In their official press release the Government confirms it is a trial for one year. They state that "Mastodon has several characteristics that make it fundamentally attractive for government communications", such as being beyond the control of others, as well as it being privacy friendly.
Let's hope that other countries will follow this design pattern, and all launch a fediverse server at social.[governmentwebsite].[TLD]. Following this pattern makes it immediately clear to people they are communicating with an official government account.
The Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server, State Secretary of Digitalisation @avhuffelen announced today! The server lives on the official domain of the Dutch government, at social.overheid.nl.
@fediversereport@avhuffelen
Love it:
“[…] the fire department send out an emergency text warning to people, urging them to check Twitter for the latest updates. However, this coincided with Twitter preventing people who do not have accounts from viewing tweets, resulting in people not being able to see emergency service updates. The House filed a motion in response, stating that emergency situations, the government should make sure that information is publicly accessible.
More Dutch government institutes have joined Mastodon today:
⛅The National Meteoreological Institute @knmi
🌊The National agency for Infrastructure and Watermanagement @rijkswaterstaat
🚗Traffic updates for the highways, also via Rijkswaterstaat @RWSverkeersinfo
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted a message on #Threads explaining why Meta is committed to adding #ActivityPub support. The reason he lists is the ability to take your social graph to another server.
@fediversereport he actually says "your audience" not your social graph, and that's a significant difference which we should note. Because the difference between Mastodon/fedi is that they are primarily social platforms which is about to be confronted by an anti social behemoth when it is allowed to federate.
Many here, sadly including admins think the protocol can preserve this, but like those arguing for search they haven't thought this through or are not considering the evidence.
@fediversereport@fediversenews@fediverse Awesome for Android users and Lemmy!
For iOS users, Memmy is great and evolving fast (it’s in beta so only available through TestFlight for now).
A group of over 40 European organisations have recently released a statement calling for the EU to set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund.
They call for this fund to support Digital Public Spaces, that are, among other things, based in FOSS, and ensure privacy by design. The statement gives three examples: #Mastodon, #PeerTube and #ActivityPub, stating that they would benefit from such a fund to further flourish.
The @EU_Commission has been supporting the fediverse for a while via @EC_NGI. This picture gives an idea of all the projects that have gotten funding via NGI.
Have questions about #PeerTube or want to know more about the team, and where the project is headed?
Next week there will be an Ask Me Anything with the @peertube team, streamed live directly on PeerTube!
I'll be the one to ask the questions to the team. You can already ask your questions right now, use the #PeerTubeAMA hashtag with your question to get them answered live on stream.
The stream will be Wednesday, Dec. 13th, 6-8 pm (CET)
Starting today, Bluesky will not require invite codes anymore and anyone can join the network. Later this month, the team will roll out an "experimental early version of federation", allowing other people to run their own 'Personal Data Server' (PDS).
Audon is a great real-time audio streaming service for the #fediverse! Think Spaces or Clubhouse, and you pretty much got it. You create a room for audio, where other people can listen to you, or just give them the role of speaker as well.
You can easily log in with your fediverse (Mastodon/Calckey/Pleroma) account, create a room, share the link, and you're ready to go!
Audon makes good use of the social graph of your fediverse account as well. You need to sign in to listen in on a room, and that means that there is a lot of different privacy settings available for the room. Like, you can have a room with only your followers, or only the people you follow. See the screenshot for all the available options.
#Kbin is growing fast, and its new community is coming together to crowdsource their own unofficial mascot. Animal themed mascots are common in the #fediverse, so it is no surprise that Kbin has continued this tradition, with a parrot.
The community has settled on this mascot after multiple iterations and polls. Now the final question is: what will the mascot be named?
Bluesky has announced that today they have started with federation, allowing anyone to host their own data on the #bluesky network.
In a blog post they announced that anyone can now host their own PDS, framing it as a way to control your own data, and also explaining how it differs from Mastodon.
Bluesky describes it as an 'early access of federation for self-hosters'.
For the last time, Jack did not invent Bluesky, he doesn't own it, he doesn't have control over it, he doesn't run it, and he's not even active over there, after finding out that most people there hate him.
It's NOSTR that's the pro-crypto network. The bluesky developers have been very adamant against incorporating web3/crypto.
Nothing was remotely "made in secret". ATProto has been open for a very long time
@fediversereport I am a big fan of your report and I have one style request: I am slightly color blind, therefore I have hard times to see the links in your report. Is it possible to give it more contrast or similar to the rest of the text?
Meet NLnet, the foundation supporting many fediverse projects
The NLnet foundation supports projects 'with ideas to fix the internet'. You might recognise some of the names: Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, PeerTube, Pixelfed and Pleroma all have had funding from NLnet.
I visited their office in Amsterdam to help you get to know foundation, what they do, and how they support the open internet, including the fediverse.
The admin for misskey.io has put out a call for people to apps for Misskey that work with both iOS and Android. They offer a bounty of 800k Yen (~€ 5350) per person for building these apps.
The Japanese #fediverse community is growing rapidly, mainly using Misskey. Misskey.io is now by far the busiest server on the fediverse, publishing twice the amount of posts/month that mastodon.social does (while m.s. has 6x more users!)
The #Lemmy developers host an AMA, talking about decentralisation, platform identity and a roadmap
@nodebb talks about how they are thinking about what federating forums actually means, and how their implementation of #ActivityPub will look like
Project Tapestry by @Iconfactory is a Kickstarter to build an App that gives you a single chronological feed from a variety of sources, such as #mastodon, #bluesky and #rss