#mastodon releases their annual report for 2022, providing an interesting insight in their financials, as well as what they accomplished last year. The amount of work they managed with the means they have is absolutely impressive.
Work on the closed beta for mozilla.social server continues, with some interesting glimpses of their plans.
Bluesky is undergoing a period of significant growth: mid September saw the network hitting 1 million accounts, and another 400k in the four weeks since.
Bluesky announced that the architecture for federation is now ready, and said they will start (internal) federation in the next few weeks. They will start federation with new servers (PDS) that are run by the Bluesky team, with open federation coming later.
Mark Zuckerberg talks about #Threads and interoperability of social networks
#Fediseer started as a way to find spam servers on #Lemmy, and is now quickly expanding into the wider fediverse to become a crowd-sourced place to exchange information about other fediverse servers
government of the German state of Saxony joins the fediverse
Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview with The Verge this week, talking about a wide variety of topics. He made some interesting comments on #Threads and #ActivityPub, touting the advantages of interoperability, and told us that he has "always believed in this stuff".
In this article I take a deeper, critical look at the arguments that Mark Zuckerberg presents, and the implications for the rest of the #fediverse.
@fediversereport A good write up there. Zuck makes for an intetesting interview by not sounding too unreasonable (unlike the head of some other corporate social media companies) but then that's his skill in terms of sounding more reasonable than his actions may end up being. We can only see.
I agree with your interpretation that "interoperability is used to create value for Meta" but TBH, I don't have a lot against that. E.g. there are a lot of companies, such as commercial news organisations, that could setup a #Mastodon instance and use the offering there to drive traffic to their own website (and advertising).
In effect, I'm ok with #Threads trying to build the best #Fediverse experience, as long interoperability of content remains.
Zuckerberg says that he has always believed in decentralized social media protocols, but that it's too complicated to implement it in Facebook. He says that the opportunity cost of transitioning an existing platform is too big. Threads is different, because they are starting from scratch.
This thread is just to highlight some of the things that Mark Zuckerberg has said that relate to the fediverse in some way. In next Sunday's episode of Fediverse Report I'll dive deeper into this interview. You can find it at fediversereport.com
The interview was done by the excellent @alexeheath
I personally find it interesting to see that the agency originally started with their own account on the federal German government server ( https://social.bund.de/explore ), and have now decided to spin up their own server for the state of Saxony. It illustrates how the government servers can function as as example for others to follow and start their own social media servers.
After reporting on the CSAM attacks at #Lemmy a few weeks, new tools are being developed to help admins deal with this. One example is scanning images with generative AI, that can run locally on an admin's GPU, without uploading images anywhere.
Thank you @fediversereport ! We'll have session notes out probably tomorrow. Many of them are very detailed, which should also help people with understanding what happened at #FediForum.
@fediversereport I am a big fan of your report and I have one style request: I am slightly color blind, therefore I have hard times to see the links in your report. Is it possible to give it more contrast or similar to the rest of the text?
In their official press release the Government confirms it is a trial for one year. They state that "Mastodon has several characteristics that make it fundamentally attractive for government communications", such as being beyond the control of others, as well as it being privacy friendly.
Let's hope that other countries will follow this design pattern, and all launch a fediverse server at social.[governmentwebsite].[TLD]. Following this pattern makes it immediately clear to people they are communicating with an official government account.
#Lemmy has experienced CSAM attacks in the last week, with the material posted on multiple communities for people to see. Due to how federation works on Lemmy, this meant that the images also got send over and stored in the databases of other Lemmy servers. This poses questions and challenges for the admins, among others on how to make sure they are legally compliant.
@fediversereport Another thing to bear in mind is that (unlike Mastodon) there is no requirement to have more than one admin. Some reasonably popular instances have a single admin and some of those seem to have gone missing.
What will happen is anyone’s guess, presumably when the hosting isn’t paid they’ll just stop without warning. If they don’t get into legal trouble for not keeping their house in gear.
@infosec_jcp i appreciate the advice, however I want to both do everything within my power to see the criminals who do this convicted AND ensure properly
Indemnified, so if and when I see it or it gets reported, i will be marking the object private in the s3 bucket, taking a snapshot of logs and the state of the environment and then contacting my contact at the FBI and an attorney. This is not a place to innovate a response plan. @fediversereport@Mastodon
A short disclaimer, considering the name Fediverse Report: I do not currently consider Bluesky part of the fediverse. I've written about the multiple meanings of the term fediverse recently in this article:
However, I think that to fully understand what's happening in the fediverse, having context on what is happening on other decentralized protocols is valuable. Thus, I want to provide that context and give news on Bluesky as well.
@fediversereport I think it makes sense to cover BlueSky. They’re a major social media project with federation as a stated design goal. They haven’t shipped it, but they do have a decent user base. If/when they DO ship federation, it will be consequential to the Fediverse.
search is currently available as a beta. At least mastodon.social and mastodon.online have it. If you check your server says 'v4.2.0-beta2' in the bottom left to double check.
In this piece I take a look at how you can approach the term fediverse from different perspective, and how they all have different ideas on what the fediverse actually is.
Is the fediverse a group of communities with a specific culture? All software that uses #activitypub? Or decentralised social networks that interoperate with each other?