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’.

The contours of the fediverse as the open social web, in a vision that goes beyond decentralised microblogging, are starting to become more visible, with more bridges, connections and other types of media getting pulled into the fediverse. It also raises the question of expectations and boundaries, with different visions of the fediverse arising: that of a highly interconnected space, or with many more insular communities and groups that are loosely connected.

WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:

“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”

This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.

Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.

Podcasting news

Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.

In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.

Bluesky has 3 million accounts

Some news from Bluesky: yesterday the network reached the milestone of 3 million accounts. This milestone comes 2 months after hitting the 2 million mark. While there are no official numbers for Monthly Active Users (MAU), Kuba Suber estimates around 500k MAU, based on the daily and weekly active users. For comparision, Mastodon has between 1 million and 1.5 million MAU, depending on the source.

Bluesky’s growth is far from over, as Bluesky said that that ‘invite codes are going away soon’. This is different from opening up the network for federation, which is also planned for early 2024.

Bluesky is explicitly positioning itself as a place that is welcoming and suitable for news organisations. Bluesky team member Emily published an explainer how newsrooms can use Bluesky for the upcoming election season. Not everyone is convinced the network is ready yet though, as ændra explains some features that the network needs to be fit for purpose.

In other news

Another write-up of the meeting that Meta held last December to discuss the fediverse, by Tom Coates. It contains some more details about the planned roadmap, and how the integration is planned to happen in separate steps. What strikes me is that both this report, and the notes by Johannes Ernst, mention that they feel they have not gotten a clear answer to the most important question: ‘Why is Meta doing this?’. Tom Coates writes: “I’ll be blunt – I didn’t find [Meta’s explanation] enormously convincing but it was interesting and I’m sure there’s some truth to it”. And Johannes Ernst: “Personally I believe this question needs a better answer than has been given publicly so far”.

An OpenAccess article in Cell Press for researchers that are considering to switch their research from X to Mastodon, by Robert W. Gehl and Roel Roscam Abbing. It describes key differences between the fediverse and X, and how Mastodon is quite different from X and Twitter from the perspective of researchers. It focuses on the expectations of privacy that people in the fediverse have, and one of the main recommendations for researchers is to shift from studying individuals to studying instances.

ActivityPods, the project to combine ActivityPub with the Solid protocol to create data ‘pods’, has been updated to version 1.5. With the new version it becomes easier to invite new people to your network, as well as better organisation of your contacts. ActivityPods tries to solve the problem that currently in the fediverse, you need to have a separate account for every fediverse service. With ActivityPods, applications can connect to your own Pod, so that your data and connections all live in one place.

The new link aggregator PieFed ‘emphasise trust, safety and happiness‘, and as part of that they have added extra notifications for commenting on posts made on servers with higher standards of moderation, such as Beehaw.org.

Fediseer, the project that provides a public space to crowd-source approval and disapproval of instances, has added a ‘rebuttals’ feature. Creator db0 noticed that instances were issuing ‘counter-censures’ (a censure is a negative judgement from one instance to another for any reason) just to reply to the original censure. Rebuttals provide an outlet for instances to explain their perspective or reasoning.

Bridgy Fed, the bridging project to connect the indieweb, fediverse (and Bluesky and Nostr in the near future) has expanded support for non-indie websites as well. Similar to RSS-Parrot, you can now follow websites and their RSS-feeds directly in your fediverse account.

The links

Pixelfed is building their spam filtering feature into a dedicated service, and working on adding parental controls.

PeerTube is building a mobile app, and is looking for people to help better understand their needs.

The research project by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi has kicked off as The Federalist Papers.

Designing a fediverse application with Bovine.

Updating your Mastodon status from a Kindle.

Mastodon client Oliphaunt for MacOS launches in beta.

radio free fedi is at a crossroads.

Short update by Write.as, saying they are working on post imports from WordPress and Substack.

The new Firefish fork Catodon moves towards the other Firefish fork, Iceshrimp. It’ll stay a separate project however.

A deeper look at one of the stand-out features of Misskey and it’s forks: Pages.

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You can also follow this blog directly on the fediverse:

Fediverse podcast hosting platform Castopod has released a discovery platform for all the podcasts that are hosted on Castopod. You can find the index at https://index.castopod.org/. It gives a nice visual overview of all the podcasts, which you can filter by category, language, or any search term you want.

In order to build this index, Castopod uses the Podcast Index Database. Incidentally, the Podcast Index is currently working on building a bridge between their database and the fediverse. Developer Dave Jones released the code for the alpha version this week. This bridge allows you to follow podcasts directly in your fediverse client. The bridge is still in active development, but a sneak peek can be seen here.

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin has been updated to version 2.0. The major feature of the release is better comment federation. Comments are now properly threaded, which makes it much easier to follow and understand threads where people are replying to each other. Comments are now also bidirectionally federated. Creator @pfefferle explains:

“When you respond to comments from the fediverse on your blog, they will now be federated. This allows you to finally engage in (threaded) communication back and forth directly from the comment section of your blog!”

This makes the plugin more valuable for bloggers who do not have another fediverse account for example, allowing them to respond directly from the blog, with their responses now showing up in the fediverse as well.

Comments made by people who use the reply feature on the website itself do not get federated. Pfefferle explains that this is mainly a legal question for GDPR compliance. Work is still continuing on the plugin: Pfefferle mentions working with the Akismet team to make sure that it’s spam detection system also works with ActivityPub, as well as working on a Profile Editor UI.

RSS Parrot is a new tool that allows you to turn your fediverse feed into a RSS feed. What was intended to be an ‘under-the-rader late night launch’ turned about to be massively popular hit in the fediverse. The tool is simple: mention @birb@rss-parrot.net in a post with the address you want to follow, and the bot replies with an account that you can follow. Every website is one account, and it posts a link every time the website has a new post.

The responses show the demand for RSS feeds that easily integrate into social networking feeds. RSS Parrot is a great workaround for websites that have not set up their own fediverse presence yet. But for people who do own websites and prefer to have direct control over the relationship with their audience, RSS Parrot’s popularity is a great reminder to set up your own fediverse presence.