A grab-bag of updates this week, where I spend some more time looking at Bonfire, the technical aspects of how Threads implemented quote posting, and how that impacts the fediverse, as well as a whole variety of other updates.
An update on Bonfire
The upcoming Bonfire project describes itself as a social networking toolkit, that allow communities to create and shape their own digital spaces, and have released some new information about some parts of their upcoming project. Bonfire is a fediverse server project in development, with its own take on the microblogging format, and tools to customise it for your community.
Bonfire Classic has been in development (and available for testing) for a while, and the new information is on the other apps that can be build with Bonfire. The team is working on an Open Science version of Bonfire, as well as a Communities version. For the Open Science version, features like integration with your ORCID (‘Open Researcher and Contributor ID’), and better embedding of scientific papers are a part of it. For the Communities version, the team is collaborating with Radio Free Fedi, and the features centre around public and private groups, and topical discussions.
In another update this week, the Bonfire team also released more information on how their extension system works. The Prosocial Network Design community designed a feature that allowed moderators to add labels to posts, with the goal of adding extra context, and help reduce misinformation. Bonfire then took this design, and packaged it as a separate extension that could easily work together with the main Bonfire codebase. This modular design of Bonfire creates a lot of space for experimentation and new ideas, and it is even better to see it being used to work on safety in online spaces.
The Bonfire team is also working towards a cooperative hosting network, to make the hosting of a Bonfire more accessible to communities. In September 2023 the Bonfire team indicated to be working towards a 1.0 release in the upcoming months.
Threads and Quote Posting
Threads is adding quote posting to their implementation of ActivityPub. Interestingly, a Threads engineer confirmed that Threads implemented two versions of quote posting, to account for the multiple ways that quote posting is handled in the fediverse.
For context: Misskey (and its forks, aka ‘Forkeys‘) have implemented quote posting, although the implementation is not according to an official ActivityPub specification, and not really used outside of the ‘Forkeys’. There is a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to standardise the Object Links (which include quote posts), which has wide agreement in the developer community, but again few projects have implemented. Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning on adding their own version of quote posting, with the extended functionality that allows people to set permissions per post on whether they can be quote posted or not.
What is notable about Threads’ implementation of quote posting is that they addedboth Misskey’s implementation of quote posting, as well as the proposed extension of ActivityPub with the FEP. The Threads engineer described their reasoning as follows:
We implemented both FEP-e232 as well as the _misskey_quote field (which usually gets checked alongside quoteUrl). This was intentional so we can get some immediate product adoption off the ground (with the unofficial key) and also be somewhat future-proof when the FEP gains more traction.
What stands out to me here is that Threads is aware of the develop community’s work on extending the ActivityPub specification, and is open to implementing proposals. How the interaction between the developer community and Meta will develop is something that is certainly worth watching.
In other news
Newsmast has made their custom and curated feeds more accessible, and launched them as a separate service, that can be accessed via newsmast.community. There are over 60 custom feeds, that ‘are hand built through a mix of hashtags, follows, filters and mutes’. By placing the custom feeds on a separate (Mastodon) server, they are easily accessible, and a great way for new accounts to populate their timeline with interesting content from the network. Their about page goes into more detail on how they build their own custom feeds.
Ryan Barrett, creator of the Bridgy Fed project, has a detailed blog post about moderation and network bridges, that is worth reading. It is an interesting analysis of the tradeoffs and complexities of the new generation of social networks. Bridges between networks and protocols can create context collapse. At the same time the networks are diverse enough in both people who use them, as well as the types of use cases they support, that context boundaries cannot be easily drawn on protocol or platform lines anymore either.
Sublinks is a new link-aggregator platform for the fediverse that is currently in development and got announced this week. Sublinks was created because creator Jason Grim found it difficult to contribute to Lemmy, and had issues with the roadmap, development speed and quality. For now, Sublinks stands out by using a different technology stack than Lemmy, which makes it easier to attract developer contributions. In the first version of Sublinks, it will still use the front-end of Lemmy, and only later will there be space for new features. The project has found major support within the community, with contributions from admins from the lemmy.world server, as well as the ‘involvement of the creators of two major Lemmy themes, Pangora & Photon‘.
A new study on the Lemmy migration that happened last summer was published this week, titled ‘User Sentiments and Dynamics in the Decentralized Web: Reddit Migration’s Impact on Lemmy’, by Thatiany Andrade Nunes. It is an extensive study, with both a sentiment analysis and survey, that together ‘depicts a predominantly positive sentiment towards Lemmy and criticisms of Reddit’. For those interested in the transition of decentralised social networks the entire paper is worth reading. Lemmy developer Dessalines writes that his own main takeaways from the paper are Lemmy needs to continue focusing on prioritising the needs of third party app developers, as well as keeping transparant communications with the community. Lemmy has focused already on community communications by giving bi-weekly developer updates, and hosted their second AMA this week as well (write-up of that coming next week).
GoToSocial is a fediverse project currently in development, that describes the features of being ‘lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused’ to stand out from comparable projects such as Mastodon or Pleroma. In their latest update they indicate to reach the beta stage of their project in the first quarter of 2024. They also give a short history of the project and how it came into being.
Mastodon is testing out a new version of the composer (only available on mastodon.social for now). It features a visual redesign, and more controversially, it renames the setting of posting as ‘Unlisted’ to ‘Quiet Public’. The feature of setting post as ‘Unlisted’ has always been difficult to explain in what it does, as the impact is different than people regularly expect. Personally I think it is good that more attention is brought to explaining to what specific settings do in Mastodon, but I’m unsure yet if they have stuck the landing here.
Finally, I wrote about why I like Phanpy as my fediverse client, and the value of adding a horizontally scrolling feed into the normal vertically scrolling reverse chronological feed.
The links
The Washington Post gives a shout-out to Bookwyrm as an alternative to Goodreads.
IFTTT adds support for the mastodon.social server. It is unclear if this limitation is because of technical reasons, or because the concept of decentralisation is simply not well understood by IFTTT.
Forgejo’s monthly update, and it may become a hard fork of Gitea.
A design concept for a specific UX to asks questions on Mastodon, highlight good answers, and mark a question as ‘answered’.
Suggestions on how Lemmy can work on its community separation problems.
An exploration of the idea of rebuilding FourSquare using ActivityPub.
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