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.

A grab-bag of updates this week, where I spend some more time looking at Bonfire, the technical aspects of how Threads implemented quote posting, and how that impacts the fediverse, as well as a whole variety of other updates.

An update on Bonfire

The upcoming Bonfire project describes itself as a social networking toolkit, that allow communities to create and shape their own digital spaces, and have released some new information about some parts of their upcoming project. Bonfire is a fediverse server project in development, with its own take on the microblogging format, and tools to customise it for your community.

Bonfire Classic has been in development (and available for testing) for a while, and the new information is on the other apps that can be build with Bonfire. The team is working on an Open Science version of Bonfire, as well as a Communities version. For the Open Science version, features like integration with your ORCID (‘Open Researcher and Contributor ID’), and better embedding of scientific papers are a part of it. For the Communities version, the team is collaborating with Radio Free Fedi, and the features centre around public and private groups, and topical discussions.

In another update this week, the Bonfire team also released more information on how their extension system works. The Prosocial Network Design community designed a feature that allowed moderators to add labels to posts, with the goal of adding extra context, and help reduce misinformation. Bonfire then took this design, and packaged it as a separate extension that could easily work together with the main Bonfire codebase. This modular design of Bonfire creates a lot of space for experimentation and new ideas, and it is even better to see it being used to work on safety in online spaces.

The Bonfire team is also working towards a cooperative hosting network, to make the hosting of a Bonfire more accessible to communities. In September 2023 the Bonfire team indicated to be working towards a 1.0 release in the upcoming months.

Threads and Quote Posting

Threads is adding quote posting to their implementation of ActivityPub. Interestingly, a Threads engineer confirmed that Threads implemented two versions of quote posting, to account for the multiple ways that quote posting is handled in the fediverse.

For context: Misskey (and its forks, aka ‘Forkeys‘) have implemented quote posting, although the implementation is not according to an official ActivityPub specification, and not really used outside of the ‘Forkeys’. There is a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal to standardise the Object Links (which include quote posts), which has wide agreement in the developer community, but again few projects have implemented. Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning on adding their own version of quote posting, with the extended functionality that allows people to set permissions per post on whether they can be quote posted or not.

What is notable about Threads’ implementation of quote posting is that they added both Misskey’s implementation of quote posting, as well as the proposed extension of ActivityPub with the FEP. The Threads engineer described their reasoning as follows:

We implemented both FEP-e232 as well as the _misskey_quote field (which usually gets checked alongside quoteUrl). This was intentional so we can get some immediate product adoption off the ground (with the unofficial key) and also be somewhat future-proof when the FEP gains more traction.

What stands out to me here is that Threads is aware of the develop community’s work on extending the ActivityPub specification, and is open to implementing proposals. How the interaction between the developer community and Meta will develop is something that is certainly worth watching.

In other news

Newsmast has made their custom and curated feeds more accessible, and launched them as a separate service, that can be accessed via newsmast.community. There are over 60 custom feeds, that ‘are hand built through a mix of hashtags, follows, filters and mutes’. By placing the custom feeds on a separate (Mastodon) server, they are easily accessible, and a great way for new accounts to populate their timeline with interesting content from the network. Their about page goes into more detail on how they build their own custom feeds.

Ryan Barrett, creator of the Bridgy Fed project, has a detailed blog post about moderation and network bridges, that is worth reading. It is an interesting analysis of the tradeoffs and complexities of the new generation of social networks. Bridges between networks and protocols can create context collapse. At the same time the networks are diverse enough in both people who use them, as well as the types of use cases they support, that context boundaries cannot be easily drawn on protocol or platform lines anymore either.

Sublinks is a new link-aggregator platform for the fediverse that is currently in development and got announced this week. Sublinks was created because creator Jason Grim found it difficult to contribute to Lemmy, and had issues with the roadmap, development speed and quality. For now, Sublinks stands out by using a different technology stack than Lemmy, which makes it easier to attract developer contributions. In the first version of Sublinks, it will still use the front-end of Lemmy, and only later will there be space for new features. The project has found major support within the community, with contributions from admins from the lemmy.world server, as well as the ‘involvement of the creators of two major Lemmy themes, Pangora & Photon‘.

A new study on the Lemmy migration that happened last summer was published this week, titled ‘User Sentiments and Dynamics in the Decentralized Web: Reddit Migration’s Impact on Lemmy’, by Thatiany Andrade Nunes. It is an extensive study, with both a sentiment analysis and survey, that together ‘depicts a predominantly positive sentiment towards Lemmy and criticisms of Reddit’. For those interested in the transition of decentralised social networks the entire paper is worth reading. Lemmy developer Dessalines writes that his own main takeaways from the paper are Lemmy needs to continue focusing on prioritising the needs of third party app developers, as well as keeping transparant communications with the community. Lemmy has focused already on community communications by giving bi-weekly developer updates, and hosted their second AMA this week as well (write-up of that coming next week).

GoToSocial is a fediverse project currently in development, that describes the features of being ‘lightweight, customizable, and safety-focused’ to stand out from comparable projects such as Mastodon or Pleroma. In their latest update they indicate to reach the beta stage of their project in the first quarter of 2024. They also give a short history of the project and how it came into being.

Mastodon is testing out a new version of the composer (only available on mastodon.social for now). It features a visual redesign, and more controversially, it renames the setting of posting as ‘Unlisted’ to ‘Quiet Public’. The feature of setting post as ‘Unlisted’ has always been difficult to explain in what it does, as the impact is different than people regularly expect. Personally I think it is good that more attention is brought to explaining to what specific settings do in Mastodon, but I’m unsure yet if they have stuck the landing here.

Finally, I wrote about why I like Phanpy as my fediverse client, and the value of adding a horizontally scrolling feed into the normal vertically scrolling reverse chronological feed.

The links

The Washington Post gives a shout-out to Bookwyrm as an alternative to Goodreads.

‘What is the ‘fediverse,’ and why does Meta want to join it?’, asks the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Castopod Podcasting Index has made following podcasts directly on the fediverse even easier.

Happy birthday ActivityPub!

IFTTT adds support for the mastodon.social server. It is unclear if this limitation is because of technical reasons, or because the concept of decentralisation is simply not well understood by IFTTT.

Forgejo’s monthly update, and it may become a hard fork of Gitea.

A design concept for a specific UX to asks questions on Mastodon, highlight good answers, and mark a question as ‘answered’.

Suggestions on how Lemmy can work on its community separation problems.

An exploration of the idea of rebuilding FourSquare using ActivityPub.

Fediverse Space Vibes.

The upcoming Bonfire project describes itself as a social networking toolkit, that allow communities to create and shape their own digital spaces, and have released some new information about some parts of their upcoming project. Bonfire is a fediverse server project in development, with its own take on the microblogging format, and tools to customise it for your community.

Bonfire Classic has been in development (and available for testing) for a while, and the new information is on the other apps that can be build with Bonfire. The team is working on an Open Science version of Bonfire, as well as a Communities version. For the Open Science version, features like integration with your ORCID (‘Open Researcher and Contributor ID’), and better embedding of scientific papers are a part of it. For the Communities version, the team is collaborating with Radio Free Fedi, and the features centre around public and private groups, and topical discussions.

The Bonfire team is also working towards a cooperative hosting network, to make the hosting of a Bonfire more accessible to communities. In September 2023 the Bonfire team indicated to be working towards a 1.0 release in the upcoming months.

Welcome to another episode, with quite some news about the fediverse that goes beyond just microblogging; Owncast’s struggles with explaining decentralisation and self-hosting to Apple, and the fediverse is apparently now enough of a buzzword to get metaverse companies interested.

How Bluesky works – the network components

The network design of Bluesky is fairly complicated, and different from how ActivityPub and the fediverse works. The design decisions that Bluesky has made has impact on how content moderation hows, as well as on federation and decentralisation. Many people have thoughts and feelings on Bluesky, but detailed information on how the network functions is hard to come by. In this new short series I explain how it works, take a look at the link below.

Owncast releases app for iOS and tvOS

Gabe Kangas, creator of the fediverse-connected streaming software Owncast, has announced the release of an iOS and tvOS app for Owncast. This comes some months after Kangas said that the development of the app had been halted due to Apple’s App Store policies. Getting the app approved has been a challenge, and Kangas details the wide variety of ‘reasons’ that Apple has given to reject the app. It took help of a legal firm and persistence from Kangas to get the app in the App Store.

The fact that Owncast did manage to publish an app to the App Store is good news for PeerTube, who are in a process of their own to create their own mobile apps for PeerTube. In PeerTube’s roadmap Framasoft said that publishing a PeerTube app might be tricky, citing Owncast’s experiences.

In the blog Kangas also talks about the identity of the platform, coming right out of the gate by reiterating that Owncast is simply server software to run ‘independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams’. Building social features such as chat, helping with discovery with the Owncast Directory and now building an app, all help with the awareness of the project. But in the end, Kangas sees Owncast as ‘server software. That’s it’.

Open metaverse platform Viverse announces fediverse support

Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.

What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.

My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.

Dutch State Secretary urges Threads to quickly implement federation

Nu.nl is one the largest news sites of The Netherlands, and they published an article on the fediverse. As part of the article, they interviewed Dutch State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen, who also spearheads the Mastodon server for the Dutch government. In it, she urges Threads to quickly implement ActivityPub so that Mastodon and Threads can fully interoperate. She also states that the comments she gets on posts on Mastodon are differ strongly in a positive way from the comments she gets on X.

Fediverse client Agora launches with For You algorithm and bridges

Agora is a new fediverse client that has some interesting opiniated ideas for what a fediverse client can do. The project is a fork of Phanpy, and adds a ‘For You’ algorithm, integration with bridges to Bluesky, Nostr and X, as well as connections to Lemmy. The For You feed, which is based on the open-source algorithm fedialgo. Fedialgo allows anyone to run their own algorithm and fine tune it on the client side. Another content integration that Agora does, is that if you follow a hashtag, it’ll automatically populate your feed with posts made in the corresponding Lemmy community as well. It also supports natively supports bridges to Bluesky and Nostr, but personally I had trouble to actually get these to properly run.

The links

Two articles explaining the fediverse; Stephan Bohacek with an article about the fediverse for government agencies, and Ben Werdmuller with an article about the fediverse for media organisations.

The Decentered Podcast by WeDistribute interviewed Hoshida, who makes the Sora app. Sora is an iOS app for Mastodon, Bluesky and most Misskey forks, with interesting takes on algorithmic feeds.

Where is all of the fediverse?

Mastodon Near Me, a way to find Mastodon servers by country, region, and language.

One year of StreetPass, the browser extension that lets you find people on the fediverse when you visit their website.

The owners .world fediverse servers (such as Mastodon.world and Lemmy.world) will form a non-profit foundation together with @stux, who owns and operates the mstdn.social servers.

A detailed explanation by Castopod for their new Castopod podcasting index.

A paper called ‘Creating a city for all of us: a role for the Fediverse in archiving civic urban memory‘ was published this week.

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

Viverse is the open metaverse platform from HTC, where people can visit virtual worlds. In a blog post, Viverse announced that they are set to join the fediverse as well. Viverse says they are adding ActivityPub support, and that the first step of integration will be interoperability with Mastodon.

What the interoperability will look like is unclear, Viverse says that it will allow ‘everyone to share Worlds, Avatars, and so much more’. Currently, the Viverse website allows you visit different virtual worlds by simply visiting the link, and it is unclear how adding ActivityPub support will meaningfully alter the experience of sharing links. The Mastodon organisation themselves have been clear that they are stretched for resources, making it also uncertain that adding support into the platform for sharing metaverse-worlds will be high on the priority list.

My personal intuition is that this news is an illustration of how the term ‘fediverse’ is starting to trend (another example here) towards a much wider, broader and generic meeting. Now that Meta has solidly put ‘fediverse’ in a wider audience and meaning with Threads, it seems likely that more companies and organisations will experiment with this version of the term ‘fediverse’.

Welcome to a new short series on Bluesky and how the network works. Bluesky recently released more information on their plans for third party moderation services. While writing about their plans, I realised that to properly explain how it works, I first needed to explain how the network is designed to function.

Most people understand the fediverse in terms of separate instances. Every instance can be a social network in itself, and by connecting with other instances form a larger network, the fediverse. This makes it easier to understand where content moderation happens: every instances has their own content moderation, own moderators and their own rules.

The Bluesky network and the AT Protocol function differently. There are different types of servers; servers for data storage, servers for data aggregation, etc. As such, content moderation happens in different places on the network. To properly explain how it works, the benefits and tradeoffs, as well as the unknowns, I am publishing a short series on Bluesky, how the network functions, and how and where content moderation happens.

In this first episode: the parts that make up the network and allow it to work.

The basic components

The Bluesky network consists of the following parts:

A Personal Data Server (PDS) that hosts all account data. It contains information about your accounts, and is where all your personal data is stored.

A Relay looks for all the PDS’s in the network, takes in all their data, and merges it together to outputs one big stream that is used by other parts of the network. The Relay puts out the data in a machine-readable format, which is often called a firehose.

AppView takes the data from the Relay, and processes it so that it is more meaningful for apps. Examples of the processing that AppView does: counting the amount of likes that a post gets, collecting all replies to a post and organising them into a thread. It also generates your “following” feed, by creating a reverse-chronologically ordered feed of posts made by the accounts that you follow.

An app, whether that is the official Bluesky mobile app or a third party website like deck.blue. The app takes the data from AppView and presents it in a nice format for people read on their preferred device.

With these four components we can imagine a basic social network:

If you open the official Bluesky app on your phone and look at the “following feed”, the data flows as follows:
All PDS’s => Relay => AppView => App.

If you then create a post and hit send, data goes from your app directly back to the PDS where your account is hosted.

Custom feeds and moderation

There are four more components to the Bluesky network: feed generators, labellers, the moderation service, and the Identity Directory.

A feed generator creates the custom feeds, using some form of algorithm. These custom feeds can be anything from a feed with the posts with the most likes in the last 24 hours, a feed of posts that contain specific terms, or anything else.

A feed generator takes data from a Relay, performs the calculations to take the raw data into a custom feed, and sends it to the AppView. The AppView then performs some final steps and sends it to your app so you can see the custom feed.

Labellers. Labelling services perform moderation activities by applying labels to a post. People can determine how they want to handle labelled content. An example of a label can be ‘Sexually Suggestive’, and people can determine if they want their app to either show, hide or warn about posts that contain the label.

A Labelling service takes data from the AppView, processes it, and then sends it back to the AppView

The moderation system, called Ozone, that allows moderators to take moderation action, such as taking down posts or accounts. This tool has the least amount of information on it, and it is not visible Federation Architecture documentation. The update this week by the Bluesky organisation shows that the system is called Ozone, and that they are in the process of making it open-source and available for others to use.

The tool at least allows moderators to alter data in the PDS, as that is where account data lives.

Every account on the Bluesky network has a unique identifier, called a DID. A DID is a unique string of random numbers and letters, and cannot change. Every account also has a handle, which is your username. New accounts start with youraccountname.bsky.social as a handle. The network also allows you to change your handle to a domain name that you own, which allows for easy verification. The information about which DID corresponds to which handle is stored in the DID PLC Directory.

Now we have all the components that together make up the Bluesky network. In the next part, I’ll take a look at decentralisation and federation, explaining for every part how it will play a role in decentralisation and federation.

Thanks to Kuba Suder for feedback on a first draft.

Gabe Kangas, creator of the fediverse-connected streaming software Owncast, has announced the release of an iOS and tvOS app for Owncast. This comes some months after Kangas said that the development of the app had been halted due to Apple’s App Store policies. Getting the app approved has been a challenge, and Kangas details the wide variety of ‘reasons’ that Apple has given to reject the app. It took help of a legal firm and persistence from Kangas to get the app in the App Store.

The fact that Owncast did manage to publish an app to the App Store is good news for PeerTube, who are in a process of their own to create their own mobile apps for PeerTube. In PeerTube’s roadmap Framasoft said that publishing a PeerTube app might be tricky, citing Owncast’s experiences.

In the blog Kangas also talks about the identity of the platform, coming right out of the gate by reiterating that Owncast is simply server software to run ‘independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams’. Building social features such as chat, helping with discovery with the Owncast Directory and now building an app, all help with the awareness of the project. But in the end, Kangas sees Owncast as ‘server software. That’s it’.