LaurensHof, 5 months ago to TwitterMigration

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 45

It has been more than a year since the #twittermigration started, with a massive inflow of new users towards Mastodon. Growth has plateaued, and the space is settling into a new dynamic. With the news that The White House and Joe Biden have joined Threads, changes in the space of social networks is far from over however.

Mastodon and reply guy culture

Mastodon has a reputation for a harboring a culture of ‘reply guys’. There is a culture of high engagement and reactions on people’s posts, which further alleviates the level and amount of replies that are annoying, irritating or demeaning. The account Mastodon Migration recently collected some posts by large accounts that all experience this issue, and how it turns them off using the fediverse.

Mastodon announced an update to their Android App, that aims to help alleviate these issues somewhat. In a blog post Mastodon announced that they recognise that Mastodon has issues with unwanted reactions, and that they are experimenting with different features to tackle the issue.

The first part is giving people a reminder for basic courtesy, the first time they are responding to someone they’re not following. It also shows a bit of information about the person they are responding to. Eugen Rochko believes that “by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field”.

The second part is to give people a reminder when they are about to respond to a post that is over 3 months old. Due to Mastodon’s heavy focus on reverse-chronological feeds, old posts can sometimes be boosted and go viral on the feeds again, months after they originally have been posted.

Both experiments do not prevent replying, and are simple notifications that can be dismissed, with a ‘Don’t remind me again’ option available as well. The update will arrive soon on the Android Mastodon app, with the update for iOS coming later. If the experiment goes well, it might come to the web interface as well.

Flipboard takes the next steps into the social web

Flipboard has already committed to decentralised social media a while ago, and is now taking the next steps in their commitment. The company announced yesterday that they will completely stop tweeting, and that they have launched a new podcast, Dot Social, about the ‘open social web movement’.

Flipboard will stop posting on Twitter, citing the rise in hate speech and disinformation as reasons. They state that open standards are the future of social media. They will post on most other social networks (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads). On Mastodon they have had active editorial desks accounts for a while (I enjoy their Culture Desk account personally), which will continue to be a focus.

Flipboard also announced a new podcast, Dot Social, hosted by the CEO Mike McCue, about the open social web. It is about how the internet is changing, and how open standards are contributing to a more open social web. Guests are people who are pioneering in the space, and include some people well known in the fediverse, such as Evan Prodromou. The first episode is with Mike Masnick, who wrote the seminal paper ‘Protocols not Platforms’, on decentralizing innovation, and is out now.

Nivenly organisation update

Nivenly is the member-run co-operative that is also behind the Mastodon server Hachyderm.io, and supports various open source projects. They gave an update on projects and project applications, some of which are of specific relevance to the fediverse.

Pachli is a Mastodon Android app, and a fork of the Tusky app. Pachli creator Nik Clayton left the Tusky project this fall over allegations of lapses in governance of the Tusky project (response by Tusky here). Pachli has applied to be a Nivenly project, to provide a governance model and a legal entity that can help with practical matters. Nivenly is currently soliciting feedback on the proposal.

FIRES, Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server, is a project by Emelia Smith, with the goal too provide the ability to subscribe to moderation advisories and recommendations that change over time. Emelia is currently working on a large technical proposal for FIRES, and it is undergoing private peer review at the moment. Her updates (here, here) have more information, and I’ll cover this in more detail once the proposal is made public.

The FSEP, Federation Safety Enhancement Project, was created a few months ago by Ro (author of The Bad Space), with the goal of providing other blocklist providers with a template for compatibility. The proposal got stuck in the first phase, as Ro got targeted with racism and other harassment over The Bad Space (the next update by @jdp23’s article series on fediverse and safety will cover this in more detail). For now the project is shelved. Meanwhile, Ro writes as a reflection on the incident that it has showcased the value of work of The Bad Space, and as a result he has set up think tank that can help develop consent-based tools for independent social networks.

In other news

Here is an overview of all the other news that has happened this week in the #fediverse.

• ActivityPods is a project that aims to combine the ActivityPub protocol with the Solid protocol. The goal of the project is that you can have one account on the fediverse, which hosts your data and followers, using the Solid Protocol. Other ActivityPub applications can then connect to your data. ActivityPods posted an update on their road towards version 2.0, scheduled to be released early 2024. They will also be working on Mastopod; a Mastodon-compatible implementation of ActivityPods.
• Tagginator is a small new bot for Lemmy, that does something simple but smart: it replies from a Mastodon account to new posts on Lemmy communities that it monitors, and comments with a hashtag that is relevant to that community. This way, people on Mastodon who follow that hashtag will now also start to see Lemmy posts in their feed. As Lemmy will not add hashtags in the near future, this is a workaround to improve the interoperability between the microblogging side of the fediverse and the threadiverse.
• Heise Online’s editor Martin Holland has regularly given updates on data and traffic for their news account. In the latest update he provides some insight in the decentralisation of the fediverse. It also shows the extend of the peak of the twittermigration last year, and how traffic has slowed down since.
• The University of Innsbruck put out a press release that they’ll be focusing more on Mastodon for science communication, and that their presence at X will be significantly reduced.
• Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.
• Kbin dev gives an overview of the current work and plans for the near future.
• All fediverse client and server updates for the week.

That’s all for the week, thanks for reading. You can subscribe to my blog on the fediverse by searching for @LaurensHof to receive updates during the week as well. Or subscribe to receive the weekly newsletter every Sunday below.

#fediverse #mastodon #Twittermigration

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-45/

LaurensHof, 5 months ago to fediverse

Here is an overview of all the other news that has happened this week in the #fediverse.

• ActivityPods is a project that aims to combine the ActivityPub protocol with the Solid protocol. The goal of the project is that you can have one account on the fediverse, which hosts your data and followers, using the Solid Protocol. Other ActivityPub applications can then connect to your data. ActivityPods posted an update on their road towards version 2.0, scheduled to be released early 2024. They will also be working on Mastopod; a Mastodon-compatible implementation of ActivityPods.

• Tagginator is a small new bot for Lemmy, that does something simple but smart: it replies from a Mastodon account to new posts on Lemmy communities that it monitors, and comments with a hashtag that is relevant to that community. This way, people on Mastodon who follow that hashtag will now also start to see Lemmy posts in their feed. As Lemmy will not add hashtags in the near future, this is a workaround to improve the interoperability between the microblogging side of the fediverse and the threadiverse.

• Heise Online’s editor Martin Holland has regularly given updates on data and traffic for their news account. In the latest update he provides some insight in the decentralisation of the fediverse. It also shows the extend of the peak of the twittermigration last year, and how traffic has slowed down since.

• The University of Innsbruck put out a press release that they’ll be focusing more on Mastodon for science communication, and that their presence at X will be significantly reduced.

• Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.

• Kbin dev gives an overview of the current work and plans for the near future.

• All fediverse client and server updates for the week.

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-in-other-news-episode-45/

#fediverse

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to mastodon

Mastodon has a reputation for a harboring a culture of ‘reply guys’. There is a culture of high engagement and reactions on people’s posts, which further alleviates the level and amount of replies that are annoying, irritating or demeaning. The account Mastodon Migration recently collected some posts by large accounts that all experience this issue, and how it turns them off using the fediverse.

Mastodon announced an update to their Android App, that aims to help alleviate these issues somewhat. In a blog post Mastodon announced that they recognise that Mastodon has issues with unwanted reactions, and that they are experimenting with different features to tackle the issue.

The first part is giving people a reminder for basic courtesy, the first time they are responding to someone they’re not following. It also shows a bit of information about the person they are responding to. Eugen Rochko believes that “by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field”.

The second part is to give people a reminder when they are about to respond to a post that is over 3 months old. Due to Mastodon’s heavy focus on reverse-chronological feeds, old posts can sometimes be boosted and go viral on the feeds again, months after they originally have been posted.

Both experiments do not prevent replying, and are simple notifications that can be dismissed, with a ‘Don’t remind me again’ option available as well. The update will arrive soon on the Android Mastodon app, with the update for iOS coming later. If the experiment goes well, it might come to the web interface as well.

https://fediversereport.com/mastodon-reply-culture/

#mastodon

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to random

Flipboard has already committed to decentralised social media a while ago, and is now taking the next steps in their commitment. The company announced yesterday that they will completely stop tweeting, and that they have launched a new podcast, Dot Social, about the ‘open social web movement’.

Flipboard will stop posting on Twitter, citing the rise in hate speech and disinformation as reasons. They state that open standards are the future of social media. They will post on most other social networks (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads). On Mastodon they have had active editorial desks accounts for a while (I enjoy their Culture Desk account personally), which will continue to be a focus.

Flipboard also announced a new podcast, Dot Social, hosted by the CEO Mike McCue, about the open social web. It is about how the internet is changing, and how open standards are contributing to a more open social web. Guests are people who are pioneering in the space, and include some people well known in the fediverse, such as Evan Prodromou. The first episode is with Mike Masnick, who wrote the seminal paper ‘Protocols not Platforms’, on decentralizing innovation, and is out now.

https://fediversereport.com/flipboard-takes-the-next-steps-into-the-social-web/

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to random

Nivenly is the member-run co-operative that is also behind the Mastodon server Hachyderm.io, and supports various open source projects. They gave an update on projects and project applications, some of which are of specific relevance to the fediverse.

Pachli is a Mastodon Android app, and a fork of the Tusky app. Pachli creator Nik Clayton left the Tusky project this fall over allegations of lapses in governance of the Tusky project (response by Tusky here). Pachli has applied to be a Nivenly project, to provide a governance model and a legal entity that can help with practical matters. Nivenly is currently soliciting feedback on the proposal.

FIRES, Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server, is a project by Emelia Smith, with the goal too provide the ability to subscribe to moderation advisories and recommendations that change over time. Emelia is currently working on a large technical proposal for FIRES, and it is undergoing private peer review at the moment. Her updates (here, here) have more information, and I’ll cover this in more detail once the proposal is made public.

The FSEP, Federation Safety Enhancement Project, was created a few months ago by Ro (author of The Bad Space), with the goal of providing other blocklist providers with a template for compatibility. The proposal got stuck in the first phase, as Ro got targeted with racism and other harassment over The Bad Space (the next update by @jdp23’s article series on fediverse and safety will cover this in more detail). For now the project is shelved. Meanwhile, Ro writes as a reflection on the incident that it has showcased the value of work of The Bad Space, and as a result he has set up think tank that can help develop consent-based tools for independent social networks.

https://fediversereport.com/nivenly-update/

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to fediverse

A roundup of the other news items of the week. For the full article, check here.

• @Jpd23 has been writing an extensive blog series about safety and blocklists. I’ll write more about it once the series has finished, but it is already worth reading, and provides good context and perspective on safety in the fediverse. Part 1 here, part 2 here.

• Evan Prodromou has published a command-line client API for ActivityPub, as part of his work on a book about ActivityPub.

• @Jaz is maintaining a list of all organisations that are self-publishing, meaning running their own fediverse server.

• One year since the day of the Twitter lockout, in which a quarter of a million people signed up for the fediverse in a single day.

• A call to action by Netzpolitik for higher education organisations to join the fediverse and control their own social media presence.

• Misskey fork Sharkey has added post importing, where they have taken the approach of not federating the posts, just importing them to the account. This avoids the problem of sending out notifications for old important posts, but does mean old posts lose favourite counts.

https://fediversereport.com/in-other-news-last-week-in-fediverse-44/

#fediverse

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 44

I was at the Next Generation Internet conference this week, and it was super fun to meet fediverse people in person, and talk about where to move from here. Longer write up on that coming soon, but it also meant that I didn’t get around to do much writing this week, so bit of a shorter update this time. Let’s dive into the Framasoft and Peertube update, interviews with fediverse builders, and more!

Framasoft’s yearly report

Framasoft, the French non-profit organisation behind projects such as PeerTube and Mobilizon, has published their yearly report, titled ‘Let’s regain ground on the toxic web’. It details the work they have been doing over the last year, their future plans, as well as a donation drive. Over the next few weeks, Framasoft will dive deeper into specific parts of their plans and products: In the week of 28th of November they’ll talk about this years work on PeerTube, and 2 weeks later they will talk about next year’s plans for PeerTube. In between, they’ll tell us more about Mobilizon.

PeerTube will released their next version (v6) at the end of November, with important features such as video chapters and password protection for videos. Password protection especially will be an interesting feature to watch, as it positions PeerTube in a clear different place than YouTube; uploading videos that you want control over who gets to watch the video. Stay tuned for more information once v6 gets released.

Framasoft also announced that next year they will bet big on PeerTube, working on features such as better moderation tools, working on promoting the ecosystem more, and an official PeerTube mobile app. All of this will get covered in more detail in a few weeks time. Watch this space for more information on a special event as well!

Finally, Framasoft has also given an update on the federated event planning software Mobilizon. After four years of development, v4 will be the final version that will be released under Mobilizon. Framasoft says that they feel that they have completed their vision for the product, and that groups will have the features they need to organise their events.

A Mammoth Task

A Mammoth Task, is the headline of the interview by German newspaper Zeit with Eugen Rochko. It details the history and background of how Eugen Rochko came to build Mastodon, and his vision for social networks. It introduces him as a private person, who rarely gives interviews, does not go to conferences, and has not met most of Mastodon’s employees in person (a shame, as I very much enjoyed meeting Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput at Next Generation Internet conference last week)

The article does not shy away from pointing out some uncomfortable facts either, noting his title as a Benevolent Dictator For Life. They write: ‘“I feel quite comfortable in this role,” he [Eugen Rochko] says, “an individual with a vision always builds a better product than a group.” He almost sounds like the Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of this world. Is Rochko really interested in building a democratic network? Or does he just want to be at the top himself?’.

The entire interview is worth reading (non-paywalled here, auto translation works well enough), as it shows that some press is moving beyond an easy narrative of Mastodon as an replacement for Twitter, and is willing to look deeper into how decisions get made on this new generation of decentralised social networks.

In other news

• @Jpd23 has been writing an extensive blog series about safety and blocklists. I’ll write more about it once the series has finished, but it is already worth reading, and provides good context and perspective on safety in the fediverse. Part 1 here, part 2 here.
• Evan Prodromou has published a command-line client API for ActivityPub, as part of his work on a book about ActivityPub.
• @Jaz is maintaining a list of all organisations that are self-publishing, meaning running their own fediverse server.
• One year since the day of the Twitter lockout, in which a quarter of a million people signed up for the fediverse in a single day.
• A call to action by Netzpolitik for higher education organisations to join the fediverse and control their own social media presence.
• Misskey fork Sharkey has added post importing, where they have taken the approach of not federating the posts, just importing them to the account. This avoids the problem of sending out notifications for old important posts, but does mean old posts lose favourite counts.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. If you want to receive this update every Sunday in your mailbox, subscribe below!

#fediverse #mastodon #peertube

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-44/

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Framasoft, the French non-profit organisation behind projects such as PeerTube and Mobilizon, has published their yearly report, titled ‘Let’s regain ground on the toxic web’. It details the work they have been doing over the last year, their future plans, as well as a donation drive. Over the next few weeks, Framasoft will dive deeper into specific parts of their plans and products: In the week of 28th of November they’ll talk about this years work on PeerTube, and 2 weeks later they will talk about next year’s plans for PeerTube. In between, they’ll tell us more about Mobilizon.

PeerTube will released their next version (v6) at the end of November, with important features such as video chapters and password protection for videos. Password protection especially will be an interesting feature to watch, as it positions PeerTube in a clear different place than YouTube; uploading videos that you want control over who gets to watch the video. Stay tuned for more information once v6 gets released.

Framasoft also announced that next year they will bet big on PeerTube, working on features such as better moderation tools, working on promoting the ecosystem more, and an official PeerTube mobile app. All of this will get covered in more detail in a few weeks time. Watch this space for more information on a special event as well!

Finally, Framasoft has also given an update on the federated event planning software Mobilizon. After four years of development, v4 will be the final version that will be released under Mobilizon. Framasoft says that they feel that they have completed their vision for the product, and that groups will have the features they need to organise their events.

https://fediversereport.com/framasofts-yearly-report/

#fediverse #peertube

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 43

The monthly update for Bluesky, Dutch broadcaster NPO joins the fediverse, and German news organisation Heise Online reflects on a year of being on Mastodon.

Bluesky October update

Last Month in Bluesky – October 23

Dutch Public Broadcaster NPO joins the fediverse

“It is our goal to have all government organisations be involved in the pilot”, the Dutch government wrote in September 2023. Since this summer, the Dutch government runs their own Mastodon server at social.overheid.nl. Gradually, more and more organisations have joined the server.

Today, the Dutch Public Broadcasting organisation (NPO) has set up their own Mastodon server as well, at social.npo.nl. Some of the new accounts are for broadcasting stations, such as NPO Radio 1, or for specific programs that are run by NPO, such as Pointer or Zembla. Zembla has been active here for a while incidentally, and now moved to the new server as well.

One of the public tasks of the NPO is to drive innovations in the media sector; finding new ways for broadcasting organisations to reach an audience in a post-Twitter landscape is an excellent way to fulfil this mandate. Will NOS, the other Dutch public broadcaster, follow?

A year on Mastodon, a reflection by Heise Online

German news organisation Heise Online has written up an extensive report (in German) on their first year on Mastodon. Some key takeaways:

“Mastodon alone generated around two thirds as many visits to the sitein the twelve months as X/Twitter overall. At the same time, this should not obscure the fact that the absolute numbers are comparatively low; Twitter was never really relevant as a traffic source for media like Heise Online.”

Their statistics also show that activity in the fediverse has noticeably slowed down: “access via Mastodon reached its peak around the turn of the year. Since then they have been slowly declining.” And: “of the 20 most popular posts on Mastodon, half come from the first three months [of the year]”.

On community interaction: “If there are direct questions or other requests to express yourself, no other social network is as busy online as Mastodon. But here too the numbers are now declining; Mastodon and the Fediverse have apparently no longer been able to really benefit from the recent waves of farewells at X/Twitter.”

But there is more to a network that engagement numbers, as Heise Online points to the both the high quality as well as quantity of comments on the fediverse. They also indicate the low cost (less than 100 EUR/month) and effort of participating in the fediverse. As other news organisations (BBC, the Dutch NPO) are joining the fediverse, they can learn from the experience that Heise Online already has here.

In other news

A preview of this week’s newsletter with all the other short news that has happened this week:

• Nathan Mattes, the freelance iOS developer for Mastodon, wrote a reflection on working on the project for the last year. There’s some interesting information in there, like development almost coming to a pause last August due to financing struggles. It also provides some good insight in the update this spring where mastodon.social got set as the default server select for signing up.

• Developing with ActivityPub can be surprisingly difficult for a variety of reasons, one of them being a lack of testing tools. @Helge got funding from NLnet and made this tool, Verify your Fediverse Actor, that helps developers and improves interoperability.

• The developer for Takahe is looking for new developers and maintainers to take over the project. Takahe is a fediverse project in development, with the goal to have multiple domains in one ActivityPub server.

• Pleroma announces plans to split the development of the front-end and the back-end. The project has struggled to synchronise the development. Now the front-end development of Pleroma will become more of a client instead.

• Kbin developer Ernest has been keeping a devlog every day for the past week on the road to release. Here’s his reflection on the week. One major new feature is that people can now request ownership of magazines that are abandoned, which should help improve the spam situation.

Tumblr and interoperability, revised

Tumblr and interoperability, revised

Algorithmic feeds in clients

Algorithmic feeds in clients

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. If you want to receive this update every Sunday in your mailbox, subscribe below!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-43/

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to bluesky

Welcome to the October update for Bluesky. The team has provided a roadmap on what they are working on, and even though it is focused on developers, there is a lot of interesting information it in for people who are interested in the network in general. Just as interesting is what is not in it; plans about content moderation are mostly missing. A high-profile case of impersonalisation with the Kyiv Independent newspaper showcases the challenges that lie ahead in a federated network. Let’s dive right in:

Bluesky roadmap

Bluesky has published a roadmap for their current development plans for the AT Protocol that powers the network. It can be found here, and it is a fairly technical read, focused on developers. There are still quite some things of interest for regular users in it:

• Federation is coming, scheduled for early 2024
• DMs are coming, but quite a way off.

The main work that the Bluesky team is focused on is getting to federation. This will allow the network to properly scale, as the current infrastructure starts to hit its limits. Federation is currently available in a separate testing environment for developers. The developers are currently working on completing the final parts of the protocol that enables federation to happen. Most of the technical roadmap is dedicated to the individual work items that are happening, or need to happen. The infrastructure that is currently used on the live network now has most parts in place to allow federation to happen. Altogether the team estimates that the network will open up to everyone via federation in early 2024.

DMs are an often requested feature, and people regularly mention that the only reason they still use their X account is to access DMs. Implementing DMs requires significant additions to the protocol, as currently all information is public. Proper end-to-end encrypted messaging needs to be added for DMs to work. The team is currently planning on focusing on this after federation is complete. The amount of work that is needed, means that DMs are still quite some time away, and should not be expected any time soon.

One part of the roadmap that does not get any mention is content moderation, and how this will function in a federated version of Bluesky. Federation opens the network to a whole new set of threat vectors, as the fediverse has experienced, but this does not get any mention in this roadmap. Even features such as comment controls, a valuable tool for safety, that are actually being implemented into the network, are not mentioned.

Protocol governance

As part of the technical roadmap, the #Bluesky team announced that they will be looking to bring the development and maintainance of the AT Protocol to an independent standards body. This will happen after the team has implemented federation, which is currently expected to be in early 2024. The team recognises that once the network federates, decisions on the network will impact other organisations, companies and individuals, and decisions should not be left exclusively to the Bluesky team.

The current plan is to house the protocol at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF is a different standards organisation that ActivityPub uses, the W3C. Bluesky expects that the process will take quite a while: “Our current hope is to bring this work to the IETF, likely as a new working group, which would probably be a multi-year process. If the IETF does not work out as a home, we will try again with other bodies.”

The current app that most people use to access the network, also called Bluesky, will not be part of the application, and the Bluesky team intends to remain in control of the development of the Bluesky app.

Impersonisation

Bluesky recently had a high-profile case of impersonation, with the account of the Ukraine newspaper Kyiv Independent. The impersonator account of Kyiv Independent existed for a while, getting to over 5.5k followers while reposting real links to the real website of the Kyiv Independent newspaper. The impersonation came to light when the impersonator account started spamming links to an unaffiliated Patreon account, trying to scam people into donating. A reporter at the Kyiv Independent created a Bluesky account, and drew further light to the impersonation. As a result, the fake account got an impersonation warning label added to the account. This was however still somewhat confusing, as the fake account had significantly more followers than the real account, and people often use follower numbers as a proxy to determine if an account is real. Finally, two days later, the impersonation account got taken down altogether.

This saga provides some insights in the challenges that lie ahead when Bluesky will federate in the near future. The original decision by Bluesky to only add an impersonation warning, and not delete the account, aligns with their vision of a federated network. In the near future when people can create accounts on other servers (called a PDS), the Bluesky organisation does not have the power to remove an account when it is located on a PDS that is not owned by the Bluesky organisation either. They do have the ability to provide the impersonation warning to everyone who uses their app (but people who use different apps might not see this either).

These concerns will certainly play up again in the future. For now, the impersonator account was located on the PDS that is owned by the Bluesky organisation, and the behaviour was a clear violation of their own community guidelines. Why it took a few days to decisively act upon it is unclear however.

Journalism and Bluesky

A three month old post by Bluesky team member Emily got significant traction again this month. The post stated that news organisations and journalists could email Bluesky to get an invite code directly. As a response, the Bluesky team published a new blog post explaining how journalists can skip the invite waiting list. However, with the amount of unused invite codes floating around, it does not seem that getting an invite code as a high-profile name would be a big barrier to joining the network.

Building on AT Protocol

The Bluesky team has published some more information for developers on how to build on the AT Protocol, as well as example projects (‘cookbook‘). The list of community projects got updated again as well, and showcases the amount of projects that people have already build on top of the network. There is a large variety of clients already available. Personally I’m eying to see if there will be a movement to make apps with native support for multiple networks at the same time, so you can use only one client to access both Bluesky, the fediverse, and any other open network.

That’s all for October, thanks for reading! If you want to receive a weekly update about what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks, subscribe here!

https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-october-23/

#bluesky

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 42

In this edition: Mastodon shares some plans for future updates, social network Pebble shuts down and starts a Mastodon experiment, and more information about Mozilla’s fediverse project.

Pebble shuts down and starts a Mastodon server

Pebble shuts down (and restarts)

Mastodon plans for 4.3 update

Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput has posted a small thread with a near-term roadmap for update 4.3 for Mastodon. It is tentatively scheduled to be released before Christmas. One item specifically stands out:

• “Notify users when relationships (follows, followers) are severed, due to a server block, display the list of impacted relationships, and have a button to restore them if the remote server is unblocked.”

Server blocks can be impactful on users, where they suddenly lose relationships with other accounts due to the connection between their servers being blocked. Currently people are not notified when this happens, even though the impact can be severe. The ability to restore connections after an unblock will also help with harm mitigations.

Other proposed improvements include grouped notifications, improved account recommendations, and more.

Mastodon quote posting timeline

Renaud Chaput gave a short update on Mastodon’s work on implementing quote posting. He stated that Mastodon is working on adding quote posts, and also on making sure that it is properly implemented in ActivityPub. The protocol currently has no formal specification for quote posts, and other platforms such as Misskey, Pleroma and Streams have all implemented quote posting in their own manner. Mastodon is looking to add a formal definition to the ActivityPub specification first, where it is also possible to get notified if you are quoted, and to control who can quote your post.

Expanding the protocol is currently mainly done via Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP), which allows everyone to submit a documents on how the ActivityPub protocol can be improved. An FEP is not mandatory, and fediverse platforms do not have to implement an FEP.

Kbin dev logs

Mbin recently appeared as a community-focused fork of Kbin. This week Mbin had their first release, with a large variety of small fixes by a group of contributors. The fork Mbin was created as a response perceived issues with governance at Kbin; contributors struggled with lack of engagement and interaction by Kbin creator Ernest, with contributions not being added or even reversed. Mbin is set up as a community project, where any of the (around 8) owners can add a feature by a contributor. Ernest has set up a new dev blog series, called the Road to Release, where he documents his progress on getting Kbin to release. The first update is the ability for admins to delete magazines, a often-requested feature.

In other news

This week marks the 1-year anniversary since the start of the Twittermigration, which lead to a massive inflow of people that left Twitter and joined the fediverse. Quite some people are writing up their reflections as part of their ‘fediversary’. It is fun to browse the #fediversity hashtag and see people’s posts. Personally I have enjoyed reading these four reflections.

Techcrunch has an extensive article and interview about Mozilla’s upcoming fediverse server mozilla.social. The server is currently still in closed beta. The entire article is worth reading, and provides some good insight in how Mozilla is thinking about their project. Techcrunch says that the “timeline to a public launch isn’t yet determined”, and it seems like it might take a while.

The links

• Alt text health leaderboard.
• Pixelfed has simplified registration for new users.
• Embedding Mastodon posts.
• Pleroma had released a significant update, and also recently got an NLnet grant.

#activitypub #fediverse #fediversity

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-42/

LaurensHof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 41

A bit quieter news week in the fediverse, which gives some space to explore some news that relates to the fediverse in relevant ways, without the news necessarily originating from the fediverse itself. The Verge gives some significant attention to posting on the internet, and new rules at Twitch provide an interesting opportunity for Owncast.

The Verge and the fediverse

Three separate but related news items from The Verge this week, that relate to the fediverse in some way:

• David Pierce published an article, ‘The poster’s guide to the internet of the future’. It is about providing an alternative to centralised internet platforms via POSSE (meaning Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). It explains how ActivityPub can power this decentralised version of the internet, and features many fediverse platforms. Manton Reece, creator of Micro.blog, talks about the pragmatism that underlines the micro.blog platform: “Instead of waiting for the perfect world, […], let’s just accept the reality, and focus on posting to your own site that you control — and then send it out to friends on other networks.” There is also a shoutout to the work that Ryan Barrett is doing with bridging between all the protocols.
  • The Vergecast had an accompanying podcast episode for this article, taking a deeper dive into what posting (and the distribution of your posts) on the internet will look like.
• In The Vergecast podcast from The Verge from this week, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel says: “my plan for our site is to federate our content, and to be more natively integrated with whatever new class of social networks that exists”. He shouts out theverge.space as a great 3rd party hack to see how a federated version of The Verge might look like.
• The Verge has started posting their content on the bot @verge. The account has existed for a long time but has been dormant.

Together, these items provide a view of how The Verge thinks where the social web is headed, a view of many interconnected networks, and where the source of information matters more than the specific network or platform it is distributed on.

Twitch simulcasting rules update

Twitch has officially announced that streamers on Twitch are now allowed to simultanously stream (simulcasting) to all other live platforms. They state that ‘We believe that you should have the freedom to decide which services you want to live stream on.’ The new policy comes with a few restrictions, such as making sure that the quality of the stream on Twitch is not lesser than on other platforms, and they are not allowed to advertise the other platforms on Twitch. Still, these changes will significantly increase options for streamers to experiment with other platforms such as YouTube.

Allowing simulcasting will likely also benefit open source fediverse streaming platform Owncast. Owncast allows you to completely self-host your streams, and connect them with the fediverse for easier social connections. The software itself is pretty great, but the platform does feature a lack of streamers actually using it. Most times when browsing the directory, the only streams listed are 24/7 music live streams. This change in the Twitch Terms of Service, Allowing Twitch streamers to simulcast to Owncast is a first step, and it seems likely that a few more dedicated fediverse fans will use this opportunity. It is still a very long way away of mainstream appeal, but this new policy change does provide Owncast with an opportunity to get at least a few more streamers on board.

The links

• Popular iOS Mastodon app Ice Cubes is now also available for MacOS.
• The Alt Text Health Check image accessibility report provides on overview of how many images include alt text in the fediverse. The median value is that around 36% of images include alt text.
• Mastodon will soon change the ‘favourite’ to a ‘like’.
• Pixelfed has implemented P2P for videos, similar how PeerTube does this.
• The website for Funkwhale has been updated.

That’s all for this week, thank you for reading! You can subscribe below to receive this update directly in your mailbox. You can also subscribe on the fediverse, to find these posts directly in your feeds. You can find me there on @LaurensHof

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-41/

LaurensHof, 7 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 40

Three stories that all relate to governance, in their own different ways. Mbin is a new fork of Kbin, due to governance issues at Kbin. A research paper on that gives some structure to how different Mastodon servers organise their rules. And Owncast runs into issues with how Apple governs access to the App Store.

Kbin and Mbin

Kbin has a new fork, called Mbin. It got created recently as a response to the struggles with governance at Kbin. Kbin has its creator Ernest in control of the project, who in an update this week let people know that there are multiple issues going on at the same time: the increased costs of the servers, which lead to delays in the delivery of development milestones (which are criteria for getting funding), as well as other major personal life events currently happening.

The control of the Kbin project is not very delegated, so when the main server kbin.social had problems this week, other Kbin core developers were not able to help with the problems. This was further illustrated this week, when the admin of the Infosec cluster of servers (they run a server of most fediverse software) announced that they will shut down their Kbin server, fedia.io. Admin Jerry Bell gives technical errors, as well as significantly higher requirements compared to Lemmy as the main reasons.

As a response to the situation, the fork Mbin has been recently created, the name a reference to Melroy van den Berg, one of the Kbin core developers who started this fork. A major goal of the fork is to create a better community-owned structure, where no single developer controls the project. Adding updates to the project requires consensus in a discussion on their Matrix channels, after which the changes can be made. The project proposes a from of Collective Code Construction Contract as governance, but the actual proposed method of getting consensus is not decided upon yet, with quite a bit of room of ambiguity (“issues/changes in the community first and have some consensus (WIP: we are still looking into some voting tool that might help here)”)

For now, this fork has allowed the fedia.io server to continue their operation, as the fork solved the most pressing errors that were present while using Kbin. One thing to watch for is how this fork will impact other updates to Kbin that have been on the backburner: for example, Kbin’s API is still not released as part of the core project, preventing Kbin apps such as Artemis to gain wider usage.

Mastodon server rules – research paper

Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances is a recently published research article that compares and characterises the rules of the most popular Mastodon servers. The researchers find that “Rules on Mastodon often pay particular attention to issues of harassment and hate — strongly reflecting the spirit of the Mastodon Covenant. We speculate that these rules may have emerged in response to problems of other platforms, and reflect a lack of support for instance maintainers.”

The report compares the rules on Mastodon servers to those on subreddits, and comes up with some interesting findings: “[R]ules about Hate Speech, Harassment, and Doxxing/Personal Info are far more common on Mastodon, while rules about Consequences/Moderation/Enforcement, Behavior/Content/Format Allowed, and Links & Outside Content are much less common. This contrast may suggest that these spaces have different values and purposes.” and “rules on Mastodon often explicitly engage with systemic oppression across many different intersectional identities beyond what is required by the Mastodon Covenant.”

And finally, this line in the report is a good indication of why I want to spend my time on the fediverse: “Mastodon instances seem to have more of an orientation towards justice”.

Owncast and the Apple App Store

Owncast creator Gabe Kangas announced that he has been working on an iOS and tvOS app for fediverse streaming platform Owncast. However, he stated that it is unlikely that this app will be released due to Apple’s App store policies. The app allowed you to browse the directory of streams on Owncast, add private server streams, and get notified when your favourite streamers were going live. Apple however refuses to approve the app into the App store, because of content rights. Apple’s position is that Owncast can only provide access to a catalog if they own the rights for the content in this catalog. As Owncast is only an intermediary portal for independently hosted servers, this is simply impossible to do. Gabe Kangas describes Owncast’s directory as similar to a podcast app. Podcasting apps can read out any podcast RSS feeds, without any permission or agreement by the podcast itself.

Gabe Kangas also states that he has been trying take a legal approach to this, but struggled finding representation that fully understands what Owncast is doing. It is an important story for the fediverse, as it is trying to expand beyond microblogging. It seems possible that someone building a PeerTube directory app might run into similar troubles.

The links

• ActivityPub, the non-standard standard. A blog post by Robert W. Gehl. about how the ActivityPub standard came to be, and what makes it stand out.
• Fedipage is a way to add ActivityPub to a static Hugo site.
• 404 Media writes why “Mastodon is the good one”.
• The weekly development update for Lemmy.
• Common Abuses on Mastodon: A Primer by Stanford Internet Observatory.
• Mike Macgirvin, developer of Hubzilla and Streams, rightfully asks the question why other fediverse software platforms have not implemented comment controls yet, like Streams has.
• Steve Bate posted his massive collection (500+ links) of bookmarks related to the fediverse on Postmarks.
• Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky: Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation.
• An in-depth review of Firefish by WeDistribute. It provides an overview of all the cool features and ideas that Firefish has. Personally I really appreciate all the ways that Firefish pushes forward what fediverse software can be and do, but I have too many concerns about server stability to currently recommend people to use it.

If you want to receive this update directly in your mailbox every week, subscribe below. Thanks for reading!

#fediverse #kbin

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-40/

LaurensHof, 7 months ago to fediverse

Welcome! Lots of individual news stories this week, with some implications about how the network currently functions and operates. WordPress is actively expanding the network by allowing all blogs on the free wordpress.com plan to become part of the fediverse. While discussions about server ownership put questions at what is expected to be an operator of a fediverse server.

WordPress.com officially connects to the fediverse

The major news of the week is that WordPress.com now can connect to the fediverse via the ActivityPub plugin. A few weeks ago I already reported on the official launch of the plugin (which had been in beta for a long while), when it became available for people who are self-hosting their WordPress site. It is now also available for everyone who uses WordPress via WordPress.com, including people on a free plan. The news got some significant attention by other tech news sites as well. Current usage of the new connection can be seen here.

People in the fediverse are understandably excited by this development, and frame it in a hopeful perspective of growth, for example, by focusing on how many websites run WordPress that can now join the fediverse. The fediverse and its cultural conventions are currently dominated by the microblogging side of the community. The potential inflow of blogs and websites into the fediverse poses new questions that deserve contemplation. These issues are not new, fediverse software like WriteFreely and Plume have been around for years. What is different is how people in the fediverse are positioning WordPress in a context of growth, by accentuation how many websites on the internet run WordPress. They ask the reader explicitly to imagine a future in which millions of WordPress websites have connected to the fediverse. The prospect of millions of sites connected to the fediverse also makes questions about current culture and norms in the fediverse more top-of-mind: How do current social norms around search and indexing in the fediverse collide with the different expectations around search on the rest of the web? What does a good user experience looks like for a feed that contains posts with less than 500 characters, interspersed with a blog post of 10.000 words? What does content moderation look like in a world where there are thousands, if not millions of websites connected to the fediverse, that are all effectively their own servers?

Journa.host and server ownership

The Journa.host server, a Mastodon server that is dedicated to journalists has transferred ownership. With it come questions regarding expectations between server owners/operators and people that use the server. The Journa.host server started as a community-centric project, with initial funding The Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Recently the ownership of the server was transferred to the Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation. This organisation also runs the Mastodon server newsie.social, and until recently the verifiedjournalist.org project as well (who’s ownership got transferred to The Doodle Project recently).

This move of server ownership sparked a thread by Ethiopian journalist Zecharias Zelalem, who moved away from the journa.host server as a result of this transfer of ownership. In his posts, he points the actual real risks that come with being a journalist, especially so in his context. Transferring journalists’ personal data, and control of their social media presence, to new ownership without any real notice and explanation does raises questions about the considerations from the previous owners about this move. One of the points that was raised is that there is little information available on the identity of the new owner, Jeff Brown. It is understandable for journalists to get uncomfortable when it is unclear who is responsible for an important part of their digital presence. At the same time, most servers are not financially sustainable, and even servers who get funding from reputable places cannot be assumed by default to stay in operation forever when funding runs out. Meanwhile, under the new ownership journa.host will allow new applications for signups again for the journa.host server.

Dan Hon wrote an interesting article on the situation, and drawing parallels with Cory Doctorow’s new book ‘The Internet Con’, which is worth reading. He is also hosting a small group digital meeting ‘Journalism, News, and Federated Social Networks’, which got set up as a response to this conversation as well. You can find more about this ‘Hallway Track’ meeting here.

IFTAS moderator needs assessment

IFTAS, the non-profit organisation for Trust and Safety on the fediverse, has released the results of their recent assessments of the needs of fediverse moderators. The entire results can be found here, and are worth checking out. Some of the noteworthy results: few servers (17%) have 24 hour moderator coverage. Most servers lose money, and most moderators are unpaid. Half of the respondents use shared block lists, such as Oliphant’s lists. What also stands out is the variety of moderator communities that are in use, that all only are used by a small part of the moderator community. There is not a clear single community for moderators that is used by the de-facto default.

On Bluesky interoperability

With Bluesky getting more popular, the conversation of interoperability between the fediverse and Bluesky/ATProtocol has come up again. In the GitHub for the AT Protocol, Bluesky engineer Brian Newbold gives a detailed answer about the various parts of interoperability between the network. The direct answer is that “it is not on the Bluesky roadmap”, but the answer also identifies which parts of interoperability could probably work, which parts are difficult from a technical perspective, and which parts are hard from a cultural perspective. Another interesting suggestion that came up is the possibility of fully embedding posts on its opposite platform, allowing for a kind of quote-posting across networks.

Mastodon user count update

Eugen Rochko gave a short update this week, indicating that the joinmastodon.org website had been undercounting data for the period between October 2nd and October 9th. The undercounting accounting for some 400k MAU and 2.3m total accounts, which only happened during the timeframe of the previous week. This got picked up by some media outlets and spread around the feeds. However, the news was framed mainly in the context that Mastodon had a lot more users than expected, which is not really correct: Mastodon has the expected amount of users, and news of the gain in numbers should have been properly accompanied with an equal loss in the week before. Getting reliable data about user numbers is fairly difficult, with multiple sources providing quite different values. joinmastodon.org lists 1.8M MAU for Mastodon currently, while fedidb.org gives 1.4M MAU for the entire fediverse. It is unclear which of these sources is more reliable. Personally, I tend to use fedidb.org, as this provides data over time, so trends can be visible.

Twittermigration report

Tim Chambers has been documenting the Twitter Migration (X Migration now) over the last year, releasing an extensive report every quarter. The latest update for Q3 2023 has just been released, and it’s worth checking out. It documents in detail the many issues that X currently faces. It also gives some good data on the growth and usage of Threads. After an explosive launch, reading 100M accounts in a week, activity cooled significantly immediately after. In the months that followed, growth and usage has stabilised. Threads is now estimated to grow at 1 million accounts every two weeks, roughly four times as much as Bluesky is currently growing.

The report indicates that the other two main beneficiaries of the X migration are Mastodon and Bluesky. One way that the report measures this is by looking how many X accounts have a handle for their account on a different network in their profile. The mentions of Mastodon are significantly bigger than Bluesky here, but are stagnating, while Bluesky’s numbers are rapidly growing. This trend is also visible in the account signup numbers for both Mastodon and Bluesky.

The report also distinguishes a Developer migration, and notes organisations that are currently working on providing ActivityPub integration, such as Automattic with WordPress, Flipboard, Mozilla, as well as other networks such as Threads, Tumblr and Post.news. No organisation is talking about using the AT Proto network currently. This is why the report quotes Nilay Patel (from February 23), where he states that ActivityPub is where the app developers are. This seems to be holding up regarding companies and organisations, who are all focused on ActivityPub. Individual hobby developers seem to be a different matter though, where the AT Protocol seems to be of significant interest: the largest individual developer community for ActivityPub has less than 200 users, while the Discord for developers for AT Protocol has almost ten times as much, close to 2000.

The links

• SURF, the Mastodon project the Dutch higher education system, has a chance to win the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory award.
• Confirmation that Mozilla’s new fediverse server, mozilla.social, will use people’s Firefox account to log in.
• A podcast about the fediverse from the perspective of advertisers
• A podcast by Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog, about ActivityPub support in WordPress.com and its impact on Micro.blog
• Renaud Chaput is now officially the CTO for Mastodon. As the organisation still has very limited funding, this is currently still a volunteer position.

That’s all for this week. If you want to receive this update every Sunday directly in your mailbox, subscribe below:

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-39/

#activitypub #bluesky #fediverse #mastodon #wordpress

LaurensHof, 7 months ago to fediverse

A bit of a slower week on the fediverse, and a busier period over at Bluesky. Let’s get to it:

Bluesky update

Last Month in Bluesky – September 2023

Mastodon Annual Report

Mastodon has released their annual report for 2022. It provides some valuable insight in how the organisation is run, and how little money you actually need to build a great social network. It is also a bit of a trip down memory lane, as in the last 9 months, lots has already changed again.

The financial statements provide as clear of a story as possible of the twittermigration that happened at the end of October 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter. The spike in donations is massive; the organisation grew from an average 7k EUR/month of income for most of the year to a sudden 132k EUR in November and 50k EUR in December. We’ll have to wait for the next report to get a better understanding of how these numbers have settled down.

Most of the income comes from donations (326k), with another 19k funding from the Prototype Fund and 43k from the NLnet foundation for reaching specific milestones. One things that’s worth pointing out is that one of the milestones of the NLnet funding is for implementing groups. This feature is mostly developed in August and September of 2022, the code is available here on Github. A few items on the todo are left open. There has been no developer work or comments being made on this since October 2022.

The report also mentions the work that has been done on software, both on the web and on mobile. Features that are now mainstay of Mastodon and hard to do without, such as editing of posts and following hashtags, were all added in 2022.

Compared with the 2021 report, the team has only grown by one extra iOS developer, for a total of 8 people. Of those 8 people, 2 are working on actual features: Eugen Rochko (besides his other many responsibilities) and Claire. The renumeration of everyone has gone up compared to 2021. However, the overall numbers are still very low compared to the US tech industry. Mastodon spend a total of 80k EUR on personnel expenses, which is less than half the average software engineer salary in San Francisco. It is a great indication of how impactful a small and passionate team can be.

In other news

Lemmy has provided their regular update again on their development work. They are working towards the next update, v0.19, which will be released soon. Part of the update is the ability for users to block other servers, something that is currently only possible as an admin. Here is a preview of how this will look. Other work is mainly technical in nature, as well as an update for the join-lemmy.org website. The update will create breaking changes for other developers, which are listed here. The developers state that they will give at least 4 weeks notice in advance for breaking changes.

Mozilla is continuing work on their fediverse server mozilla.social. Although it is still in closed beta, it is seeing more and more use. Mozilla has also posted the repositories for the server online, as well as some job descriptions for the mozilla.social project. It seems that the server uses Elk as a front end. Currently the backend is Mastodon, but @Jeremiah spots that the job listing for backend engineers asks for different programming languages than Mastodon currently uses. Interestingly, their repository also list iOS and Android apps that do not seem to be forks of any current apps, and suggest that the are building their own apps.

The links

• A one-month update on Postmarks.
• ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou writes about ActivityPub, the social web, and the issues with competition by other protocols.
• Fediseer now allows servers to self-tag, helping self-reporting. @db0 explains why this might be helpful: “For example, let’s say that you want your instance to be SFW, you could explicitly block any instance self reporting as “porn” or “gore” etc.”
• A simple Mastodon Bot Generator.
• Around 2% of accounts have opted into Mastodon’s search ability.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want to receive this update directly in your inbox, subscribe below:

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-38/

#activitypub #fediverse #mastodon

LaurensHof, 7 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – episode 37

Welcome to another busy news week. There are too many things happening nowadays, so I’ve decided to focus more on the larger stories that need more context, and spend some less time on simpeler news like links to new apps. There are some interesting new stories again this week, with the main story of Mark Zuckerberg comments on Threads enough for it’s own article. Let’s dive in!

Mark Zuckerberg on Threads and ActivityPub

The main focus of the week is on the comments that Mark Zuckerberg has made, as they provide some clear indications of his visions for Threads, and why he thinks Threads should interoperate with the rest of the fediverse. It’s a big enough topic for its own article, which you can read here:

Mark Zuckerberg on Threads and ActivityPub

Fediseer

Fediseer is project that has gained steam recently, and is another take on the concept of shared block lists. It is centered around the concept of a “chain of trust”. Every server admin can submit information, and validate other servers whether they are trustworthy or not. The project is centred around Lemmy, although it is not exclusively so, and other fediverse servers can also use the project.

Fediseer started in the summer of 2023 as a project by @db0. When he started a Lemmy server, he noticed that quite a few other servers were major sources of spam and bot accounts. In the blog post announcing the project, @db0 explains the process in detail, but the summary is as follows: server admins claim ownership of a server, and validate that other servers are not sources of spam. The thought behind this is, that during a spam wave attack (where bad actors can easily start new bot servers), an admin can move to a allow-list, where only servers can federate who are validated.

Over the last period, this project has started to expand, and is now used to share information about servers that should be avoided as well. It is also moving beyond Lemmy, with more and more other microblogging servers such as Mastodon showing up. This puts the functionality more into the direction of shared blocklists like The Bad Space or Oliphant’s block lists. A few features of Fediseer stand out from other projects:

• It creates three different negative classifications: Censures, which is a disapproval from server A to server B. This can be for any subjective reason, and is mostly used in a similar manner as blocklists are. The Censure list gives a good impression, as it is largely servers that on most blocklists for reasons like ‘hate speech’ and ‘pedopelia’. Hesitations are a a milder form of censures, and the list gives again a good impression of how people use this. Hesitations like ‘poor communication on reports’ or ‘repost-bot’ indicate that these are indeed milder than censures. Suspicious instances are algorithmically determined, and are mainly aimed at Lemmy instances that might be sources of spam.
• It allows admins to filter the lists based on which server contributed the hesitations and censures. This allows for significantly greater customisation, forcing every admin to consciously decide which other admins they trust to listen to their suggestions for hesitations and censures.
• There is significant community buy-in. Almost all large Lemmy servers are participating, as can be seen here. This makes it that proposed blocks/censures can better represent the Lemmy community at large.

Overall, Fediseer is an interesting take on the concept of sharing information about other servers to potentially block, especially with the large community buy-in from Lemmy. A project that is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Blogging resurgence

There has been quite a bit of activity again in the blogging software for the fediverse. WriteFreely is a free, open-source blogging project that has been around for a while. It is integrated with write.as, with provides a managed hosting server with paid extra features. Activity around the project had calmed down, with the previous update that had new features stemming from summer 2021. Now, WriteFreely has finally a new update out again this week, with features such as fediverse verification.

Meanwhile, PostFreely is a recently started fork of WriteFreely, by @reiver (who also runs fediverse hosting company SpaceHost) and @matthew. To get an impression of the direction they will be taking, their Lemmy post discussing the archetypes of people who might use PostFreely.

And in the background of it all is WordPress’ ActivityPub plugin. It recently went to the official 1.0 version. It has been available for people who run their own version of WordPress, with it coming soon to all blogs who run on WordPress.com, enabling millions of blogs to easily connect to the fediverse. I’ve been running it on both my sites, and it’s a great feature to have.

German state of Saxony starts a Mastodon server

The German state of Saxony has started their own Mastodon server at social.sachsen.de/. The server is intended for the departments and organisations that are part of the government of Saxony. It is run by the Saxon Data Protection Authority ( @sdtb ), who states: “I am pleased that I can provide public bodies with a data protection-compliant social network for their public relations work.”

I personally find it interesting to see that the agency originally started with their own account on the federal German government server ( social.bund.de/explore ), and have now decided to spin up their own server for the state of Saxony. It illustrates how the government servers can function as as example for others to follow and start their own social media servers.

Germany and social networks, continued

Staying with the theme of Germany for a bit, here are another four short unrelated news items about Germany and social networks:

• Cybersecurity expert Erik Uden appears on German public television at the ZDF, one of the countries largest independent broadcasters, wearing a Mastodon t-shirt, and receiving an internship at Mastodon as a prize at the end. My German is not good enough to fully understand what its about, but the YouTube broadcast got half a million views, so at least the Germans liked it.
• German Mastodon server Mastodon.de announces a large scale pro-Mastodon campaign, saying: “the aim of bringing selected people (including artists, actors, authors, politicians, …) as well as non-profit institutions to the Fediverse. This campaign starts in October 2023 and, in our opinion, is one of the most important steps to make the Fediverse more suitable for the masses.”
• Two weeks ago I noticed that Germans are heavily overrepresented compared to other Europeans on Bluesky. This effect seems even stronger now, with German posts regularly getting to the top most popular posts on the network during prime hours for the USA as well.
• Among the many crazy and evil things Elon Musk is saying, he is now also picking a fight with the German Federal Foreign Office, who isn’t having any of it. Ethical analysis of this here.

Together these separate strands of news all point towards a shift in German culture. There are many people who have pointed out the many misgivings and ethical concerns they have with Elon Musk’s X, but there are not many government agencies who have rebuked Elon Musk so explicitly as this German government agency did. At the same time, separate data points circumstantially indicate that Germans are at the forefront of movements towards other social networks, both Mastodon, and Bluesky.

In other news

The Activitypub.rocks community is undergoing a revitalisation project. The current website is still the official website for the ActivityPub protocol, and thus by extension, for the technical part of the fediverse. As the site has not been updated since January 2021, which is not particularly inviting for new developers. The reboot of the project is happening over at the Social Hub, and is a real grass-roots movements where everyone can participate and contribute.

@jerrytheadmin implemented Cloudflare’s CSAM scanning into both Mastodon and Firefish servers. CSAM scanning is an important tool for server admins, as both the Stanford Internet Observatory report and recent weaponisation of CSAM at Lemmy have shown. Cloudflare provides a CSAM scanning tool, but this requires an admin to register with NCMEC as an organisation. It also needs custom integration into the servers, as neither Mastodon nor Firefish provide standard functionality for this. I’ve reached out for further comment.

Thank you for reading! If you want to receive this update every Sunday directly in your mailbox: subscribe right here!

#activitypub #fediverse #mastodon #threads

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-37/

LaurensHof, 8 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – episode 36

Welcome to another busy week, with the FediForum conference, Mastodon 4.2 update, new safety tools, and more. Let’s dive right in:

FediForum

The update on FediForum got big enough to be it’s own post, which you can read here:

FediForum September 2023

Mastodon 4.2

Mastodon has officially launched the 4.2 update. With this update come a variety of highly anticipated features, such as opt-in search and a better onboarding experience. Here is the official blog post by Mastodon announcing the update. It has gotten a fair bit of media attention as well, with articles by The Verge and TechCrunch. Both focus on how Mastodon has gotten easier to use with this new update, via the onboarding process, but also via better interaction if you open a Mastodon post on a server that is not your own home server.

Mastodon has been focused on getting consent from people for being included into search. This is inherent in a decentralised platform; you cannot make any assumptions about other people who run their own server, as they are completely free to have their own preferences. This is not without drawbacks however, as searching tools become more valuable when they cover a larger percentage of the network. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko indicated that 14k people have opted into search so far, after that the search patch has been available for over two weeks on the biggest server, mastodon.social. This makes it less than 5% of active users that have opted into search after two weeks. Other fediverse software projects are following the design of Mastodon when it comes to opt-in search: Firefish recently moved to the same opt-in structure, and now Pixelfed has annouced to do so as well.

The 4.2 update comes with other great features as well. A personal favourite of mine in this update is the new option of exclusive lists. You can now set an account to be ‘exclusive’, and posts by accounts on this list do not show up in your home feed anymore, and you only see them while you’re looking at this list. I use this to add bots such as the mastodonusercount bot and the Alt Text Health bot to an exclusive lists. They are interesting bots with information that I want to know, but do not need to clutter up my home feed. Now, I can keep track of the information the bots send out, and only see it when I want to.

Fedi-safety

Recently, Lemmy has experienced multiple attacks where people weaponised Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), as I’ve written about here. By uploading CSAM to Lemmy communities, they expose the admins of Lemmy servers to significant liability, as well as hurting both the actual victims as well as the people who see the images.

One of the practical problems that admins face here is that automated scanning of images is possible, but locked behind large providers such as Cloudflare. For a small server admin it is not feasible to meet all the regulatory requirements to be able to partake in such automated scanning. Beyond that, people are hesitant to use Cloudflare in the first place, as it does mean that all your content gets scanned by a large tech company. One part of the things these scanning tools do is compare images that get uploaded Lemmy for example against a dataset of known CSAM. As such, access to these tools is often highly restrictive

@db0, who also created the AI Horde, used the knowledge he build up there to create a tool called Fedi-safety. This tool allows admins to scan their database for CSAM. Instead of comparing against an actual dataset of CSAM, it instead uses the abilities provided by generative AI tools to determine if an image contains both sexual content as well as depictions of children. @db0 has a more detailed explanation here. In the description of the Fediverse Safety tool, he explains that “this tool will have a lot false positives”. False positives means in this case the tool will classify an image as CSAM when it is not. Considering the costs that come with having false negatives (an CSAM image does not get classified as CSAM), this might be a worthwhile tradeoff for admins.

Now, @db0 created the another update, which is integration of the fedi-safety tool directly into Lemmy. Once it is installed, the scanning of images now happen when a user tries to upload an image. When the scanner thinks the image is unsafe, the image cannot be uploaded and spread around the network at all. As with the fedi-safety tool, it comes with the price of false positives. One thing that does stand out about it is that the scanning of images can be completely self-hosted on your own GPU. People can be hesitant about sending images to third party scanners. With this tool, the scanning can be done by the same server admin who you are already entrusting your image to. Another aspect that people worry about is if their content is used to train an AI. The fedi-safety tool does not do that, as it is completely locally run, and immediately deletes images after scanning.

FediGov

FediGov is an campaign that is started by the Free Software Foundation Europe, with the goal of convincing public authorities to rethink their use of social media. The initiative hopes to convince more governments to use the fediverse, suggesting that they use Mastodon, PeerTube and Pixelfed instead. They list four main reasons why governments should do so: sovereignty, privacy, the use of public funds, and legal certainty. These arguments are noticeably similar to the arguments that the Dutch and Swiss governments recently gave when they introduced their own Mastodon servers this summer. Especially the arguments around sovereignty and privacy were explicitly mentioned as core reasons for the Dutch and Swiss governments to start their Mastodon pilots, indicating that this is indeed strong arguments for the FSFE to focus on.

The links

• IFTAS is offering funding for personal digital safety services to fediverse moderators.
• An excellent guide by WeDistribute on how to connect your WordPress blog to the fediverse.
• Kbin has restricted federation to only other Kbin and Lemmy servers. Admin Ernest cites “recent spam campaigns, untested features, and the lack possibility of quick fixes on the new infrastructure” as the reasons.
• Talking about Kbin, @reiver documents his experiences as a new Kbin admin here.
• Flipboard is working on full federation. This is fairly exciting news, and something I’m sure that will be revisited soon.
• Renaud Chaput is now officially the CTO of Mastodon.
• MissKey, not to be outdone by Mastodon’s major 4.2 update, has a major update as well. The patch notes are only available in Japanese, here, further reinforcing the concept that MissKey is primarily for the Japanese side of the fediverse.
• Lemmy is starting with a bi-weekly development update. The first version is here.
• Evan Prodromou posted some comments about the SWICG rechartering process. This week saw another meeting of the SWICG as well about this. I could not make it, and have not gotten around diving into this. Expect an update on this next week.

Final note

On a final note: last week I promised an update on the situation with The Bad Space. After spending quite some time on it, and realising I still had not a full overview of the entire situation, I don’t think I am in a situation where I can give a fair and balanced overview of the situation. The situation cannot be seen independent of both a historical context, as well as a larger analysis of block lists in general. This is not something I can provide at this time. Thank you for your understanding.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want to receive this update every Sunday directly in your mailbox, subscribe below!

#activitypub #fediverse #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-36/

LaurensHof, 8 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – episode 35

A packed week; Switzerland joins the fediverse, discussions on how to organise the group responsible for the ActivityPub specification, thoughts and developments regarding Lemmy and governance and more! This week also saw major conversations on the feeds regarding blocklist, and especially The Bad Space, with discussions and allegations getting quite heated. I’ve decided to move my writeup of the situation towards next week; getting a bit of distance in time helps me with doing the situation justice.

Switzerland joins the fediverse

The Swiss government has officially launched their Mastodon server at social.admin.ch! In the press release (not available in English), they state that this is a pilot test that will run for one year. The server is intended for the Federal Council and the government departments.

Some departments that have already registered an account include the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Home Affairs, and the Department for Economy, education and research. Swiss’ multilingual culture poses an interesting challenge; in which language will the accounts posts? The Department for Foreign Affairs maintain a separate account for English communication, with the other account posting in German, French and Italian. The spokesperson of the Swiss Government, André Simonazzi, also has an account, and posts in all four languages.

In the blog post announcing the new server, a few characters are listed as to why Mastodon is ‘fundamentally attractive for government communications’. They point out that decentralisation avoids the control of both an individual company and state censorship authorities. The privacy friendliness, and the transparency towards data is also mentioned as a positive.

For people who have been active on the fediverse for a while, this idea of freedom and independency is not new. What is striking however, is that we are seeing a shift towards governments also realising this. The value of digital autonomy for government entities is cannot be overstated enough.

Meanwhile, the Dutch government is actively working on their Mastodon pilot as well. In a post they echoed this sentiment of digital autonomy, adding that dependency on other platforms can harm public values. They also state that the goal of their Mastodon pilot is to get all (!) governmental organisations to be a part of it, reiterating that they are trying to find out if Mastodon can help the entire government (“de hele overheid”) reach their citizens.

The SWICG had a meeting about restructuring

The Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG) had a meeting this week, and one of the items that was being discussed is the potential restructuring of the group. This is a fairly relevant and important discussion, but the meaning of this might need some context: the W3C is the main organisation that is responsible for internet standards, such as ActivityPub, but many others as well. They can start Working Groups, who can produce official recommendations for internet standards. Between 2014 and 2018, the Social Web Working Group worked on the standards that power the fediverse, and in 2018 the W3C officially published the ActivityPub standard as a recommendation. The Working Group, having completed their recommendation, spun down, and started the Social Web Incubator Community Group, which maintains and coordinates work on the Social Web standards.

The main relevant difference between a Working Group and a Community Group, is that a members of a Working Group need to be either part of a organisation that is a (paid) member of the W3C, or be invited in as an Independent Expert. A Community Group is open to everyone. A Working Group can publish updates to the official documents, while a Community Group can only publish errata and clarifications.

The basic tradeoff can be summarised as follows: people feel that the standards as they are currently published need updates and work. This is hard to do with the mandate of a CG. Rechartering a WG enables more updates to the standards and protocols. This comes at the cost of openness however, as anyone can join a CG, and the ability to join a WG is significantly limited. As typically the criteria for being a member of a WG is to either be an employee of a W3C member organisation, or to be invited in as an Independent Expert, this might give participating organisations and companies more influence than independent fediverse developers.

The discussion on this will continue on Friday 22th (1300 UTC) with the next meeting of the SWICG.

Lemmy Governance and Beehaw doubts

Lemmy is working on making the process for changes more democratic, by adding RFCs. RFC stands for Request For Comments, and are meant to describe how major new features can be implemented in the software. By first explaining the potential changes, and allowing everyone to comment on them, more people can get involved in the process. Announcement here, directory here.

Meanwhile, the Lemmy server Beehaw.org is having doubts about continuing to use Lemmy. The Beehaw.org server is a Lemmy server with strong moderation standards that has been around. Ever since the new influx of users, they find that the moderation tools of Lemmy are too limited to properly deal with all the moderation work that needs to be done on posts and users that enter Beehaw via other, less well moderated, servers. They also list the lack of acknowledgement of the Lemmy developers on the seriousness of these issues as contributing to their hesitation to keep using Lemmy. A few weeks ago I reported on the issue of CSAM on Lemmy. The admin of Beehaw posted about the impact this had on their mental health, and by extension, on the urgency to look for a platform with better moderation tools. The Beehaw team expect that it will be in the order of months before a jump to a different platform is made.

WordPress and ActivityPub

The WordPress plugin for connecting a website to the fediverse via ActivityPub has officially launched in a 1.0 version. It comes with a variety of new features that further accentuate the social nature of connecting a blog to the fediverse. It allows you to follow the entire website now, instead of a singular author. It also gives you the option for an easy ‘follow me’ button, so that people can easily tell that the WordPress website is a part of the fediverse. Or showcase it with a ‘followers’ block.

The biggest news however, is that this plugin will soon also come to WordPress.com. So far, it is only available for people who do self-hosted versions of WordPress. The support for WordPress.com is “coming soon”, and will greatly expand the number of people who can make use this to connect their website to the fediverse.

For more detailed info, check out WPtavern’s blog about this. WeDistribute has an detailed guide on how to use the plugin, and use it to enable comments from across the fediverse on a WordPress blog.

The links

• Kbin creator Ernest gives a status update about the work on Kbin, as well as the amount of pressure the work brings.
• iOS app SoraSNS is already one of the more interesting fediverse apps in development, that supports a variety of platforms and has interesting ideas with algorithmic timelines. It now supports Bluesky as well.
• Bonfire is an interesting upcoming microblogging platform for the fediverse. They’ve announced that they are working towards 1.0 in the coming months.
• WriteFreely has not seen major updates recently, with updates and pull requests , and a PostFreely is a new fork that has started to been worked on.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-35/

LaurensHof, 8 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 32

Search is really, actually, finally coming to Mastodon. By far one of its most discussed and requested features, there is now finally an implementation that fully accounts for people’s consent to opt-in to being indexed. How Lemmy’s community is evolving, and grappling with conversations about defederation and blocking continues to be a major focus for me. Beyond that, how software forges like now GitLab are working on becoming part of the fediverse is something to look out for, how this will impact the idea about what the fediverse actually is. Speaking about ‘fediverse’, I wrote an article about its multiple meanings this week, check it out! But first, let’s dive into this week’s news.

Lemmy follow-up

Last week I wrote about defederation and Lemmy, and the conversation is far from over. Some updates that are worth mentioning:

In last week’s update I mentioned that lemmy.world had defederated from the dbzer0 server. This is not correct, as lemmy.world only blocked the piracy community on the dbzer0 server. As this is by far the largest community on the server, the point that defederation decisions between two servers can meaningfully impact people on unrelated servers still stands. However, it does provide an insight in how these more granular controls for server administrators help curate and moderate their own server better. Lemmy.world admins are concerned about the legal liabilities of having content about piracy on their server, and they could solve it this way without impacting the other communities on the dbzer0 server. Thanks to @erlend and @Leraje on the feedback.

In another conversation about the server literature.cafe potentially defederating from the Hexbear server, I found this comment chain by @Janvier to be a worthwhile read. He makes the case for smaller servers to defederate from many large servers, and not only Hexbear, as a way for smaller communities to grow organically. It is an interesting and different vision of Lemmy; many smaller ‘islands’ that are only marginally connected, instead of one big platform that is tightly connected between the different servers.

In other Lemmy news:

• On the technical side of blocking and defederation: the ability for people to block an entire server is in currently in the works.
• New tools like defed.xyz and Defederation Investigator help give people insight into the current interaction between servers, and which servers have blocked each other.
• Lemmy Handshake is a new tool that makes it easier to manage multiple Lemmy accounts and migrate across instances.
• Two conversations about community duplication on Lemmy. Here is a discussion on how to approach the ‘fediverse’ communities that exist on multiple servers, and here a post on the duplicate Rust communities.

In other news

Opt-in search is really coming to Mastodon, and is now available in public beta testing, and already available on servers like mastodon.social. It is fully opt-in, and people have to manually enable a new setting ‘include public posts in search results’ under their privacy settings. Search has always been a contentious issue in Mastodon, even though other fediverse platforms have had it for a long while, often with full opt-in consent. The full opt-in nature of the implementation does satisfy people’s requirements for getting consent to be included in search results. It does come with the cost of increasing complexity for Mastodon; people will have to be told about the option, make a decision for themselves whether they want it, and then find the button that is 3 clicks deep in the personal preferences page. The new implementation does allow for advanced operators to be used, you can find them here on Mastodon’s Github. The uptake of people actually opting into being included in search results is definitely something to keep your eyes on.

Gitlab plans to add ActivityPub support. This is a project that has been years in the planning, but last week an extensive design document was posted. The project is split into five phases. The final goal is that you can use ActivityPub to submit merge requests across different instances. In order to get there, the first step is to implement ActivityPub for following activities. This means that you can see activity on Gitlab on your Mastodon account, for example. As @J12t notes, the project is tagged with ‘CEO interest’, and if a CEO of a 7 billion dollar public company wants to be in the loop, it is usually a good indication that this is a meaningful project for the company.

Due to a cascade of technical errors, three fediverse servers are permanently offline, affecting around 4 thousand people. The admin of the server has given a detailed explanation of what happened here, and why the situation is not salvageable. It is a painful reminder that there is a real tradeoff in entrusting your social media presence to volunteers. Even if these volunteers are highly skilled and motivated, there is a risk of things going wrong, which can result in the complete and permanent loss of your social media account without any recourse.

The links

• Pixelfed promises to add groups features next week, a feature that has been developed but never released since 2021. It will initially ship without federation, which will be added later.
• The parliament of the German federal state of RheinlandPfalz stops posting to X and will use Mastodon instead.
• Pixels is an interesting demo application of what you can do with ActivityPub, a social canvas to draw pixel art together.
• @jdp23 points out the stark differences between instances for Mastodon’s growth numbers in the last three months: almost all growth has gone to mastodon.social, with other large instances gaining drastically fewer signups, and decreasing MAU, versus increasing MAU on mastodon.social.
• A deep dive into Firefish Groups, which are effectively group chats, and how this compares to features on other platforms such as Mastodon.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-32/

LaurensHof, 9 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 31

Welcome! It’s been a somewhat slower news week, over on the microblogging side of the fediverse, but that makes it up for a busy week of community drama on the threadiverse. Being a young platform that has recently had a massive inflow of new people means figuring out as a group of communities on how to interact together. Lemmy is now seeing this process play out, with multiple ongoing conversations and issues around defederation. Let’s dive right in!

Defederation drama on Lemmy

Over the last few weeks, multiple Lemmy servers have either defederated from each other, or held discussions about defederation. These decisions and conversations have been for quite different reasons, but there is some underlying common threads in the conversations around it. Decisions by individual servers to defederate is usually something I prefer not to report on, but in this case its worth noting the community’s response to it.

A quick rundown of the different events: A Lemmy server decided to defederate from Lemmynsfw.com, a Lemmy server that is dedicated to porn. The NSFW community made a thread (here, but might be down) to complain about the defederation decision. Lemmy’s largest server, Lemmy.world has defederated from a large server that is dedicated to piracy, citing regulatory reasons. The decision was originally published in their discord, leading to pushback from their own community over both the decision itself as well as their communication methods. Finally, multiple servers have held open discussions about whether to defederate from Hexbear, with the end result that Hexbear in turn decided to defederate from one the involved servers. Hexbear is an active Lemmy server that has existed for multiple years seperated from the rest of the fediverse, and only in the last few weeks have turned on federation. The community is strong leftist, and formed after the ChapTrapHouse community got banned from Reddit.

What stands out in these separate events is the wider community involvements and opinion regarding the defederation decisions. On the microblogging side of the fediverse, drama between servers that leads to defederation is usually treated more as a something that only really affects the people on both servers, and people on servers that are not part of the drama either staying out of it, or offering commentary from the sideline.

In the threads on Lemmy dedicated to these decisions, lots of people from who are not directly impacted by the decisions chimed in. Part of this is the affordances of the software, which accentuates the idea that everyone can centrally respond to a specific topic. Another part of it is that defederation on Lemmy has a different and broader impact on the entire community than it has on, let’s say Mastodon. This is most visible in the case of Lemmy.world defederating from the large piracy community dbzer0. For the Lemmy community at large, the piracy community is more valuable the more people are contributing to it. So when the largest Lemmy community cannot contribute anymore, this decision meaningfully impacts the people who are not part of neither the lemmy.world or dbzer0 community.

Community culture on Lemmy also differs from the culture that is more dominant on other parts of the fediverse. On microblogging platforms, defederation and blocking is framed in terms of safety and protection. On Lemmy and Kbin safety also plays a role, especially in the case of defederation between Hexbear and Blahaj.zone. However, defederation tend to also be framed in the context of censorship. The Lemm.ee server, a proposal to defederate from Hexbear was viewed much more critical, with comments focusing more on individual responsibility. In the other cases regarding piracy or NSFW content, people’s hesitation towards defederation gets framed even more in terms of censorship. Overall it feels like the broader Lemmy community is still searching for a shared communal attitude towards when defederation is a proper tool to be used, if such consensus can even be found.

In other news

The Nivenly foundation announced that Kris Nóva has passed away. She was the driving force behind the hachyderm.io server as an admin. She stepped back from that role and became the president of the Nivenly foundation, the ‘nonprofit on a mission to bring sustainable governance and autonomy to open source projects’. Her contributions and work with Hachyderm and Nivenly have made a significant positive contribution on the fediverse.

Bean, a Lemmy app for iOS has officially launched. One of it’s standout features is the ability to group communities into a single feed, although this is locked behind the paid version. The Lemmy developers relegated the decision on how to approach duplicate communities to well, the community, and this grouping in the client is one potential way of dealing with the duplication. In a short conversation with the developer, he said he expects to add Kbin support as well, once the Kbin API officially releasesand that other Lemmy apps will do so too. This might hopefully avoid the microblogging problems of the fediverse, where the vast majority of apps only support Mastodon and rarely the other microblogging platforms.

Red Planet Lab, a VC-backed startup, has released a demo of a Mastodon clone with a completely rewritten backend, in order to have it handle Twitter-sized audience (500M+ users). Their demo is done to showcase their product Rama, their new programming platform. Red Planet Lab promises to open source release their ActivityPub server next week. Backend architecture is not the only necessary requirement to have a success product however, as the recent shuttering of Cloudflare’s Wildebeest project indicates. It also has sparked a renewed conversation on the fediverse regarding server sizes: ‘what is a good size for fediverse servers, and can servers be too large?’

The links

• A Threads engineer posts about ActivityPub, specifically about putting in effort to learn about the protocol. From the thread, it seems there is a team of at least four engineers at Meta who are working on what they call ‘fediverse workstream from threads’. They express an interest in joining the Fediverse Developer Network as well.
• Mozilla.social, the Mastodon server of Mozilla that is currently in closed beta testing, seems to be using a front end client based on Elk as a user interface.
• A new cross poster that allows you to automatically post your fediverse posts to Bluesky as well.
• An update by Robert W. Gehl on his upcoming book “Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media”.
• Firefish continues its professionalisation steps with a new paid developer, sponsored by Spacehost. Spacehost is a new hosting service for fediverse software, with Chris Trottier being involved in both Spacehost and Firefish.
• The Verifiedjournalist.org project is looking for someone to take over the project.
• The University of Innsbruck has set up their own Mastodon server. (h/t for the tip @gunchleoc)
• WeDistribute has a great article on IFTAS, the organisation for Independent Federated Trust and Safety.
• An extensive article on hashtags by Chris Messina, creator of the hashtag. The article goes into detail on Mastodon’s proposed changes to hashtags.

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#fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-31/

LaurensHof, 9 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 30

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou asks. It’s a good question, and I’m not sure of my personal answer. I enjoy my time here, but I also see lots of opportunities for how things could be better. There have been some interesting projects this week of people working on structural improvements within the fediverse, on safety, testing and search. Plus, we take a look at how the Japanese side of the fediverse is doing.

Search in Mastodon

Search, and the lack thereof, on Mastodon has been a hotly contested issue for a long time. There are some technical challenges with implementing search in a federated contest, but the main limitation has always been social: how do you make sure that you have consent of the people who you are indexing? One option is to take the setting ‘Discoverable’, which indicates that your profile can be found by search engines and other discoverability services, and take all the posts by accounts that use the (opt-in) setting Discoverable, and return all public posts by that account. This is the approach taken by a custom patch created by @vyr, which as been used on the Universeodon server for a while.

Now, Eugen Rochko has proposed a similar change for Mastodon proper (without mentioning the previous work by @vyr), stating “It is my decision to unite all discovery features in one setting, because all of this stuff is an expected part of a social network and splitting it up into different settings that everyone has to opt-into one by one just to get the same behaviour they get by default on other social media seems like a bad user experience.”

The definiteness of the statement, and the lack of discussion (Eugen Rochko closed the comment section soon after) as well as the implementation itself lead to quite a bit of discussion from the community. These responses got taken up upon, and a new implementation got proposed a few days later. The current proposal for search is to have two separate opt-in options, one for the discoverability of your profile, and one for the discoverability of your posts.

This seems like a fairly optimal outcome, with full granular control and opt-in to get people’s consent. The process to get there though is more of a mixed bag. The way it is implemented also indicates that Mastodon struggles with its role as a community leader; a significant group of long-term Mastodon users also has feelings that are at best ambivalent about how the Mastodon organisation is run. By not crediting earlier work by others, and making unilateral executive decisions about controversial topics without community input runs the risk of eroding community trust and support in the project.

In other news

Official announcement of the Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP). The goal of the FSEP is “to reduce the administration burden for Mastodon admins, and increase safety for Mastodon users, by providing tools that will make it easy and convenient for admins and moderation teams to consistently discover harmful instances and protect their communities”. It is an interesting collaboration between multiple actors who are working on improving safety within the fediverse. Expect a more extensive report on this soon. For now, the proposal itself is worth reading.

The fediverse promotes interoperability between platforms and products and services via ActivityPub, but putting this in practice can be hard. For developers, there are scant little tools available to make sure that the product they are making is actually interoperable in practice. To help with this, the Social Web Incubator Community Group held a meeting about organising towards testing tools that developers can use to test is their platform is indeed interoperable with the other platforms. For non-developers who are interested in the fediverse, the most important takeaway is that for all its lofty ideals, getting full interoperability on the fediverse is really difficult. There is a lack of tools, documentation, but also knowledge of what tools actually are available is often lacking or hard to find. For developers, it’s worth checking the notes here, and the presentation by Johannes Ernst (@J12t)

The Misskey flagship server misskey.io reorganises themselves into a company, Nikkei Asia reports. Misskey continues to grow rapidly, especially in Japan. Misskey.io has recently restricted new signups to only people from Japan in order to be able to handle all the growth. I published a more extensive report on Misskey and the Japanese side of the fediverse this week, here.

The Lemmy developers held an AMA, and I wrote a report on the major themes in their answers, which you can read here. Much has been said about the political views of the developers, who explicitly identify themselves as Marxist-Leninist. What interested me was their views on software and the fediverse. And here they are surprisingly hands-off, something I did not expect beforehand. At some point they explicitly state that the fediverse “will grow whether we want it or not”, which surprised me, considering they developer the third most popular software on the fediverse. This gives them significant influence in whether and how the fediverse growth, but so far they seem reluctant to admit to this power.

The Links

• Mastodon starts selling merchandise, with most of the items already being sold out again.
• IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust And Safety, has written a blog post to introduce themselves, and launch another survey for a Needs Assessment.
• Wired has posted an extensive description of how to migrate your posts from Instagram to Pixelfed.
• Threads has added support for “rel=me” links, allowing you to verify your Threads account on Mastodon. The Verge has a simple guide on how to use this. What stands out is the comment by Threads developer Jessel, who says: “my hope is that folks take this as a sign that we’re embracing open standards seriously”.
• Techmeme continues to add further support for the fediverse. They’ve linked to fediverse accounts as commentary for a while. Now it also links directly to their Mastodon post for you to comment, like or share, similar how it links to their post on X.
• Lemmy held a Canvas event, similar to /r/Place on reddit, where people can place a pixel on a canvas every few minutes. Here is the final result.
• Tweakers is one of the largest Dutch tech news website. They published an article on all Reddit alternatives, going in large detail on both Lemmy and Kbin.
• An extensive wiki with practical guides for fediverse software.
• A tool to discover new Lemmy communities.

What I’ve been reading

This one is for the people who’re interested in the technical minutiae of how ActivityPub works in detail. Understanding ActivityPub is a very extensive and in-depth, three part guide on how ActivityPub works, and how implementation in both Lemmy and Mastodon work in practice. It is written in a style that makes it easy for me as a non-developer to understand what is going on exactly, I definitely learned a lot. It also comes with a custom modified Mastodon server, ActivityPub.Academy. It’s basically your ActivityPub masterclass; it is not casual reading, but it does teach you well.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-30/

LaurensHof, 9 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 29

Welcome to another episode! The BBC joins the fediverse, and content moderation remains the most important conversation in the fediverse. My unscientific vibe-o-meeter also sees more discussions around content moderation and the

The BBC has launched their own Mastodon server this week, announcing their presence in an extensive blog post. It is a private server, only intended for accounts from the BBC, such as Radio 4 and 5 Live. The R&D department of the BBC established the server as an experimental project that will run for six months. After that, the BBC will evaluate whether and how to continue.

In the blog post, the BBC talks about the challenges they have run into while setting up a presence on the fediverse. They note that explaining the decentralised, federated model is hard when people are mostly familiar with centralised ownership models, as well as the resulting questions about hosting user content. Moderation is also a bit of an open question, as it relies on trust that other 3rd party servers will moderate their users properly. The BBC comes from a model where they are responsible for comments (on their own website for example), and have all the necessary tools to moderate comments properly that do not meet their guidelines. Here, they are dependent on other server’s moderation to take action when required.

The entrance of the BBC into the fediverse comes at a time when news organisations are actively exploring how move forward with social media. The situation in Canada is most notable for this, as a result of Online News Act, Google and Meta will have to pay Canadian news organisations for posts made on their platform that link to their sites. Meta has been threatening for a while that the passing of this bill will result in them banning news altogether, and this week actually banned all links to news (both Canadian and international) organisations for all Canadian users. News organisations setting up their own social media server on the fediverse seems to be a possible way out of this impasse, but for now, nothing has been said about this.

Meanwhile, over at Meta, employees at Thread seem to be acute aware of the BBC launching the Mastodon server. A Threads engineer states, in response to the BBC news: “we’ve been following this news internally with excitement. no updates on our side to share yet”. Threads have consistently stated their intent to add ActivityPub support to Threads. They have also stated multiple times not to be interested in hosting news and political content. News organisations posting their own content on their self-hosted fediverse servers thus fits right in with Meta’s thinking. This is something I wrote about earlier as well, and Threads employees being excited about this scenario playing out further points into this direction of why Meta is stating to add ActivityPub support.

Another direction that the conversation around the BBC joining the fediverse was transphobia and server blocking. Many trans people feel uncomfortable with the BBC platforming explicit transphobia. As such, some servers decided to block the BBC Mastodon server as a response. This prompted some interesting and constructive discussions about the extend to which server admins should block servers. On a base level, freedom of association is one of the core principles of a decentralised social network, so people being free to block whichever server they prefer is the system working as intended. However, asking critical questions about if doing so meaningfully contributes to providing safety to your users is also a valid way of holding people accountable for the actions they take on behalf of others. If this is something that interests you, I personally found these two exchanges to be valuable to read, where in both cases, I find the value in the comments where people voice their differences.

The fediverse and CSAM, continued

In last week’s update I wrote about the Stanford report on CSAM on Mastodon, with an overview of the situation and the promise to keep track of what is happening in the fediverse as a response. WeDistribute also published an extensive article about the findings that is worth reading. It zooms in on the recommendations, and also places it into a larger context on what is at stake with regards to internet regulation as well.

The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group held a special topic call this week, about the Social Web and CSAM, where the Stanford report was discussed in depth. David Thiel and Alex Stamos, of the Stanford Internet Observatory were also present. Meeting notes and audio recording are available here. Some of my notes and takeaways:

Alex Stamos makes a distinction between three different problems: (1) finding, taking down and reporting CSAM where the material is known in databases such as PhotoDNA. (2) the same, but for material that is new or computer generated. (3) situations where the social media accounts of the victims children are actively involved in the creation of material.

For the first problem, infrastructure exists that institutions can use to automate the scanning, reporting and deletion of CSAM. This however is aimed at large organisations and is not build to handle a federated structure. The second problem is something that centralised social networks struggle with as well. The third problem is something that’s not really a part of the fediverse currently, as it is largely adults who use the fediverse, and it is currently mainly happening on Instagram. If the fediverse grows and different audiences join, this might change however. For now, Alex Stamos recommends focusing on the first problem; how to implement a centralised scanning service into a federated architecture.

Another point came up regarding the effectiveness of adding a standard scanning tool is. Here Alex Stamos is clear, stating that scanning for perceptual hashes is an effective way in greatly reducing people’s ability to trade CSAM.

Regarding the reporting of CSAM two problems are noted: a lack of reporting to NCNEC. US fediverse servers are mandated by law to file a report to NCNEC every time they take down CSAM content. It is unclear if this legal procedure is being followed. At the least, there is a lack of awareness and education for server operations regarding this. Secondly there is a lack of moderation infrastructure, both in automated reporting, as well as in ways to safeguard moderators against both CSAM and violent content. An example of the latter would be making images black and white and blurring, when automated scanning suspect it is an extremely violent video.

The work of IFTAS remains highly interesting to me, in this case the work on providing a centralised intermediary service for the thousands of server operators to gain access to automated CSAM scanning tools.

In other news

Software and other technical news

• Artemis, the first Kbin app for Android and iOS has launched in public beta.
• Automadon is a new iOS app that allows you to create custom shortcuts for your Mastodon account on iOS.
• Two new ways to bring the fediverse to your Apple Watch: Stomp allows you to see your Mastodon timeline (via TechCrunch) and Voyager reports having an app in Testflight to check your Lemmy account on your Apple Watch!
• Reddit third party app Sync is back, but as a Lemmy app.
• Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, reports that he has started work on an open source encrypted fediverse instant messenger, based on the Signal protocol.
• SpaceHost is a new managed hosting service for the fediverse, which donates a portion of net revenue to the software developers. It is still in early access, and starts with providing Lemmy and Firefish managed hosting.
• Cloudflare’s ActivityPub server Wildebeest is no longer being maintained, according to their GitHub.

Community

• Nivenly, the cooperative behind Mastodon server hachyderm.io, is having a community discussion and vote on how to approach distributed generative AI system. The blog Nexus of Privacy has an extensive writeup on the discussion and arguments within the community. The follow-up comment by author Jon points to the reasons why I’m linking to this: Community governance efforts are hard, and it’s worth learning from others how they have approached community governance.
• The Lemmy developers will host an Ask Me Anything on Monday August 7th, 15u CEST. The thread is already open to post questions in advance. The fediverse does not have a great mode of communication between developers and users, with communication either often happening on Github/Codeberg, or in random comment sections. Providing a more structured place for people to hear more from the developers is a good direction to go in.

What I’ve been reading:

• Mastodon’s Mastodon’ts. An essay on “how Mastodon posts work are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability.” To me, the lack of ability to remove replies on a post you’ve made is a significant barrier for institutions to adopt the fediverse. Harmful and racist replies can stay up if the admin of another server will not act upon a report, while a block does not prevent other people from seeing the reply. With the renewed interest of news organisations and governments into setting up a presence of the fediverse, it seems likely that this issue will become more pressing.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-29/

LaurensHof, 9 months ago to fediverse

Last Week in the Fediverse – Episode 28

Welcome back to another episode! I was still on holiday this week as well, but enough has happened that I wanted to give you a shorter overview of the most important news. It’s been interesting to experience the fediverse as a regular user that doesn’t try to keep up with all the news however. That’s why this episode is still short, focusing on a few highlights that stood out for me. Next week this update will be fully back, including some upgrades!

Mastodon and CSAM

The most important news is the release of a report by Stanford about the proliferation of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on Mastodon. The report looked at the public timelines of the top 25 Mastodon servers and found 112 pieces of actual CSAM, as well as over 1200 text posts mainly used to coordinate offsite trading of CSAM, all which is absolutely horrifying. The researchers also share detailed directions for future improvements that are worth reading.

The Washington Post is reported in detail on this as well. In the article it is not super clear that some servers such as Pawoo, a known bad actor, are commonly blocked. The Stanford report understandably is super limited in providing information on where exactly the information is found, but servers like Pawoo and some of the large Japanese Mastodon servers are the most common suspects. This lead to people voicing their frustrations that they felt like they were getting lumped in for a description of fediverse that does not match their view of fediverse (since they’ve blocked the server).

There are multiple frames of analysis here: the direct response by the community, the secondary response by the community by working on better safety features relating to this, and how this impacts the larger public’s understanding of Mastodon. I have not been available enough the last week to give a proper analysis of the direct response of the community, I’m regret to say. Responses seem to have varied wildly, from ‘the Washington Post article is a hit piece’ to large concerns about the findings. Personally I feel uncomfortable with some more negative responses that focus on mistakes and framing in reporting by news outlets, when in the end, there is a goddamn CSAM material on Mastodon and limited moderation tools to deal with it. I’ll be writing more how different community initiatives are being worked on to improve Trust and Safety and moderation tools, as well as how this report impacts the public’s perspective on Mastodon.

What turned people off Mastodon

Erin Kissane has done excellent research by asking people on Bluesky what turned them off Mastodon. Its an extensive look at 350 people who tell in their own words what turned them off Mastodon. Erin’s work is deliberately structured in a way that resists easy summarisation, so I’ll refrain from that with the urge to simply read it all, it’s worth it.

A few things stood out to me: Eugen Rochko’s responds to the line in the article ‘If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress.’ with ‘Not that far off the truth!’. The Mastodon post for this article got a massive amount of attention, virtually all of it positive. Considering the amount of critiques of Mastodon culture that are in the post, it is nice to see how open people are to the feedback. Thats not to say that everyone is open in all context, and the scolding behaviour that Mastodon is known for is certainly real. However, it shows there are ways to format structural feedback and criticism that are acceptable to the community.

Calckey rebrands to FireFish, with new forks.

Two weeks ago, Calckey rebranded itself as Firefish. An impressive part of this rebrand is how the main server calckey.social got transferred to a new domain, firefish.social, without impact on the users. For example, my new username is now laurenshof@firefish.social, but old posts that are still tagged with laurenshof@calckey.social properly refer to my account. Firefish has put in significant effort in individual account transfers as well. WeDistribute has a writeup on how to transfer from Mastodon to Firefish, which includes a full transfer of your posts, lists, blocks and mutes.

Arguments between the main developer and other contributors of Firefish lead to the creation of the hardfork Iceshrimp. Hajkey, which is run by the admins of blahaj.zone server, was originally a soft fork of Calckey, with several safety features merged back into Calckey. Lead Hajkey developer @supakaity announced that they will not rebrand, and go downstream from Iceshrimp instead. In the announcement post she mentioned that she recently got overruled when trying to implement a feature which was intended to improve the safety of a minority group. As such, she felt that Hajkey aligns better with Iceshrimp, and as such will position Hajkey instead as downstream from that project.

Other links

• The flagship server for Misskey, misskey.io, is experiencing rapid growth, adding 90k users in the last 2 weeks. Uncertainty around GDPR compliance has led them to discourage signups from European users, @darnells writes.
• Mastodon client Mammoth has added an algorithmic For You page. TechCrunch has a review of it.
• Mastopoet is a tool to share Mastodon posts as images, and specifically focuses on the design and visuals.
• A blog posts by @renchap, one of the Mastodon developers, on a vision for the future of Trust & Safety for Mastodon.
• The podcast Looks Like New talks about some of “Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms: Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub), Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos), and Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky).”
• The Podcast Moderated Content has a new episode with an extensive discussion on “safety issues with the Fediverse, how Meta might deal with them, and some potential solutions to get ready for the challenges without Meta effectively calling the cops on a huge number of instances.”
• PCMag has a review of Lemmy and Kbin.
• The EFF writes about the FBI raid where the server of kolektiva.social got seized.
• “The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem”.
• Lemmy has had a massive inflow of bot registrations in the last months. @kersploosh has a writeup of their work on getting admins to delete these suspicious inactive accounts, leading to a drop of 900k registered users for Lemmy.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-28/

LaurensHof, 10 months ago to fediverse

Making sense of Threads and regulation

There are many conversations happening in the fediverse regarding Meta and Threads, about their intentions, what the best approach of dealing with Threads is, and much more. One factor that is part of getting a better understanding of why Meta has launched Threads, and why they promise to add ActivityPub support, is the various regulations of Big Tech that are happening around the world. In this piece I take a look at three of them, to get a better understanding of how they can help get a better understanding of why Thread promises ActivityPub support. Two of these are European regulations, and it is no coincidence that Threads has not launched in the EU yet. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri explicitly gives the DMA and DSA as the reasons for not launching the EU, but does expect to launch there eventually.

Please note that I’m extremely not a lawyer, and all information below represents at best a limited understanding by a layman. It is best to see this post as a way to structure my own thoughts and understanding, that I hope might be of use to others. Any corrections and better explanations are much welcomed.

Digital Markets Act

The Digital Markets Act, DMA, determines if internet companies that operate in the EU are so big, that they classify as gatekeepers. Gatekeeper companies that want to operate in the EU have to meet certain extra requirements. The EU announced the preliminary list of companies that submitted themselves as gatekeeper early July and includes Meta. The EU will determine the final list on September 6th, after which the gatekeepers have 6 months to come into compliance. Two requirements of the DMA stand out in the context of Thread and federation: Gatekeepers cannot keep users locked into their ecosystem (data portability) and cannot treat their own other services and products more favourably (preferencing).

The article 6(9) deals with data portability:

“The gatekeeper shall provide end users and third parties authorised by an end user, at their request and free of charge, with effective portability of data provided by the end user or generated through the activity of the end user in the context of the use of the relevant core platform service, including by providing, free of charge, tools to facilitate the effective exercise of such data portability, and including by the provision of continuous and real-time access to such data.” (emphasis mine).

The phrases ‘continuous and real-time access’ imply for me that ActivityPub federation of Threads is a way for Meta to meet this requirement. GDPR requires data portability but it is not real-time and continuous. The practical implementation of current data portability according to GDPR is that you can export your Instagram posts, and import them in PixelFed, via a manual process.

The GDPR article on data portability does not require continuous and real-time access to data, and does not mention these terms. Assuming that Meta implements GDPR via only whats minimally required (big assumption here!), this implies that providing data portability via an archive export does not meet the requirements for ‘continuous and real-time’. With a surface level reading, it seems to me that using ActivityPub to allow account transfer to other platforms such as Mastodon would meet the stricter requirements of data portability.

Another requirement for the DMA is not preferencing your own systems and services. It is unclear if only being able to sign up with Instagram for Threads would qualify for this. This quote in The Verge explains the situation:

Georgios Petropoulos, Stanford Digital Economy Lab digital fellow, told The Verge in an interview on Thursday that Threads wasn’t an unambiguous self-preferencing case — but that it did raise concerns. “If it uses the existing popular products it has like Instagram, like Facebook, to promote this new platform, that could also be viewed as something,” said Petropoulos. “It’s not a clear violation of the self-preferencing obligation, but it could be considered this way.” The EU is expected to provide more guidance to companies this fall, potentially clearing up the confusion.

I personally find it hard to read article 5(8) in a way that implies that only being able to sign up for Threads via Instagram is according to the DMA however. It reads:

“The gatekeeper shall not require business users or end users to subscribe to, or register with, any further core platform services listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9) or which meet the thresholds in Article 3(2), point (b), as a condition for being able to use, access, sign up for or registering with any of that gatekeeper’s core platform services listed pursuant to that Article.” (emphasis mine).

Currently Meta (the gatekeeper) requires end users to register with Instagram (a core platform service) as a condition for being able to sign up with Threads (any of the gatekeepers’ core platform service). I would imagine that Threads will allow signing up with without Instagram before launching in the EU.

Digital Services Act

The Digital Services Act (DSA) goes into effect for social media platforms that have over 45m monthly active users in the EU, which Threads does not qualify for yet. The DSA is mainly focused on making online platforms safer for people, and give better user protection. The EU lists some of the obligations for online platforms here. These are obligations that Meta will have to make for their other products, such as Facebook and Instagram. As such it seems reasonable to assume that Meta can also do this for Threads. One requirement stands out to me:

“Measures to counter illegal content online, including illegal goods and services. The DSA imposes new mechanisms allowing users to flag illegal content online, and for platforms to cooperate with specialised ‘trusted flaggers’ to identify and remove illegal content;”

The main open question for me is, how these new mechanisms for flagging of illegal content interact with federation. If illegal content is posted on a platform that is not Threads, but does federate with Threads, how does that interfere with this requirement? I could not find much more that relates to both this specific new mechanism and federation.

Canada revenue sharing

The Canadian Online News Act requires Big Tech companies (‘digital news intermediary’ in the bill) to pay Canadian online news organisations to pay to link to their websites. In response, both Meta and Google have banned links to Canadian news outlets altogether. Meta holds a fair amount of power in this dynamic. Adam Mosseri goes out of his way to reiterate the stance that Threads is not interested in hard news and politics, because it contributes to significant extra political scrutiny and moderation questions.

If Meta indeed does not budge on this, Canadian news publishers will have to find a new way to reach their audience. How federation of Threads with the rest of the fediverse plays into this is an open question. For Meta it might be beneficial if a links to Canadian news publishers get posted on a different platform such as Mastodon, with the posts then potentially federating towards Threads users. This might prevent Meta from having to pay Canadian news publishers, while people on Threads still being able to see and click the links.

With a surface level reading of the bill (again, I’m not a lawyer and even more not a Canadian lawyer) two clauses stick out to me:

In the definitions of what a digital news intermedia is, article 2(1):

• digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada.

Personally I feel that the phrasing of this definition, ‘makes news content […] available to persons in Canada’, does not give Threads much room to differentiate between content that is posted on Threads, versus content that is posted on Mastodon and gets federated and read by users on Threads.

The definition of making news available, article 2(b):

• For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if […] access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.

The phrase ‘facilitated by any means’ seem to leave not much room for Meta to get around the issue of linking to news by federating with ActivityPub. My interpretation would be that it is not legal for Meta to show a Mastodon post in Threads if that post contains a link to a Canadian news site, without paying the news site.

Conclusion

This post has been helpful for me to get my own thoughts more clear on this issue. My takeaways:

• The provisions around data portability in the DMA are stronger than I expected. My guess is that they are playing a significant role in the deliberation of Meta to add ActivityPub support to Threads.
• The DSA is more of an open question to me. Federation with ActivityPub would seem to make compliance for Threads significantly more difficult.
• Regarding the Online News Act, before diving into it I assumed that federation of Threads would be a convenient workaround for Meta. They could let other servers host the content, while they do not have to deal with it, and Thread users can still read it. Now that I’ve looked more into the details of the bill I’m doubtful that this would be in compliance with the bill.

Any feedback or corrections would be much appreciated, as I’m far from an expert in these fields. You can find me @fediversereport. And if you want to receive a weekly update on whats happening in the fediverse right in your mailbox, you can sign up below.

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#activitypub #fediverse #lawstodon #threads

https://fediversereport.com/making-sense-of-threads-and-regulation/

LaurensHof, 11 months ago to RedditMigration

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 23

There are a few disparate trends that are currently happening in the fediverse, that are all influencing each other, but are not forming into one single clear narrative. Meta’s new project, named probably Threads (earlier codenames P92 and Barcelona) is on the verge of joining the fediverse in some capacity. How to approach Meta continues to be subject of debate. The growth of Lemmy and Kbin (nicknamed the ‘threadiverse’) is signalling a clear shift in the fediverse as well. Beyond the inflow of people itself, it also signals the power of federation and interoperability to people. People on the fediverse have largely internalised the concept that you can talk to other people that are also microblogging on different servers. But experiencing is something else, as this post described it:

“Until recently, I understood the theoretical practicality of an interoperable protocol such as ActivityPub. But being able to experience it in practice is truly something else.”

Readings on the #redditmigration

If you are looking for a writeup for the situation with Reddit, The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good overview here. It ends with a section on the move towards the fediverse, placing the move towards the threadiverse as a flight away from Reddit.

Lemmy developers @dessalines and @nutomic posted an update about Lemmy, detailing their experience over the last few weeks. Beyond mentioning the sudden growth, they also note that the way their financials are structured, this sudden large growth is detrimental to their finances. The developers work full time on Lemmy, and can do this via a grant from NLNet, that pays out if the developers deliver certain milestones. But this extra work due to the large inflow of people inhibits working on the milestones that pay money, which is an interesting side effect of how NLNet grants work. They also mention the critiques of being called fascists, and their alleged support of genocide. They deny these allegations, and call them slender, linking to two other posts explaining the history of Lemmy. These posts list (among other things) grievances with the politics of Reddit, but it is unclear how these posts refute the allegations that are made.

This article called ‘ talks about the issues at Reddit, and zooms in on the financial aspect. It is an important aspect that I feel is not discussed enough. Looking past the surface of all the drama that is currently happening, and you find that Reddit has raised 1.3 billion USD from investors who want a return on that money. As Reddit is currently not profitable, it is safe to assume that Reddit will feel like it has to implement other measures to improve their cashflow. It also seems likely that some of these measures might not be popular with users. In short, the financial side of the equation makes it likely that new drama with Reddit will surface, and with it, new waves of migration to Lemmy and Kbin.

This article by @jon, “Don’t tell people “it’s easy”, and six more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon”, has good take-aways and lessons learned for the new #redditmigration. It also points out that moves towards the fediverse happens in waves, something other people have also shown. This current #redditmigration wave is only one of the waves, and their will be others. (On the subject of migration waves, Chris Trottier recently pointed out the Japanese move towards Misskey as a highly underappreciated wave.) The article also points out the importance of developer values, something that is reiterated by this article on Lemmy and Kbin.

Some other links:

• A magazine around styling and altering the layout of Kbin, with this style being a good example of what users already have made. Here are some more examples.
• Two different websites that track subreddits that have migrated towards Lemmy or Kbin.
• Artemis is a new app for Kbin that is in active development.
• Memmy, an iOS app for Lemmy, is looking for feedback for a redesign.
• Some advanced and detailed statistics on user growth in the fediverse, focusing on Lemmy and Kbin.
• Lemmy and Kbin are seriously lacking in moderation features, as per this review.
• The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress works with Kbin.
• Lemmyverse is a Lemmy Explorer showing all the different Lemmy servers.
• An FAQ about Kbin for new users.
• Lemmy’s implementation of blocking is closer to muting.
• PixelFed is working on Kbin support.

The links

• The spreadmastodon website has officially launched. This unaffiliated project is aimed at reducing friction for people entering the fediverse. It allows for easy and direct signup to Mastodon. This currently leads to mastodon.social. They also launched a proposal on how to spread people towards other servers as well.
• Flickr is “definitely still considering” adding ActivityPub support.
• A book on 15 years of fediverse history. In Catalan, but open source and free to translate.
• Ebou is now open source. It is a cross-platform desktop client for Mastodon. Instead of organising posts in a feed, it organises posts by user, like a messaging app would.
• The Mastodon server home.social has shut down. Multiple admins of other servers had offered to take over the server hosting, but these offers had not been taken up upon.
• Owncast is looking for a UX designer.
• An essay on the #twittermigration, and the lessons to be learned from it.
• The fediverse hosted their own #fedivision party this week, where people could vote on the most popular songs created by fediverse users.

On other networks

A few links with news about other decentralized networks that might be of relevance:

• A vision for decentralized content moderation for Nostr. The core design thinking for Nostr is based around censorship resistance, an idea which is often in an uneasy balance with content moderation and safety. This proposal by nos.social provides a vision on how to deal with this.
• One of the developers for Bluesky, Paul Frazee, explains some of his current thinking on how Bluesky can implement hashtags. Direct link, and image screenshot here. Some ideas, such as placing hashtags in a separate field, might be of interest to fediverse software as well. Calckey already has a separate field, but no real away of making them less visually prominent. The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress allows you to add completely invisible hashtags to federated articles.
• A deep dive into the proposed federation architecture for Bluesky.

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#activitypub #fediverse #fediversenews #kbin #lemmy #mastodon #redditmigration #Twittermigration

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-23/