Laurens Hof

I write Connected Places, a news site to help you understand the new social web.

This is my personal account, where I share and comment on anything I find interesting.

I care about an ethical internet.

From the Netherlands 🇳🇱.

Connected Places: connectedplaces.online
Personal website: https://laurenshof.online
Bluesky: @laurenshof.online
Matrix: @wisdomchicken:matrix.org

Public Key

npub17m8z9gfl0t3x69ux50mfawyrpt4w5rkxsfaz9ckgvhp8y75t429q8drsw8

NIP-05 Address

laurenshof_at_indieweb.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0dn3z5ylh4cndz7r28a57hzps46h2pmrgy73zutyxtsnj02964zsprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hszrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqsukutw

Publishing to

relay.snort.social

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub17m8z9gfl0t3x69ux50mfawyrpt4w5rkxsfaz9ckgvhp8y75t429q8drsw8

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Last Notes

2026-03-10 21:58:18 UTC

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i think it will be good for the collective safety model in this space because while vibe coding brings it to the foreground that you cannot assume on remote software being safe, that assumption was never valid to begin with
theres some pretty high profile fediverse software with some pretty serious safety issues, and thats all handcoded not vibecoded

2026-02-10 22:13:40 UTC

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one scream please

2026-02-10 21:59:54 UTC

RE: https://toot.fedilab.app/@apps/116048181884367592
the meta-problem, that a well-meaning actor does not feel comfortable in the knowledge the 'indexable' flag can actually be treated the way it says on the label actually a massive problem for fedi
#note1m3j…gahy

2026-01-08 15:15:36 UTC

mastodon should keep mastodon.social as the default on joinmastodon.org and their apps, as it is an amazing strategy to maximise engagement on the fediverse

2025-06-24 11:58:33 UTC

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why are people who dont even have a fediverse account talking about interoperability on the fediverse? literally the only thing they do is whitewash meta. fuck this

2025-04-18 15:34:55 UTC

federation challenge: how does this work?
i made a post (note) on my wordpress account. its enabled with activitypub, and thus gets send out to the fediverse. My wordpress account gets followed by a Discourse forum. Someone on the Discourse forum replies with a note. I open the wordpress article with my main mastodon account. I see the discourse reply. I want to react, but with my personal mastodon account.
(cont)

2025-04-16 11:17:10 UTC

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Thats absolutely true from the network perspective. easy to make an account on another instance, and indeed much harder to impossible to control the presence of people on the fediverse.
But people have a presence on an individual server. Would mastodon.social thus simply say to the threatened account "sorry, we have to comply with the law, so please move your account to a different server"?
Thats what I wanna know, what would mastodon.social do in this case?

2025-04-16 11:00:04 UTC

Considering this post is going viral here and boosted by Mastodon's ceo:
What is mastodon.social's policy if it had received the same takedown request?
Meaning if an account on mastodon.social was ordered to be taken down by a Turkish judge 'under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, citing “national security and public order.”'
More context on the request: https://bianet.org/haber/x-users-in-turkey-migrate-to-bluesky-amid-censorship-306189
cc @npub1vl7…f6g0 @npub13za…8j89
https://mas.to/@osma/114346166890552471

2025-02-01 17:13:30 UTC

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finally!

2025-01-22 20:37:16 UTC

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omg he actually posted that jesus
also you cut to the core very well, it is fundamentally about the story
*insert baudrillard picture here*

2025-01-22 19:25:33 UTC

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some of the best scholars on digital governance are on fedi, with people like nathan schneider. the problem is not about knowing what to do, but about admitting that this means relinguishing control
also it is fully about him, pixelfed and loops are just pretty much completely dan's projects. i believe him to be serious when he says that he wants them to be projects with a billion users. Platforms that big, and those that strive to be that big, should be accountable!

2025-01-22 18:54:15 UTC

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i mean, a simple first step towards becoming more accountable would not be to post that you'll not do any interviews with any media
(think he deleted the post now(talking about accountability lol))

2025-01-22 18:28:56 UTC

the unaccountable leadership of the big tech platforms is bad! Please join our network with unaccountable leadership instead!

2025-01-22 10:34:57 UTC

anyone have any idea what happened here?
5.6k servers shutting down in a month is a lot, but it is not reflected in other stats. im not convinced yet that there were 5k servers out there being actively used by real people that could all shut down without people noticing it in other ways
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/871/555/480/224/937/original/2579282fd51ba397.png

2025-01-13 14:30:22 UTC

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👀👀
It wasnt super clear from the blog announcement itself, but this implies that some form of community ownership is for consideration for the toplevel holding org?
also, great work, very important step for masto regardless, awesome you could help them push in this direction

2024-12-06 15:04:38 UTC

A quick comparison between how people like Paul and Hailey can Post, versus how Eugen or the Lemmy devs post, as well as the active user numbers between these platforms make me just ever so slightly doubtful of this claim
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113602196673345224

2024-12-03 22:44:47 UTC

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yeah this is correct, they get suspended on both the bsky appview and pds.

2024-11-22 12:19:49 UTC

This is why I included a section on Mastodon in my article on how Bluesky is not distributed in a social sense. Its much easier to deal with on Bluesky because of the explicit nature of the centralisation points.
The fediverse is absolutely failing at decentralisation here: we are clearly centralised on one of the aspects that actually matter, and handed power over to a dictator-for-life who refuses accountability
https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-decentralisation-and-the-distribution-of-power/
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113524158302790957

2024-11-17 19:57:14 UTC

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im not sure on how likely it is either, but it absolutely is what im hoping for.
the advantage of having bluesky around is that it can make it much clearer in what direction fedi should not go in

2024-10-23 08:27:23 UTC

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Thats because atproto server is the wrong conceptualisation of how atproto works.
activitypub takes all the individual components (data storage, identity, aggregation, rendering) into a single server monolith. atproto takes all the components apart (pds, plc directory, relay, appview) and makes them individually available.
there are quite some (1k+) independent PDS's, a few backup plc dirs, ~20 relays, and 5+ appviews for other products

2024-08-29 14:00:04 UTC

i just dont understand why fedi does not seem to be talking about brazil potentially banning twitter in the next 12 hours

2024-08-28 17:12:24 UTC

latest update for #bluesky is legit:
- detaching quote posts
- disable quote posting per post
- hide replies for everyone
bluesky is moving fast, and in the current phase the space of decentralised social network is in this matters
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-28-2024-anti-toxicity-features

2024-08-27 13:21:12 UTC

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tagging @npub1vwf…95aa for this, since piefed is probably the closest as theyve already got aguppe group support. So building support for a group that is currently seeing very active use might be interesting as well

2024-08-26 17:37:38 UTC

official french press release with charges against #telegram ceo Durav
https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files/2024-08/2024-08-26%20-%20CP%20TELEGRAM%20.pdf
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/029/536/601/040/130/original/d67549535a43c7c2.png
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/029/536/580/090/774/original/f5263db0a03b4bcb.png

2024-08-15 09:02:48 UTC

public group chats on #nostr
https://groups.nip29.com/
https://primal.net/e/note1qlh36usgj8wupzafy6vhxclwez80qk22mvntlwp6cj28q2a9krgqh4ghxt

2024-08-13 14:49:50 UTC

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list with the MPs joining bluesky:
https://bsky.app/profile/samuel.bsky.team/post/3kzkd42yjn62b

2024-08-13 14:47:20 UTC

"Now, Bluesky says it has seen a 60% jump in general activity from accounts in the UK, with several MPs also joining the platform recently."
https://news.sky.com/story/bluesky-social-media-site-reports-surge-in-new-uk-users-after-elon-musks-riot-comments-13196374

2024-08-13 10:00:43 UTC

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also interesting that neither the @npub1m96…ag4y nor https://bsky.app/profile/thierrybreton.bsky.social posted about it on masto or bsky

2024-08-13 09:58:59 UTC

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much bigger source of discussion on both nostr and farcaster, where people frame it as gov overreach/censorship, and iterate it as a need for anti-censorship platforms

2024-08-13 09:58:22 UTC

Social web observations:
On both bsky and fedi the decision by the EU to send a warning to X about misinformation and the DSA does not get a whole lot of traction anymore, and does not seem to have entered Discourse. Def used to be different in that people viewed such a thing as a potential migration wave towards either masto or fedi. Seems that people do not have that hope anymore.

2024-08-12 07:28:35 UTC

and the relentless march of phanpy continues
https://mastodon.social/@_elena/112947480880544830

2024-08-04 09:37:41 UTC

"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
decentralisation and federation fixes this, electric boogaloo edition
https://tilde.zone/@kirch/112881713102745337

2024-07-05 22:38:12 UTC

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yeah ghost and buttondown are also good examples. all indicate a potential shift of ap-fedi towards longform content though, which would both be really good but also probably alter the network structure quite a bit
oh and if were talking innovative and ghost: Fedify is very much worth mentioning there, activitypub reaaally needed a good server framework

2024-07-05 22:35:05 UTC

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my biggest issue when i complain about a lack of innovation in fedi is actually a frustration that innovations by the other networks do not get seen as such, nor seen as something that ap-fedi should adopt and iterate on
for both custom feeds and custom moderation did bluesky evolve from what fedi could offer, and did farcaster iterate and alter on what bluesky offers.
that contextual awareness and interest in that its something to learn from is completely missing imo

2024-07-05 22:27:29 UTC

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third party tools and clients for mastodon are permissionless, so that you see (and i agree) some cool innovation there makes sense
i see a lack of innovation in actual platforms that are product-ready. all fedi platforms are multiple years old at this point, and pretty much all bigtech platform clones.
Discourse/nodebb might bring some change tho
agreed that the innovation power in fedi comes from the esoteric shit like activitypods or stuff like Weird

2024-07-05 22:15:38 UTC

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"most of them were variations on people having their stuff moved outside of what they perceived to be the fediverse they joined? "
yes, but thats exactly what makes it not permissionless imo
permissionless open social network is what farcaster does here: offering an indexer-as-a-service that will pipe the entire freaking network directly into your own database to do whatever you want with
https://warpcast.com/rish/0x1dc1ee78

2024-07-05 21:58:35 UTC

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i think thats sort of the core of the problem:
- its not permissionless because you are not allowed to do certain things on ap-fedi, and which things are verboten is not documented
- its not permissioned, because there is no entity you can get approval from
think this conundrum explains a significant part of why fedi has been lacking in innovation imo

2024-07-05 21:35:04 UTC

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id argue that the activitypub side of the fediverse is the only open social protocol is the only one id argue is not permissionless. nostr, atproto and farcaster it definitely makes sense. But considering the amount of pushback you get on ap-fedi for going against social customs (see opt-in search for example) i dont think it feels permissionless. At least not in the way that nostr is permissionless, for example