Mind Map

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: