LaurensHof, 6 days ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 67

People are interested in bridges between Bluesky and the fediverse, it turns out: Bridgy Fed quietly launched in test mode for a few people to try, but already 1200 accounts have signed up when they found out about it, without any announcement. Some interesting news about plugins as well this week, for both PeerTube and Lemmy. Let’s dive in:

Bluesky and fediverse bridge silently launches

Bridgy Fed, the bridge between the fediverse by Ryan Barrett, is now publicly available for testing. The bridge quietly became available for people to test, but as bridged posts started to appear, other people became aware and more and more people started to test and use the bridge. Barrett states that already 1200 accounts have bridged in one or both directions. Some 750 of those accounts have made their fediverse account visible in Bluesky, which can be tracked via a directory made by Kuba Suder. Barrett also says that the bridge is still in a very early state, that he was not expecting so much attention so quickly, and that users should still expect plenty of bugs and downtime.

When the bridge was first announced, it lead to a storm of protest within the fediverse. Many people felt uncomfortable that the bridge was opt-out and not opt-in, and did not want that their public fediverse posts became available in Bluesky. Barrett has listened to the feedback, and the entire system is now opt-in. In order to make your fediverse account available in Bluesky, you’ll have to follow this account. For your Bluesky account to become visible in the fediverse you can follow this account. It might take a few minutes before your account becomes visible. Barrett also says that “much of the current state is not final. Expect some design and policy choices to change. For example, right now you have to manually enable the bridge, but that may change eventually, at least for Bluesky accounts bridging into the fediverse.”

The News

A variety of news from the side of PeerTube: PeerTube released version 6.1, with new features such as account import/export, banners and avatars for instances, and a change in the way PeerTube counts a view. Now, more in line with other platforms, someone has to watch a video for 10 seconds to count as a view, down from 30. Counting is also done based on a unique ID generated by a web browser, instead of an IP address. PeerTube has a plugin system, with two new interesting plugins this week that are being worked on:

• The Premium user plugin allows videos to be limited to be viewed only by paying accounts, with an integration with Stripe.
• A subtitle editor plugin which allows creators to add subtitles or captions without having to use external software.

Finally, WeDistribute wrote a guide this week on how to stream with PeerTube and Owncast.

Discourse and WordPress are now directly federating with each other. This means that a forum category on Discourse can follow a WordPress blog, and the blogs on WordPress will appear as new posts in the Discourse Forum category. Demo is available here, and as of this week’s episode, my newsletter should also appear on the ActivityPub Social Hub forums. In general there is a lot of activity happening with interoperability between Lemmy, WordPress, NodeBB and Discourse. They are all focusing more on long-form writing, and the Working Group‘s meeting of this week spend quite some effort on improving how these different platforms for ‘Forums and Threaded Discussions’ can federate. Lemmy is also working on federating directly with NodeBB, and it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like in practice.

Newsmast announces that they have been working on a new feature to extend their Mastodon servers, Amplifier. With Amplifier come two major new features to Newsmast: The ability for individual accounts on the server to opt-in or opt-out of posts from Bluesky and Threads, and a feature to scroll back through time similar to Phanpy’s excellent Catch-up feature. With bridging becoming more prominent, it makes sense to have the feature clearly available as a setting to people, and I’m curious to see how they will implement it. Newsmast has not shared yet when Amplifier will be released.

Lemmy announces a Proof of Concept for a plugin system. The system is currently fairly basic, and developer nutomic says that he will not implement the system until it is clear that there is interest, and at least one plugin is in development. The responses do show that there is clear interest in such a system though, and it’s worth watching to see what comes of it.

Viverse, the metaverse platform of HTC, has joined the fediverse. Viverse allows you to visit 3d worlds directly in your browser. The fediverse integration means that you can now chat from your Viverse account with Mastodon accounts, the blog shows how this looks in practice. What stands out to me about the announcement is that the fediverse is becoming attractive for products to bootstrap their social network. Viverse does not appear to be particularly busy, the most visited ‘world’ is visited some 7000 times total, and adding fediverse integration is an interesting way to increase visibility.

Conversations on Mastodon forks are nothing new, but have popped up recently again, after some public pushback against some of the board members of Mastodon’s new U.S.-based non-profit organisation. Jon Pincus of The Nexus of Privacy makes a case for a hard fork in this article. Fediverse developer and Mastodon contributor Emelia Smith wrote a response on why she thinks a hard fork is not the way forward. Roland Pulliam, who works on the shared deny list project The Bad Space, announced a fork Awujo, but not much is known about the fork yet.

E2EE encryption might be coming to the fediverse: ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou got a grant from the Summer of Protocols Initiatives to add end-to-end encryption to the ActivityPub protocol, together with developer Tom Coates. WeDistribute has a closer look as well.

Tusks is a new iOS app for Mastodon with the goal of “makes posting on Mastodon feel like publishing to your blog”. It only shows your own posts, and focuses on helping you write posts, especially threads. Tusks is available iOS as well as the iPad and Mac, and the full product is $4.99.

For the people interested in protocols: A call to participate help the lead author of the original Webfinger RFC with improvements.

The Links

• The DotSocial Podcast interviewed Ryan Barrett about building bridges to the fediverse.
• Robert W. Gehl, who is currently writing a book about the fediverse, has a blog post about decentralisation vs noncentralisation, and Bluesky vs the fediverse.
• A study on social media commissioned by the French government recommends that teenagers ” access only what it called “ethical” social media, such as Mastodon.“
• A video going over all the updates made to Micro.blog in recent weeks.
• New updates on fediverse testing tool Fedify.
• An update on FediTest.
• An update on radiofreefedi.
• Flipboard has a recap of their fediverse webinar for creators and curators.
• This week’s overview of server, client and FEP updates.
• Mastodon put out a short call for how to help with coding.
• Bloost button.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-67/

LaurensHof, 9 days ago to bluesky

Last Month in Bluesky – April 2024

After the hectic months of February and March, things are more stable in Bluesky. The biggest development is the first president that has joined Bluesky, with Brazilian president Lula joining Bluesky as part of a larger conflict between the Brazilian government and X.

The News

Brazilian president Lula has opened an account on Bluesky, Brasil247.com reports. The news comes after an escalating conflict between X and the Brazilian Courts. Elon Musk publicly refused to follow orders by the Brazilian court to block certain accounts on X, and a Brazilian judge has ordered an investigation of Elon Musk for obstruction of justice. President Lula opening an account on Bluesky is a direct response to the ongoing conflict between the Brazilian government and X, and indicates how governments are starting to be fed up with the situation at X. President Lula used his first post on Bluesky to say that 38 slaughterhouses will be authorised to export meat to China. (?) Finally, Bluesky dropped their official policy against heads of states joining Bluesky.

Skygaze, the organisation behind the For You custom feed announced that they have quit the feed, and transferred ownership of the feed to the Bluesky organisation. The For You feed was by far the most popular custom feed that had a personalised algorithm. Skygaze said that they are moving on to other projects. Skygaze had been fairly involved in the Bluesky community, running a hackaton only 2 months ago. Recently, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber stated that one ways Bluesky plans to make money is to create a marketplace for custom feeds and third party moderation, where Bluesky will take a cut of the payments. Skygaze was one of the only creators of custom feeds that appeared to have a commercial side, as they seemed to have an affiliation with YCombinator. With them leaving the ATmosphere for other projects there are no other organisations that operate a third party service on the ATmosphere have expressed a clear interest in monetisation of their services yet.

Bluesky announced the second batch of ATProto grant recipients. The total grant was 4.8k USD, spend on various microgrants. SkyBridge is the grant project that got the most attention (TechCrunch, The Verge), which got a 800USD grant to rewrite the project in Rust. SkyBridge has been around for almost a year, although I personally never really got it to work properly. The grant should give the project a boost and renewed interest.

In February, Bluesky announced that they started federation, allowing people to run their own PDS, albeit under significant restrictions (apply for Relay access, limit the PDS to 10 accounts) while the process underwent testing. So far, these restrictions have not been lifted yet.

App updates

The official Bluesky apps have gotten some updates this month:

• You can now post gifs.
• You can now embed Bluesky posts on your website.
• YouTube Music player support.

The Links

• Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network is an extensive history and documentation of the development of Bluesky and ATProto by the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter.
• An introduction to ATProto by the creator of WhiteWind, a blogging platform build on top of ATProto.
• WhiteWind latest update allows mentions to appear as comments on your blog.
• A guide for bot development on ATProto.
• Hosting WhiteWind blog posts on your own website.
• A tool to download the entirety of Bluesky into your own database.
• Third party client Skywalker now lets you post entire threads at once.
• Bluesky Crash Course: Labelers by Kairi.
• DataBot is Bluesky feed that uses machine learning to find data visualisations on Bluesky.
• The Changelog podcast interviews Bluesky developer Paul Frazee to talk about ‘how the Bluesky apps are built, tested, and deployed’.
• The Aegis Labeler is experimenting with giving out ‘Verified‘ tags to help combat impersonation spam. It is now a separate labeler.
• The Aegis Labeler posted their Declaration of Values.

That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky, or subscribe to my newsletter below. You’ll get a weekly update on the fediverse in your inbox, and a monthly update on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-april-2024/

LaurensHof, 20 days ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 65

Welcome to another busy news week. I’ve spend a bit more focus on NodeBB and Discourse federating with each other, as it is an interesting new way of putting federation in practice. Other news, such as around Ghost and PodcastAP show how expansive the fediverse is getting. Lets dive in:

Forum federation

NodeBB and Discourse are now federating with each other. Both forum softwares are working on their implementation of ActivityPub, and this week’s milestone marks a new step in federation that has not really been seen in the fediverse before. The implementation allows forum categories to follow each other. This means that a forum category on Discourse can now take in and show all posts on a specific forum category on NodeBB. An example of this can be seen here, this category on the Social Hub (which runs Discourse) follows a category of a NodeBB forum, and as such the posts made on NodeBB now show up on Discourse. To make it even more interesting, the NodeBB posts also federate with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, and as such comments made with a Mastodon account also show up.

This new version of federation might be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, so a quick explainer how this differs from how link-aggregator platforms like Lemmy and Kbin federate with each other. on there you can follow categories/communities that are on different instances/platforms, but the communities themselves cannot interact with each other. As an example: If you have an account on kbin.social you can follow both !fediverse and !fediverse, but these communities stay separate. This often leads to duplicate posts, and splintered communities. What NodeBB and Discourse have done is equivalent to if !fediverse and !fediverse could follow each other, so a post in one of the communities would show up in the other community.

The News

Ghost, the open-source platform for newsletters, has long had the request to add ActivityPub support. This week, Ghost founder John O’Nolan posted that the “idea has been at the top of the list for a long time, so this week we’re starting work to look into the possibility of adding ActivityPub support to Ghost.” Ghost posted a survey asking for input. The responses by the community show that there is a great interest in this feature: Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput reached out offering help (which O’Nolan gladly accepted), The Verge’s Editor In Chief Nilay Patel said that The Verge would be interested in knowing how Ghost approaches federation for paid newsletters, as The Verge wants to do this too, as well people sharing their survey responses. For more information, check out TechCrunch.

Upcoming fediverse platform Emissary has shown another preview how it can be used to build a federated Bandcamp alternative. In a short video developer Ben Pate walks through the current state, showing of a band page that is fully customisable, and has space for hosting (as well as linking to) music, and shows. For more information, check out this week’s article by WeDistribute.

Pixelfed developer Dansup has launched PubKit in closed beta. PubKit is a toolset for ActivityPub, that helps developers with testing and debugging their software. Dansup is considering options on how to/whether to open-source the code being PubKit while also making sure that his efforts are fairly compensated.

Mobilizon has transferred ownership from Framasoft to Kaihuri. Kaihuri is a small French organisation that has been maintaining the French Mobilizon instance Keskonfai for a long time, and got funding from NLnet to improve and maintain Mobilizon. Kaihuri showed a demo this week (recording here) of their work on the new features, with Calendars, Groups, a more customisable front page, and multi-day events all coming to the new update, which will be released soon. I’ll go into more detail once the update releases.

There has been some reshuffling in the different Misskey forks (‘Forkeys’). Sharkey is steadily cruising along. Firefish has passed on to new owner naskya, who is in the process of getting complete control and starting up the project again after a pause of a few months. Development on Catodon, a Firefish fork, is currently paused due to other obligations for the current lead developer. Iceshrimp, originally a fork of Firefish, is in a feature-freeze as the entire project (frontend and backend) is being rewritten in .net/C#. Iceshrimp announced this week that work on the backend is mostly finished.

Trump’s social network Truth.social is based on Mastodon, which is licensed under AGPL. In short means that the source code has to be made available to everyone who interacts with it. Truth.social has not done so for more than a year, and Evan Boehs decided to try to get Truth.social to comply with the AGPL license. To his surprise, they did, and send them the source code. Write-up of the situation here, source code here, analysis of the code by @Jasmin here.

Mastodon has gotten funding to implement quote posts. The feature is planned for update 4.4. The ability to opt-out of quote posts is also currently planned, which makes it that Mastodon’s implementation will not be compatible with other fediverse implementations of quote posting.

PodcastAP is new tool that allows you to easily follow every podcast with your fediverse, as it is integrated with podcastindex.org. With their latest update podcasts that already live on the fediverse (if they use Castopod or PeerTube to host their podcast), it can now follow the ActivityPub version of the podcast, as well as the ‘bridge’ version.

Liaizon Wakest pointed out that blogging platform Loforo.com has been fully federating with ActivityPub for a while. I cannot find any announcements by Loforo that they started with federation, and it seems like it has been active for a while. This in itself makes it intriguing; my assumption has always been so far that if platforms join the fediverse, that they will make it into a news story, and Loforo seems to prove that assumption wrong.

The Links

• WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley writes about A Content-Fallback Mechanism for the Fediverse.
• WeDistribute is also expanding and looking for contributors.
• Jon Pincus writes about ‘Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers’.
• A Mastodon plushie is coming soon.
• Stefan Bohacek proposes that fediverse admins disable images on World Sight Day so that only alt-text shows up.
• Martin Holland has been keeping track of media accounts on the fediverse. This data set has now been expanded to include media accounts on Threads that have federation enabled.
• Castopod’s latest feature allows you to display the podcasts’ transcript directly on the episode page.
• EchoFeed is an interesting blend of RSS and the fediverse, allowing you to easily republish RSS/Atom feeds on to the fediverse and other places.
• The weekly overview of all fediverse server and client updates.
• Evan Prodromou tries out TikTok Notes, and writes about how it should integrate with ActivityPub.
• PeerTube has started a newsletter, and the first edition can be found here.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-65/

LaurensHof, 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 64

This edition of Last Week in Fediverse seems to be a President’s edition; Barack Obama turns on fediverse sharing for his Threads account, and Brazil’s president Lula joins Bluesky. Lots more going on this week, lets dive in:

The News

IFTAS, the nonprofit organisation for Trust & Safety on the social web, has put out a guide for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The guide caters towards ‘small and micro services’ that has member accounts in the EU, which is the large majority of fediverse servers. It is a practical and easy overview of what is expected if you are the operator of a fediverse server, and highly recommended if you are a server admin to check it out. Most requirements in the DSA that are applicable to ‘small and micro services’ (platforms with less than 50 employees and less than 10M EUR turnover) are on how to provide ways of communication with authorities and how to handle their requests. The requirement (art 13) in the DSA that might give server operators the most difficulty is that platforms that are located outside of the EU, but ‘serve EU users or make their services available in the EU are required to have an EU-based
legal representative to manage compliance and communication with EU authorities.’ It seems a significant number of fediverse servers are currently not in compliance with this requirement, and no clear direction yet on how to get there.

Sora is an iOS and MacOS client for the fediverse (for Mastodon, the Forkeys as well as Bluesky), which has been pushing the boundaries with what is possible with 3rd party fediverse clients. The app features a custom For You algorithmic feed, and the developer recently showed during FediForum how people have complete control over their algorithm. Now the developer is back with another update, this time adding P2P video calling to the client. A gif in the announcement post shows how it works. You can schedule a meeting, which send a link for the other person’s fediverse account to join. Both people need to use Sora to use the feature. The developer stated that if there is enough interest in the feature, he will work on making the feature available as a web client that does not require Sora.

Flipboard has reached another major milestone in their process fully federate Flipboard and have full interoperability with the rest of the fediverse. There is now two-way interaction with fediverse accounts and Flipboard accounts that are federated. CEO Mike McCue explains: “Now when a federated Flipboard user curates, people in the fediverse can reply, favorite, boost or follow those Flipboard users who will in turn see that activity in their usual notifications tab. Even better, Flipboard users can directly reply to people in the fediverse — and very soon they will also be able to follow each other.” Furthermore, Flipboard has enabled federation for another 11000 magazines, creating increasing the amount of curated content that is available in the fediverse.

Lyrak is a new social platform that focuses on real-time news and revenue sharing with creators that was announced this week. In the announcement post, Lyrak also stated that fediverse integration will be added to the platform ‘soon’. For more information on Lyrak, Sarah Perez has more extensive look, over at TechCrunch.

Russia’s censorship agency blocks access to the lgtbqia.space server in Russia. The admins of the lgtbqia.space server got a notification by the Russian agency demanding that they remove an account from their server. The account is for a ‘blog about LGBTQ+ people, literature, sports, humor, etc.’ The admins refused to comply, after which the server is now inaccessible in Russia.

During FediForum, Newsmast showcased their new project Patchwork. In a new update, Newsmast says that they ‘are looking at rolling out a Beta version in the coming months, with features like easy opt in or out of networking with Threads & Bluesky, spam management and content filters.’

Some news from Threads

• Barack Obama’s also turns on fediverse sharing for his Threads account, making him the second US President to do so.
• WeDistribute wrote a ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the Fediverse, for Threads Users’.
• A blog post on using Mastodon to follow on Threads accounts, from the perspective of someone who has mainly been using Threads. The blog showcases how third party clients are a major selling point for the fediverse.
• Meanwhile, Threads invites developers to sign up for API access, but it seems the API can only be used for posting into Threads, as well as analytics. It rules out the possibility of building full-featured third-party clients as you can with the rest of the fediverse.

Some news from Bluesky

Brazilian president Lula has opened an account on Bluesky, Brasil247.com reports. The news comes after an escalating conflict between X and the Brazilian Courts. Elon Musk publicly refused to follow orders by the Brazilian court to block certain accounts on X, and a Brazilian judge has ordered an investigation of Elon Musk for obstruction of justice. President Lula opening an account on Bluesky is a direct response to the ongoing conflict between the Brazilian government and X, and indicates how governments are starting to be fed up with the situation at X. President Lula used his first post on Bluesky to say that 38 slaughterhouses will be authorised to export meat to China. (?)

The Links

• Mastodon is hiring a new core team member for back-end development.
• An update on BridgyFed, the upcoming bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, and the work to make it fully opt-in/consent based.
• Fediverse Event planning tool Mobilizon has transferred ownership recently, and the new team, Kaihuri, will give a presentation of the new version next week on Monday April 15th.
• A reading of the Canadian Online Harms Act, from the perspective of fediverse admins.
• An update on radio free fedi, who have launched their new website as well.
• Pixelfed open-sources their mobile apps.
• Annual Mastodon Pledge Drive.
• The University of Innsbruck expands their Mastodon server to all university employees.
• Notes on an setting up a fediverse relay with FediBuzz on an Ubuntu server.
• Lifehacker writes about the current state of the podcast landscape, and role that ActivityPub can play.
• How to get started with FediTest, a testing suite that is currently being build.
• An update by ForgeFed on their work on implementing federation into software forges.
• An overview of this week’s updates to fediverse products.
• An update from NodeBB and their work on ActivityPub Development.
• Lemmy’s biweekly development update.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-64/

LaurensHof, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 63

The President of the United States posting into the fediverse is not something I expected to happen so soon, but here we are. A new photo sharing app in development, and analysis of the different communities in the fediverse. Let’s dive in.

Joe Biden is now posting into the fediverse

The official US president Threads account, @POTUS, has turned on the fediverse connection, allowing people in the fediverse to follow the account. Besides the POTUS account, the @whitehouse account and the Spanish version @lacasablanca have also turned on federation.

Threads’ work on federation is still in open beta, as only people in US, Canada and Japan are able to use it. Federation is only one way currently, people using fediverse software can follow accounts on Threads, but not the other way around. Comments made in the fediverse on Threads posts are also not send back to Threads.

The official accounts are remarkably early adopters of the feature, as last week I reported that the total number of Threads accounts that have turned on federation is likely just north of 3000. Being able to follow the president of the United States from your fediverse account changes the dynamics of the fediverse in a variety of ways. It alters the dynamic of discussions on whether instances should block Threads or not. For some people it will increase the perceived cost of not federating with Threads, while for others it can help sharpen the focus of what type of posts they do not want to be part of their community. It makes conversations with other (government) organisations about joining the fediverse easier; as “even the POTUS is a part of the fediverse” is a good sell that is hard to beat.

The news

Vernissage is a third party client for Pixelfed for iOS which celebrated their 1-year anniversary this week. As part of the moment the developer announced that Vernissage now has become it’s own fediverse platform, focusing on being a platform for photographers, with photos at the center. The official instance is available at vernissage.photos, but as the platform is still in testing phase it is closed for registrations for the moment. The platform is already federating, with the global timeline showing photos from Pixelfed. Vernissage.photos is completely standalone from the Vernissage client for Pixelfed, and the developer says that it is possible that the name of the client might change in the future to avoid confusion. Vernissage is open source, available here.

Newsmast has published a new report, with research on the communities on the social web. The report, Mapping The Fediverse, indicates the fediverse is more than talking about Linux: “People often think the Fediverse is about tech. We’ve not found that,” says Michael Foster, Co-Founder of Newsmast. “Around a million people participated in knowledge-sharing over the last six months, in a broad range of Communities, from Pets to Politics.” The entire report is worth reading, and gives a good overview of the fediverse. The fediverse has a very ‘long tail’ of people who post for a relatively smaller group of followers, and who are fine with their posts not gaining a large visibility. The fediverse seems to have a much bigger section of this group of people than Bluesky, for example. But as impressions of the communities of a network are often based on the most popular and viral posts, it is especially easy on the fediverse to not fully appreciate this long tail of people. Talking about Newsmast: Tedium wrote an article about Newsmast, and placing them in the context of real-time news in the social media era

Darnell Clayton writes how Flipboard, not Threads, may become the largest fediverse instance. Sharing your content on Flipboard to the fediverse is opt-out, while it is opt-in for Threads. This difference in approach, in combination with a low uptake of any opt-in system, might just mean many more Flipboard accounts than Threads account will be part of the fediverse. Flipboard also published a blog this week, explaining what it means to have a federated Flipboard profile.

Some governments have experimented with the fediverse by setting up their own Mastodon or Peertube instance, but I think that this (WordPress) website of a Dutch government organisation that has started using the ActivityPub plugin is the first case of a government organisation joining the fediverse via WordPress. This Phanpy link showcases that the website is now visible via the fediverse.

A paper on detecting toxic speech by focusing on the conversational context of posts, titled ‘Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse’. Finding the context of a conversation is harder in a decentralised network, since not all instance have the same complete overview. Scientific analysis of the fediverse has mainly focused on Mastodon so far, and this paper expands on that by viewing Pleroma as their own social network within a the larger social networks of the fediverse.

The newly formed Working Group for the forum/link-aggregator part of the fediverse has had their first meeting, and voted to be the Threadiverse Working Group, that will create a Task Force as part of the SWICG. It is a collaboration project in a way that has not really happened in the fediverse before. I’m very interested in how this will develop; the dominant way of creating fediverse software so far has been hobby projects that sometimes scale up slightly, now this is intersecting more and more with existing organisations with complete products who are expanding their product to include fediverse integration. This creates both space and need for more cross-product collaboration, something that is highly valuable and needed within the fediverse.

The links

• Ben Pate, developer of the upcoming Emissary platform, demos how Emissary can be used to build federated music service.
• WeDistribute spoke with micro.blog creator Manton Reece about Indieweb, federation, and personal blogging.
• Write.as gives a short update on the current priorities: better fediverse integration, the ability to import posts, and a revision to drafts.
• For the protocol-people: Ryan Barrett and @nightpool published a draft report for the SWICG about ActivityPub and HTTP Signatures.
• The monthly update for Forgejo, with some more information on their work on implementing federation.
• Development work on Catodon is halted, as the lead developer has other IRL obligations and the project has not managed to find a co-lead dev.
• Last week I wrote about the work on @Oliphant’s blocklists being halted, in favour of the upcming FediCheck. @Oliphant gave another update on the current status on the transition.
• Skeb is a Japanese art commission platform that has started to integrate together with Misskey.
• GoToSocial’s latest update adds support for account moving, hiding your follower count, and custom themes.
• Upcoming link-aggregator platform Sublinks has put out of moderator survey.
• Threads has an internal blocklist of which fediverse servers it will not connect with. The Fedibird.com instance was on that list, and got itself removed after reaching out. As Liaizon Wakest says in the post pointing this out, it is interesting to see playing out.
• Podcastindex.org has a bridge to the fediverse, allowing you to follow all the indexed podcasts from your fediverse accounts. This work has been going on for a bit, and it is getting more traction now.
• This week’s updates to fediverse servers and clients.
• An update on the current state of moderation tools available in Piefed.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-63/

LaurensHof, 1 month ago to bluesky

Last Month in Bluesky – March 24

February was a extremely eventful month for Bluesky, with the network opening up. While things have been less hectic in March, there have been significant additions to the ATmosphere: stackable moderation and third party labelers, blogging on ATproto and more. Let’s dive in.

Stackable moderation and labelers

One of the core design parts of Bluesky and the AT Proto network is a focus on individual choice, for both curation (via custom feeds) as well as moderation. With this month’s release of open-source moderation tools and third party labeling services, Bluesky has put their view on what they call ‘Stackable Moderation’ in practice. The idea of stackable moderation (in earlier writings Bluesky called it composable moderation) is that the Bluesky organisation provides a ‘base layer’ of moderation services, and individuals can decide to ‘stack’ additional moderation services on top of the services already provided by Bluesky.

To enable this, Bluesky released ‘Ozone’ as open-source software, which is the moderation tool that the Bluesky organisation uses in-house for their moderation services. They also implemented third party ‘labelers’, allowing other people to run a moderation service that labels posts and accounts. People who subscribe to that labeling service can decide to hide posts that have that specific label. Bluesky posted a short video to demonstrate this here.

Some examples of these new labelers are Aegis, XBlock Screenshot Labeler and AI Moderation Service. The XBlock labeler automatically labels screenshots from all the other social networks, and is a great option for people who are not interested in seeing every post by Elon Musk being dunked on. AI Moderation Service labels posts that are made with AI. Aegis focuses on safety, especially for the queer communities on Bluesky, and has grown out of the lists that were maintained by Kairi, known as the Contraption. Her postmortem analysis of running these denylists for the last 10 months is excellent and worth reading, as it indicates how being placed on a widely adopted moderation list is a highly effective way to starve bad actors of oxygen.

Blogging on AT Protocol

WhiteWind is a new blogging platform that runs on AT Protocol, and allows anyone with a Bluesky account to create their own blog for free. One of the core ideas of building the AT Protocol out in the open is that other people can build different apps on top of it as well, that are not microblogging. The launch of WhiteWind shows that this is indeed possible, and that AT Protocol can be used to build different applications.

Using WhiteWind is as simple as logging in with your Bluesky handle and app password, hit the ‘plus’ button in the bottom right, and start typing. WhiteWind uses Markdown, and for more information there is a basic explanation page.

For the people interested in protocol stuff: WhiteWind is an AppView, that indexes posts with a different ‘lexicon’ than the standard microblogging. Your WhiteWind blogs however are stored on the same PDS, so Bluesky probably hosts your blogs, even though the official Bluesky app will not show the blog posts.

Graber on how Bluesky plans to make money

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was on the Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel to talk about Bluesky and Federation. There are lots of interesting discussions in there, and the episode is worth listening to (or reading, transcript available). What stood out to me is Graber’s answer regarding Bluesky’s plans to make money, where she says: “We’ve been building marketplaces within the app, essentially. So, we’ve got information marketplaces, moderation marketplaces. This is a direction that we’re going to lean into.”

In February, after Bluesky dropped the need for invite codes, The Verge also spoke with Graber, and also asked the question about ways to make money: “the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.”

It is striking to me to how different these answers are: moderation marketplaces is new, and paid additional app features as well as a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm are not mentioned.

In other news – Bluesky

Bluesky has announced a 10k USD microgrants program, to help foster and grow the developer ecosystem, with grants between 500USD and 2000 USD per project. No recipients of the grants have been announced yet.

Last month, Bluesky hired Aaron Rodericks as head of Trust and Safety. This news led to Elon Musk changing the name of X’s Trust and Safety team to ‘Safety’ instead.

The Links

• Indie developer Kuba Suder has build a variety of projects for Bluesky and ATproto, and gave an overview of all the projects he has made. Suder has build a way to show all quote posts of a post, a handles directory, a way to cross-post from Bluesky to Mastodon, and more.
• The Decentered podcast interviewed Rudy Fraser, who is building the Blacksky curated feed and community.
• Enable comments on your website with Bluesky. This implementation mixes both fediverse interactions with Bluesky interactions together.
• Bluesky Feed Creator does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing anyone to create their own custom feed with no coding required. They announced recently that they dropped the waiting list.
• Mike Masnick wrote about ‘Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far’.
• Jay Graber on the Techdirt podcast.
• A technical explanation of what a PDS implementation actually entails, by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold.
• A visual history of the maturation of the atproto network by Bluesky’s Daniel Holms.
• An experiment in using Bluesky’s DID:PLC with ActivityPub.

That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. If you are interested in the world of decentralised social networks, you can subscribe to my newsletter where you get a weekly update on all that is happening.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-march-24/

LaurensHof, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 62

A bit of a quieter news week, especially after last week’s business with Threads’ open beta for federation and Fediforum, with a variety of smaller news items. So let’s dive into this week’s news:

The News

Fediverse event planning platform Mobilizon transfers ownership, from Framasoft to Kaihuri. Framasoft (who also develops PeerTube) has been developing Mobilizon for the past few years, and feels that they have achieved their vision. The Kaihuri association has obtained funding from the NLnet organisation for futher developement.

@Oliphant has maintained the Oliphant’s blocklists over the last few years. He has been working together with IFTAS on the upcoming FediCheck project. FediCheck is a Web service from IFTAS that allows service providers to review and subscribe to external sources such as the IFTAS CARIAD database for automated updates. @Oliphant says about his blocklist project that “project I’m doing is an “interim step on the road to something better.” FediCheck is the “something better”, at least so far as what I can contribute.” As such, future work on the Oliphant blocklist will be minimal, and more information on this will be out soon.

Mastodon’s upcoming new release will feature ‘severed relationship’ notifications. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput explains that these notifications will appear when a moderator or admin blocks a user or a whole domain and this action caused you to loose some follows or followers. Screenshots how this will look like available here. There will also be new ways to filter your notifications. The new update, version 4.3, is expected to be released in the next 6 to 8 weeks.

A short update on statistics about Threads: Threads’ legal department denied the request to share NodeInfo data, according to Daniel Supernault, who maintains fedidb.org. Mastodon’s CTO Renaud Chaput meanwhile indicates that mastodon.social knows about 2800 Threads accounts who have turned on federation. While the mastodon.social server does not know about all Threads accounts, it does provide a good indication of roughly the amount of Threads accounts that have turned on federation.

WeDistribute wrote about the decision by the maintainer of fedi.garden to only list instances that do not federate with Threads. The article has a good explainer of the situation, but what stands out to me is that this is another small step towards understanding the fediverse as multiple fediverses instead.

John Spurlock has given an extensive write-up of the current state of work on ActivityPub and podcasting. It is a subject that deserves significantly more attention, something that I hope to get to soon. For people who are interested in a deep dive on the subject, the write-up by Spurlock is excellent.

Sora, an iOS fediverse client for Mastodon, the Forkeys as well as Bluesky keeps pushing the boundaries of innovation in fediverse clients. Last week on Fediforum the developer showcased how Sora has client-side algorithmic feeds that are customisable.. The latest update is a ‘fediverse watch tab’, a scrolling feed of fediverse videos.

The Links

• FediTest, a framework to help fediverse developers test, has some new information about the feedback they’ve received.
• The Pixelfed for Android Beta is now available.
• Out of fediforum came plans to set up a working group for the Forasphere/Threadiverse. The first Technical Alignment Meeting will be on April 4th, 18.00 UTC.https://community.nodebb.org/category/30/activitypub
• Mangane, a custom front-end for Akkoma, has a new update, which includes to option to schedule post deletion.
• Macstodon is a Mastodon client for vintage Macintosh computres, and includes “Toot-to-Speech” technology.
• An overview of fediverse developer resources by the Emissary developer.
• Share Openly is a prototype to help people share to the fediverse.
• An interview with Manton Reece about Micro.blog.
• The bi-weekly update of the Lemmy developers on their work.
• This week’s updates for fediverse servers, clients and tools.
• Flipboard published a blog post explaining why creators should pay attention to what’s happening in the fediverse.
• On cross-posting from Mastodon to Lemmy.
• You can now follow each channel on Streaming service Nebula on the fediverse via nebula.pub.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-62/

LaurensHof, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 61

A busy week in the fediverse, with Threads launching their open beta, as well as Fediforum happening this week.

Threads has entered the fediverse

Threads has officially entered the fediverse, by entering an open beta where people in the US, Canada and Japan can now opt in to connect their profile to the fediverse. The feature was first demoed on the Fediforum this week by Threads employees, who were there to show the feature and participate in the discussions. A video of the demo can be seen here, which showcases how the connection between Threads and the fediverse works.

Threads accounts that opt-in to the connection will get a few popups that explain what the fediverse is, and what it means to be connected.

4 screenshots where Threads explains what fediverse sharing isSource.In the announcement post, Meta goes into more detail, explaining how this open beta is part of their phased approach to the fediverse. In the current phase of this open beta, only public posts are federated out towards other servers that connect with Threads, with Meta saying:

“Certain types of posts and content are also not federated, including:

• Posts with restricted replies.
• Replies to non-federated posts.
• Post with polls (until future updates).
• Reposts of non-federated posts.“

The blog also goes into more detail on how Threads has approached quote posts, by adopting both the Misskey-style of quote posts as well as the FEP-a232 style of quote posts. I wrote about this in more detail a while ago. It indicates the impact that Threads has on the entire fediverse by participating with ActivityPub. The status of how the FEP process relates to the formal specification of the protocol has never been fully formalised, but the participation of Meta in this process changes the dynamics.

On Instagram, Adam Mosseri posted a story where he explains why Threads is joining the fediverse, listing multiple reasons. He states that it is an ‘interesting way for social networks to operate’, and the ‘direction the internet is going’, calling it a paradigm shift that he wants Threads to lean into. He also describes Threads as the challenger to Twitter, and thus willing to take on more risk.

Threads’ phased approach to federation is as much a technical challenge as it is a regulatory challenge. Currently, Threads accounts do not see individual likes on their federated posts, instead getting a notification that says ‘4 fediverse users from 3 servers liked this post’, for example. According to Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput, Threads cannot use profile info from fediverse accounts on Threads yet because they are not allowed to do so yet by their Legal department.

With Threads and the fediverse being a main topic of conversation again, some short bits of news:

• Threads does not connect to all servers in the fediverse either, and they published their guidelines on which servers Threads will not connect to here.
• FediDB has also added support for Threads to the database that tracks the fediverse, and now Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed account on the fediverse.
• The developer of GoToSocial wrote about the social and power dynamics of when a large corporate implementation of a protocol is incompatible with the implementation by a small independent group.
• Threads uses a their own logo to denote the fediverse, not the coloured 5-pointed one. Whether or not a server federates with Threads is a major mark of separation within the fediverse, and Liaizon Wakest uses the different logos to distinguish between an ‘open fediverse’ and a ‘Corporate Fediverse’.

Fediforum

Fediforum was this week, a 2-day digital unconference where everyone could call sessions, as well as a variety of speed demos at the beginning. The event consists of speed demos of 5 minutes, and sessions that anyone could convene.

The speed demos were a good showcase in the incredible projects that people are building on top of the fediverse. It also indicated a need for better ways for people to share what they are building with the rest of the fediverse, as there are some amazing projects that have not gotten the attention yet that they deserve. I don’t have the space (nor time) for this edition of the newsletter to go over all of the demos, but you watch them on the Fediforum Youtube channel. TheNewStack has a good write-up of the event as well, and if you are really interested you can scroll through WeDistribute’s liveblog of the event. I’ll give one sneak peak, that I was impressed by Emissary, a stand-alone fediverse server and RSS reader, which easily allows you to build custom apps on top as well. To understand what that really means, I’ll recommend you check out the demo video. I’ll go over the demo videos some more in a separate article, as I want to say more about how Fediforum highlighted the need for more ways for the fediverse to showcase itself.

Threads has been a significant presence at this edition of Fediforum as well, with the first public demo of how the Threads’ fediverse integration, ahead of their open beta launch a few days later, as well as multiple employees who participated both days in the sessions as well. The employees talked about that they understand the widespread skepticism about Threads joining the fediverse, with one employee saying: “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”

There has been a clear interest in collaboration projects on the fediverse as showcased by the various sessions held during Fediforum. A session on the Threadiverse led to the start of a Threadiverse working group. As a side note, the Thread on NodeBB about the Threadiverse working group is a great showcase for the integration of ActivityPub into NodeBB as well.
There were sessions about the Fediverse Developer Network as well as Evan Prodromou organised a session about a potential Fediverse Advocacy Group. It is clear that the interest is there, with the more difficult next step being to put this into practice.

In other news

IFTAS has been hard at work behind the scenes, and with it some of the things that they will release this month:

• FediCheck, a Moderation-as-a-Service app that gives administrators control to compare their deny list with IFTAS’ CARIAD list, and allows them to easily add and subtract instances to the their own deny list. This was also demoed at Fediforum, video available here.
• DSA Guidebook for Micro Services. Everything you wanted to know about the EU’s Digital Services Act and were too afraid to ask.
• A moderation community portal
• Moderation Documentation Support
• Moderator Advisory Council

It is a massive list, and something I’ll certainly cover more when things are released.

Two podcasts episodes (one, two) on the work of connecting ActivityPub and ActivityStreams in the podcasting specification. Some fascinating things are happening in the podcasting space that I have not really been able to fully check out and report on yet, but for people interested in the topic, this is definitely something that is worth diving deeper into.

The links

• Donald Trump’s Truth Social runs a forked version of Mastodon, and it seems that it has not patched the vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Mastodon.
• WeDistribute has written about the state of ActivityPub, and the efforts to extend the protocol.
• The Mastodonusercountbot reported that Mastodon now has 15 million accounts. This bot is likely not accurate, with other sources listing somewhere between 7 and 9 million Mastodon accounts.
• @Box464 has written an extensive walkthrough for completing a Bonfire installation. For more information about the upcoming platform, check out this article by WeDistribute, or my recent reporting on how they are involved with the launch of a new Open Science Network.
• Pixelfed developer Dansup is working on Loops, a federated platform for short form vertical video. A video demonstrating how Loops will look like is available here.
• A blog by the European Broadcasting Union with a call for all public broadcasters to join decentralised social networks, based on the experiences by Deutsche Welle on Mastodon.
• Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media.
• Last week I reported about Fedify, a fediverse server framework. They released another demo of what is possible with Fedify, this time with fedi badges. Fedify also released a tutorial, here.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The latest update on NodeBB’s fediverse implementation.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-61/

LaurensHof, 1 month ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 60

The fediverse stays in the theme of announcing projects that are a copy of a well-known platform, but with ActivityPub added to it. This week its a proof-of-concept of a federated version of Wikipedia, as well as the announcement that Dansup will now work on creating a Loops, a federated version of TikTok.

The news

Lemmy developer Nutomic has announced Ibis, a federated wiki platform. Ibis is a proof-of-concept that allows anyone to run their own wiki, and connect them via ActivityPub. In the announcement post, Nutomic frames Ibis explicitly not just as any wiki, but as a Wikipedia alternative specifically, outlining some of the problems that he sees with the way that Wikipedia is run. Nutomic’s solution is for different places to host their own wiki, where articles and edits can be shared across different wiki instances via ActivityPub. The problems that Nutomic sees with Wikipedia are mainly regarding the moderation policies of Wikipedia and how they are executed. Ibis does not have any moderation tools yet, nor a vision of how moderation policies and privileges will be federated across different instances.

Commenters in the announcement post point out that Ibis might have a target audience with the Wikia/Fandom wikis, wikis for specific/niche topics that are heavily ad-driven. What personally surprised me is Ibis does not have any connection with Lemmy communities, in the same way that Reddit has wikis for subreddits. Nutomic says that Ibis in a very early stage of development, and will not be able to work on in it the near term as his daughter will soon be born, and hopes that other developers will help contribute to the project.

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Pixelfed developer Dansup has announced that he is working on Loops, a new fediverse platform for sharing short videos. Dansup says that Loops is based on an old web UI for videos for Pixelfed that is getting repurposed into a new app. Not much other information is known about the project, expect that Dansup expects that the project will ship ‘soon’.

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A paper on hashtag activism on Mastodon, titled ‘Showing your ass on Mastodon’. It is an autoethnographic narrative about how a fight about a hashtag used to show pictures of donkeys highlights issues with hashtag activism on decentralised social networks. The article is fun to read, and there is also a good commentary by Robert W. Gehl.

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There is some tensions brewing below the surface at Lemmy. This blog by @db0 explains the issues and gives a good overview. The Beehaw community is actively thinking about moving away from Lemmy to a different fediverse platform, and with the upcoming platform Sublinks as well as Piefed there are now new intereresting options to choose from.

---

The San Francisco International Airport museum has joined the fediverse, and they have put some serious effort into the project. They published an extensive blog post explaining their thinking, and how this has been a long time in the making. The SFO museum had thought about years earlier about possibilities of making every museum object into a social media presence, either on Twitter or on FourSquare. Their fediverse presence starts calmer, with only a few accounts, build with their own custom code.

The Links

• Hatsu is a new self-hosted bridge that interacts with Fediverse on behalf of your static site.
• Streams developer Mike Macgirvin has started work on adding Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub. Fediverse platform Streams already has Nomadic Identity, but Streams internally uses a different protocol to handle this.
• Fedify is a fediverse server framework that’s currently in development. This week the creator showed a demo of what it can do.
• Micro.blog leans into the Indieweb and adds blogrolls.
• Mozilla has recently scaled down their involvement with the mozilla.social server, and now they have ditched the custom front-end based on Elk for their server.
• Manyfold is a place to organise your 3d-printing files, is actively thinking about adding ActivityPub.
• Piefed has added the ability to opt-out of search.
• Owncast’s newletter for March.
• Piefed showcases how their ’tile’ interface is a great way to browse memes on the treadiverse.
• Social address instead of handle.
• The Lemmy developer’s bi-weekly update.
• A simple fediverse subscribe feature for static sites.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-60/

LaurensHof, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 59

It’s been a quiet news week in the fediverse overall, but Phanpy’s new Catch-up feature is one of the most innovative features released in the fediverse in a long while, so that more than makes up for it.

Phanpy releases Catch-Up

Phanpy, one of the most innovative third-party clients for the fediverse, has released a major new feature: catch-up. Catch-up allows you to simply, well, catch-up with your timeline by showing all the posts of the last X amount of hours by the accounts you follow in a few different ways.

• You can scroll through the list of people who have posted, select their avatar and only see their posts they have made, allowing you to quickly see what your close friends and mutuals have posted.
• You can sort to see only all the boosted posts, and order them by the most boosts or likes, to get a quick update on the most popular posts have been boosted by the people you follow.
• You can select to only show posts (not boosts and replies) by the people you follow, and then group them by author.

After using the feature for a while, I can say that this has completely changed the way I interact with the fediverse for me, and has allowed me to be much more mindful with the time I spend on here. It has made it much easier for me to limit my time on the feeds to only specific moments, in which I can spend more focused time on finding the posts I want. And if I’m in the train with just a few minutes to kill, it is much nicer to use catch-up to quickly read only the posts made by my mutuals and friends, instead of just scrolling in reverse-chronological order and never see the posts by mutuals that live in different time zones. One major downside of only having a reverse chronologically ordered feed is that it gets really difficult to read posts by people you follow who post in different time zones, and even more so if they are not a particularly prolific poster. This feature has made it significantly easier for me to actually read those posts and make sure I don’t miss them, which is a major contributing factor as to why I love it so much.

Phanpy is available at phanpy.social on web, and works great on mobile as a PWA as well.

The News

• Threads has expanded their testing of ActivityPub, and now some Threads accounts that are not Threads employees are starting to federate as well, as part of a beta program. Spotted accounts that are federating are of Snarfed, Tim Chambers and Evan Prodromou.
• Newsmast is looking for Community Curators.
• An extensive conversation with Marcia X, creator of the fediblock hashtag, about Blackness in the fediverse.
• Kilogram.makeup is a bridge between Instagram and the fediverse that is currently in development.
• Fedify is a fediverse server framework that is currently in development, making it easier for people to develop fediverse platforms.
• The Fediverse Developer Network had a show-and-tell for FediTest this week, recording here. The plan is to reinstate regular meetups again for the developer network.
• Pixelfed has released their latest update, implementing account migrations and curated onboarding. Pixelfed also released the documentation for their implementation of ActivityPub.
• Lemmy does not provide a way to delete pictures, which has some significant privacy implications. WeDistribute has taken a closer look at the situation.
• Sublinks is a link-aggregator for the fediverse that is currently in development, and this week some work on their front-end was showcased.
• NodeBB developer Julian Lam was on the FLOSS Weekly podcast to talk about NodeBB’s implementation of ActivityPub.
• Podnews Weekly Review had Evan Prodromou on to talk about ActivityPub.
• Piefed published a blog post on moderation and design.
• ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou is working on a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media, and some chapters are available for people with access to O’Reilly Media Learning Platform for feedback.
• IFTAS wrote about ‘Open Social for the Common Good’, explaining how government agencies can embrace the fediverse.
• An overview of all server and clients updates of the last week.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-59/

LaurensHof, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to bluesky

Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024

Welcome to the overview of all the news that has happened in the ATmosphere for February 2024. For those who don’t know me; I’m Laurens, and I write weekly updates about what happened in the fediverse. Last year I also started writing monthly updates summarising the news for Bluesky. I had to skip a few months due to time restrictions, but now I’m back with regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.

The main stories of this month is Bluesky dropping the invite code requirement, opening up the network for federation, and Bluesky’s appeal in Japan.

Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere

Bluesky has opened up the network for federation, allowing people to host their own data. This means that now anyone can set up their own Personal Data Server (PDS) and connect to the main network. Bluesky frames the opening of the network in the context of website hosting, making a direct comparison between how anyone can host a website on the internet. By hosting a website, you are in control of your data, and move to a different hosting provider without any noticeable change for the visitors. Bluesky says that they “think social media should work the same way”; by hosting your own PDS you are in control of your own data, able to move to a different host, without your followers noticing anything.

The update Bluesky released this week is an early version, which changes coming later, with Bluesky saying:
The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.

In the announcement post, Bluesky also makes a comparison with Mastodon, and explains how some of the differences in the approaches: Bluesky focuses on a global conversation and a global network, which can be fine-tuned to individual preferences with composable feeds and composable moderation. This is in contrast with most fediverse implementations, where network view and moderation are dependent on the instance or server you are on. Bluesky also has full account portability, where you can keep your data and identity when you move to a different server. Over 260 people have since set up their own Personal Data Server.

Bluesky also crossed the 5 million account mark this week, gaining almost 2 million accounts in the last few weeks since the network dropped the invite code requirement. A significant part of this inflow comes from Japan, where Bluesky turns out to be hugely popular; Japanese is now the dominant language on the network. With this inflow the Bluesky network (colloquially also called the ATmosphere) has become more significantly active than the fediverse (~1.1M MAU); with close to double the amount of Monthly Active Users. A new website for reliable statistics on Bluesky recently started tracking data, but for the MAU to be a reliable number a few more weeks of datapoints are needed. The current Weekly Active Users for the Bluesky network is around 1M, and the MAU is around 1.9M.

Potential bridge between fediverse and Bluesky

Developer Ryan Barrett has been working on a bridging service between the fediverse (Mastodon and other platforms) and Bluesky. This month, he announced that the to-be-released project will be opt-out, meaning that people on either network that do not want to be able to be followed by people on the other network, will have to manually opt-out of the service. This lead to a backlash and drama on the fediverse, as there is a significant group of people that do not want their public posts to be visible on the Bluesky network. Some media covered it as drama between Mastodon and Bluesky, but it seems more accurate to say that Mastodon and the fediverse has been in conflict for a longer time with itself about network boundaries and consent, while the role of Bluesky in this all is more of a confused bystander.

In the media

As Bluesky opens up, the team has been more visible in the public. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber appeared on the Hard Fork podcast, as well as Chris Messina’s podcast. She also participated in a conversation with Mike Masnick and Yoel Roth, video replay here.

In an interview with The Verge, Jay Graber also talked a bit more about how Bluesky plans to make money:

While the AT Protocol is being opened up soon, the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.

In another interview with Wired, Graber says that Bluesky ‘won’t enshittify the network with ads’.

In other news

Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbald held a technical talk on the technology behind AT Protocol that makes account portability possible: the decentralised identifier DID PLC. Newbald also goes into more detail on how Bluesky is thinking about governance for this decentralised identifier. You can watch the replay here.

Bluesky has hired a head of Trust & Safety, Aaron Rodericks. The community has voiced their demands for a head of Trust & Safety for a while. Rodericks has previously co-leading the Trust and Safety team at Twitter.

Bluesky App updates

Some major updates have launched on the official app for Bluesky: the latest update brought hashtags and the much-requested ability to mute certain words (or hashtags). Another update is that your Bluesky handle url is now a direct link to your profile as well.

Other app updates

• deck.blue, a spiritual successor to TweetDeck, has added a Gallery mode.
• iOS app Skeets has added the ability to edit posts. It is still an experimental feature as it depends on a workaround, the ability to edit posts is not officially yet part of the protocol. Skeets also added the ability to register and log in to a third party PDS.
• Graysky added notifications, and feeds now respond to your content languages.
• People have created over 40k custom feeds, the large majority (34k+) coming from third party feed generator skyfeed.

The links

• Comic-driven software development.
• A complete guide to Bluesky.
• A high-level explanation of how the AT Protocol works.
• Adding comments on your blog with ATProto.
• Bluesky handle directory.
• Bluesky has given the documentation website a major update.
• A list of the most influential scientists on Bluesky, based on their network centrality.
• A proposal for OAuth 2.0 for ATProto.

That’s all, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online and @fediversereport.com, on the fediverse, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter:

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-februari-2024/

LaurensHof, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 58

The fediverse has long had the struggle that the wider network consists of a huge variety of product types, but that in most people’s conceptualisation it mainly consists of microblogging. The news this week is another indication of the need for a broader understanding of what the fediverse is, with the announcement of an Open Science Network, as well more and more tighter integration of forum software into the fediverse with both NodeBB and Discourse.

Open Science Network announced

The Open Science Network is a new fediverse project, based on the to-be-released Bonfire project. Bonfire is a modular platform for the fediverse, for more information on that I wrote about it recently, as did WeDistribute. Bonfire aims to be modular and customisable and allow for a variety of extensions to be build on top of it. The Open Science Network project takes the Bonfire platform, and is working on adding a variety of features for building an open science network. The Open Science Network will have the ability to sign in with ORCID, automatically import publications, the ability to work collaboratively on papers, and more. Bonfire and the Open Science Network have not given an estimation for when the project launches.

Forum Federation

Forum software NodeBB now connects to the fediverse! In the February update, developer Julian Lam shows that the forum for NodeBB itself is now connected to the fediverse. You can see the post made on NodeBB on Mastodon for example. The project is still under development, but major functionality is now available, with both accounts and public posts now bi-directionally federating. This means you can follow NodeBB accounts from the rest of the fediverse, and posts by NodeBB accounts you follow show up in your fediverse. Comments you make with your other fediverse account also show up in the comment section of the NodeBB posts. The announcement posts shows some examples, with some replies being made by Mastodon accounts that show up in the NodeBB forum topic.

Meanwhile, Discourse has also made progress with their ActivityPub plugin, so that Discourse forums now also are able to follow fediverse accounts. It is unclear at this point how federation between these forums will interact. One thing is clear though, with the development of ActivityPub integrations for NodeBB, Discourse coming online, as well as platforms like PiedFed and Sublinks, is that innovation and change in the fediverse is not happening in the space of microblogging, but of forums instead.

In other news

Newsmast has released a new update, allowing anyone to log into their platform with their current Mastodon account. This way, you can experience their curated community feeds on their platform, without having to make a new account at all. The ability to log in with your Mastodon account sidesteps one of the issues that the fediverse currently has, namely the need for a new account for every new project. For more information on Newsmast, TechCrunch published an extensive article on the project, which is worth checking out.

Funkwhale is working towards a version 2.0, and in their latest update they talk about how to ‘make Funkwhale a truly interoperable and social platform for audio enthusiasts and content creators everywhere’. Funkwhale is still early in the process, and shows how much unsolved the concept of federation is. People have some understanding of what federation means in the context of microblogging, but federation of platforms that serve other functions that microblogging is still an under-explored space.

Benjamin Bellamy, who is behind the Castopod project, joined the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, to talk about Castopod and ActivityPub. In the episode, Bellamy says that currently somewhere between 300 and 500 people have installed their own version of Castopod, up from a couple dozen a year ago.

Content Nation is a platform in development that has been working on adding ActivityPub integration that experienced significant backlash this week. WeDistribute has an article explaining the situation.

The Links

• Threativore is an automoderator bot for the threadiverse by @db0.
• A blog exploring the bridging between the fediverse and the ATmosphere from the perspective of GDPR.
• Mona, a Mastodon client for iOS and MacOS has a major update, v6, and MacStories has an extensive review of the update.
• A study on ‘User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms’.
• The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group is restarting a schedule of monthly group calls.
• Mastodon updated their Android app, allowing you to share your profile via a QR code.
• The Decentered Podcast’s latest episode is an interview with @jaz from IFTAS.
• For Dutch-speaking people: PublicSpaces is organising a workshop to help guide public organisations in The Netherlands to make a transition towards Mastodon.
• A blog by Codeberg reflecting on the recent spam wave in the fediverse.
• Regular meetups for the FediDevs group are restarting, with the first one being March 7th, with a show-and-tell of FediTest.
• Friendica has a script to make Friendica user nicknames function as Bluesky user handles.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse #nodebb

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-58/

LaurensHof, 2 months ago to bluesky

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 57

Two major news stories in the world of decentralised social networks this week: the fediverse is hit with spam wave, which showcases some of the vulnerabilities of the network. Bluesky has opened up the network to third parties for federation, which means that we now seem to enter a new chapter the development of decentralised social networks.

Advanced Persistent Teenagers hit the fediverse with spam wave

The fediverse is currently experiencing an persistent ongoing spam wave. The source of the spam is from a dispute on a Japanese Discord server. This post has an in-depth timeline and collection of all the information about the groups and people behind the spam attack that is known at this point. TechCrunch has a good article that explains the situation, as well as how Discord has not been able to handle the source of the harm that originated on their servers.

The fediverse has been ‘lucky’ that the content of the spam messages is relatively harmless, even though it still has a real impact on all the labor by the admins and moderators. As last summer’s attack on Lemmy showed, this is certainly not a guarantee. It does give the fediverse an opportunity to respond and build better defense tools against spam, as these attacks have showcased how vulnerable the network is to attacks.

Mastodon has taken some actions and updates, mainly focusing on making servers less suspectible to be used by malicious actors. If you set up a new Mastodon server, the default will be that all registrations now require approval. Admins can still set the registrations to be open to everyone, but it is not the default setting like it is now. Mastodon servers that are updated to the latest version and do have open registrations will now also automatically switch to approval mode if there has not been any action by the mod and admin accounts. These updates are helpful, but not in the near future. They require new and updated servers, while the problem is the very long tail of unmaintained servers that are currently out there. And that these servers are currently used for spam, makes it likely they will not be updated anytime soon either.

The spam wave forced admins to work together, such as the work by Erik Uden to maintain and share a list of servers that are the source of the spam wave. The interesting question that is worth watching is if and how the fediverse adopts these practices for even more coordination on shared deny lists. There are projects in development that help with deny list coordination, such as IFTAS’ CARIAD and The Bad Space, but these have not available yet. What I do find striking is that there seems to have been little interest in the Mastodon community to use the Fediseer project to help deal with the spam wave. Fediseer was started last summer to help with the spam wave on Lemmy, and allows server admins (including Mastodon server admins) to classify other servers as spam.

Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere

Bluesky has opened up the network for federation, allowing people to host their own data. This means that now anyone can set up their own Personal Data Server (PDS) and connect to the main network. Bluesky frames the opening of the network in the context of website hosting, making a direct comparison between how anyone can host a website on the internet. By hosting a website, you are in control of your data, and move to a different hosting provider without any noticeable change for the visitors. Bluesky says that they “think social media should work the same way”; by hosting your own PDS you are in control of your own data, able to move to a different host, without your followers noticing anything.

The update Bluesky released this week is an early version, which changes coming later, with Bluesky saying:
The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.

In the announcement post, Bluesky also makes a comparison with Mastodon, and explains how some of the differences in the approaches: Bluesky focuses on a global conversation and a global network, which can be fine-tuned to individual preferences with composable feeds and composable moderation. This is in contrast with most fediverse implementations, where network view and moderation are dependent on the instance or server you are on. Bluesky also has full account portability, where you can keep your data and identity when you move to a different server. Account portability in the fediverse is a subject of many discussions and something people want to implement, but with limited progress so far.

Bluesky also crossed the 5 million account mark this week, gaining almost 2 million accounts in the last few weeks since the network dropped the invite code requirement. A significant part of this inflow comes from Japan, where Bluesky turns out to be hugely popular; Japanese is now the dominant language on the network. With this inflow the Bluesky network (colloquially also called the ATmosphere) has become more active than the fediverse; the fediverse has stayed around roughly 1.2M Monthly Active Users for the last half year. A new website for reliable statistics on Bluesky recently started tracking data, but for the MAU to be a reliable number a few more weeks of datapoints are needed. The current Weekly Active Users for the Bluesky network is around 1.2M, and the MAU is above 1.5M.

The links

• Pixelfed has made some updates to their server directory. Pixelfed also added curated onboarding, meaning the ability for server admins to have people apply for an account instead of being able to register directly.
• A video that goes in-depth on all of the features of Sharkey. For a complete overview of all the feature comparisons between the Forkeys, check out this comparison table.
• A new update for Akkoma, with some throwback to the MySpace-period of the internet: Both Akkoma and Sharkey now allow you to set a background image on your profile, and this background image also federates.
• WeDistribute has a podcast with Oliphant, who is behind a shared blocklist project for the fediverse.
• Lemmy bi-weekly development update.
• Funkwhale has a blog about their process of making a new app for the project.
• The Mozilla.social project was also developing their own Android and iOS apps for the project. Now that the project has significantly been down-scaled in size, these projects seem to be abandoned. Firefly.social is a continuation of the Mozilla.social Android app, but it is not affiliated with Mozilla anymore.
• Write.as has added the ability for people to turn off federation for their public blogs, if they so desire.
• PieFed explores how much difference it makes to add a Content Delivery Network. It also added support for audio posts.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#bluesky #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-57/

LaurensHof, 2 months ago to bluesky

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 56

Quite a dramatic week in the fediverse; with a lot of discussion about a potential bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse, some security issues, and spam overrunning the network. Good news as well, in the form of the BBC extending their Mastodon trial and Flipboard expanding their fediverse integration.

Bluesky Bridge announcement drama

Ryan Barrett, who is behind the bridgy.fed project, announced the opt-out policy for his upcoming bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. Barrett had earlier posted about his considerations on opt-in versus opt-out, and with this post decided to go for an opt-out policy. This led to a major backlash across the fediverse, as people felt that this is not appropriate and should have been opt-in to properly account for people giving consent to having their post appear on the Bluesky network. In a follow-up post, Barrett says that he is working on a proposal to make it appeal to the opt-in demand by sending a DM asking for a confirmation the first time a fediverse account is followed by a Bluesky account.

This lead to some news covering it as a fight between the Mastodon and Bluesky, but the attitude of Bluesky seems to be mainly one of confused on-looking as Mastodon is fighting with itself. Beyond that, the article in TechCrunch does provide a good overview of the debate. I agree with the framing that the debates about the bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse are as much a debate about the Bluesky network itself as it is a debate about the specific implementation of the bridge as worked on by Barrett.

The blowback also is a debate about the nature of the fediverse, and what it is, exactly. People have been debating what they have consented to, when they joined a Mastodon server, and what they have opted into. This is illustrated with the Privacy Policy for mastodon.social, which says “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” What exactly is ‘the network’? Is Bluesky part of ‘the network’? Is a bridge to bluesky part of ‘the network’? It is unclear, and people have different definitions and expectations about what they have consented to.

There is a significant group of people for whom the answer is a clear ‘no, I do not view Bluesky and bridges to Bluesky as part of the network’. Bluesky represents ideals about corporate ownership and data indexing that they do not want to be a part of. This viewpoint clashes with Mastodon’s CEO Eugen Rochko, who gave an interview with Platformer this week. In this, Rochko says that he still hopes that Bluesky will switch to using ActivityPub someday, so that there is a native integration between the networks.

The News

The BBC is extending their Mastodon social media trial for another 6 months, after finishing their first 6-month trial run. The BBC states that it has been a valuable learning experiment, and it has been effective in the technical, financial and cultural needs of running a presence in a decentralised space. The BBC also says that they are exploring to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub directly, and not just hosting a Mastodon presence, but not much more is known beyond that. They also find that Mastodon has a relatively large engagement numbers, taken the smaller user base into account, and that they find they have had to do very little moderation so far.

---

Flipboard has extended their ActivityPub integration, and is bringing in even more curated feeds into the fediverse. Flipboard describes it as another step towards fully federating Flipboard, a process that started in December 2023 when a small number of accounts where brought to the fediverse. With this week’s update, over 1000 magazines now have native ActivityPub feeds, which allow them to be followed from fediverse apps.

---

Mozilla is scaling back their investments into various products, including their social fediverse platform mozilla.social. Mozilla.social got announced in Spring 2023, with a focus on content moderation that makes it a nice platform to use. Over the year, the product stayed in invite-only beta, and has slowly grown. In an internal memo (courtesy of TechCrunch), Mozilla says “Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order to effectively shape the future of social media.” Mozilla says that with a much smaller team they will focus on more launching smaller experiments more rapidly.

---

Ivory is adding some basic support for quote posting in their Mastodon app in their upcoming release. What this means in practice is that if a link to a Mastodon post is part of the body of a post, it will get rendered as if it is a quote post. Other apps like Ice Cubes and Phanpy also have this feature.

The announcement prompted Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput to post a thread to reiterate that Mastodon is working on a full implementation of quote posting. The goal of Mastodon’s implementation is to give people granular control, allowing them to determine on per-post basis whether they want the post to be quote posted or not. Mastodon’s approach to implementing quote posting means that it’ll be incompatible with the current implementations of Threads, all the forkeys, and the Hubzilla-lineage. Chaput says that they will be publishing Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) to document their implementation, hoping that the publication ensures that Mastodon’s implementation becomes the standard in the fediverse. However, with the imminent arrival of Threads (who already have decided on implementing quote posting with ActivityPub), Mastodon’s ability to set standards for the fediverse might just be significantly more difficult.

---

Forgejo is a self-hosted git forge for software (git forges are online platforms for managing and collaboration on repositories, of which GitHub is the most well-known), and up until now it has been a soft fork of Gitea. Forgejo now has become a hard fork, meaning that they are no longer bound to Gitea. Forgejo says that they have now enough people contributing to it’s main mission to be an independent project.

---

Two weeks ago Mastodon had a major security vulnerability. The details of the vulnerability have now been disclosed. The author who found the vulnerability has an extensive write-up of the proces, timeline and impact of the vulnerability. The impact of unpatched servers is major, as it allows attackers to impersonate posts and accounts on the vulnerable servers. Meanwhile, Mastodon has disclosed another vulnerability, bringing the total to 3 vulnerabilities in two weeks.

The entire fediverse is also dealing with a major spam wave attack. The source seems to be from a Japanese Discord server which seems to have misgivings with Misskey. I could not verify this allegation due to cultural and language barrier, but Misskey.io admins indicated this weekend that they are talking to the police about it, as their server seems to suffer the brunt of it. The attack also showcases the vulnerability of the fediverse to spam attacks.

The links

• ‘Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?‘ by @db0, who also is behind the FediSeer initiative, a project that helps deal fediverse server admins with spam.
• A video that explains in detail the history of Misskey fork Sharkey, and reviews the features.
• WeDistribute takes a look at upcoming project Bonfire.
• Major tech sites cannot resist a good headline, to write about the shutdown of the queer.af mastodon server.
• FediTest has a blog post on some of the design considerations for writing a testing suite for the fediverse.
• Micro.blog adds private notes.
• A call to internationalise the fediverse, meaning in this case that Mastodon will support Unicode usernames.
• Terence Eden has written an ActivityPub ‘which can be deployed as a single PHP file. No databases, no libraries, no dependencies, no frameworks. Also, no advanced features!’ M
• An experiment in using the private notes on your own Mastodon profile as a storage place for settings data.
• Self-updating lists of official & verified media accounts on Mastodon.
• A blog post by Funkwhale explaining their own on a new API.
• Lemmy is working on implementing Private Communities, and is looking for comments on the proposal.
• Nootti is a new cross-posting app for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and got a closer look in TechCrunch.
• SoraSNS, the iOS app for Forkeys, Mastodon and Bluesky, is adding AI detection to the app. OpenAI and Adobe add a tag to the metadata of images that are generated using their software. SoraSNS checks for these tags, and displays that the image is generated with AI tools.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#bluesky #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-56/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to bluesky

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 55

The major news of the week is that Bluesky drops the invite codes, and that it turns out to be massively popular in Japan. The network grew from just over 3 million to some 4.7 million accounts this week. For more information, you can find my article below.

Bluesky opens the network

The news

Last week, some 20 people got together on the OFFDEM conference in Brussels to talk about events and the fediverse. It connected the different projects that work on events in the fediverse together; with Mobilizon, Gath.io and the Event Federation project, as well as other people in the space. The meeting got a considerable amount of mutual understanding; explaining the difference between federation and interoperability, the value of using ActivityPub, and a common ground for what makes an ‘event’. Seeing different projects come together for a mutual understanding and working together is great to see, and hopefully other parts of the fediverse can do something similar as well.

---

Mastodon recently had a major security vulnerability, and Mastodon CTO Renaud Chapot reports that 90% of active users was part of a server that had adopted the patch to fix the vulnerability within 48 hours. Part of the reason for this quick uptake seems to be a very large banner that was added in a recent patch, which warned server admins of the problem. Now Pixelfed has another major vulnerability as well, and hopefully the patch can reach similar levels of uptake speed as well.

---

WriteFreely has a new update, which allows people to subscribe to your blog via email. In the current version admins will have to connect an email service for this to work, currently only mailgun is support. This feature will get expanded upon in later updates.
The ActivityPub integration also has gotten some more features, and you can now see who is following your blog.

---

Two projects switched ownership this week: Takahe has a new developer, after the current developer said a few months ago that he could not continue working on the project.

Firefish now has new ownership as well, as the previous lead developer Kainoa handed it over to another contributor to the project, Naskya. Naskya was not informed of this decision beforehand. They pushed out a new release a few days later. In a comment on the situation, Naskya said that ‘we decided to continue this project; although we may struggle to manage the project, especially at the beginning, and we foresee a slow development due to the leaving of core maintainers’.

---

The fediverse project Streams is working on Conversation Containers. One aspect of how most projects currently implement ActivityPub is that if you create a post, there is little to no control over the replies. In this post, Streams developer Mike Macgirvin lays out what a ‘constrained’ conversation model would look like, and introduces an accompanying Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) to go with it.

---

Wired has an interview with a product manager at Meta about Threads, saying that Threads expects that “general users may be able to access the new features in a couple of months”. Threads also says that federation will be opt-in. Wired also notes in the article that there are still big questions that are unanswered: Threads is not clear about how they will handle differences in content moderation (for example around nudity), nor is it clear why exactly Meta wants to implement federation at all.

---

Some large tech publications had articles about the fediverse and the new wave of open social networks more broadly. David Pierce of The Verge wrote an explainer for the fediverse. TechCrunch reflects on a year of drastic changes in the world of the large platforms, and how that is impacting a new generation of social networks. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch takes a closer look at a variety of different apps that are sprouting up on the new social networks.

The Links

• Phanpy is working on a ‘catch-up’ timeline, allowing you to see the posts since your last visit, sorted by date, like count, replies or boosts. There is no indication yet if/when this feature will be released, but reponses show there’s great demand for such a feature.
• Commune is an open social community platform that’s build on top of Matrix. In a new blog post, Commune explains what they are and how it works, as well as their roadmap.
• A three part blog series guide on implementing ActivityPub into a static site.
• PieFed explains how their priorities and values led to a design that uses a lot less bandwidth.
• An overview of active journalist accounts on the fediverse by Martin Holland.
• Nootti is a new iOS app that allows you to crosspost to Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr.
• The January update for Funkwhale, where most of their current work is on more API support and technical work on the back-end of their current desktop app.
• A look at the UX and UI changes coming to Mastodon 4.3.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.

#bluesky #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-55/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to bluesky

Bluesky opens the network

Bluesky has opened up the network, dropping the invite codes and allowing anyone to create an account. This spurred a massive new signup wave, and the total accounts grew in two days by 50%, from just over 3 million registered accounts to 4.5 million accounts.

What is striking about these massive wave of 1.5 million new signups is that it largely seems to be from Japan. A quick analysis of the posts by language makes it clear what is happening:

graph of posts by language, showing japanese posts suddenly quadruple over english language posts after opening the networkVisualisation by David ThielCustom feeds that show the top recent posts of the network also confirm that most of the posts are now in Japanese. Some popular accounts from Japan have migrated from X to Bluesky. At this point in time, it seems like Bluesky is rapidly turning into a Japanese social network. It is a trend that is worth watching, as it seems fairly rare that a language-specific migration to another platform is suddenly shifts the previously dominant language of the platform so much.

Bridges and architecture

As part of the opening, Bluesky also released more information on the technical structure of Bluesky and how federation works with the release of a technical paper. It indicates how complicated Bluesky’s architecture is; the paper seems to raise as much questions as it answers. Crucial questions on the moderation, where it happens and to what extend people who run their own server (PDS) can influence content moderation in some way are still unclear.

In an interview with The Verge, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also talks more about plans on how the Bluesky company can make money:

“While the AT Protocol is being opened up soon, the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.”

Finally, Bluesky also says they are planning with the first steps of federation at the end of the month. At that point, anyone will be able to run their own data server (PDS) and join the network. At this point, the network will be federated (meaning that any nodes in the network can contact and communicate with each other), but not decentralised yet (as Bluesky will still run the other parts of the pipeline, the Relay and AppView). However, this already changes the network significantly, as Ryan Barrett confirms that with federated PDS, bridges between the network will be able to operate, including his project BridgyFed. This allows people from the ActivityPub-based fediverse to connect with the Bluesky network via the bridge.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-opens-the-network/

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LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 54

This week saw a large variety of smaller news items, so a short experiment with a slightly different format. I just came back from FOSDEM, and it was great to talk to so many fediverse people, gives me great energy to keep working on all of it. Next year I hope there will be more of an organised ActivityPub and fediverse presence though, lots of opportunity there.

The news

NodeBB has provided update on their work on implementing ActivityPub. As part of their update, they detail their vision on which parts of the forum gets federated, and in which manner. As federated forums are mostly new to the fediverse, this provides some insights in how the developers are thinking which parts of forum software can get federated, and how that can be implemented into a user interface.

---

PieFed has made some improvements to new account sign-up flow, and as a part of that, different communities are now aggregated into ‘Topics’. Once you sign up, and select a few Topics you are interested in, you automatically follow multiple communities related to the topic.

Over on Lemmy, the conversation on how to provide the best experience for handling multiple communities about similar subjects that live on different servers come up regularly, including in Lemmy latest AMA. Developer Rimu says that one future direction he is thinking about is using the Lemmy Explorer (which indexes all public Lemmy communities) to aggregate communities into Topics.

---

The Lemmy developers held an AMA this week, and I wrote up an article some of my takeaways from the comments that stood out to me.

---

IFTAS is working together with GLAAD to help platforms ‘update their policies to add express prohibitions against targeted misgendering and deadnaming’, similar to how platforms like Discord have explicitly banned deadnaming and misgendering trans people. IFTAS explains that “not about accidentally getting someone’s pronouns wrong. Rather, our concern centers on deliberate and targeted acts of hate and harassment rooted in gender identity discrimination”. IFTAS provides a sample Code of Conduct for admins to use, as well as the possibility for admins to sign a pledge that they included rules in their policies against targeted misgendering and deadnaming.

---

Video creator TechAltar has a new video explaining the fediverse. It frames the fediverse as a new internet, and as a way around the walled gardens from the current Big Tech platforms. Over on video platform Nebula, TechAltar also provided the videos with the full interviews with EMastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Automattic’s (company behind Tumblr and WordPress) Matt Mullenweg, Matej Svancer, who is building a multi-network platform Openvibe, as well as the admins of mastodon server sfba.social.

---

Some more developers are tinkering with building minimal ActivityPub implementations to serve their needs. Julian Fietkau wrote an ActivityPub server to host a single bot, Daily Rucks. The implementation shows the value of building something beyond just a Mastodon bot, as the home page for the bot shows a beautiful customised landing page for the bot. Fietkau also posted a blog explaining the How and Why of the project.

Terence Eden also build a minimal ActivityPub server, with the sole purpose of posting messages to your followers. It is a part of a longer project to work on building a FourSquare-like service on the fediverse.

---

Project Tapestry is a new Kickstarter project by The Iconfactory company that just reached their funding milestone. The goal of the project is to release an iOS app that pulls feeds from various sources, such as Mastodon, Bluesky as well as RSS feeds into one single chronological timeline. It will allow people to plug in their own data sources as well, provided the APIs are accessible. Iconfactory says that it will be anywhere between 9 to 12 months to release the app. The idea of aggregating multiple data sources into a single app or feed seems to be popping up in various places recently, such as with Openvibe and Agora.

---

A quick personal take from this year’s FOSDEM: I can echo Jaana Dogan’s observation that all the speakers at FOSDEM seem to have switched from Twitter handles to using their fediverse handles on their slides. It seems there is more than enough interest to make sure there will be a fediverse devroom next year as well.

The Links

• Some reverse engineering shows how Threads is working on their fediverse integration.
• Eugen Rochko was on the Software Engineering Podcast to talk about Mastodon.
• The Firefish project has been deemed dead by the community for a bit now, but now the lead developer has officially stepped down.
• A small demo by micro.blog on all their cross-posting options.
• ‘Betula is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web’. Their latest update added federation, and now people from across the fediverse can follow your bookmarks, similar to Postmarks.
• Fediverse Test Suite is a new testing project that just got underway with funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.

#fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-54/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

Lemmy ask you anything (again)

The Lemmy developers Dessalines and Nutomic hosted their another AMA this week. The conversations ranged from decentralisation, the developer roadmap and funding to platform identity, and I’ll go over some of the responses that stood out to me

Lemmy is applying for a new funding round from NLnet, and with their proposed project they will add 2 extra (paid) developers to the team if it gets approved. Their detailed planned milestones are laid out here. For the current developers, they’ll be focusing on a replacement web UI, as well as their Android app Jerboa, API and performance improvements, as well as transitioning to a donation-funded co-op.

In response to a question about interoperability with other platforms, Nutomic notes the difficulty working with other fediverse developers, especially Mastodon, and a describes a lack of interest of other platforms to become interoperable with Lemmy. These issues with interoperability and a lack of cooperation mainly concern platforms that are of a different nature than Lemmy; newer link aggregators like Sublinks are explicitly working on interoperability with Lemmy.

Dessalines’ comment on the identity of a platform is worth reading in full, where he says:

“At the same time, it was clear that we weren’t making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth’s sake.”

The association of the Lemmy developers with tankies has been criticised within the broader fediverse community before. However, in those conversations this viewpoint by Dessalines is rarely mentioned, in how it helps in keeping “free speech” bigotry away.

The developers are also thinking about how to avoid centralisation around a few larger servers. Part of their approach is with making sure random instances get offered to new people who join Lemmy, and they are actively looking at other ideas to combat centralisation. In another comment, Dessalines links the issue of centralisation with the problems he views with social media, saying:

“The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy’s users who don’t really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.”

Overall, lets hope that more platforms join Lemmy and PeerTube in holding regular AMA’s with their communities.

#fediblog #fediverse #lemmy

https://fediversereport.com/lemmy-ask-you-anything-again/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – episode 53

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 added both 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.
• ‘What is the ‘fediverse,’ and why does Meta want to join it?’, asks the Columbia Journalism Review.
• The Castopod Podcasting Index has made following podcasts directly on the fediverse even easier.
• Happy birthday ActivityPub!
• 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.
• Fediverse Space Vibes.

#activitypub #fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-53/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

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.

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.

#bonfire #fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/an-update-on-bonfire/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 52

Welcome to another episode, with quite some news about the fediverse that goes beyond just microblogging; Owncast’s struggles with explaining decentralisation and self-hosting to Apple, and the fediverse is apparently now enough of a buzzword to get metaverse companies interested.

How Bluesky works – the network components

The network design of Bluesky is fairly complicated, and different from how ActivityPub and the fediverse works. The design decisions that Bluesky has made has impact on how content moderation hows, as well as on federation and decentralisation. Many people have thoughts and feelings on Bluesky, but detailed information on how the network functions is hard to come by. In this new short series I explain how it works, take a look at the link below.

How Bluesky works – the network components

Owncast releases app for iOS and tvOS

Gabe Kangas, creator of the fediverse-connected streaming software Owncast, has announced the release of an iOS and tvOS app for Owncast. This comes some months after Kangas said that the development of the app had been halted due to Apple’s App Store policies. Getting the app approved has been a challenge, and Kangas details the wide variety of ‘reasons’ that Apple has given to reject the app. It took help of a legal firm and persistence from Kangas to get the app in the App Store.

The fact that Owncast did manage to publish an app to the App Store is good news for PeerTube, who are in a process of their own to create their own mobile apps for PeerTube. In PeerTube’s roadmap Framasoft said that publishing a PeerTube app might be tricky, citing Owncast’s experiences.

In the blog Kangas also talks about the identity of the platform, coming right out of the gate by reiterating that Owncast is simply server software to run ‘independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams’. Building social features such as chat, helping with discovery with the Owncast Directory and now building an app, all help with the awareness of the project. But in the end, Kangas sees Owncast as ‘server software. That’s it’.

Open metaverse platform Viverse announces fediverse support

Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.

What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.

My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.

Dutch State Secretary urges Threads to quickly implement federation

Nu.nl is one the largest news sites of The Netherlands, and they published an article on the fediverse. As part of the article, they interviewed Dutch State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen, who also spearheads the Mastodon server for the Dutch government. In it, she urges Threads to quickly implement ActivityPub so that Mastodon and Threads can fully interoperate. She also states that the comments she gets on posts on Mastodon are differ strongly in a positive way from the comments she gets on X.

Fediverse client Agora launches with For You algorithm and bridges

Agora is a new fediverse client that has some interesting opiniated ideas for what a fediverse client can do. The project is a fork of Phanpy, and adds a ‘For You’ algorithm, integration with bridges to Bluesky, Nostr and X, as well as connections to Lemmy. The For You feed, which is based on the open-source algorithm fedialgo. Fedialgo allows anyone to run their own algorithm and fine tune it on the client side. Another content integration that Agora does, is that if you follow a hashtag, it’ll automatically populate your feed with posts made in the corresponding Lemmy community as well. It also supports natively supports bridges to Bluesky and Nostr, but personally I had trouble to actually get these to properly run.

The links

• Two articles explaining the fediverse; Stephan Bohacek with an article about the fediverse for government agencies, and Ben Werdmuller with an article about the fediverse for media organisations.
• The Decentered Podcast by WeDistribute interviewed Hoshida, who makes the Sora app. Sora is an iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky and most Misskey forks, with interesting takes on algorithmic feeds.
• Where is all of the fediverse?
• Mastodon Near Me, a way to find Mastodon servers by country, region, and language.
• One year of StreetPass, the browser extension that lets you find people on the fediverse when you visit their website.
• The owners .world fediverse servers (such as Mastodon.world and Lemmy.world) will form a non-profit foundation together with @stux, who owns and operates the mstdn.social servers.
• A detailed explanation by Castopod for their new Castopod podcasting index.
• A paper called ‘Creating a city for all of us: a role for the Fediverse in archiving civic urban memory‘ was published this week.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.

#fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-52/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

Open metaverse platform Viverse announces fediverse support

Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.

What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.

My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.

#activitypub #fediblog #fediverse #metaverse

https://fediversereport.com/open-metaverse-platform-viverse-announces-fediverse-support/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to bluesky

How Bluesky works – the network components

Welcome to a new short series on Bluesky and how the network works. Bluesky recently released more information on their plans for third party moderation services. While writing about their plans, I realised that to properly explain how it works, I first needed to explain how the network is designed to function.

Most people understand the fediverse in terms of separate instances. Every instance can be a social network in itself, and by connecting with other instances form a larger network, the fediverse. This makes it easier to understand where content moderation happens: every instances has their own content moderation, own moderators and their own rules.

The Bluesky network and the AT Protocol function differently. There are different types of servers; servers for data storage, servers for data aggregation, etc. As such, content moderation happens in different places on the network. To properly explain how it works, the benefits and tradeoffs, as well as the unknowns, I am publishing a short series on Bluesky, how the network functions, and how and where content moderation happens.

In this first episode: the parts that make up the network and allow it to work.

The basic components

The Bluesky network consists of the following parts:

• A Personal Data Server (PDS) that hosts all account data. It contains information about your accounts, and is where all your personal data is stored.
• A Relay looks for all the PDS’s in the network, takes in all their data, and merges it together to outputs one big stream that is used by other parts of the network. The Relay puts out the data in a machine-readable format, which is often called a firehose.
• AppView takes the data from the Relay, and processes it so that it is more meaningful for apps. Examples of the processing that AppView does: counting the amount of likes that a post gets, collecting all replies to a post and organising them into a thread. It also generates your “following” feed, by creating a reverse-chronologically ordered feed of posts made by the accounts that you follow.
• An app, whether that is the official Bluesky mobile app or a third party website like deck.blue. The app takes the data from AppView and presents it in a nice format for people read on their preferred device.

With these four components we can imagine a basic social network:

If you open the official Bluesky app on your phone and look at the “following feed”, the data flows as follows:
All PDS’s => Relay => AppView => App.

If you then create a post and hit send, data goes from your app directly back to the PDS where your account is hosted.

Custom feeds and moderation

There are four more components to the Bluesky network: feed generators, labellers, the moderation service, and the Identity Directory.

• A feed generator creates the custom feeds, using some form of algorithm. These custom feeds can be anything from a feed with the posts with the most likes in the last 24 hours, a feed of posts that contain specific terms, or anything else.
  • A feed generator takes data from a Relay, performs the calculations to take the raw data into a custom feed, and sends it to the AppView. The AppView then performs some final steps and sends it to your app so you can see the custom feed.
• Labellers. Labelling services perform moderation activities by applying labels to a post. People can determine how they want to handle labelled content. An example of a label can be ‘Sexually Suggestive’, and people can determine if they want their app to either show, hide or warn about posts that contain the label.
  • A Labelling service takes data from the AppView, processes it, and then sends it back to the AppView
• The moderation system, called Ozone, that allows moderators to take moderation action, such as taking down posts or accounts. This tool has the least amount of information on it, and it is not visible Federation Architecture documentation. The update this week by the Bluesky organisation shows that the system is called Ozone, and that they are in the process of making it open-source and available for others to use.
  • The tool at least allows moderators to alter data in the PDS, as that is where account data lives.
• Every account on the Bluesky network has a unique identifier, called a DID. A DID is a unique string of random numbers and letters, and cannot change. Every account also has a handle, which is your username. New accounts start with youraccountname.bsky.social as a handle. The network also allows you to change your handle to a domain name that you own, which allows for easy verification. The information about which DID corresponds to which handle is stored in the DID PLC Directory.

Now we have all the components that together make up the Bluesky network. In the next part, I’ll take a look at decentralisation and federation, explaining for every part how it will play a role in decentralisation and federation.

Thanks to Kuba Suder for feedback on a first draft.

#atproto #bluesky #fediblog

https://fediversereport.com/how-bluesky-works-the-network-components/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago to fediverse

Owncast releases app for iOS and tvOS

Gabe Kangas, creator of the fediverse-connected streaming software Owncast, has announced the release of an iOS and tvOS app for Owncast. This comes some months after Kangas said that the development of the app had been halted due to Apple’s App Store policies. Getting the app approved has been a challenge, and Kangas details the wide variety of ‘reasons’ that Apple has given to reject the app. It took help of a legal firm and persistence from Kangas to get the app in the App Store.

The fact that Owncast did manage to publish an app to the App Store is good news for PeerTube, who are in a process of their own to create their own mobile apps for PeerTube. In PeerTube’s roadmap Framasoft said that publishing a PeerTube app might be tricky, citing Owncast’s experiences.

In the blog Kangas also talks about the identity of the platform, coming right out of the gate by reiterating that Owncast is simply server software to run ‘independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams’. Building social features such as chat, helping with discovery with the Owncast Directory and now building an app, all help with the awareness of the project. But in the end, Kangas sees Owncast as ‘server software. That’s it’.

#fediblog #owncast

https://fediversereport.com/owncast-releases-app-for-ios-and-tvos/

LaurensHof, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 51

The contours of the fediverse as the open social web, in a vision that goes beyond decentralised microblogging, are starting to become more visible, with more bridges, connections and other types of media getting pulled into the fediverse. It also raises the question of expectations and boundaries, with different visions of the fediverse arising: that of a highly interconnected space, or with many more insular communities and groups that are loosely connected.

WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:

“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”

This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.

Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.

Podcasting news

Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.

In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.

Some podcast news of my own as well: WeDistribute has launched the new podcast series Decentered. In this first episode, Sean, Damon I and talk about Creation and Discovery. Go check it out!

Bluesky has 3 million accounts

Some news from Bluesky: yesterday the network reached the milestone of 3 million accounts. This milestone comes 2 months after hitting the 2 million mark. While there are no official numbers for Monthly Active Users (MAU), Kuba Suder estimates around 500k MAU, based on the daily and weekly active users. For comparision, Mastodon has between 1 million and 1.5 million MAU, depending on the source.

Bluesky’s growth is far from over, as Bluesky said that that ‘invite codes are going away soon’. This is different from opening up the network for federation, which is also planned for early 2024.

Bluesky is explicitly positioning itself as a place that is welcoming and suitable for news organisations. Bluesky team member Emily published an explainer how newsrooms can use Bluesky for the upcoming election season. Not everyone is convinced the network is ready yet though, as ændra explains some features that the network needs to be fit for purpose.

In other news

Another write-up of the meeting that Meta held last December to discuss the fediverse, by Tom Coates. It contains some more details about the planned roadmap, and how the integration is planned to happen in separate steps. What strikes me is that both this report, and the notes by Johannes Ernst, mention that they feel they have not gotten a clear answer to the most important question: ‘Why is Meta doing this?’. Tom Coates writes: “I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find [Meta’s explanation] enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it”. And Johannes Ernst: “Personally I believe this question needs a better answer than has been given publicly so far”.

An OpenAccess article in Cell Press for researchers that are considering to switch their research from X to Mastodon, by Robert W. Gehl and Roel Roscam Abbing. It describes key differences between the fediverse and X, and how Mastodon is quite different from X and Twitter from the perspective of researchers. It focuses on the expectations of privacy that people in the fediverse have, and one of the main recommendations for researchers is to shift from studying individuals to studying instances.

ActivityPods, the project to combine ActivityPub with the Solid protocol to create data ‘pods’, has been updated to version 1.5. With the new version it becomes easier to invite new people to your network, as well as better organisation of your contacts. ActivityPods tries to solve the problem that currently in the fediverse, you need to have a separate account for every fediverse service. With ActivityPods, applications can connect to your own Pod, so that your data and connections all live in one place.

The new link aggregator PieFed ‘emphasise trust, safety and happiness‘, and as part of that they have added extra notifications for commenting on posts made on servers with higher standards of moderation, such as Beehaw.org.

Fediseer, the project that provides a public space to crowd-source approval and disapproval of instances, has added a ‘rebuttals’ feature. Creator db0 noticed that instances were issuing ‘counter-censures’ (a censure is a negative judgement from one instance to another for any reason) just to reply to the original censure. Rebuttals provide an outlet for instances to explain their perspective or reasoning.

Bridgy Fed, the bridging project to connect the indieweb, fediverse (and Bluesky and Nostr in the near future) has expanded support for non-indie websites as well. Similar to RSS-Parrot, you can now follow websites and their RSS-feeds directly in your fediverse account.

The links

• Pixelfed is building their spam filtering feature into a dedicated service, and working on adding parental controls.
• PeerTube is building a mobile app, and is looking for people to help better understand their needs.
• The research project by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi has kicked off as The Federalist Papers.
• Designing a fediverse application with Bovine.
• Updating your Mastodon status from a Kindle.
• Mastodon client Oliphaunt for MacOS launches in beta.
• radio free fedi is at a crossroads.
• Short update by Write.as, saying they are working on post imports from WordPress and Substack.
• The new Firefish fork Catodon moves towards the other Firefish fork, Iceshrimp. It’ll stay a separate project however.
• A deeper look at one of the stand-out features of Misskey and it’s forks: Pages.

If you want to receive this weekly update directly in your inbox, subscribe below!

You can also follow this blog directly on the fediverse:

#fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-51/