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:

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: