Two major news stories in the world of decentralised social networks this week: the fediverse is hit with spam wave, which showcases some of the vulnerabilities of the network. Bluesky has opened up the network to third parties for federation, which means that we now seem to enter a new chapter the development of decentralised social networks.
Advanced Persistent Teenagers hit the fediverse with spam wave
The fediverse is currently experiencing an persistent ongoing spam wave. The source of the spam is from a dispute on a Japanese Discord server. This post has an in-depth timeline and collection of all the information about the groups and people behind the spam attack that is known at this point. TechCrunch has a good article that explains the situation, as well as how Discord has not been able to handle the source of the harm that originated on their servers.
The fediverse has been ‘lucky’ that the content of the spam messages is relatively harmless, even though it still has a real impact on all the labor by the admins and moderators. As last summer’s attack on Lemmy showed, this is certainly not a guarantee. It does give the fediverse an opportunity to respond and build better defense tools against spam, as these attacks have showcased how vulnerable the network is to attacks.
Mastodon has taken some actions and updates, mainly focusing on making servers less suspectible to be used by malicious actors. If you set up a new Mastodon server, the default will be that all registrations now require approval. Admins can still set the registrations to be open to everyone, but it is not the default setting like it is now. Mastodon servers that are updated to the latest version and do have open registrations will now also automatically switch to approval mode if there has not been any action by the mod and admin accounts. These updates are helpful, but not in the near future. They require new and updated servers, while the problem is the very long tail of unmaintained servers that are currently out there. And that these servers are currently used for spam, makes it likely they will not be updated anytime soon either.
The spam wave forced admins to work together, such as the work by Erik Uden to maintain and share a list of servers that are the source of the spam wave. The interesting question that is worth watching is if and how the fediverse adopts these practices for even more coordination on shared deny lists. There are projects in development that help with deny list coordination, such as IFTAS’ CARIAD and The Bad Space, but these have not available yet. What I do find striking is that there seems to have been little interest in the Mastodon community to use the Fediseer project to help deal with the spam wave. Fediseer was started last summer to help with the spam wave on Lemmy, and allows server admins (including Mastodon server admins) to classify other servers as spam.
Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere
Bluesky has opened up the network for federation, allowing people to host their own data. This means that now anyone can set up their own Personal Data Server (PDS) and connect to the main network. Bluesky frames the opening of the network in the context of website hosting, making a direct comparison between how anyone can host a website on the internet. By hosting a website, you are in control of your data, and move to a different hosting provider without any noticeable change for the visitors. Bluesky says that they “think social media should work the same way”; by hosting your own PDS you are in control of your own data, able to move to a different host, without your followers noticing anything.
The update Bluesky released this week is an early version, which changes coming later, with Bluesky saying:
The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.
In the announcement post, Bluesky also makes a comparison with Mastodon, and explains how some of the differences in the approaches: Bluesky focuses on a global conversation and a global network, which can be fine-tuned to individual preferences with composable feeds and composable moderation. This is in contrast with most fediverse implementations, where network view and moderation are dependent on the instance or server you are on. Bluesky also has full account portability, where you can keep your data and identity when you move to a different server. Account portability in the fediverse is a subject of many discussions and something people want to implement, but with limited progress so far.
Bluesky also crossed the 5 million account mark this week, gaining almost 2 million accounts in the last few weeks since the network dropped the invite code requirement. A significant part of this inflow comes from Japan, where Bluesky turns out to be hugely popular; Japanese is now the dominant language on the network. With this inflow the Bluesky network (colloquially also called the ATmosphere) has become more active than the fediverse; the fediverse has stayed around roughly 1.2M Monthly Active Users for the last half year. A new website for reliable statistics on Bluesky recently started tracking data, but for the MAU to be a reliable number a few more weeks of datapoints are needed. The current Weekly Active Users for the Bluesky network is around 1.2M, and the MAU is above 1.5M.
The links
Pixelfed has made some updates to their server directory. Pixelfed also added curated onboarding, meaning the ability for server admins to have people apply for an account instead of being able to register directly.
A video that goes in-depth on all of the features of Sharkey. For a complete overview of all the feature comparisons between the Forkeys, check out this comparison table.
A new update for Akkoma, with some throwback to the MySpace-period of the internet: Both Akkoma and Sharkey now allow you to set a background image on your profile, and this background image also federates.
WeDistribute has a podcast with Oliphant, who is behind a shared blocklist project for the fediverse.
Lemmy bi-weekly development update.
Funkwhale has a blog about their process of making a new app for the project.
The Mozilla.social project was also developing their own Android and iOS apps for the project. Now that the project has significantly been down-scaled in size, these projects seem to be abandoned. Firefly.social is a continuation of the Mozilla.social Android app, but it is not affiliated with Mozilla anymore.
Write.as has added the ability for people to turn off federation for their public blogs, if they so desire.
PieFed explores how much difference it makes to add a Content Delivery Network. It also added support for audio posts.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
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