Nostr notes by Laurens Hof

Fediverse Report – #122 Fediverse Report is now Connected ...

2025-06-24T19:12:29Z

Fediverse Report – #122

Fediverse Report is now Connected Places! You can read more about this in the announcement post. For this week’s news, Mastodon announces and retracts a new ToS for mastodon.social, Threads continues their streak of implementing ActivityPub in the most confusing way possible, and Wanderer is a new fediverse platform for sharing your hiking and biking trails.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!The News

Mastodon introduced a new Terms of Service for the mastodon.social and mastodon.online instances, and then retracted the new ToS after criticism from the community about some of the conditions that are in the ToS. Mastodon announced the new ToS with a summary email that explained that the new ToS would “explicitly prohibit the scraping of user data for unauthorized purposes, e.g. archival or large language model (LLM) training. We want to make it clear that training LLMs on the data of Mastodon users on our instances, is not permitted.” It would also set a minimum age of 16 for everyone, and clarified rights regarding content licensing. There were multiple points of criticism with the ToS:
It made the IP license grant irrevocable, and not even deleting the post or account would revoke the IP license.
It had a binding arbitration waiver, which tech writer Cory Doctorow argued hard against.
To whom do these terms actually apply? Federation is complicated, and the legal framework for how federation interacts with user content rights is untested. Two different posts (1, 2) go into some of open questions regarding how the ToS interacts with federation.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko noted in the Mastodon Discord that “the lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms”, which points to the challenge of writing a ToS for federated platforms. Rochko also said that he has taken up on Doctorow’s offer to have lawyers of the Electronic Frontier Foundation get involved. The first two concerns listed above seem fairly straightforward to handle. However the question of how Terms of Service apply in a federated network seem more complicated to resolve, as it is unclear if there is even a broad agreement on how the ToS should function in a federated context, let alone how to translate that into legalese.

Meta, the company that relentlessly removes friction from their social apps to maximise engagement, has moved fediverse posts on Threads to a separate ‘fediverse’ feed. Posts from fediverse accounts will only appear in this new fediverse feed, and will not appear in the regular timelines on Threads. You can not reply on posts from the fediverse with your Threads account, Threads engineer Peter Cottle says that this feature (lol) is an ‘eventual goal’. The fediverse feed on Threads also shows top-level posts, not replies and reposts. Cottle says that this is to create a ‘cleaner product experience’. You can now also search for fediverse accounts in Threads, before this update users had to wait for a post by a fediverse account showed up in their feed so they could click on the profile and hit follow. David Imel from the MKBHD and Waveform channels asked Cottle about Threads’ plans for account portability, noting that this was an important point made by Threads’ Adam Mosseri. Cottle says that this is “top of mind for us”, but that they do not have a concrete timeline for this. Threads’ fediverse integration is also still not available in the EU, with no clear indication if or when it will launch in the region.

Wanderer is a platform for managing and sharing your hiking, running and biking trails. It is self-hosted and open source, and the latest update for Wanderer has added ActivityPub, making it decentralised and federated as well. There is a demo instance of Wanderer available to try out what the platform actually looks like. Wanderer also has the option to import trails from other platforms like Strava and Komoot. Wanderer does face a familiar challenge that goes for a new type of platforms on the fediverse however: how does it bootstrap itself into becoming a community?

Mastodon shared an update on their strategy for 2025. The organisation said they are still working on new non-profit organisation in Europe that will own the Mastodon assets. When Mastodon announced this in January 2025 they also said that the current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down and work on product strategy. The latest update by Mastodon does not share any news on a potential new CEO. Growth his one of the three key pillars of Mastodon’s strategy for 2025, and they are working on making Mastodon more accessible for general users, as well as some features that other organisations have asked for, such as greater customisation for instances. Regarding financial sustainability Mastodon said that they are working on offering additional commercial service, and that they’ll announce more on that soon.

Related to Mastodon growing into a more mature and sustainable organisation, they also announced this week that Mastodon is registered as a digital public good. This registration is part of the Digital Public Good Alliance, a large multi-stakeholder organisation. In a speech during the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies‘s Open Source Week, Mastodon Board of Director member Hannah Aubry explains what it means for Mastodon to meet the DPG Standard: “adhering to privacy best practices, doing no harm, and contributing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. And it aids us in our mission to empower public institutions to speak directly to their citizens and constituents, without the filter of a corporation.”

PieFed is officially out of beta, and has released the 1.0 version. The Reddit-like platform has grown significantly over recent weeks. Popular Lemmy instance Lemm.ee announced they would be shutting down, and PieFed has been one of the main recipients of users and communities looking for a new place. Lemmy app Voyager is also in the process of adding support for PieFed to the app. The growth of PieFed in recent weeks is instructive for understanding how community growth within the fediverse actually happens. PieFed has been around for over a year, with a compelling feature set (especially regarding moderation, as well as clustering communities in feeds and topics), but had a low adoption rate. It took an exogenous event for people to actually take the effort to give PieFed a serious consideration and migrate away from Lemmy to a different platform.

Framasoft has successfully completed their crowdfunding campaign, raising over 75k EUR. The large majority of the funds are for further development of the PeerTubeapp , such as playing video on background, adding support for live streaming, and managing videos within the app. The final part of the campaign funds is for the support of the Framasoft organisation itself. Framasoft says that most new features will likely be released late this year or next year. Live broadcast is currently already in development and is scheduled to launch “fairly quickly”.In Other News

Wafrn is a Tumblr-like platform with native support for both ActivityPub and ATProto. The platform developers have released an Android app for Wafrn on F-Droid.

Manyfold is a fediverse platform for hosting and sharing 3D printer files, providing an alternative to platforms like Makerworld and Thingiverse. Manyfold was already available for self-hosting, and the 3dprint.social is the first publicly available instance that is now open for joining as well.

Bonfire is fediverse (micro)blogging platform that is getting close to release, and the developers are hosting online install parties to help people get started setting up their own instance.

FediThreat is a newly announced open source content moderation API for the fediverse by Pixelfed and Loops developer Daniel Supernault. There is not much publicly known yet on how FediThreat actually works. The project is scheduled for July.

The Event Federation project shares what they’ll be working on in the future to make events more accessible within the fediverse.The Links
The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix) – Tim Chambers
ORCID and the Fediverse: What Can We Do with Public Information? – Julian Fietkau
New Look, Faster Blocks in ActivityPub 6.0.0
delightful fediverse experience is a highly extensive overview of fediverse softwares.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-122/

Bluesky Report – #121 Media discourse about how Bluesky is ...

2025-06-19T18:50:58Z

Bluesky Report – #121

Media discourse about how Bluesky is dying, a new type of moderation relay by Blacksky, and backing up your ATProto account with bsky.storage.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!The News

US and UK media outlets (1, 2, 3, 4) have published various opinion articles these weeks about how Bluesky is dying, a narrative well-supported by the fact US Vice President JD Vance has joined Bluesky this week. The opinion pieces, as well as Vance joining Bluesky, illustrates that Bluesky has grown to the point where it is both part of mainstream culture, as well as one of the new battlegrounds for the culture wars. Bluesky does have an issue with retention rates, with the monthly active user numbers dropping by around 30% in the last three months. While this drop in user numbers is held up as the reason for the ‘Bluesky is dying’ discourse, the main frustration in the articles is about Bluesky, culture and audience. Sarah Perez wrote a response for TechCrunch, arguing that the main point of Bluesky is the open network and technology that it enables. While the protocol indeed matters, the main conflict is about the social capital and culture that Bluesky is creating, and who has influence over it. The impact on current culture and politics that Bluesky is having is illustrated by Wired’s coverage of the Tesla Takedown protest, documenting how a single post on Bluesky had led to widespread continuing protests.

Blacksky has build a moderation relay, which takes all moderation actions by all labelers on the network, and bundles them into a single relay output. As Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser explains: “With this update, folks building custom feeds can leverage moderation actions from the whole network more easily in their algorithms. 🤖 Wanna exclude twitter screenshots, transphobia, AND anti-blackness from your feed? rsky-relay is now a one-stop-shop for all of those labels.”

Blacksky also has reached their fundraising goal, and they will launch a Blacksky app. Some of the features for the Blacksky app will be the ability to set defaults for the Blacksky community, such as using the Blacksky moderation labeler by default and having the Blacksky Trending feed as default. Blacksky is also requesting feedback from the community on what they want from the app.

Bsky.storage is a new service that allows people to store an hourly backup of their ATProto PDS. It also can generate a recovery key that allows people to take back control over their account even when they have lost access to that account or Bluesky becomes unavailable. Bsky.storage is made by Storacha, which stores the data on a decentralised storage network with IPFS and Filecoin. ATProto gives people the ability to take full control over their account’s PDS, and it feels like the design space that this allows has only just starting to be explored. Bsky.storage is such an example, the ability to always take back control of your account even when the service provider goes offline or becomes adversarial, is something genuinely new for the space of social networks.

Publishing platform Leaflet has added the ability subscribe to publications via ATProto. Writers can create Bluesky posts with every new post, and when the audience subscribes to a publication, Leaflet generates a custom Bluesky feed for them that contains only the posts from all Leaflet publications they subscribed to. Leaflet is further exploring how to use the social graph for more ways to keep up to date with Leaflet. They are also working on email subscriptions, placing it in closer competition with other newsletter platforms such as Substack and Ghost.

On the topic of email subscriptions, subs.blue is a new tool to create email notifications on ATProto. It allows people to create an email channel. When other people subscribe to that channel, they get email notifications for posts in that channel, on the email address that they registered their ATProto account with.

OAuth remains one of the more challenging technical parts of ATProto to implement. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy posted an article that explains some of the design considerations that the team has made in their OAuth implementation design. Bluesky PBC also shared some of the improvements to OAuth that they are making. Relevant for non-developers: the time it takes before you need to log in again to a client is now two weeks, where it used to be one week. For developers that do use OAuth, check out the entire post.

UFOs is a new dashboard and API for exploring the ATmosphere, measuring the activity of all the lexicons on the network. In practical terms, this gives visibility into which apps are used on the network, and how often. It shows unusual activity (such as blocks on Bluesky being up 100% day over day), as well as giving insight into what other apps are used. It shows how incredible dominant Bluesky is over the ATmosphere, and how much of a hard time other apps have getting traction. UFOs also gives an indication of how mass adoption of the open social web has some interesting side effects as well, such as that statistics about user behaviour becomes publicly visible for everyone. UFOs also has an API, and it is part of microcosm, a larger collection of projects by developer @phil that build on the aggregate data of the ATProto firehose.

Smol.life is a new fork of the Bluesky web client, that has additional integrations with other ATProto apps. It has a section for games, where you can play Skyrdle and at://2048. These are two web-based games that have ATProto integrations, where you can keep track of your scores on your own PDS. Smol.life also has an integration with linkat.blue, a Linktree-clone on ATProto. This allows you to see someone’s linkat links while viewing their Bluesky profile on smol.life.

atproto-os is a virtual desktop that runs in your web browser, where the current state of your desktop (which applications are you currently running, etc) is stored on ATProto in your PDS. It uses Open Web Desktop, a larger project for running desktops on the web. As the project says: “Each window with its metadata can eventually be broadcast via #atproto Jetstream to update real-time data about whoever is on your desktop”. What a use case would be for broadcasting your current desktop applications to the entire public internet is somewhat less clear to me however.The Links
Custom feed creator platform BlueskyFeeds.com is winding down due to the complexity of maintaining the project.
ATProto-powered publishing platform Leaflet writes about their tech stack.
Featureparity.blue keeps an overview of feature parity between Bluesky and X.
Git collaboration platform Tangled now has a commit tracker.
Bluesky will now warn users when they click on links that are known to be malicious.
Film review app Popsky can now automatically sync with your Letterboxd account.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-121/

Fediverse Report – #121 Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub ...

2025-06-17T19:23:33Z

Fediverse Report – #121

Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum available, and bridging to Bluesky op a per-server basis.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!The News

Fediforum has published the videos of the keynotes and the software demos. For a list of all the demos, you can check out the website. Some thoughts on some of the demoes that stood out to me:
The keynote by Christine Lemmer-Webber talks about how the social media style of the 2010s is no longer good enough. With this, she refers to both the fediverse as well as Bluesky. Lemmer-Webber makes the case we live in an age of surveillance, and both Bluesky and the fediverse do not meet the need for safety and privacy that comes with that. She says that shame is not an effective way to get people to use better platforms, and that we need to bring joy to the new platforms. Lemmer-Webber is now working on different protocols with the Spritely Institute, that use Object Capabilities. I’ll go into more detail on that once Spritely gets closer to public usage, but to hugely oversimplify: with Object Capabilities, you can enforce who has access to your data that you send out. Seeing one of the co-authors of ActivityPub actively advocating for further development of new open protocols indicates to what extend the space of the open social web is still in active development.
BadgeFed is a platform for issues badges using the Open Badges standard and ActivityPub protocol, where the badges can later be verified cryptographically. There are some interesting parallels with how people are developing badges on ATProto, and it seems to me that both networks are now in the stage that there are solid proofs that you can build systems for credentials on decentralised protocols. The next stage is seeing how people will start using these new systems.
For developers: ActivityFuzz is an upcoming project from Darius Kazemi, and builds upon the Fediverse Schema Observatory. These tools give a much greater insight into how all the different fediverse projects have implemented ActivityPub in practice, and shows all the differences. This makes building fediverse platforms that are compatible with other platforms more accessible.
Gobo is a client that allows people to post to multiple different platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky. One of the challenges with cross-posting tools is that these platforms have different character limits, which Gobo has some nice ways of setting the cutoff-point for a longer text thats different for each platform.
Encyclia is a recently-announced project to make ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) records connected to the fediverse, with the demo providing a first view of what this looks like in practice.
The Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm takes your Mastodon timeline and uses various customisable algorithms to create custom clusterings for the post, allowing you to sort your timeline into various different topics.

The team implementing the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has posted a blog with a roadmap what they are working on. The team has plans to majorly expand the plugin, and make WordPress a full member of the fediverse. So far, the interaction has mainly focused on publishing to the fediverse, which will now be expanded to also be able to follow, read and interact with the rest of the fediverse directly via a WordPress account. The main feature will be a reader experience, which is effectively a timeline feed within WordPress. It places WordPress into even more direct competition with Ghost, who also offers a timeline reader as part of their ActivityPub integration.

The Social Web Foundation released a draft of their work to implement end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging over ActivityPub. Their plan uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS), a protocol for encrypting messages, that is designed to be used in combination with other protocols for sending the encrypted messages. One of the parts that is missing for ActivityPub is the ability to send real private messages to each other, and an integration with MLS can help with that. It might take a while before it gets there, this first version of the draft is now ready for proof-of-concept implementations and interoperability testing.

Bridgy Fed, the bridging software that connects ActivityPub with ATProto, has gotten an update where server admins can opt-in to the bridge for their entire server. For some context: Bridgy Fed was originally designed to be opt-out, meaning that every fediverse account could automatically be bridged to the Bluesky network and visa versa. After massive pushback from the fediverse community, this was changed to opt-in, where people have to actively take action to have their account be connected to the other network. The debate laid bare to what extend the fediverse struggled with being a decentralised network, where decentralised means that there are different communities with values that at times are incompatible with each other. Instead the debate got largely framed in terms of what the value (opt-in or opt-out) should be for the entire network. However, with this latest update individual communities can now be independently decide for themselves if they want to be connected to other protocols by default.The Links
Bonfire has added the ability to create a separate ‘Events’ feed for Mobilizon and Gancio events.
Canvas is a yearly fediverse event where people can paint on a shared canvas, one pixel at a time, for 48 hours. This year’s Canvas event will start on July 12th.
Mastodon has made some tweaks to smaller screen layouts on web.
Fediverse Support Line #2 – Migrating – FediHost Podcast.
Ghost talks about how they are making all replies show up.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-121/

ATmosphere Report – #120 WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing ...

2025-06-12T19:24:38Z

ATmosphere Report – #120

WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing digital badges and attestations, and more.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!The News

The Linux Foundation has announced FAIR, a package manager project for WordPress. It is “a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” To achieve this independent and federated repository of tools for the WordPress ecosystem, FAIR uses ATProto underneath. FAIR has build their own protocol, the FAIR protocol, on top of ATProto. It uses DID PLC as an identifier for the packages, and ATProto for indexing and discoverability. As the project has just launched and some of the final parts are still being ironed out there are no packages yet that use the FAIR system. As such I cannot give yet a good context for what discoverability of WordPress packages over ATProto actually looks like. The chaos of the last year around the management of WordPress shows a need for decentralised repository of packages and plugins, and FAIR does already show that ATProto can be much more than only a microblogging network.

Gnosco is a new tool for digital badges and attestations on ATProto. It acts as a secure middleman between the application that issues the badge and your PDS. This allows applications to create a signed record to award a badge of attestation for a user. This badge is then not yet placed into the user’s PDS, but instead held in escrow by Gnosco. Users can then log into Gnosco with their ATProto account and review the badges. If they approve, the signed badge then added to their own PDS.

Gnosco took me a while to wrap my head around what the tool is and what it does, but it tackles the following problem. Badges and awards and other attestations need to be accepted and signed by both the issuer and the receiver. But not for all attestations that are issued it is known in advance if the user actually wants to receive this attestation and store it on their PDS. So there needs to be a way for the user to accept or reject a badge or attestation that is issued. Gnosco provides this interface that is platform-neutral, where users can accept and reject any attestation or badge.

Photo-sharing platform Grain now has their own moderation system on their own infrastructure. Grain is building a social photo-sharing network on ATProto that is separate from Bluesky, using their own lexicon. One reason why image-sharing platforms so far tend to have been alternate Bluesky clients is that means that the client does not have to be responsible for moderation. For Grain, the goal is to build their own independent social network, and thus their own moderation system is mandatory as well. The Grain developer also released a stand-alone app to embed Grain galleries on your own website.

Blacksky is proposing to make a soft-fork of the Bluesky client for the Blacksky community. With their own forked app, Blacksky can set some default values that benefit their community, such as setting the default feed to the Blacksky Trending feed, and setting the Blacksky moderation as default moderation. The organisation is looking for 2500 USD in recurring monthly donations, and they are close to reaching that goal.

ATProto chatroom app Roomy has released the another alpha version. Besides offering public chatrooms, Roomy continues to experiment with features for collecting and aggregating chat messages into longer-lived places for text. In this update they included ‘boards’, where people can create simple markdown pages as well as collect ‘threads’ that are pulled out of the chat log. Roomy is on the bleeding edge of technology when it comes to using ATProto, by combining it with Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT). The Roomy blogs go into more detail on why they are building the architecture this way, but the current practical problem is that CRDTs are new enough that what Roomy needs is still in development.Tech updates and news
ATStudio is a new developer-focused tool that allows people to interact with ATProto. It allows you to “experiment with the protocol and debug code paths by making direct XRPC requests and executing @ATProtocol SDK methods using the integrated dashboard.”
Boost Blue is a new Bluesky client for Android and iOS, that has a few in-demand features that the main Bluesky client is missing, such as repost muting by user, drafts and bookmarks.
Bluesky’s latest update adds a ‘share’ button on every post, and an announced update to get notification on likes on reposts is pushed back to the next update which contains more notification filters.
An update by Skylight on how they are building their algorithm.
Work on the Deer client is paused for the summer.
Graze announced they are backing Party Starter with a 1k USD grant, a “toolkit for creating short-lived, location-aware events”. Not much else is known yet about Party Starter.
A “minor change to the PLC Directory service, with the aim of expanding compatibility with non-atproto apps and services”.
A tool to run raffles on Bluesky posts.
A new PDS browser with a retro interface.The Links
How to use Bluesky to grow your brand – a comprehensive guide for organisations on how they can use Bluesky.
Feel the ATmosphere: it’s 1995 all over again – a writeup of last month’s Ahoy! conference
Alumni Ventures is one of the companies who invested in Bluesky’s series A last October. They’ll be hosting a webinar next week on why they invested in Bluesky.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-120/

Fediverse Report – #120 Fediforum happened this week, porting ...

2025-06-11T17:58:20Z

Fediverse Report – #120

Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!FediForum and related announcements

The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week.

Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months.

Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session.

Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story.

Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.Shutdown of Lemmy and opportunity for PieFed

Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server.

The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.Platform updates

Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’.

Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May.

PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app.

Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.The Links
I Posted to Mastodon 1 Mile Away from an Internet Connection – Tom Casavant
Backfilling Conversations: Two Major Approaches – Julian Lam
The Power of a Niche – FediHost
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-120/

Bounce, and how the Open Social Web is continually changing ...

2025-06-09T18:37:02Z

Bounce, and how the Open Social Web is continually changing

Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay that has been not been published elsewhere yet. This is a republication of last week’s essay I send out, slightly modified and expanded. If you’re interested, subscribe below to get all the updates directly in your inbox every week!

When we talk about emerging technologies, especially social networks, we tend to seek clear definitions and boundaries. The question ‘what is the fediverse?’ quickly becomes ‘which platforms belong and which don’t?’ It indicates that definitions of terms like ‘Open Social Web’ and ‘fediverse’ are by their very nature contested. This theme, that the definition of what the open social web is continually contested, is of the core ideas behind a presentation I gave last week during FediForum. When the organisers asked me to host a session on ‘What’s New in the Open Social Web’ for newcomers to the space, I initially considered taking a straightforward approach, talking about software, and cool news apps people have been building. But I think that would have missed the trees for the forest. For people who want to get up to speed on what’s been happening in the space of the Open Social Web in the last half year or so, it seems much more helpful to understand how ideas about this space have evolved. The software and apps do not exist in a vacuum, but are built as a response to how people view the Open Social Web.

To understand the open social web, the fediverse, the ATmosphere and the entire cluster of loosely related open protocols, platforms and software, I think the best way is to see it as a set of contested ideas. The large majority of people who are involved in this “thing” of the open social web have some shared idea about that open protocols and open social networks are important. But once you zoom in a little bit more, it is easy to see that there are a wide set of diverging opinions on what the open social web is, what is included, and how it should work. Furthermore, these different opinions are not static, but change over time. A clear example of this is what I recently wrote about the concept of decentralisation, and how people’s viewpoints on this have shifted recently.

But the open social web is not just purely vibes and opinions, it is also shaped by technology and software. Technology sets the boundaries within opinions can be contested. Sometimes, technology comes along that changes what’s possible, and expands the understanding of what the open social web is. Bounce is a great example, of how a new technology changes and expands the contested boundaries of what the Open Social Web is

Bounce is a newly announced tool by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, which allows people to move accounts across different networks and protocols. With Bounce, people can move their social network graph from Bluesky to ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed. This represents a significant technological development that was not possible before, as Bluesky uses a different protocol. For more information on how Bounce works, check out A New Social’s blog post.

Bounce is one of those tools that is meaningful not only for the technical capabilities, but also for how it changes what people understand the space of the open social web to be. Up until now, the fediverse and the ATmosphere were two different places, only partially connected via Bridgy Fed. With the ability to transfer a social graph across different protocols, these two separate places move much closer together.

One interesting property of a tool like Bounce is that it the existence of the tool matters more than people actually using the tool. A major part of building healthier social platforms is the ability to have a “credible exit”. That means that people can leave the platform if they want to, and take the valuable parts (their social graph and their data) with them. Bounce expands the ability to have a credible exit from Bluesky. One challenge that Bluesky PBC faces is that they’ve build the AT Protocol to give their users a credible exit to other apps using the protocol, but these hypothetical other apps are slow to emerge. Now users do have the possibility for a credible exit to another protocol, where there are multiple other communities and platforms to choose from.

What makes this space of the open social web, the fediverse and the ATmosphere so interesting to me is how it is continually changing and evolving. And with the ability to move your social graph between protocols, how we can understand this space has changed yet again. This is why I framed my update on Whats New on the Open Social Web in terms of contested and evolving ideas. The most significant developments in this space are not always new software or apps, they are also shifts in how we think about what these networks are and how they operate. Bounce is an example of both: it presents a new technology, the ability to transfer a social graph across protocols, but it also changes how people understand the ATmosphere and fediverse to be two separate places. Choosing a platform is becoming less of a permanent choice, as the social graph you build becomes more portable. Tools like Bounce suggest the direction of the Open Social Web is less about specific protocols, and more about expanding user agency.

https://fediversereport.com/bounce-and-how-the-open-social-web-is-continually-changing/

ATmosphere Report – #118 Making custom feed building blocks ...

2025-05-29T17:59:39Z

ATmosphere Report – #118

Making custom feed building blocks with Surf, transfer your account to a new PDS in style with ATP Airport, and Bluesky expands their verification system.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!The News

ATP Airport is a new tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS, created by Spark developer Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg. Migrating to a different PDS was already possible, but required technical know-how. ATP Airport makes the process much more accessible, with an easy-to-use interface and striking design. What’s notable about the design of ATP Airport is that it takes a story-telling approach to explain and frame what is a fairly technically sophisticated operation. Moving a user’s repo with their social networking data from one server to another is an operation that has no clear equivalent in the current social networking landscape. This makes the process hard to explain to people: knowing what a repo transfer to a different PDS does, and why someone would want to do it, requires a significant amount of knowledge. ATP Airport is an interesting attempt to make this technical process more accessible, by using an analogy of airport transfers. Making the concepts of ATProto, and the new affordances that regular users now have access to will require a lot more education and explanation from a wide variety of actors. ATP Airport already refers to an upcoming new feature: the ability to set your own rotation keys for your PDS. This is another example of a complex technical feature, that requires technical know-how both in execution, as well as in understanding why a user would want to do such a thing. Storytelling and analogies to make features such as PDS transfers and PLC rotation keys legible are sorely needed, and ATP Airport is a cool way of making it more accessible.

Bluesky is expanding their verification system, and people can now apply to be verified. Bluesky says that “notable and authentic accounts can apply for verification”. The eligibility guidelines for notability are quite broad, and each account is considered on a per-case basis. Bluesky also expanded their list of Trusted Verifiers, adding another set of news organisations as Trusted Verifiers. Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee describes one of the design goals of the verification system as “a healthy digital society should distribute power!” So far, Bluesky has limited their distribution of power over who should be verified to only American news organisations. When the system launched last month, I wrote how the system of Trusted Verifiers simply moves the power further up the chain. The way that Bluesky PBC limits Trusted Verifiers to a single specific type of news organisations, shows the limited extent that power is distributed so far when it comes to verification.

I wrote the following about Surf this week’s fediverse newsletter, republished here as it is just as relevant for the ATProto community. Surf is a new app by Flipboard, that describes itself as a browser for the open social web. The app allows people to build and browse custom feeds, that take in content from across the open social web. It can combine Mastodon posts with Bluesky posts, as well as RSS and more, into a single feed. With their most recent update, Surf has created Starter Sets for building custom feeds. Starter Sets are organised around various popular themes, like News, Tech or Sports. Within these themes, people can choose from a large variety of data sources to get started with building their own custom feeds. These custom feed sources can be from across the open social web and are modular. This means that a list of Mastodon accounts can be combined with a Bluesky custom feed to create a new single custom feed that consists of both data source. These custom feeds can also be published to Bluesky, so people who are not using the Surf app can also view these feeds.

Surf also now offers a variety of tools to manage the content of a custom feed. For example, a feed can be customised to include or exclude reposts, replies or adult content. There are also options to filter out posts about politics from the feed. The ability to filter about posts about Elon Musk is surely a popular feature as well. Surf categorises all posts via algorithmic clustering, which gives the ability to limit posts in a feed to a certain topic. This means that you can add an account to a feed, but only their posts related to the specified topic will be displayed. The app is currently in closed beta, and Flipboard is gradually onboarding more people from the waiting list.In Other News

Graze, a tool to build and monetise custom feeds, recently started Graze Grants, where they fund 5 projects on ATProto with 1000 USD to grow the network. This week, Graze announced the first two recipients of these grants, SkyShrooms and Tomo. SkyShrooms is a mushroom-themed trading card and battle game built on ATProto. Tomo is an old-school guestbook that can be added to personal websites, powered by ATProto. Creator Ms Boba has regularly been live streaming her work on creating such a guest book as well.

ATProto video app Spark has shared some of the features they are working on. They include a video editor, duets, a sound library, live streaming and more. It is an ambitious set of features that Spark is working on. Spark is not a video client for Bluesky, comparable to Skylight, instead they use their own data format (lexicon). Using a different lexicon than Bluesky is a tradeoff; it requires the app to build more infrastructure themselves, be responsible for moderation, and lose some of the interoperability with people using the Bluesky app. However, the planned features shown by Spark here also show the value doing so, it allows Spark to build a set of features that would not be possible as a Bluesky video client.

Wormhole is a browser extension for ATProto that allows you to easily switch between apps while viewing the same data. If you have a post open in Bluesky, the extension allows you seamlessly to open that same post in a variety of other ATProto apps, from PDS browsers like atp.tools and PDSls to PLC log viewers like boat.kelinci and more.

UFOs is a new tool and API which provides data and insight on how all lexicons are used on the network. It is made by the creator of microcosm, which they describe as ‘building blocks for ATProto’. One of these other building blocks is constellation, which keeps track of all links on the entire ATProto network, and the network consists now of over 5 billion backlinks. Links in this context means any form of interaction that happens on the network, as any interaction consists of a backlink to another piece of data. UFOs is effectively a filter on all of these data, to show which data types (and thus, which applications) are being used on the network.

BlueArk is a tool to import Twitter/X posts into Bluesky with the original data. BlueArk tried to build a small business around the tool, as it was launched during the period in late 2024 where Bluesky saw a massive inflow of users. As this inflow has slowed down significantly, BlueArk says they are entering maintenance-only mode, as they cannot cover cost anymore. The service will remain available for the time being.

A Working Group for a Commons European Moderation Relay has started, with the goal of figuring out how to build DSA-compliant moderation infrastructure. One major challenge for people and organisations that are currently considering is figuring out what compliance with European regulation like the DSA looks like. There is uncertainty both from a legal perspective (for example, how does the DSA apply to an infrastructure part like a common open relay) as well as technical practicalities (what is the best way to handle takedown requests for independent PDS hosting providers).

Bluesky in the media:
A podcast interview with Bluesky’s head of Trust & Safety Aaron Rodericks, in which Rodericks talks more about how to make decisions during phases of rapid growth with limited resources.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber spoke at the Web Summit conference, VOD here.Tech and tools
Skyswipe is a new video client for Bluesky, that gives a TikTok-like interface. The app is available for beta testing on iOS Testflight. The developer says that there are no current plans for an Android version.
A demo implementation of creating group chats on Bluesky chats. It works by creating a bot account that forwards the messages between all the different participants of the group chat.
The PDS implementation in Rust by the Blacksky team now has full admin capabilities, similar to the Bluesky implementation.
A new tool for ‘like’ statistics, and see which accounts have ‘liked’ the most of your posts, and which accounts have you ‘liked’ the most.
A new tool to handle PDS admin via a web interface.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-118/

Fediverse Report – #118 The Surf app goes even deeper on ...

2025-05-27T16:05:39Z

Fediverse Report – #118

The Surf app goes even deeper on building custom feeds for the fediverse and Bluesky, , a crowdfunding campaign for the PeerTube mobile app, and updates to the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!The News

Surf is a new app by Flipboard, that describes itself as a browser for the open social web. The app allows people to build and browse custom feeds, that take in content from across the open social web. It can combine Mastodon posts with Bluesky posts, as well as RSS and more, into a single feed. With their most recent update, Surf has created Starter Sets for building custom feeds. Starter Sets are organised around various popular themes, like News, Tech or Sports. Within these themes, people can choose from a large variety of data sources to get started with building their own custom feeds. These custom feed sources can be from across the open social web and are modular. This means that a list of Mastodon accounts can be combined with a Bluesky custom feed to create a new single custom feed that consists of both data source. These custom feeds can also be published to Bluesky, so people who are not using the Surf app can also view these feeds.

Surf also now offers a variety of tools to manage the content of a custom feed. For example, a feed can be customised to include or exclude reposts, replies or adult content. There are also options to filter out posts about politics from the feed. The ability to filter about posts about Elon Musk is surely a popular feature as well. Surf categorises all posts via algorithmic clustering, which gives the ability to limit posts in a feed to a certain topic. This means that you can add an account to a feed, but only their posts related to the specified topic will be displayed. The app is currently in closed beta, and Flipboard is gradually onboarding more people from the waiting list.

PeerTube is starting a crowdfunding campaign for its mobile app. The first version of the PeerTube app was officially launched earlier this month. PeerTube is developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit organisation that builds a variety of open source software tools. The crowdfunding campaign is a way to raise money for the organisation, and also provides a way “to gauge public enthusiasm for the mobile application and the PeerTube project in general”. Some of the features that PeerTube wants to work on for its app are the ability to play videos in background, casting videos to TVs, managing channels and accounts directly from the app. Livestreaming from mobile is also being worked on, although Framasoft says they do not expect to release this in 2025. Framasoft says that these features will be worked on regardless of whether the fundraising goals are met, and that otherwise money from the generic Framasoft budget will be used, as a way to show their dedication towards PeerTube.

Mastodon has announced some upcoming new features that help server admins with the legal side. Server admins will be able to set a Terms of Service (ToS), besides server rules and a privacy policy. Server admins will also be able to set the server rules into multiple different languages. There will also be the option to set a minimum age requirement for sign-up for servers. Having a ToS is standard fare for any online platform, and multiple countries require by law that platforms have these. Europe’s DSA is fairly explicit about this, which states: “Providers of intermediary services shall include information on any restrictions that they impose in relation to the use of their service in respect of information provided by the recipients of the service, in their terms and conditions.” In that context, it is high time that Mastodon has added the ability for servers to set a ToS. Mastodon also says that they will provide a template for a ToS that other servers can use if they so desire.

A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, has launched a dedicated page for people to manage their account bridging. Bridgy Fed is a piece of software that allows people to ‘bridge’ their account across multiple protocols. This allows people on the fediverse to interact with people on Bluesky (using AT Protocol). For this, people need to manually opt-in their accounts to be bridged to other networks (largely due to cultural reasons from the fediverse communities). Up until now, doing so was a fairly confusing process that involved manually following other accounts. With the new update, people can log in to Bridgy Fed with the account they want to bridge, and simply turn it on or off. It also has an easier option to update the handles for Mastodon accounts that are bridged to Bluesky. For example, by default my Mastodon account on Bluesky can be found at @laurenshof.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy, which is a fairly cumbersome handle, to put it mildly. At the settings page I can now change it to any handle I want, similar to how any Bluesky account can change their handle. A New Social is also launching a Patreon as they are working towards financial sustainability, with plans to launch merch soon as well.

Ibis is a federated wiki platform that is currently in development, made by nutomic, one of the Lemmy creators. With the most recent update, Ibis wiki articles are now compatible with Lemmy, and can be viewed directly from Lemmy. One of the driving reasons for making Ibis is that nutomic views Wikipedia as untrustworthy. He also says that other centralised Wikipedia alternatives have failed to gain traction, and sees federation as a solution for this. For now, Ibis has the same problem of getting traction.

Tvmarks is a new self-hosted platform to keep track of shows you’ve watched. It gives you a clean overview of shows you are watching, which ones you’ve completed, and provide reviews and ratings per episode. This information can be federated via ActivityPub, allowing others to see what you’ve been watching.The Links
WriteFreely creator Matt Baer shares some of his thoughts and plans for the write.as platform for 2025.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Upcoming photo sharing platform Vernissage gives an update on the work and design considerations for the last month.
A thread on how the name ‘ActivityPub’ came to be.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-118/

Fediverse Report – #117 Keynote speakers for FediForum ...

2025-05-20T16:27:14Z

Fediverse Report – #117

Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.The News

PieFed, a link aggregator platform for the fediverse, has made some interesting updates recently. It is one of the first (if not the first) platform to add support for Passkeys to the platform. It has also added flair (community-specific tags) to posts, that are federated as well. PieFed has also made a image hashing service available that can be used by any fediverse platform. This service generates a unique fingerprint of every image, and that fingerprint can be used to identity other posts that use the same or fairly similar images. This can be used for content moderation, PieFed has a demo video available on PeerTube showcasing how it can find and take down multiple posts that all contain a similar image.

FediForum has announced three keynote speakers and published a tentative agenda. On Thursday, June 5, Ian Forrester will give the opening keynote. Forrester has been a driving factor for the BBC R&D department to get the broadcaster to experiment with a Mastodon server. Later on Thursday, Cory Doctorow will give a keynote. On Friday June 6, Christine Lemmer-Webber will give the opening keynote. On Thursday, I will be hosting a session on Whats New at the Open Social Web, where I’ll be going over all the news and events that have happened since 2025.

The branch of fediverse software that consists of Friendica, Hubzilla and more, is now 15 years old. The main developer Mike Macgirvin lists the large number of features that the platforms have, including groups, nomadic identity, comment controls, and much more. When it comes to the large variety of features, no fediverse platform comes anywhere close to what this branch of platforms offer. The software platforms have managed to create their own small self-sustaining communities. While a number of the software platforms such as Streams do not publish any statistics, extrapolating data from what some servers running Hubzilla and Friendica publish, together I would estimate the active accounts to be less than 10k MAU. Still, these communities have managed to find long-term sustainability, exisiting over 15 years in various forms is no mean feat. As Macgirvin says: ‘if you think that this “alternative fediverse” is going away any time soon, you must be new here.’The Links
Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser – Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast
My Dream Fediverse Platform – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
Ben Werdmuller has been writing a four-part series on strategies for the open social web, with articles on product strategies for Mastodon, Bluesky, starting fresh, and now his most recent article on various funding strategies for the open social web.
A detailed overview of how federation between Lemmy and Mastodon works in practice. It is a good indication that using the same protocol does not automatically guarantee good interoperability. Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look like.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Ghost’s weekly update on their fediverse integration, mentioning that ActivityPub is now also available at another vendor who offers Ghost hosting.
Flipboard is federating another 124 accounts, this time from international publishers. Flipboard now federates over 1200 accounts of publishers.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-117/

Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework Programming note: ...

2025-05-19T16:34:04Z

Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework

Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay that has been not been published elsewhere yet. This is a republication of last week’s essay I send out. If you’re interested, subscribe below to get all the updates directly in your inbox every week!

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

A network like the fediverse has an architecture that is easy to recognise as being decentralised: there are multiple independent servers that are all talking to each other, without one central entity. But there are other ways to create social networks that are decentralised, using a different architecture. Nostr is a good example of a decentralised social network that operates in a significantly different way, while also being clearly decentralised.

For the fediverse community, the mental model of decentralised networks such as the fediverse itself, but also email, became more dominant. There was less space to consider other ways to design a social network that is also decentralised. The size difference between the fediverse and the much smaller Nostr network made other alternatives easy to brush aside. But the growth of Bluesky and the ATmosphere network changed this dynamic.

The goal of Bluesky and ATProto is to create a decentralised social network, but with different characteristics and goals than the fediverse and ActivityPub have. For people on the fediverse, decentralisation became the main way how they analysed this competing network. As Bluesky is by far the largest app on the ATProto network, by multiple orders of magnitude, Bluesky not actually being decentralised became a common criticism. I made a similar argument in fall 2024, about how Bluesky has not meaningfully distributed power due to how clustered the people are around a single app. However, that is something different than the technological network architecture being (de)centralised. These criticisms became intertwined with each other, especially from the fediverse side.

In recent weeks, people have made some significant progress in using Bluesky (in technical terms: engaging with posts with Bluesky’s lexicon) with infrastructure that is entirely independent from the Bluesky company. This demonstrates the network being decentralised in a meaningful way. But as the term ‘decentralisation’ has become so intertwined with other meanings, both regarding other network architecture as well as the spread of the user base, that conversations around these developments became hopelessly confusing. The achievement of using Bluesky without using infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC became solely analysed through the frame of “is the network decentralised”.

In all this discourse, it has become lost that decentralisation is a description of a network topology, and not an intrinsic Good. People do not actually care about decentralisation itself. Decentralisation is valuable because it enables other properties, such as network resilience, and are more resistant to capture by oligarchs.

Within the ATProto developer community, the discourse that essentialised decentralisation led to a counter reaction, where decentralisation is not seen as a useful term anymore. Instead, other descriptors should be used, to consider specific features that the network enables. While the community seems largely in agreement that decentralisation has lost a lot of its usefulness as a way to analyse the network, there is less consensus on what other factors the network should be judged on.

As an observer of both networks this makes the current situation particularly interesting. One developer community seems to come to an agreement that one mental framework has lost some of its use, while the other developer community has not done so. Furthermore, it is not clear yet what framework should take its place instead. Is it a framework of analysing a network by its possible failure modes, or something else entirely?

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/decentralisation-as-a-shifting-mental-framework/

ATmosphere Report – #116 Resilient relays, a web interface to ...

2025-05-15T19:40:59Z

ATmosphere Report – #116

Resilient relays, a web interface to manage your ATProto account directly on your PDS, and a new upcoming ATProto platform with Speakeasy.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!Relays, Free Our Feeds and IndieSky

Free Our Feeds, the campaign to build independent infrastructure for ATProto, has provided IndieSky with 50k USD funding. IndieSky is a working group that arose from within the ATProto developer community, at the Seattle ATmosphereConf and Hamburg’s Ahoy! conferences.

As phil, an independent ATProto developer who runs three separate relays, points out, there is little value in using an alternative relay. They are commoditised by design, and the important part of relays is that they are it is easy for apps to switch to another relay if the relay that is used by Bluesky PBC becomes unreliable. With relay costs now solidly under 50USD/month (as acknowledged by Free Our Feeds), people speed-running the setup in minutes, and multiple other independent relays that have popped up in recent weeks the relay part of the ATProto network is at this point resilient. Free Our Feeds switching their focus away from relays makes sense in that context.

That does not mean however that all parts of ATProto are as resilient as relays are, nor that other parts will be able to scale down to such low costs as relays can. AppViews and moderation remain costly in a way that scales with the amount of users. Relays have gotten an overly large amount of attention due to various cultural and historical reason. Relays are smartly designed part of the system, and it is impressive that passing through the network traffic of tens of millions of accounts can be done for such little amount of money. But not all parts of the network will scale that way.

Free Our Feeds goes into the question of why they want to raise 30M USD, saying: “We are supporting the development of fully independent infrastructure that enables the development and running of social apps that can serve tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. […] We think this is a fraction of the money that will be needed to remake the social web from where it is today – with the dominance of Big Tech – to a future where billions of internet users control their online lives. We need many more initiatives – public, non-profit and private to make this happen.”

Taken all the news together, of Free Our Feeds taking a broader approach to support independent infrastructure, a multiple independent public relays being available, and people collaboration on independent infrastructure with the IndieSky working group, makes it feel the network is getting to a new phase in the road towards full independence. Over the last year the conversation around network decentralisation has been overly dominated by relays, more than it fully deserved. Now that the relay part of the network can now be seen as sufficiently resilient, more focus can be put on other, more challenging, parts of the network.

The next meeting of the IndieSky working group will be on May 22nd, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 1800 CEST.In Other News

Bluesky has updated their PDS reference implementation, and it now has a web interface to manage and create accounts directly on the PDS themselves. ATProto apps that use the OAuth for login did not have a way to get new users to create an account yet. The work-around up until now was to refer people to the Bluesky app to login. This is not a great user experience, and also gives Bluesky PBC an outsized role in the ecosystem. With the latest update, apps can now create accounts directly on a PDS, even a PDS owned by Bluesky PBC if so desired. The web interface (for accounts on a Bluesky PDS, accessible at https://bsky.social/account/), gives people some basic account management options, such as the ability to sign out of specific devices or revoke access of connected apps. For this web interface Bluesky PBC expects more features to be implemented here in the future. These features are related to account management that are not tied to a specific app, such as email updates and password changes. Bluesky PBC is encouraging other PDS implementations to innovate and differentiate with new features as well, speculating that PDS hosting could be bundled with other hosted networking services.

Speakeasy is an upcoming social media platform build on ATProto, and is compatible with Bluesky. An early version of Speakeasy can already be accessed, and it is a fork of the Bluesky web client. Speakeasy is building private posts as a distinguishing feature. Founder Chris Jensen says that private messages are stored outside of the network for now, and that he believes that private posts are an urgent needed feature for the network. Jensen also says that once Bluesky PBC has an official implementation for private data, they will merge their implementation.

Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines has created a local developer environment for ATProto. It gives developers the option to run a local PDS and PLC that can resolve DNS handles. Gerakines describes it as a “turnkey dev stack with full ATProtocol flows, HTTPS everywhere, and DNS-backed handle resolution—without needing to expose anything publicly.”

Flashes, a client app for Bluesky that focuses on images, has received funding from Skyseed. The funding will be used to build an Android version, as well as further infrastructure in Europe to make the app more independent from Bluesky PBC. Creator Sebastian Vogelsang says that they have begone designing a mobile PDS.

Two independent ATProto developers are taking a stab at guestbooks: Ms Boba has been livestreaming her development of a guestbook on ATProto that can be embedded on websites. Dame has an approach of creating welcome messages for people who view their PDS on a PDS viewing tool like PDSls or atp.tools. Software updates
Event planning app Smoke Signal is now open sourced, and available on Tangled.
Tangled has added OAuth support.
Various updates to the Streamplace interface and new documentation.
ATProto Audio room platform Bluecast now has a public mode for live streams, so that audio streams can be listened to without logging in.
One of the challenges for ATProto app developers is that users are regularly asked to log back into their client. Graze recently released a tool that helps with this, in collaboration with Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines. Skylight is now implementing this tool to prevent this pain point.
UX and search updates for Spark.
A short update by Northsky on their current state of development.Tech Links
Demesme is an app that is currently in development by Bluesky engineer Samuel Newman to store your account keys on your phone.
Authr is an ATProto OAuth server that’s currently in development, with a demo available here.
ATSyntaxTools is “a lightweight Swift library for handling validations for various identifiers within the AT Protocol.”
A MCP server for ATProto docs.
A template for deploying a PDS on Railway.
A web app to search all the posts on Bluesky that you’ve liked.
Creating a paper key for a PLC rotation key.Further reading
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee held a talk about Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech at the The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which can be viewed here.
A three-part article series exploring how ATProto can be combined with local-first software (1, 2, 3)
Block Party now has support for Bluesky. Block Party became well-known as a tool for Twitter that offers advanced safety tools. With changes to Twitter’s API, Block Party became a “browser extension that helps users update their privacy and security settings and clean up their content across 12+ platforms, including Bluesky.”
Notes on migrating a Bluesky account.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-116/

Taking control of your timeline – in different ways One of the ...

2025-05-14T19:01:47Z

Taking control of your timeline – in different ways

One of the main ways that decentralised social networking platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon use to advertise themselves is that they gives people control over their timelines. Bluesky’s website highlights this as its primary feature, saying “Your timeline, your choice – Stay focused on your friend group, keep up-to-date on the latest news, or explore with an algorithm that learns what you like. On Bluesky, there’s a feed for that.” Mastodon takes a similar approach, and puts it front and center on the joinmastodon.org website, saying “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see.” Both platforms share a common critique, namely that Big Tech’s control over algorithmic feeds results in systemic problems, and both see a solution in giving people control over their feeds.

But examining the different approaches taken by platforms in the fediverse and ATmosphere1 shows that both networks take quite different approaches. Moreover, these approaches seem compatible with each other, and it’s been surprising to me that no platform has really tried to unify these yet.How Bluesky gives you choice

Bluesky is focused on giving people choice. Instead of one ‘For You’ feed with an opaque algorithm that Big Tech platforms have, Bluesky offers the users to subscribe to any number of feeds. New users start with a simple following feed, as well as an algorithmic feed, the Discover feed. AT Protocol (ATProto) allows people to create any type of feed, that others can subscribe to. Other tools and businesses have popped up to take advantage of this, such as Graze and Skyfeed. These tools give people the option to build their own custom feeds.

ATProto can be understood as one massive pool of data, that is publicly accessible to everyone. Users control their data, but it’s visible to any app. Every application build on top of ATProto takes a portion of that data, restructures it and presents it to the user via a client. A custom feed is effectively a application that is build on ATProto. It takes a small portion of the data of the entire network, and presents it to the user. For example, the News Feed is a custom feed made by an independent developer, which shows articles posted made by news organisations. It functions by taking only the Bluesky posts made by news organisations from the giant data pool that is the ATmosphere network, and orders the post in chronological order, and presents that to the user. Another example is the Moss Feed, which looks for all the Bluesky posts that contain pictures of moss in the entire network, and show those moss pictures to people who subscribe to the feed..

This gives us an answer as to what Bluesky means when the company says “your timeline, your choice”. The choice is that people can choose which part the entire network they want to see. They can choose to see the posts from the accounts they follow, they can choose to see posts from news organisations. The choice is in the data, and people express that choice by using a custom feed.Fediverse platforms and choice

Fediverse platforms take a different approach to user choice over their timeline. Mastodon2 gives a user three feeds, the home timeline, which is the feed of what you follow, and by far the most important feed in Mastodon. (Mastodon also a few other feeds, which are significantly deprioritised.3) Where Bluesky wants to give people control by letting them pick any subset of the entire data of the network to see, Mastodon wants users to only see the content you opted in by following. This is the user choice that Mastodon advertises with on their site, where they say that “your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most”, meaning posts from accounts you follow.

Mastodon has a fairly strict idea of what content should be shown in your Home timeline: only content you follow. This is often the accounts you follow, but can also be hashtags. Nor does it have to be microblogging posts: Mastodon will happily show you content from other types of software, from WordPress articles to PeerTube videos to podcast episodes to RSS. As long as you can follow it via ActivityPub, it shows up in your Home timeline. It does not even have to abide by Mastodon’s own restrictions: a Mastodon post is limited to 500 characters by default, but other servers can set different limits. A Mastodon server with a 500 character limit will still show posts with a much higher character limit. The only restriction is that it has to be content you followed, or got boosted by an account you follow.

Mastodon also has a stronger focus on control over the content in your Home timeline. As the Home timeline is so important, there are many ways for users to take granular control over what they see. You can mute accounts you follow for a time period (helpful if someone is live blogging an event you are not interested in), turn off boosts from specific accounts if they have a tendency to boost too many posts, and a variety of other features.

Other fediverse software takes this a step further: Phanpy is a client for Mastodon, with a unique Catch-Up feature. This takes all the posts from your Home timeline from the last few hours, and gives you the option to display them in any way you want. You can group the posts by Author, sort them chronologically or reverse-chronologically, only display boosted posts sorted by boosts, and much more. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform which shares quite some of the design features with Mastodon. It also has a strong focus on a Home timeline with content you follow, but with even more features to give users control over how the content on that Home timeline is displayed. The screenshot below displays the wide variety of options that people have to change how their Home timeline is displayed.

The wide variety of options that Bonfire gives represent the ideal vision of fediverse platforms on what user choice for your timeline looks like: the content you follow, with all the tools you need to organise that content.Two approaches to a similar problem

Comparing these two networks, I find it interesting to see that their approaches to control over your feeds are quite different. Bluesky’s approach is great for discoverability. There is a lot of posts on the network that I’m interested in seeing that are made by accounts that I don’t follow. Custom feeds are absolutely great for that. Mastodon is great for giving me control over how I see the content I already decided to follow. There are a great many ways to shape and fine-tune my home feed exactly the way I want, and deal with annoyances as they pop up. Tools like Phanpy’s CatchUp give an unparalleled amount of control that no other platform even come close to.

People have been looking for alternatives to how Big Tech platforms handle their algorithmic feeds. Bluesky’s answer is to give people a maximum amount of control over which data they want to see, with fairly limited ways to control how that data is then displayed. Various fediverse platforms take a different approach: the only data you see is what you have deliberately selected for, with a maximum amount of control on how that data is displayed. That both networks have taken a different approach and focus on how to build better timeline, is a reflection on the belief systems of the people building these new social networks. Bluesky is focused on open and public data, and the custom feeds allow anyone to access that data. Mastodon sees the problem as that corporations control what you see, and as such only shows content that you have deliberately opted in to see.

What’s interesting to me is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is totally possible to build a system that provides both: The discoverability of custom feeds, with the customisability of Bonfire’s filtering system. It’s what I’m looking for, at least.

Every week, I publish two reports about everything that is happening in the fediverse and in the ATmosphere. You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:The network that consists of platforms that use ATProtocol. Bluesky is by far the biggest platform on this network. ↩︎Other fediverse microblogging platforms like Misskey or Pleroma operate the same. ↩︎Mastodon also has a local timeline, which shows all posts that are made on your server, and the federated timeline, shows posts from all accounts that everyone on your server follows. This does not scale particularly well: on Mastodon’s flagship server mastodon.social the local timeline and federated timeline update every second with a dozen new posts, making it literally impossible to read the timelines. There is also a Trending feed, which shows popular posts from across the network. ↩︎

#bluesky #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/taking-control-of-your-timeline-in-different-ways/

Fediverse Report – #116 FediForum will be next month, Discourse ...

2025-05-13T16:37:52Z

Fediverse Report – #116

FediForum will be next month, Discourse talks about their fediverse integration, and an update on Bonfire.The News

FediForum has a new date and a new board

The fifth edition of FediForum has been rescheduled, and will be held on June 5-7. The event was originally planned for early April, but got cancelled at the last-minute after transphobic posts by one of the co-organisers of the event were surfaced. FediForum held two sessions in the meantime with the community on how the event should move forward. One of the outcomes is that there is now an advisory board for FediForum with people from the community. For this edition of FediForum, I will be hosting a session on what’s been going on in the fediverse in 2025. The network is constantly changing and evolving, and this session is intended to get you up to speed on what’s been happening in the last half year. More information on that soon.

Discourse and the fediverse

Forum software Discourse has posted a blog talking about how they have integrated ActivityPub into their forums. They explain how Discourse forums can now select per category if it is federated, and thus followable by other fediverse software. It also shows what Discourse-to-Discourse federation looks like, allowing 2 forums to cooperate with each other. Federated forums require a mindset shift as have to get used to seeing forum posts in their microblogging timelines. Forum software like Discourse and NodeBB have made great strides in the technological capabilities regarding what’s possible with federated forums. Now people have to find out and experience what these technological features enable in practical use cases for people.

Bonfire slowly moves towards a 1.0 release

Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform, with a core functionality of microblogging with a focus on extensibility. In their latest update about how the platform is moving to a 1.0 release, Bonfire talks about the values and intentions of the platform, writing: “In a world of ‘move fast and break things,’ we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.”

Bonfire has taken a deliberate and mindful approach to software development, but their own description of “Slow Software” seems fairly accurate as well, as the team has talked about getting ready for a 1.0 release in the next few months since at least September 2023.

FediDB onboarding

Fediverse statistics site FediDB, operated by PixelFed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, now has an onboarding tool to help people get started with the fediverse. It asks the user a few simple questions: first to select the type of content they are interested in, such as microblogging, video or forums. Based on that choice, it recommends various platforms. Based on the platform choice it asks for a few simple filters, such as region and community size, before presenting the user with a list of servers to choose from for registration.

The onboarding tool is sleekly designed, and streamlines the signup process by boiling it down to a few essential questions that the user needs to answer. However, this also showcases the issues that the fediverse has with onboarding new users: picking a platform and picking a server are meaningful choices that are hard to fully grasp the impact from as a new user. When it comes to picking a platform, the tool lists a few features for each platform, but comparing the relevance of these features is hard to do as an outsider. And when it comes to picking servers, the challenge is that servers themselves often do not publish relevant information that is needed to make an informed choice of which server to pick.

Mastodon: Giving Journalists Options Away From Big Tech

Saskia Welch from Newsmast writes about Mastodon and the fediverse at the recent International Journalism Festival. A consistent challenge remains to put all the lofty ideals about healthy social networks into practice, with Welch noting: “However, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use.” – WeDistribute/Saskia Welch

Owncast turns 5

The fediverse streaming platform Owncast turns 5 years this month, with a new merch store. One of the challenges of FOSS projects such as Owncast is the sustainability, and Owncast creator Gabe Kangas “at one point exhausted his personal savings so he could work on Owncast full-time.” Kangas says that now “people want to be around in meaningful ways. From the newsletter, core code contributions, the Roku app, people answering questions in chat, people brainstorming in GitHub, it’s important for it to be bigger than myself”. – Owncast Newsletter/Kit Rhett Aultman

Bandwagon talks about monetisation and sustainability

Bandwagon is a fediverse music sharing platform that’s currently in development, where artists can share their music. They are currently working on online album sales, and Bandwagon is committed to making this feature available without taking any transaction fees. In order for the project to be sustainable, Bandwagon is a paid 10$/month paid premium plan which will enable online album sales and higher bitrate streaming. At the same time, creator Ben Pate is also committed to keeping the software open source, and says that the project needs other Bandwagon servers to exist if the project is to be successful. – Bandwagon.fmThe Links
Test your knowledge of ActivityPub with this quiz.
Search engine Kagi now has the option to find and filter for PeerTube videos.
Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks & Tidbits for April 2025, where the organisation announces that they’ve hired another front-end developer.
Lemmy development update for April 2025.
Domain blocking and notification improvements for Ghost.
FediAlgo, a self-hosted algorithmic timeline for Mastodon, is now available as a web app as well.
Flohmarkt is a fediverse market place, and Flohra is a new Android app for the platform.
The Social Web Foundation released their first annual report.
An interview with Christine Lemmer-Webber about the future of decentralised networks.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-116/

Bluesky Report – #115 Independent ATProto infrastructure has ...

2025-05-08T20:03:05Z

Bluesky Report – #115

Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!Independent Infrastructure news

Over the last week, the effort towards decentralisation and running independent pieces of ATProto infrastructure has sped up significantly. There are now multiple relays that are publicly accessible. Other people also have made alternate AppViews that are Bluesky-compatible. Combined, this makes it now possible to fully use Bluesky without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC, and the first people have done so. To do so means using a separate PDS, relay, AppView and client.

Some of the updates regarding relays:
Blacksky has built their own relay, using their own custom implementation. This relay is publicly accessible, meaning that other people can use this relay instead of the relay that Bluesky PBC uses.
A writeup on how to set up your own relay by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold, for some 34 USD/month.
Making relays cheaper has been due to the Sync 1.1 update, Bluesky PBC goes into more detail in a blog post what this entails.

And the updates regarding clients and AppViews:
Two clients now support the ability for users to set their own AppView, Deer and TOKIMEKI.
AppViewLite is another AppView for Bluesky that has been around for a while, that focuses on being cheap to run. It also heavily optimises for network data storage, with creator Alnkq running AppViewLite that contains full network data on a cheap 10 year old machine. So far, AppViewLite only worked with a custom frontend. An update this week now make it possible to use AppViewLite in combination with other clients.

Some further thoughts:
The way ATProto works, is that it takes the software that runs a social network and splits it up into separate components, with each of those components being able to be run independently. This has made self-hosting any component possible since the beginning of the network opening up. But to tak advantage of this, and get to a state of full independence, it means running multiple pieces of software. This has created a bit of a catch-22 in the ecosystem: you could run your own relay, but without another independent AppView to take advantage of this, it is not super useful. You could run your own (focused on the Bluesky lexicon) AppView, but without a client that allows you to set your own AppView it is not particularly useful either. What happened now in the last weeks is that all these individual pieces are starting to come together. With Deer allowing you to set your own custom AppView, there is now a use to actually run your own AppView. Which in turn also gives more purpose to running your own relay.
For building features in a Bluesky client that Bluesky itself does not have, a different AppView is needed. Now that these are starting to become available, there is new space to experiment with clients that have features that Bluesky does not have. Deer has already started going in this direction by allowing people to set any account as a trusted verifier, for example.
There has been skepticism around Bluesky PBC’s claims regarding decentralisation, especially from people within the ActivityPub community. Part of this distrust has come from people applying a mental framework of how ActivityPub works to how ATProto works. In this framework, Bluesky being decentralised would mean that there are other software platforms that are interoperable with the Bluesky lexicon. I’ll be writing more about those different mental frameworks, and how that relates to decentralisation later. But for now these developments strengthen the claims of Bluesky PBC around decentralisation and building a network that is ‘billionaire-proof’.In Other News

at://2048 is the game of 2048, integrated with ATProto. 2048 is a sliding tile puzzle game where players combine numbered tiles to reach the 2048 tile, that has gotten popularity years ago and has been reimplemented a number of times. What makes the at://2048 version stand out is that the scores of the game are stored on your ATProto PDS. This creates new features and challenges: it gives the game a more social element, with features like leaderboards. It also creates a new challenge, of how to verify that a score on someone’s PDS is actually legit. at://2048 is experimenting with verified badges to authenticate if a score is legit. Integrating games with ATProto is one of the areas that is under-explored, and this reimplementation of 2048 is worth watching to get a sense of how the integration of games with ATProto will further develop.

Bluesky differs from other social networks in one significant way, namely that users blocking each other is public information. This creates new dynamics, from people being able to see who have blocked them, to leaderboards of the most blocked accounts on the network. A new paper, ‘Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding blocking behavior on Bluesky‘, takes advantages of data on blocks being public to study user behaviour. Some of their findings: “users who receive a high number of blocks exhibit distinctive behavioral traits that set them apart from the general user population. These patterns are not necessarily linked to toxicity or misinformation, indicating that block-worthy behavior is more nuanced and complex than traditional moderation markers might suggest. Second, these distinctive traits can be effectively encoded and leveraged by machine learning models, suggesting the feasibility of early-warning or flagging systems able to assist moderation teams by surfacing potentially problematic users even before issues escalate.”

Custom feed builder Graze is giving out 5 grants of 1k USD for other projects in the ATProto ecosystem. Explaining why the startup is giving out grants, Graze says: “First, we want to help accelerate growth in the ATProto / Bluesky ecosystem. Projects that help *others* are vital. Second, we want to empower communities to sustain themselves. Third, we want to help give people & orgs direct access to their audiences. Broadly, those are *our* goals as an org.”Bluesky in the media
Time Magazine talks with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and COO Rose Wang after they both got recognised as rising leaders in the Asian Pacific Community by Gold House. On monetisation, Graber says “she’s considering subscription models or monetizing Bluesky’s marketplaces of custom tools, but no concrete plans have been set in motion.”
Wired published an article on how digital archivists are racing to save Black History while the Trump administration is trying to erase it. Wired talks with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser, who describes “Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years”.
How the San Francisco Standard uses Graze to hone their social media strategy – GrazeATProto tech news
The two developers behind Git collaboration platform Tangled, the brothers Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, gave an interview on the devtools.fm podcast about Tangled. The platform also got various feature updates this week, and customisable profiles.
Graze has made their ATProto authentication tool open-source and available for everyone to use. The ‘ATmosphere Authentication, Identity, and Permission Proxy‘ allows developers to easily add ATProto authentication to their software as a separate micro-service.
WhiteBreeze is a self-hostable frontend for WhiteWind, allowing people to build their own blog on ATProto.
ATProto Migrator is a tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS. It does so via a web application, without people having to touch the Command Line Interface (CLI). This makes account migration more accessible, as other tools until now (such as goat by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold) require people to use the CLI.
Flashes is a Bluesky client focused on images, and they are experimenting with some new ways to deal with the limitations that come from using Bluesky’s data. A Bluesky post can contain a maximum of 4 images and 300 characters. Flashes has upgraded that limit to 900 characters and 12 images. It works by actually creating 3 separate Bluesky posts in a thread, and displaying this as a single post in the Flashes app.
A guide on Publishing ATProto Lexicons.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-115/

Fediverse Report – #115 PeerTube has a new update for their ...

2025-05-06T17:11:50Z

Fediverse Report – #115

PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more.The News
PeerTube has officially launched their apps as a v1, some four months after the apps became available in beta. Some new features include the ability to log in with an existing PeerTube account (up until now you’d log in with a local account that only existed in the app itself), commenting from the app, and playlist and channel management options.
Mastodon announced some updates on how their team is evolving. The organisation is currently in the process of setting up a Foundation in Europe. Mastodon is also growing their team, and the organisation now consists of 15 employees. Mastodon’s news update is a followup on their announcement from January 2025, in which Mastodon said that current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down. A new CEO has not been announced yet by Mastodon. In the previous update, Mastodon also said that they would need a €5 million annual operating budget. There are some new team members related to fundraising, but Mastodon has not made a clear statement yet on how exactly they will raise the money needed for this budget.
Evan Prodromou of the Social Web Foundation has published a first version of places.pub. It is a service that “makes OpenStreetMap geographical data available as ActivityPub objects.” The goal is for other fediverse software to integrate with places.pub to have a standardised way to refer to geospatial objects via ActivityPub.
A follow-up on last week’s news regarding the Fosstodon server: the server administration will be taken over, with an update and introduction by the new admin here. The Links
A recommendation algorithm for PeerTube videos. It is a browser extension that records your PeerTube viewing history, and uses that to generate recommendations to watch.
PieFed development updates for April.
The fediverse statistics site FediDB is getting an update, and can now be self-hosted as well.
Talking Protocols With Evan Prodromou – FediHost Podcast.
How To Make Your Mastodon Feed More Algorithmic – FediHost Tutorial.
Ghost now gives blog authors the ability to block users.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-115/

Fediverse Report – #114 Posts made by a Fosstodon server ...

2025-04-29T18:58:06Z

Fediverse Report – #114

Posts made by a Fosstodon server moderator on Reddit has caused some drama, leading to both Fosstodon admins to call it quits, a number of servers (threatening to) defederate from the Fosstodon server, leading to an uncertain future for the Fosstodon server.Fosstodon drama

A few days ago someone published a post on Mastodon, with screenshots and links to posts made on Reddit by one of the Fosstodon moderators. In the linked posts, the Reddit account in question, which seemingly belongs to the Fosstodon moderator, holds various right-wing beliefs, ranging from defending the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil to claiming Democrat supporters are in a cult. Backlash to the Fosstodon server was swift and strong, with various calls and plans from other servers to defederate from Fosstodon, members of the Fosstodon server looking for other servers to move their account to, and a general condemnation from the wider community. Both Fosstodon admins have posted articles declaring they are stepping down, citing not only the current drama as a reason, but that they see the work of being server admins as frustrating with little pay-off. One Fosstodon community member is considering to take over the administration of the server, though as of writing, that process is still ongoing and the outcome unclear.

Some thoughts and takeaways about what this drama says about the social side of federation on the network, and how different communities interact:

When a server moderators holds opinions other people view as problematic, the social cost of these views is partially extended to server users as well. See for example the account for fediverse streaming platform Owncast, which has an account on the Fosstodon server. Owncast says that they are getting messages that say they need to move servers, otherwise people will see them as Nazis. This blog post about another Fosstodon user explains a similar thought process, where it is rational for them to move to a different server, because they will be associated with the politics of the server moderator in question otherwise.

This behaviour has an impact on how people on the fediverse should find an instance they want to join. It turns out that knowing the political affiliations of server moderators is important, and that this is something that people should know about before joining a server. People will be judged for being on a server that has a moderator with toxic political views. As such, it becomes important for people to know this information beforehand: both that they will get judged for the politics of server moderators, as well as knowing what those political views actually are.

This is another indication of why the process of selecting a server when someone joins the fediverse is actually a challenge: important information that should impact server choice is not made available to users, nor is it made clear that this information is important in the first place.

The second takeaway from the situation is that it shows a need for fediverse servers to have a federation policy. How federation currently works on the fediverse is that servers are connected with each other by default, and the assumption is that servers can disconnect from each other for any reason, but will mostly do so only if one of the servers is misbehaving in some way. Freedom of association is one of the valuable features of the fediv erse. Server operators should be free to defederate from any other server, for any reason. Being able to defederate from another server because you strongly disagree with the politics from one of the server moderators is a good thing. But if this is a consistent policy of the server, it would do well to make this policy public and explicit. Servers defederating from each other can have significant impact on users, who suddenly can lose connections with their friends. A policy of defederating from other servers based on the expressed beliefs of server moderators is something that is not immediately obvious to new people joining the fediverse. There are absolutely valid reasons to do so, but it seems to me that formalising such a policy would be a good step towards making the culture on the fediverse more sustainable.

The third takeaway is that running a fediverse server is challenging, especially over longer periods of time. Both Fosstodon admins have called in quits in response to the most recent drama. Their blog posts explaining their perspectives is that this has been a long time coming, and that the Fosstodon server has been uncompensated work that they do not love doing for years now. Regardless of one’s perspective on how the admins handled the latest situation, it is a further indication that being a fediverse server admin is a challenging job, one that should not be expected that someone can do forever. This means that servers like Fosstodon need governance systems that allow for better and earlier rotation of administrative power. Fediverse software should also be better at dealing with the realities of admin burnout. The users who are transferring from Fosstodon to another server will lose their posts; Mastodon does only transfer the social graph, and not posting history. While ideally the majority of servers would have extensive governance systems in place that can help deal with admin burnout, the reality is that most servers do not. More fediverse software should provide better support for users having to move to different servers, including with their posts.The Links
NLnet, a fund that contributes to many open-source initiatives with a long track record of support fediverse projects, has published the beneficiaries of their latest funding round. PeerTube has gotten another grant, and publisher Framasoft talked about more how the money will be spend in their 2025 roadmap. The other fediverse beneficiary is an OpenScience flavour of Bonfire. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform with a broad range of features, but the platform has struggled to get to an actual release. Bonfire published a blog post about their ‘road to Bonfire 1.0’ in September 2023, and an update in October 2024 where they announced a bounty program to get contributions to improve performance of the app.
Flipboard uploaded more videos from last months Fediverse House event at SXSW on their PeerTube channel, including an interview with Cory Doctorow and a demo of the Surf app.
The Doo the Woo podcast, hosted by WordPress ActivityPub plugin developer Matthias Pfefferle, interviewed André Menrath. Menrath is working on a plugin to bring WordPress events to ActivityPub.
The Bad Space is a project where various fediverse servers share their blocklists to build an aggregate of fediverse servers that are potentially worth blocking. The project is now available for self-hosting.
Some new features for FediAlgo, a customisable timeline algorithm for Mastodon, including a ‘What’s Trending’ feature.
A writeup on how to make a blog site using Lemmy as data storage.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-114/

Fediverse Report – #113 When FediForum got cancelled a few ...

2025-04-22T18:09:42Z

Fediverse Report – #113

When FediForum got cancelled a few weeks ago, I heard from multiple participants that they were planning to showcasing some new features or products that they’ve been working on. The sudden last-minute cancellation has caused uncertainty on how to proceed, and there has not been a new date set for FediForum (nor is it clear in what format it will continue, if any). However, by and large participants have decided not to showcase or present their work outside of FediForum. This shows the influential role that FediForum plays in the fediverse development ecosystem. It is important avenue for developers to showcase their work to the rest of the developer community, with no clear replacement for it. As such, the news for the fediverse is especially slow this week.The News

Two papers on the fediverse came out recently: Labour pains: Content moderation challenges in Mastodon growth talks about the challenges that moderators face on fediverse instances. Leading the Mastodon Herd: Analysing the Traits of Influential Leaders on a Decentralised Social Media Platform finds a relation between negative sentiment and influence on the network.
Ghost now allows publications to set their own custom usernames. Staff user profiles is coming as well, but “is still a ways off”.
Decentralizing Schemes – Tim Bray
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says that a viral Facebook post in Taiwan lead to some 20k new signups over 2 days.
Fediverse House Highlight Reel, SXSW 2025
This week’s fediverse software updates.
If I ran Mastodon – Ben Werdmuller
Why Is Mastodon Using So Much Storage? – Fedihost tutorials
An update from the Catodon project (a fork of a fork of Misskey), which is still on hiatus.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-113/

Bluesky Report – #112 The main news of this week is about the ...

2025-04-18T16:47:42Z

Bluesky Report – #112

The main news of this week is about the Turkish government pressuring Bluesky to hide accounts by political dissidents on the network. Yesterday I published an article about the situation, and how geographic-based moderation works on Bluesky. The other news of this week is that custom feed builder Graze raised 1M USD, and a new fork of the Bluesky app.Graze raises 1 million USD

Custom feed builder Graze has raised 1 million USD in a pre-seed adventure round. Graze allows people to build their own custom feed, in a way that makes it accessible for non-coders. The platform also allows for feed builders to include ads into their feeds. The feature has been slowly rolling out recently, and feed operators are starting to use the advertisement options now. One example is the News Feeds by independent ATProto developer Ændra Rininsland, who recently shared plans at the ATmosphere Conference to reinvest the ad revenue back into the development of queer communities on ATProto. Graze is charging 1 dollar per 1000 impressions, a number the team expect to go up as Bluesky grows. Graze takes a 30% cut of this, which goes to hosting, payment processing and the development of the Graze platform. TechCrunch reports further on the revenue sharing:

“the team is considering doing a revenue share with Bluesky and other apps built on its underlying technology, the AT Protocol (ATProto). Today, Graze is working with other Bluesky ATProto-based apps, including photo and video apps like Skylight, Spark, and Flashes. “We’re very interested in figuring out what is the ethical revenue sharing model that helps everyone involved in the picture, including app developers,” said Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke.”

Meanwhile, Graze is working further on making their feeds accessible outside of Bluesky as well, their latest update allows feeds to be embedded on any web page.

In last week’s update, I reflected on comments by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about Bluesky’s monetisation plans. Graber mentions marketplaces and subscriptions as the main plans for how Bluesky plans to make money. When it comes to marketplaces, Graber’s example is about Blacksky, where Graber imagines that people can subscribe to feeds and that Bluesky will take a cut of the transaction. Last week I already went about how that does not seem to line up well with the direction that Blacksky is taking. But Graze raising 1 million to build their own business also shows that the marketplace for feeds might just happen outside of Bluesky PBC instead.In Other News

Deer is a new client for Bluesky, and it is a fork of the official Bluesky app. What stands out about Deer is it focuses on some specific design choices that Bluesky has made, and giving users the ability to take different choices. For example, Deer allows people to turn various Bluesky features off, such as the go.bsky.app redirect, show posts where two other people have blocked each other (undoing the ‘nuclear block’), or remove the geographic moderation labelers.

An academic paper on Starter Packs: ‘Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs‘. The paper shows how big the impact of Starter Packs on the Bluesky network has been. The authors write: “Their impact [of Starter Packs] on the social graph increases over time surpassing 40 % of all the follow operations in December 2024. […] This represents a remarkable 19.95 % of all follow edges of the network, indicating a large impact of starter packs on the overall social graph. Follows resulting from starter packs are also long-lasting: we observe that by the end of 2024, 93.82 % of them are still present.”

Bluesky PBC is hiring for another two positions: a Senior Communications Manager and Developer Relations.

Newsletter platform Ghost has been working on an ActivityPub integration, allowing newsletters to show up in the fediverse. Combined with the Bridgy Fed, the connector software that allows posts to travel between the fediverse and the ATmosphere, posts from Ghost could already show up on Bluesky, but this can be a finicky process. Ghost is working on making this easier, with a simple one-click button to connect Ghost sites to Bluesky.

Stream.place is a video streaming platform that integrates with ATProto. It is grown out of the Livepeer ecosystem, a crypto DAO that focuses on livestreaming and video decoding. Stream.place has asked the Livepeer DAO for a grant of ~390k USD, with the DAO now voting on the proposal.

Some more ways and tools to interact with feeds this week. Summarising your Bluesky following feed via an LLM, with an MCP server. Transparant.se is building a Discover/For You type of algorithmic feed that is customisable. 777Bluesky gives 10 trending posts in audio format.

Bluesky PBC will apply stricter moderation to the usage of list as a vector for harrassment.

Bluecast is an audio room platform on ATProto, that mainly caters towards the Japanese community. Their latest update allows for recordings to be converted into 3minute videos and to be posted on Bluesky.

Tangled is a git collaboration platform on ATProto. In their latest blog post Tangled shares how they are building their own pull request system.

A scientific article on how to use Bluesky and Instagram for science professionals, in the Fisheries journal.

The International Journalism Festival held a panel called ‘Breaking on Bluesky: live news in a post-Twitter era’, with Emily Liu from Bluesky and Sarah Jeong from The Verge. The session can be rewatched here.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-112/

ATmosphere Report – #111 Bluesky CEO Jay Graber hints some more ...

2025-04-10T19:07:02Z

ATmosphere Report – #111

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber hints some more at Bluesky PBC’s plans for monetisation, on ATProto’s ethos, and more.

Note for regular readers: since 2025 I’ve experimented with alternating this weekly newsletter, with one with focusing on Bluesky and more of the cultural and social side of the network, and the other week on ATProto and the more technical side. For this week, I went back to a combination, with both news about Bluesky and culture, as well as some more technical ATProto news. I’d love to hear some feedback if you prefer the newsletters to keep alternating between Bluesky and ATProto, of if this week’s format of putting everything together is better.

And another reminder: Thursday April 24th is Ahoy!, the European ATProto and Bluesky conference in Hamburg. The conference announced some more great speakers this week! You can hear Bluesky developer Samuel Newman, Ændra Rininsland about building resilient queer spaces, Anirudh Oppiliappan about Tangled, a git platform on ATProto, Paul Sharratt, about Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency, Marc Faddoul about the Free Our Feeds campaign, and much more! I’ll be there as well, and doing some interviews with people. Would be great to meet you there!The NewsOn Bluesky and monetisation

The New Yorker published an extensive long read with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, about her personal life and what led her to this place. The entire article is worth reading, and gives a good insight into Graber, and how Bluesky came to be. I want to zoom in on one single sentence, where the article talks about how Graber thinks about making money with Bluesky PBC. The New Yorker writes:

“Graber envisions sustaining the business by eventually charging subscription fees, and by monetizing its marketplace of custom tools—users would pay, say, five dollars a month for Blacksky, and Bluesky would take a cut.”

Bluesky PBC originally announced that they would have an optional subscription model back in October 2024, as part of their funding round. In December 2024 COO Rose Wang said that this was planned to be launched at the end of 2024. The period of late 2024 was also one of unrest within the Bluesky community, a significant part of the community was unhappy with how the company handled moderation regarding Jesse Singal. That translated into a vocal part of the community loudly proclaiming they would not want to participate in a subscription program for Bluesky PBC as long as the company would not take action to create a safer community. Since then there have been very few updates on Bluesky PBC launching a subscription model. This interview with Graber confirms that Bluesky PBC still is planning on launching such a service. However, Graber also couches it in an “eventually”, indicating that such a subscription model will likely not launch in the near future.

Graber also mentions Bluesky PBC making money by functioning as a marketplace. This is one of the core ideas on how she sees Bluesky PBC making money, and she has mentioned it interviews since at least early 2024. So far, Bluesky PBC has not actually build a marketplace yet. As the ecosystem develops, Bluesky PBC runs the risk of other organisations building marketplaces first. Custom feed builder Graze already contains a marketplace for ads. Graber’s example of people paying for access to Blacksky and Bluesky PBC taking a cut of the transaction seems to imply that other organisations will depend on Bluesky PBC for such a transaction.

But observing the actual behaviour of Blacksky Algorithms Inc, the company behind Blacksky, shows a different picture. Blacksky is building infrastructure to be fully independent from Bluesky PBC. The company already has their own PDS implementation, a grant to work on their own relay implementation, and announced a few months ago that their longer term plans are to also have their own frontend apps as well as their own AppView. Earlier this year, the Blacksky company transitioned away from being fiscally hosted by Open Source Collective to being an independent fiscal host, to save 10% in fiscal host fees, and Blacksky advertised the move as being fiscally independent. Together it paints a picture of Blacksky as a company that values their independence, both in technological as well as financial infrastructure, a company that will put in effort to avoid another organisation taking a cut of the transaction.

While not every organisation and community on ATProto will have the same characteristics as Blacksky, it shows some of the limitation of Graber’s proposal. There is a financial incentive to avoid Bluesky PBC taking a cut of transactions, and Bluesky PBC has provided all the tools with the openness of ATProto to make it as easy as possible to do so. Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser responded to the quote by Graber with a simple “👀”.Turkey and censorship requests

Turkish news agency Bianet reports that X users in Turkey are migrating to Bluesky, “after X has restricted visibility to dozens of accounts in the country following nationwide protests sparked by the detention of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on Mar 19.” Censorship by the Turkey’s government is also reaching Bluesky however, and Bianet further writes:

“According to the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), at least 44 Bluesky accounts have already been blocked in Turkey under the same Article 8/A of Law No. 5651. These restrictions were enacted by various judicial decisions, again citing concerns over national security and public order.

Despite the rulings, Bluesky has not taken any action to suspend or block these accounts, and they remain accessible from within Turkey. However, if the platform refuses to comply with Turkish court orders to restrict access to certain users, authorities may consider a full ban on the platform, a possibility that past precedents suggest is not unlikely.”

In order to comply with local regulations, Bluesky has set up moderation services for various countries. These moderation services are mandatory for accounts that are currently located within that country, but not for accounts that are outside that country. Bluesky has had local moderation services for Germany and Brazil for a while. Recently a local moderation service for Russia became active as well. Local moderation services for Turkey have been set up, but are not active yet.ATProto Ethos

Bluesky engineer Daniel Holmgren wrote about the ATProto ethos, based on his talk at the recent ATmosphere conference in Seattle. For technical people I can definitely recommend reading the entire article (and/or watching Holmgren’s talk). Holmgren describes the core ideas of ATProto as follows:

Atproto is situated as the synthesis of these three movements.
From the web: an open, permissionless, and universal network of interconnected content.
From peer-to-peer: location-independent data, self-certifying data, and skepticism of centralized control of any aspect of the user’s experience.
From data-intensive distributed systems: a splitting of read and write load, application-aware secondary indices to facilitate high-throughput and low latency, streaming canonical data, and the decomposition of monoliths into microservices.

From this basis, atproto adds two core innovations: identity-based authority and the separation of data hosting from the rich applications built on top of it.

Holmgren also describes two other ideas that are underlying ATProto: The idea that structure gives freedom, and lazy trust. On structure, Holmgren writes:

“While there’s something empowering about the idea of being able to do anything, it’s also easy for this to fall into the tyranny of structurelessness – a collapse in coordination that prevents anything from actually getting done. Without structure in the network, energy that could go into novel development gets redirected into facilitating interoperation, fixing edgecases between implementations, building up defenses to bad actors or security issues from other parties, and trying to coordinate evolution without a clear leader.“

One of the main topics that I keep coming back to when covering the fediverse is in this tyranny of structurelessness. The recent news about Pixelfed’s vulnerability that affected other software, and the lack of responses by the affected servers, is a good example of this collapse in coordination between the different parties in the network.

Lazy trust is the idea that often, it is enough to know that every post and signature can be verified, without actually having to be verified on the spot. ATProto allows a cryptographic verification (the Authentification Transfer part in AT Protocol) that every post you see is the correct post as created by the author. But when a regular person opens up the Bluesky app, it is less important for them to know that the post at the top of their feed has been verified. Instead, it is often enough to know that the app they are using is staking their reputation on serving the correct data. Anyone can prove if a service is behaving correctly, since the data is locked open.Bluesky culture

Two articles and observations on Bluesky’s culture this week. Adobe joined Bluesky this week, and got relentlessly bullied of the platform. The software company has been widely unpopular in broader culture for a while now, due to their monopolistic pricing practices, as well as their pivot to AI. Both characteristics which are widely unpopular on Bluesky as well, and when Adobe made their announcement post, they got heavily ratio’ed and yelled at. The company ended up taking down their post again. As Ryan Broderick points out in Garbage day, this does point to an issue for Bluesky PBC: advertising is one of the marginally few ways in which social media companies can make money at scale. Brand accounts are an integral part of advertising on social networks, and to make it work brand accounts getting bullied off the platform is slightly contra-productive. That said, the interview with Graber (see above)shows that she is currently not thinking about advertisement as a way to to make money with Bluesky PBC. Furthermore, the state of Bluesky’s culture is such that, if people believed that Bluesky PBC was considering advertising on the platform, brand accounts would likely get yelled at even more.

The second article is by Wired, ‘Bluesky Can’t Take a Joke’. It is about the shift in culture that Bluesky has experienced in the last half year or so, where the replies on popular posts tend to get obnoxious. One of the main complaints is that lots of replies tend to take a joke seriously. Another phenomenon is when a big account shares a piece of news, there is a group of people that sees that as an opportunity to yell in the replies about how bad Trump, Musk or any other conservative is, regardless of what the shared news is actually about.In Other News

Some updates on Skylight, the Bluesky client for shortform video:
Skylight has now over 150k users, in the week since the app first launched to the public.
The app is currently not available worldwide, and Skylight CEO Tori White says that they are working to make sure they are complying with local laws before launching globally. White specifically points to Europe’s GDPR as a point of uncertainty. It is unclear which parts of the GDPR Skylight is potentially not yet in compliance with. Other Bluesky clients like Flashes have not noted major problems with GDPR compliance.
Skylight shared a short video with their story of why they are building a TikTok alternative on ATProto.
Skylight CTO Reed Harmeyer shared that the main things Skylight is working on are the video editor and the algorithm.

WhiteWind development is paused for the foreseeable future, creator K-NKSM has said, due to changes in their personal life. WhiteWind is a blogging platform on ATProto, but it has not seen active development for quite a while. WhiteWind was one of the earliest AppViews on ATProto that used a different lexicon and built a platform outside of Bluesky. It has surprised me that no other blogging platforms on ATProto have sprung up so far. There is a wide market appeal for long-form writing, as people looking for alternative platforms.

PinkSea can now be selfhosted. PinkSea is an Oekaki board, a platform where people can draw pictures on the platform itself with simple tools and share them. So far, platforms that are building on ATProto mainly are a single app, and there have not been many cases yet where a new software platform (AppView) gets hosted by multiple providers. PinkSea is now a decentralised network in itself as well, with multiple other PinkSea instances out there. For some more information on PinkSea, creator Kacper “prefetcher” Staroń had an interview on the Software Sessions podcast this week.

Roomy is a group chat app that uses ATProto, and has opened up again for its second alpha testing version. Some new updates include the ability give rooms custom handles, similar to how ATProto uses custom handles, themes for the UI, wiki pages for chat rooms. For an introduction to Roomy, developer Zeu held a talk at the recent ATmosphere conference. Atproto.garden is one of the first communities to use Roomy, and it is a place for creators who are working on ATProto in some way.

The DAIR Institute released a paper on the role that social media plays in genocide, focusing on the 2020-2022 Tigray war. They are shared a 10 minute video explaining the context and their main findings. The organisation is warning that they are now seeing an “seeing an acceleration of the same type of warmongering on social media platforms that we documented at the beginning of the catastrophic Tigray war in 2020.” The reason I’m sharing this in this ATProto newsletter is the same reason what Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser says about the paper. Fraser points out that there are very valid “concerns about how atproto’s shape would fair any better at preventing this kind of thing“. I share those concerns, Bluesky and ATProto are aiming to rebuild a social network for the entire globe. And with that come some very difficult challenges, such as that people will use a social network to instigate war and genocide in a cultural context that is far removed from the people who are building the network.

Statusphere is the demo application by Bluesky PBC to help people start building their own ATProto app. Independent developer Baily Townsend has taken the Statusphere example and remade it in Rust. He released it as a full tutorial for people looking to get started on ATProto using Rust.

Custom feed builder Graze has added a new feature where people can share and reuse components of their custom feeds. For example, many custom feeds will want to use a NSFW filter, and now people can take someone else’s NSFW filter without having to build one themselves.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-111/

Fediverse Report – #111 A new security fund for the fediverse, ...

2025-04-08T17:22:28Z

Fediverse Report – #111

A new security fund for the fediverse, and the Lemmy developers held an AMA.The News

The Nivenly Foundation, the organisation that administers the Hachyderm.io instance, is opening a new security fund to sponsor contributors who disclose security vulnerabilities. All software has security vulnerabilities, and the fediverse is no exception. The recent Pixelfed vulnerability, which affected non-Pixelfed servers, is a clear example of how fediverse software can make software vulnerabilities more complex due to the interaction between different software platforms.

The Nivenly Fediverse Security Fund will sponsor $250 USD for vulnerabilities that are rated as high risk (7-9 CVSS score) and $500 USD for vulnerabilities with a critical score (9+ CVSS). The program will run until the end of September 2025. Nivenly members “hold a member vote to determine if we want to continue the program, and to establish a longer-term committee to steward and maintain the program.”

Last week, I wrote how Pixelfed’s vulnerability actually showed three different problems: The main problem is Pixelfed’s software vulnerability itself, but there were also two other problems: other software like Mastodon do not make it clear which risk comes with their private posts feature. And once a leak like this one happens, very few fediverse software admins communicated to their users that they might have been affected.

A security fund contributes to combating software vulnerabilities, but it can also help with communication to the rest of the fediverse once a vulnerability is found. It incentives that standard industry practices regarding software vulnerability get followed, and make communication clearer to a wider audience. For example, if Pixelfed’s recent vulnerability had gotten a CVSS classification, it might have been easier to make the severity of the vulnerability explicit to other fediverse software admins. In turn, this might have made it more likely that server admins would communicate the situation with their users.

In last week’s email essay I also wrote about how the fediverse is missing governance infrastructure that connects the various independent nodes and communities. One way to view the fediverse is as a response to centralised Big Tech platforms. These platforms have centralised governance, and are under the control of few people. The fediverse’s response to this is to build a social network that consists of tens of thousands of independent communities, all with their own governance structure. The fediverse has been successful in decentralising the single entity that oversees a social network into many pieces that all oversee a small portion of the network. But it has struggled to build a governance structure that ties all these individual pieces together again.

The Nivenly Fediverse Security Fund is a good example of this problem: software security impacts all the thousands of independent fediverse communities, but there is no overarching structure to collaborate and improve the security. It took one server taking the initiative into their own hands and provide a service for the entire network, at their own cost. Ideally, communities would collaborate on such a security fund instead. Nivenly’s announcement does leave space for such a future direction of the fund, saying that they are open to “establish a longer-term committee to steward and maintain the program”.

Note: if you sign up for my email newsletter, you get a weekly essay about the open social web that I do not publish anywhere else. You can sign up right here:

The Lemmy developers, Dessalines and nutomic, held an Ask Me Anything recently, and here are some of the answers that stood out to me:
Lemmy is working towards their 1.0 release. This is currently expected to be in the fall, although nutomic also says that “these things always take longer than expected”. He also expects some instances like lemmy.ml already to upgrade some months before.
One of the main features for Lemmy 1.0 is private communities, where only approved accounts can browse and posts to the community. This type of closed group functionality is in high demand, and both Mastodon and Pixelfed have tried to implement it. Mastodon got a grant for it, but the proof-of-concept code has been sitting there since 2022. Pixelfed has announced and teased a group feature multiple times over the year and showed screenshots of it, but it also is not publicly available yet.
Lemmy posts are interoperable with Mastodon, but the interoperability is not great: a Lemmy post appears on Mastodon as the title plus the URL. There has been many conversations about how Mastodon handles content from other platforms, with no changes so far. In this AMA, nutomic is explicit in saying that it is up to Mastodon to change this. While Mastodon seems open to the idea, and has been in conversations with developers from platforms like Ghost and NodeBB on how to show their content better on Mastodon, there has been little indication that Mastodon is taking steps towards making Lemmy content also better visible on Mastodon.
On the subject of how Lemmy can grow, Dessalines describes it as an organic progress, saying: “niche communities on reddit will keep getting fed up with the changes, and migrate to lemmy.” Nutomic describes a similar dynamic for fedi and Bluesky more broadly, saying that he expects that over the long term the fediverse might grow in a similar manner: “when the Bluesky admins make decisions that the community doesnt like, and then there may be another migration wave to the Fediverse”. Both replies indicate Lemmy’s vision of how the project can grow in the long run: stay consistently working on your product, and because platforms like Lemmy are not beholden to investors, they can have a longer lifespan, and outlive platforms who are beholden to shareholder expectations.
Grouping of communities (similar to PieFed’s topics or Reddit’s multireddits) “will be implemented soon“.

Ahoy! is a one-day conference for the European Social Web, and will be held on April 24th 2025 in Hamburg, Germany. The conference is mainly focused on Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and has some super fascinating speakers of people who are in the forefront of building new communities on the open social web. If you’re around I can definitely recommend it. I’ll be doing some interviews with people there, so if you are considering joining, let me know and we can say hi!The Links
More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks – Jon Pincus/The Nexus of Privacy
Ghost says there are now over a 1000 Ghost servers who have connected with the rest of the fediverse.
Mastodon’s monthly engineering updates, Trunk & Tidbits, is now available for March 2025.
A dataset with over 900 verified accounts of media organisations on Mastodon.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-111/

Bluesky Report – #110 Video app Skylight is available for ...

2025-04-03T18:47:55Z

Bluesky Report – #110

Video app Skylight is available for public release, with funding from Mark Cuban and 55k users in the first 24 hours. Spark is building their own entire video platform on ATProto, and just launched in beta. Skylight and Spark

The main news this week comes from two video apps for Bluesky and ATProto, Skylight and Spark. Skylight is a video client for Bluesky, that has launched to the public this week. In the first 24 hours since launch, the app has gotten 55k users, and hit #2 in the entertainment category on the Apple App Store in the US. Skylight also announced that they’ve gotten a pre-seed funding round from Mark Cuban, as well as another venture fund. The total amount of funding is unknown. Cuban said he’d fund a TikTok alternative on ATProto in January this year, just before TikTok got banned in the US for a day. In 2 days TikTok is set to be banned again in the US. If that were to happen again, Skylight is now ready to welcome people looking for an alternative. The official Bluesky app has also made significant improvements to video in the meantime as well, potentially making the entire network more attractive as a TikTok alternative.

Spark is another video app for ATProto, and this week they launched in beta. Spark takes a different approach than Skylight, and is building their own entire platform that does not depend on Bluesky. They are building out their own infrastructure, including their own relay, appview, CDN and more. Spark also uses their own lexicon, allowing them to build their own network on ATProto. On Lexicons

Spark and Skylight are taking two different approaches on building a video platform on ATProto, and the core difference is in how they approach ATProto lexicons. This difference is something we will likely be seeing more of on ATProto, so I think it’s worth diving deeper into the choices that both apps are making, and the tradeoffs that the choices entail.

A short and simplified explainer on lexicons: lexicons are a type of file structure for social data, and it says how data should be formatted. Every lexicon has an owner, usually the organisation who is building the app who uses the lexicon. It serves two purposes: it defines what an app can and cannot do, and it allows for interoperability between different apps. For example, the lexicon for a Bluesky post defines that a post should have a maximum length of 300 characters. Because this file structure is openly available, anyone else can also publish a Bluesky post. A lexicon says that if that post that is not made by Bluesky, but does follow the correct Bluesky lexicon, the post will show up in the Bluesky app. If it does not follow the lexicon correctly, it will not be visible.

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee wrote some guidelines on lexicons this week, which says that you should use existing lexicons when you intend to interoperate with other apps, and if you don’t intend to interoperate you should create your own lexicon.

Skylight takes the first approach: the goal is to interoperate with Bluesky, and thus the app uses Bluesky lexicons. Effectively, Skylight is a client for Bluesky that focuses on only a portion of Bluesky posts, namely videos. This has some advantages for Skylight:
Skylight does not have to do moderation. Every video posted via Skylight goes through Bluesky’s usual moderation infrastructure.
Skylight inherits the 33M+ user base of Bluesky. When you open up Skylight, there is immediately a ton of videos to see.
Skylight is not limited to only using Bluesky’s lexicon, and by integrating multiple types of lexicons Skylight can create an app that offers something different than just using the Bluesky app for video. Skylight CEO Tori White says that they are working together with stream.place to bring live streaming to the app. Stream.place is a live streaming platform with ATProto integration.

There are also downsides though:
Skylight is fully dependent on Bluesky, for both moderation as well as operation.
Skylight cannot change the limitations that Bluesky sets. Bluesky has set the length over videos at 3 minutes. This used to be one minute. Skylight has no control over these settings or when they are changed. Bluesky PBC could set the video duration limit to 10 minutes if they wanted to, without Skylight having any say in the matter.
It is harder for Skylight to define its own culture. For example, US politics is one of the most dominant parts of the conversation on Bluesky. If someone is currently using Bluesky to mainly talk about US politics, they might be less interested in also having some silly meme videos get posted to their Bluesky profile. Skylight is already tweaking their algorithm to get more variation in their feeds due to the prominence of US politics videos.

Spark uses its own lexicon and infrastructure, and its upsides and downsides are mirrored to that of Skylight:
Spark will have to do their own moderation for videos uploaded to Spark.
Spark’s ecosystem for videos posted with the Spark lexicon will have to start from scratch.

There are also upsides:
Spark can add features to videos that Bluesky does not have, Spark has talked about adding support to easily add music and other audio to your videos. Spark’s videos can also be of a higher quality (300mb vs 100mb) compared to Bluesky.
Spark gets to create their own community and culture that is distinct from Bluesky’s culture.
Spark is fully independent from Bluesky. Spark’s independence from Bluesky’s moderation is due to their choice in using their own lexicon, while the company also has made the choice to be fully independent in infrastructure: running their own relay, PDS, CDN and more.

The reason for spelling out the difference between these two approaches in detail is because Spark and Skylight will likely be the first of many more organisations that will have to make this choice between using other organisation’s lexicons and creating their own lexicons. There is no singular answer on which choice is better, and each comes with tradeoffs. Image-focused apps are another case where developers will make similar considerations about which lexicons they will be using. Flashes is a Bluesky client with an Instagram-like interface, that went for the first option, using Bluesky lexicons for posts. There has not been a major push yet towards an Instagram-like app on ATProto that uses its own lexicons and stays more separate from Bluesky. When people are considering building an image-focused app on ATProto, understanding the differences between Spark and Skylight might help with the tradeoffs and impact that come with each choice.In Other News

Altmetric has posted a blog with more details on their finding that Bluesky now has more posts on academic research published in 2025 than X has. What stands out to me is that Bluesky has a considerably larger ratio of original posts discussing research, compared to X. In contrast, X’s posts on research trend much more towards reposts. Altmetric also reports a finding I have not seen anywhere else yet, namely that Bluesky tends to be more active on weekdays, whereas X tends to be busier during weekends.

Bluesky PBC is growing; the company currently has around 20 employees and is hiring for 6 new positions. The company recently hired a product designer, and is now looking for a Head of Product as well.

Custom feed builder Graze has released a tool, Contrails, to turn their custom feeds into a developer-friendly structure that allows the feed to be used for other purposes than reading the posts via the Bluesky app. For example, when building a bot that listens to certain keywords and then take an action, bots developers usually listen to the firehose of the entire network. With Contrails, Graze can do the filtering, and developers can use this filtered stream of output to build their own toolings, such as bots, dashboards or moderation systems.

A sprawling blog post by Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser, about building an internet of many autonomous communities. There are many ideas in the post, and I can recommend reading it in full. I want to highlight a small section, where Fraser lists some things that are needed for building communities:
Treat “communities” as first class citizens (like “users” or “customers”). This is like how labelers are a special kind of account. Allow people to build things specifically for community account types.
Trust that individuals will show up to shoulder the burden of forming and maintaining these communities (incl. but not limited to performing moderation responsibilities – some of us are weird like that). This means as new features are designed, you don’t need to ask “but who will do that”? Probably me tbqh.
At best provide a non-extractive/non-taxing monetization path (DID2DID payments?) and at least don’t get in the way of communities forming reciprocal or gift economies.

Treating communities as a specific type of entity within the ATProto network makes sense to me. Both Blacksky and Northsky are creating spaces within ATProto and Bluesky. Blacksky is already successful at creating a vibrant community, and Northsky looks to do the same as well. Other communities are likely to follow suit to build their own places on ATProto. This might just expand beyond Bluesky-type communities, see for example how video apps like Spark have the potential to build a video-first community that is apart from Bluesky and microblogging, while also being connected to it. One of the core ideas of the fediverse is that make up of an interconnected network of many independent communities. While the vision of interconnected communities is one of the most appealing part of the fediverse to me, it struggles to make the switch from ‘connected servers’ to ‘connected communities’. The Links

In the media:
New Paradigms in Trust and Safety: Navigating Defederation on Decentralized Social Media Platforms – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Can Bluesky’s AT Protocol build the decentralized social media ecosystem the Fediverse aspires to? – Joshua Benton/NiemanLab
Blue Skies Ahead: Social Media’s Quiet User Revolution – Damion Taylor/Forbes
Beyond Bluesky: These are the apps building social experiences on the AT Protocol – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch

And some more links:
Hose race is a silly race game that allows you race words against each other directly from the Bluesky firehose (accompanying blog post here).
A writeup of the recent ATmosphere Conference in Seattle by one of the organisers.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

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https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-110/

Fediverse Report – #110 A vulnerability in Pixelfed caused ...

2025-04-01T17:36:15Z

Fediverse Report – #110

A vulnerability in Pixelfed caused private posts from other platforms to leak, a post-mortem on the CSAM scanner from IFTAS, and Fediforum has been cancelled.Pixelfed vulnerability impacts private posts across most of the fediverse

The fediverse suffered from a significant breach for private accounts, that affects the large majority of fediverse servers, due to a vulnerability in the Pixelfed software. What is notable about the situation is that the software vulnerability is in Pixelfed, but the affected accounts are not exclusive to Pixelfed: accounts on Mastodon and other fediverse software with a form of private accounts are also vulnerable. The vulnerability was found by the independent developer Fiona, who wrote a blog post about the vulnerability and the disclosure process.

To understand the situation, a short explanation of two features of Mastodon and some other fediverse microblogging software, locked accounts, and follower-only posts. Together these two features make it possible to have a form of private accounts. Locked accounts means that you cannot automatically follow that account, it has to be approved instead. Follower-only posts means that the post will only be displayed to your followers.

When a locked account approves a follower, follower-only posts now get send to the server that this follower is on. Because the receiving server now has this follower-only post in their database, they need to correctly handle whom they show this post to and whom they do not. If another account on the other server also tries to follow the locked account, but the locked account does not approve, this third account should not be able to see the messages. This is where Pixelfed’s vulnerability comes in: Pixelfed was not waiting for a confirmation if a follow request was approved, it assumed that it was automatically approved. That is how any private posts made on (almost) any fediverse server could be leaked: if a Pixelfed server already had the private post (because of someone of Pixelfed followed the locked account with approval), it would show it to anyone else who also tried to follow the locked account, even if the locked account rejected the follow request.

Pixelfed’s vulnerability points to deeper issues with the fediverse, activitypub and private posts. If all it takes to leak private messages is another server to be misconfigured, than it indicates the huge security risk inherent in private posts via ActivityPub. Even more so considering that the network incentivises and encourages people to build their own software implementations, which increases the risk of security vulnerability and other misconfigurations significantly. For simplicity I’ll focus here on Mastodon, although it also goes for other microblogging fediverse software that offers a combination of follower-only posts and locked accounts. At its core, private posts via ActivityPub requires to trust other servers. This is how ActivityPub works: your server sends posts to another server. There is no way to enforce that this other server respects your preference on how they should handle this post. If you do not trust another server to handle your data properly, the only way to deal with that is by not sending your post to that server.

When you make a follower-only post on Mastodon, the UI prompt warns you that followers-only posts without setting your account to locked allows anyone to view your posts by simply following you. The documentation for Mastodon also reinforces this, saying: “To effectively publish private (followers-only) posts, you must lock your account–otherwise, anyone could follow you to view older posts.” The documentation makes it clear that Mastodon views the combination of follower-only posts with a locked account as private posts. But nowhere is it made clear that these posts being private depends on other servers being good actors and not having an error in their code. So using private posts on Mastodon comes with the risk of the private posts being leaked due to flaws in other software, without people being aware of this risk.

Once a leak like this one happens, it is unclear who is responsible for communications with affected users. It was a flaw in Pixelfed that caused the vulnerability, but it is other people on other fediverse servers that are affected. Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault has only made minimal announcements, urging Pixelfed admins to upgrade, without further explanation to the people who are actually affected by the vulnerability. Personally I think Supernault should have handled communications significantly better. But it is the thousands of fediverse server admins who provide the actual social networking to people on their server. They are the ones who are offering a social networking site with a variety of features, including the ability to make private posts (as advertised by the Mastodon software), and are the ones who are responsible for handling the data of their users. I could only find one example of a server admin that has informed their users of the situation, even though it is the data of their users that is affected. I’m unclear if this is because the admins are not aware of what’s going on, or the admins view it as the responsibility of someone else to inform people that data they thought was private might potentially have been leaked.

Overall, it means that there actually three separate problems going on at the same time:
The first problem is that Pixelfed had a vulnerability which leaked private data from people on other platforms.
The second problem is that software like Mastodon and others promise private posts, without explaining what the risks are of using private posts, and that this depends on other servers behaving correctly. The Pixelfed vulnerability shows that these concerns are not theoretical or minor, but can happen to one of the biggest fediverse software/server.
The third problem is that when private data gets leaked, most fediverse server admins do not inform the people on their platform that they might have been affected by this.

It is still unclear to what the direct impact is of the Pixelfed vulnerability, and how many people’s private post have been accessed by others, and it’s unsure if that will ever be answered. But it is the indirect impact of the situation that I’m most interested in: will this change how people perceive private posts, and will it fediverse server admins take a clear position on when they should inform their users, and when the should not?IFTAS’s post-mortem on their Content Classification System

IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust And Safety organisation, has released a post mortem on their content classification system (CCS). The CCS project was a pilot project to detect and report CSAM for a small group of Mastodon servers, and lasted for half a year. The pilot was shut down after IFTAS did not manage to find the funding they were looking for, and the organisation had to shut down most of their projects this month.

CCS operated on 8 servers, which combined have around 30k monthly active users, and IFTAS found a total of 80 matches, averaging 4.29 matches per 100,000 media files. IFTAS writes:

“4.29 matches per 100,000 may not sound like a large number. However, to be clear, this is a higher number than many services would expect to see, and it includes a broad range of media, from “barely legal” minors posted publicly, to intimate imagery shared without consent, to the very, very worst media imaginable. In some cases, it was apparent that users were creating accounts on host services to transact or pre-sale media before moving to an encrypted platform, under the belief that Mastodon would not be able to detect the activity.”

The results show that there is a clear need for proper CSAM scanning and reporting services for the fediverse, and that IFTAS does not have the funding to provide such a service is a significant loss to the network.

On a note related to IFTAS’s funding: Erin Kissane gave a talk at the AT Protocol conference recently, in which she talked about ‘vernacular institutions’. She described vernacular institutions as emergent and local organisations, which solve practical needs on the ground. Kissane describes vernacular institutions as ‘more useful than legible’. She then mentions IFTAS as a clear example; it provides a need for local communities (as illustrated by the CCS project), but its illegibility made it hard for funding organisations to understand what IFTAS was doing and provide them with the funding they need.Fediforum has been cancelled

Fediforum has been cancelled, to be rescheduled at a later date. The unconference about the fediverse and the open social web was scheduled for today and tomorrow, April 1-2. This was supposed to be the 5th edition of Fediforum, which consists of speed demos and sessions that anyone can run on any topic. Fediforum is organised by Johannes Erst, with Kaliya ‘IdentityWoman’ Young as the co-organiser. Transphobic tweets by Young had surfaced in the days leading up to the event, and various prominent community members announced that they were either withdrawing themselves from the event, or said that they personally would not want to go to the event. Ernst then announced on his personal account that Young would be “transitioning out of Fediforum”. A day later (March 31), the official Fediforum account confirmed that Young would no longer be involved. At this point, community trust in Ernst was damaged and the discourse had reached a harmful stage, and Ernst decided to cancel the unconference and reschedule it to a later date. WeDistribute has a more extensive writeup of the situation here.

An unconference like Fediforum depends to a large extent on community trust and good intentions, and it was clear that the vibe was not great for constructive conversation at the point that Ernst decided to postpone the event altogether. Still, Fediforum provided a great place for fediverse projects to do some promotion with the speed demos, and Fediforum said that they even had a waiting list for this edition. There is a clear demand for an (un)conference like Fediforum, but the fediverse has not managed to create other community events that allow people to showcase their fediverse project in the last few years, besides Fediforum itself.The Links
Mastodon is hiring a Senior Product Designer.
Independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith wrote two articles this week, one on the ‘Open-source tools needed for the future of decentralized moderation’, as well as on how ‘Federation on the fediverse doesn’t have to be a binary choice between allowing everything or needing to pre-approve your entire network.
The Newsmast Foundation is taking over the administration of the indieweb.social server
Funkwhale has released a first alpha version of Funkwhale 2.0.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
PeerTube: the Fediverse’s decentralized video platform (part 2: creator edition) – Elena Rossini
The Lemmy developers held an AMA this week. I didn’t get into covering their responses this week, that will happen next week. The entire AMA can be found here.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-110/

ATmosphere Report – #109 The ATmosphereConf was last weekend, ...

2025-03-27T22:01:12Z

ATmosphere Report – #109

The ATmosphereConf was last weekend, independent relays are starting to appear, and more.Conference

This weekend was the first ATProto conference, the ATmosphereConf, in Seattle. Over two days there were a large number of speakers and sessions, with over 150 people in attendance, and a significant number watching the live streams as well. I could not make it to the US, so for a full overview of the event, I recommend this extensive article by TechCrunch’ Sarah Perez, who was present at the event. The entire event was livestreamed, and all talks can be viewed via this YouTube playlist.

Some assortment of thoughts I had while watching the livestream and VODs over the last few days:
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave a short speech, about her background as a digital rights activist, and how she is now “holding the door open, so people can see another world is possible”. Graber is clearly aware of her position, where she is seen as a figurehead of the network, while also wanting to build a decentralised network where there is place for competing platforms. Being a figurehead of a network, without becoming the de facto leader of the network, while also holding the leadership position of by far the largest organisation in the network, is a challenging position to balance.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee talked about where Bluesky came from and where it is going. One of the things he talked about is the consideration of why Bluesky decided on their own protocol and not ActivityPub. His answer focuses on practical considerations, especially how ActivityPub handles identity and account migration. Watching the ATProto Ethos talk by Bluesky protocol engineer Daniel Holmgren it struck me that the question could also be framed as a matter of lineage. Holmgren talks about how ATProto takes inspiration from the Web, Peer to Peer systems as well as Distributed Systems. Placing it in such a context makes it clear that ATProto has quite a different background and other ways of thinking than ActivityPub has.
Ændra Rhinisland talked about how community projects can become load-bearing for the network, without adequate support structures for the people who run such projects. She also runs the popular news feeds using Graze. Graze has been adding support for advertisements, and Ændra is one of the first to take advantage. In her talk she walked through how at current usage rates, the feeds could generate over $20k per month in ad revenue. She plans to use this revenue to support the queer communities building on ATProto, and showed early plans for a self-sustaining fund powered by Graze’s feed revenue, to support initiatives such as Northsky.
The talk by Ms Boba is a great indication of how much under-explored design space there is on Bluesky and ATProto. Her talk focuses on labelers and fandom communities, and has some great examples of how they can be used outside of moderation.
Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser gave an excellent talk, describing Bluesky as a skeuomorphism, meaning that it imitates the design of the product it’s replacing. This phase is a part of the adoption cycle for new technologies, but Fraser does not to stop at imitation but instead explore the new ways that communities can be build online. Fraser is specifically interested in building platforms that can serve mid-sized communities, ranging from hundreds of thousands to a few million people. The Blacksky community is an example of this, and Fraser hopes that Blacksky can inspire other communities to do the same. His framing of content moderation as community care and not a cost of business also resonated with me.
Erin Kissane’s talk goes into detail about vernacular institutions, local and grassroots organisations and practices that are often illegible to outsiders but deeply embedded in local communities. This allows them to be close to the needs of their community members, but makes them hard to see and understand from the outside. This outside illegibility is a double-edged sword: IFTAS served a crucial role for trust and safety in the fediverse ecosystem, but had to shut down to a lack of funding as a result of being illegible to financiers.

Some more articles on the events:
The under-the-radar tech revolution that could change how the internet works – Marcelo Calbucci/GeekWire
Things That Caught My Attention – Dan Hon
What’s next for ATProto, the protocol powering Bluesky and other apps – Sarah Perez/TechCrunchOn relays

Bluesky PBC has been working on a new version of the relay that makes it easier and cheaper to host, under the Sync 1.1 proposal. This new version is now starting to roll out, showing a significant drop in resource usage. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shared some statistics here. Independent ATProto developer @futur.blue set up his own relay as a speedrun. He shows that a full network relay can be run on a 50USD Raspberry Pi, with an easy-to-follow tutorial here.

That full network ATProto relays are cheap to run has been known for a while within the ATProto developer community, but that knowledge has not spread much yet. One reason for this is that independent developers have set up relays primarily for their own use, sharing access with a few friends, but no other publicly accessible full-network relays exist yet1.

Upcoming short-form video platform Spark is building their own complete infrastructure. Spark’s relay will publicly accessible, and hosted in Brazil. Having ATProto infrastructure outside of US jurisdiction is a conversation that has come up regularly, and often followed by the assumption that the alternative is to have infrastructure like a relay hosted in Europe. Spark is bringing in a slightly unexpected twist here, by having the first publicly accessible relay that is not owned by Bluesky PBC being hosted in Brazil instead.

Having other relays that are not owned by Bluesky PBC has been the subject of a lot of conversation, and the Free Our Feeds campaign was founded on the idea that a significant financial investment is needed to do so. Furthermore, it assumes that such a relay is not only expensive, but that it requires an extensive governance infrastructure to manage it. The current developments regarding relays call both of these assumptions into serious question: relays are cheap, not expensive. Furthermore it seems that there is enough incentive that organisations that are serious about building their own ATProto platforms are willing to run their own relays.In Other News

Bluesky PBC has published a proposal on how they want to handle OAuth Scopes. OAuth Scopes is one of the main projects on the roadmap for the first half of this year. Currently, logging into an ATProto app via OAuth requires you to give that app permission to access all the data for your account. OAuth Scopes allows an app to only ask for the permissions that are necessary, and not the entire account. There are two problems that need to solve: the technical part of making it work, as well as the handling the UX to communicate clearly to people what data an app wants to access. The challenging part of the UX is how to handle the translation from the technical description of the data that is requested (stylised like ‘app.bsky.feed.getFeed’, for example), into a way that is understandable for the everyday user. The second challenge is that apps require permission not for one, but for many types of this lexicon data. A third-party Bluesky client that is restricted to only Bluesky data will still have to request a dozen of these Lexicons. A long list of technical lexicon names makes it impossible for regular people to have an informed opinion on what data is and is not being accessed. Bluesky PBC’s proposal is to group different lexicons into bundles, and create new lexicons that reference these bundles. Scoped OAuth can then request access to a bundle of lexicons, with a description that is legible for regular people.

Git repository platform Tangled is working on news ideas how a GitHub alternative might do things differently, and one of their first proposals is defining two types of pull requests. For another look at Tangled, this blog post experiment with what the platform allows.

One of the talks at the ATmosphereConf was by independent developer Rashid Aziz, who is the co-founder of basic.tech. Basic is a protocol for user-owned data, and seems to be fairly comparable to the PDS part of ATProto, with the major difference that Basic allows for private data on their version of a PDS. Aziz used the combination of these two protocols to create private bookmarks for Bluesky.

The new Record Collector labeler automatically displays if someone has been using other apps in the ATmosphere outside of Bluesky.

Rocksky is a new music scrobbler service on ATProto, that is currently in closed beta testing. It allows people to connect their Spotify account and automatically ‘scrobble’ (track) the music they are listening to.The Links

Some tech-focused links for ATProto:
ATCryptography is a package with cryptographic utilities for the ATProto, written in Swift.
A blog post by independent ATProto developer Mary about ‘AT Protocol, OAuth, and well, decentralization’. Mary also published a repository car file explorer this week.
A Python API library for Bluesky.
Independent ATProto developer Kuba Suder writes about database optimalisation and speeding up the process of firehose processing.
‘this website is hosted on bluesky (for real this time)’ is a blog post about hosting your website data on an ATProto PDS, with a ‘thin AppView layer’ for easier to parse URLs.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.Cerulea.blue is a publicly accessible relay, using a custom implementation, but it is limited to non-Bluesky PDSes. ↩︎

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-109/

Fediverse Report – #109 An essay on user preferences, and how ...

2025-03-25T18:20:08Z

Fediverse Report – #109

An essay on user preferences, and how the fediverse’s interconnected network of communities can play into that, as well as some other news.User Intents

The Bluesky Company (Bluesky PBC) recently announced a proposal to add User Intents to the AT Protocol (ATProto). The proposal allows people to set account-wide preferences how their data should be handled outside the network. It gives people the ability to opt in or opt out their account from a few different things, such as bridging to other protocols or not wanting any of their data being used in generative AI datasets. The proposal is similar to how robots.txt works, meaning that it is a machine-readable format which good actors are supposed to abide by, but is not legally enforceable.

I cover both the fediverse and Bluesky (including ATProto) under Fediverse Report because these networks are deeply interconnected and influence each other. Decisions on one network, like Bluesky’s User Intents proposal, can influence how the fediverse develops and builds their own features. My goal is to help readers understand the fediverse more deeply. By observing how Bluesky’s approaches default user preferences, the fediverse can build their own systems that use its strength of having many diverse and connected communities.

The proposal by Bluesky PBC is as follows:
People are able to set their preferences for four different categories:
generative AI
protocol bridging
bulk datasets
public archiving and preservation
These preferences are account wide. They are valid not only for Bluesky, but for every app build on ATProto.
The default value is ‘undefined’, not opt-in or opt-out.
Projects which are intending to use the public data should decide for themselves whether data reuse when the intents are classified as “undefined” is acceptable or not.
the current proposal is set to lead the way for more granular user preferences, allowing people to specify on an app-level or post-level what their preference is.

Also, some concepts of ATProto that are relevant, which makes the protocol different from ActivityPub:
On ATProto, a user has only 1 account, and can use that account to log into any service. This is in contrast with ActivityPub, where you need a new account for every service.
Data on ATProto is public by default, and designed to be accessible. Everyone has full and free access to the data of the entire network.

One thing about user preference settings in social apps is that they are a bit of red herring. The majority of people never change the default settings. Giving people choice is a good thing, but it is impossible force people to choose: the majority of people will just not choose anything. This makes it so that the default value for any preference is hugely important, as it is the de-facto value that the majority of people will experience.

Bluesky PBC tries to avoid this issue by introducing a default “undefined” value. The advantage of using a default value of “undefined” is that Bluesky PBC will not overstep their boundaries and determine the preference of everyone on the network, including people who are not using Bluesky but are using other platforms on the network. The downside is that Bluesky PBC effectively makes no decision at all for the majority of people. Bluesky PBC leaves it to the organisations who use the data to determine how data can be handled if the preference is set to “undefined”. These organisations are likely to value their own interests more than the interest of people whose data they intent to process.

Bluesky PBC has three options here, that all have a downside:
If Bluesky PBC sets default values for how ATProto account data can be handled it reinforces its centralising role in the network.
If Bluesky PBC does not set a default value, no decision is made for the majority of people, and it is left to organisations whose goals do not align with those of the people whose data they process.
If Bluesky PBC sets User Intent not on an ATProto-account wide level, but only on an per-app basis, choices quickly become overwhelming if users must set preferences for every app.

So far I’ve only been talking about Bluesky and ATProto. But the fediverse has a long history of debates, conversations and drama on how to deal with data processing that happens outside of the network. Some high-profile cases include the blowup around Bridgy Fed considering making the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky opt-out, or the backlash against Searchtodon, which saved user’s timeline locally for searching.

These debates are around data scraping, consent, things being opt-in or opt-out. But one of the struggles that the fediverse has had is to build structural solutions. A significant portion of the fediverse does not consent to have their data handled outside of the network. A persistent problem is that this preference is not expressed in a machine-readable way. This leads to an endless cycle of new developers coming in that are not familiar with the culture who then cross lines of consent and it all blows up in drama again.

Moreover, the fediverse and ActivityPub have a significant advantage on how to deal with the dilemma of setting default values over ATProto. The fediverse is a network that is build up of many different communities connecting with each other. A variety of communities allows for diverse preferences, which can also be expressed in setting default values. And it is a shame that the fediverse is not capitalising on this advantage.

There are communities from whom discoverability is important. Just as there are communities for whom not being easily publicly discoverable is important. These preference can differ within an individual as well: people treat personal photos shared with friends differently from blog articles.

The fediverse can sidestep the question of default account values because people have many accounts on the fediverse, for different use cases. This gives the option to set a different default value for different services. A Pixelfed platform for close friends should set stricter default data-handling preferences. A Mastodon server for blogging platform Medium that has the goal of giving more visibility and reach to its writers could consider setting default values to be more open.

The power of the fediverse is in that there does not have to be a single default at all. Instead, communities and servers should be able to set default values for themselves. This can help shape the tone of the community, and makes it clear what the identity of a community is about. What’s even more powerful is that this only concerns the default value, giving people the ability to set their preferences as they desire. The state of the open social web is such that there are now two protocols in competition with each other. That gives the ability for the fediverse to take ideas from other networks, and improve on them in a way that plays up to the unique strengths that the fediverse has.The News

Reminder: next week will be FediForum, on April 1-2, and you can register here.

FediverseSharing: A Novel Dataset on Cross-Platform Interaction Dynamics between Threads and Mastodon Users is a new academic paper (currently under review and up on arXiv) that explores the interaction between Threads users and Mastodon users. It takes a dataset of 20k Threads users that have fediverse sharing enabled and compares it to 20k Mastodon users that have interacted with these Threads users. The main goal of the research is to build up this dataset and share it with the community for further research. How sharing a dataset of aggregated user interactions relates to the above essay on user preferences for being included in bulk datasets is left as an exercise to the reader.

PeerTube has done a major redesign for their v7 of the software that came out a few months ago. The organisation now shared the design and development reports that shaped the update.

IFTAS recently had to shut down most of their larger projects due to a lack of funding. One of their projects, FediCheck is now available as open source for someone else to continue with. FediCheck is a deny list management tool that allows server admins to subscribe to external deny lists.

The Lemmy developers will hold an AMA on Wednesday March 26th.

Last week, Ghost made their ActivityPub integration available in public beta for Ghost Pro subscribers. Their weekly update says that now over 250 sites already use the integration. WeDistribute has a hands on with the new features that Ghost offers.

Note: Last week I wrote about the new fediverse platform Forte, and said that the repository did not include an install guide. This is incorrect, the guide can be found here.The Links
Website League and the Rise of Island Networks – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute.
The fediverse has a long tradition of building silly clients for Mastodon. This article has an overview of some of them.
Two new video tutorials by FediHost, for setting up a GoToSocial instance and configuring a PeerTube instance.
An update on how search works in music sharing platform Bandwagon.
A development update for Letterbook, an upcoming fediverse microblogging platform.
This weeks’ fediverse software updates.
Fediverse Events hackaton project.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-109/

Bluesky Report – #108 Northsky is a new cooperative that is ...

2025-03-20T19:14:21Z

Bluesky Report – #108

Northsky is a new cooperative that is building their own space for the trans and queer community on Bluesky/ATProto, multiple apps are starting to work towards financial sustainability, and more.The NewsNorthsky announced

Northsky Social is a newly announced cooperative that is “working to build a digital space designed around active moderation and user safety for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.” The Canadian cooperative features a group of people from Bluesky’s 2SLGBTQIA+ community that have decided to build their own place on ATProto, serving the trans and queer community.

The first part of the Northsky project focuses on data hosting. Northsky is providing their users with managed PDS hosting. Users can transfer their data from a Bluesky-managed PDS to a Northsky-managed PDS. Northsky focuses on all their infrastructure being hosted in Canada, outside of the US. The anti-trans climate in the US is given as the main reason why Northsky is first going with PDS hosting. Even though it does not contribute to Northsky’s goals towards better moderation, it is something that Northsky can help their community with right now.

Northsky is building out their own custom tooling to help people with this transfer. The current tools for transferring an account to a different PDS require technical know-how, and Northsky is building tools to make it accessible for the layperson. Northsky is also making their customers aware of, and helping them, with registering recovery keys. Setting and storing a recovery key allows people to always gain control of their account using that key. This is one of the features of ATProto that has been hidden so far, and also currently requires technical knowledge to set up. One of the challenges for Northsky is that Bluesky PBC currently does not allow accounts to migrate back to their PDSes. This means that if an account starts using Northsky, they’ll permanently have to either use Northsky or find another PDS provider service. Bluesky PBC seems open to changing this however.

In their announcement, Northsky talks about building safer digital places, and addressing “the gaps we see in moderation by implementing tooling and processes focused on keeping our users safe.” These plans cannot be met with just PDS hosting, and need moderation systems, and Northsky’s own appview as well. Northsky says that this will be phase 2 of their project, with more details to be shared later. The social dynamics of moderation are much more difficult than providing hosting services, so the real challenge for Northsky to build safer places will come later.In Other News

This weekend will be the ATmosphere conference in Seattle. The event is sold out, but there will be remote livestreaming available. The conference has a busy schedule with two full days of talks. For Europeans there is another ATProto conference upcoming: AHOY! This single-day event will be held on April 24th in Hamburg, Germany, and tickets are now available. The first two announced speakers are the developers of Skyfeed and Tangled, and more speakers are already scheduled to be announced soon as well. As a note: I’m involved with helping organise the AHOY! conference, and hope to see many of you there!

Multiple apps in the Bluesky/ATProto ecosystem are taking the next step towards professionalising and are working towards financial sustainability. Spark is an upcoming ATProto short-form video platform, and they launched a fundraiser this week. The organisation of four people incorporated into a Public Benefit Company (PBC) recently, and are now looking to raise 100K USD via a crowdfunding campaign. Bluesky video client Skylight is also now incorporated as a PBC. The creator of Bluesky client deck.blue announced they’re working full-time on deck.blue, and can financially sustain themselves on the Patreon subscriptions. Bluesky video client Flashes is launching a fundraiser for bringing the app to Android, and will include an optional $1.99/month subscription to keep the apps financially sustainable.

The most recent update to the official Bluesky app contains a separate inbox for DMs and 3-minute videos. Bluesky has long had an issue with DM spam, although the team has been working to reduce this issue. The new DM inbox contains chat requests from unknown accounts where they can be accepted or rejected. This makes spam DMs less intrusive. The other update is that longer videos are now allowed on Bluesky, from 1 minute to 3 minutes, and from 50mb per video to 100mb per video. Notably, the option for longer videos put Bluesky even more in direct competition with Spark, an upcoming video platform on ATProto: Spark advertises its higher limits of 3 minute videos of 300mb as a unique feature, and of the reasons why they went with its own lexicon instead of using Bluesky.

Altmetric is a platform that tracks online engagement on scientific research across social networks. They observe that Bluesky has become a major platform for sharing scientific publications. Publications from 2025 are shared more on Bluesky than on X, and that overall volume of conversation about research is getting close to equal in absolute terms to X as well, even though Bluesky has an order of magnitude less active users than X does.

Bluesky PBC is pivoting into a t-shirt company. Last week CEO Jay Graber wore a tshirt to the SXSW conference with the text “Mundus sine caesaribus” meaning “A world without Caesars”. The Bluesky community demanded the shirt as merch, and the first batch sold out in 30 minutes. A few days later the company brought the shirts back into stock, and COO Rose Wang said that the company had more money coming in from the shirts in a single day as they did from two years of selling custom domains.

Bluesky PBC has set up an EU representative office in Belgium, as part of mandatory compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Bluesky PBC made the news last November when a spokesperson for the European Commission called out Bluesky PBC for not following some of the compliance requirements for the DSA. The DSA mandates that all platforms that are active in the EU register their EU headquarters, and now Bluesky PBC has a point of contact in Belgium for the specific purpose of contact with EU Member states and agencies.

Fast Company ranked Bluesky PBC at number 17 on its list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2025. Alongside the ranking, they featured an interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.

Timeline app Surf is an upcoming app to build and browse custom feeds across different protocols and platforms. It allows you to browse content from platforms such as the fediverse, Bluesky, Threads, YouTube and more, customised into whatever topic or feed you want. Surf’s latest updates allow for significantly better integration with Bluesky: you can now log into the app with your Bluesky account, have a unified home timeline for both your Bluesky and Mastodon account, and engage and post from the Surf app onto Bluesky. The app is build by Flipboard, and is currently in private beta.

And some Bluesky/ATProto software that caught my eyes:
Wamellow is a third-party tool for Discord that allows for a variety of social media services to be further integrated into a Discord server. Their latest update to the Discord integration allows people to like a Bluesky post that has been posted on Discord by reacting with the 🩵 emoji within Discord.
Bluesky video client Skylight now has an in-app video editor. One of the challenges facing Bluesky media client apps is in how they’ll distinguish themselves from the official Bluesky apps. Having an in-app video editor is such a feature, where Skylight now can provide a meaningful value add over using the Bluesky app to watch videos.
ATProto.im is a client for Bluesky DMs, built in the style of the old AIM chatting platform.
Dragonfly is a new Bluesky client for MacOS desktop and the iPad.The Links
Statistics for the different languages used on Bluesky.
A sticker pack for Signal with logos and images of various ATProto projects.
Bluesky By The Second is a dashboard for showing realtime statistics of the firehose.
Feed generator platform Graze did interviews with the creators of the Medsky feed and the Art Feed Collection feed in their newsletter.
A Bluesky For Dummies book will come out soon.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-108/

Fediverse Report #108 Newsletter publisher Ghost is now ...

2025-03-18T18:12:17Z

Fediverse Report #108

Newsletter publisher Ghost is now connecting to the fediverse in public beta, updates about the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, and more.The News

The public beta for connecting Ghost to the fediverse is here, and the ActivityPub integration is now available for Ghost Pro subscribers. Ghost is a publishing platform for sending out blogs via email. With this latest update, Ghost now has another method of distribution, namely via the fediverse. Ghost’s integration with the fediverse consists of two parts: sending out long-form articles published on Ghost into the fediverse, and a reader app to the fediverse from Ghost.

Publishing Ghost articles on ActivityPub makes them accessible to the rest of the fediverse, similar to how WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin works. For users of Ghost this is an easy sales pitch, it is simply another free and automatic distribution channel for their blog. The second part of Ghost’s integration with the social web is a reader app. This app allows Ghost users to browse and read posts on the fediverse. It is split up into two parts: an inbox for reading other long-form posts from Ghost or WordPress, and a feed for all other types of posts. This allows accounts on Ghost not only to send out posts via the ActivityPub integration, but also to connect, respond and follow their audience. It even allows you to post short-form microblogs (notes), just like you’d use on Mastodon, that do not show up on the Ghost website. This makes the Ghost integration a full fediverse experience.

A New Social is the non-profit organisation that builds and manages cross-protocol tools for the open social web. The organisation currently manages Bridgy Fed, the connector that allows accounts to ‘bridge’ between both ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr and more, and is currently in the process of setting up and launching the organisation. In their first update they shared this week, A New Social shared that they have a board of directors, consisting of Erin Kissane, Ben Werdmuller and Susan Mernit. Bridgy Fed Config is the first upcoming launch that they announced, scheduled for early April. To bridge their account, Bridgy Fed currently requires people to follow the Bridgy Fed account on their platform, which can be confusing and opaque for people as to what is actually happening and if it is working. The upcoming Config settings page allows people to log in with their social web account (Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed) and turn the bridging on with a simple switch. A New Social also mentions supporting Threads with the new Bridgy Fed Config update, which is currently not supported by Bridgy Fed.

Forte is a new fediverse platform, that comes from the lineage of Hubzilla and Streams, created by the same developer Mike Macgirvin. Forte’s major feature is that it has Nomadic Identity over ActivityPub. Nomadic Identity means that you can port your entire account, including your posts, settings, social connections, etc. It is slightly different than the account migration that Mastodon has, which transfers your social graph to a new account. With Nomadic Identity, you create a single identity that can be connected to multiple different servers, so when one server becomes unavailable, all your personal data can be transferred and accessed from another server linked to your account. Forte, as well as Hubzilla and Streams, remain on the bleeding edge on what’s possible with ActivityPub. However, Forte also suffers from the same issue that its predecessors have, namely that getting to use the software is surprisingly difficult. By design there is no way to see a list of Forte servers. Forte mainly targets people with technical know-how, as the code repository does not include guide on how to setup your own Forte server. It leads to the funny situation where I would like to give Forte a try because I’m interesting in trying out the new features, but I legitimately do not know how.

Myo is a new image-focused client for the open social web, and allows you to connect your Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr accounts into a single timeline. Combining multiple accounts into a single timeline is similar to OpenVibe, but Myo instead focuses media, in a design that is more reminiscent of Instagram than Twitter. Myo is made by the same developer as SoraSNS, which is also a multi-protocol app that focuses on microblogging instead. Myo and SoraSNS are both available for iOS.

ActivityPub badges is a new project that is currently in development to build a badges/credential system similar to Credly on ActivityPub. The project is currently at the proof-of-concept phase, where badges can be created and send over ActivityPub.

IFTAS, the non-profit for collaborative work on trust & safety on the fediverse, recently had to shut down various of their services due to a lack of funding. In their latest update, the organisation talks about how they are rescoping and moving forward, as the organisation itself is not shutting down. IFTAS will continue with various community support projects, such as their community platform IFTAS Connect. They will also continue providing insight into commonly blocked domains, in a scaled down version of the shut-down FediCheck program.

A new form of spam/scam has recently emerged on the fediverse, and it involves private messages from an account that identifies itself as ‘Nicole the fediverse chick’. So many people have gotten a variation of this message that it is quickly becoming a meme on the fediverse. It is unclear what the exact purpose of this spam is, with either a doxing ex or an elaborate 4chan troll as likely explainers.
Keeping Watch Over the Fediverse: Mass Surveillance in Non-Centralized Social Media – Eric Fassbender

This article by Fassbender examines how state surveillance treats federated and decentralised social networks, focusing on the BlueLeaks dataset, which contains a large amount of internal documentation of state surveillance organisations. Fassbender writes: “[…] surveillance actors are less interested in understanding decentralization within platforms, but rather look at organizations first, then take an interest in all platforms that they spread to. This means that any platform (or in the case of the fediverse, grouping of platforms that share a method for interconnecting) can become suspect.”The Links
The fediverse promises social media without Big Tech – if it can avoid familiar pitfalls – Aram Sinnreich and Robert W. Gehl/The Conversation.
PeerTube’s latest update revamps the about page and brings better podcast support.
The Fireside Fedi livestream interviewed Laurin, the developer of ActivityPods, as well as PieFed developer Rimu.
Piefed makes community discovery easier by integrating with the Lemmyverse community dataset.
Sneak peek: Mastodon’s upcoming update will finally include the ability to show all replies on a post.
FEP Search Tool is a small web tool to search all the FEP’s.
Forum software Flarum got funding by NLnet in 2023 to implement ActivityPub, but recently decided that this effort would be postponed for the foreseeable future.
Notes on migrating an account from Mastodon to GoToSocial.
A Manyfold 3D viewer directly in a Mastodon timeline.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Setting Up A New Mastodon Instance – a PeerTube tutorial by FediHost.
Mastofuse is a Mastodon file system client.
Roboherd is a tool to build automated Fediverse actors.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-108/

Fediverse Report #107 Pixelfed raises 138k Canadian dollars for ...

2025-03-11T18:26:35Z

Fediverse Report #107

Pixelfed raises 138k Canadian dollars for their project, and a new way to connect researchers to the fediverse with an upcoming ORCID bridge.The News

The Pixelfed Kickstarter campaign has concluded, and the project has raised 138k Canadian dollar (88k EUR/95k USD). The campaign raised money from over 2100 backers, and reached far past it’s original goal of 50k CAD. The campaign has grown significantly in scope, and indicates that the Pixelfed campaign is much more than just about the image-sharing platform Pixelfed. Pixelfed itself has also grown, and there are now reportedly 8 people joining the team. With the money, the team is working on the following:
Further development of Pixelfed, as well as supporting the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art servers
Development of Loops, and getting it to a state where it can be made available as open source. In the most recent update Pixelfed says that this will be “once it is ready in 2025”.
Building a dedicated server environment around the world, that can handle “the 1000s of TBs of video traffic (plus storage requirements)”.
Building Fedi-CDN to host and serve Loops videos, as well as offering “excess compute/bandwidth to other fediverse platforms as a collaborative shared service.”
Building an E2EE messaging platform Sup, with the near future focused on development planning.
The latest update of the Kickstarter also notes that Pixelfed has started another side project, FediThreat, for fediverse admins to share information about lower-risk harmful actors such as spam accounts. This project is currently in the proof-of-concept stage.
Launching a Pixelfed Foundation. Setting up a foundation was originally put behind to a 200k CAD stretch goal, but it seems like this will still happen, even though the goal is not met. The latest Kickstarter update notes that a Pixelfed Foundation is currently being worked on, as a non-profit under the government of Alberta, Canada.

The amount of money that Pixelfed has raised is significant, especially by fediverse standards. At the same time, this is a lot of different types of projects that the team is undertaking. Pixelfed has a history of overpromising and underdeliving, for example the Groups feature has been announced to be released “soon” for over 2 years now, and this is a feature that they have gotten an NLnet grant for. The new projects that Pixelfed is working on, such as a shared CDN are definitely valuable for the fediverse. But with the attention of the Pixelfed team being pulled in so many different directions, and a lack of clarity on which projects will get focus, it is unclear on which timeline Pixelfed can deliver the planned features.

Encyclia is a newly announced project to make ORCID records available on the fediverse. ORCID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a unique identifier for researchers and scientists. Every researcher can have their own unique ORCID, and with it, every publication become records connected to that ORCID. With Encyclia, all these ORCIDS can be followed from your ActivityPub account, meaning that you can always keep up to date with research, even when the researcher does not have a fediverse account. Encyclia is currently still in pre-alpha, and not yet available for use by the public.

This weekend was the SXSW festival, and Flipboard hosted the Fediverse House, with quite some well-known names within the fediverse community, as well as representatives from Bluesky and Threads, as well. There does not seem to be recordings available, but Jeff Sikes was there and had a good live blog if you want to also experience some FOMO.

In my recent updates on Bluesky and ATProto I talk about how Bluesky is increasingly becoming a political actor, due to the presence of various high-profile people who are actively speaking out against the Trump/Musk regime. This impact so far is less visible on the fediverse, as there are no politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the platform to speak out. But resistance does not only come from high-profile individuals, it comes from people on the ground that organise themselves. To that end, Jon Pincus wrote two articles on organising on the fediverse: If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next has an overview of the current state of the networks in relation to organising. Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere has a lot more practical details, examening various softwares that can be used in practice. Both articles are great sources of information to get more practical details for people who are considering using decentralised social networks.The Links

Decentralized Social Networks & WordPress with Alex Kirk. The Open Web Conversations has a new Fediverse series, hosted by WordPress ActivityPub plugin creator Matthias Pfefferle. They discuss talk about how a WordPress blog can be build into a full decentralised social networking node with the Friends plugin by Kirk and the ActivityPub plugin by Pfefferle.

Standards War? – Robert W. Gehl. Gehl compares IFTAS’ funding struggles with the Free Our Feeds campaign, who are raising money to build alternative ATProto infrastructure, and describes it as an illustration of the emerging standards war between ActivityPub and ATProto.

A Long-Shot Bet to Bypass the Middlemen of Social Media – John Markoff/New York Times. The NYT interviews Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue to talk about how the company is using building a new decentralised social web with Flipboard and timeline app Surf.

The Software Sessions podcast did an interview with Hong Minhee. Hong is the developer for ActivityPub framework Fedify, as well as Hollo, a single-user microblogging platform.
The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied – Joan Westenberg/The Index
PeerTube: the Fediverse’s decentralized video platform (part 1: first impressions) – Elena Rossini
Ghost’s weekly update on their ActivityPub implementation.
This week’s fediverse software updates. Some notable app updates: Ivory now supports grouped notifications, and OpenVibe can save your position in a timeline.
Keeping PeerTube Storage Under Control – a tutorial by FediHost.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-107/

Bluesky Report – 2025mar.a Frequency is a new project for a ...

2025-03-06T21:19:02Z

Bluesky Report – 2025mar.a

Frequency is a new project for a decentralised relay using a blockchain. The Bluesky clients ecosystem keeps developing.The NewsRelays, a blockchain and Free Our Feeds

The Bluesky relay is often seen as a centralising aspect in the ATProto ecosystem, and there are various projects underway to combat this. Bluesky PBC is working on significantly lowering the technical requirements for hosting a relay. Free Our Feeds is working on getting a publicly-accessible relay on European infrastructure. Blockchain company Frequency has announced that they are building their own custom relay implementation.

Frequency’s plan is to split the relay into two separate parts: an archive and a firehose. The archive is non-blockchain database that stores and archives all the data coming through the network (unless people delete or opt-out), while the firehose is the actual event stream, which continuously broadcasts all the events on the network as they happen. All data that lives on ATProto already has a unique identifier, a CID (Content Identifier). Every time an event happens on the network, the CID of that event gets stored on a blockchain, while the actual data gets archived in the regular database. This blockchain is effectively a list of CIDs with timestamps of when these events happen. This is the comparable with the firehose output of Bluesky’s relay, it is a list of events as they currently happen.

Frequency’s blockchain-style relay has some differences, and some similarities, with how Bluesky’s relay functions. Both Bluesky’s relays output a continuous stream of events as they happen on the network. Users can tap into this firehose to get continues updates on all events that happen on the network, and use this to power their apps. Bluesky’s relay is realtime, while Frequency updates their blockchain every six seconds. This means that using Frequency’s relay will have a slight delay. Frequency also has an advantage over using Bluesky’s relay, it allows you to ‘replay’ the event stream from a past date, allowing you to see what the firehose looked like at an arbitrary date in the past. I’m not clear on what the actual use case in practice for such a feature is, but at least it is a feature that is new.

The main reason why people became aware of Frequency’s announcement is for the ties it has with Free Our Feeds. The press release ties Frequency’s project explicitly as a project between Project Liberty and Free Our Feeds. Robin Berjon, one of the driving forces of Free Our Feeds however stresses that there is actually little connection between Free Our Feeds and Frequency, stating that there is no money or anything exchanged. Instead he describes it as two separate projects that both are working on the same goal: making Bluesky and ATProto more decentralised by providing more publicly-accessible relays. The whole situation honestly has me quite confused: if there is indeed no meaningful connection between Free Our Feeds and Frequency’s blockchain project, why is Free Our Feeds mentioned so prominently in the press release? Furthermore, it is clear that the culture of Bluesky is one of a deep distrust of anything that reeks of blockchains and crypto. What is the value of tying the Free Our Feeds name to a project that was always going to be distrusted and ridiculed by the community, simply because it uses a blockchain?

That said, one common criticism aimed at Bluesky and ATProto is that the relay is a centralising force. While there are few independent developers that run their own relay, there is no other relay that is publicly accessible to anyone, besides the relay run by Bluesky PBC. Frequency, for all the hate and ridicule that blockchains and crypto companies rightfully deserve, is an organisation that is actually working on further decentralising the ATProto network by building a different type of relay. But for Frequency to actually get any real credits, I’ll first want to see it working in practice, because I do not feel that the crypto/blockchain ecosystem is one where organisations deserve the benefit of the doubt, and a large amount of “Ill believe it when I see it” is warranted.Bluesky clients update

Tapbots, the makers of popular apps like Ivory for Mastodon and Tweetdeck for Twitter have announced they are making an app for Bluesky called Phoenix. Tapbots said that they see Mastodon as their home on the social web, and plan to continue developing Ivory. They also said that they need to keep up with Bluesky, as that is where the growth is, and the company cannot sustain itself on subscription income from Ivory alone. Some app developers, like Openvibe, are working to combine the multiple networks such as fediverse and Bluesky and Nostr into a single app. However, this is not the direction that Tapbots is taking, saying they believe the user experience is better if the networks keep being separate. The plan is to release Phoenix somewhere this summer.

Image-focused Bluesky client Flashes has officially launched this week, and the client has racked up over 50k downloads so far. Flashes is a Bluesky client, and at its core it is a way to view images posted on Bluesky. One of the challenges of building an Instagram-like image-sharing app as a Bluesky client is that people use microblogging platforms in a different way than image-sharing platforms like Instagram. Flashes includes features to help people share photos in a way that’s more Instagram than Bluesky. For example, the Portfolio feature allows people to their best photos as their portfolio’, while filtering out less serious content such as a quick meme. Flashes also prominently features two custom feeds for only posts that are made with Flashes, to get timelines that are more catered towards photo-sharing.

ThreadSky is a Bluesky client, that is a mix between Reddit and Bluesky. ThreadSky takes Bluesky posts, and displays them in a Reddit-style format. This makes ThreadSky different from other ATProto-based link-aggregator platforms like Frontpage. Frontpage is largely separate from Bluesky, only your account is shared between Frontpage and Bluesky. ThreadSky is a client for Bluesky, and displays Bluesky data in a visually distinct manner that is more suited for reading comments sections. The app is still in development, with quite some features not working yet. However, I do find that a Bluesky client that focusing on the comment section of Bluesky posts to be an interesting direction, and it does make reading comment sections on popular posts quite a bit easier.Bluesky is political

Two weeks ago I wrote about how the America’s rapid decline into authoritarianism is resulting in Bluesky becoming a political actor in itself. Authoritarianism does not tend to go well with places that allow people of the opposition to freely gather, talk and organise. In that light, some more illustrations on how Bluesky is an explicitly political place:
The TeslaTakedown protest movement against Elon Musk has its roots on Bluesky in a conversation between actor Alex Winter and sociologist and professor Joan Donovan. Winter describes Bluesky as his major tool for signal-boosting and driving momentum for the protests, with writers like Ed Niedermeyer also using the network to drive the momentum on the protest movement forward.
A simple comparison in engagement on Threads and Bluesky for the phrase Slava Ukraini.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not going to Trump’s Joint Address, instead commenting and answering questions on Bluesky and Instagram Live.
Bluesky as a place that shapes politics is also visible in Russian disinformation network Matryoshka being active, this time to spread false rumours about Germany’s election being rigged.Some updates on Trust & Safety on Bluesky:

Last week, someone hacked television screens inside an US government office building to display an AI-generated video of Donald Trump sucking on Elon Musk’s toes. Videos from inside the office that also showed the AI-generated video appeared on Bluesky, first posted by reporter Marisa Kabas, where it went viral. This post then got taken down by Bluesky for violation the rules on “non-consensual explicit material”. 404 Media published an entire article on the situation. Bluesky reversed course quickly and restored the post, saying “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.” Another Bluesky employee clarified that “the mods are *very* touchy on any AI generated sexual videos. We have updated policy to make exceptions for notable political/newsworthy cases like this.”

Bluesky also announced they are partners with the Internet Watch Foundation. Bluesky will use several of IWF’s services, which are related to shared lists of known CSAM material to help Bluesky find and take down such content more easily. Bluesky also worked on cutting down on DM spam in recent weeks.In other news
Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser talked about Blacksky in a podcast interview
Registering a recovery key for your ATProto account.
Bluesky ads.
cred.blue is a library of ATProto resources.
Bluesky will be at SXSW, with CEO Jay Graber giving a keynote as well as a session with The Onion.
PMSky is a project to build peer moderation on Bluesky.Next week’s sneak peek

Next week’s edition will be focused on ATProto and the wider ATMosphere network again. Some news that I’ll be covering, with a sneak peek if you’re interested in digging in yourself:
Threaded is a Git collaboration platform on ATProto.
The ATProto Community fund announced a project for location data on ATProto.
Popsky is a review platform app for iOS.
OpenMeet is an open source alternative to MeetUp build on ATProto.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all the articles of this week, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-2025mar-a/

Fediverse Report #106 IFTAS is shutting down most of their ...

2025-03-04T20:31:36Z

Fediverse Report #106

IFTAS is shutting down most of their services following a lack of funding, and Tumblr-like platform Wafrn now has its own apps, and a Bluesky integration to boot.The News

The fediverse trust and safety organisation IFTAS has announced it is shutting down most of its services, following a lack of funding. Last month the organisation said that they would soon run out of funding, and that they’d do a final effort at getting structural funds for the organisation. This has not happened, and now IFTAS will shut down most of their services. The biggest project to be shut down is IFTAS’ Content Classification Service, a service which handled CSAM scanning and reporting for fediverse servers. When fediverse server admins encounter CSAM, most countries have mandatory reporting requirements that admins are obliged to follow. Another project that is shutting down is FediCheck, which provides shared deny lists that server could use to build their own deny lists for their servers.

IFTAS shutting down their services is a double blow to the fediverse. The obvious one is that functions like IFTAS’ Content Classification Service were aiming to provide a service that filled an crucial gap in the operations of many fediverse servers. Scanning for CSAM, and handling the legal requirements on reporting to the relevant agencies is a challenging task for server admins to execute, and many fediverse servers do not have good procedures in place to handle this delicate process. IFTAS’ CCS would have provided a way for smaller fediverse server to handle the legal obligations they have regarding handling CSAM.

The second blow to the fediverse is in that IFTAS fills an important role in building a collaborative structure for moderation across fediverse servers. The fediverse is a network of independent places (servers), and while they are interconnected on a technical level via a protocol, building connections between servers for collaborations is proving to be much harder. Over the years there have been many suggestions and ideas on how fediverse servers could work together, for example regarding on sharing information on which servers to block. These conversations currently take place mainly via admin backchannels or via the #fediblock hashtag, and a more structural interface could help streamline this process. For such a process to work trust is needed between fediverse server admins to participate with such infrastructure. IFTAS, as a grassroots fediverse organisation, is one of the best-placed organisations to have build trust and provide a nexus around which such infrastructure could be build. IFTAS got pretty far with their rollout of FediCheck, which was building such a place for collaboration between server admins. Now that IFTAS will not be the center around which shared moderation infrastructure can be build, will there be another organisation in the future to do so? Especially when IFTAS found out that getting funding for such a project is so difficult?

Fediverse platform Wafrn has announced they now have apps for Android and iOS available in testing. I have not talked about Wafrn much, but it is one of the more interesting fediverse platforms that is currently being worked on. Wafrn is a Tumblr-inspired platform that clearly does not take itself too seriously: the name stands for “We Allow Female Representing Nipples“. It is a reference to a decision by Tumblr to ban adult content, and they used the phrase “Female-presenting Nipples” in their community guidelines which became a target of ridicule. Wafrn has a variety of unique features, such as a place to ask and answer questions for the Wafrn community. The most standout feature of Wafrn however is a native integration of both ActivityPub and ATProto. A Wafrn account allows you to have a full connection with the fediverse, as well as with Bluesky. On the fediverse, your account is visible as @name@app.wafrn.net, while on Bluesky your account is visible as @name.at.wafrn.net. Because this is not a bridge, and instead a native integration, a Wafrn account can interact with any Bluesky and fediverse account, other accounts are not required to opt-in in order to connect.

One criticism that often gets put at Bluesky from people within the fediverse is that it has not federated yet. I do not think that ‘federation’ is a helpful term to help understand ATProto actually works, see this article for more context. However, the interoperability between Bluesky and Wafrn does involve interoperability between servers over ATProto, making that Bluesky and Wafrn are federated in the way people on the fediverse understand the term federation. The fact that an app called “We Allow Female Representing Nipples” is what makes Bluesky federated is honestly extremely funny to me.

Link aggregator platform PieFed has added support for feeds. Feeds on PieFed are similar to how multi-reddits work on Reddit: it allows you to create a custom feed that displays posts from multiple communities. Feeds can also be shared, allowing people to follow a feed that others have created. Feeds on PieFed are somewhat similar to their Topics feature. Topics are also a collection of multiple fediverse communities around a certain theme. The main difference between topics and feeds is that topics are created by the server owner, and set for the entire server. With feeds, anyone can create and share one, and you can also follow feeds from other PieFed servers.The Links
Timeline app Tapestry has gotten an investment by Tumblr.
WeDistribute writes about Funkwhale and their decision to filter out far-right music.
Ghost‘s weekly update on their ActivityPub implementation
Xenon is a new fediverse client app for iOS
Fireside Fedi is a interview series on PeerTube, and this week they’re talking with one of the people behind ActivityPods.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

#fediblock #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-106/

Fediverse Report’s deep research on Deep Research’s fediverse ...

2025-03-03T21:28:36Z

Fediverse Report’s deep research on Deep Research’s fediverse report

ChatGPT recently released a new feature, called Deep Research, that allows ChatGPT to “use reasoning”, and process large amount of online information. In his newsletter Platformer, Casey Newton reported on the new ChatGPT’s new feature. To judge the quality and functionality of Deep Research, Newton prompted ChatGPT to output a report of 5k words using Deep Research, and compare this to a similar report made by Google’s Gemini. Notably for this blog, Newton asks ChatGPT for a report about how the fediverse could benefit publishers. A Fediverse Report, you could call it. Newton does not spend a lot of time analysing the results, saying that the output hits on the requirements of the prompt, and says that compared to Gemini, deep research “blows it out of the water”. Not all tech writers are as impressed with Deep Research, AI doomer king Ed Zitron wrote another long article, ‘The Generative AI Con’, in which Zitron pushes back against AI hype. He takes a Deep Research by reading through the same report that about the fediverse that Newton has published in Platformer. Zitron is not impressed by OpenAI’s new feature, saying that “the citations in this “deep research” are flimsy at best“, and that “this thing isn’t well-researched at all.“

A report on the fediverse is quite up the alley for a blog named Fediverse Report. So let’s do some deep research on Deep Research’s fediverse report. I’ll go over ChatGPT’s output in detail, analysing what information ChatGPT gives, and which information is missing.

ChatGPT’s output gets quite a lot of information correct, and more importantly, it structures the information well. It pulls in relevant examples, and also manages to find relevant obscure information. Deep Research’s ability to show what information the output is based on gives insight in how an LLM’s output gets constructed. It also allows the sources to be analysed, and it turns out there is a lot of interesting information you can learn by looking at the sources that Deep Research uses for the output. The report is also pretty well structured, and hits on most of the relevant points that publisher who is curious about the fediverse needs to know.

A common critique of LLMs is that they will give factually incorrect information, often simply called hallucinations. This problem is also visible in Deep Research’s output, it contains factual mistakes. The problem of factual (in)correctness of LLMs is well-known, and not a debate I want to rehash here. What I am interested in is the analysis and research part of Deep Research: which sources does the output use? Are those sources any good? And just as importantly: which relevant sources should have been part of the report, but aren’t? Judging if the output of an LLM is correct or incorrect is reasonably straightforward. But judging if the output of the LLM does not include information that reasonably should have been included is much harder. This goes doubly so for emerging fields like the fediverse, where there is no authoritative base of knowledge to rely upon.

In ChatGPT’s output that Newton uses to get a sense of the performance of Deep Research, I find that there are three types of issues relating to data and analysis. There are issues with the quality of the sources that ChatGPT cites, and there are sources missing that I expect to have been cited. But the most intriguing part for me is when ChatGPT cites a source correctly, but the resulting output is still lacking, because the needed information to get to a good understanding is not actually available on the internet.Source quality

One issue that Deep Research struggle with is with the quality of the data sources it cites. The clearest example is this specific Reddit post, which ChatGPT cites six different times as a source in the section on monetization in the fediverse. The post is titled ‘monetization’ and posted on /r/fediverse. This specific Reddit post is the second search result on Google, as well as Kagi and DuckDuckGo for the search query ‘fediverse monetization’.

ChatGPT heavily focuses on WebMonetization by Interledger in this section, and how it integrates with Castopod. Interledger is a (non-crypto) payment network that allows people to send microtransactions to creators. There is indeed an WebMonetization integration with Castopod, but ChatGPT’s output gives no indication of how unrepresentative this is for the fediverse. With respect to Castopod and Interledger and what they are building, WebMonetization is in no way any meaningful part of the fediverse. In fact, both organisations presented their integration in 2025 during FOSDEM. The room consisted of the most in-the-know in-crowd of fediverse developers, and as far as I can tell this potential fediverse integration with WebMonetization was new information for most if not all of them. ChatGPT provides a reasonable summary of the position of Interledger regarding monetization in their output, but the complete lack of context of how early in the adoption stage WebMonetization makes that the output does not represent the state of the fediverse, as it is currently used by most people, at all.

An article by TwipeMobile is the prime source that ChatGPT uses throughout the article. TwipeMobile is software development company that builds apps for newspapers. The company also publishes research papers about related topic, and one is called “What is the Fediverse? A guide for publishers and the uninitiated.” With a title like that it is no surprise that ChatGPT likes the article. The quality of the article is mediocre however, and it lives in the twilight zone where it is impossible to tell for sure whether the article is generated by an LLM or written by a human.

The TwipeMobile article has some major issues with factuality, and as a result, ChatGPT’s output suffers as well. This is especially noticeable in ChatGPT’s comparison between ActivityPub and ATProto. The TwipeMobile article describes ActivityPub as ‘widely adopted’ and having an ‘established user base’, and ATProto as early in its growth. The article was published on 6 December 2024, and at that date the fediverse had 1.1 million monthly active users, while Bluesky had around 11 million monthly active users. That ATProto is 10x the size in terms of active users compared to ActivityPub does not seem particularly clear from the language used in the TwipeMobile article, which seems to imply that ActivityPub is more active than ATProto. As ChatGPT’s output relies so heavily on TwipeMobile’s article, this misconception is reflected in ChatGPT’s advice as well, which describes ActivityPub as having an ‘established audience’ and ATProto as being in an ‘early growth stage’.Missing sources

ChatGPT does miss a few relevant sources, that would help publishers get a good understanding of the state of the fediverse and whether the network is relevant for them. One source that is missing from ChatGPT’s output is regarding monetisation and sub.club. Sub.club was a platform that let fediverse creators offer paid subscriptions and premium content, using existing fediverse infrastructure. It allowed people to set up a fediverse account, to share content with the rest of the fediverse. Creators could then set a paywall on posts if they so wanted, and sub.club provided the payment infrastructure. Sub.club shut down in December 2024, only a few months after launched, and they managed to onboard only 150 people. For publishers that are interested in monetisation on the fediverse Sub.club’s struggle to gain traction is a relevant data point. Sub.club got a fair amount of media attention (1, 2) from well-known outlets, so there was not a lack of sources for ChatGPT to cite from.

Another example of sources that are not included in ChatGPT’s output is not only a matter of not linking to articles, the lines between ‘relevant information that is missing from ChatGPT’s output’ and ‘relevant information that is not covered in well-known news publications’ are thin. Some of the most relevant information that is missing in the output is also missing in articles that rank high in search engines. A notable example is the statistics that Heise editor Martin Holland regularly publishes, which compares traffic to their site from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and X over a longer time period. The original prompt by Newton asks for report on how the fediverse could benefit publishers, and traffic data time series is one of the best ways of showing the concrete benefits for publishers.

As best I can tell this data series is not published in news media, which explains why it does not show up. ChatGPT seems to prefer to use English-speaking sources. For example, there is no information on how ZDF, one of Germany’s largest public broadcasters, has had their own Mastodon server for years. Heise being a German news outlet also likely contributes to the data series is being not being reported on in English-speaking media, and not being found by ChatGPT.On data availability

One limitation that ChatGPT’s output has is that it is dependent on available information. But what if the information is not available online, nor a clear indication there is missing data at all? Let’s take a look at how ChatGPT describes Medium as an example for how publishers can use a Mastodon instance to amplify author’s reach. The output cites Medium’s announcement blog post and summarises the point of why Medium started their Mastodon server this correctly. On a surface level ChatGPT’s output is good: it found relevant information and summarised the important points.

What’s missing here is the follow-up: Medium launched their Mastodon more than 2 years ago. So did their plans actually work out? That seems pretty relevant information for a potential publisher to know. In 2024, Medium barely posted about their Mastodon server on their blog. CEO Tony Stubblebine mentions Medium’s Mastodon server once in his ‘State of Medium‘ post, also saying that he finds Threads to be a better place for self-promotion. Those two additional data points suggest that Medium’s experience with launching a Mastodon server is mixed: the me.dm server has 1.7k MAU, so it clearly provides some benefit to the Medium user base. But neither are there signals that it is an overwhelming success.

The issue here is that Medium (or anyone else) has not published an analysis or statement with a follow-up on Medium’s Mastodon server, to ask the question: “are the benefits of running a Mastodon server by a publishing platform good enough that it is recommended for other publishers to do so as well?” Newton’s original prompt asks for “high-level strategic analysis for a digital-native publisher”, and this is the type of analysis that is needed for a publisher to actually make a decision. For a publisher it is only knowing about the existence of a project is not the point, a publisher needs to know if that project is successful and if they should consider it as well. This type of analysis is hard for ChatGPT to properly execute: LLMs are fundamentally about processing data, and it cannot process data that doesn’t exist.Some more notes

ChatGPT’s output on recommendation I find to be quite good. The first three points of advice – Establish an Authentic Presence, Integrate Your Website with ActivityPub, Engage with the Community- are quite good at a high level, and advice that I would give to publishers as well. The advice to “Stay Adaptive with Protocols” is also good advice, but the description is wrong on some pretty important parts. Then again, this is also because the quoted source (TwipeMobile again) is wrong on this, so at least ChatGPT cited a bad source correctly.

ChatGPT spends another section on discoverability and engagement, writing a comparison between ActivityPub and ATProto. It correctly notes that discoverability on the fediverse happens to community sharing and hashtags, and that ATProto has space for algorithmic discovery. ChatGPT’s tendency to equate both sides is in full play here: it does correctly say the difference between the networks, but refrains from making a material conclusion about it, describing them both as equal but different. Again, the biggest fault ChatGPT here is not in what it writes, but what it does not write. There is no information on that search is opt-in on the fediverse, that around 5% of accounts have opted into being discovered, and that as a result search and discovery works significantly less well on the fediverse than it does on Bluesky.

Finally, ChatGPT offers the advice to use “third-party analytics services to gauge engagement.” There are indeed tools available for analytics, but not all of them are easy to find, or to know which one to use. ChatGPT does not tell you which tools you can potentially use, instead offering very basic advice on tracking engagement. ChatGPT’s output would have been better here with some more ‘deep research’.

Another general note on ChatGPT’s output: Zitron does not like Deep Research’ tone of writing, and I agree with what he writes here: “I don’t like reading it! I don’t know how else to say this — there is something deeply unpleasant about how Deep Research reads! It’s uncanny valley, if the denizens of said valley were a bit dense and lazy. It’s quintessential LLM copy — soulless and almost, but not quite, right.”

Over the last years how you feel about LLMs and generative AI has quickly become an identity marker for many people, with opinions ranging from LLMs being the new way to build machine god to a torment nexus that is designed to strip workers of their power. For this article I am not aiming to argue for a specific position in the debate about the values and impacts of LLMs, and instead I’m aiming for a smaller goal. OpenAI released a new mode that says it can do deep research, and a prominent tech writer used a singular prompt to get a sense of how good this new mode this. This prompt happened to be on a subject field I do know something about. I wanted to know how much ‘deep research’ was in ChatGPT’s output, so to that end, I simply did some deep research of my own.

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-reports-deep-research-on-deep-researchs-fediverse-report/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.d Welcome to the ...

2025-02-27T20:21:44Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.d

Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again on Bluesky and it’s surrounding ecosystem of media apps.The News

Constellation is a project that recently released that provides a database of all backlinks in the entire network. Constellation now has a database of over 1.2 billion links, and an accompanying website with statistics to slice through. The Constellation API is now also getting integrated into multiple PDS browsers, both PDSls and atp.tools show backlinks to the ATProto records now. This puts PDS browsers more into their own specific place on the network: not a full AppView, but more than just a way to view the content of a PDS.

Bluesky PBC has put out a new proposal for ATProto, Sync 1.1. The proposed update concerns the relays, and the validation work they do. As part of the Authenticated Transfer, which ATProto is named after, relays validate every event on the firehose. This validation process currently requires a relay to store the entire repo, which can take up a lot of space. This is one of the aspects that make hosting a relay more expensive. The proposed update changes the way validation works, which allows a relay to validate the integrity of all the data going through the firehose without having to store the entire repo. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy provides an explainer thread on how this works here. This update makes it much more feasible for people to self-host relays.

Another proposal by Bluesky PBC is for moderation routing report. The new feature allows labelers to select which type of report they want to receive. A common problem that labelers currently face is that users tend to receive reports that are not relevant for their specific labeling service, which causes them unnecessary extra work, as well as getting unnecessarily exposed to awful content. The new proposed update allows labelers to opt-out of specific reporting categories. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold says Bluesky PBC is currently working on implementing the feature, aiming to ship it soon.In Other News

Bluesky has posted some new job vacancies, and they are now hiring a System Integrity Engineer, Product Designer and Senior Trust and Safety Lead. Both the System Integrity Engineer and Trust and Safety Lead indicate that Bluesky is expanding their Trust and Safety work: both of these jobs are newly created positions, with the engineering position explicitly focused on moderation systems and regulatory compliance.

Some podcasting news: two podcasting apps, Transistor and TrueFans, both added support for displaying Bluesky comments on the podcast episode page. TrueFans also supports fediverse comments, so that a podcast episode page can display comments and reactions from both networks.

Bluesky engineer Jaz wrote an article about ‘lossy’ timelines. The summary is that to maintain performance, the home timelines of accounts that follow more than 4k accounts will not always see all posts on the timeline.

Upcoming ATProto short-form video platform Spark shared their outline on some of the limits they’ll set. Spark aims to allow videos of 300 MB or 3 minutes long (compared to Bluesky’s 50MB or 1 minute), and 12 files for image posts (5MB each). This is part of the reason why Spark is not using Bluesky’s lexicon, instead developing their own. Setting these limits higher will also require Sparks to provide their own PDSes, as the file size limit is set by the Bluesky PDS. Hosting video is expensive, and it is not yet clear how Spark will finance this.

A short tutorial on how to publish lexicon verification. The first verified lexicons are now starting to show up on lexidex.

Roomy has posted a deep dive on their tech stack, how they are combining ATProto and Automerge to build public chatrooms.

Web browser Opera adds Bluesky integration, allowing you to more easily doom scroll in the sidebar of the browser.

Bluesky video client Skylight is now available in beta on Android, after Skylight had trouble with Google to get the Android beta approved.

Some events: Feed builder Graze will hold a meetup in New York this Friday the 28th, and at SXSW (March 10th, Austin) there will be Bluesky meetup.The Links
An interview with Game Industry Labeler developer Trazy on how builds a community of thousands of game devopers on Bluesky.
A guide (in Japanese) on how to upload videos using Bluesky API (XRPC)
An interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at Knight Media Forum.
A podcast interview with the developer of the ATProto art platform Pinksea

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all the articles of this week, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-2025feb-d/

Fediverse Report #105 While the news in the world is louder and ...

2025-02-25T19:46:02Z

Fediverse Report #105

While the news in the world is louder and intenser than ever, the fediverse has had one of it’s most quiet news weeks in a long time. But as compensation I’ll have another article out tomorrow, that I did not manage to finish for today.The News

Some updates for GoToSocial: GoToSocial published the documentation that would also allow other fediverse platforms to implement their Interaction Policies. And Slurp is a new CLI tool to import your posts from other fediverse servers into GoToSocial. A guide to import your Pixelfed posts into GoToSocial with Slurp is available here.

Last week I wrote extensively about Mastodon’s plan to implement quote post. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed in a follow-up that Mastodon will not display quote posts if they are made using another implementation than Mastodon proposes. This means in practice that even when Mastodon has added support for quote posts, it will not display quote posts made by Misskey, unless Misskey also implements Mastodon’s new proposed system for quote posts.

Elgg is an old-school open source social network that started in 2004. It added a plugin for ActivityPub this week.

John Oliver discussed content moderation on Last Week Tonight, quickly promoting Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bluesky and Signal as alternatives.

The Identity Graph Explorer is a simple tool to find out how “identifiers on the Fediverse / Social Web are connected to one another”.

The Hexbear Lemmy community recently lost control of their domain, leading to a bidding war for the domain name for thousands of dollars. The admins now report that they have gotten back control of their domain.The Links
IFTAS is In a Funding Crisis – WeDistribute
GoToSocial empowers you to have your own home on the Fediverse – with unique controls – Elena Rossini
How to Launch Your Own Fediverse Community Server – WeDistribute
Website League update for February
Managing Mastodon Storage – FediHost
Lemmy biweekly development update.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

Subscribe to our newsletter!

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-105/

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.c Social platforms are not, and ...

2025-02-20T19:55:18Z

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.c

Social platforms are not, and can not, be neutral in a context authoritarianism, and Bluesky cannot avoid this dynamic either. On a lighter note, many experiments with building image and video clients for Bluesky are ongoing, more insight in how ATProto can scale down, and more.Bluesky is political

The US continues its rapid decline into authoritarianism. Authoritarian states tend not to be particularly great fans of places where the opposition can gather and freely talk. American politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries or Illinois governor JB Pritzker all use the platform to put out messages explicitly against the US Government. Authoritarian states also tend to put great propaganda effort into being seen and understood as representing “the people”. In that context it stands out to me how high-profile Americans like Mark Cuban present Bluesky as being an “app of the people“. It shows the value that Bluesky has, but also how the network is quickly becoming a relevant political actor. Considering this context it remains prudent to keep the possibility in mind that Trump and Musk might crack down on social networks such as Bluesky, and prepare for such situations accordingly.

Free Our Feeds shared a first update on their project to build independent ATProto infrastructure. The organisation says that their first priority is getting an independent archival relay up and running in Europe. For this, they are targeting a 4 million USD fund raise over the next 8 weeks. Currently, Free Our Feeds has raised almost 100k USD. The big question here seems to be if large institutions have an appetite for bigger donations.

Personally, I think the challenge here is that only having an ATProto relay that is not under US jurisdiction is a good step in the right direction, but not sufficient to make the Bluesky network resilient against US government interference. For that, the Bluesky app (AppView, in ATProto terms) needs to be in a different place as well. And running a different app on ATProto means doing content moderation, which is both expensive and the type of nitty-gritty work that is harder to get funding for.

Speaking of funding for content moderation: the Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative is a new collaborative effort by various large tech companies to build open source moderation tools. Bluesky is partnering with Roost by co-developing various modular tools. Smaller social media organisations often lack the tools needed to do proper content moderation at scale, and Roost is aimed at helping that by making these tools open source and available for everyone. The organisation is also thinking about how they can help Bluesky third-party labelers with their tools. Still, the announcement led to quite some outrage in the community, which is strongly tied to people’s distrust of AI tools, as well as earlier grievances regarding Bluesky’s moderation choices. While the outrage had little connection to what the collaboration between ROOST and Bluesky actually entails, it does provide a good indication of why content moderation can be a barrier to build other products on ATProto.The Media apps

Some updates from the various image and video Bluesky clients that people are building:
TechCrunch covered various apps that are building Instagram competitors: Flashes, Pinksy and Skygram, as well as the ActivityPub-based Pixelfed.
Flashes is taking some steps towards building their own Lexicon with a new portfolio feature, which allows people to select some of the images they have posted on Bluesky to be highlighted as their portfolio. Flashes is currently available for beta testing, with the release planned on February 25.
Flashes developer Sebastian Vogelsang said that the main reason why Flashes is a client for Bluesky, and not a standalone ATProto app with it’s own Lexicon, is that this means having to do your own moderation. This is a problem that all other apps that are build on ATProto face: doing moderation is the hardest and most expensive part of building a standalone product.
Flashes is currently only available on iOS, and Vogelsang said that making Flashes available on Android will only happen with either external funding or if subscriptions bring in enough funding.
Video app Skylight is struggling to the beta approved on the Google Play Store.
Pinksky is another Instagram-like app for Bluesky, and it is now available on Android. TechCrunch has taken a closer look at Pinksky as well.
Gridsky is a new web client for Bluesky that aims to bring “the Instagram experience to Bluesky”, with both a design of the feed as well as user profile that is similar to that of Instagram.
Upcoming ATProto video app Reelo (previously also known as Tik and Flicky) has renamed itself to Spark. Spark is the only media app for ATProto that takes a different direction by not leaning on Bluesky, instead building its own Lexicon. This allows spark to build new features such as a music and audio library for videos. Spark will not only show videos, but images as well, as seen on a preview. Spark has set itself up as a Public Benefit Company as well, and plans to launch late March.In Other News

For the people who are interesting the technical side of Bluesky and ATProto, I highly recommend reading this blog about how ATProto and Bluesky can scale down. For the non-technical people, the short of it is that it shows that Bluesky can indeed be self-hosted for a low cost. It shows that the cost of running the Bluesky AppView is in that 31 million people use the AppView, and that the cost is not in processing the data that these 31 million accounts generate. This is done by building a new separate component in the ATProto infrastructure, that creates an index of all links on the entire network. This database can be used by others as well, making the entire network more modular.

Cred.blue is a newly launched project that generates Bluesky credibility scores. It looks at the public data footprint of ATProto accounts to “establish their credibility and authority”. It looks at a variety of factors, such as alt-text usage, if accounts use more of ATProto than just Bluesky, activity, profile completeness and more. Ranking people on credibility scores is a sensitive subject, and not something that everyone agrees with. Cred.blue describes itself as “one experiment among many that is attempting to help people understand which social media accounts are more (or less) trustworthy.”

Bluesky has made some more updates to their app, including the ability to limit replies to people who follow you. The new setting can also be combined with the (already present) option to limit replies to people who you follow to limit replies to only mutuals. There is also a new developer mode setting, which gives some extra options related to ATProto, such as easily copying someone’s DID.

Bluesky is now using Crowdin for translations for the app. Crowdin is a platform for apps to manage translations, which allows other people to contribute with translations as well.

Some American sports news: the NBA and MLB have set up official accounts on Bluesky, although they have not started posting yet. This is in contrast with the NFL, where NFL teams are not allowed to have a Bluesky account because it is not an “approved platform”. Fans are now suing the NFL for not allowing teams to have a Bluesky account.

ATmosphereConf, the volunteer conference about Bluesky and ATProto, has shared more information about some of the talks Bluesky members will give. CTO Paul Frazee will talk about Bluesky’s history and future, Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren about the principles underlying ATProto. The conference will be held on March 22nd and 23rd in Seattle, USA. The conference is also looking for people to make designs for swag for the conference.

Dazzle is a new site for trending topics on Bluesky, using their own algorithms separate from Bluesky’s trending topics. It shows various trending topics, sorted into some 20+ categories, with a short AI-generated summary and some of the more popular posts the trending topic it is based on.In the media
Bluesky’s Emily Liu on rethinking social media (and why it’s time to chime in) – Kristina Bravo/Mozilla
What Makes Bluesky the New ‘It’ Space for Urbanists – Planning Magazine
The Fork Around and Find Out podcast talked with Bluesky engineer Jaz about what it’s like to scale Bluesky from 100k users to >30M.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-bluesky-2025feb-c/

Fediverse Report – #104 Mastodon has announced it will add ...

2025-02-18T18:41:02Z

Fediverse Report – #104

Mastodon has announced it will add quote posts to the platform, and some more news.The News

Mastodon has announced it is adding quote posts to the platform, a long-awaited feature. Mastodon got a grant by NLnet in 2024 to add quote posts, and they are now sharing an update on their work. Mastodon is adding a variety of features to quote posts, such as giving people the ability to opt out of being quote posted. They will publish the technical work to support quote posts as Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, and Mastodon is currently in the process of writing these proposals. The organisation does not say when quote posts will be added, only noting that it ‘will still take more time to develop.’

For a long time, Mastodon had not implemented quote posts because CEO Eugen Rochko saw them as bad. His main concern is that quote posts lead to ‘dunking’ and toxic behaviour. Dunking refers to the behaviour where people use quote posts to ‘dunk’ on other people’s post, often with the intent that this mocking will lead to their followers to also mock and harass the original poster. Dunking was a visible part of Twitter’s culture, and in popular belief dunking and toxicity became linked together. Research showed a more complicated picture. Hilda Bastian analysed over 30 studies on quote tweeting, and concludes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs [quote Tweets] increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.“

In 2023 Mastodon changed their opinion, and first started saying that the organisation was open to implementing quote posts. Still, toxic behaviour via dunking continued to be a main concern. This is visible in the accompanying design research that Mastodon has done in their work on quote posts. Mastodon’s view seems to be that quote posts are toxic at it’s core, saying that “the team started out with a shared view that Quote Posts can be misused.”

Mastodon takes a technical approach to dealing to the purported problem of toxicity of quote posts, and the blog posts lists three features to mitigate it: people can choose if their posts are able to be quoted, people get notified if they are quoted, and there will be the ability to withdraw your post from the quoted context. Bluesky also has these features for quote posts, and they’re generally received well. What I find missing here is a take by Mastodon on the effect of these features on Bluesky. Mastodon sees quote posts as being dangerous, and that is why they will implement some features to mitigate the risk. But do they think that quote posts are being used well on Bluesky? Is Bluesky’s behaviour and culture around quote posts something that Mastodon is striving towards? I’m not clear to me what Mastodon’s answer is here.

Mastodon’s design research also says that they will display quotes in a different way to ‘steer away from dunk culture”‘, a feature not mentioned in Mastodon’s announcement blog post. Mastodon is planning to display a quote post by first showing the quote, and showing the reply below it. This is similar to how Tumblr does quote posts. But it differs from how all other platforms that interoperate with Mastodon display quote posts: fediverse native platforms like Misskey, Akkoma and Streams, as well as connected networks like Bluesky and Threads, all display quote posts by showing the reply at the top, and the quoted post below.

Mastodon’s position is that quote posts are a risky feature invite misuse, and thus need a variety of safety features. But Mastodon is not an isolated platform, it is connected to various other platforms that all have their own ideas about quote posts. If displaying quote posts Tumblr-style (quote above, comment below) is preferred over displaying them Twitter-style (comment above, quote below), what is the expectation on how other platforms should interact with Mastodon quotes? Is Misskey expected to display Mastodon’s quote post differently? Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning to display quotes that originate from Misskey not in the way that Misskey does (Twitter-style), but in their own manner (Tumblr-style), saying that it has “very little impact on the semantics”.

I find these statements hard to square: on the one hand, Mastodon says it how quote posts are displayed has little impact on the semantics of a post, but at the same time it is assumed to have enough of an impact in that it can reduce “dunking culture”. But if the manner a quote post is displayed can impact people’s behaviour, it automatically follows that the manner a quote post is displayed impacts its semantics, as otherwise there would be no impact on people’s behaviour either. But if the semantics of a post are altered by using a different display method for quote posts, than it means that Mastodon is taking an active decision to alter the semantics of posts made on other networks like Misskey and Bluesky.

Mastodon’s choice to use a different way of displaying quote posts than the other platforms in their network opens up a new interesting avenue for federated diplomacy. We’ve seen both ways of displaying quote posts be successful, the way posts are quoted is a significant part of how conversations flow on Tumblr. But what is new here is Mastodon is part of a federated network, and that means that their decisions impact other players, and their decisions have impact on Mastodon as well. This interaction between different display types of quote posts is something we have not really seen before, leading to some interesting new types of negotiations: how Mastodon expect Misskey to display Mastodon quote posts on Misskey? How does Threads feel about having their quote posts being displayed differently on Mastodon? What is the expected behaviour of Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects Bluesky with Mastodon? All those questions are still open, and I’m curious what the answer will turn out to be.

Tumblr is still planning to join the fediverse. I reported this recently, and now TechCrunch got a followup and a confirmation from Automattic, saying that ‘Automattic declined to share a time frame as to when the migration would be complete, given its scale, but a rep for the company called the progress so far “exciting.”’

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has announced they are now a formal member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C tends to favour institutional membership, but the W3C Social Community Group that concerns itself with ActivityPub is open to everyone. The SWF is working on various improvements to ActivityPub, such as adding end-to-end encryption and supporting data portability.

Event Federation is a WordPress plugin that extends the ActivityPub support plugin for WordPress by adding support for WordPress events. The plugin is now officially released as a 1.0 version.

Hexbear is a controversial Lemmy server that let domain expire. The Hexbear domain is now for sale, and an avid bidding war has driven up the price for the domain to over 2300 dollar at time of writing.

ForgeFed is an ActivityPub extension that adds federation support to software forges such as Forgejo. It has gotten a new NLnet grant, with the project now focusing on user research and documentation.

A few weeks ago, Fedidb removed fediverse platfrom GoToSocial from the database after refusing to honor robots.txt, and the GoToSocial developer spoofed data as retaliation. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault later decided to properly add support for robots.txt, but stopped crawling for the entire fediverse in the meantime while it was implemented. Supernault now confirms that Fedidb honors robots.txt and has added GoToSocial back to the data set.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has set up their own Mastodon server for all community members, including students. The Links
An experiment with social media handles – Doctor Popular
Micro Social is a new third-party app for Micro.Blog
A podcast by The Conversation about how decentralised social media platforms work, interviewing Robert Gehl
Five Confusing Fediverse Things – FediHost Podcast
ActivityPods shared their presentation from FOSDEM, about how the project compares to ATProto and their work with NextGraph.
Another FOSDEM presentation that was uploaded recently was by Davide Eynard, about ‘Building your own Timeline Algorithm’.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform – Alex Kirk

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-104/

Last Week in Fediverse #103 This week I’m zooming in on the ...

2025-02-11T18:28:35Z

Last Week in Fediverse #103

This week I’m zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they’ll run out of funding soon, indicating the challenges with funding Trust & Safety in the network.On bridging and fediverse culture

Erin Kissane wrote an excellent article this week, about ‘bridging’ (connecting separate networks), fediverse culture, and why this regularly leads to drama and blowups. Kissane gives three explanations as to why this type of drama keeps happening, of which I want to highlight one: ‘Conflicting models of what the fediverse “really” is’. Kissane focuses on two different cultures on the fediverse regarding how connections between different places on the fediverse should be made, and how they should deal with consent.

I agree with Kissane’s observation, both that these competing models exist, as well as that a lack of acceptance that there are different models leads to conflict. Just last week I wrote about two separate cases of drama between various people about fediverse software that deals with these conflicting models on what the fediverse really is. In general I think that it is highly important to have a good understanding of what the fediverse truly is, and not only what people want the fediverse to be.

This Sunday was the NFL Superbowl, with the halftime show by Kendrick Lamar. Lamar made some powerful visual statements in his show, such as a flag of America that consists entirely of Black men. Browsing both the fediverse and Bluesky this Monday morning served as a good indication of how different the cultures of these two networks are.

On Bluesky, 20 of the most liked 25 posts of the entire network 1 discussed the Superbowl, and of those 20, 12 were specifically about Lamar’s halftime show. Shortly after the end of the show, network traffic spiked to almost double the traffic for a short period as people logged in to talk about the show.

On the fediverse, I had a hard time finding any posts discussing the Superbowl. I saw one post on the trending page of mastodon.social. Browsing through all posts made with the hashtag #superbowl gave me more than five times as much superb pictures of owls as it gave me posts about the halftime show.2 There is a long tradition of posting pictures of owls with the tag SuperbOwl, that far predates the fediverse.

It shows two social networks with very different cultures: one as a place to discuss mainstream cultural events, and one as a place for counterculture and the subversion of mainstream culture. I do not think this difference is an anomaly either, in general I see significantly less conversations about pop culture on the fediverse. This specific example with the Superbowl halftime show is just a clear example of a larger trend

To be clear here: this is not a criticism of the fediverse, nor is it a call for the fediverse to change and suddenly start posting about Lamar. The reason I’m highlighting these difference is to show what the fediverse actually is. There is a significant group of people that have an interest in the fediverse for the potential that it can be. This group frames the fediverse as an alternative to platforms like X, as a way to build social media platforms that are welcoming for everybody. This is a laudable goal to strive for. The ongoing coup in the US illustrates the urgent need for social platforms that are not owned by the oligarchy. But I also think that working towards such goals requires a good understanding what the fediverse currently actually is.

That is why I’m placing this observation in the context of Kissane’s post, who notes that people having ‘conflicting model of what the fediverse “really” is’ leads to conflict, and hampers potential for change in the fediverse. To me, how the fediverse responded to the Superbowl is a good illustration of the current culture of the network. What the fediverse currently is, is a countercultural network with little interest in mainstream pop culture. This is an absolutely fine identity to have! But for the people who are working to bringing the fediverse into the mainstream, it is important to realise that this countercultural identity clashes with with bringing a mainstream cultural identity to the fediverse. The News

IFTAS has announced that they are running out of funding, and that barring new funding sources that will come through this month, the organisation will have to scale down their activities significantly. IFTAS says that they are currently focused on getting funding for their Content Classification Service (CCS). CCS is an opt-in system which helps fediverse server admins with CSAM detection and reporting. Running a social networking server comes with a fair amount of requirements regarding reporting CSAM, which are difficult to do for fediverse admins. CCS is intended to help with that, but IFTAS describes it as an “a ridiculously expensive undertaking, far beyond what the community can support with individual donations”. If IFTAS cannot secure funding by the end of the month, they will have to suspend the operation of CCS and its CSAM detection service. Other work that IFTAS will have to halt if no funding comes through is giving policy guidance, like their recent work for server admins on how to navigate the new UK Online Safety Act.

Funding Trust & Safety has been a major challenge for the fediverse. Recently, Mastodon tried a fundraiser for a new Trust & Safety lead, where Mastodon only managed to raise 13k of the aimed 75k. It is a concerning situation for the fediverse. One of the selling points of the network is that it can be a safer place for vulnerable people. But it turns out that actually funding the work that can make the fediverse a safer place is a lot harder than it should be.

Tapestry is a new iOS app by Iconfactory, who once made the popular Twitter client Twitterific. Tapestry is a combination of a news reader and a social media site. It allows you to combine many feeds into a single timeline. Tapestry supports social feeds like Mastodon, Bluesky and Tumblr, as well as RSS, YouTube, and more. The app was funded via Kickstarter last year. In a review, David Pierce from The Verge describes Tapestry as a ‘timeline app’, in a similar category as apps like feeeed and Surf. In his review, Pierce describes how timeline apps are about consuming information and new in a different way, and help manage the information overload that social media feeds present us with. I think that is also why I find these types of apps interesting, as they also frame the fediverse in a different way. Most popular fediverse software like Mastodon and Pixelfed are wired around social interaction. However, they follow the same patterns as the Twitters and Instagrams that came before, and over the last 15 years society has reshaped itself so that platforms like Twitter became not only used for talking, but also as a way to distribute news. So far, the fediverse is repeating this structure; Mastodon is used both for organisations that just want to send out a link to their news article as well as for people to chat with their friends. Timeline apps like Tapestry help split out these use cases, and allow people to take one part of the interaction pattern of Mastodon (following news and updates) without the other pattern (chatting with friends). The Links

Some more videos of fediverse presentations that happened at FOSDEM last week were published online:
Fediscovery – Improving Search and Discovery on the Fediverse – David Roetzel (Mastodon)
Castopod & Web Monetization on the Social Web – Benjamin Bellamy (Castopod) & Jeremiah Lee (Web Monetization)
Presenting ActivityBot at FOSDEM – Terence Eden
Fediverse Fighters – The Role of Public Institutions – Melanie Bartos

The Brazilian Institute for Museums, a Brazilian government agency, is hiring two people to expand their integration with ActivityPub.

Flipboard has published more information and a schedule for Fediverse House, a conference about the social web. It will be held in Austin, Texas, on Sunday March 9th and Monday March 10th.

And some more links:
Trunk & Tidbits, January 2025, Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update.
A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship – Robert W. Gehl
Pixelfed Crowdfunds More Open Source Social Alternatives for the Fediverse – David Cassel/The New Stack
Release candidate 0.18 for GoToSocial with a wide variety of new features.
Lemmy is working towards a 1.0 release with breaking changes in their API.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!I checked at 6am PST, and looked at the past 12 hours. ↩︎Also checked on 6am PST, and checked all posts made with that hashtag as visible from the mastodon.social server. I saw 61 pictures of owls, and less than 10 pictures by non-automated accounts of the show by Lamar. I’m saying less then 10 here because there were some automated bot accounts in there who mirror posts from news websites. Due to the size difference in userbase between Bluesky and Mastodon I’m less interested in the absolute numbers as in the relative difference between them. ↩︎

#superbowl

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-103/

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.a Bluesky’s public launch was ...

2025-02-07T14:52:48Z

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.a

Bluesky’s public launch was one year ago today, and here you can see how the network has grown and changed over this first year. In that year, Bluesky has managed to find a serious role in the larger media ecosystem. The media ecosystem itself has shifted rapidly as well: outlets like Wired and 404 Media, and independent reporters like Marisa Kabas and Nathan Tankus at the forefront of reporting what is happening in the US. I do not think it is an accident that they are all active on Bluesky

Note: I’ve been sick for the past few days, so this edition is a bit shorter and a day late, apologies. Next week’s edition will be focused again on the more technical side of AT Protocol (ATProto).Credible exit

One of the core concepts why Bluesky is build on the open ATProto is to give users ‘credible exit’. The Bluesky company (Bluesky PBC) is mindful of how companies turn bad over time, and CTO Paul Frazee explicitly talks about how he sees his own company as a ‘future adversary‘. The idea is that in a future where Bluesky has become an adversary to its users, people can have a ‘credible exit’ away from Bluesky towards another microblogging app. People can take their digital identity (the DID, in ATProto terms), social graph and posts with them, and seamlessly continue microblogging on ATProto using another app. Such another competitor microblogging app on ATProto currently does not exist, and an important factor in that is the incentives to build such an app currently are not there. Bluesky is currently not an adversary, has a well-designed app and some significant funding, and it is hard to compete with that. Still, the assumption made by Bluesky PBC is that over the years, Bluesky PBC will gradually turn ‘bad’ in some way, and at some point the incentives are such that another company will build a microblogging competitor on ATProto, and people will have the option to have a credible exit.

The ongoing coup in America changes the dynamic however. Autocratic regimes are not particularly compatible with platforms that allow for free speech by people that oppose the regime. This creates a possibility that either the Musk or the US government will force Bluesky to censor speech or ban accounts that they don’t like, or that either party will come after Bluesky directly. Musk has called Bluesky ‘pedosky’ multiple times, indicating his feelings of contempt for the network that rivals his X platform. Such actions would likely be wildly illegal and should be fought in court, but in a world where an unelected private citizen can decide to shut down entire US government departments, it is prudent to account for the possibility that other illegal stuff might happen as well.

This new political environment changes the understanding of Bluesky having a credible exit as well. So far, Bluesky PBC frames credible exit as a way for people to move to a different app on the same network when the company becomes an ‘adversary’. But in the current political climate, it might just be that the US government becomes an adversary which prompts a need for a credible exit.Bluesky clients

Bluescreen is the latest video app for Bluesky, made by the creator of the popular Bluesky client Skeets. It is similar to apps like Skylight and Videos for Bluesky, all three apps provide a TikTok-like interface to watch videos that are posted on Bluesky. Over at TechCrunch, Sarah Perez wrote an overview of all the video apps for ATProto that are currently being developed.

Now that I’ve gotten to play around with all three video apps for Bluesky, I am not convinced that Bluesky video clients are the way forward to build a ‘TikTok for Bluesky’. Bluesky’s recent update for video feeds have turned the official Bluesky app into a suitable video client as well, and I find that the video watching experience on the official Bluesky app is better than on any of these three apps. Part of it is that the competitor client apps are all still early in development, and this may change over time. But more importantly, videos on Bluesky get posted in an environment where there are lots of non-video content as well. If I watch a video on Bluesky and I want to see that account’s profile, I’m want to be able to see all of their posts, not just their videos. I can do this with the official Bluesky app, but not with any of the Bluesky video-focused clients.

There are now multiple image-focused Bluesky clients as well. Pinksky was recently released with an interface that is heavily inspired by Instagram. Bluescreen also now has a Bluesky client specifically for photo-sharing, Flashes, that entered open beta this week. Atlas is a Bluesky client for images that has collections similar to Pinboard. These image-focused Bluesky clients all bring something to the table that the official Bluesky client does not have, by restructuring the interface around images. But just with video, I’m wondering if it is enough to build a steady user base.The Links
Two RSS readers added Bluesky support this week: Feedly and Inoreader.
handles.net allows for large-scale managing of Bluesky handles, similar to other services like Aviary.
Another way to add bookmarks to Bluesky, this time with a separate app.
Automating a dynamic avatar for Bluesky.
Bluesky is now also using labelers for more casual use-cases, advertising a labeler for people to support their team during the Super Bowl.

In the media:
Bluesky’s science takeover: 70% of Nature poll respondents use platform – Celeste Biever/Nature
Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch
Seizing social media for the people – Kate Lindsay/Embedded
Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness – Mike Masnick/Techdirt
Selling followers where the skies are blue – Conspirador Norteno/Conspirator0
Bluesky’s AT Protocol is the real “everything app” – Scott Polhemus

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-bluesky-2025feb-a/

ATProto Explained – Lexicons and video With the US news around ...

2025-01-22T20:48:59Z

ATProto Explained – Lexicons and video

With the US news around TikTok, Bluesky and AT Protocol (ATProto) has seen a surge in interest in building video apps on Bluesky and ATProto. We’re seeing two different approaches: projects that build an app to display video’s posted on Bluesky (such as Skylight), and projects that are building their own video platform (such as reelo). The difference between these two approaches gets expressed by people asking the question: “does the project have their own Lexicon?”

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote this deep dive explaining how Lexicons are part of ATProto, and what they do. Lexicons are a part of the protocol that are not widely known, but their presence has major impact on how people experience the network. Specifically, Lexicons explain the major difference between two different approaches people are taking to build video apps on ATProto. Here is the deep dive, slightly edited, and expanded upon at the end to further explain their impact on how people are building video apps.

On a high level: Lexicons are the part of ATProto that specify how an ‘object’ on ATProto works. For example, the Lexicon for a Bluesky posts specifies that it has to be contain text, that it might contain an image. Technically that makes Lexicons about data structures, but it also makes Lexicons about power: defining how an object work can have big impact on many people and projects.

To explain what Lexicons work, first a simplified explanation of ATProto. There are two core parts: A Personal Data Server (PDS) which contains all your data, and AppViews, apps/sites that take all public data and display it in a useful way.

A PDS can contain any sort of data. It can contain a microblogging post from bsky.app, and it also can contain a recipe from recipe.exchange. The dream of ATProto is that someone else can build their own microblogging platform on ATProto, and reuse the same data and social graph by using the data that is already on the PDS.

If someone were to build another microblogging app on ATProto, lets call it GreenField, they would look at the data in the PDS, and see that Bluesky already has formatted the data related to Bluesky in a specific way. You can see what that looks like in reality here by using PDSls. The GreenField app wants to display a post made by someone on Bluesky, so it would look at the data that is formatted under app.feed.bsky.post. This is a Lexicon, created by Bluesky PBC, and Bluesky PBC has determined that post made by with the Bluesky app all follow the format that is specified by app.feed.bsky.post.

So far so good, you open the GreenField app, log in with your ATProto (aka Bluesky) account, and you see the posts made by your friends. Now you want to make a post yourself using the GreenField app. This is where GreenField will have to make some interesting decisions. GreenField can store this post as a app.field.bsky.post in your PDS. People who are on the Bluesky app can now see the post you’ve made using the GreenField app, great. But what if the GreenField app wanted to do a few things differently from Bluesky? For example, what if GreenField decided they wanted to set a character limit of 500 characters on their posts? app.feed.bsky.post has a limit of 300 characters (defined here, line 16), so if the GreenField app would store a post with 500 characters under app.feed.bsky.post on your PDS, the post would not be visible to people in the Bluesky app. GreenField could also decide to make their own Lexicon, app.feed.greenfield.post, and define the character limit of the Lexicon to be 500 instead. But the Bluesky app only displays posts with the app.feed.bsky.post Lexicon, and not posts with app.feed.greenfield.post. So the post would also not be visible on Bluesky.

This example shows the power of Lexicons, and who gets to determine the specifications of a Lexicon. Anyone can create a Lexicon, which results in a system where the Lexicons that have the most users have the most power. Bluesky determined that their microblogging posts have a maximum of 300 characters. Anyone else can create their own Lexicon that sets a different character limit, but the soft power of 910 million posts that are already using the Lexicon that sets a 300 character limit is incredibly strong.

This is a long explanation of what seems like a technical detail, but worth knowing: decisions made via Lexicons can have powerful and long-lasting impact on the entire community, and I think it is important that decisions made here are not only left up to a few enthousiastic developers.

An example of the impact of Lexicons: There are now three different ATProto apps for sharing text snippets, effectively Pastebin clones: atpaste, plonk.li and Pastesphere. The three apps have similar features and purpose. But they all use different Lexicons. This makes these apps not interoperable with each other, and if one of the apps shuts down, it means you cannot access the text snippets that you’ve made with that app with any of the other apps.

It is the same with the review sites (reviews made with Skylights are not interoperable with Bookhive), the recipes sites (A recipe on recipe.exchange is not visible on recipes.blue). These apps could be interoperable if they agreed on either a common Lexicon, or supported each other’s Lexicon’s. But the apps were build at the same time when they were not aware yet often of each’s other’s existence, had different requirements, or just simply like doing their own thing.

A way to deal with the non-interoperability of Lexicons is with Lexicon.community, an community-organised project by independent ATProto developers to come to a set of standardised Lexicons that developers can use. The project got set up in the last month, and the first community defined Lexicons are now getting formalised. The benefit of using a generic community Lexicon for other app developers is that they automatically get interoperability, as well as a standardised Lexicon that is still extendable for customised additional features that are specific to that app.

We now have some better perspective to explain the difference between the approaches an app like Skylight takes, which uses the Bluesky Lexicons, and an app like reelo, which is creating it’s own Lexicons:

Skylight uses Bluesky’s Lexicon for videos. That means videos that are shown on Skylight will have to follow the definitions set by Bluesky, such as video length being limited to 1 minute. It also means Skylight gets to use Bluesky’s infrastructure for moderation, and does not have to set up their own moderation infrastructure. Videos posted with Skylight will also be automatically visible from Bluesky.

Reelo is creating their own Lexicon for videos. This gives them the flexibility to add other features to their videos that Bluesky does not support. It also means that they will have to provide their own moderation infrastructure for moderating the videos posted with reelo. This makes using your own Lexicon significantly more involved.

Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages: Skylight’s approach is easier and cheaper, but makes the project dependent on another party. Reelo’s approach is more involved, takes more effort and risk, but does give reelo control to build their own independent platform.

Thank you for reading. I write a weekly newsletter about Bluesky and the ATmosphere. To follow along you can follow me on Bluesky or subscribe to receive a weekly email update in your mailbox:

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atproto-explained-lexicons-and-video/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 94 Keeping up with links shared on ...

2024-11-26T18:29:20Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 94

Keeping up with links shared on your feeds with Sill, a new open protocol with Leaf, and PeerTube is starting to test their mobile app. The News

Sill is a new app that aggregates the most popular links that are posted in your network. Sill connects to both your Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and gives a combined overview of all the networks, as well as the option to filter the links. It not only shows you the links, but also shows you what people you follow have posted about these links, and sends you a daily email update. Creator Tyler Fisher describes Sill as an open-source passion project, and says he wants to make it sustainable, and is thus thinking about potential ways to make revenue. Fisher also says that he is ‘committed to always keeping the basic Sill web client free’.

The Leaf Protocol is a newcomer in the space of decentralised protocols, a peer-to-peer federation protocol. The Leaf protocol is working towards what they call an ‘agentic fediverse’. The Leaf Protocol is developed in tandem with the product named Weird, which provides people with a simple homepage on the internet. Underneath this website is Leaf, which provides the possibility of federation with other versions of Weird, as well as other potential products. The team has written here on how Leaf compares to ActivityPub and ATProto, as well as about capabilities and identity to see how it holds up to Christine Lemmer-Webber’s ‘recipe for making the “Correct Fediverse IMO (TM)”‘.

One of PeerTubes main goals for 2024 is to release a mobile app. PeerTube has now started testing the first versions of the app, available for both Android and iOS. They note that the app is still under active development, with some features missing.

Ghost’s latest update on their work on implementing ActivityPub shows that they are working on two different types of readers: an inbox for long-form content, and a feed for short-form.The Links
A new way to describe the Fediverse and its opposition to Big Tech – Elena Rossini.
Key Transparency and the Right to be Forgotten – Soatek, as part of their series on E2EE in the fediverse.
How I started my GoToSocial instance in the Fediverse.
Loopless.app is a third-party Android app for short-form video platform Loops.video.
This blog is now federated natively to lemmy – db0.
Raccoon for Friendica is a new mobile Android app for Friendica and Mastodon.
This week is Support Week for ActivityPub for WordPress.
Discord is working on profile connections for Mastodon and Bluesky.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
ActivityPub Discovery is a new (draft) report by the SocialCG Discovery Task Force.
‘I spent the last year working on the Fediverse. Here’s what I’ve learned.’
OpenVibe’s latest update supports for tagging users on multiple platforms.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-94/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 93 Even on the fediverse is Bluesky ...

2024-11-19T17:33:56Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 93

Even on the fediverse is Bluesky currently the main topic of conversation, and some other smaller news as well.The News

Bluesky is having a major moment in the spotlight right now, which is also impacting the fediverse. It is a major source of conversation on the feeds, as it asks people to reflect on what exactly they want out of social media. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko shared that Mastodon also sees some impact of people looking to leave X, with a 27% increase in monthly signups. With a total of 90k new signups this month, that amounts to ~20k new users that might potentially be attributed to the changing environments at X. Statistics on fedidb indicate that monthly active users for Mastodon grew by around 50k in the last month. In Japan, Misskey seems to be a popular destination according to a survey, but it’s hard to know how this translates to numbers as Misskey statistics have been unreliable for a while now.

Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which allows you to easily follow many people around a certain theme, are especially a source of conversation, and there are multiple attempts at bringing various forms of Starter Packs to the fediverse as well. Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault is releasing ActivityPub Starter Kits ‘soon’, the documentation is available here.

Sub.club keeps expanding their offering, and with their latest update you can turn the RSS feed of your website into an ActivityPub feed with a paywall.

The latest update for the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress now gives you a ‘fediverse preview’ option, which shows you what your WordPress post will look like viewed from the fediverse.

The popularity of Bluesky has led Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault to ask the community whether Pixelfed should add support for Bluesky, but he decided against it after significant pushback from the community.

Threads has made another marginal update to their ActivityPub implementation, and it’s another one for the list of ‘how did they not do that already with the previous update?’.

Trouble in Paradise? Understanding Mastodon Admin’s Motivations, Experiences, and Challenges Running Decentralised Social Media – an academic paper that interviewed 16 instance admins and describes their experiences. Short write-up of the paper here.

A proposal for a Public Key Directory server as a first step towards E2EE encryption on ActivityPub. I’m not a cryptography expert at all, but I’m personally curious how this differs from ATProto’s PLC.Directory.

Sharkey is announcing some major security vulnerability patches that affects all *key software.

The Mastodon team will have a stand at the Social Web Devroom on FOSSDEM. You can still submit proposals until December 1st.The Links
First Look: Loops, by Pixelfed – WeDistribute.
Fedi Moderation Tooling Research.
Mastodon & OpenTelemetry.
Trunks & Tidbits for October 2024, the monthly update from the Mastodon engineering series.
Loops has added share links.
Lemmy development update.
A short update on the Hubzilla Association.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
My Thoughts on GoToSocial – James Ashford
Vivaldi’s podcast ‘For a Better Web’ interviewed Evan Prodromou.
The weekly update for Ghost on their ActivityPub implementation.
Flipboard is promoting the fediverse on TikTok.
Resources for choosing the right fediverse instance – and I’m not just talking about Mastodon (DRAFT) – The Nexus of Privacy.
The ‘Do the Woo’ podcast has two episodes about WordPress and the fediverse.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-93/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 91 Loops has finally launched, ...

2024-11-05T18:10:59Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 91

Loops has finally launched, Radio Free Fedi will shut down, and governance for Bridgy Fed.The News

Loops.video, the short-form video platform has finally launched, after weeks of delays. There is now an iOS app on TestFlight available, as well as an Android APK, and it there is no waitlist anymore. In some statistics shared by Loops developed Daniel Supernault, Loops now has more than 8000 people signed up and close to a 1000 videos posted. The app has the bare minimum of features, with only one feed that seems to be algorithmic, and there is no following feed. Supernault says that he is currently working on adding discovery features as well as notifications to the app. The app currently loads videos smoothly and quickly, and Supernault has already had to upgrade the server to deal with traffic. Loops is currently not federating with the rest of the fediverse, and you cannot interact with Loops from another fediverse account. This feature is planned, but there is no estimation when this will happen. Third party clients are already possible with Loops, and one is already available.

Radio Free Fedi has announced that it will shut down in January 2025. Radio Free Fedi is a radio station and community that broadcasts music by people on the fediverse. The project has grown from a simple stream into multiple non-stop radio streams, a specialty channel and a channel for spoken word, and build up a catalogue of over 400 artists who’s art are broadcast on the radio. Running a project requires a large amount of work, and was largely done by one person. They say that this is not sustainable anymore, and that the way that the project is structured make handing the project over to someone else not an option. Radio Free Fedi has been a big part of the artist’s community on the fediverse, which has contributed to a culture of celebrating independent art, and the sunset of Radio Free Fedi is a loss for fediverse culture.

In an update on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.

The Social Web Foundation will organise a Devroom at FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a yearly conference in Brussels for free and open source software, and will be on February 1-2, 2025. The Social Web Foundation is inviting people and projects to give talks about ActivityPub, in the format of either a talk of 25 minutes for bigger projects, or a lightning talk of 8 minutes.

OpenVibe is a client for Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr, and has now added support for cross-posting to Threads as well. OpenVibe also offers the ability to have a combined feed, that shows posts from your accounts on all the different networks into a single feed, which now can include your Threads account, as well as your Mastodon, Nostr and Bluesky accounts.

The shutdown of the botsin.space server lead to some new experiments with bots on the fediverse:
Ktistec is a single-user ActivityPub server that added support for bots in the form of scripts that the server itself periodically runs.
A super simple server scripts for bots.The Links
Fediblock, a Tiny History – Artist Marcia X.
A faux “Eternal September” turns into flatness – The Nexus of Privacy.
Fediverse Migrations: A Study of User Account Portability on the Mastodon Social Network – a paper for the Internet Measurement Conference.
IFTAS is collaborating with Bonfire on building moderation tools into the upcoming platform.
Another update on how traffic from different platforms compare to the German news site heise.de
Lemmy development update for the last two weeks.
An infographic and blog on how account recommendations work in Mastodon.
Ghost’s weekly update on their work on ActivityPug.
For Mastodon admins: a script to ‘restart delivery to instances that had some technical difficulties a while ago but are now back online’.
Letterbook is a social networking platform build from scratch, currently under development, and is holding office hours for maintainers.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-91/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 3 Chatting comes to ...

2024-10-16T18:21:13Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 3

Chatting comes to the ATmosphere with Picosky, X is unbanned in Brazil, and a significant group of Brazilians moved back, and a deeper dive into aviary.domains.Picosky

Picosky is a new chatting service build on top of atproto. Picosky was created by Juliet, and started as an experiment with building an simple chatting app on atproto, originally limited to just 12 characters per message. It was a demonstration of making an AppView for chatting on atproto that utilises the existing infrastructure of the network: You log in with your Bluesky/atproto account, messages are stored on your PDS, and the PicoSky AppView listens to all the messages on the Relay and displays them. The direct connection of your Bluesky account made it a fun place for atproto hackers to hang out, which expanded the scope of Picosky quickly to a serious project.

Over the last week or so Picosky has undergone rapid changes by the developers Juliet and Elainya: you can log in with OAuth, the character limit got increased multiple times, now at 2048, you can edit and delete your posts, and UI updates where it is now a clear and minimalist proper chat UI.

The simple structure of Picosky, and the way that it integrates with the atproto infrastrucuture, makes Picosky an attractive place to further build on by other developers: one of the first Picosky-compatible projects to make it available via IRC. This is a separate AppView, that reads the same posts as the Picosky AppView does, and that can fully interact (federate) with each other. Other projects in the works are an iOS client or one for the terminal.

Meanwhile, the Lexicon structure (which determines the format of the messages) has had a major update the other day: there is now support for creating separate rooms on Picosky. Anyone can create rooms, and the owner of the room can set moderation to be based on a deny-list or an allow-list. The frontend has not been updated yet to take advantage of this however, but I’m sure we’ll get back to Picosky next week.The News

It is now a week since X has been unbanned in Brazil, and a significant part of the Brazilian user base that joined Bluesky has gone back to X. Daily Active User count dropped by half, from 1.2M to 600k. This number was around 300k before the ban, indicating that a large number of Brazilians did stick around: Portuguese is still the most popular language of the platform; 45% of posts are in Portuguese, compared to 32% English posts. It shows that social networks are extremely sticky, and people have very high switching costs. In that context, Bluesky has done well with the number of Brazilian who stayed around after X became unbanned.

Bluesky is hiring, and they are looking for a Feed Algorithmics Engineer. The job is to “design and implement machine learning models to improve personalized content recommendations, spam detection, labeling, and more.” As the network grows, so do the challenges of providing algorithmic recommendations for feeds and spam detection.

Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.

Altmetric, which tracks online engagement with academic research, is looking for people that are willing to help with feedback sessions for their Bluesky attention tracking roll-out.

Bluesky has updated their app (v1.92), with some new features: you can now pin a post to your profile. There are also design improvements, including new font options. You can also now filter your searches by language.

TOKIMEKI, an alternative client for Bluesky, now supports showing your atproto-powered Linkat and WhiteWind profiles.

Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.

Frontpage, a link-aggregator platform build on atproto, is now open and available for everyone to use. The developers say that they’ll work on notifications first, and that decentralised and self-sovereign sub-communities are coming later.

For the protocol-people: what happens when there are clashing lexicon fields? Nick Gerakines publishes his thoughts on how the Lexicon system can evolve, with some additional thoughtsby Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold.Deep dive: Aviary.domains

Aviary.domains is a new service that helps managing domains for Bluesky and the ATmosphere, that recently launched in early access. Aviary makes it easy for people who have a domain name to share that domain name with other people as their handle.

To place Aviary in a larger context, a short explanation: It helps to understand as the central offering of the ATmosphere being a single digital identity. When you first sign up for Bluesky, two things happen:
You join the ATmosphere, by creating a digital identity (a DID) that works with all other products that are build on atproto.
You log in with this newly created identity into Bluesky, and use Bluesky with this digital identity.

This digital identity, a DID (Decentralized IDentifier) is a unique string of letters and numbers that can never change, which is good for computers because it is unique, but very unpractical for humans to use. That’s why you have a handle, which corresponds behind the scenes with your DID. The idea of atproto is to use a website domain name as your handle. You can always change your handle to a different handle if you want, as long as you have a website domain you can use. Most people do not have their own website domain, so when you first join the ATmosphere and your DID gets created, Bluesky also gives you one of their sub domains you can use: yourname.bsky.social.

The goal for Bluesky is that people use their website domains as their handle, as it gives an easy way to verify ownership: the owner of the website is also the owner of the account. One problem however, is that many people do not have their own website domain. This is both an opportunity for Bluesky (which now sells domain names to people), but also still a challenge: a significant group of people are simply not interested in paying money for what amounts to a better user name. Even if you have your own website domain, having to change DNS settings is still a technical barrier that is too high for a large group of people.

This is the part where Aviary.domains comes it, as it tries to find an audience for people who have a domain name, that they want to share with their community. It has created a system where an owner of a domain name can invite other people to use a version of that domain as their handle on Bluesky. So as the owner of laurenshof.online, I can log in with Aviary, and generate a subdomain for, lets say my cat. Aviary generates a link that my cat can click; they log in on Aviary with Bluesky’s OAuth, type in their name, press accept, and their handle is now changed, without them having to change settings.

What makes this different from projects like swifties.social, which also hand out subdomains for people to use as handles on Bluesky, is that it does not require the final step, changing settings in the app. It also gives the owner of the domain control over each subdomain, with the ability to subtract subdomains as well. This makes Aviary more useful for people who want to have more control over who identifies with the domain, and can show they are part of the community.The Links
A new FAQ for Blacksky.
A minimal OAuth browser client implementation for atproto.
Post to Bluesky with PHP.
Post to Bluesky with the date of the post set to any arbitrary date in the past.
Lexicon design techniques (in Japanese).
Introduction to the AT Protocol: Understanding the ideas behind the protocol (also in Japanese).
Audio spaces app Bluecast now can show your broadcasting history.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.

#atmosphere #bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-oct-24-week-3/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 60 The fediverse stays in the theme ...

2024-03-17T15:59:57Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 60

The fediverse stays in the theme of announcing projects that are a copy of a well-known platform, but with ActivityPub added to it. This week its a proof-of-concept of a federated version of Wikipedia, as well as the announcement that Dansup will now work on creating a Loops, a federated version of TikTok.The news

Lemmy developer Nutomic has announced Ibis, a federated wiki platform. Ibis is a proof-of-concept that allows anyone to run their own wiki, and connect them via ActivityPub. In the announcement post, Nutomic frames Ibis explicitly not just as any wiki, but as a Wikipedia alternative specifically, outlining some of the problems that he sees with the way that Wikipedia is run. Nutomic’s solution is for different places to host their own wiki, where articles and edits can be shared across different wiki instances via ActivityPub. The problems that Nutomic sees with Wikipedia are mainly regarding the moderation policies of Wikipedia and how they are executed. Ibis does not have any moderation tools yet, nor a vision of how moderation policies and privileges will be federated across different instances.

Commenters in the announcement post point out that Ibis might have a target audience with the Wikia/Fandom wikis, wikis for specific/niche topics that are heavily ad-driven. What personally surprised me is Ibis does not have any connection with Lemmy communities, in the same way that Reddit has wikis for subreddits. Nutomic says that Ibis in a very early stage of development, and will not be able to work on in it the near term as his daughter will soon be born, and hopes that other developers will help contribute to the project.

Pixelfed developer Dansup has announced that he is working on Loops, a new fediverse platform for sharing short videos. Dansup says that Loops is based on an old web UI for videos for Pixelfed that is getting repurposed into a new app. Not much other information is known about the project, expect that Dansup expects that the project will ship ‘soon’.

A paper on hashtag activism on Mastodon, titled ‘Showing your ass on Mastodon’. It is an autoethnographic narrative about how a fight about a hashtag used to show pictures of donkeys highlights issues with hashtag activism on decentralised social networks. The article is fun to read, and there is also a good commentary by Robert W. Gehl.

There is some tensions brewing below the surface at Lemmy. This blog by @db0 explains the issues and gives a good overview. The Beehaw community is actively thinking about moving away from Lemmy to a different fediverse platform, and with the upcoming platform Sublinks as well as Piefed there are now new intereresting options to choose from.

The San Francisco International Airport museum has joined the fediverse, and they have put some serious effort into the project. They published an extensive blog post explaining their thinking, and how this has been a long time in the making. The SFO museum had thought about years earlier about possibilities of making every museum object into a social media presence, either on Twitter or on FourSquare. Their fediverse presence starts calmer, with only a few accounts, build with their own custom code.The Links

Hatsu is a new self-hosted bridge that interacts with Fediverse on behalf of your static site.
Streams developer Mike Macgirvin has started work on adding Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub. Fediverse platform Streams already has Nomadic Identity, but Streams internally uses a different protocol to handle this.
Fedify is a fediverse server framework that’s currently in development. This week the creator showed a demo of what it can do.
Micro.blog leans into the Indieweb and adds blogrolls.
Mozilla has recently scaled down their involvement with the mozilla.social server, and now they have ditched the custom front-end based on Elk for their server.
Manyfold is a place to organise your 3d-printing files, is actively thinking about adding ActivityPub.
Piefed has added the ability to opt-out of search.
Owncast’s newletter for March.
Piefed showcases how their ’tile’ interface is a great way to browse memes on the treadiverse.
Social address instead of handle.
The Lemmy developer’s bi-weekly update.
A simple fediverse subscribe feature for static sites.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-60/

Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024 Welcome to the overview ...

2024-03-05T15:55:09Z

Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024

Welcome to the overview of all the news that has happened in the ATmosphere for February 2024. For those who don’t know me; I’m Laurens, and I write weekly updates about what happened in the fediverse. Last year I also started writing monthly updates summarising the news for Bluesky (here, here and here). I had to skip a few months due to time restrictions, but now I’m back with regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.

The main stories of this month is Bluesky dropping the invite code requirement, opening up the network for federation, and Bluesky’s appeal in Japan.Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere

Bluesky has opened up the network for federation, allowing people to host their own data. This means that now anyone can set up their own Personal Data Server (PDS) and connect to the main network. Bluesky frames the opening of the network in the context of website hosting, making a direct comparison between how anyone can host a website on the internet. By hosting a website, you are in control of your data, and move to a different hosting provider without any noticeable change for the visitors. Bluesky says that they “think social media should work the same way”; by hosting your own PDS you are in control of your own data, able to move to a different host, without your followers noticing anything.

The update Bluesky released this week is an early version, which changes coming later, with Bluesky saying:
The version of federation that we’re releasing today is intended for self-hosters. There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem. After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users. For a more technical overview of what we’re releasing today and how to participate, check out the developer blog.

In the announcement post, Bluesky also makes a comparison with Mastodon, and explains how some of the differences in the approaches: Bluesky focuses on a global conversation and a global network, which can be fine-tuned to individual preferences with composable feeds and composable moderation. This is in contrast with most fediverse implementations, where network view and moderation are dependent on the instance or server you are on. Bluesky also has full account portability, where you can keep your data and identity when you move to a different server. Over 260 people have since set up their own Personal Data Server.

Bluesky also crossed the 5 million account mark this week, gaining almost 2 million accounts in the last few weeks since the network dropped the invite code requirement. A significant part of this inflow comes from Japan, where Bluesky turns out to be hugely popular; Japanese is now the dominant language on the network. With this inflow the Bluesky network (colloquially also called the ATmosphere) has become more significantly active than the fediverse (~1.1M MAU); with close to double the amount of Monthly Active Users. A new website for reliable statistics on Bluesky recently started tracking data, but for the MAU to be a reliable number a few more weeks of datapoints are needed. The current Weekly Active Users for the Bluesky network is around 1M, and the MAU is around 1.9M.Potential bridge between fediverse and Bluesky

Developer Ryan Barrett has been working on a bridging service between the fediverse (Mastodon and other platforms) and Bluesky. This month, he announced that the to-be-released project will be opt-out, meaning that people on either network that do not want to be able to be followed by people on the other network, will have to manually opt-out of the service. This lead to a backlash and drama on the fediverse, as there is a significant group of people that do not want their public posts to be visible on the Bluesky network. Some media covered it as drama between Mastodon and Bluesky, but it seems more accurate to say that Mastodon and the fediverse has been in conflict for a longer time with itself about network boundaries and consent, while the role of Bluesky in this all is more of a confused bystander.In the media

As Bluesky opens up, the team has been more visible in the public. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber appeared on the Hard Fork podcast, as well as Chris Messina’s podcast. She also participated in a conversation with Mike Masnick and Yoel Roth, video replay here.

In an interview with The Verge, Jay Graber also talked a bit more about how Bluesky plans to make money:

While the AT Protocol is being opened up soon, the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.

In another interview with Wired, Graber says that Bluesky ‘won’t enshittify the network with ads’.In other news

Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbald held a technical talk on the technology behind AT Protocol that makes account portability possible: the decentralised identifier DID PLC. Newbald also goes into more detail on how Bluesky is thinking about governance for this decentralised identifier. You can watch the replay here.

Bluesky has hired a head of Trust & Safety, Aaron Rodericks. The community has voiced their demands for a head of Trust & Safety for a while. Rodericks has previously co-leading the Trust and Safety team at Twitter.Bluesky App updates

Some major updates have launched on the official app for Bluesky: the latest update brought hashtags and the much-requested ability to mute certain words (or hashtags). Another update is that your Bluesky handle url is now a direct link to your profile as well.Other app updates

deck.blue, a spiritual successor to TweetDeck, has added a Gallery mode.
iOS app Skeets has added the ability to edit posts. It is still an experimental feature as it depends on a workaround, the ability to edit posts is not officially yet part of the protocol. Skeets also added the ability to register and log in to a third party PDS.
Graysky added notifications, and feeds now respond to your content languages.
People have created over 40k custom feeds, the large majority (34k+) coming from third party feed generator skyfeed.The links

Comic-driven software development.
A complete guide to Bluesky.
A high-level explanation of how the AT Protocol works.
Adding comments on your blog with ATProto.
Bluesky handle directory.
Bluesky has given the documentation website a major update.
A list of the most influential scientists on Bluesky, based on their network centrality.
A proposal for OAuth 2.0 for ATProto.

That’s all, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online and @fediversereport.com, on the fediverse, or subscribe to my weekly newsletter:

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-februari-2024/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 54 This week saw a large variety of ...

2024-02-04T20:05:44Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 54

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.

#fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-54/

Lemmy ask you anything (again) The Lemmy developers Dessalines ...

2024-01-31T16:25:14Z

Lemmy ask you anything (again)

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.

#fediblog #fediverse #lemmy

https://fediversereport.com/lemmy-ask-you-anything-again/

An update on Bonfire The upcoming Bonfire project describes ...

2024-01-23T16:18:16Z

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.

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.

#bonfire #fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/an-update-on-bonfire/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 52 Welcome to another episode, with ...

2024-01-21T16:36:26Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 52

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.

How Bluesky works – the network components

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.

#fediblog #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-52/

Open metaverse platform Viverse announces fediverse support ...

2024-01-19T15:48:18Z

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’.

#activitypub #fediblog #fediverse #metaverse

https://fediversereport.com/open-metaverse-platform-viverse-announces-fediverse-support/

How Bluesky works – the network components Welcome to a new ...

2024-01-18T16:04:39Z

How Bluesky works – the network components

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.

#atproto #bluesky #fediblog

https://fediversereport.com/how-bluesky-works-the-network-components/

Owncast releases app for iOS and tvOS Gabe Kangas, creator of the ...

2024-01-16T15:59:08Z

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’.

#fediblog #owncast

https://fediversereport.com/owncast-releases-app-for-ios-and-tvos/

WordPress ActivityPub plugin updates to v2.0 The WordPress ...

2024-01-10T15:16:26Z

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.

#activitypub #fediverse #wordpress

https://fediversereport.com/wordpress-activitypub-plugin-updates-to-v2-0/

RSS feeds in the fediverse a huge hit RSS Parrot is a new tool ...

2024-01-07T12:49:37Z

RSS feeds in the fediverse a huge hit

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.

https://fediversereport.com/rss-feeds-in-the-fediverse-a-huge-hit/

Bridging Nostr and the fediverse Mostr, the bridge that connects ...

2023-12-06T16:16:27Z

Bridging Nostr and the fediverse

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.

#fediverse #nostr

https://fediversereport.com/bridging-nostr-and-the-fediverse/

NLNet has announced 55 new projects that are awarded a NGI Zero ...

2023-11-28T15:06:57Z

NLNet has announced 55 new projects that are awarded a NGI Zero grant. NGI Zero is the Next Generation Internet program from the European Commision, that funds projects that work on what they call the next generation internet. For more info in NLnet and NGI Zero, check out this interview I did with NLnet this summer. The latest round of grants has quite a few projects that connect to the fediverse in some way. An overview:

NodeBB is a popular forum software platform. They got funding to add ActivityPub integration to NodeBB, allowing interoperability with both other NodeBB forums as well as the fediverse at large. NodeBB says that the “hardest part of starting a community is gaining a critical mass of adoption in order to sustain interest and content”, and integrating with the fediverse is seen as a way to overcome their biggest hurdle.

The loosely connected group of developers at fedidevs.org got a grant to build an automated test framework and test cases. It is currently hard for fediverse developers to build fediverse software that properly federates with the rest dof the network, as a consistent test suite for ActivityPub is lacking. This new test framework hopes to make it easier for developers to start building for the fediverse.

Bonfire is a federated social network that’s currently in development, with most of the work now on getting the platform ready for release. Their grant will go towards improving the performance, as well releasing their version of the ActivityPub library they are using as open-source.

GoToSocial is a lightweight, customisable, and safety-focused entryway into the fediverse, and is currently in Alpha development. With this grant, the team will add two factor authentication, and improve interoperability and scalability.

Mobilizon is a federated event planning tool, originally developed by Framasoft. Framasoft recently announced that they have completed their vision of Mobilizon. The project is not over however, as another group got funding to further improve the UX of Mobilizon.

PeerTube got funding for further improving the adoption, accessability and popularity of the platform, as well as to develop a mobile app. Framasoft has quite a few announcements in the pipeline, I’ll talk more about Framasoft, PeerTube and Mobilizon in the near future with more information.

Commune is social networking build on Matrix instead of ActivityPub, with a focus on creating communities. The project has interesting ideas about how to build social spaces, and is looking to add fediverse integration as well.

Overall there are a lot of cool and interesting projects that NLnet has funded, with a mix of supporting and scaling existing projects, as well as funding new ideas. For other projects that are interested, you can find more information about their grant process here. The deadline for the next round is December 1st 2023.

https://fediversereport.com/a-fediverse-look-at-nlnets-latest-grant-round/

#fediverse