The fediverse stays in the theme of announcing projects that are a copy of a well-known platform, but with ActivityPub added to it. This week its a proof-of-concept of a federated version of Wikipedia, as well as the announcement that Dansup will now work on creating a Loops, a federated version of TikTok.

The news

Lemmy developer Nutomic has announced Ibis, a federated wiki platform. Ibis is a proof-of-concept that allows anyone to run their own wiki, and connect them via ActivityPub. In the announcement post, Nutomic frames Ibis explicitly not just as any wiki, but as a Wikipedia alternative specifically, outlining some of the problems that he sees with the way that Wikipedia is run. Nutomic’s solution is for different places to host their own wiki, where articles and edits can be shared across different wiki instances via ActivityPub. The problems that Nutomic sees with Wikipedia are mainly regarding the moderation policies of Wikipedia and how they are executed. Ibis does not have any moderation tools yet, nor a vision of how moderation policies and privileges will be federated across different instances.

Commenters in the announcement post point out that Ibis might have a target audience with the Wikia/Fandom wikis, wikis for specific/niche topics that are heavily ad-driven. What personally surprised me is Ibis does not have any connection with Lemmy communities, in the same way that Reddit has wikis for subreddits. Nutomic says that Ibis in a very early stage of development, and will not be able to work on in it the near term as his daughter will soon be born, and hopes that other developers will help contribute to the project.

Pixelfed developer Dansup has announced that he is working on Loops, a new fediverse platform for sharing short videos. Dansup says that Loops is based on an old web UI for videos for Pixelfed that is getting repurposed into a new app. Not much other information is known about the project, expect that Dansup expects that the project will ship ‘soon’.

A paper on hashtag activism on Mastodon, titled ‘Showing your ass on Mastodon’. It is an autoethnographic narrative about how a fight about a hashtag used to show pictures of donkeys highlights issues with hashtag activism on decentralised social networks. The article is fun to read, and there is also a good commentary by Robert W. Gehl.

There is some tensions brewing below the surface at Lemmy. This blog by @db0 explains the issues and gives a good overview. The Beehaw community is actively thinking about moving away from Lemmy to a different fediverse platform, and with the upcoming platform Sublinks as well as Piefed there are now new intereresting options to choose from.

The San Francisco International Airport museum has joined the fediverse, and they have put some serious effort into the project. They published an extensive blog post explaining their thinking, and how this has been a long time in the making. The SFO museum had thought about years earlier about possibilities of making every museum object into a social media presence, either on Twitter or on FourSquare. Their fediverse presence starts calmer, with only a few accounts, build with their own custom code.

The Links

Hatsu is a new self-hosted bridge that interacts with Fediverse on behalf of your static site.

Streams developer Mike Macgirvin has started work on adding Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub. Fediverse platform Streams already has Nomadic Identity, but Streams internally uses a different protocol to handle this.

Fedify is a fediverse server framework that’s currently in development. This week the creator showed a demo of what it can do.

Micro.blog leans into the Indieweb and adds blogrolls.

Mozilla has recently scaled down their involvement with the mozilla.social server, and now they have ditched the custom front-end based on Elk for their server.

Manyfold is a place to organise your 3d-printing files, is actively thinking about adding ActivityPub.

Piefed has added the ability to opt-out of search.

Owncast’s newletter for March.

Piefed showcases how their ’tile’ interface is a great way to browse memes on the treadiverse.

Social address instead of handle.

The Lemmy developer’s bi-weekly update.

A simple fediverse subscribe feature for static sites.

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

It’s been a quiet news week in the fediverse overall, but Phanpy’s new Catch-up feature is one of the most innovative features released in the fediverse in a long while, so that more than makes up for it.

Phanpy releases Catch-Up

Phanpy, one of the most innovative third-party clients for the fediverse, has released a major new feature: catch-up. Catch-up allows you to simply, well, catch-up with your timeline by showing all the posts of the last X amount of hours by the accounts you follow in a few different ways.

You can scroll through the list of people who have posted, select their avatar and only see their posts they have made, allowing you to quickly see what your close friends and mutuals have posted.

You can sort to see only all the boosted posts, and order them by the most boosts or likes, to get a quick update on the most popular posts have been boosted by the people you follow.

You can select to only show posts (not boosts and replies) by the people you follow, and then group them by author.

After using the feature for a while, I can say that this has completely changed the way I interact with the fediverse for me, and has allowed me to be much more mindful with the time I spend on here. It has made it much easier for me to limit my time on the feeds to only specific moments, in which I can spend more focused time on finding the posts I want. And if I’m in the train with just a few minutes to kill, it is much nicer to use catch-up to quickly read only the posts made by my mutuals and friends, instead of just scrolling in reverse-chronological order and never see the posts by mutuals that live in different time zones. One major downside of only having a reverse chronologically ordered feed is that it gets really difficult to read posts by people you follow who post in different time zones, and even more so if they are not a particularly prolific poster. This feature has made it significantly easier for me to actually read those posts and make sure I don’t miss them, which is a major contributing factor as to why I love it so much.

Phanpy is available at phanpy.social on web, and works great on mobile as a PWA as well.

The News

Threads has expanded their testing of ActivityPub, and now some Threads accounts that are not Threads employees are starting to federate as well, as part of a beta program. Spotted accounts that are federating are of Snarfed, Tim Chambers and Evan Prodromou.

Newsmast is looking for Community Curators.

An extensive conversation with Marcia X, creator of the fediblock hashtag, about Blackness in the fediverse.

Kilogram.makeup is a bridge between Instagram and the fediverse that is currently in development.

Fedify is a fediverse server framework that is currently in development, making it easier for people to develop fediverse platforms.

The Fediverse Developer Network had a show-and-tell for FediTest this week, recording here. The plan is to reinstate regular meetups again for the developer network.

Pixelfed has released their latest update, implementing account migrations and curated onboarding. Pixelfed also released the documentation for their implementation of ActivityPub.

Lemmy does not provide a way to delete pictures, which has some significant privacy implications. WeDistribute has taken a closer look at the situation.

Sublinks is a link-aggregator for the fediverse that is currently in development, and this week some work on their front-end was showcased.

NodeBB developer Julian Lam was on the FLOSS Weekly podcast to talk about NodeBB’s implementation of ActivityPub.

Podnews Weekly Review had Evan Prodromou on to talk about ActivityPub.

Piefed published a blog post on moderation and design.

ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou is working on a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media, and some chapters are available for people with access to O’Reilly Media Learning Platform for feedback.

IFTAS wrote about ‘Open Social for the Common Good’, explaining how government agencies can embrace the fediverse.

An overview of all server and clients updates of the last week.

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

Welcome to the overview of all the news that has happened in the ATmosphere for February 2024. For those who don’t know me; I’m Laurens, and I write weekly updates about what happened in the fediverse. Last year I also started writing monthly updates summarising the news for Bluesky. I had to skip a few months due to time restrictions, but now I’m back with regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.

The main stories of this month is Bluesky dropping the invite code requirement, opening up the network for federation, and Bluesky’s appeal in Japan.

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. Over 260 people have since set up their own Personal Data Server.

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 significantly active than the fediverse (~1.1M MAU); with close to double the amount of Monthly Active Users. 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 1M, and the MAU is around 1.9M.

Potential bridge between fediverse and Bluesky

Developer Ryan Barrett has been working on a bridging service between the fediverse (Mastodon and other platforms) and Bluesky. This month, he announced that the to-be-released project will be opt-out, meaning that people on either network that do not want to be able to be followed by people on the other network, will have to manually opt-out of the service. This lead to a backlash and drama on the fediverse, as there is a significant group of people that do not want their public posts to be visible on the Bluesky network. Some media covered it as drama between Mastodon and Bluesky, but it seems more accurate to say that Mastodon and the fediverse has been in conflict for a longer time with itself about network boundaries and consent, while the role of Bluesky in this all is more of a confused bystander.

In the media

As Bluesky opens up, the team has been more visible in the public. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber appeared on the Hard Fork podcast, as well as Chris Messina’s podcast. She also participated in a conversation with Mike Masnick and Yoel Roth, video replay here.

In an interview with The Verge, Jay Graber also talked a bit more about how Bluesky plans to 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.

In another interview with Wired, Graber says that Bluesky ‘won’t enshittify the network with ads’.

In other news

Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbald held a technical talk on the technology behind AT Protocol that makes account portability possible: the decentralised identifier DID PLC. Newbald also goes into more detail on how Bluesky is thinking about governance for this decentralised identifier. You can watch the replay here.

Bluesky has hired a head of Trust & Safety, Aaron Rodericks. The community has voiced their demands for a head of Trust & Safety for a while. Rodericks has previously co-leading the Trust and Safety team at Twitter.

Bluesky App updates

Some major updates have launched on the official app for Bluesky: the latest update brought hashtags and the much-requested ability to mute certain words (or hashtags). Another update is that your Bluesky handle url is now a direct link to your profile as well.

Other app updates

deck.blue, a spiritual successor to TweetDeck, has added a Gallery mode.

iOS app Skeets has added the ability to edit posts. It is still an experimental feature as it depends on a workaround, the ability to edit posts is not officially yet part of the protocol. Skeets also added the ability to register and log in to a third party PDS.

Graysky added notifications, and feeds now respond to your content languages.

People have created over 40k custom feeds, the large majority (34k+) coming from third party feed generator skyfeed.

The links

Comic-driven software development.

A complete guide to Bluesky.

A high-level explanation of how the AT Protocol works.

Adding comments on your blog with ATProto.

Bluesky handle directory.

Bluesky has given the documentation website a major update.

A list of the most influential scientists on Bluesky, based on their network centrality.

A proposal for OAuth 2.0 for ATProto.

That’s all, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online and @fediversereport.com, on the fediverse, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter:

The fediverse has long had the struggle that the wider network consists of a huge variety of product types, but that in most people’s conceptualisation it mainly consists of microblogging. The news this week is another indication of the need for a broader understanding of what the fediverse is, with the announcement of an Open Science Network, as well more and more tighter integration of forum software into the fediverse with both NodeBB and Discourse.

Open Science Network announced

The Open Science Network is a new fediverse project, based on the to-be-released Bonfire project. Bonfire is a modular platform for the fediverse, for more information on that I wrote about it recently, as did WeDistribute. Bonfire aims to be modular and customisable and allow for a variety of extensions to be build on top of it. The Open Science Network project takes the Bonfire platform, and is working on adding a variety of features for building an open science network. The Open Science Network will have the ability to sign in with ORCID, automatically import publications, the ability to work collaboratively on papers, and more. Bonfire and the Open Science Network have not given an estimation for when the project launches.

Forum Federation

Forum software NodeBB now connects to the fediverse! In the February update, developer Julian Lam shows that the forum for NodeBB itself is now connected to the fediverse. You can see the post made on NodeBB on Mastodon for example. The project is still under development, but major functionality is now available, with both accounts and public posts now bi-directionally federating. This means you can follow NodeBB accounts from the rest of the fediverse, and posts by NodeBB accounts you follow show up in your fediverse. Comments you make with your other fediverse account also show up in the comment section of the NodeBB posts. The announcement posts shows some examples, with some replies being made by Mastodon accounts that show up in the NodeBB forum topic.

Meanwhile, Discourse has also made progress with their ActivityPub plugin, so that Discourse forums now also are able to follow fediverse accounts. It is unclear at this point how federation between these forums will interact. One thing is clear though, with the development of ActivityPub integrations for NodeBB, Discourse coming online, as well as platforms like PiedFed and Sublinks, is that innovation and change in the fediverse is not happening in the space of microblogging, but of forums instead.

In other news

Newsmast has released a new update, allowing anyone to log into their platform with their current Mastodon account. This way, you can experience their curated community feeds on their platform, without having to make a new account at all. The ability to log in with your Mastodon account sidesteps one of the issues that the fediverse currently has, namely the need for a new account for every new project. For more information on Newsmast, TechCrunch published an extensive article on the project, which is worth checking out.

Funkwhale is working towards a version 2.0, and in their latest update they talk about how to ‘make Funkwhale a truly interoperable and social platform for audio enthusiasts and content creators everywhere’. Funkwhale is still early in the process, and shows how much unsolved the concept of federation is. People have some understanding of what federation means in the context of microblogging, but federation of platforms that serve other functions that microblogging is still an under-explored space.

Benjamin Bellamy, who is behind the Castopod project, joined the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, to talk about Castopod and ActivityPub. In the episode, Bellamy says that currently somewhere between 300 and 500 people have installed their own version of Castopod, up from a couple dozen a year ago.

Content Nation is a platform in development that has been working on adding ActivityPub integration that experienced significant backlash this week. WeDistribute has an article explaining the situation.

The Links

Threativore is an automoderator bot for the threadiverse by @db0.

A blog exploring the bridging between the fediverse and the ATmosphere from the perspective of GDPR.

Mona, a Mastodon client for iOS and MacOS has a major update, v6, and MacStories has an extensive review of the update.

A study on ‘User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms’.

The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group is restarting a schedule of monthly group calls.

Mastodon updated their Android app, allowing you to share your profile via a QR code.

The Decentered Podcast’s latest episode is an interview with @jaz from IFTAS.

For Dutch-speaking people: PublicSpaces is organising a workshop to help guide public organisations in The Netherlands to make a transition towards Mastodon.

A blog by Codeberg reflecting on the recent spam wave in the fediverse.

Regular meetups for the FediDevs group are restarting, with the first one being March 7th, with a show-and-tell of FediTest.

Friendica has a script to make Friendica user nicknames function as Bluesky user handles.

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

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:

Quite a dramatic week in the fediverse; with a lot of discussion about a potential bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse, some security issues, and spam overrunning the network. Good news as well, in the form of the BBC extending their Mastodon trial and Flipboard expanding their fediverse integration.

Bluesky Bridge announcement drama

Ryan Barrett, who is behind the bridgy.fed project, announced the opt-out policy for his upcoming bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. Barrett had earlier posted about his considerations on opt-in versus opt-out, and with this post decided to go for an opt-out policy. This led to a major backlash across the fediverse, as people felt that this is not appropriate and should have been opt-in to properly account for people giving consent to having their post appear on the Bluesky network. In a follow-up post, Barrett says that he is working on a proposal to make it appeal to the opt-in demand by sending a DM asking for a confirmation the first time a fediverse account is followed by a Bluesky account.

This lead to some news covering it as a fight between the Mastodon and Bluesky, but the attitude of Bluesky seems to be mainly one of confused on-looking as Mastodon is fighting with itself. Beyond that, the article in TechCrunch does provide a good overview of the debate. I agree with the framing that the debates about the bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse are as much a debate about the Bluesky network itself as it is a debate about the specific implementation of the bridge as worked on by Barrett.

The blowback also is a debate about the nature of the fediverse, and what it is, exactly. People have been debating what they have consented to, when they joined a Mastodon server, and what they have opted into. This is illustrated with the Privacy Policy for mastodon.social, which says “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” What exactly is ‘the network’? Is Bluesky part of ‘the network’? Is a bridge to bluesky part of ‘the network’? It is unclear, and people have different definitions and expectations about what they have consented to.

There is a significant group of people for whom the answer is a clear ‘no, I do not view Bluesky and bridges to Bluesky as part of the network’. Bluesky represents ideals about corporate ownership and data indexing that they do not want to be a part of. This viewpoint clashes with Mastodon’s CEO Eugen Rochko, who gave an interview with Platformer this week. In this, Rochko says that he still hopes that Bluesky will switch to using ActivityPub someday, so that there is a native integration between the networks.

The News

The BBC is extending their Mastodon social media trial for another 6 months, after finishing their first 6-month trial run. The BBC states that it has been a valuable learning experiment, and it has been effective in the technical, financial and cultural needs of running a presence in a decentralised space. The BBC also says that they are exploring to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub directly, and not just hosting a Mastodon presence, but not much more is known beyond that. They also find that Mastodon has a relatively large engagement numbers, taken the smaller user base into account, and that they find they have had to do very little moderation so far.

Flipboard has extended their ActivityPub integration, and is bringing in even more curated feeds into the fediverse. Flipboard describes it as another step towards fully federating Flipboard, a process that started in December 2023 when a small number of accounts where brought to the fediverse. With this week’s update, over 1000 magazines now have native ActivityPub feeds, which allow them to be followed from fediverse apps.

Mozilla is scaling back their investments into various products, including their social fediverse platform mozilla.social. Mozilla.social got announced in Spring 2023, with a focus on content moderation that makes it a nice platform to use. Over the year, the product stayed in invite-only beta, and has slowly grown. In an internal memo (courtesy of TechCrunch), Mozilla says “Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order to effectively shape the future of social media.” Mozilla says that with a much smaller team they will focus on more launching smaller experiments more rapidly.

Ivory is adding some basic support for quote posting in their Mastodon app in their upcoming release. What this means in practice is that if a link to a Mastodon post is part of the body of a post, it will get rendered as if it is a quote post. Other apps like Ice Cubes and Phanpy also have this feature.

The announcement prompted Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput to post a thread to reiterate that Mastodon is working on a full implementation of quote posting. The goal of Mastodon’s implementation is to give people granular control, allowing them to determine on per-post basis whether they want the post to be quote posted or not. Mastodon’s approach to implementing quote posting means that it’ll be incompatible with the current implementations of Threads, all the forkeys, and the Hubzilla-lineage. Chaput says that they will be publishing Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) to document their implementation, hoping that the publication ensures that Mastodon’s implementation becomes the standard in the fediverse. However, with the imminent arrival of Threads (who already have decided on implementing quote posting with ActivityPub), Mastodon’s ability to set standards for the fediverse might just be significantly more difficult.

Forgejo is a self-hosted git forge for software (git forges are online platforms for managing and collaboration on repositories, of which GitHub is the most well-known), and up until now it has been a soft fork of Gitea. Forgejo now has become a hard fork, meaning that they are no longer bound to Gitea. Forgejo says that they have now enough people contributing to it’s main mission to be an independent project.

Two weeks ago Mastodon had a major security vulnerability. The details of the vulnerability have now been disclosed. The author who found the vulnerability has an extensive write-up of the proces, timeline and impact of the vulnerability. The impact of unpatched servers is major, as it allows attackers to impersonate posts and accounts on the vulnerable servers. Meanwhile, Mastodon has disclosed another vulnerability, bringing the total to 3 vulnerabilities in two weeks.

The entire fediverse is also dealing with a major spam wave attack. The source seems to be from a Japanese Discord server which seems to have misgivings with Misskey. I could not verify this allegation due to cultural and language barrier, but Misskey.io admins indicated this weekend that they are talking to the police about it, as their server seems to suffer the brunt of it. The attack also showcases the vulnerability of the fediverse to spam attacks.

The links

‘Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model?‘ by @db0, who also is behind the FediSeer initiative, a project that helps deal fediverse server admins with spam.

A video that explains in detail the history of Misskey fork Sharkey, and reviews the features.

WeDistribute takes a look at upcoming project Bonfire.

Major tech sites cannot resist a good headline, to write about the shutdown of the queer.af mastodon server.

FediTest has a blog post on some of the design considerations for writing a testing suite for the fediverse.

Micro.blog adds private notes.

A call to internationalise the fediverse, meaning in this case that Mastodon will support Unicode usernames.

Terence Eden has written an ActivityPub ‘which can be deployed as a *single* PHP file. No databases, no libraries, no dependencies, no frameworks. Also, no advanced features!’ M

An experiment in using the private notes on your own Mastodon profile as a storage place for settings data.

Self-updating lists of official & verified media accounts on Mastodon.

A blog post by Funkwhale explaining their own on a new API.

Lemmy is working on implementing Private Communities, and is looking for comments on the proposal.

Nootti is a new cross-posting app for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and got a closer look in TechCrunch.

SoraSNS, the iOS app for Forkeys, Mastodon and Bluesky, is adding AI detection to the app. OpenAI and Adobe add a tag to the metadata of images that are generated using their software. SoraSNS checks for these tags, and displays that the image is generated with AI tools.

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

The major news of the week is that Bluesky drops the invite codes, and that it turns out to be massively popular in Japan. The network grew from just over 3 million to some 4.7 million accounts this week. For more information, you can find my article below.

The news

Last week, some 20 people got together on the OFFDEM conference in Brussels to talk about events and the fediverse. It connected the different projects that work on events in the fediverse together; with Mobilizon, Gath.io and the Event Federation project, as well as other people in the space. The meeting got a considerable amount of mutual understanding; explaining the difference between federation and interoperability, the value of using ActivityPub, and a common ground for what makes an ‘event’. Seeing different projects come together for a mutual understanding and working together is great to see, and hopefully other parts of the fediverse can do something similar as well.

Mastodon recently had a major security vulnerability, and Mastodon CTO Renaud Chapot reports that 90% of active users was part of a server that had adopted the patch to fix the vulnerability within 48 hours. Part of the reason for this quick uptake seems to be a very large banner that was added in a recent patch, which warned server admins of the problem. Now Pixelfed has another major vulnerability as well, and hopefully the patch can reach similar levels of uptake speed as well.

WriteFreely has a new update, which allows people to subscribe to your blog via email. In the current version admins will have to connect an email service for this to work, currently only mailgun is support. This feature will get expanded upon in later updates.
The ActivityPub integration also has gotten some more features, and you can now see who is following your blog.

Two projects switched ownership this week: Takahe has a new developer, after the current developer said a few months ago that he could not continue working on the project.

Firefish now has new ownership as well, as the previous lead developer Kainoa handed it over to another contributor to the project, Naskya. Naskya was not informed of this decision beforehand. They pushed out a new release a few days later. In a comment on the situation, Naskya said that ‘we decided to continue this project; although we may struggle to manage the project, especially at the beginning, and we foresee a slow development due to the leaving of core maintainers’.

The fediverse project Streams is working on Conversation Containers. One aspect of how most projects currently implement ActivityPub is that if you create a post, there is little to no control over the replies. In this post, Streams developer Mike Macgirvin lays out what a ‘constrained’ conversation model would look like, and introduces an accompanying Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) to go with it.

Wired has an interview with a product manager at Meta about Threads, saying that Threads expects that “general users may be able to access the new features in a couple of months”. Threads also says that federation will be opt-in. Wired also notes in the article that there are still big questions that are unanswered: Threads is not clear about how they will handle differences in content moderation (for example around nudity), nor is it clear why exactly Meta wants to implement federation at all.

Some large tech publications had articles about the fediverse and the new wave of open social networks more broadly. David Pierce of The Verge wrote an explainer for the fediverse. TechCrunch reflects on a year of drastic changes in the world of the large platforms, and how that is impacting a new generation of social networks. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch takes a closer look at a variety of different apps that are sprouting up on the new social networks.

The Links

Phanpy is working on a ‘catch-up’ timeline, allowing you to see the posts since your last visit, sorted by date, like count, replies or boosts. There is no indication yet if/when this feature will be released, but reponses show there’s great demand for such a feature.

Commune is an open social community platform that’s build on top of Matrix. In a new blog post, Commune explains what they are and how it works, as well as their roadmap.

A three part blog series guide on implementing ActivityPub into a static site.

PieFed explains how their priorities and values led to a design that uses a lot less bandwidth.

An overview of active journalist accounts on the fediverse by Martin Holland.

Nootti is a new iOS app that allows you to crosspost to Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr.

The January update for Funkwhale, where most of their current work is on more API support and technical work on the back-end of their current desktop app.

A look at the UX and UI changes coming to Mastodon 4.3.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.

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.

This week saw a large variety of smaller news items, so a short experiment with a slightly different format. I just came back from FOSDEM, and it was great to talk to so many fediverse people, gives me great energy to keep working on all of it. Next year I hope there will be more of an organised ActivityPub and fediverse presence though, lots of opportunity there.

The news

NodeBB has provided update on their work on implementing ActivityPub. As part of their update, they detail their vision on which parts of the forum gets federated, and in which manner. As federated forums are mostly new to the fediverse, this provides some insights in how the developers are thinking which parts of forum software can get federated, and how that can be implemented into a user interface.

PieFed has made some improvements to new account sign-up flow, and as a part of that, different communities are now aggregated into ‘Topics’. Once you sign up, and select a few Topics you are interested in, you automatically follow multiple communities related to the topic.

Over on Lemmy, the conversation on how to provide the best experience for handling multiple communities about similar subjects that live on different servers come up regularly, including in Lemmy latest AMA. Developer Rimu says that one future direction he is thinking about is using the Lemmy Explorer (which indexes all public Lemmy communities) to aggregate communities into Topics.

The Lemmy developers held an AMA this week, and I wrote up an article some of my takeaways from the comments that stood out to me.

IFTAS is working together with GLAAD to help platforms ‘update their policies to add express prohibitions against targeted misgendering and deadnaming’, similar to how platforms like Discord have explicitly banned deadnaming and misgendering trans people. IFTAS explains that “not about accidentally getting someone’s pronouns wrong. Rather, our concern centers on deliberate and targeted acts of hate and harassment rooted in gender identity discrimination”. IFTAS provides a sample Code of Conduct for admins to use, as well as the possibility for admins to sign a pledge that they included rules in their policies against targeted misgendering and deadnaming.

Video creator TechAltar has a new video explaining the fediverse. It frames the fediverse as a new internet, and as a way around the walled gardens from the current Big Tech platforms. Over on video platform Nebula, TechAltar also provided the videos with the full interviews with EMastodon’s Eugen Rochko, Automattic’s (company behind Tumblr and WordPress) Matt Mullenweg, Matej Svancer, who is building a multi-network platform Openvibe, as well as the admins of mastodon server sfba.social.

Some more developers are tinkering with building minimal ActivityPub implementations to serve their needs. Julian Fietkau wrote an ActivityPub server to host a single bot, Daily Rucks. The implementation shows the value of building something beyond just a Mastodon bot, as the home page for the bot shows a beautiful customised landing page for the bot. Fietkau also posted a blog explaining the How and Why of the project.

Terence Eden also build a minimal ActivityPub server, with the sole purpose of posting messages to your followers. It is a part of a longer project to work on building a FourSquare-like service on the fediverse.

Project Tapestry is a new Kickstarter project by The Iconfactory company that just reached their funding milestone. The goal of the project is to release an iOS app that pulls feeds from various sources, such as Mastodon, Bluesky as well as RSS feeds into one single chronological timeline. It will allow people to plug in their own data sources as well, provided the APIs are accessible. Iconfactory says that it will be anywhere between 9 to 12 months to release the app. The idea of aggregating multiple data sources into a single app or feed seems to be popping up in various places recently, such as with Openvibe and Agora.

A quick personal take from this year’s FOSDEM: I can echo Jaana Dogan’s observation that all the speakers at FOSDEM seem to have switched from Twitter handles to using their fediverse handles on their slides. It seems there is more than enough interest to make sure there will be a fediverse devroom next year as well.

The Links

Some reverse engineering shows how Threads is working on their fediverse integration.

Eugen Rochko was on the Software Engineering Podcast to talk about Mastodon.

The Firefish project has been deemed dead by the community for a bit now, but now the lead developer has officially stepped down.

A small demo by micro.blog on all their cross-posting options.

‘Betula is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web’. Their latest update added federation, and now people from across the fediverse can follow your bookmarks, similar to Postmarks.

Fediverse Test Suite is a new testing project that just got underway with funding from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe to my email newsletter or follow me on the fediverse below.

The Lemmy developers Dessalines and Nutomic hosted their another AMA this week. The conversations ranged from decentralisation, the developer roadmap and funding to platform identity, and I’ll go over some of the responses that stood out to me

Lemmy is applying for a new funding round from NLnet, and with their proposed project they will add 2 extra (paid) developers to the team if it gets approved. Their detailed planned milestones are laid out here. For the current developers, they’ll be focusing on a replacement web UI, as well as their Android app Jerboa, API and performance improvements, as well as transitioning to a donation-funded co-op.

In response to a question about interoperability with other platforms, Nutomic notes the difficulty working with other fediverse developers, especially Mastodon, and a describes a lack of interest of other platforms to become interoperable with Lemmy. These issues with interoperability and a lack of cooperation mainly concern platforms that are of a different nature than Lemmy; newer link aggregators like Sublinks are explicitly working on interoperability with Lemmy.

Dessalines’ comment on the identity of a platform is worth reading in full, where he says:

“At the same time, it was clear that we weren’t making the mistake of all the other reddit alternatives, by promising to be a free speech haven for bigoted communities. Those people actively did our work for us by warning their communities to stay away from Lemmy and its tankie devs, thereby making Lemmy a much more enjoyable place from the very beginning. That was a crucial test: we were not willing to sacrifice our values for growth’s sake.”

The association of the Lemmy developers with tankies has been criticised within the broader fediverse community before. However, in those conversations this viewpoint by Dessalines is rarely mentioned, in how it helps in keeping “free speech” bigotry away.

The developers are also thinking about how to avoid centralisation around a few larger servers. Part of their approach is with making sure random instances get offered to new people who join Lemmy, and they are actively looking at other ideas to combat centralisation. In another comment, Dessalines links the issue of centralisation with the problems he views with social media, saying:

“The biggest concern for me about Lemmy, would be a centralization onto one big server, that tries to replicate all the worst things and behaviors about reddit: its combativeness, xenophobia, bigotry, pro-US-foreign policy agendas, and advertising. There is a noticeable chunk of Lemmy’s users who don’t really see any problem with those things, they just want a reddit that lets them use 3rd party apps again.”

Overall, lets hope that more platforms join Lemmy and PeerTube in holding regular AMA’s with their communities.