The European Commission has announced their new Mastodon account, and that they will stay on the fediverse. Over the last 2 years, the European Data Protection Supervisor had run a Mastodon and Peertube pilot for the EU, and that pilot has come to an end. The European Commission had by far the most successful and impactful presence on the fediverse out of the pilot, and they wanted to continue. The problem was that the EDPS struggled to find another EU organisation willing to take on the responsibility of hosting. As I wrote when the news came out, the perception and framing of the EDPS was wrong on how the fediverse should be approached by the EU: taking on responsibility for all EU-affiliated organisations social media presence is an unrealistic ask, and it is not a surprise that they could not find an organisation willing to do so. Instead, now the European Commission is taking responsibility and control of their own account; they are hosting their own Mastodon server. This is a much more sustainable and realistic approach for EU organisations moving forward.
The bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky has been used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messaging, with the spam originating from Nostr. The spam was created on Nostr, which bridges to the fediverse with the Momostr.pink bridge, which in turn can be bridged to Bluesky. While all the networks have many places of easy, open signups, spam tends to happen were signups can easily happen in bulk, and the protocol design of Nostr makes it especially easy to create new accounts.
(2024-05-21 Correction: the original article stated that the Mostr.pub bridge was used for the spam attack. This is incorrect, and the article has been updated to reflect that a different bridge, momostr.pink has been used.)
Micro.blog held their yearly micro.camp as an online live stream event, with a conversation about blogging with Christina Warren, as well as a demo of two new features of micro.blog: hiding replies on your blog and a new way for people to comment by verifying their Mastodon, Bluesky or micro.blog account.
Bluesky projects
This week I also wrote about three projects from Japanese developers who are building on top of ATProto, and build a video platform, audio spaces and a blogging platform, and I go into more detail on the challenges that building new products for the ATmosphere poses.
Ghost’s weekly update about building on ActivityPub, showing more progress. Ghost estimates that a release will take “more than a month, but less than a year, probably”.
Pixelfed has a Matrix channel again. Pixelfed developer lost admin control of the previous Matrix channel, and considered going exclusively to Discord. After many requests from the community now there is a new matrix channel again.
The ForgeFed project, which works on federated software forges, has gotten their NLnet grant extended, and showcased a demo of their reference implementation.
Hackaday.com looks at ‘your open-source client options in the non-Mastodon fediverse’
Video, audio and blogging: Japanese Bluesky is building in the ATmosphere
When Bluesky dropped the invite code requirement early in 2024, it led to a big inflow of the Japanese community into Bluesky. At some point, they became the biggest community on Bluesky, with 43% of the posts being made in Japanese, compared to 34% in English. Over the last few months, the Japanese Bluesky community has build a variety of cool new tools, projects and platforms for the ATmosphere. Let’s take a look at three of them: Whitewind, a blogging platform, Bluecast, a social audio app, and Bluemotion, a video hosting platform.
Video with Bluemotion
Bluemotion is a video platform that integrates with your Bluesky/ATmosphere account. You log in with your Bluesky handle and (app)password, and get an overview of the videos hosted on the platform:
front page of bluemotion showing 3 cat videosThe basics of a video hosting platform are all there: you can browse through categories, see what other people have posted, and post your own videos. Where it gets really interesting is that the accounts that post the videos are easily recognisable as Bluesky handles.
Now let’s take a look at a video. On the left is the video on Bluemotion, on the right is the same video, but now as a post on the official Bluesky app.
2 screenshots of the same video, on the left of bluemotion and on the right of bluesky. it shows the same video and engagement numbersWhat is worth noting here is that this is the exact same post, as visible by the engagement numbers. You can interact with the post from the Bluesky app, but you can also boost and like it directly from Bluemotion itself. Now, the only difference here is that the official Bluesky app cannot play videos, so it is a link to the Bluemotion site instead. Still, its a great example of what you can build on top of the AT Proto. Bluemotion is made by developer So Asano.
Blogging with WhiteWind
WhiteWind (stylized as whtwnd.com) is a blogging platform build on top of ATProto. As with all the products in this article, you simply login with your Bluesky/ATProto handle and (app) password.
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-4-1024x568.pngLogging into WhiteWind shows you a front page with the latest and popular blog entries, as well as the ability to write your own blog posts. The integration with ATProto is visible in two different ways: first of all, your WhiteWind account is your ATProto/Bluesky account. Secondly, you can comment on blog posts with your account, and these are visible as a post on Bluesky as well. WhiteWind is developed by @K.
Audio with Bluecast
Bluecast is an audio app build on top of ATProto. The idea is fairly simple, but well executed. Log in with your ATProto/Bluesky account, and browse the current live audio streams. You can also host your own live audio stream as well.
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-6-1024x748.pngWhat impresses me most about Bluecast is that it has managed to build up an active audience of users. By far the hardest part of building a social app is getting people to consistently use it. Audio apps build on top other other protocols (such as audon.space for the fediverse) have struggled to get people to use them, even though they work perfectly fine. For Bluecast however, every time I have checked over the last week I have seen active audio rooms and people using the app. Part of it is that developer So Asano has been running events with multiple streams after each other, with some 60 people tuning in.
Integrating ATProto into Bluesky
The developers have made some impressive new products. At the same time, their work also showcases some struggles for new developers building on top of ATProto. The developer of WhiteWind wrote a blog recently about their experience developing WhiteWind, and write: “My service’s data should be reaching Bluesky, but Bluesky doesn’t understand it and simply discards it. It’s true that I can improve the quality of the service by for example making the UI more beautiful, without relying on atproto. But if it is the only way, what is the point of using atproto in the first place?”
To understand the point they are making, first a quick and oversimplified explanation: A lexicon is part of the protocol, and defines what a post does and how it looks. The official Bluesky app has defined the lexicon for posts to be short posts, limited to 300 characters. Anyone can build their on app on top of ATProto, and define their own lexicon. You can create a Lexicon for long-form blogging, videos, or whatever you want. Importantly however, the official Bluesky app does not process posts with a different lexicon well.
This is the problem that the WhiteWind developer is referring to: WhiteWind has their own lexicon for long-form writing, which does not get processed by the Bluesky app. This is quite different from the fediverse, where long-form posts (from WordPress/Discourse/WriteFreely/etc) can show up in your microblogging app, such as Mastodon. I connected my WordPress blog to the fediverse, and now my blogs show up as full text in the feed of people who follow me, in turn gaining me quite some extra organic reach. This is not possible with AT Proto,new users will still have to visit your website to start using it, making growth for a new product that much harder.
At the same time, Bluesky developers are understandably wary of the Bluesky app becoming an ‘everything-app’. The goal of the Bluesky company is to build a decentralised protocol after all, and the Bluesky app is explicitly an app for microblogging. Bluesky users have regularly criticised the move by X to promote longer-form writing as well, indicating that native long-form writing in Bluesky might not even be appreciated by a part of the userbase.
Overall it points for an interesting point in time for the ATmosphere: Japanese Bluesky developers have build some impressive new products on AT Proto, but is the network interested in adopting other products beyond Bluesky’s own microblogging?
A bit of a slower news week, where everyone’s feeds turned purple with pictures of the aurora borealis. Still, work on (and interest in) bridges, curated content and new products in development show that things are dynamic all the same.
Fediverse Bridges
Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed and the new bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, has given another update on the Bluesky-fediverse bridge that recently was quietly launched. He says that now more than 2500 accounts have bridged now. Barrett also explains that there are still many bugs with the bridge, and that he is busy working on it.
A week after Threads launched their beta version of federation, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput said that mastodon.social knew about 2800 federated Threads accounts. While the total number of federated Threads account will have been higher, it will likely not have been that much higher either. Comparing this to the 2500 bridged account for a service that is still in active testing and development, indicates that there is significant interest in connections between the fediverse and Bluesky. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also bridged her account this week.
The bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse also allows Nostr to connect to Bluesky, with a case here where a post is made on Bluesky, replied to from Nostr, and then replied to again from Mastodon.
Bridge Finder is a new tool to help people with using the bridges between the networks, providing an easy visual interface with an explanation on how to use the bridges, as well as the requirements for opting into using them.
The News
Ghost recently announced their major push for ActivityPub support, and published their first update this week. Ghost explains the history and background of why they are working on the project, and why now specifically, saying: “In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.” Molly White’s response, saying “is this feeling… hope?” captures the sentiment well. Ghost also shared a first screenshot of their new ActivityPub powered reader app:
Ghost reader app that showcases activitypub powering the app.Recently Mastodon announced their new U.S.-based non-profit board members. People had quite some questions about it, and Mastodon has updated the blog with a detailed FAQ. One point of contention was why Biz Stone and Amir Ghavi are on the board. The FAQ explains that Ghavi has provided pro-bono legal council to Mastodon over the last year, with specific knowledge about open-source licensing and further connections to the tech industry. About Biz Stone Mastodon says that “as a Twitter co-founder [Stone] has invaluable experience scaling a social media platform to its first few million users and many connections to experts who are familiar with the problems Mastodon is facing”.
Flipboard announces that they have enabled federation for another 100 curators this week, briding the total of federated Flipboard magazines over 2500. Flipboard also announces that they have had over 100k social interactions on all the federated magazines in the last month.
Forgejo has set their first step towards federation, with the ability for federated likes. What makes this stand out is that Forgejo is a self-hosted software forge. While the fediverse is predominantly understood as a (microblogging) social network, Forgejo shows that federation can also be used for very different types of software products.
Fedihosting Foundation is a non-profit that was recently founded by the admins of the .world (lemmy.world, mastodon.world) cluster and mstn.social has expanded to include the toot.community server as well.
The Links
Trunk & Tidbits is a new series by the Mastodon engineering team. This edition shows what they’ve been working on in April 2024.
Last week I wrote about some conversations about a hard fork for Mastodon. WeDistribute wrote about the trouble forking Mastodon, going into more detail about previous attempts that place it into a historical context.
Upcoming short video platform Loops has started to roll out the first invites for a closed beta test.
ActivityPub server framework Fedify has some more updates.
Documentation to get starting on a plugin for Lemmy.
PieFed gives an overview of their work of the last few weeks.
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.
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:
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.
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 @Jasminhere.
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.
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:
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.’
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.
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:
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.
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’.
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.
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. @Oliphantsays 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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
@LaurensHof thank you, as usual, for this great round-up - you provide an amazing service to all of us in helping keep up-to-date with all of the different strands of activity!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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: