Gibt es etwas, was alle, Journalist*innen, Fernsehanstalten oder der öffentliche Raum unbedingt über das Fediverse wissen muss?
Was wollt Ihr unbedingt gesagt haben?
Oder was ist Euch noch unklar?
If you want your name (you don't need to be Canadian!) on the letter that goes to officials in Canada's Parliament advocating for using #OpenSocialWeb services you need to let me know before 9AM PDT tomorrow (Monday Jun 3).
The #Fediverse is important for many reasons obviously. With the commercial influence on recommendations and the continued enshitification of search, it is crucial we retain the capacity to share what is important, delightful, amusing, and valued for reasons we deem, not them. #technology
First place in Best Alcohol Ink Painting contest! Blown yellow flowers on black. Yellow represents warmth, cheerfulness & increased mental activity. Orange represents happiness, creativity & success. A winning combination.
Moderator communities, government petitions, and also how I think that PieFed latest small update is more meaningful that it seems. I also spend some time looking at Nostr and Farcaster, as there are interesting developments happening on those networks that are relevant for the fediverse. Let’s dive in:
The News
IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust and Safety organisation, has launched IFTAS Connect, a ‘new community of practice designed specifically for Fediverse moderators.’ IFTAS has regularly held surveys under fediverse moderators, the Moderator Needs Assessments, and one of the most requested items was a better way to convene and communicate. With IFTAS Connect there is now such a platform, that features an extensive library, forums and a place for group discussions.
The Canadian House of Commons was presented with a petition to for the Canadian government to “enact policy and dedicate budgetary resources to enable the Parliament of Canada to provide an open, trusted, federated, social media presence”. Here’s the video of the petition being read in the House of Commons.
Newsmast wrote last week on the fediverse as a hub for the social web, and how they are integration people into their communities from across multiple platforms, including Threads and Bluesky. They posted a research report this week, Mapping the Social Web, that takes a closer look at where different communites are on different platforms. Some of the main takaways: Most communities are present on only one of two of the platforms, and only US Politics and Politics have strong communities on both Threads, Bluesky and the fediverse.
Link aggregator platform PieFed can now federate with PeerTube. Furthermore, PieFed is using its ‘Topics’ system to promote some PeerTube channels as well. PieFed’s Topics take an aggregation of different Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin communities and group them together under a certain Topic. For example, the Linux Topic now contains a collection of Lemmy communities such as !Linux, as well as @thelinuxexperiment_channel. I think this is something worth paying attention to, as it signals a shift in thinking about how the link-aggregator platforms can work: Platforms like Lemmy (or Reddit) work by having users push content into the platform and are thus fully dependent on user-submission. This addition by PieFed allows for a pull-method as well: PieFed now pulls content into their Topics from other platforms automatically by subscribing to them.
Darnell Clayton draws some more attention to Loforo.com, a Tumblr-like fediverse platform, and points out that it actually has quite a sizable community. The platform reports around 15k MAU, which makes it a top-10 instance in the fediverse by MAU, even though the service is virtually unknown. As I reported a few weeks ago, Lofoto has apparently been integrated with ActivityPub for a while, but never made any formal announcement about it, as for as I can tell. Clayton reports that it is likely that Loforo uses the Mastodon API to a significant extend, as logging into Loforo with a Mastodon client works, and fediDB lists Loforo as a Mastodon instance.
Hollo is a new single-user microblogging platform that is currently being build by Hong Minhee. Hong is also behind Fedify, an ActivityPub server framework, which just got updated this week as well. Hollo is build using the Fedify framework.
FediVision 2024 has concluded, the yearly song contest where artists that are on the fediverse can submit their songs. This year, 72 entries were submitted, and the winner is Misaligned Aardvarks by The Island of Nothing.
Some news from Farcaster and Nostr
Some news from the crypto-affiliated decentralised social networks:
I wrote about Farcaster this week, with the goal of answering the question: why is a social network with 80k daily users valued at 1 billion dollars? While the height of the valuation seems questionable to me, it is clear that Farcaster provides a social network that is indeed valuable for (crypto-focused) VCs. There are enough interesting ideas in Farcaster that it is worth paying attention to.
Talking about Farcaster and why I’m paying attention to what is happening there: Neynar is a company that builds tools that help people create products on top of Farcaster. Neynar announced that they raised 11M USD in a series A. What we’ve seen in the broader ecosystem of decentralised social networks so far is that Nostr has managed to punch above their weight (in terms of active users) with the amount of products being build for Nostr, and a major contributor to that is relatively easy to build other products on top of Nostr. This is in contrast with Bluesky, which has the least amount of developer activity, even though it has the largest active user base, with developers saying it is hard to develop for ATProto. A company that makes it easy for developers to build on top of the protocol can have a significant impact.
Jack Dorsey’s Block mentioned Nostr in their Q1 Shareholder letter, saying that “Creative endeavors will rely heavily on micropayments, something that’s been discussed since the dawn of the internet, and finally being realized at scale with things like “zaps” (transferring small amounts of bitcoin via lightning) on the NOSTR protocol.” Block says that they see an opportunity to build systems that connect the existing financial system with emerging systems, heavily implying Nostr’s Zap system. Rumour is that TIDAL and CashApp (both owned by Block) are working on integrations. Websites for both companies have a link that follows a standard Nostr reference structure: https://tidal.com/.well-known/nostr.json?name=TIDAL and https://cash.app/.well-known/nostr.json. Nothing is officially confirmed however, as far is I can tell this is the only reference to TIDAL and CashApp doing something with Nostr.
(EDIT 2024-06-03: another reference to Nostr in the TIDAL code base)
WeDistribute joined Nos Social’s Journalism Accelerator Program. Nos Social is a client app for Nostr. WeDistribute writes about why they are joining, and seeing value in expanding their writing to include Nostr: “different [networks] offer unique and novel approaches to solving common problems that every decentralized network struggles with. We’re all tackling different pieces of the puzzle, in an effort to make the Social Web a viable alternative”.
The Links
Project Defiant, the 10k USD seed grant to build an alternative for DeviantArt on the fediverse, has some more detailed information on the grant application process. The deadline is June 4th.