Bluesky has opened up the network, dropping the invite codes and allowing anyone to create an account. This spurred a massive new signup wave, and the total accounts grew in two days by 50%, from just over 3 million registered accounts to 4.5 million accounts.

What is striking about these massive wave of 1.5 million new signups is that it largely seems to be from Japan. A quick analysis of the posts by language makes it clear what is happening:

Visualisation by David Thiel

Custom feeds that show the top recent posts of the network also confirm that most of the posts are now in Japanese. Some popular accounts from Japan have migrated from X to Bluesky. At this point in time, it seems like Bluesky is rapidly turning into a Japanese social network. It is a trend that is worth watching, as it seems fairly rare that a language-specific migration to another platform is suddenly shifts the previously dominant language of the platform so much.

Bridges and architecture

As part of the opening, Bluesky also released more information on the technical structure of Bluesky and how federation works with the release of a technical paper. It indicates how complicated Bluesky’s architecture is; the paper seems to raise as much questions as it answers. Crucial questions on the moderation, where it happens and to what extend people who run their own server (PDS) can influence content moderation in some way are still unclear.

In an interview with The Verge, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also talks more about plans on how the Bluesky company can make money:

“While the AT Protocol is being opened up soon, the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.”

Finally, Bluesky also says they are planning with the first steps of federation at the end of the month. At that point, anyone will be able to run their own data server (PDS) and join the network. At this point, the network will be federated (meaning that any nodes in the network can contact and communicate with each other), but not decentralised yet (as Bluesky will still run the other parts of the pipeline, the Relay and AppView). However, this already changes the network significantly, as Ryan Barrett confirms that with federated PDS, bridges between the network will be able to operate, including his project BridgyFed. This allows people from the ActivityPub-based fediverse to connect with the Bluesky network via the bridge.

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:

“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”

This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.

Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.

Mastodon app Mammoth has released a new version of their app, Mammoth 2. The app was launched in early 2023 for the iPhone, Mac and iPad, and it is made by startup that is backed by Mozilla. Mammoth has focused on the user experience, especially of new users, and over the summer they launched a For You feed. In the announcement post for Mammoth 2, co-founder Bart Decrem says that ‘Social needs to be an open protocol that anybody can build on’. To illustrate their belief in the value of open software, Mammoth 2 is now open source as well.

One common criticism of the fediverse is that it is hard to get started. Finding interesting people and content to follow is harder than on other platforms, who are more willing to suggest accounts and posts to you. Decrem talks about wanting to make something that takes the values and the passion of FOSS projects, and make them accessible to a larger base of people. With Mammoth, he is actively working on making Mastodon more accessible for new people, in multiple ways.

The standout feature for Mammoth 2 is curated ‘Smart Lists’, where Mammoth has asked people within the community to curate lists around certain topics, from Space to Indieweb to Queertech. The handpicked curation provides a counter to algorithmic feeds, and also provides new accounts with a good place to start. If you have been in the fediverse for a while, you will probably recognise most accounts on the Smart Lists that interest you, but for a new account it can certainly be helpful.

The For You feed is now makes use of the smart lists as well. Mammoth explains how it works in more detail here. You can customise your For You feed as well, selecting which parts you want to be included or excluded into your feed. You can select each smart list you subscribe to, Friends of friends, Trending among follows, and handpicked accounts by Mammoth.

The two algorithms of Trending among follows and Friends of friends are still in the testing phase. Decrem explains that these algorithm are hard to implement well, both from a technological perspective as well as a cultural viewpoint. The entire fediverse network is currently also on the small side to get enough engagement to create a well functioning feed.

Bart talks about that there are communities on the fediverse that have critical mass, and are self-sustaining with worthwhile content, but that other bla

For 2024, Decrem expects that it’ll be the year of social as an open protocol, with many different products being build. For Mammoth, that means making Mastodon and the fediverse accessible to a wider audience, with the following priority they are working on: first of all, making sure that Mammoth provides a great Mastodon experience. Secondly, provide a good experience for interacting with the fediverse at large. Thirdly, they are watching closely what Threads is doing, and making sure that Threads is accessible on day 1 that they launch ActivityPub support.

A large part of the Mammoth 2 update is about content curation. Decrem says however that being a content curator is a not a part of their core business, stating that Mammoth is especially good at thinking about the user experience. For now, that means helping with content curation. That is why other organisations such as Newsmast, and people from the community have been actively involved in taking the role of content creation.

Mammoth is also thinking about how to sustain the project, to which they have introduced Mammoth Gold. This optional subscription (2.99 USD/month) is about supporting the project, and gets you optional features such as more icons, early access and votes on new features, and being present on the quarterly board meetings.

The app will not be just focused on Mastodon forever, and Decrem sees a lot of potential for Threads implementing ActivityPub. This is something he actively hopes to make use of, and provide Threads users with another app that they can use. He sees a lot of options how Mammoth can do things better than Threads, and give users more handpicked and curated content to browse.

It’s been a busy week for fediverse news, with a long update. Three articles this week, as well as quite some other news and interesting links.

Next week I’ll be hosting a livestream together with Framasoft, to ask them questions about PeerTube. The event will be livestreamed on PeerTube, on Wednesday, Dec. 13th, 6-8 pm (CET). You can already send in your questions now, simply by posting them with the #PeerTubeAMA on the fediverse. See you there!

5 years of Mobilizon

An end, as well as a new beginning for Mobilizon. With the latest update, Framasoft adds a variety of new features, and hands the project over to a new team. Read the update below

Nostr bridge Mostr gets an update

The bridging between the different decentralised social networks remains one of the more interesting developments, as they point towards a future of the fediverse that is more complex than just a single platform ‘winning’. In this piece, I take a look at Mostr, the bridge that connects the fediverse to Nostr, and the complex questions about culture and safety that arise.

Mammoth gets a major update

Mastodon app Mammoth gets a major update

In other news

A blog post by Lickability, the design agency that works on the official Mastodon apps, that explains the design process behind Mastodon’s reply safety features. It explains the thought process behind the design, and compares it to how Instagram, Twitter and Youtube are handling somewhat similar features.

SocialInbox is a new feature of Distributed.Press which integrates a website’s comment section with federated social media platforms like Mastodon. Distributed.Press is an open source publishing tool that can help send out your website content to the decentralized web. With SocialInbox, websites can now become part of the fediverse, in a similar way to how the ActivityPub plugin makes WordPress websites part of the fediverse. With the Social Inbox, your website becomes an account on the fediverse that can be followed, and posts can be interacted with as with any Mastodon post, which gets send back to your own website.

Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have announced that they will be running a new project, titled Fediverse Governance Successes & Gaps. The project looks to find more information about the current governance models in the fediverse, as well as the gaps in infrastructure that are present for the governance of the new generation of social networks. The goal is to create a practical handbook as well as whitepaper on governance.

SURF, the Dutch IT cooperative for education and research, has extended their Mastodon pilot for another year. I spoke to them this spring about the pilot, here. For the next year they will be focusing on adoption of the fediverse by participation organisations, as well as working on taking the next organisational steps of going from pilot to a regular service that SURF offers to their members. More information in their interview with PublicSpaces, in Dutch.

Social network Spoutible is adding cross-posting to different networks. They have added Bluesky, and are now in the process of adding support for Mastodon. This is not full federation, as likes and comments are not carried over. Neither is Mastodon fully supported yet. It does however provide an indication of where social networks are headed, with more and more connections between networks. WeDistribute has more info, here.

Catodon is an new and upcoming fediverse platform, based on Firefish, that is currently in development. It is being worked on by some of the team that used to contribute to Firefish. As the firefish.social flagship server continues to struggle with serious technical issues, more forks of the project (such as Sharkey) are springing up.

The links

IFTAS, the non-profit organisation that helps support the fediverse moderator community, and has a Moderator Advisory Council to help guide the organisation. They are looking for someone with moderation experience who can contribute, with stipend available.

The ActivityPub Community Group held a meeting together with the Community Group for the Solid protocol, looking for ways to join forces. The notes of the entire meeting can be found here.

Pixelfed is working on making their Collections feature directly accessible and followable via Activitypub.

The third episode of Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast is out, this time with Ian Forrester, about the BBC’s experiment in the fediverse.

Another German government has joined the fediverse, this time the federal state of Baden-Württemberg.

Kbin app Artemis has shut down after the developer disappeared, WeDistribute reports.

Lemmynade is a new app for Lemmy.

The Mastodon.nl server has a blog post that discusses server size, and the tradeoffs that come with it. In Dutch.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. You can subscribe via email below, or laurenshof@fediversereport.com if you want to follow this blog with your fediverse account.

— experiencias iniciais (mat.winck.xyz, atlas.winck,xyz, presencaweb.winck.xyz, etc…)

Presença Web

— criar modelos prontos para serem duplicados

— vender os sites a partir dos modelos

— oferecer o modelo online como amostra

— vincular cada modelo a um formulário equivalente com espaços para todas infomações e mídias do cliente

— oferecer personalização limitada dentro do modelo

Geral

– Investimento inicial(dez/2023):

• Hospedagem WordPress Hostinger: R$ 200 por ano

– Próximo investimento

• Servidor Linode Starter: R$ 35 por mês (R$ 420 por ano) – 2 Apps Cloudron: RSS e ChatBot
• Cloudron Premium: R$ 75 por mês (R$ 900 por ano)
• Servidor Linode Advanced: R$ 70 por mês (R$ 840 por ano)
• Servidor Linode Master: R$ 140 por mês (R$ 1.680 por ano)

Total final:

– R$ 140 + 75 = R$ 215 por mês (R$ 2.580 por ano)

Futuro:

– Investir em servidor próprio e energia solar: R$ 10.000 únicos(servidor) + R$ 10.000(painel solar) (R$ 360 por ano) – Economia mínima de R$ 2.500 por ano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.

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

All fediverse client and server updates for the week.

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

Mastodon and reply guy culture

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

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

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

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

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

Flipboard takes the next steps into the social web

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

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

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

Nivenly organisation update

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

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

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

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

In other news

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

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

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

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

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

Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.

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

All fediverse client and server updates for the week.

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

NLNet has announced 55 new projects that are awarded a NGI Zero grant. NGI Zero is the Next Generation Internet program from the European Commision, that funds projects that work on what they call the next generation internet. For more info in NLnet and NGI Zero, check out this interview I did with NLnet this summer. The latest round of grants has quite a few projects that connect to the fediverse in some way. An overview:

NodeBB is a popular forum software platform. They got funding to add ActivityPub integration to NodeBB, allowing interoperability with both other NodeBB forums as well as the fediverse at large. NodeBB says that the “hardest part of starting a community is gaining a critical mass of adoption in order to sustain interest and content”, and integrating with the fediverse is seen as a way to overcome their biggest hurdle.

The loosely connected group of developers at fedidevs.org got a grant to build an automated test framework and test cases. It is currently hard for fediverse developers to build fediverse software that properly federates with the rest dof the network, as a consistent test suite for ActivityPub is lacking. This new test framework hopes to make it easier for developers to start building for the fediverse.

Bonfire is a federated social network that’s currently in development, with most of the work now on getting the platform ready for release. Their grant will go towards improving the performance, as well releasing their version of the ActivityPub library they are using as open-source.

GoToSocial is a lightweight, customisable, and safety-focused entryway into the fediverse, and is currently in Alpha development. With this grant, the team will add two factor authentication, and improve interoperability and scalability.

Mobilizon is a federated event planning tool, originally developed by Framasoft. Framasoft recently announced that they have completed their vision of Mobilizon. The project is not over however, as another group got funding to further improve the UX of Mobilizon.

PeerTube got funding for further improving the adoption, accessability and popularity of the platform, as well as to develop a mobile app. Framasoft has quite a few announcements in the pipeline, I’ll talk more about Framasoft, PeerTube and Mobilizon in the near future with more information.

Commune is social networking build on Matrix instead of ActivityPub, with a focus on creating communities. The project has interesting ideas about how to build social spaces, and is looking to add fediverse integration as well.

Overall there are a lot of cool and interesting projects that NLnet has funded, with a mix of supporting and scaling existing projects, as well as funding new ideas. For other projects that are interested, you can find more information about their grant process here. The deadline for the next round is December 1st 2023.

Framasoft has officially released the newest version of PeerTube, v6. The video platform added some of the most requested features in this massive update. Some of the highlights:

Protect your videos with passwords

Video storyboard

Upload a new version of your video

Add chapters to your video

The announcement blog has more details, as well as 10 second videos (hosted on PeerTube of course!) demonstration all the features.

Storyboard is when you hover over the progress bar of a video, and it shows you a preview of the frame at that timestamp. This allows you to quickly browse through a video, or help you search for a specific moment. Chapters allow you to divide the video into different segments, and give them titles. With video storyboard and video chapters, PeerTube brings the experience of the user closer to what they get from YouTube.

PeerTube positions itself explicitly as an alternative to YouTube and Twitch, but with the other new features, offers possibilities that those platforms can not, and help PeerTube create their own unique space.

With password protect, creators can now lock down access to videos with a password. Creators who want to share videos with a limited audience (their paying supporters for example) currently do not have a good way to do this on YouTube. PeerTube has now a specific clear use case where it is better than YouTube. For protected videos, YouTube massive audience is not a relevant metric after all.

Uploading a new version of your video is again a feature that is unique to PeerTube, allowing creators to update a video or correct a mistake. As this feature requires trust between the creator and their audience, it is not enabled by default, and the video will display a “Video re-upload” tag on updated videos.

It is a significant update for the video platform, with even more in the works. Framasoft will announce more details on their plans for PeerTube in the next two weeks. Stay tuned for more information about a special event for this as well!