li><li>In the main Bluesky app, if you block someone and you have a thread in which both you and the blocked account have posted replies, it prevents other people from viewing those posts, which often breaks the thread. This system, the ‘apocalypseblock’ is intentional for Bluesky, but the openness of the protocol allows people to <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3kxg32sjqi22x">build other thread viewers</a> that do not have this feature.</li>That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! <input type="hidden" name="nr" value="minimal"><input type="hidden" name="nlang" value=""><input class="tnp-email" type="email" required="" name="ne" value="" placeholder="Email"><input class="tnp-submit" type="submit" value="Yep, I want to receive the newsletters" style="">
#fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-78/
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/20240612-05-Spoonleaf-sundew-in-a-nature-reserve-1024x293.jpg