Jack Dorsey leaves the board of Bluesky, DMs have arrived, and much more.
The News
Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky. The unexpected announcement came after a question on Twitter if he was still on the board, which he answered with a simple ‘no’. At that point, no announcement had been made yet, which came soon after. Dorsey says that he left the board because according to him, Bluesky ‘went in the wrong direction’. He had not been actively involved with Bluesky for a while, as an indication of his noninvolvement, developer Paul Frazee said he has never met with him. Shortly after, Dorsey gave an extensive interview where he discussed his thoughts on Bluesky more. He has been more involved in Nostr, and in the recent shareholder letter of Block, where Dorsey is CEO, Block says they are working on integrating Nostr into more of their products (with TIDAL announcing a first small integration recently). For some more analysis:
Bluesky has published a new roadmap for what can people can expect of the app in the near future. The most important new features include DMs (since delivered), video, improvements to custom feeds, better anti-harassment features, and OAuth. The improvements for custom feeds show that Bluesky is leaning more and more into algorithmic choice for their users. What stands out to me is how similar some of the proposed features are to how Farcaster has build their custom feeds (as Michael Foster from Newsmast also discovered). The current era of competing open protocols for social networks show a rapid iteration and dissemination of good ideas, and I’m excited to see how Bluesky will expand their custom feeds.
The Bluesky company also published a roadmap for atproto. In another step towards open federation, new PDS’es do not require approval anymore, but their is still an account limit per PDS that can be lifted manually (such as for the fediverse<->Bluesky bridge). There is also more work being done on security, with major work on supporting OAuth, as well as more basic MFA for the current transition period. Bluesky also mentions that some requested features are on the roadmap, but will likely not be implemented in 2024: E2EE DMs, private posts and post editing are all things that Bluesky will work on, but will take a while to complete.
Bluesky also mentions that they originally planned to start a formal process to submit atproto to a standards body in summer 2024, but that they are delaying this process until there are more new applications being build on top of atproto. Bluesky notes that most developer activity has revolved around the microblogging app Bluesky, but that until recently it has been difficult for developers to build completely new applications on top of atproto.
The first feature of Bluesky’s product roadmap already shipped: DMs! Due to the high demand for DMs and how it helps with user retention, DMs are a simple implementation that is not build on top of atproto (which is planned for later), nor is it end to end encrypted. It is a bare-bones chatting service that currently does not even have the ability to send images or group chats (which are planned soon). Third party developers do have the ability to also implement chats into their clients, which some people already managed to do before the feature officially got launched.
Newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer has a deep dive into Bluesky’s Engineering culture that is worth reading. It lists everyone working on the product (plus 20 unnamed people working in moderation), which is a helpful overview to understand how the company works. What also stood out to me is the answer on how Bluesky plans to make money: it only lists selling custom domains as a way to make money. In two interviews with The Verge in February and March 2024, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also listed a variety of other plans to make money, which are not mentioned here: managed hosting via a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm, and marketplaces for moderation and custom feeds. It is unclear what the status of these ideas is.
The developer of atproto-based blogging platform WhiteWind has written a blog about his experience of developing on atproto. They write: “[WhiteWind] looked no different from existing services on Bluesky, so I could say that atproto did not contribute to enhancing the competitiveness of my service. Users could switch their service to another similar one anytime thanks to atproto, but since there are no such services, the benefit is virtually none.” This is a signal that is worth paying attention to, as the Bluesky company is explicitly saying that they need more developers building new applications. Meanwhile, WhiteWind is the only application so far that meets that definition, and the developer is not clear what the benefits are to building on top of atproto. In the meantime, two Japanese web clients, Klearsky and Hagoromo, have starting to support WhiteWind, by showing blog articles at the top of people’s profile.
The bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky has been used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messaging, with the spam originating from Nostr. The spam was created on Nostr, which bridges to the fediverse with the Momostr.pink bridge, which in turn can be bridged to Bluesky. While all the networks have many places of easy, open signups, spam tends to happen were signups can easily happen in bulk, and the protocol design of Nostr makes it especially easy to create new accounts.
A closer look at Japanese developers building on atproto
I took a closer look at three products build on top of atproto: video with Bluemotion, audio with Bluecast, and WhiteWind.
Ændra has been running the XBlock labeler, that labels screenshots from other social networks. She has written up some of her thoughts here about the experience of running a labeler.
Two updates to WhiteWind, including a new homepage that shows recent and popular articles, and the ability to create article drafts.
Bluesky has handed out micro-grants to three labeling services: XBlock, Aegis and News Detective.
Xblock published a roadmap on the work on the labeler.
That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky, or subscribe to my newsletter below. You’ll get a weekly update on the fediverse in your inbox, and a monthly update on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.
Moderator communities, government petitions, and also how I think that PieFed latest small update is more meaningful that it seems. I also spend some time looking at Nostr and Farcaster, as there are interesting developments happening on those networks that are relevant for the fediverse. Let’s dive in:
The News
IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust and Safety organisation, has launched IFTAS Connect, a ‘new community of practice designed specifically for Fediverse moderators.’ IFTAS has regularly held surveys under fediverse moderators, the Moderator Needs Assessments, and one of the most requested items was a better way to convene and communicate. With IFTAS Connect there is now such a platform, that features an extensive library, forums and a place for group discussions.
The Canadian House of Commons was presented with a petition to for the Canadian government to “enact policy and dedicate budgetary resources to enable the Parliament of Canada to provide an open, trusted, federated, social media presence”. Here’s the video of the petition being read in the House of Commons.
Newsmast wrote last week on the fediverse as a hub for the social web, and how they are integration people into their communities from across multiple platforms, including Threads and Bluesky. They posted a research report this week, Mapping the Social Web, that takes a closer look at where different communites are on different platforms. Some of the main takaways: Most communities are present on only one of two of the platforms, and only US Politics and Politics have strong communities on both Threads, Bluesky and the fediverse.
Link aggregator platform PieFed can now federate with PeerTube. Furthermore, PieFed is using its ‘Topics’ system to promote some PeerTube channels as well. PieFed’s Topics take an aggregation of different Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin communities and group them together under a certain Topic. For example, the Linux Topic now contains a collection of Lemmy communities such as !Linux, as well as @thelinuxexperiment_channel. I think this is something worth paying attention to, as it signals a shift in thinking about how the link-aggregator platforms can work: Platforms like Lemmy (or Reddit) work by having users push content into the platform and are thus fully dependent on user-submission. This addition by PieFed allows for a pull-method as well: PieFed now pulls content into their Topics from other platforms automatically by subscribing to them.
Darnell Clayton draws some more attention to Loforo.com, a Tumblr-like fediverse platform, and points out that it actually has quite a sizable community. The platform reports around 15k MAU, which makes it a top-10 instance in the fediverse by MAU, even though the service is virtually unknown. As I reported a few weeks ago, Lofoto has apparently been integrated with ActivityPub for a while, but never made any formal announcement about it, as for as I can tell. Clayton reports that it is likely that Loforo uses the Mastodon API to a significant extend, as logging into Loforo with a Mastodon client works, and fediDB lists Loforo as a Mastodon instance.
Hollo is a new single-user microblogging platform that is currently being build by Hong Minhee. Hong is also behind Fedify, an ActivityPub server framework, which just got updated this week as well. Hollo is build using the Fedify framework.
FediVision 2024 has concluded, the yearly song contest where artists that are on the fediverse can submit their songs. This year, 72 entries were submitted, and the winner is Misaligned Aardvarks by The Island of Nothing.
Some news from Farcaster and Nostr
Some news from the crypto-affiliated decentralised social networks:
I wrote about Farcaster this week, with the goal of answering the question: why is a social network with 80k daily users valued at 1 billion dollars? While the height of the valuation seems questionable to me, it is clear that Farcaster provides a social network that is indeed valuable for (crypto-focused) VCs. There are enough interesting ideas in Farcaster that it is worth paying attention to.
Talking about Farcaster and why I’m paying attention to what is happening there: Neynar is a company that builds tools that help people create products on top of Farcaster. Neynar announced that they raised 11M USD in a series A. What we’ve seen in the broader ecosystem of decentralised social networks so far is that Nostr has managed to punch above their weight (in terms of active users) with the amount of products being build for Nostr, and a major contributor to that is relatively easy to build other products on top of Nostr. This is in contrast with Bluesky, which has the least amount of developer activity, even though it has the largest active user base, with developers saying it is hard to develop for ATProto. A company that makes it easy for developers to build on top of the protocol can have a significant impact.
Jack Dorsey’s Block mentioned Nostr in their Q1 Shareholder letter, saying that “Creative endeavors will rely heavily on micropayments, something that’s been discussed since the dawn of the internet, and finally being realized at scale with things like “zaps” (transferring small amounts of bitcoin via lightning) on the NOSTR protocol.” Block says that they see an opportunity to build systems that connect the existing financial system with emerging systems, heavily implying Nostr’s Zap system. Rumour is that TIDAL and CashApp (both owned by Block) are working on integrations. Websites for both companies have a link that follows a standard Nostr reference structure: https://tidal.com/.well-known/nostr.json?name=TIDAL and https://cash.app/.well-known/nostr.json. Nothing is officially confirmed however, as far is I can tell this is the only reference to TIDAL and CashApp doing something with Nostr.
(EDIT 2024-06-03: another reference to Nostr in the TIDAL code base)
WeDistribute joined Nos Social’s Journalism Accelerator Program. Nos Social is a client app for Nostr. WeDistribute writes about why they are joining, and seeing value in expanding their writing to include Nostr: “different [networks] offer unique and novel approaches to solving common problems that every decentralized network struggles with. We’re all tackling different pieces of the puzzle, in an effort to make the Social Web a viable alternative”.
The Links
Project Defiant, the 10k USD seed grant to build an alternative for DeviantArt on the fediverse, has some more detailed information on the grant application process. The deadline is June 4th.
An interesting news week, that fits Newsmast’s description of the fediverse as a hub for the social web: the trend for the fediverse is clearly in the direction of how other products and platforms can be connected together in order to form a larger network.
The News
Digiday writes “why publishers are preparing to federate their sites“, and in the article they break the news that both The Verge and 404 Media “are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.” The Verge has been interested in the fediverse for a while now, and 404 Media are also active users. Both sites are very aware of the risks that come from depending on Big Tech platforms for reaching their audience, and are looking to secure that connection without an intermediary. The Verge has been working on switching to using WordPress, but it is not clear if they will be using the current ActivityPub plugin or are developing their own solution. The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel said in response to Ghost’s announcement earlier this month that The Verge is also interested in having paid newsletters that connect to the fediverse. The interest of 404 Media to connect to the fediverse is directly linked to Ghost as well, as their site runs on Ghost.
Newsmast has posted an update on how the fediverse can be “a hub for the social web”, and how Newsmast can play a role in that. Newsmast is focused on bridging, and how connections between differnet platforms, products and protocols can all be connected to form a larger social web, in which the fediverse can function as a central hub. As a first step, the communities on Newsmast now start featuring posts by people on Bluesky and Threads as well.
Openvibe is a social media client that supports both Nostr and Mastodon. The client was originally for Nostr, but now fully supports Mastodon, and is working on adding support for Bluesky next. What stands out about the way Openvibe supports multiple networks is that Openvibe tries to integrate multiple platforms into a single experience. This means that you can have a single timeline on your homescreen that combines both posts from Nostr and Mastodon. Posting also allows you to easily post to both networks at the same time. There have been clients that allow you to connect multiple accounts before, but Openvibe’s vision of integrating different networks into a single feed represents a new steps towards how the different decentralised social networks relate to each other.
Another update by Bridgy Fed on improvements towards the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. Last week the news got picked up that the bridge was used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messages that originated from Nostr, and Bridgy Fed is now working on implementing spam filters.
Bart Decrem, co-founder of Mastodon app Mammoth, offers a 10k USD seed funding for anyone to build a DeviantArt alternative on top of ActivityPub. This comes after a recent article by Slate about “The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery”, explaining how bots with AI generated content have overrun the revenue-sharing programs of the platform. Decrem focuses on the community aspect of DeviantArt, saying that “the critical thing here is to truly understand what DA is/was all about, what this community needs”.
The Links
FediVision 2024 is live, with musicians all over the fediverse sending in over 70 tracks in a song contest.
Owncast creator Gabe Kangas wrote a blog post marking four years of fediverse streaming platform Owncast.
Vivaldi hosted a community talk “Why does being on the Fediverse matter to us?”. Notably they used fediverse audio platform Audon.space for the talk, which integrates with ActivityPub.
The European Commission has announced their new Mastodon account, and that they will stay on the fediverse. Over the last 2 years, the European Data Protection Supervisor had run a Mastodon and Peertube pilot for the EU, and that pilot has come to an end. The European Commission had by far the most successful and impactful presence on the fediverse out of the pilot, and they wanted to continue. The problem was that the EDPS struggled to find another EU organisation willing to take on the responsibility of hosting. As I wrote when the news came out, the perception and framing of the EDPS was wrong on how the fediverse should be approached by the EU: taking on responsibility for all EU-affiliated organisations social media presence is an unrealistic ask, and it is not a surprise that they could not find an organisation willing to do so. Instead, now the European Commission is taking responsibility and control of their own account; they are hosting their own Mastodon server. This is a much more sustainable and realistic approach for EU organisations moving forward.
The bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky has been used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messaging, with the spam originating from Nostr. The spam was created on Nostr, which bridges to the fediverse with the Momostr.pink bridge, which in turn can be bridged to Bluesky. While all the networks have many places of easy, open signups, spam tends to happen were signups can easily happen in bulk, and the protocol design of Nostr makes it especially easy to create new accounts.
(2024-05-21 Correction: the original article stated that the Mostr.pub bridge was used for the spam attack. This is incorrect, and the article has been updated to reflect that a different bridge, momostr.pink has been used.)
Micro.blog held their yearly micro.camp as an online live stream event, with a conversation about blogging with Christina Warren, as well as a demo of two new features of micro.blog: hiding replies on your blog and a new way for people to comment by verifying their Mastodon, Bluesky or micro.blog account.
Bluesky projects
This week I also wrote about three projects from Japanese developers who are building on top of ATProto, and build a video platform, audio spaces and a blogging platform, and I go into more detail on the challenges that building new products for the ATmosphere poses.
Ghost’s weekly update about building on ActivityPub, showing more progress. Ghost estimates that a release will take “more than a month, but less than a year, probably”.
Pixelfed has a Matrix channel again. Pixelfed developer lost admin control of the previous Matrix channel, and considered going exclusively to Discord. After many requests from the community now there is a new matrix channel again.
The ForgeFed project, which works on federated software forges, has gotten their NLnet grant extended, and showcased a demo of their reference implementation.
Hackaday.com looks at ‘your open-source client options in the non-Mastodon fediverse’
Video, audio and blogging: Japanese Bluesky is building in the ATmosphere
When Bluesky dropped the invite code requirement early in 2024, it led to a big inflow of the Japanese community into Bluesky. At some point, they became the biggest community on Bluesky, with 43% of the posts being made in Japanese, compared to 34% in English. Over the last few months, the Japanese Bluesky community has build a variety of cool new tools, projects and platforms for the ATmosphere. Let’s take a look at three of them: Whitewind, a blogging platform, Bluecast, a social audio app, and Bluemotion, a video hosting platform.
Video with Bluemotion
Bluemotion is a video platform that integrates with your Bluesky/ATmosphere account. You log in with your Bluesky handle and (app)password, and get an overview of the videos hosted on the platform:
front page of bluemotion showing 3 cat videosThe basics of a video hosting platform are all there: you can browse through categories, see what other people have posted, and post your own videos. Where it gets really interesting is that the accounts that post the videos are easily recognisable as Bluesky handles.
Now let’s take a look at a video. On the left is the video on Bluemotion, on the right is the same video, but now as a post on the official Bluesky app.
2 screenshots of the same video, on the left of bluemotion and on the right of bluesky. it shows the same video and engagement numbersWhat is worth noting here is that this is the exact same post, as visible by the engagement numbers. You can interact with the post from the Bluesky app, but you can also boost and like it directly from Bluemotion itself. Now, the only difference here is that the official Bluesky app cannot play videos, so it is a link to the Bluemotion site instead. Still, its a great example of what you can build on top of the AT Proto. Bluemotion is made by developer So Asano.
Blogging with WhiteWind
WhiteWind (stylized as whtwnd.com) is a blogging platform build on top of ATProto. As with all the products in this article, you simply login with your Bluesky/ATProto handle and (app) password.
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-4-1024x568.pngLogging into WhiteWind shows you a front page with the latest and popular blog entries, as well as the ability to write your own blog posts. The integration with ATProto is visible in two different ways: first of all, your WhiteWind account is your ATProto/Bluesky account. Secondly, you can comment on blog posts with your account, and these are visible as a post on Bluesky as well. WhiteWind is developed by @K.
Audio with Bluecast
Bluecast is an audio app build on top of ATProto. The idea is fairly simple, but well executed. Log in with your ATProto/Bluesky account, and browse the current live audio streams. You can also host your own live audio stream as well.
https://fediversereport.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-6-1024x748.pngWhat impresses me most about Bluecast is that it has managed to build up an active audience of users. By far the hardest part of building a social app is getting people to consistently use it. Audio apps build on top other other protocols (such as audon.space for the fediverse) have struggled to get people to use them, even though they work perfectly fine. For Bluecast however, every time I have checked over the last week I have seen active audio rooms and people using the app. Part of it is that developer So Asano has been running events with multiple streams after each other, with some 60 people tuning in.
Integrating ATProto into Bluesky
The developers have made some impressive new products. At the same time, their work also showcases some struggles for new developers building on top of ATProto. The developer of WhiteWind wrote a blog recently about their experience developing WhiteWind, and write: “My service’s data should be reaching Bluesky, but Bluesky doesn’t understand it and simply discards it. It’s true that I can improve the quality of the service by for example making the UI more beautiful, without relying on atproto. But if it is the only way, what is the point of using atproto in the first place?”
To understand the point they are making, first a quick and oversimplified explanation: A lexicon is part of the protocol, and defines what a post does and how it looks. The official Bluesky app has defined the lexicon for posts to be short posts, limited to 300 characters. Anyone can build their on app on top of ATProto, and define their own lexicon. You can create a Lexicon for long-form blogging, videos, or whatever you want. Importantly however, the official Bluesky app does not process posts with a different lexicon well.
This is the problem that the WhiteWind developer is referring to: WhiteWind has their own lexicon for long-form writing, which does not get processed by the Bluesky app. This is quite different from the fediverse, where long-form posts (from WordPress/Discourse/WriteFreely/etc) can show up in your microblogging app, such as Mastodon. I connected my WordPress blog to the fediverse, and now my blogs show up as full text in the feed of people who follow me, in turn gaining me quite some extra organic reach. This is not possible with AT Proto,new users will still have to visit your website to start using it, making growth for a new product that much harder.
At the same time, Bluesky developers are understandably wary of the Bluesky app becoming an ‘everything-app’. The goal of the Bluesky company is to build a decentralised protocol after all, and the Bluesky app is explicitly an app for microblogging. Bluesky users have regularly criticised the move by X to promote longer-form writing as well, indicating that native long-form writing in Bluesky might not even be appreciated by a part of the userbase.
Overall it points for an interesting point in time for the ATmosphere: Japanese Bluesky developers have build some impressive new products on AT Proto, but is the network interested in adopting other products beyond Bluesky’s own microblogging?
A bit of a slower news week, where everyone’s feeds turned purple with pictures of the aurora borealis. Still, work on (and interest in) bridges, curated content and new products in development show that things are dynamic all the same.
Fediverse Bridges
Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed and the new bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, has given another update on the Bluesky-fediverse bridge that recently was quietly launched. He says that now more than 2500 accounts have bridged now. Barrett also explains that there are still many bugs with the bridge, and that he is busy working on it.
A week after Threads launched their beta version of federation, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput said that mastodon.social knew about 2800 federated Threads accounts. While the total number of federated Threads account will have been higher, it will likely not have been that much higher either. Comparing this to the 2500 bridged account for a service that is still in active testing and development, indicates that there is significant interest in connections between the fediverse and Bluesky. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also bridged her account this week.
The bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse also allows Nostr to connect to Bluesky, with a case here where a post is made on Bluesky, replied to from Nostr, and then replied to again from Mastodon.
Bridge Finder is a new tool to help people with using the bridges between the networks, providing an easy visual interface with an explanation on how to use the bridges, as well as the requirements for opting into using them.
The News
Ghost recently announced their major push for ActivityPub support, and published their first update this week. Ghost explains the history and background of why they are working on the project, and why now specifically, saying: “In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.” Molly White’s response, saying “is this feeling… hope?” captures the sentiment well. Ghost also shared a first screenshot of their new ActivityPub powered reader app:
Ghost reader app that showcases activitypub powering the app.Recently Mastodon announced their new U.S.-based non-profit board members. People had quite some questions about it, and Mastodon has updated the blog with a detailed FAQ. One point of contention was why Biz Stone and Amir Ghavi are on the board. The FAQ explains that Ghavi has provided pro-bono legal council to Mastodon over the last year, with specific knowledge about open-source licensing and further connections to the tech industry. About Biz Stone Mastodon says that “as a Twitter co-founder [Stone] has invaluable experience scaling a social media platform to its first few million users and many connections to experts who are familiar with the problems Mastodon is facing”.
Flipboard announces that they have enabled federation for another 100 curators this week, briding the total of federated Flipboard magazines over 2500. Flipboard also announces that they have had over 100k social interactions on all the federated magazines in the last month.
Forgejo has set their first step towards federation, with the ability for federated likes. What makes this stand out is that Forgejo is a self-hosted software forge. While the fediverse is predominantly understood as a (microblogging) social network, Forgejo shows that federation can also be used for very different types of software products.
Fedihosting Foundation is a non-profit that was recently founded by the admins of the .world (lemmy.world, mastodon.world) cluster and mstn.social has expanded to include the toot.community server as well.
The Links
Trunk & Tidbits is a new series by the Mastodon engineering team. This edition shows what they’ve been working on in April 2024.
Last week I wrote about some conversations about a hard fork for Mastodon. WeDistribute wrote about the trouble forking Mastodon, going into more detail about previous attempts that place it into a historical context.
Upcoming short video platform Loops has started to roll out the first invites for a closed beta test.
ActivityPub server framework Fedify has some more updates.
Documentation to get starting on a plugin for Lemmy.
PieFed gives an overview of their work of the last few weeks.
People are interested in bridges between Bluesky and the fediverse, it turns out: Bridgy Fed quietly launched in test mode for a few people to try, but already 1200 accounts have signed up when they found out about it, without any announcement. Some interesting news about plugins as well this week, for both PeerTube and Lemmy. Let’s dive in:
Bluesky and fediverse bridge silently launches
Bridgy Fed, the bridge between the fediverse by Ryan Barrett, is now publicly available for testing. The bridge quietly became available for people to test, but as bridged posts started to appear, other people became aware and more and more people started to test and use the bridge. Barrett states that already 1200 accounts have bridged in one or both directions. Some 750 of those accounts have made their fediverse account visible in Bluesky, which can be tracked via a directory made by Kuba Suder. Barrett also says that the bridge is still in a very early state, that he was not expecting so much attention so quickly, and that users should still expect plenty of bugs and downtime.
When the bridge was first announced, it lead to a storm of protest within the fediverse. Many people felt uncomfortable that the bridge was opt-out and not opt-in, and did not want that their public fediverse posts became available in Bluesky. Barrett has listened to the feedback, and the entire system is now opt-in. In order to make your fediverse account available in Bluesky, you’ll have to follow this account. For your Bluesky account to become visible in the fediverse you can follow this account. It might take a few minutes before your account becomes visible. Barrett also says that “much of the current state is not final. Expect some design and policy choices to change. For example, right now you have to manually enable the bridge, but that may change eventually, at least for Bluesky accounts bridging into the fediverse.”
The News
A variety of news from the side of PeerTube: PeerTube released version 6.1, with new features such as account import/export, banners and avatars for instances, and a change in the way PeerTube counts a view. Now, more in line with other platforms, someone has to watch a video for 10 seconds to count as a view, down from 30. Counting is also done based on a unique ID generated by a web browser, instead of an IP address. PeerTube has a plugin system, with two new interesting plugins this week that are being worked on:
The Premium user plugin allows videos to be limited to be viewed only by paying accounts, with an integration with Stripe.
A subtitle editor plugin which allows creators to add subtitles or captions without having to use external software.
Finally, WeDistribute wrote a guide this week on how to stream with PeerTube and Owncast.
Discourse and WordPress are now directly federating with each other. This means that a forum category on Discourse can follow a WordPress blog, and the blogs on WordPress will appear as new posts in the Discourse Forum category. Demo is available here, and as of this week’s episode, my newsletter should also appear on the ActivityPub Social Hub forums. In general there is a lot of activity happening with interoperability between Lemmy, WordPress, NodeBB and Discourse. They are all focusing more on long-form writing, and the Working Group‘s meeting of this week spend quite some effort on improving how these different platforms for ‘Forums and Threaded Discussions’ can federate. Lemmy is also working on federating directly with NodeBB, and it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like in practice.
Newsmast announces that they have been working on a new feature to extend their Mastodon servers, Amplifier. With Amplifier come two major new features to Newsmast: The ability for individual accounts on the server to opt-in or opt-out of posts from Bluesky and Threads, and a feature to scroll back through time similar to Phanpy’s excellent Catch-up feature. With bridging becoming more prominent, it makes sense to have the feature clearly available as a setting to people, and I’m curious to see how they will implement it. Newsmast has not shared yet when Amplifier will be released.
Lemmy announces a Proof of Concept for a plugin system. The system is currently fairly basic, and developer nutomic says that he will not implement the system until it is clear that there is interest, and at least one plugin is in development. The responses do show that there is clear interest in such a system though, and it’s worth watching to see what comes of it.
Viverse, the metaverse platform of HTC, has joined the fediverse. Viverse allows you to visit 3d worlds directly in your browser. The fediverse integration means that you can now chat from your Viverse account with Mastodon accounts, the blog shows how this looks in practice. What stands out to me about the announcement is that the fediverse is becoming attractive for products to bootstrap their social network. Viverse does not appear to be particularly busy, the most visited ‘world’ is visited some 7000 times total, and adding fediverse integration is an interesting way to increase visibility.
Conversations on Mastodon forks are nothing new, but have popped up recently again, after some public pushback against some of the board members of Mastodon’s new U.S.-based non-profit organisation. Jon Pincus of The Nexus of Privacy makes a case for a hard fork in this article. Fediverse developer and Mastodon contributor Emelia Smith wrote a response on why she thinks a hard fork is not the way forward. Roland Pulliam, who works on the shared deny list project The Bad Space, announced a fork Awujo, but not much is known about the fork yet.
E2EE encryption might be coming to the fediverse: ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou got a grant from the Summer of Protocols Initiatives to add end-to-end encryption to the ActivityPub protocol, together with developer Tom Coates. WeDistribute has a closer look as well.
Tusks is a new iOS app for Mastodon with the goal of “makes posting on Mastodon feel like publishing to your blog”. It only shows your own posts, and focuses on helping you write posts, especially threads. Tusks is available iOS as well as the iPad and Mac, and the full product is $4.99.
For the people interested in protocols: A call to participate help the lead author of the original Webfinger RFC with improvements.
The Links
The DotSocial Podcast interviewed Ryan Barrett about building bridges to the fediverse.
Robert W. Gehl, who is currently writing a book about the fediverse, has a blog post about decentralisation vs noncentralisation, and Bluesky vs the fediverse.
After the hectic months of February and March, things are more stable in Bluesky. The biggest development is the first president that has joined Bluesky, with Brazilian president Lula joining Bluesky as part of a larger conflict between the Brazilian government and X.
The News
Brazilian president Lula has opened an account on Bluesky, Brasil247.com reports. The news comes after an escalating conflict between X and the Brazilian Courts. Elon Musk publicly refused to follow orders by the Brazilian court to block certain accounts on X, and a Brazilian judge has ordered an investigation of Elon Musk for obstruction of justice. President Lula opening an account on Bluesky is a direct response to the ongoing conflict between the Brazilian government and X, and indicates how governments are starting to be fed up with the situation at X. President Lula used his first post on Bluesky to say that 38 slaughterhouses will be authorised to export meat to China. (?) Finally, Bluesky dropped their official policy against heads of states joining Bluesky.
Skygaze, the organisation behind the For You custom feed announced that they have quit the feed, and transferred ownership of the feed to the Bluesky organisation. The For You feed was by far the most popular custom feed that had a personalised algorithm. Skygaze said that they are moving on to other projects. Skygaze had been fairly involved in the Bluesky community, running a hackaton only 2 months ago. Recently, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber stated that one ways Bluesky plans to make money is to create a marketplace for custom feeds and third party moderation, where Bluesky will take a cut of the payments. Skygaze was one of the only creators of custom feeds that appeared to have a commercial side, as they seemed to have an affiliation with YCombinator. With them leaving the ATmosphere for other projects there are no other organisations that operate a third party service on the ATmosphere have expressed a clear interest in monetisation of their services yet.
Bluesky announced the second batch of ATProto grant recipients. The total grant was 4.8k USD, spend on various microgrants. SkyBridge is the grant project that got the most attention (TechCrunch, The Verge), which got a 800USD grant to rewrite the project in Rust. SkyBridge has been around for almost a year, although I personally never really got it to work properly. The grant should give the project a boost and renewed interest.
In February, Bluesky announced that they started federation, allowing people to run their own PDS, albeit under significant restrictions (apply for Relay access, limit the PDS to 10 accounts) while the process underwent testing. So far, these restrictions have not been lifted yet.
App updates
The official Bluesky apps have gotten some updates this month:
That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky, or subscribe to my newsletter below. You’ll get a weekly update on the fediverse in your inbox, and a monthly update on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.
Welcome to another busy news week. I’ve spend a bit more focus on NodeBB and Discourse federating with each other, as it is an interesting new way of putting federation in practice. Other news, such as around Ghost and PodcastAP show how expansive the fediverse is getting. Lets dive in:
Forum federation
NodeBB and Discourse are now federating with each other. Both forum softwares are working on their implementation of ActivityPub, and this week’s milestone marks a new step in federation that has not really been seen in the fediverse before. The implementation allows forum categories to follow each other. This means that a forum category on Discourse can now take in and show all posts on a specific forum category on NodeBB. An example of this can be seen here, this category on the Social Hub (which runs Discourse) follows a category of a NodeBB forum, and as such the posts made on NodeBB now show up on Discourse. To make it even more interesting, the NodeBB posts also federate with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, and as such comments made with a Mastodon account also show up.
This new version of federation might be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, so a quick explainer how this differs from how link-aggregator platforms like Lemmy and Kbin federate with each other. on there you can follow categories/communities that are on different instances/platforms, but the communities themselves cannot interact with each other. As an example: If you have an account on kbin.social you can follow both !fediverse and !fediverse, but these communities stay separate. This often leads to duplicate posts, and splintered communities. What NodeBB and Discourse have done is equivalent to if !fediverse and !fediverse could follow each other, so a post in one of the communities would show up in the other community.
The News
Ghost, the open-source platform for newsletters, has long had the request to add ActivityPub support. This week, Ghost founder John O’Nolan posted that the “idea has been at the top of the list for a long time, so this week we’re starting work to look into the possibility of adding ActivityPub support to Ghost.” Ghost posted a survey asking for input. The responses by the community show that there is a great interest in this feature: Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput reached out offering help (which O’Nolan gladly accepted), The Verge’s Editor In Chief Nilay Patel said that The Verge would be interested in knowing how Ghost approaches federation for paid newsletters, as The Verge wants to do this too, as well people sharing their survey responses. For more information, check out TechCrunch.
Upcoming fediverse platform Emissary has shown another preview how it can be used to build a federated Bandcamp alternative. In a short video developer Ben Pate walks through the current state, showing of a band page that is fully customisable, and has space for hosting (as well as linking to) music, and shows. For more information, check out this week’s article by WeDistribute.
Pixelfed developer Dansup has launched PubKit in closed beta. PubKit is a toolset for ActivityPub, that helps developers with testing and debugging their software. Dansup is considering options on how to/whether to open-source the code being PubKit while also making sure that his efforts are fairly compensated.
Mobilizon has transferred ownership from Framasoft to Kaihuri. Kaihuri is a small French organisation that has been maintaining the French Mobilizon instance Keskonfai for a long time, and got funding from NLnet to improve and maintain Mobilizon. Kaihuri showed a demo this week (recording here) of their work on the new features, with Calendars, Groups, a more customisable front page, and multi-day events all coming to the new update, which will be released soon. I’ll go into more detail once the update releases.
There has been some reshuffling in the different Misskey forks (‘Forkeys’). Sharkey is steadily cruising along. Firefish has passed on to new owner naskya, who is in the process of getting complete control and starting up the project again after a pause of a few months. Development on Catodon, a Firefish fork, is currently paused due to other obligations for the current lead developer. Iceshrimp, originally a fork of Firefish, is in a feature-freeze as the entire project (frontend and backend) is being rewritten in .net/C#. Iceshrimp announced this week that work on the backend is mostly finished.
Trump’s social network Truth.social is based on Mastodon, which is licensed under AGPL. In short means that the source code has to be made available to everyone who interacts with it. Truth.social has not done so for more than a year, and Evan Boehs decided to try to get Truth.social to comply with the AGPL license. To his surprise, they did, and send them the source code. Write-up of the situation here, source code here, analysis of the code by @Jasminhere.
Mastodon has gotten funding to implement quote posts. The feature is planned for update 4.4. The ability to opt-out of quote posts is also currently planned, which makes it that Mastodon’s implementation will not be compatible with other fediverse implementations of quote posting.
PodcastAP is new tool that allows you to easily follow every podcast with your fediverse, as it is integrated with podcastindex.org. With their latest update podcasts that already live on the fediverse (if they use Castopod or PeerTube to host their podcast), it can now follow the ActivityPub version of the podcast, as well as the ‘bridge’ version.
Liaizon Wakest pointed out that blogging platform Loforo.com has been fully federating with ActivityPub for a while. I cannot find any announcements by Loforo that they started with federation, and it seems like it has been active for a while. This in itself makes it intriguing; my assumption has always been so far that if platforms join the fediverse, that they will make it into a news story, and Loforo seems to prove that assumption wrong.
Stefan Bohacek proposes that fediverse admins disable images on World Sight Day so that only alt-text shows up.
Martin Holland has been keeping track of media accounts on the fediverse. This data set has now been expanded to include media accounts on Threads that have federation enabled.
Castopod’s latest feature allows you to display the podcasts’ transcript directly on the episode page.
EchoFeed is an interesting blend of RSS and the fediverse, allowing you to easily republish RSS/Atom feeds on to the fediverse and other places.
The weekly overview of all fediverse server and client updates.
Evan Prodromou tries out TikTok Notes, and writes about how it should integrate with ActivityPub.
PeerTube has started a newsletter, and the first edition can be found here.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
This edition of Last Week in Fediverse seems to be a President’s edition; Barack Obama turns on fediverse sharing for his Threads account, and Brazil’s president Lula joins Bluesky. Lots more going on this week, lets dive in:
The News
IFTAS, the nonprofit organisation for Trust & Safety on the social web, has put out a guide for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The guide caters towards ‘small and micro services’ that has member accounts in the EU, which is the large majority of fediverse servers. It is a practical and easy overview of what is expected if you are the operator of a fediverse server, and highly recommended if you are a server admin to check it out. Most requirements in the DSA that are applicable to ‘small and micro services’ (platforms with less than 50 employees and less than 10M EUR turnover) are on how to provide ways of communication with authorities and how to handle their requests. The requirement (art 13) in the DSA that might give server operators the most difficulty is that platforms that are located outside of the EU, but ‘serve EU users or make their services available in the EU are required to have an EU-based
legal representative to manage compliance and communication with EU authorities.’ It seems a significant number of fediverse servers are currently not in compliance with this requirement, and no clear direction yet on how to get there.
Sora is an iOS and MacOS client for the fediverse (for Mastodon, the Forkeys as well as Bluesky), which has been pushing the boundaries with what is possible with 3rd party fediverse clients. The app features a custom For You algorithmic feed, and the developer recently showed during FediForum how people have complete control over their algorithm. Now the developer is back with another update, this time adding P2P video calling to the client. A gif in the announcement post shows how it works. You can schedule a meeting, which send a link for the other person’s fediverse account to join. Both people need to use Sora to use the feature. The developer stated that if there is enough interest in the feature, he will work on making the feature available as a web client that does not require Sora.
Flipboard has reached another major milestone in their process fully federate Flipboard and have full interoperability with the rest of the fediverse. There is now two-way interaction with fediverse accounts and Flipboard accounts that are federated. CEO Mike McCue explains: “Now when a federated Flipboard user curates, people in the fediverse can reply, favorite, boost or follow those Flipboard users who will in turn see that activity in their usual notifications tab. Even better, Flipboard users can directly reply to people in the fediverse — and very soon they will also be able to follow each other.” Furthermore, Flipboard has enabled federation for another 11000 magazines, creating increasing the amount of curated content that is available in the fediverse.
Lyrak is a new social platform that focuses on real-time news and revenue sharing with creators that was announced this week. In the announcement post, Lyrak also stated that fediverse integration will be added to the platform ‘soon’. For more information on Lyrak, Sarah Perez has more extensive look, over at TechCrunch.
Russia’s censorship agency blocks access to the lgtbqia.space server in Russia. The admins of the lgtbqia.space server got a notification by the Russian agency demanding that they remove an account from their server. The account is for a ‘blog about LGBTQ+ people, literature, sports, humor, etc.’ The admins refused to comply, after which the server is now inaccessible in Russia.
During FediForum, Newsmast showcased their new project Patchwork. In a new update, Newsmast says that they ‘are looking at rolling out a Beta version in the coming months, with features like easy opt in or out of networking with Threads & Bluesky, spam management and content filters.’
A blog post on using Mastodon to follow on Threads accounts, from the perspective of someone who has mainly been using Threads. The blog showcases how third party clients are a major selling point for the fediverse.
Meanwhile, Threads invites developers to sign up for API access, but it seems the API can only be used for posting into Threads, as well as analytics. It rules out the possibility of building full-featured third-party clients as you can with the rest of the fediverse.
Some news from Bluesky
Brazilian president Lula has opened an account on Bluesky, Brasil247.com reports. The news comes after an escalating conflict between X and the Brazilian Courts. Elon Musk publicly refused to follow orders by the Brazilian court to block certain accounts on X, and a Brazilian judge has ordered an investigation of Elon Musk for obstruction of justice. President Lula opening an account on Bluesky is a direct response to the ongoing conflict between the Brazilian government and X, and indicates how governments are starting to be fed up with the situation at X. President Lula used his first post on Bluesky to say that 38 slaughterhouses will be authorised to export meat to China. (?)
The Links
Mastodon is hiring a new core team member for back-end development.
An update on BridgyFed, the upcoming bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, and the work to make it fully opt-in/consent based.
Fediverse Event planning tool Mobilizon has transferred ownership recently, and the new team, Kaihuri, will give a presentation of the new version next week on Monday April 15th.
A reading of the Canadian Online Harms Act, from the perspective of fediverse admins.
An update on radio free fedi, who have launched their new website as well.
The President of the United States posting into the fediverse is not something I expected to happen so soon, but here we are. A new photo sharing app in development, and analysis of the different communities in the fediverse. Let’s dive in.
Joe Biden is now posting into the fediverse
The official US president Threads account, @POTUS, has turned on the fediverse connection, allowing people in the fediverse to follow the account. Besides the POTUS account, the @whitehouse account and the Spanish version @lacasablanca have also turned on federation.
Threads’ work on federation is still in open beta, as only people in US, Canada and Japan are able to use it. Federation is only one way currently, people using fediverse software can follow accounts on Threads, but not the other way around. Comments made in the fediverse on Threads posts are also not send back to Threads.
The official accounts are remarkably early adopters of the feature, as last week I reported that the total number of Threads accounts that have turned on federation is likely just north of 3000. Being able to follow the president of the United States from your fediverse account changes the dynamics of the fediverse in a variety of ways. It alters the dynamic of discussions on whether instances should block Threads or not. For some people it will increase the perceived cost of not federating with Threads, while for others it can help sharpen the focus of what type of posts they do not want to be part of their community. It makes conversations with other (government) organisations about joining the fediverse easier; as “even the POTUS is a part of the fediverse” is a good sell that is hard to beat.
The news
Vernissage is a third party client for Pixelfed for iOS which celebrated their 1-year anniversary this week. As part of the moment the developer announced that Vernissage now has become it’s own fediverse platform, focusing on being a platform for photographers, with photos at the center. The official instance is available at vernissage.photos, but as the platform is still in testing phase it is closed for registrations for the moment. The platform is already federating, with the global timeline showing photos from Pixelfed. Vernissage.photos is completely standalone from the Vernissage client for Pixelfed, and the developer says that it is possible that the name of the client might change in the future to avoid confusion. Vernissage is open source, available here.
Newsmast has published a new report, with research on the communities on the social web. The report, Mapping The Fediverse, indicates the fediverse is more than talking about Linux: “People often think the Fediverse is about tech. We’ve not found that,” says Michael Foster, Co-Founder of Newsmast. “Around a million people participated in knowledge-sharing over the last six months, in a broad range of Communities, from Pets to Politics.” The entire report is worth reading, and gives a good overview of the fediverse. The fediverse has a very ‘long tail’ of people who post for a relatively smaller group of followers, and who are fine with their posts not gaining a large visibility. The fediverse seems to have a much bigger section of this group of people than Bluesky, for example. But as impressions of the communities of a network are often based on the most popular and viral posts, it is especially easy on the fediverse to not fully appreciate this long tail of people. Talking about Newsmast: Tedium wrote an article about Newsmast, and placing them in the context of real-time news in the social media era
Darnell Clayton writes how Flipboard, not Threads, may become the largest fediverse instance. Sharing your content on Flipboard to the fediverse is opt-out, while it is opt-in for Threads. This difference in approach, in combination with a low uptake of any opt-in system, might just mean many more Flipboard accounts than Threads account will be part of the fediverse. Flipboard also published a blog this week, explaining what it means to have a federated Flipboard profile.
Some governments have experimented with the fediverse by setting up their own Mastodon or Peertube instance, but I think that this (WordPress) website of a Dutch government organisation that has started using the ActivityPub plugin is the first case of a government organisation joining the fediverse via WordPress. This Phanpy link showcases that the website is now visible via the fediverse.
A paper on detecting toxic speech by focusing on the conversational context of posts, titled ‘Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse’. Finding the context of a conversation is harder in a decentralised network, since not all instance have the same complete overview. Scientific analysis of the fediverse has mainly focused on Mastodon so far, and this paper expands on that by viewing Pleroma as their own social network within a the larger social networks of the fediverse.
The newly formed Working Group for the forum/link-aggregator part of the fediverse has had their first meeting, and voted to be the Threadiverse Working Group, that will create a Task Force as part of the SWICG. It is a collaboration project in a way that has not really happened in the fediverse before. I’m very interested in how this will develop; the dominant way of creating fediverse software so far has been hobby projects that sometimes scale up slightly, now this is intersecting more and more with existing organisations with complete products who are expanding their product to include fediverse integration. This creates both space and need for more cross-product collaboration, something that is highly valuable and needed within the fediverse.
The links
Ben Pate, developer of the upcoming Emissary platform, demos how Emissary can be used to build federated music service.
WeDistribute spoke with micro.blog creator Manton Reece about Indieweb, federation, and personal blogging.
Write.as gives a short update on the current priorities: better fediverse integration, the ability to import posts, and a revision to drafts.
For the protocol-people: Ryan Barrett and @nightpool published a draft report for the SWICG about ActivityPub and HTTP Signatures.
The monthly update for Forgejo, with some more information on their work on implementing federation.
Development work on Catodon is halted, as the lead developer has other IRL obligations and the project has not managed to find a co-lead dev.
Last week I wrote about the work on @Oliphant’s blocklists being halted, in favour of the upcming FediCheck. @Oliphant gave another update on the current status on the transition.
Skeb is a Japanese art commission platform that has started to integrate together with Misskey.
GoToSocial’s latest update adds support for account moving, hiding your follower count, and custom themes.
Upcoming link-aggregator platform Sublinks has put out of moderator survey.
Threads has an internal blocklist of which fediverse servers it will not connect with. The Fedibird.com instance was on that list, and got itself removed after reaching out. As Liaizon Wakest says in the post pointing this out, it is interesting to see playing out.
Podcastindex.org has a bridge to the fediverse, allowing you to follow all the indexed podcasts from your fediverse accounts. This work has been going on for a bit, and it is getting more traction now.
This week’s updates to fediverse servers and clients.
An update on the current state of moderation tools available in Piefed.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
February was a extremely eventful month for Bluesky, with the network opening up. While things have been less hectic in March, there have been significant additions to the ATmosphere: stackable moderation and third party labelers, blogging on ATproto and more. Let’s dive in.
Stackable moderation and labelers
One of the core design parts of Bluesky and the AT Proto network is a focus on individual choice, for both curation (via custom feeds) as well as moderation. With this month’s release of open-source moderation tools and third party labeling services, Bluesky has put their view on what they call ‘Stackable Moderation’ in practice. The idea of stackable moderation (in earlier writings Bluesky called it composable moderation) is that the Bluesky organisation provides a ‘base layer’ of moderation services, and individuals can decide to ‘stack’ additional moderation services on top of the services already provided by Bluesky.
To enable this, Bluesky released ‘Ozone’ as open-source software, which is the moderation tool that the Bluesky organisation uses in-house for their moderation services. They also implemented third party ‘labelers’, allowing other people to run a moderation service that labels posts and accounts. People who subscribe to that labeling service can decide to hide posts that have that specific label. Bluesky posted a short video to demonstrate this here.
Some examples of these new labelers are Aegis, XBlock Screenshot Labeler and AI Moderation Service. The XBlock labeler automatically labels screenshots from all the other social networks, and is a great option for people who are not interested in seeing every post by Elon Musk being dunked on. AI Moderation Service labels posts that are made with AI. Aegis focuses on safety, especially for the queer communities on Bluesky, and has grown out of the lists that were maintained by Kairi, known as the Contraption. Her postmortem analysis of running these denylists for the last 10 months is excellent and worth reading, as it indicates how being placed on a widely adopted moderation list is a highly effective way to starve bad actors of oxygen.
Blogging on AT Protocol
WhiteWind is a new blogging platform that runs on AT Protocol, and allows anyone with a Bluesky account to create their own blog for free. One of the core ideas of building the AT Protocol out in the open is that other people can build different apps on top of it as well, that are not microblogging. The launch of WhiteWind shows that this is indeed possible, and that AT Protocol can be used to build different applications.
Using WhiteWind is as simple as logging in with your Bluesky handle and app password, hit the ‘plus’ button in the bottom right, and start typing. WhiteWind uses Markdown, and for more information there is a basic explanation page.
For the people interested in protocol stuff: WhiteWind is an AppView, that indexes posts with a different ‘lexicon’ than the standard microblogging. Your WhiteWind blogs however are stored on the same PDS, so Bluesky probably hosts your blogs, even though the official Bluesky app will not show the blog posts.
Graber on how Bluesky plans to make money
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was on the Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel to talk about Bluesky and Federation. There are lots of interesting discussions in there, and the episode is worth listening to (or reading, transcript available). What stood out to me is Graber’s answer regarding Bluesky’s plans to make money, where she says: “We’ve been building marketplaces within the app, essentially. So, we’ve got information marketplaces, moderation marketplaces. This is a direction that we’re going to lean into.”
In February, after Bluesky dropped the need for invite codes, The Verge also spoke with Graber, and also asked the question about ways to make money: “the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.”
It is striking to me to how different these answers are: moderation marketplaces is new, and paid additional app features as well as a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm are not mentioned.
In other news – Bluesky
Bluesky has announced a 10k USD microgrants program, to help foster and grow the developer ecosystem, with grants between 500USD and 2000 USD per project. No recipients of the grants have been announced yet.
Last month, Bluesky hired Aaron Rodericks as head of Trust and Safety. This news led to Elon Musk changing the name of X’s Trust and Safety team to ‘Safety’ instead.
The Links
Indie developer Kuba Suder has build a variety of projects for Bluesky and ATproto, and gave an overview of all the projects he has made. Suder has build a way to show all quote posts of a post, a handles directory, a way to cross-post from Bluesky to Mastodon, and more.
Enable comments on your website with Bluesky. This implementation mixes both fediverse interactions with Bluesky interactions together.
Bluesky Feed Creator does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing anyone to create their own custom feed with no coding required. They announced recently that they dropped the waiting list.
Mike Masnick wrote about ‘Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far’.
An experiment in using Bluesky’s DID:PLC with ActivityPub.
That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. If you are interested in the world of decentralised social networks, you can subscribe to my newsletter where you get a weekly update on all that is happening.
A bit of a quieter news week, especially after last week’s business with Threads’ open beta for federation and Fediforum, with a variety of smaller news items. So let’s dive into this week’s news:
The News
Fediverse event planning platform Mobilizon transfers ownership, from Framasoft to Kaihuri. Framasoft (who also develops PeerTube) has been developing Mobilizon for the past few years, and feels that they have achieved their vision. The Kaihuri association has obtained funding from the NLnet organisation for futher developement.
@Oliphant has maintained the Oliphant’s blocklists over the last few years. He has been working together with IFTAS on the upcoming FediCheck project. FediCheck is a Web service from IFTAS that allows service providers to review and subscribe to external sources such as the IFTAS CARIAD database for automated updates. @Oliphantsays about his blocklist project that “project I’m doing is an “interim step on the road to something better.” FediCheck is the “something better”, at least so far as what I can contribute.” As such, future work on the Oliphant blocklist will be minimal, and more information on this will be out soon.
Mastodon’s upcoming new release will feature ‘severed relationship’ notifications. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput explains that these notifications will appear when a moderator or admin blocks a user or a whole domain and this action caused you to loose some follows or followers. Screenshots how this will look like available here. There will also be new ways to filter your notifications. The new update, version 4.3, is expected to be released in the next 6 to 8 weeks.
A short update on statistics about Threads: Threads’ legal department denied the request to share NodeInfo data, according to Daniel Supernault, who maintains fedidb.org. Mastodon’s CTO Renaud Chaput meanwhile indicates that mastodon.social knows about 2800 Threads accounts who have turned on federation. While the mastodon.social server does not know about all Threads accounts, it does provide a good indication of roughly the amount of Threads accounts that have turned on federation.
WeDistribute wrote about the decision by the maintainer of fedi.garden to only list instances that do not federate with Threads. The article has a good explainer of the situation, but what stands out to me is that this is another small step towards understanding the fediverse as multiple fediverses instead.
John Spurlock has given an extensive write-up of the current state of work on ActivityPub and podcasting. It is a subject that deserves significantly more attention, something that I hope to get to soon. For people who are interested in a deep dive on the subject, the write-up by Spurlock is excellent.
Sora, an iOS fediverse client for Mastodon, the Forkeys as well as Bluesky keeps pushing the boundaries of innovation in fediverse clients. Last week on Fediforum the developer showcased how Sora has client-side algorithmic feeds that are customisable.. The latest update is a ‘fediverse watch tab’, a scrolling feed of fediverse videos.
The Links
FediTest, a framework to help fediverse developers test, has some new information about the feedback they’ve received.
A busy week in the fediverse, with Threads launching their open beta, as well as Fediforum happening this week.
Threads has entered the fediverse
Threads has officially entered the fediverse, by entering an open beta where people in the US, Canada and Japan can now opt in to connect their profile to the fediverse. The feature was first demoed on the Fediforum this week by Threads employees, who were there to show the feature and participate in the discussions. A video of the demo can be seen here, which showcases how the connection between Threads and the fediverse works.
Threads accounts that opt-in to the connection will get a few popups that explain what the fediverse is, and what it means to be connected.
4 screenshots where Threads explains what fediverse sharing isSource.In the announcement post, Meta goes into more detail, explaining how this open beta is part of their phased approach to the fediverse. In the current phase of this open beta, only public posts are federated out towards other servers that connect with Threads, with Meta saying:
“Certain types of posts and content are also not federated, including:
Posts with restricted replies.
Replies to non-federated posts.
Post with polls (until future updates).
Reposts of non-federated posts.“
The blog also goes into more detail on how Threads has approached quote posts, by adopting both the Misskey-style of quote posts as well as the FEP-a232 style of quote posts. I wrote about this in more detail a while ago. It indicates the impact that Threads has on the entire fediverse by participating with ActivityPub. The status of how the FEP process relates to the formal specification of the protocol has never been fully formalised, but the participation of Meta in this process changes the dynamics.
On Instagram, Adam Mosseri posted a story where he explains why Threads is joining the fediverse, listing multiple reasons. He states that it is an ‘interesting way for social networks to operate’, and the ‘direction the internet is going’, calling it a paradigm shift that he wants Threads to lean into. He also describes Threads as the challenger to Twitter, and thus willing to take on more risk.
Threads’ phased approach to federation is as much a technical challenge as it is a regulatory challenge. Currently, Threads accounts do not see individual likes on their federated posts, instead getting a notification that says ‘4 fediverse users from 3 servers liked this post’, for example. According to Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput, Threads cannot use profile info from fediverse accounts on Threads yet because they are not allowed to do so yet by their Legal department.
With Threads and the fediverse being a main topic of conversation again, some short bits of news:
Threads does not connect to all servers in the fediverse either, and they published their guidelines on which servers Threads will not connect to here.
FediDB has also added support for Threads to the database that tracks the fediverse, and now Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed account on the fediverse.
The developer of GoToSocial wrote about the social and power dynamics of when a large corporate implementation of a protocol is incompatible with the implementation by a small independent group.
Threads uses a their own logo to denote the fediverse, not the coloured 5-pointed one. Whether or not a server federates with Threads is a major mark of separation within the fediverse, and Liaizon Wakest uses the different logos to distinguish between an ‘open fediverse’ and a ‘Corporate Fediverse’.
Fediforum
Fediforum was this week, a 2-day digital unconference where everyone could call sessions, as well as a variety of speed demos at the beginning. The event consists of speed demos of 5 minutes, and sessions that anyone could convene.
The speed demos were a good showcase in the incredible projects that people are building on top of the fediverse. It also indicated a need for better ways for people to share what they are building with the rest of the fediverse, as there are some amazing projects that have not gotten the attention yet that they deserve. I don’t have the space (nor time) for this edition of the newsletter to go over all of the demos, but you watch them on the Fediforum Youtube channel. TheNewStack has a good write-up of the event as well, and if you are really interested you can scroll through WeDistribute’s liveblog of the event. I’ll give one sneak peak, that I was impressed by Emissary, a stand-alone fediverse server and RSS reader, which easily allows you to build custom apps on top as well. To understand what that really means, I’ll recommend you check out the demo video. I’ll go over the demo videos some more in a separate article, as I want to say more about how Fediforum highlighted the need for more ways for the fediverse to showcase itself.
Threads has been a significant presence at this edition of Fediforum as well, with the first public demo of how the Threads’ fediverse integration, ahead of their open beta launch a few days later, as well as multiple employees who participated both days in the sessions as well. The employees talked about that they understand the widespread skepticism about Threads joining the fediverse, with one employee saying: “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
There has been a clear interest in collaboration projects on the fediverse as showcased by the various sessions held during Fediforum. A session on the Threadiverse led to the start of a Threadiverse working group. As a side note, the Thread on NodeBB about the Threadiverse working group is a great showcase for the integration of ActivityPub into NodeBB as well.
There were sessions about the Fediverse Developer Network as well as Evan Prodromou organised a session about a potential Fediverse Advocacy Group. It is clear that the interest is there, with the more difficult next step being to put this into practice.
In other news
IFTAS has been hard at work behind the scenes, and with it some of the things that they will release this month:
FediCheck, a Moderation-as-a-Service app that gives administrators control to compare their deny list with IFTAS’ CARIAD list, and allows them to easily add and subtract instances to the their own deny list. This was also demoed at Fediforum, video available here.
DSA Guidebook for Micro Services. Everything you wanted to know about the EU’s Digital Services Act and were too afraid to ask.
A moderation community portal
Moderation Documentation Support
Moderator Advisory Council
It is a massive list, and something I’ll certainly cover more when things are released.
Two podcasts episodes (one, two) on the work of connecting ActivityPub and ActivityStreams in the podcasting specification. Some fascinating things are happening in the podcasting space that I have not really been able to fully check out and report on yet, but for people interested in the topic, this is definitely something that is worth diving deeper into.
The links
Donald Trump’s Truth Social runs a forked version of Mastodon, and it seems that it has not patched the vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Mastodon.
WeDistribute has written about the state of ActivityPub, and the efforts to extend the protocol.
The Mastodonusercountbot reported that Mastodon now has 15 million accounts. This bot is likely not accurate, with other sources listing somewhere between 7 and 9 million Mastodon accounts.
@Box464 has written an extensive walkthrough for completing a Bonfire installation. For more information about the upcoming platform, check out this article by WeDistribute, or my recent reporting on how they are involved with the launch of a new Open Science Network.
Pixelfed developer Dansup is working on Loops, a federated platform for short form vertical video. A video demonstrating how Loops will look like is available here.
A blog by the European Broadcasting Union with a call for all public broadcasters to join decentralised social networks, based on the experiences by Deutsche Welle on Mastodon.
Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media.
Last week I reported about Fedify, a fediverse server framework. They released another demo of what is possible with Fedify, this time with fedi badges. Fedify also released a tutorial, here.
The fediverse stays in the theme of announcing projects that are a copy of a well-known platform, but with ActivityPub added to it. This week its a proof-of-concept of a federated version of Wikipedia, as well as the announcement that Dansup will now work on creating a Loops, a federated version of TikTok.
The news
Lemmy developer Nutomic has announced Ibis, a federated wiki platform. Ibis is a proof-of-concept that allows anyone to run their own wiki, and connect them via ActivityPub. In the announcement post, Nutomic frames Ibis explicitly not just as any wiki, but as a Wikipedia alternative specifically, outlining some of the problems that he sees with the way that Wikipedia is run. Nutomic’s solution is for different places to host their own wiki, where articles and edits can be shared across different wiki instances via ActivityPub. The problems that Nutomic sees with Wikipedia are mainly regarding the moderation policies of Wikipedia and how they are executed. Ibis does not have any moderation tools yet, nor a vision of how moderation policies and privileges will be federated across different instances.
Commenters in the announcement post point out that Ibis might have a target audience with the Wikia/Fandom wikis, wikis for specific/niche topics that are heavily ad-driven. What personally surprised me is Ibis does not have any connection with Lemmy communities, in the same way that Reddit has wikis for subreddits. Nutomic says that Ibis in a very early stage of development, and will not be able to work on in it the near term as his daughter will soon be born, and hopes that other developers will help contribute to the project.
Pixelfed developer Dansup has announced that he is working on Loops, a new fediverse platform for sharing short videos. Dansup says that Loops is based on an old web UI for videos for Pixelfed that is getting repurposed into a new app. Not much other information is known about the project, expect that Dansup expects that the project will ship ‘soon’.
A paper on hashtag activism on Mastodon, titled ‘Showing your ass on Mastodon’. It is an autoethnographic narrative about how a fight about a hashtag used to show pictures of donkeys highlights issues with hashtag activism on decentralised social networks. The article is fun to read, and there is also a good commentary by Robert W. Gehl.
There is some tensions brewing below the surface at Lemmy. This blog by @db0 explains the issues and gives a good overview. The Beehaw community is actively thinking about moving away from Lemmy to a different fediverse platform, and with the upcoming platform Sublinks as well as Piefed there are now new intereresting options to choose from.
The San Francisco International Airport museum has joined the fediverse, and they have put some serious effort into the project. They published an extensive blog post explaining their thinking, and how this has been a long time in the making. The SFO museum had thought about years earlier about possibilities of making every museum object into a social media presence, either on Twitter or on FourSquare. Their fediverse presence starts calmer, with only a few accounts, build with their own custom code.
The Links
Hatsu is a new self-hosted bridge that interacts with Fediverse on behalf of your static site.
Streams developer Mike Macgirvin has started work on adding Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub. Fediverse platform Streams already has Nomadic Identity, but Streams internally uses a different protocol to handle this.
Fedify is a fediverse server framework that’s currently in development. This week the creator showed a demo of what it can do.
Micro.blog leans into the Indieweb and adds blogrolls.
Mozilla has recently scaled down their involvement with the mozilla.social server, and now they have ditched the custom front-end based on Elk for their server.
Manyfold is a place to organise your 3d-printing files, is actively thinking about adding ActivityPub.
Piefed has added the ability to opt-out of search.
@LaurensHof thank you, as usual, for this great round-up - you provide an amazing service to all of us in helping keep up-to-date with all of the different strands of activity!