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LaurensHof

@LaurensHof@fediversereport.com

Consultant and writer on decentralised social media

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The Roundup – Episode 22

It’s been a hectic week in the fediverse, with lots of attention going to Lemmy and Kbin. The Reddit blackout focuses the spotlight both on other services (such as Lemmy and Kbin), as well as indicating the vulnerability of communities that are run by centralised for-profit service companies. As this situation is currently rapidly evolving, I’m bundling all news and development in another article later this week.

Meta has shown of more from their upcoming microblogging platform, that they’ve positioned as a response to Twitter. The Verge has the information. It confirms indeed support for ActivityPub, not just Mastodon. Earlier leaks were not 100% clear if their would be full interoperability with the entire fediverse or just some connection with Mastodon, but this latest information confirms that the upcoming app will indeed use ActivityPub. A potential name for the service seems to be ‘Threads’, which would interfere with current movements by people on the fediverse to call the Lemmy/Kbin side of the fediverse the ‘threadiverse’. The release date is ‘as soon as we can’.

Standardised block lists got some discussion again this week on the feed. A post went viral where Linux creator Linus Torvald told a user off for calling the New York Times communist woke propaganda. While people appreciated Linus formulating (among other things) his support for trans rights in his own words, it also raised questions about why Linus could interact with that user in the first place. It turned out that Linus’ server did not defederate yet from Poast, one of the biggest right-wing extremist servers in the fediverse, noted for extremely bad behaviour (as well as links to Truth Social, as discussed last week). @mekkaokereke raised the point, asking the question why blocking the worst of the worst servers is not a default setting for new server admins in the first place. He also offered a several suggestions about standard opt-in block lists for new servers. This got picked up by Mike Connor, engineering lead for Mozilla, who offered capacity of his Mozilla engineers to help implement such features. Mastodon’s infrastructure engineer @renchap in response to this offer that such changes are on the list for Mastodon, but that their resources are very thin. It is interesting to see multiple actors getting aligned on important safety and moderation issues. With Mozilla getting more actively involved with Mastodon, it’ll be interesting to see how Mike Connor’s offer will translate to actual features for Mastodon.

PixelFed news

PixelFed has been on a roll lately, with a significant amount of updates and changes:

  • The main new feature is Instagram Import, allowing you to import all your Instagram photos directly into PixelFed.
  • PixelFed is accepting and soliciting corporate sponsorships. So far a significant amount of funding for PixelFed came from NGIZero grants, as well as a lot of dedication and volunteer work by creator @dansup. Corporate sponsorships indicate that the project is reaching a new stage in its growth.
  • PixelFed now has their own blog.
  • A new (beta preview) website for the API documentation. The fediverse loves to advertise itself with interoperability between services, but putting this in practice can be surprisingly hard sometimes. Clear API documentation is of great help with this.
  • A new project @dansup is embarking on is ModDB, which is described as ‘Community Federation Moderation’. Details are scarce, but it seems to be a new way to share block lists between server admins.

The links

  • Bonfire (a federated microblogging platform, in alpha) continues to be worked on. A recent dev diary blog post goes into more detail about how federated groups work in Bonfire.
  • Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is working on a microblogging platform that centres around trust-based algorithm. He confirmed that ActivityPub support is on the todo-list, but not the first priority.
  • @box464 has a new tutorial out for working with Calckey plugins, this time to create snippets. Calckey plugins are one of it’s most under-utilised features, due to a lack of documentation, among other reasons. Creating snippets of text is also helpful with MFM art, another powerful Calckey feature that can be hard to use. For context, MFM is a markup that is specific to Misskey and Calckey, and can be used to create quite intricate imagery. Here are some examples, that can be reused much easier with such a plugin.
  • A call to help organise the next fediverse conference.
  • Jetpack, a plugin for WordPress, has made it easier to share posts directly to Mastodon. In the announcement post, the creator says that Automattic is approaching the fediverse from both sides: either native support with the ActivityPub plugin, or easier sharing with Jetpack. Support for other microblogging platforms beyond Mastodon is being worked on as well.

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-22/

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The Roundup – episode 21

Welcome to another edition of The Roundup! I’ve mentioned this blog post by Signal a few times before, and will do so again. One of the reasons why I think it is so relevant, is that it shows how the same communication platform is used it wildly different ways in different geographical regions, with people often not even realising that this happens. This already happens when everyone uses the same app, Signal. I’ve pointed out before that this effect must therefore be even stronger on the fediverse, where people are not even using the same app.

This differentiation in the fediverse is starting to play out in more and more pronounced ways. For most fediverse users in the Western world, the fediverse is tightly linked with Mastodon. But the Japanese fediverse community is growing extremely rapidly, mainly using Misskey. It has grown in less than half a year from 75k accounts to 325k accounts. Not only that, people on misskey.io love to post. Compared to Mastodon’s biggest server, mastodon.social, people on misskey.io post 12 times as much!

The language barrier between English and Japanese contributes that these groups do not overlap much, with people often not really knowing what happens at the other side. Still, if you want to understand the fediverse, its getting harder and harder to ignore Misskey. We used to have a moment where people referred to Misskey and Calckey as *key, but with Calckey getting a rebranding and name change soon, the field of fediverse microblogging clients keep expanding.

Discussion platforms

Beyond the expanding scene of microblogging services is the field of forums and link aggregators. Reddit’s changes to their API pricing, effectively killing 3rd party apps, has a lot of people upset, and some are looking for new places to go.

Lemmy is one of the main recipients of the new inflow of people. As an illustration, Beehaw.org is a small Lemmy community that is focusing on being a safe and diverse place. They have had to restrict signups after their user base doubled in the last few days. Lemmy has an Android client, and an iOS client that entered TestFlight beta a few weeks ago. Another project to work on a read-only client for Lemmy is underway as well. Lemmy is not without controversy though; the large account FediTips voiced their concern about the politics of the developers, regarding the denial of human rights abuses. As one of the largest Lemmy server explicitly states that they like Stalin, and some developers of Lemmy associate with this server, it is understandable that people are hesitant to recommend Lemmy. For a more in-depth article regarding this, as well as the context where this happens regarding Reddit’s changes, as well as the potential for Kbin in this, I recommend this article by @jayeless.

Forum software Discourse has been working on a plugin to enable federation, and the first version of this is available. As of now, it only publishes a note to the rest of the fediverse when a new topic is created, and does not allow for the federation of comments yet. The ActivityPub Social Hub is one of the first forums to make use of this functionality, so you can now easily see on your fediverse account when new topics are created.

The links

  • Mastodon is featured on the Apple App Store. It describes Mastodon in fairly good detail, and links to popular client apps such as Ivory and Mona.
  • Mozilla.social is the Mastodon server by Mozilla that is currently in closed beta. Mozilla is focusing on content moderation, and trying to make it a nice and friendly place on the internet. They are hiring a senior director of product to lead mozilla.social.
  • Trunks is a Mastodon app for iOS, Android and web client, and after 5 months in beta has now officially been released.
  • An excellent article that goes into the details of making an app for the fediverse, and the practical complications with interoperability. While in theory all apps should talk with each other via ActivityPub, getting the details correct for the implementation turns out to be quite a bit more complicated.
  • Web browser Vivaldi has been running their own Mastodon server for a while now. In a new interview, the CEO talks more about federation and running their own server.
  • An overview of the top 30 most popular servers that relate to the fediverse in some way. This list takes the widest possible interpretation of fediverse. Quite a few people will disagree with including Truth Social on the list for example, as it does not federate. I personally see this list as a good overview of what is out there, even though I hold a narrower definition of fediverse.
  • Bonfire is a microblogging client that is still in alpha testing, that focuses on circles and boundaries. A new blog post explains their thinking in more detail.
  • Calckey has the feature to add plugins. This is barely used, as their is little documentation on how to make plugins. Jeff Sikes has been building plugins, and documenting the process on how to make them.
  • Owncast celebrates its 3 year anniversary with a major update.
  • Fedified’s Elk fork continues to go into its own direction, now adding trending posts from feditrends.com.
  • PixelFed has updated their onboarding process for new users. One notable thing is that they use the word ‘communities’ to describe servers/instances. Personally I think that is a great term that makes it easier for new users to understand what is going on with federation.
  • John Gruber might have some mixed feelings on Mastodon (stating last month that Mastodon is doomed to relative obscurity, compared to Bluesky), but still implemented federation for his blog Daring Fireball.

Beyond the fediverse

Quite a lot of news this week that is not directly about the fediverse, but still relates to it in some way.

  • On Bluesky: This article by The Intercept answers some basic questions about Bluesky in an detailed manner, such as who exactly owns Bluesky. It also reiterates Bluesky’s goal to federate with other servers that run ATproto. If/when that happens, bridging to the ActivityPub fediverse is all but guaranteed. This will complicate the question about what the fediverse entails even further.
  • Bluesky, continued: Bluesky has a roadmap update. They give a shout out to an extension Skylink, that shows you if a domain that you visit while browsing is used as a domain on Bluesky. This is pretty much the exact thing as the StreetPass extension for Mastodon.
  • One of the servers in the far-right server cluster that include places like Kiwifarms suffered a databreach, which includes leaked DMs. The Daily Dot reports that the DMs show that Alex Gleason is working closely with Trump’s Truth Social as well. This in itself is not surprising news, as both platforms use the Soapbox front-end, of which Alex Gleason is the creator. Gleason claims that this information was public all along. The story by Daily Dot did bring this connection into the spotlight, with outlets like Yahoo also reporting on it.
  • WordPress.com has launched paid newsletters in a challenge to Substack. This is not fediverse news, for now, but the impact might be visible in the fediverse later on. WordPress is actively working on further integration into the fediverse with their ActivityPub plugin. Substack has so far not focused on interoperability with other platforms. Their new microblogging platform, Notes, does not interoperate, for example. How this will play out is uncertain, but worth watching.

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-21/

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The Roundup – episode 20

Welcome! It has been an interesting week in the fediverse, with some events that will play out over longer timeframes. Conversations about defederation, but also a growth in tech projects that go beyond microblogging, and the continuation of developer organisation. Besides that, it took around a month for Mastodon to add another million accounts, crossing the 12 million line this week.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about Meta’s new project Barcelona, a microblogging platform that (allegedly) interoperates with the fediverse. One of the main questions is if servers on the fediverse should interact with this new platform, or if they should defederate from Meta’s projects. Quite a few people have vocally advocated for the immediate and full defederation of all Meta’s projects on sight. The power of the fediverse is that every server admin gets to set their own rules, and that there does not have to be full consensus on policies. However, for people who fear that Barcelona is a full Embrace-Extend-Extinct project that can only be thwarted by avoiding content altogether, the result of the latest poll might spell bad news:

https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/image-1.pngA 4k response is a pretty high result for fediverse polls. Anonymous polls cannot be a fully representative sample, but there is a good case to be made that the selection bias is probably in favor of people who are opiniated about the subject. This makes a full-on defederation by the entire fediverse quite unlikely and not particularly effective at preventing EEE.

In the meantime, an article by Johannes Ernst places some question marks with the assumption that the Barcelona project will fully implement ActivityPub. A careful reading of all the leaked information does not definitively confirm it. It might be that Meta implements a connection with Mastodon in a more asymmetric way, which would complicate the question even further.

In other trends that is worth keeping an eye on, is the continued integration of cooperation of fediverse developers. Until quite recently, coordination on fediverse work mainly happened on the social hub for ActivityPub, with only few developers who worked on implementation actively participating. Now the is a large Matrix Space, with channels for most fediverse projects, as well as more conversation space for the fediverse in general. There are also regular meetings (next one May 31st), and a conference later this year.

Beyond microblogging

While microblogging has gotten by far the most attention as the main form of communication on the fediverse, new projects are also springing up that focus on the forums.

Kbin is a federated link aggregator, similar to reddit. The main public instance is available at kbin.social. It also integrates with Lemmy, the other link aggregator on the fediverse. Kbin is currently in active development, adding features such as ‘magazines’, and even has it’s own extension already. The project recently got funding from NLNet, and released an accompanying roadmap. It is still early days in the project, but it is fully functional and usable. An interesting and exciting project that will certainly be checked in with later to see how it is progressing.

Besides Kbin, there are now three other forum software projects that are adding federation: Flarum, nodeBB and Discourse are all working on integrating ActivityPub into their current forum software. All the projects are still in early development. However, it does provide a clear indication that if you want to think about the future of the fediverse, you should think beyond just (micro)blogging, as decentralized forums are close on the horizon.

PixelFed is also rapidly shipping changes and updates. Most notable are post editing, better tools to handle spam (including Advanced Autodetection of spam), account verification in the similar style as Mastodon, and Place tags. Even more features are being worked on, such as Stories, Loops and live streams. There is also an interesting parallel between Instagram and it’s tightly connected Barcelona project, and PixelFed and it’s tight connection with Mastodon (and other fediverse microblogging platforms), especially since there will be a connection between them soon. How this will all play out is worth watching.

The links

  • The Linux Experiment has an excellent video about Framasoft, a French NGO that is quite impactful in the fediverse, even though their name might not be very well known. They are behind the fediverse projects PeerTube and Mobilizon. The Linux Experiment also hosts their videos on both YouTube and PeerTube, which is cool to see.
  • Flipboard is continuing with their integrations into their app. You can now use Bluesky and Pixelfed accounts via the Flipboard app.
  • Bridgy Fed is a service that turns your website in your own fediverse account. Developer Ryan Barrett (@snarfed) is looking for feedback on the draft for the further bridging with the other open protocols like ATproto and Nostr.
  • The jointhefediverse.net project is looking to translate into different languages.
  • Mastodon app Mammoth has created a personalized people search tab for people who use their instance moth.social.
  • Calckey continues to become a serious player in the fediverse. It will soon change it’s name, as the main developer Kainoa feels its not right to have the project named after him anymore now that there are so many other contributors. Work is also slowly starting to completely rewrite the backend, as it currently consists of a lot of legacy code from Misskey.
  • The European Commision has supported many fediverse projects via NGIZero. This infographic has an overview of all the projects that are supported.
  • Fedilabs is one of the earliest apps for the fediverse, and is now 6 years old!
  • Ivory is a premier Mastodon app for iOS, that is now also available on Mac.
  • Martin Holland has diligently been tracking traffic to the German news website heise.de for both Twitter and Mastodon, and sharing the data in great detail. This is the latest update.
  • Akkoma now has granular controls about the accounts you want to receive private messages from.

The poll

This poll sadly just closed before the newsletter, but the results are still worth sharing: Most servers are financially sustainable.

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-20/

screenshot of poll result

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The Roundup – episode 19

Happy 15-year birthday to the fediverse! One of the fascinating aspects of writing about the fediverse is how quickly the field is continually changing. One of the main theme’s of the last weeks relate to defederation. Questions came to the foreground about when servers should defederate regarding search policies and spam moderation. New questions are still waiting to be answered regarding connecting with other protocols, Nostr and Bluesky’s ATproto. Meanwhile, more news leaked about Meta’s new text based network that connects to the fediverse in some way, with people having drastically different attitudes towards connecting with them as well.

The latest info regarding Meta’s Barcelona project can be found here. While people on the fediverse have understandably focused on what this means for the fediverse and ActivityPub, the project should also be framed in a context of a Twitter competitor. The downstream effect of Twitter having a new real competitor on the fediverse is still an open question, but it seems likely that something that breaks Twitters dominance will also be good for the fediverse as well.

Meanwhile, Bluesky continues to grow and be its own thing. The culture of shitposting, centred around a main character (or theme) of the day, in order to get on the What’s Hot feed, is decidedly different than the posting culture that exists on the fediverse. This cultural difference will be interesting to keep in mind while people are trying to bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto.

The bridging between Bluesky and the fediverse are quickly progressing. Skybridge is a way to use Mastodon clients (such as Ivory) with your Bluesky account, allowing you to post to both networks with a single app. It got released a few days ago, and it is surprising how polished this experience already is. Dave Weiner, one of the pioneers of RSS, made his Bluesky feed into an RSS feed, allowing you to follow any Bluesky user as an RSS feed.

The links

  • One-click privacy-conscious post quoting with Elk. It feels like the debate around quote posting is largely over, and now it is a matter of slowly implementing and integrating quote posting into most fediverse software. This is one of the latest examples.
  • Tuba is a Mastodon client for Linux in active development. The latest release advertises that it has native support for Bookwyrm and Funkwhale previews. The fediverse advertises itself as a network that goes beyond microblogging, so it is interesting to see clients actively working on this.
  • The W3C SocialWeb Incubation Community Group had a meeting, here are the notes. Setting up communication channels like this shows that the interesting in ActivityPub is indeed finally gathering steam again. Coordination like this between developers is of great importance.
  • You can now verify your Wikipedia user page on Mastodon. Tim Chambers explains the importance of integrations between Wikipedia and the fediverse like this one, here.
  • PCmag tests out 18 different Mastodon apps, and recommends you the best one for specific circumstances.
  • Mastodon has had the groups feature on the roadmap for a while, and the feature has been available in the GitHub repo for months. Truth Social, which is build on Mastodon but does not federate with the rest of the fediverse, has decided to add this groups feature before Mastodon itself does.
  • A podcast interview with WordPress developer Alex Standiford on how WordPress and the fediverse can be combined.
  • Funkwhale has posted an April and May update. One of the interesting things is that they are starting work on an API for tools to synchronize podcast playback, and that they are working with podcast players like AntennaPod.
  • A tool to visualise your connections on the fediverse.
  • Micro.blog held a virtual conference, Micro Camp. You can rewatch the talks on their website.
  • fedi.software is a new server that is specifically to provide fediverse software projects a home for their accounts.
  • New_Public has an excellent deepdive in all the different decentralized protocols that are currently being worked on.
  • Calckey is working on the ability to import your Twitter posts.
  • PixelFed now has an autospam detection feature.

The poll

A few polls about how people choose their fediverse server. For Calckey users, here they are in an easy clip.

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-19/

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The roundup – episode 18

Mastodon has a reputation of being a platform that is for very serious conversations, with little space for sillyness and fun. This weekend’s Eurovision songfestival was a great opportunity for Mastodon to shed some of that reputation, as it turns out that people on the fediverse love Eurovision. At least 24k posts where made using the hashtag , where normally popular hashtags rarely get over 1k posts per 24h. It’s popularity also inspired a new fedivision, a fediverse song contest that starts in June.

The links

An excellent article by Annaleen Newitz (@annaleen) in the Atlantic, about how social media has entered a chaos era. It goes into theoretical concepts around federation and decentralization. One thing that people have trouble with when they first join the fediverse, is making the mindshift from centralized siloes to a real decentralized network. This article is a great help for that, without being bogged down by the technical details, and instead helps people focus on decentralization itself.

The European University Association gives a good writeup about pilot project the Dutch higher education and research organisations are doing with their Mastodon server social.edu.nl. An in-depth interview with Programme Manager Mufty is available on Fediverse Report as well.

Robert W. Gehl (@rwg) is writing a book about Mastodon and the fediverse. As part of the project, he takes a deep dive into the history of ActivityPub and how it came to be. Here is part 2, where he goes into the details of the meetings that lead to the creation of the standards.

Vocata is a new ActivityPub server in current development. It takes a different approach from other current software, in that in separates the server and the client, and is agnostic about the content type. This first part of the readme.md is absolutely worth checking out, even for nonprogrammers, as it goes into more detail about what the fediverse actually is.

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a familiar face on the fediverse, and the term enshiffitication has quickly caught on. This time he writes for the EFF, how in a time of decaying platforms, services on the internet can be designed to put users first.

Hannah Aubry (@haubles) writes for Fastly on specific tools devs can use to deal with one of the major issues of decentralization: content duplication.

Stefan Bohacek (@stefan) wrote an article about how the fediverse will ‘win’, due to the way it has figured out the money part. For good measure, he also released a tool to visualise your connections on the fediverse this week.

In PixelFed news: main developer @dansup proposed setting pixelfed.social as the recommended server for new users signing up, but reverted course after significant feedback. The hashtag was also temporarily blocked on Instagram, but the ban did not seem to last for very long.

Calckey news

Calckey is moving so rapidly it deserves it’s own section at this point. The developers are offering paid bounties for adding Calckey support to new or existing apps. An engineering lead for Automattic created a thread on adding Calckey support to their Jetpack plugin, which quickly lead to expanding the current ‘Share to Mastodon’ button to ‘Share to fediverse’ button. @shoq is recruiting a developer to build an ‘enterprise’ version of Calckey. The current design of Calckey can be quite loud and noisy, so while @shoq does not expand on what an enterprise edition might look like, a cleaner and calmer version might make sense. @supakaity has added new functionality regarding Content Warnings, adding the option to add a CW to a post you want to boost but does not originally has a CW. Other recently added features are post editing and better accessibility tools.

The poll

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-18/

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The Roundup – episode 17

Welcome to a new edition of the roundup. For the next few editions I´m experimenting with adding some more context to most news, to help you give a better understanding of why all the links are there. Lets get to it!

Crypto spam

Mastodon.social experienced a crypto spam wave attack. The attack took roughly an hour, and was one of the largest spam wave attack lately. This event brought multiple discussions to light again: the fear that mastodon.social is getting too big, leading to a re-centralization of the fediverse. This discussion has become significantly more pronounced since Mastodon decided to suggest mastodon.social as the server for people who register via the official Mastodon apps.

While this fear is understandable, the spam attack hightlights the conflicting forces in the debates about (de)centralization of servers. During the spam wave, an admin of another server publicly stated that they wished to be able to block mastodon.social during the attack, but couldn’t because of how large the server is. Other server admins opted to mute mastodon.social instead.

The difference between muting and blocking is highly relevant in this case: muting allows messages to pass between people who already follow each other. Blocking permanently separates the servers, meaning all follow and followers between accounts on the servers are lost permanently. This got some servers in trouble when they realized they did actually block mastodon.social instead of mute, and lost all their follow-connections from mastodon.social.

In other news

Bluesky continues to be a large subject of discussion, both on culture and about interoperability. The biggest change of this week is update to the Ikuradon app (Android and iOS). This Japanese app is a client for Mastodon, and the latest beta adds Bluesky support, allowing you to read messages from your Bluesky account all in the same app.

The Universeodon server has updated their signup process, helping people with the onboarding process and getting them to follow some accounts. Any process that helps new users with onboarding is always great to see. It also is an indication of a slowly building trend of servers trying to individually distinguish themselves with the technical services they offer.

The discover.fedified tool is rapidly getting upgrades, and now all Mastodon users can sign up for the directory. These discovery tools have historically been overwhelmingly focused on Mastodon, so it’ll be interesting to see if they can make the switch towards server-agnostic fediverse discovery tools. In an early encouraging sign is the fediverse.info directory, which is now advertizing that it supports Calckey too. The VerifiedX project (such as verifiedjournalist.org)is now expanding to third party applications as well, with the verified.thecanadian.social directory.

Mozilla is opening up the beta for their mozilla.social mastodon server. The announcement post is worth reading, and so is the coverage from The Verge. They position themselves clearly on the issue of content moderation. They are not trying to build a neutral platform, but instead are making opiniated choices about content moderation, with the goal of providing a nicer place to be on the internet. They do also mention the possibility of giving their server some UI love. What is not mentioned is their signup flow, as you log in directly with your Firefox account. This will make signing up to the fediverse significantly easier once the server gets out of beta.

Mastodon makes changes to the signup flow, setting mastodon.social as the default server if you sign up during the apps. This choice went live a few weeks ago, and has continued to be majorly controversial for a variety of reasons. In the end the argument is best summarized as a choice of decentralization versus ease of signup: the new design increases both centralization as well as user inflow, and it is a matter of personal preference to what extend they feel it’s worth making this tradeoff.

The blogpost also announces quote posts, search and groups, three features that are also sources of major discussion. It’ll be interesting to see in what format they will be shipped, and in what timeframe. One of the more interesting responses is by GoToSocial who sees it as a cutoff point regarding them supporting the Mastodon API.

The links

To read

@erlend has put out two blog posts this week that are both worth reading. Juicy clients is about how clients can become real clients for the fediverse and not just Mastodon. Sense-making in federated discourse is about how to organise information in an overload of posts that are hard to organise.

Erin Kissane’s (@kissane) essay ‘Blue Skies over Mastodon‘ has generated quite a lot of discourse on the feeds. It is an excellent critique on Mastodon’s issues with user focused product design, and what can be learned from Bluesky.

The poll

Annalee Newitz posted two polls with peoples biggest fears regarding the fediverse. The responses where quite varied with no excessive winners, which indicates that people see and fear quite a few potential struggles that can hurt the future of the fediverse. The result that stood out most is that of monetization, which got by far the lowest amount of the votes. People are clearly more worried about culture, such as volunteer moderator burnout than about building businesses on top of the fediverse.

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-17/

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The Roundup – episode 16

Welcome to another episode of the roundup. There is lots of discourse currently happening on the fediverse feeds, about bluesky, moderation drama, centralization worries, issues that Black users face with regards to racism, and so much more. I’m doing a bigger writeup of this soon, as it feels like fediverse culture is changing as we spead.

For now, I’ve started giving more context and opinion to the newsitems, to help you better understand all the links and things that are happening. This means a large list, so let’s dive right in!

The links

  • Work is starting on a protocol bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol (the protocol that Bluesky uses). Here is a work in progress (and another demo) of using your Bluesky in Mastodon clients, and there is also a group network starting up that is dedicated to working on bridges. This is one of the key stories of the fediverse at the moment, with massive implications down the line. Bluesky has a lot of energy and interest behind it currently, and being able to interoperate with the rest of the fediverse would be of great benefit to all parties.
  • The website for Calckey got a new update. Visually it looks great, and really helps sell the appeal of Calckey.
  • The opt-in account database at fediverse.info that helps you find interesting accounts to follow is live with a new update. The visual update looks great, and it can be helpful to find people, especially with some more niche hashtags. The popular hashtags feature so many accounts that it can be hard to know which accounts to follow.
  • The fedidb.org dashboard that gives an overview of statistics about the fediverse is officially launched as a 2.0 update. As I talked about earlier, there are multiple competing dashboards and API that all measure statistics on the fediverse. As fedidb.org is maintained by @dansup, creator of PixelFed, fedidb.org has the potential become the new standard in a set of conflicting standards, as the methodology is clearer, there is an API, and it comes from a trusted source.
  • Jointhefediverse.net is a new website that helps new users get a better understanding of what the fediverse actually is, and how they can be onboarded. This is a great project to see, and the fediverse needs a lot more. Explaining federation and decentralization is hard, and this is a good approach.
  • Calckey has been getting a lot more attention recently. Community manager Panos Damelos is working on gathering this energy into more collaborative development work. Like Panos mentioned, Calckey started as a personal project, and the earlier choice to get a community manager on board early in the process is a great step to scale the project.
  • Mike Masnick wrote a new article ‘Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options’ that is worth reading. It is an indepth look at the different networks and protocols, and has a good explanation of Bluesky as well. Its good to see that the fediverse gets stressed more, by not only mentioning Mastodon, but also giving attention to Calckey.
  • Flipboard interviews ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou. One of the things Evan is asked about is best practices and rules of engagements for creators. The fediverse, especially Mastodon, is quite notorious for having specific cultural standards that are not written down. Being put in writing about what people deem acceptable and not is important.
  • The admin of the hachyderm.io server steps down after conflicts with other server admins. @maegul has an excellent writeup of the entire situation. It is a sad situation, Krís Nova was an excellent admin and great contribution to the fediverse. @maegul has an good take on the situation, questioning the use of defederation as a weapon. I agree with them, and I feel this situation could have been avoided by having the other admins be more accepting of a slower decision making process, instead of immediately going for defederation. The best summary: “Once tens of thousands of people are affected, decision speed ought to slow down.” That this was not taken into account by other folks is painful and damaging.
  • The server mastodon.online, which is hosted by the Mastodon organisation, is switching to a nightly build. This means that all the latest updates will always be immediately available on this server. Here is a showcase of some of the updates that will be coming to the rest of Mastodon soon.
  • The Vergecast, the flagship podcast by The Verge, interviews Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about ActivityPub. Great episode to listen to, both hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce have been explicit about the value of ActivityPub (and thus, the fediverse), and its great to see this theme being continued. Worth a listen.
  • Micro.blog will support the Twitter API until July 15th, but now also supports crossposting to Bluesky. Micro.blog is one of the fediverse projects that often flies under the radar. It is a great product, that features a unique combination of both full blogs and microblogs.
  • Ars Technica is now officially on Mastodon.
  • FediMoviesRock is a new fediverse project for movies. Alpha announcement here. It allows you to tag pretty much any movie in the format @{TileOfTheMoviePascalCase}_{YEAR}@alpha.fedimovies.rocks to your posts. You can follow accounts to get all the posts about the movie. The difference with using a simple hashtag is that this comes back to a managed page which is both more visually pleasing and easy to understand, such as in this example. There is a lot of potential in projects like this. For now it is a fun toy that is helpful, but there is a lot more that can be build on top of it.
  • Audon.space is a great audio tool, pretty much exactly like Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse. I’m impressed by how easy to use it is, and how well it incorporates your social graph. The developer quickly responding to extra requests from the blind community is great to see as well. Personally, I see a great potential for tools like this for the fediverse. So often the discussion is framed in context of microblogging (hello bluesky!), but this seems like such an interesting direction. A standalone tool that uses your fediverse social graph in order to increase the value of said tool. I foresee a future where lots more tools will start doing this.

The poll

Did you enjoy this roundup of last week’s news? You can subscribe to my newsletter at fediversereport.com to get this every Sunday right in your mailbox. Thanks for reading!

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-16/

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The Roundup – episode 15

Welcome to another episode of the Roundup! The week feels like it has been absolutely dominated by news about Twitter and Elon Musk. Even if you use the fediverse to get away from Twitter drama, it is hard to escape people talking about it. At the same time, this gives extra renewed energy to efforts to get people to use the fediverse. One major of such projects is the launch of SpreadMastodon, a website and movement to get people to use Mastodon. It specifically targets the onboarding flow, and tries to make that as easy as possible. This renewed interest in Mastodon has Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko note that MAU is trending upwards again for the first time in a few months.

Tons of links and news, lets dive in!

The links

The poll

Evan Prodromou ran a bracket of polls for the best bot on the fediverse this week. The result? Alt_text is the best bot, but the final championship was very close! @ca_dmv_bot, @mastodonusercount and @APoD were all close contenders!

Meanwhile, Stefan Bohacek is still running polls about fediverse culture and documenting into his netizen’s guide. An interesting one this week was the question whether you refer to posts as ‘toots’. The userbase is very split on this question, see the results here.

This weeks poll:

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-15/

LaurensHof, to fediverse
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The Roundup – episode 14

Even though many people join the fediverse to avoid the chaos of Twitter, this week was one of those weeks that it was hard to avoid talking about Twitter. The news that NPR was leaving Twitter (and others after it as well) created a lot of chatter about how to get these organisations to join the fediverse instead. For now this is a story in active development, and we’ll see how the situation plays out. Some smaller radio stations have joined, but NPR and PBS have not, even though some of their journalists have. It is also notable how big the support is for GBH News, a local news station from Boston, in this specific context.

The first Fediverse Developer Network meeting was last Monday, with a big turnout. Lots of developers are interested in connecting with each other, and helping each other build the fediverse. Some of the outcomes:

Meanwhile, the Social Hub of the ActivityPub Rocks community is also working on organization structures. It is exciting to see this interest in better organisation and working together coming from so many different directions.

Mastodon also celebrated 11 million accounts this week. I wrote about the reliability of data earlier. However, gaining 1 million accounts in 25 days is a clear sign of growth.

Some Wikipedians have started a community-run Wikipedia account. They are also in the process of adding support for fediverse verification for all Wikipedia accounts. It’s worth watching how this renewed interest between the fediverse and Wikipedia develops.

The links

The poll

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-14/

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The Roundup – episode 13

Lots of news items this week. The major milestone is the 1 billion posts across the entire fediverse per month! Lots of new interesting tools as well, it won’t be long before that will turn into an entirely separate post each week.

I’m also fascinated by the speed with which PixelFed is developing. So far, Mastodon has been the centre piece of the fediverse, it’s where all the app development goes, and what everyone talks about. But PixelFed is quickly becoming a big contender as well. The release of Stories will certainly contribute to that. There is a new third party iOS app, Vernissage, and a new easy friend-finding tool. Curious to see how this will develop.

The Links

  • The fediverse has reached a new milestone: an average of 1 billion posts per month!
  • Vernissage is a new iOS app for PixelFed.
  • iOS app Mammoth is trying for a consistent implementation of quote posts across apps.
  • FindMyFriends is a new tool to find your Mastodon friends on PixelFed.
  • Daring Fireball’s John Gruber did a poll on iPhone case usage on both Twitter and Mastodon. Even though his Twitter account has almost 10 times the amount of followers, the poll on Mastodon got more engagement in absolute terms.
  • Developer Roni Laukkarinen released a UI for Mastodon that closely resembles Twitter, Mastodon Bird UI. It is currently mainly intended to be installed by admins as the default look for a server. You can see how it looks on his own server, mementomori.social.
  • Twitter alternative Post.News confirms that they are still planning to support ActivityPub, even though it will not be in 2023. News here, commentary here.
  • Mastometrics, an analytics tool for your personal data, has an update to easily see the people who you interact with the most.
  • News outlet EUobserver writes an editorial about the fediverse.
  • FediMeister is a new Mastodon desktop client for all operating systems with a focus on content creators. It can automatically break up large bodies of text into threads, supports the scheduling of posts as well as hashtag research. Hashtag research gives you an overview on which days which hashtags are used the most.
  • Ellie is a new Windows client for Mastodon.
  • The Verge has an extensive article about Tapbots, the makers of Mastodon app Ivory.
  • A new Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to enhance the ActivityPub protocol with ValueFlows.
  • Hyperspace, a desktop app for most operating systems, is winding down. In a blog post, the creator reflects: “Apps like Elk, Ice Cubes, and Ivory are providing great user experiences that would feel like a dream to have back in 2019.” (h/t @liaizon )
  • A fascinating thread on the transition from Twitter to Mastodon for Ethiopian journalists.
  • Verifiedjournalist.org, a directory of journalists on the fediverse, now allows for full keyword search of accounts who have signed up and verified with the service.
  • This Monday will be the first event of a Fediverse Developer Network.

The Poll

If you want to get this weekly roundup of news in your mailbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter. You can do this directly via fediversereport.com. Every week you’ll get the weeks biggest news stories as well as the roundup of shorter news bits. Thank you for reading!

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-13/

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The roundup – episode 12

Welcome to another episode of the round-up. There’s been a big unconference this week, FediForum, which was interesting. Talking to other people who are excited about the fediverse is infectious, and gives me energy to keep working on this.

Friday was Trans Day of Visibility, and a good reminder of how influential trans people have been in shaping the fediverse. Thank you!

The links

The interview

Only one interview link this week, but its a major one: The Verge’s Decoder podcast did an interview with Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko. It’s an in-depth talk, Nilay Patel knows how to ask good questions. A lot is focused on how the organisation Mastodon makes money. Eugen Rochko’s answers are great, but also jarring in a way: Decoder usually interviews big-shot CEOs that manage billions and billions of dollars. The contrast with Eugen talking about funding spanning half a million over the entire lifespan of the organisation is a stark contrast to that. It shows the incredible power of decentralized software, with how little money things can actually be build. Absolutely recommended listen.

The Poll

Stefan Bohacek has created ‘A netizen’s guide to Mastodon and the fediverse‘, a site with an overview of polls about how people behave on the fediverse. This is a project I find absolutely fascinating, and as a small contribution I’ll try and regularly add a poll to the round-up for you.

This week’s poll:

If you want to get this weekly roundup of news in your mailbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter. You can do this directly via fediversereport.com. Every week you’ll get the weeks biggest news stories as well as the roundup of shorter news bits. Thank you for reading!

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-12/

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The roundup – episode 11

A shorter roundup this week, as it feels like we´re transitioning to a different news cycle. Last month has focused mainly on current organisations joining the fediverse. Medium, Flipboard, Vivaldi and Mozilla have all set up their own Mastodon servers, and WordPress acquired the ActivityPub plugin. The next phase is now to experience the new users that will slowly start to join via these new types of servers, and how this will change fediverse culture. Meanwhile, the current weeks are more themed around community meetups. Last week was MozFest, with three sessions about the fediverse, and the coming week will be Fediforum.

The Roundup

  • Pixelfed is working on an Instagram Import feature, and is at the same time working to make sure Meta meets EU regulation for the data.
  • Matthias Pfefferle, the developer of the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, did an interview (in German about this. Important takeaway: Automattic is actively looking to make this plugin a Canonical Plugin, with the suggestion coming from the CEO.
  • Bookwyrm, the federated platform for book reading and tracking, is used to maintain a list of all books being banned from public schools in the US. Bookwyrm is explicit about their involvement in social causes, so this fits right in.
  • Tuba is a new Mastodon app for Linux that just got released.
  • Woolly is a new iOS and MacOS app for Mastodon that got featured in TechCrunch.
  • The Mastodon organisation will release Mastodon merchandise soon.
  • Debirdify, a tool to find your Twitter followers on Mastodon, has been suspended from Twitter.
  • A full list of all the demos at Fediform this week.
  • Macstodon is a new Mastodon client for MacOS with an incredible vintage look. Worth checking out for the visuals. (edit, thanks to @liaizon: Macstodon is for very old computers only. it runs on 68020+ or PPC Mac and System 7.1 through 9.2.2 so saying its for MacOS is sorta correct but not really since it only runs on 20 year old operating systems)

Readings

If you want to get this weekly roundup of news in your mailbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter. You can do this directly via fediversereport.com. Every week you’ll get the weeks biggest news stories as well as the roundup of shorter news bits. Thank you for reading!

#activitypub #fediverse #fediversenews #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-11/

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