“It’s the future of social media, and the future of the web!” Speaking with Mike McCue makes it immediately clear why Flipboard has joined the fediverse. Monday, the company announced that Flipboard has begun federating, and that people from other parts of the fediverse can now interact and follow with Flipboard accounts.

The plan is to implement federation in three steps. The first step started this week, and allows full interoperability between a selected group of 27 publishers and creators. In January 2024, all Flipboard accounts will federate, with people from the fediverse being able to follow and interact with any public curator. Finally, Flipboard plans for April 2024 for all Flipboard accounts to interact with fediverse accounts as well.

McCue explains Flipboard’s Magazines, by saying that if you are interested in a subject, for example Mountain biking, you want to see all of the content, and not limit it to only one type: not just posts (microblogs), but also videos, photo’s, articles. Flipboard’s magazines is a collection of all these different types of media. He says that federation presents a great opportunity to introduce people to the concept of Flipboard and its curated magazines.

McCue is also thinking on how Flipboard maps onto the current structure that most fediverse software uses. In Flipboard, one account can maintain multiple magazines, and you ‘flip’ the content into one specific magazine. With the current implementation of federation, you only follow a Flipboard account, and all the posts you see in your feed get the text “Posted Into [Magazine]” added. You cannot follow an individual magazine from an account yet. As Flipboards Magazines do not easily map onto the structure that other fediverse platforms use. The closest analogue might be PeerTube’s Channels, which also don’t federate.

Flipboard is also thinking about how to share their work on content moderation, stating in their announcement post that “we will share [our red/green domain list] with other instance owners in the Fediverse as soon as is practically possible”. McCue explains that the red/green domain list is used by Flipboard to determine if websites are trustworthy, with quality content and fair reporting (green list), or untrustworthy or harmful for the red domain list.

Flipboard uses these list to determine on how to approach accounts and posts in their recommendations. The fediverse has been thinking and working about various initiatives on how to share information about whether other fediverse servers are trustworthy. For more information, The Nexus of Privacy has an extensive look at three major initiatives in the fediverse, FediSeer, FIRES and The Bad Space. There are many open questions on how Flipboard’s work will look, but it does represent an expansion in the thinking of how the fediverse can work together to share information about trust.

The steps by Flipboard to federate represent two trends going on in the fediverse currently;
a transition of the fediverse towards an open social web, where products and organisations can add a social components to their product by adding fediverse integration. The other is in placing an increased focus on content curation. A significant group of people in the fediverse express skepticism about algorithmic discovery. Hand-curated content represents an alternative way of finding new content in the fediverse, and Flipboard makes that easier now, with their federation of magazines.

An overview of the interesting links from the previous week.

FediForum, the online unconference about the fediverse, has opened registrations for the third edition, on March 19-20, 2024. More information and registration on the website.

Mozilla.social, the fediverse server by Mozilla, is slowly opening up the server, and have added the first group of people from the waitlist.

Mastodon is experimenting with a new recommendation algorithm for finding interesting accounts to follow. The experiment is only available on the mastodon.online server.

Event Federation is a project that aims to federate WordPress events with the rest of the fediverse, and make it interoperable with programs like Mobilizon and Gancio. They just showed a sneak peak on the interoperability between WordPress Events and Mobilizon.

Bonfire has released documentation on their framework, that further explains how it is both a social network as well as a toolkit for communities to (re)design their digital spaces.

IFTAS has announced a sandbox server intended for moderators to practice moderation in a safe environment.

Owncast has started their own monthly newsletter, the first edition is available here.

For all of this week’s news, check out Last Week in Fediverse – ep 48.

It’s been quite a week for news in the fediverse, with the news that Threads has started their process of incrementally adding federation to Threads taking most of the attention. But lots of other great stuff happened in the fediverse as well:

Threads

Threads has started their implementation process of federation and adding ActivityPub to Threads. The first careful step is that a few Threads profiles are now visible in the fediverse, and that posts made by them can be viewed from fediverse servers. For now only the accounts for the profiles of Threads head Adam Mosseri and 2 Threads engineers are visible. Replies to their post made by a fediverse account does not federate back yet. Mosseri says that the process of adding federation will be done gradually in steps, and that he expects that this process will take most of the year. In another post, Mosseri also notes that federation will likely be opt-in for Threads accounts. This is in contrast with most fediverse software, which federates with all other fediverse servers by default, and federation is opt-out (blocking).

PeerTube

Framasoft announced their plans for PeerTube for the next year, in an extensive blog. I also hosted a livestreamed AMA with Framasoft for the community to ask all their questions about PeerTube, and it turned out amazing, with lots of great information. The entire AMA can be rewatched here. I’ll do a larger writeup on all the PeerTube news next week, but for now already the highlights: PeerTube is doubling their dev team, creating a mobile app, and will work on better moderation tools, and a review and redesign of the user interface. Stay tuned!

In other news

Lemmy has released their latest big update, v0.19. In this blog post they go over all the changes they’ve made. Two major new features are improved post ranking and instance blocking for individual accounts. With the new feed sorting of scaled sort, the community size where the post is made gets taken into account. This allows for smaller communities to have better visibility, and should increase their reach. People can now block entire instances as well, which should provide a significant increase in the ability for people to curate their digital spaces.

Discourse has been working on joining the fediverse for a while, and their latest update shows how far along they are. A Discourse category can now follow any actor in the fediverse. Check out their video to show this in practice, with federation between both different Discourses as well as Mastodon. This is a major step in expanding the fediverse, and worth keeping your eyes on.

The links

FediForum, the online unconference about the fediverse, has opened registrations for the third edition, on March 19-20, 2024. More information and registration on the website.

Mozilla.social, the fediverse server by Mozilla, is slowly opening up the server, and have added the first group of people from the waitlist.

Mastodon is experimenting with a new recommendation algorithm for finding interesting accounts to follow. The experiment is only available on the mastodon.online server.

Event Federation is a project that aims to federate WordPress events with the rest of the fediverse, and make it interoperable with programs like Mobilizon and Gancio. They just showed a sneak peak on the interoperability between WordPress Events and Mobilizon.

Bonfire has released documentation on their framework, that further explains how it is both a social network as well as a toolkit for communities to (re)design their digital spaces.

IFTAS has announced a sandbox server intended for moderators to practice moderation in a safe environment.

Owncast has started their own monthly newsletter, the first edition is available here.

Other articles

I wrote other articles as well this week, check it out!

Newsmast, a social network committed to thoughtful knowledge sharing and curated communities, has emerged as a notable project within the fediverse. It is backed by the UK Newsmast Foundation Charity, which has set itself as a mission to change social media for the better. I spoke with Michael Foster, co-founder of Newsmast, and Freddie Johnson, Foundation Ambassador for Newsmast.

The main way that Newsmast is working towards their mission is with curated communities. The idea came to the co-founders after he realised how during the Russian invasion of Ukraine an online community of valuable news and commentators emerged online. As this happened mainly on Twitter, the events of the last year necessitated the use of a different place to facilitate these trusted news communities, which they found in Mastodon and the fediverse.

Over the last year, the team has been busy building their own place on the fediverse. Starting with a fork of Mastodon, they have developed their own apps for Android and iOS, as well as their own web interface. The design puts communities at the core, as a way for people to help with discovery on the fediverse, and find valuable content.

Curated Communities

Newsmast has put quite a bit of work in their curated communities, and it goes beyond just providing a list of accounts to follow. There are communities in a large variety of topics, varying from ‘Government and Policy’ to ‘Biodiversity and Rewilding’, to ‘Ukraine invasion’, to ‘History’. A Newsmast community has some parallels with Bluesky’s custom feed. For creating each community, Newsmast takes a group of hashtags, then apply some strong filters to the posts made with this hashtag. Then it adds some specific hand-picked accounts to the subject as well that are knowledgeable in the field.

Freddie Johnson explains that they have structured the communities around academic or newspaper subjects, and that the focus is groups like academics, news organisations, and non-profit workers. They are thinking about how to provide editorial oversight over communities. The organisation is working on establishing a community based editorial board, that takes inspiration from the academic model for oversight boards.

A unique home on the fediverse

Another aspect about Newsmast that stands out is that it is also a hosted fediverse server that anyone can join. While there are many fediverse servers that are available for signup registration, there are not many servers that provide a clear governance structure in the way that Newsmast can. When new people first join the fediverse, the question of which server to join can be a difficult one, for multiple reasons: for people new to decentralised social networks it is often unclear what the question means, what the impact of the choice is. But the differences between the servers can be hard to find as well. Signing up asks you to trust the administrators of the server, with limited info of who they are. Newsmast stands out in a positive way; it presents a clear and extensive vision for what they want their social network to be, and also shows that the server is run by a UK accredited charity. For new people joining the fediverse, Newsmast provides an attractive option to join.

Expanding communities

Newsmast is working on making their curated content more broadly accessible. In the latest update of Mastodon app Mammoth, there are now curated “Smart Lists”, with the Environment and Nature Smart Lists curated by Newsmast. The organisation is also working on an update so you can log into Newsmast with your current Mastodon account, which should make it easier for people to access the Newsmast communities.

Different organisations are thinking about, and working on, curating and helping people discover interesting content. Flipboard is expanding their native integration with the fediverse for their magazines, Mammoth is providing Smart List, and for Bluesky is curated feeds one of their key features. Newsmast takes this concept and moves it further by actively thinking about how to provide oversight to the editorial power that the curators have. It is one of the more interesting projects in the fediverse that I have seen in quite a while, and certainly worth keeping an eye on. You can try Newsmast at newsmast.org.

In the last month or so, the Bluesky team has made some updates and changes to the network; adding reply controls, starting to make the network publicly available, and working on the bulk follow spam accounts.

Reply controls

One of the main features recently released is the Thread Reply Controls. When you compose a post, you can now select who is able to comment. You can either select no-one, only accounts who are mentioned in the post, only your followers, or accounts that are on one of your lists.

Giving people control over who can comment is a significant improvement for the safety. It can help cut down on annoying or harmful replies. It should be noted that these reply controls can only be set during the creation of the post, and can not be changed afterwards. This means it is not possible to apply extra limitations on comments in case a post goes unexpectedly viral.

Public visibility of network

Soon, Bluesky will make the entire network publicly visible. Currently it is not possible in the standard web interace to view posts or profiles without an account, giving the impression that the network is private. However, the entire network has always been public, with posts and accounts visible for everyone, if one used 3rd party tools or the API.

As part of the preparation for federation and opening the entire network for everyone, Bluesky will soon be making all posts and profiles publicly visible for people without an account. When the team announced this a few weeks ago, it came with quite a few critiques that people had a need for their profile to be private, and that they did not want their posts to be easily accessible.

In order to accommodate the needs and requests for privacy, Bluesky has added the ability for people to opt out of the public web interface in a new setting. This reintroduces the current friction in viewing peoples profiles and posts: it is currently possible, but requires a certain technical know-how and effort. However, it is not certain that other third party clients will respect the setting. It can also create a false sense of security, where people think their posts are private when they have turned on the feature, when in practice it means that they are obscured instead, and still accessible to those who really want access.

Bluesky is aware that this opt-out setting is not equal to a full privacy setting, and the language used reflects this: the setting says that it will ‘Discourage apps from showing my account to logged-out users’, and comes with a warning that it does not make your account private.

Bulk following spam

Finally, Bluesky is stepping up enforcement against engagement farming. There are quite a few accounts that try to gain followers by following tens of thousands account at the same time, with the hope that these accounts will follow them back. These accounts will now get labelled as spam. The hope is that this label both deter the behaviour. With Bluesky’s composable moderation, the default value is that posts from accounts labelled as spam are hidden.

Last year’s Twitter migration, where a large number of people decided to move to Mastodon, is an example of a giant collective behavioural change that people engaged in voluntarily. A new paper takes a look at how the collective coordination happened, and what can be learned as the drivers of such a collective action.

The authors (Lucia La Cava, Luca Maria Aiello, Andrea Tagarelli) show that Twitter communities migrated more quickly where:

The social connections in the community are relatively sparse. There is a cost to severing a social connection, and in a tight-knit community the social cost of leaving is higher.

Community members repeatedly post about their migration plans. The more people post with the #twittermigration hashtag, the more likely people are to follow up on the call.

Language use that emphasises a shared identity and the exchanges factual knowledge. Cooperation in a community can be facilitated when discussions and conversations create a sense of belonging to the group.

The blog post explaining the research can be found here, the paper here.

It’s been a busy week for fediverse news, with a long update. Three articles this week, as well as quite some other news and interesting links.

Next week I’ll be hosting a livestream together with Framasoft, to ask them questions about PeerTube. The event will be livestreamed on PeerTube, on Wednesday, Dec. 13th, 6-8 pm (CET). You can already send in your questions now, simply by posting them with the #PeerTubeAMA on the fediverse. See you there!

5 years of Mobilizon

An end, as well as a new beginning for Mobilizon. With the latest update, Framasoft adds a variety of new features, and hands the project over to a new team. Read the update below

Nostr bridge Mostr gets an update

The bridging between the different decentralised social networks remains one of the more interesting developments, as they point towards a future of the fediverse that is more complex than just a single platform ‘winning’. In this piece, I take a look at Mostr, the bridge that connects the fediverse to Nostr, and the complex questions about culture and safety that arise.

Mammoth gets a major update

Mastodon app Mammoth gets a major update

In other news

A blog post by Lickability, the design agency that works on the official Mastodon apps, that explains the design process behind Mastodon’s reply safety features. It explains the thought process behind the design, and compares it to how Instagram, Twitter and Youtube are handling somewhat similar features.

SocialInbox is a new feature of Distributed.Press which integrates a website’s comment section with federated social media platforms like Mastodon. Distributed.Press is an open source publishing tool that can help send out your website content to the decentralized web. With SocialInbox, websites can now become part of the fediverse, in a similar way to how the ActivityPub plugin makes WordPress websites part of the fediverse. With the Social Inbox, your website becomes an account on the fediverse that can be followed, and posts can be interacted with as with any Mastodon post, which gets send back to your own website.

Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have announced that they will be running a new project, titled Fediverse Governance Successes & Gaps. The project looks to find more information about the current governance models in the fediverse, as well as the gaps in infrastructure that are present for the governance of the new generation of social networks. The goal is to create a practical handbook as well as whitepaper on governance.

SURF, the Dutch IT cooperative for education and research, has extended their Mastodon pilot for another year. I spoke to them this spring about the pilot, here. For the next year they will be focusing on adoption of the fediverse by participation organisations, as well as working on taking the next organisational steps of going from pilot to a regular service that SURF offers to their members. More information in their interview with PublicSpaces, in Dutch.

Social network Spoutible is adding cross-posting to different networks. They have added Bluesky, and are now in the process of adding support for Mastodon. This is not full federation, as likes and comments are not carried over. Neither is Mastodon fully supported yet. It does however provide an indication of where social networks are headed, with more and more connections between networks. WeDistribute has more info, here.

Catodon is an new and upcoming fediverse platform, based on Firefish, that is currently in development. It is being worked on by some of the team that used to contribute to Firefish. As the firefish.social flagship server continues to struggle with serious technical issues, more forks of the project (such as Sharkey) are springing up.

The links

IFTAS, the non-profit organisation that helps support the fediverse moderator community, and has a Moderator Advisory Council to help guide the organisation. They are looking for someone with moderation experience who can contribute, with stipend available.

The ActivityPub Community Group held a meeting together with the Community Group for the Solid protocol, looking for ways to join forces. The notes of the entire meeting can be found here.

Pixelfed is working on making their Collections feature directly accessible and followable via Activitypub.

The third episode of Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast is out, this time with Ian Forrester, about the BBC’s experiment in the fediverse.

Another German government has joined the fediverse, this time the federal state of Baden-Württemberg.

Kbin app Artemis has shut down after the developer disappeared, WeDistribute reports.

Lemmynade is a new app for Lemmy.

The Mastodon.nl server has a blog post that discusses server size, and the tradeoffs that come with it. In Dutch.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. You can subscribe via email below, or laurenshof@fediversereport.com if you want to follow this blog with your fediverse account.

Mastodon app Mammoth has released a new version of their app, Mammoth 2. The app was launched in early 2023 for the iPhone, Mac and iPad, and it is made by startup that is backed by Mozilla. Mammoth has focused on the user experience, especially of new users, and over the summer they launched a For You feed. In the announcement post for Mammoth 2, co-founder Bart Decrem says that ‘Social needs to be an open protocol that anybody can build on’. To illustrate their belief in the value of open software, Mammoth 2 is now open source as well.

One common criticism of the fediverse is that it is hard to get started. Finding interesting people and content to follow is harder than on other platforms, who are more willing to suggest accounts and posts to you. Decrem talks about wanting to make something that takes the values and the passion of FOSS projects, and make them accessible to a larger base of people. With Mammoth, he is actively working on making Mastodon more accessible for new people, in multiple ways.

The standout feature for Mammoth 2 is curated ‘Smart Lists’, where Mammoth has asked people within the community to curate lists around certain topics, from Space to Indieweb to Queertech. The handpicked curation provides a counter to algorithmic feeds, and also provides new accounts with a good place to start. If you have been in the fediverse for a while, you will probably recognise most accounts on the Smart Lists that interest you, but for a new account it can certainly be helpful.

The For You feed is now makes use of the smart lists as well. Mammoth explains how it works in more detail here. You can customise your For You feed as well, selecting which parts you want to be included or excluded into your feed. You can select each smart list you subscribe to, Friends of friends, Trending among follows, and handpicked accounts by Mammoth.

The two algorithms of Trending among follows and Friends of friends are still in the testing phase. Decrem explains that these algorithm are hard to implement well, both from a technological perspective as well as a cultural viewpoint. The entire fediverse network is currently also on the small side to get enough engagement to create a well functioning feed.

Bart talks about that there are communities on the fediverse that have critical mass, and are self-sustaining with worthwhile content, but that other bla

For 2024, Decrem expects that it’ll be the year of social as an open protocol, with many different products being build. For Mammoth, that means making Mastodon and the fediverse accessible to a wider audience, with the following priority they are working on: first of all, making sure that Mammoth provides a great Mastodon experience. Secondly, provide a good experience for interacting with the fediverse at large. Thirdly, they are watching closely what Threads is doing, and making sure that Threads is accessible on day 1 that they launch ActivityPub support.

A large part of the Mammoth 2 update is about content curation. Decrem says however that being a content curator is a not a part of their core business, stating that Mammoth is especially good at thinking about the user experience. For now, that means helping with content curation. That is why other organisations such as Newsmast, and people from the community have been actively involved in taking the role of content creation.

Mammoth is also thinking about how to sustain the project, to which they have introduced Mammoth Gold. This optional subscription (2.99 USD/month) is about supporting the project, and gets you optional features such as more icons, early access and votes on new features, and being present on the quarterly board meetings.

The app will not be just focused on Mastodon forever, and Decrem sees a lot of potential for Threads implementing ActivityPub. This is something he actively hopes to make use of, and provide Threads users with another app that they can use. He sees a lot of options how Mammoth can do things better than Threads, and give users more handpicked and curated content to browse.

— experiencias iniciais (mat.winck.xyz, atlas.winck,xyz, presencaweb.winck.xyz, etc…)

Presença Web

— criar modelos prontos para serem duplicados

— vender os sites a partir dos modelos

— oferecer o modelo online como amostra

— vincular cada modelo a um formulário equivalente com espaços para todas infomações e mídias do cliente

— oferecer personalização limitada dentro do modelo

Geral

– Investimento inicial(dez/2023):

• Hospedagem WordPress Hostinger: R$ 200 por ano

– Próximo investimento

• Servidor Linode Starter: R$ 35 por mês (R$ 420 por ano) – 2 Apps Cloudron: RSS e ChatBot
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• Servidor Linode Advanced: R$ 70 por mês (R$ 840 por ano)
• Servidor Linode Master: R$ 140 por mês (R$ 1.680 por ano)

Total final:

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Futuro:

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Mostr, the bridge that connects Nostr to the fediverse, has gotten some upgrades recently. With the latest update, the homepage of the bridge, Mostr.pub, allows people to enter a fediverse handle, and open the link in their Nostr client of choice. Here is the Nostr page for my Fediverse Report account as a demonstration. Finding people on the fediverse and connect to them from Nostr has become significantly easier with this update.

For some context to this news, Nostr is another social network based on an open-source protocol. I explain a bit more how it works here. In the context of Mostr, two things are important to know: one of the core values of the network is anti-censorship, and there is no intermediary for creating an account.

In a talk (available on PeerTube here) at the Nostr conference Nostrasia, Mostr.pub creator Alex Gleason about his history with Nostr and the fediverse. He explains how he worked on fediverse software Soapbox, and then got hired as the head of engineering for Trump’s Truth Social, and now has quit that job to work fulltime on Nostr.

The Mostr bridge has been available for a bit, which allows Gleason to present some interesting statistics about it’s usage: 70% of the usage is from people on Nostr following people on the fediverse, with over 10k unique users across the bridge.

One part of Gleason’s presentation that stands out is his claim that Nostr is now part of the fediverse. I wrote about the multiple definitions of the term fediverse here, talking about how fediverse can be defined by protocol, by culture, or by interoperability. Although people can argue about which definition is correct, and whether or not Nostr should be included, Gleason’s remarks do indicate that Mostr makes the boundaries of what the fediverse is fuzzier, and harder to define.

Gleason also talks about content moderation and blocking, saying: “One thing that has been holding the ActivityPub protocol back from achieving even more, is the blocking culture”. But if Mostr wants to see itself as just another server among many in the fediverse, content moderation happens to it in the same way that it happens to other servers: by simply blocking the server you do not feel like connecting with. Any justification for it is only necessary between the admin and their users, and not anyone beyond that.