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VERSV de HumanWare

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:

You can now post gifs.

You can now embed Bluesky posts on your website.

YouTube Music player support.

The Links

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network is an extensive history and documentation of the development of Bluesky and ATProto by the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter.

An introduction to ATProto by the creator of WhiteWind, a blogging platform build on top of ATProto.

WhiteWind latest update allows mentions to appear as comments on your blog.

A guide for bot development on ATProto.

Hosting WhiteWind blog posts on your own website.

A tool to download the entirety of Bluesky into your own database.

Third party client Skywalker now lets you post entire threads at once.

Bluesky Crash Course: Labelers by Kairi.

DataBot is Bluesky feed that uses machine learning to find data visualisations on Bluesky.

The Changelog podcast interviews Bluesky developer Paul Frazee to talk about ‘how the Bluesky apps are built, tested, and deployed’.

The Aegis Labeler is experimenting with giving out ‘Verified‘ tags to help combat impersonation spam. It is now a separate labeler.

The Aegis Labeler posted their Declaration of Values.

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.

Another busy newsweek in the fediverse: the EU pilot for the fediverse comes to an end, but the European Commission will stay on the fediverse; Ghost announces that they will support ActivityPub and build a fediverse news reading client, and Mastodon creates a U.S.-based non-profit.

EU Voice and EU Video ends their 2 year pilot program

The EU has had a presence on the fediverse with the EU Voice (Mastodon) and EU Vision (PeerTube) projects over the last 2 years. These two projects will get shut down next month, as no institution within the EU could be found that was willing to take on the responsibility. This problem was a long time in the making, with the EDPS already warning against this happening in fall 2023. The pilot project was supposed to run for one year, and was extended for second year.

The issue is that the EU fediverse project is currently run by the European Data Protection Supervisor. The pilot project as originally envisioned focused on showing that social networks that do respect individual rights are possible, which is why the EDPS claims the pilot as a success. However, as the fediverse grows and matures, the fediverse itself has moved from an experiment to a serious player in the space of social networks. Presence by the EU on the fediverse demands more serious attention and commitment from an organisation that specialises in this, and the EDPS feels that they themselves are not a good fit for facilitating the EU fediverse presence anymore. The problem is that the EDPS could not find another organisation within the EU that was willing to take on the responsibility.

The most notable fediverse account of the EU is the account of the European Commission, with some 100k followers. The account of the European Commission confirmed that they will stay active on Mastodon, stating:

“We are working on a solution to ensure our continued presence on your feeds, taking full advantage of Mastodon’s identity portability. And we are even growing the team behind our Mastodon presence, increasing efforts to engage with your comments on our posts. We are fully committed to being a real part of the conversation in the fediverse.”

My personal reading on the situation is that this is a necessary painful transition to go through, and the fact that the European Commission will stay active and increase their efforts is good news. The EU is a hugely diverse and complex organisation, to put it mildly, and I am doubtful that having one singular institute within the EU organisation that is responsible for all of the EU’s fediverse presence is going to work out. It is not surprising to me that the EDPS could not find a group or organisation within the EU that was willing to take on the responsibility of ownership. The sales pitch for taking ownership of the EU Voice is basically: “if things go great, you’ll have ownership and responsibility for social presence of a large number of EU politicians and organisations”. That does sound like a frightening amount of responsibility to take on, especially since it is unclear what this means in practice. The more logical way forward seems to me is to have many different EU fediverse servers, where each EU organisation becomes responsible for their own presence. That seems to be the direction that the account of the European Commission is taking as well.

Ghost and Buttondown announce plans to join the fediverse

Newsletter platform Ghost announced that they will soon join the fediverse, in a web page that basically amounts to a manifesto on the importance of the fediverse and ActivityPub, with plans to support ActivityPub in 2024. Together with Ghost, email newsletter service Buttondown also announced they are working on adding ActivityPub support, and that they are working together with Ghost on the implementation.

There are two parts to Ghost’s announcement, Ghost founder John O’Nolan explains: “We offer multiple methods of distribution for posts, the web, RSS feeds, email, and – soon – ActivityPub! So, publishers will be able to distribute their content easily to the ActivityPub network. Additionally, we’re building an ActivityPub reader client into Ghost, so publishers can also follow and subscribe to content from within their admin area.”

The first part is quite straightforward: ActivityPub will become an option to distribute posts made on Ghost. You can already follow long-form articles (such as from WordPress) with your fediverse account, and now Ghost and Buttondown will become two other options.

The second part is quite a few steps bigger, as Ghost is building a reader client that is based on ActivityPub, of which they showed a few screenshots on their website. It seems like Ghost is building a fairly direct competitor of the reader client that Substack offers. The fediverse does not have a great place to read native long-form writing yet, and Mastodon stands out in offering only fairly basic support for it, compared to other platforms. Ghost’s reader client might just become a great place to read WordPress, WriteFreely or Buttondown articles as well.

Ghost adding support for ActivityPub has been a top requested for years, and when I asked O’Nolan why now was the right time to implement it, he said that “it feels like we have a critical mass of momentum in 2024 with a significant number of platforms taking ActivityPub seriously – which is creating the type of consumer awareness needed for a new protocol to take off.”

Newsletter software Buttondown is also implementing ActivityPub, and Ghost’s announcement mentions them working together (as well as with Mastodon and others). Buttondown’s founder Justin explains that they are particularly interested in it simpler and easier for platforms to adopt ActivityPub down the line. Justin says that “Despite the great work done by early adopters and the spec authors, there’s still a lot of undefined behavior and non-obvious design decisions that must be made when onboarding to AP.” Both Buttondown and Ghost also mention the possibility of having premium or gated content as a project that they are collaborating on. The question of how to implement federation in combination with paid content is an open question with wider interest: in response to Ghost’s announcement, The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel responded that The Verge is also interested in having paid newsletters that connect to the fediverse.

In the article on Ghost by The Verge, Nilay Patel says that “At this point I’m not sure any social platform that launches without an eye towards federation stands a chance, really.” I agree, but I think the example of Ghost provides an example new and interesting phenomenon: using ActivityPub as a differentiator to compete with existing products, in this case Substack’s news reader.

Mastodon forms a U.S. non-profit

Mastodon has formed a new U.S. non-profit organisation. The new non-profit is to facilitate U.S.-based fundraising, as well as promote Mastodon in there, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says. The ‘operating structure is still the Germany-based Mastodon gGmbH’, Chaput also said. Mastodon also reveals that their non-profit status has been revoked in Germany, which they have appealed. Mastodon says they do not know why it has been revoked. The organisation also has gotten large individual donations of $100k each, from Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood and Mozilla, which has allowed Mastodon to hire a third full-time programmer.

Mastodon also announced the five board members for the U.S. non-profit, of which two has led to some critical comments within the larger fediverse community: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and legal advisor Amir Ghavi. Ghavi is involved in Blockchain and AI Technologies, technologies that the fediverse community is critical of, and Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko himself is also has spoken out against. Both Ghavi and Stone are involved in the space of venture capital, which also has drawn criticism within the community, as they feel that it goes against the values of the fediverse.

The News

IFTAS, the organisation for Trust & Safety in the fediverse, has published their Spring update to give an update on all the projects they are working on. Their biggest project is an opt-in content classification system, that allows instance admins to send their media to IFTAS for a hash-scan for CSAM. Another major project is the FediCheck/CARIAD project, their moderation-as-a-service domain federation app. With FediCheck instance admins can have an automatically updated block lists that covers the basics. FediCheck is not intended to provide a fully complete block list, instead it is a starting point that covers the worst instances, so that new instance admins do not have to start with a blank slate.

Streaming software Owncast has published their recent newsletter, in which they announce that Owncast is available again on the Roku store. The Owncast Directory allows you to browse through the Owncast channels that are currently live (and opt into being part of the directory), and it is now available as a Roku channel as well. This is after a brief hiatus after Roku discontinued the publishing system that Owncast originally used.

Digiday, a trade magazine for online media, writes how the US ban on TikTok creates instability in the current state of online platforms. It describes how some platforms, such as Flipboard, Threads and Ghost are moving to the fediverse instead. Most notable is their citation of The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, who is quoted saying that ‘The Verge says it also has plans to federate its own site to have more ownership over its content and audience’.

Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernaut has shared some more information about the upcoming short video platform Loops: the onboarding flow, a short description of the algorithm that is used by Loops, and a first (non-federating) Loop itself.

The links

The DotSocial Podcast by Flipboard’s Mike McCue talks with two people from Threads.

WeDistribute’s podcast Decentered interviewed WordPress’ ActivityPub plugin creator Matthias Pfefferle.

WeDistribute wrote about ActivityPods, a combination of the Solid and ActivityPub protocols.

A development update for upcoming platform Memory, which is based on ActivityPods.

A development update for PieFed for April 2024.

Cross-server Interactions in ActivityPub, a blog by Evan Prodromou.

TheNewStack talks about identity management in the fediverse.

FediGames allows you to play some simple games over ActivityPub.

A new roadmap for Lemmy app Mlem.

A migration guide for moving from Mastodon to Sharkey, which explains how you can keep all of your content (including posts and lists) when you move.

For the people interested in protocol development: Evan Prodromou posted new documentation for ActivityPub Miscellaneous Terms.

Mastodon for the Nintendo 3ds?

RSS reader app feeeeds latest update has ActivityPub follows.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

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@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml, 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@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml 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 @Jasmin here.

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.

The Links

WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley writes about A Content-Fallback Mechanism for the Fediverse.

WeDistribute is also expanding and looking for contributors.

Jon Pincus writes about ‘Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers’.

A Mastodon plushie is coming soon.

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.’

Some news from Threads

Barack Obama’s also turns on fediverse sharing for his Threads account, making him the second US President to do so.

WeDistribute wrote a ‘A Beginner’s Guide to the Fediverse, for Threads Users’.

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.

Pixelfed open-sources their mobile apps.

Annual Mastodon Pledge Drive.

The University of Innsbruck expands their Mastodon server to all university employees.

Notes on an setting up a fediverse relay with FediBuzz on an Ubuntu server.

Lifehacker writes about the current state of the podcast landscape, and role that ActivityPub can play.

How to get started with FediTest, a testing suite that is currently being build.

An update by ForgeFed on their work on implementing federation into software forges.

An overview of this week’s updates to fediverse products.

An update from NodeBB and their work on ActivityPub Development.

Lemmy’s biweekly development update.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

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 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.

The Decentered podcast interviewed Rudy Fraser, who is building the Blacksky curated feed and community.

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’.

Jay Graber on the Techdirt podcast.

A technical explanation of what a PDS implementation actually entails, by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold.

A visual history of the maturation of the atproto network by Bluesky’s Daniel Holms.

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. @Oliphant says 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.

The Pixelfed for Android Beta is now available.

Out of fediforum came plans to set up a working group for the Forasphere/Threadiverse. The first Technical Alignment Meeting will be on April 4th, 18.00 UTC.

Mangane, a custom front-end for Akkoma, has a new update, which includes to option to schedule post deletion.

Macstodon is a Mastodon client for vintage Macintosh computres, and includes “Toot-to-Speech” technology.

An overview of fediverse developer resources by the Emissary developer.

Share Openly is a prototype to help people share to the fediverse.

An interview with Manton Reece about Micro.blog.

The bi-weekly update of the Lemmy developers on their work.

This week’s updates for fediverse servers, clients and tools.

Flipboard published a blog post explaining why creators should pay attention to what’s happening in the fediverse.

On cross-posting from Mastodon to Lemmy.

You can now follow each channel on Streaming service Nebula on the fediverse via nebula.pub.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

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.

Source.

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 can monitor denylists from your trusted sources and automatically update your server. This was also demoed at Fediforum, but a video is not yet available.

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.

This week’s fediverse software updates.

The latest update on NodeBB’s fediverse implementation.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below: