Nostr notes by Laurens Hof

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/

Bluesky Report – #119 Answer anonymous questions with ...

2025-06-05T19:54:02Z

Bluesky Report – #119

Answer anonymous questions with Navyfragen, more academic research on Bluesky, and view cool art on Bluesky in a 3D gallery.

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

Navyfragen is an anonymous question inbox, build on ATProto. It functions similar to the popular NGL app, where people can ask anonymous questions to someone. The person with the inbox can decide which questions to answer, and the answers are then automatically shared to Bluesky. Navyfragen follows a similar visual design to NGL, where the questions are shared as an image with the answer in the body of the post. The app is simple to use: log in with your ATProto account, and share the inbox link. From there, other people can anonymously ask questions.

Grain is a ATProto-powered photo sharing platform that launched recently. Grain is quickly becoming a full-featured ATProto platform, with the ability for new people to sign up outside of Bluesky now in beta. Grain also takes an interesting approach to the social graph that I have not seen before. Grain does not import a user’s social graph from Bluesky, your followers and followees are unique to Grain. However, Grain gives you multiple feeds: a feed for accounts you follow on Grain, as well as a feed for accounts you follow on Bluesky.

Pew Research Center finds that Bluesky is catching on with news influencers. News influencers are “individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media”, and have at least 100k followers on the Big Tech platforms. Pew finds that the number of news influencers with a Bluesky account in their research doubled from 21% before the US 2024 election to 43% in spring 2025. Furthermore, they find that, while total active users on Bluesky slowly dropped in the first quarter of 2024, the number of news influencers on Bluesky who are actively posting, increased during that same time period. That Bluesky is left-leaning politically is no surprise, and also shows up in this research: 69% of left-leaning news influencers are on Bluesky, while 15% of right-leaning news influencers are on Bluesky.

A new academic paper studies how the migration of academics from Twitter to Bluesky functions. They find that “information sources drive migration far more powerfully than audience”, meaning that it is the people you follow who determine platform migration, not your audience and followers. The paper also finds that “simple contagion drives two-thirds of all exits”, where people will move to Bluesky when they see another academic they follow also move to Bluesky. Shock events, such as downtime at Twitter or radical new policy positions, account for 16% of exits. Moving to Bluesky because of shock events is largely by politically disengaged scholars, Politically engaged academics mainly move to Twitter because of other academics they follow instead.

Sky Museum is a downloadable game that allows people to walk around in a 3D art gallery. Within the gallery you can view Bluesky feeds and posts, displayed as art pieces. Players can set their own feed to display as art within the gallery. Multiplayer is also supported, and you can host up to 32 players.

Storacha is a decentralised web3-based storage network on IPFS, that has added support for storing a backup of your PDS. This means that even if your current PDS provider goes down, you can still get all your data from the Storacha backup and move to a different PDS provider.

Bluesky PBC published a new proposal for ATProto’s Oauth. Currently, browser-based ATProto apps have to choose between being a simple app with short login sessions (where a user has to log in again after a day or so), or building a more complex backend infrastructure to handle authentication. The proposal introduces a simple server component that makes it possible for smaller browser-based clients to have full authentication features without running a server-side authentication system. Updates
Bluesky will add more options for notifications soon, including the ability to turn off individual notifications, as well as getting notifications for likes on reposts.
Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines has shared a “comprehensive Rust library for AT Protocol identity management, record signing, verification, and OAuth operations.”
Popsky is a media review app on ATProto, that has added integration with Streamplace. This means you can now see who’s currently live streaming on Popsky.
Leaflet is an ATProto-based writing platform, and it now allows you to set your own custom domain for ATProto-based publications written with Leaflet.
Git collaboration platform Tangled has added verified commits, which allow people to cryptographically sign all their commits. Tangled also wrote a blog post about stacking and reviewing pull requests.
ATProto Payment Identities – a blog post theorising how to integrate ATProto identity with a crypto-based identity.
smolsky is a (paid, $1.99) app for MacOS to post to Bluesky directly from the menubar.
Openmeet is an event planning app on ATProto, that has added various calendar integrations for import and export.

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-119/

Fediverse Report – #119 A quiet news week this week, as all the ...

2025-06-03T18:26:31Z

Fediverse Report – #119

A quiet news week this week, as all the new announcements seem to be waiting for FediForum. FediForum will be this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On Thursday I’ll hold a session on What’s new in the Open Social Web, so come check that out!

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

PeerTube announced that they reached their first milestone in the funding of the PeerTube app, with over 15k EUR raised of the targeted 75k. This milestone will add the ability to play videos on the app in the background, add notifications for new uploads, and the ability to cast a PeerTube video to a TV using Chromecast. Framasoft also held an AMA on Lemmy this week, as part of their fundraiser. Some of the answers of the AMA that stood out to me:
PeerTube is mainly framed as a YouTube competitor. But here, Framasoft describes PeerTube more as a Vimeo competitor, placing it in the market for video hosting. PeerTube is indeed more suitable as a product for pure video hosting than for the social-networking side that YouTube also has. As Framasoft says, PeerTube is not on the same level as YouTube when it comes to providing a distribution channel with social features, and it is also missing the monetisation options that creators are looking for. Monetisation integrations with platforms like Patreon are a potential avenue, but Framasoft says that this would be a long way off.
Framasoft is an explicitly French organisation, with most of their communications in French, their funding largely depending on French donors, and French employees. Framasoft says they are okay with this meaning that the audience for Framasoft products is thus more focused on the French-speaking audience, and often less accessible to the rest of the world. They say that they would rather prefer if there were other organisations who do the same as Framasoft.

Framasoft employee Booteille also did an interview on the Fireside Fedi show this week.

The Social Web Foundation has published a new software library that makes it easier to embed or display ActivityPub content on a website. The software, ap-components, is a set of Web Components for ActivityPub.

Fediverse forum platform PieFed has shared their development update for May, with a large number of new features: PieFed posts now can have flair (that federates), you can schedule posts, nofication and UX improvements, support for passkeys, better moderation of images and more. Lemmy also shared their monthly update, and they are focused on getting the software ready for a 1.0 release.The Links
The DAIR Institute did a livestream about the future of the Black web experience, with Ro from The Bad Space and Rudy Fraser from Blacksky.
Ghost’s weekly update on their work on adding ActivityPub, and mentions are now working correctly.
Splinter is a web app to split a long post into a Mastodon thread.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
FediAlgo has had some behind the scenes updates, which improve the speed significantly. A few weeks I wrote about how taking control of your timeline on the fediverse usually means giving users control of *how* they can see their content, and FediAlgo remains one of the best examples of that.
Andy Piper, head of Comms at Mastodon, did a podcast interview about how Mastodon can break social media siloes.
Fediverse indie radio channels.

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-119/

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/

ATmosphere Report – #114 The Bluesky and ATmosphere reports are ...

2025-05-01T18:51:48Z

ATmosphere Report – #114

The Bluesky and ATmosphere reports are back after I was occupied last week with the Ahoy! conference about ATProto in Hamburg. It was amazing to meet so many cool people in real life, and share the excitement of working on this network together. There were some great talks, and just being around people who you can talk in-depth about Bluesky and ATProto with is just great. Hoping to see many more ATProto conferences pop up and meet more of you in real life.

A practical note: if you missed the ATmosphere report last week, a reminder that I’m also sending out the reports via email every Friday. This comes with an extra analysis article that’s not on the website, so don’t forget to subscribe!Bluesky launches a blue check verification system

Bluesky has launched a new verification system for their platform, with blue checkmarks. With the checkmark system, Bluesky selects a few Trusted Verifiers, who can hand out checkmarks. Bluesky PBC will also hand out checkmarks to “authentic and notable accounts”. The main reason for this system’s existence is that the other verification system, using domain names as handles, did not perform well enough. Bluesky PBC says that 270k accounts have set their own domain name as a handle, but not enough high-profile accounts have done so. The other problem with domain names as verification is that many well-known public figures do not have a well-known website. The first organisations that are Trusted Verifiers in the Bluesky app are the New York Times and Wired Magazine.

Bluesky PBC advertises the new checkmark verification system with its Trusted Verifiers as “a healthy digital society should distribute power”. However, it is unclear with the current implementation to what extend power is actually distributed. Bluesky PBC is the one who selects the Trusted Verifiers that can be displayed in their app. In their blog post, they also write: “Bluesky will review these verifications as well to ensure authenticity.” To me, it seems far from distributing power, and can at best be seen as distributing operational work. With Bluesky PBC holding full control of who gets to be a Trusted Verifier, as well as reviewing their output, how much power has Bluesky PBC actually distributed?

The new checkmark verification system is not exclusive to the Bluesky app however, and it is build on an open system. Anyone can create verifications or become a Verifier, as all the data for verification is openly accessible to anyone. The only difference is that verifications that are not made by Bluesky PBC or one of their Trusted Verifiers will not be visible in the official Bluesky clients. Other systems have already sprung up, a new verifier tool by cred.blue allows anyone to easily hand out verifications. The Deer client, which is a fork of the Bluesky client, already allows for anyone to set their own Verifiers as well. I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming article, as what is happening with Deer and verification has some interesting implications on how the network will likely develop.

For now, Bluesky PBC has build a technologically cool system, which also solves a meaningful problem that their app has in the short term. While the way it is currently implemented falls short of the advertised distribution of power regarding verification, the team is clear that this is an early implementation and that the system will evolve later.Streamplace funding

Some news from streaming software Streamplace:
Streamplace has raised 100k Livepeer tokens, worth around 500k USD, from the Livepeer Treasury to further expand the Streamplace platform. The money will be used to expand the team, enhance infrastructure and build a deeper integration with ATProto, as well as building content moderation infrastructure.
A short explanation of Livepeer, and how it relates to Streamplace. Livepeer is a decentralised network for video transcoding and processing. Transcoding (in this context) processes the video stream to make it accessible in various formats and qualities, so a stream can be viewed both by someone on a slow internet connection in 360p, as well as someone with fast internet in 4K definition. Livepeer is a DAO, with an attached crypto token. Streamplace uses Livepeer for the video transcoding, and because of this integration, which allows the Livepeer network to grow as well, the Livepeer DAO has awarded Streamplace 100k tokens, currently worth around 500k USD. It is unclear to me how the Livepeer token works, with its corresponding tokenomics, and where the value of the tokens is coming from.
Streamplace creator Eli Mellon gave an interview on the devtools-fm podcast where Eli goes into more detail on the background of Streamplace and how the software works.
Two other ATProto apps are working on integration Streamplace. Skylight already announced earlier to be working with Streamplace. At the ATProto conference Ahoy in Hamburg last week Joe Basser, co-founder of the ATProto video platform, announced to be working on livestreaming with Streamplace as well.
Streamplace is hiring a Decentralized Video Protocol Engineer and a Lead Front-End Engineer
An OBS overlay to display Streamplace chat on-stream.An update on relays and independent infra

Bluesky PBC made some changes to how their relays work, with an update with the unassuming name of ‘Sync 1.1′. The update made it much cheaper to run relays, as they do not have to store data of the entire network anymore. This has made a drastic impact on running relays. Last month, independent developer @futur set up a relay on his own Raspberry Pi. Now Phil, another independent developer, has set up multiple relays and made them publicly accessible. This means that there are now multiple other full-network relays that index the entire network, that are outside of US jurisdiction. Just as importantly, running these full-network relays is cheap, with costs getting as low as 18 USD per month. Feed builder Graze is also creating their own implementation of a relay: Turbostream includes a large amount of extra information in the stream. For example, where Jetstream (a simplified version of a relay) broadcasts a reply, Turbostream broadcasts a reply together with the post that is being replied to, as well as a range of other information. This in turn makes it easier to other parties to build on, as most information needed is already included in Turbostream.

These developments leads to some interested new questions. When it comes to running a relay, technology and costs are clearly not barriers anymore. But what about moderation and uptime guarantees? Is having a relay that many other parties depend on even the right model of the network?

It also calls the model that the Free Our Feeds campaign had in mind, which aligned more with a perspective of expensive and large relays. Today, Free Our Feeds announced that they will donate a 50k USD grant to a new IndieSky Working Group. The IndieSky came out of the second day of the conference, organised by Boris Mann and Ted Han. Mann and Han are behind the ATProtocol Developer Community Group, and also organised the first ATProto conference in Seattle last month. The goal of IndieSky is to “work together on R&D, code, and infrastructure on how and why to run different parts of the ATProto stack”, with more details in the announcement. The first meeting for the working group is on May 8th.In Other News

The Ahoy! conference for the European Social Web was last week, and as an extremely biased person who helped organise the conference I think it was a great success! Massive shout-out to Sebastian Korfmann who has done an incredible amount of work getting the conference to such a great place, super impressive. During the conference I did some longer video interviews with some of the people in the community, those videos will be released in the coming weeks. The main takeaway for me from the conference was to see the amount of positive energy and enthusiasm in the community. People are aware that they are contributing to a space that has massive potential and is undergoing rapid changes. I’m excited to see more conferences for ATProto, and meet more people from the community in real life, as it has been super great to meet the people at Ahoy!.

Turtleisland.social is a Mastodon server for the North American Native/Indigenous community. They have set up their own PDS server for community members to join Bluesky as well. Community-centered data hosting is one of the possibilities with the PDS system of Bluesky that is mentioned regularly as an option, but has not been borne out much yet. Two other communities are in the process of building out a similar structure: Blacksky is creating their own PDS software for the Black community, and Northsky is building out systems that allow people to easily migrate their ATProto account to a Northsky PDS. It’s worth pointing out here that the early adopters of new technology on social networking are all minority communities. For people building social networks this provides a pragmatic argument (besides the much more important ethical argument) for creating safe digital spaces: the people for whom safety is the most crucial are also the most likely to be early adopters of new technologies.

Not all early adoption is by minority communities: Gander.social is a newly announced social network on ATProto, focusing on the Canadian community. Gander has a lot of plans for features that make it stand out from the Bluesky app. The project is still in development, and it seems once the project gets closer to launch it will become clearer what the ATProto integration will actually entail.

Bluesky has made some changes to their PDS, allowing people to sign up directly for an ATProto account on a PDS without going through the Bluesky app. Link aggregator platform Frontpage is one of the first to take advantage of this, allowing account creation on the Frontpage platform now.

Bluesky PBC is joining Lexicon Community Technical Steering Committee. Bluesky Engineer Bryan Newbold will be the representative. It signals a growing maturity of the ecosystem, that an effort run by the ATProto developer community can come to a place where Bluesky joins the initiative on an equal footing.

Openvibe is a multi-network client that combines someones Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads accounts into a single app. Their latest update is an customisable For You algorithmic timeline, which combines posts from multiple networks into a unified algorithmic timeline.

Newsletter publishing platform Ghost now has a simple setting to share posts on Bluesky, via the ActivityPub bridge. This was already possible with Bridgy Fed, but that required some manual steps, where it is now a simple toggle setting.The Links

For the protocol-minded people:
A proposal for private images (not posts!) on ATProto.
Proposal: A Simple XRPC Method for Signing Payloads in ATProtocol
News from Bluesky takes the most popular links on the network and displays them in an interface more like Hacker News.
Bluesky video client Skylight is working on a dislike feature so people can further fine tune their algorithm.
An ArXiv paper on Bluesky’s growth.
A frontend for a (selfhosted) PDS which displays the accounts on the PDS as well as their most recent posts.
An interview with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee by Flipboard, at their recent Fediverse House event at SXSW.
A tool to explore duplicated content on Bluesky.
A Bluesky MCP server to bring context from Bluesky and ATProto into the context window of an LLM.
For ATProto data nerds: A watchface for Rebble which displays the current tid.
A simple web app to store running data on your PDS.
A blog on decentralisation and threat models.
An example of how inauthentic accounts use Starter Packs to quickly build a following and integrate themselves into the network.

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-114/

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/

Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation On 19 March ...

2025-04-17T19:11:51Z

Bluesky, censorship and country-based moderation

On 19 March 2025, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested by the Turkish police. İmamoğlu is the presidential primary candidate for the Republican People’s Party, which is the opposition party for the ruling AKP party. The arrest of İmamoğlu sparked widespread protests across Turkey. The Turkish government cracked down on the protests in various ways, including by applying censorship on social media. A few days after the arrest, the government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts that are associated with the protests. X announced that it had filed an individual application with Turkey’s Constitutional Court challenging local court orders to block accounts. Bianet, an independent news agency in Istanbul, reported that X has not yet enforced the bans on the accounts.

In response to the censorship requests, users on X started to move towards Bluesky, to avoid the restrictions. The censorship requests from the Turkish government quickly extended to Bluesky, and Bianet reported on April 5th that 44 Bluesky accounts had been ordered to be blocked by the Turkish judicial system, citing concerns over national security and public order. Bianet noted that at that time, Bluesky PBC (the company behind Bluesky) had not yet blocked any of these accounts, and that they remained accessible from Turkey.

I reported last week that Bluesky PBC was in the process of setting up a Turkish moderation labeler, but that it was not active yet. Such a moderation layer allows Bluesky (the app) to apply moderation decisions that are only experienced by people currently geolocated in a specific country, more on that below. A few days ago, the Turkish moderation labeler became active, and the labeler started hiding accounts, making the accounts invisible for people in Turkey. Between April 14 and 17, Bluesky PBC made 18 accounts and 2 posts invisible in Turkey.

The decision by Bluesky PBC to adhere to the orders by the Turkish government to censor certain accounts in Turkey lead to criticism, ranging from the Turkish online community (1, 2), as well as the fediverse community. The language used is in the criticism notable, with many people describing Bluesky PCS’s action as “account takedown” and “ban”. That is not actually what happened here. Bluesky PBC hid the accounts, making them invisible in Turkey but visible outside of the country. Still, the impact is largely the same: the vast majority of people within Turkey are not able to see the accounts, and the reach and impact of these accounts is severely limited.

There is a technical story, of how Bluesky and the AT Protocol (ATProto) do composable moderation for specific countries. But this is not just an interesting technology, it has implications of government censorship more broadly. Not only is the Turkish censorship of accounts even easier to sidestep, it also allows for new ways to highlight and create visibility for the content that the Turkish government wants to be hidden. To explain how that all works, first a closer look at how moderation works on Bluesky.How Bluesky does moderationFor those who want it, a quick refresher on how ATProto works, with this simplified explanation:

– A Personal Data Server (PDS) stores all account data in a publicly accessible database
– A relay gathers all events (posts, likes, etc) from all the PDSes in the network, and outputs a continues stream of all events that happen on the entire network.
– An AppView takes in the data from the relay, and processes the data (such as creating a Discover feed and putting all the post for the feed in the right order, and calculating the number of likes on a feed).
– Labelers apply a label to posts. This label contains information on what an app should do with this post (hide a post entirely or put a warning sign on the post)
– A client or app takes the processed data from the AppView, as well as the labelers, and displays it to the user.

For clarification on language:
– Bluesky PBC refers to the company which makes the Bluesky network and the AT Protocol
– Bluesky PBC runs the Bluesky AppView. This is a large software that does all the technical stuff so some 35 million accounts can access the network.
– Bluesky PBC operates 3 clients/apps. There is Bluesky on the web (bsky.app), as well as the app on Android and iOS. Both the AppView, the clients, as well as the entire network can be referred to as ‘Bluesky’. In this article when I refer to ‘Bluesky’ I’m referring to the entire network. If I mean the specific AppView or client this is clarified.

Bluesky PBC employs three1 main forms of moderation:
Bluesky PBC takes down a post or account, meaning removing the content/account from the PDS. This usually occurs in cases of significant rule violations with major impact. Bluesky PBC can only do this when the account in question is located on one of the PDSes owned by Bluesky PBC.
When this happens, the Bluesky moderation labeler applies a ‘takedown’ label to the account or post as well.
Bluesky PBC uses their moderation labeler to apply a label to the post or account. This moderation layer applies to everyone who uses Bluesky. This happens in three cases:
The rules violation is less significant. For example when people are being rude, Bluesky PBC can apply the ‘rude’ label to a post. Users can adjust their settings to show, warn, or hide posts with this label.
The post or account creates content that is allowed, but needs to be able to be hidden in order to comply with user preference. Most notably this is for sexual content. Sexual content and nudity are allowed on Bluesky, but Bluesky PBC applies a label such as ‘porn’ or ‘sexual’ to the content so people can filter it out if they so desire.
the account that violated Bluesky’s ToS is not located on PDS owned by Bluesky PBC. As such, Bluesky cannot take down the post or account. The moderation labeler does apply a ‘takedown’ label to the post.2
Bluesky PBC uses their geographic moderation labelers to apply a ‘hide’ label to posts or accounts. This makes the content invisible to the people who subscribe to labeler. The content is still visible to accounts who are not subscribed to the geographic moderation labeler.
Bluesky PBC uses these geographic moderation labelers to comply with local regulations. It only applies these labels if content is in violation of local laws, while it would be legal in other jurisdictions. An example of this is Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, which requires platforms to remove all illegal content within 7 days. Bluesky PBC has taken down 20 posts in Germany in 2025, and no posts before that.
Bluesky PBC currently operates geographic labelers for Germany, Brazil, Turkey, and Russia. There are also references to labelers for various other regions and countries on the network, but they are not active as of writing.

For this news about the government of Turkey requesting accounts being taken down, it is these geographic moderation labels that are relevant. These were first launched in September 2024, and. Head of Trust & Safety Aaron Rodericks explains the feature:

“In some cases, content or accounts may be allowed under Bluesky’s Community Guidelines but violate local laws in certain countries. To balance freedom of speech with legal compliance, we are introducing geography-specific labels. When we receive a valid legal request from a court or government to remove content, we may limit access to that content for users in that area. This allows Bluesky’s moderation service to maintain flexibility in creating a space for free expression, while also ensuring legal compliance so that Bluesky may continue to operate as a service in those geographies. This feature will be introduced on a country-by-country basis, and we will aim to inform users about the source of legal requests whenever legally possible.”

The implication of what Rodericks writes is that Bluesky PBC judges a government’s request to remove content on its legal validity, and not on an ethical, moral, or other framework. If it is legally valid, Bluesky PBC will comply and limit access to that content in the applicable jurisdiction.Moderation labels are (not) optional

In ATProto, labels applied by a labeler serve as recommendations for how clients should treat content. This is a direct result of all data on ATProto being public and locked open. Clients and apps are expected to follow a labeler’s output (hiding a post from the users when they have subscribed to the labeler that gave the ‘hide’ label), however clients can potentially deviate from this if they want to.

The Bluesky apps made by Bluesky PBC make their own moderation labeler mandatory. When using the official Bluesky apps, the Bluesky’s moderation labeler gets applied automatically, with no way to opt out of this. Thus, users of the official Bluesky app cannot opt out of Bluesky PBC’s moderation decisions.

Additionally, the Bluesky apps enforce a mechanism where the client checks the user’s current IP address. When the user is in one of the regions with a geographic labeler, these labelers are also applied automatically and compulsory. When someone uses the Bluesky app while they are on a Turkish IP address, they will be automatically subscribed to the Turkish moderation labeler. Posts made by accounts that the government of Turkey has mandated to be removed are not visible. If the same account logs in from outside Turkey, it is no longer subscribed to the Turkish moderation labeler. Content that the government of Turkey has mandated to be removed is now visible.3

However, other clients can make other decisions on using the moderation labelers. Clients will (almost) always also apply the main Bluesky moderation labeler. Getting a client app into the Google and Apple App Stores requires social media apps to have moderation integrated into their apps. Clients could build their own moderation labeler and use that in their app. However, moderation for a network of 35 million accounts is difficult and expensive, and reusing the Bluesky moderation labeler is free. As a result, almost all third-party client apps use the Bluesky moderation labeler.

Things are different when it comes to the geographic moderation labelers. This step is optional for clients, and most clients do not implement support for geolocating their users and mandating the geographic moderation labelers. As a result, using a different client is a simple way to bypass the geographic content restrictions. Using Bluesky with a Turkish IP address on most4 other clients does show content that the government of Turkey has mandated to be taken down.The impact

Government censorship of social media can best be understood as a way to minimise reach and virality, rather than a 100% effective way to prevent literally everyone from seeing the content. The practice of governments requesting content on social networks to be taken down is not new, and has happened on Big Tech platforms for a while. The Big Tech platforms usually take a similar approach, restricting access to posts and accounts only within the relevant jurisdiction. This means that VPNs allow people to sidestep these restrictions. Governments are largely fine with this, as the goal of the censorship is still reached: there are now meaningful barriers to viewing said content, and the large majority of people will likely not see it.

What makes Bluesky and ATProto different is two aspects:
Restrictions on content can now be bypassed via other clients. There is not even a need for a VPN anymore, simply using a different client is enough.
The content that governments want to censor is now easily accessible for the rest of the world. The output of the geographic moderation labelers is easily publicly accessible. Scanning services like PDSls or a tool like the Query Labeler Service give a complete and publicly accessible list of all content that is taken down according to the respective jurisdiction. For example, The Query Labeler Services tool shows that the moderation-tr.bsky.app account (the handle for the Turkish moderation labeler) has hidden 18 accounts and 2 posts, at the time of writing.

It is this new dynamic of being able to see which content governments wants to be hidden is most interesting to me. “The government does not want you to see this!!1!” is one of the most successful clickbait titles of all time, for good reason. And now we’re in a new situation where this is not necessarily clickbait anymore. Indeed, it is publicly visible which accounts and posts a government does not want people to see. Even more so, ATProto and Bluesky allow other people to build custom feeds and list, based on this information. I would not be surprised if before we will see a custom feed specifically with the accounts that the government wants to be censored. How that changes the dynamic of Bluesky and this new generation of social networks remains to be seen.

The ways that how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, government requests for takedown, and the ways that these government censorship demands can be sidestepped also shines some more light on the concept of decentralisation. Decentralisation, in the meaning of a technical description of a network that consists of multiple different interacting software platforms, is often lauded as a way to combat censorship. But how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, and the way that it can be sidestepped, show that this is not a hard requirement. Avoiding the censorship and being able to see the content that governments do not want to be seen turns out to only need open data, a compartmentalised moderation system and an open API to have third party client apps.

However, focusing on that it is technically possible to see the censored content misses that the censorship is still effective. The large majority of people will not actually use this option, if they are even aware of it. In order to build a network that does not have a single chokepoint where governments can apply pressure for censorship requests, it is that people have to be spread out over different services. How ATProto and Bluesky handle moderation show that this spread of people over different services does not have to mean multiple different platforms, having people meaningfully spread out over different clients would also be effective in this specific case. It shows that the value of a decentralised social network is less dependent on the technical capabilities, and more on the distribution of people and power. It matters less what the protocol and technical features of a network are capable of, and more to what extend people are clustered in single group, whether that is a single service, platform or client.

For now, it seems that Bluesky PBC and the Turkish government both have reached a situation that is acceptable. The Turkish government has significantly restricted the visibility of accounts they deem unwanted. Sidestepping these restrictions remains an option, with new and easier ways to do so. But considering how powerful the default apps are and how few people use other apps, this seems likely to be an acceptable tradeoff. For Bluesky PBC it seems to be an acceptable outcome as well. Not complying with the government order would risk the app to be banned in the entire country. Using geographic moderation labelers gives compliance with the government order, while at the same time minimising the impact: the accounts in question are still visible outside of the country, and people within Turkey have fairly accessible ways of sidestepping the ban.

Note: the regularly scheduled weekly Bluesky Report will be released tomorrow instead of today. This article was originally intended as part of the Bluesky Report, but I felt it was relevant enough to be released separately.This is not exhaustive. Bluesky PBC can also ban third-party PDSes from the relay that Bluesky uses. This is intended for preventing network flooding spam and DDoS types of attacks. It is unclear if/when Bluesky PBC has actually used this option. ↩︎Violating accounts can also already be banned on the AppView level in this case. I’m unclear which option Bluesky PBC usually uses here, and I think it is actually both, but I might be wrong on that. ↩︎Users can also voluntarily subscribe to a geographic labeler. ↩︎I actually have not found an example yet of a third party client which does mandate the geographic moderation labelers. ↩︎

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-censorship-and-country-based-moderation/

Fediverse Report – #112 This week is a bit of a shorter Report, ...

2025-04-15T17:00:17Z

Fediverse Report – #112

This week is a bit of a shorter Report, it’s a relatively quieter news week and some other work is taking up most of my attention this week. Still, there is a PeerTube roadmap for 2025, some more updates on how FediForum is moving forward and more.The News

Framasoft has published their PeerTube roadmap for 2025. Last year, PeerTube’s big focus was on the consumer, with the launch of the PeerTube apps. This year, PeerTube’s improvement is on instance administrators. The organisation will work on building a set-wizard, making it easier for new instance admins to get started and configure the platform. Framasoft will also work on further customisation for instances, allowing admins to further tune how the instance looks for the end-users. There is also a lot of work being done on video channels, with the new features being the ability to transfer ownership of a channel, as well as having channels that are owned by multiple accounts. Framasoft also mentions they are working on shared lists of blocked accounts and instances, where admins can share information with other admins on which instances to block. And now that PeerTube is available on Android and iOS, other new platforms that PeerTube will come to is tablets and Android TVs.

The planned FediForum for early April was cancelled at the last minute. A group of attendees held the Townhall event that was held in its place to discuss how to move forward, and listen to people’s perspectives. The notes of the FediForum Townhall have now been published. Last week, the FediForum account posted: “Planned next steps: another townhall likely next week, and a rescheduled & adapted FediForum in May.” The organisers posted a survey for attendees on how to move forward as well. Jon Pincus has an extensive article, “On FediForum (and not just FediForum)” that places the entire situation of why FediForum was cancelled, in its larger context.

PieFed now allows people to limit who can DM them. By default only people on the same instance can receive DMs from each other. The Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin network has seen a rise on spam DMs which send gore images, and this is a helpful way of dealing with this harassment.

IFTAS wrote about how they are continuing their mission. The organisation recently had to wind down most of their high-profile projects due to a lack of funding. This is not the end of the entire organisation however, as IFTAS will continue with their Moderator Needs Assessment, the CARIAD domain observatory, which provides insight in the most commonly blocked domains and more, as well as the IFTAS Connect community for fediverse moderators.

A master’s thesis on the fediverse, which looks at the user activity and governance structures, with the main finding: “The findings reveal that instance size and active engagement—such as frequent posting and interacting with others—are the strongest predictors of user activity, while technical infrastructure plays a more supportive role rather than a determining one. Governance structures, such as moderation practices and community guidelines, show a weaker but positive correlation with user activity.”

Sean Tilley from WeDistribute writes how his work on ‘Integrating a News Publication Into the Fediverse’. Tilley has over a decade of experimentation on building journalistic outlets on fediverse platforms, and in this article he reflects on all the different case studies he has done over the years, and where WeDistribute is headed next.

Building a blog website on Lemmy. This personal website uses Lemmy as a backend for a personal blogging site, where the site is effectively a Lemmy client that looks like a blogging site. The Links
Pixelfed now has custom filters.
Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault had an interview on the Fireside Fedi show.
How to Migrate a Mastodon Account to GoToSocial – Fedihost tutorials
Ditch the DIY Drama: Why Use Fedify Instead of Building ActivityPub from Scratch? – Hong Minhee
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-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.

#bluesky

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 the ATmosphere – 2025feb.b Welcome to this ...

2025-02-13T19:10:08Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.b

Welcome to this week’s edition of all the news that happens in the wider ATProto ecosystem. This edition is somewhat more technical, next week I’ll focus again on Bluesky and the growing ecosystem of video and image apps around it.

For the people who are less interested in the technical side, I think some of the main news of this week is still relevant: Chatting app Roomy shows that you can use only a few parts of the ecosystem and combine it with other protocols to build apps. And Microcosm shows that the network infrastructure can be even more modular and accessible than it has been so far.The News

Roomy is a new P2P public group chat platform, build on both ATProto and Automerge. The project is currently in public alpha testing. Roomy has gotten funding from the ATProto Skyseed fund, and is build by the same people who are also building Weird. Roomy is not the first group chat on ATProto, last fall Picosky released an AppView for chatting on ATProto as well. What makes Roomy different is in the combination of using both ATProto and Automerge: ATProto is used for identity and logging in, and data is stored (in encrypted form) on your PDS. Automerge is used for the actual chatting itself. Automerge uses conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) to ‘merge’ everyone’s chat messages into a single chat room, even when other people are offline. What is most interesting to me about Roomy is that it shows that building on ATProto does not have to mean using all the components of the system. Instead, parts like the identity system can be used and combined with other protocols to build products. Another example of this is stream.place, a streaming platform which also integrates with ATProto by using the identity part of ATProto, while using other systems for the actual video streaming part.

Microcosm is an open source and self-hosted JSON API to an index the entire ATProto network, with records of all PDS record back-links. This allows anyone to write queries against it, for things like ‘how many likes did this post get’, and ‘who are all the followers of a DID’. In effect, this is a partial backend of an ATProto AppView: The Bluesky AppView listens to the firehose to get all updates, and creates an internal database that keeps track of these things like ‘how many likes does a post have’. With Microcosm, this part of the AppView is now split into a separate service, called Constellation. This service can index the entire global network and still run of a Raspberry Pi. That this type of service is now available as both API and for selfhosting means that other ATProto apps can also take advantage of it, an early example that uses Constellation is Skyblur. What is interesting to me is that it shows that it is possible to split ‘AppViews’ into multiple components that can be reused, making it more accessible to run apps on global scale without having to run a large infrastructure. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold says that this type of generic API/service as an original design goal for Bluesky’s Big Graph Server. In later designs this got scaled down to a more simple Relay. Now other independent developers can bring such services to the network anyway, without depending on Bluesky.

Lexidex is a web index of all the different Lexicons that are used on ATProto. It is part of a bigger proposal regarding Lexicon resolution that Bluesky is working on. With the new proposal, DIDs can now claim ownership over a Lexicon via DNS record, similar to handle validation. Only when a DID has properly claimed ownership over a Lexicon it will show up on Lexidex. For seeing all Lexicons and how often they get used, I can recommend this dashboard, which keeps track of all Lexicons.

Bluesky PDF uploader is a tool to upload a PDF file to your PDS, which then automatically gets posted to Bluesky. It follows a trend of people exploring how you can use the PDS to store arbitrary files, such as with ATFile. In general I think this space is hugely under-explored, and this simple PDF uploader tool is a good illustration of what is possible on an open protocol where everyone has a server that can store personal data.

MuteSky is a site that allows you to manage mute words in bulk. MuteSky has lists of thousands of terms, sorted by category, allowing people to easily manage lots of different mute words. I think sites like MuteSky point to what is possible, if people want to filter out and don’t see specific types of content, it helps if others have already done the work of selecting the words to filter out. However, one of the more difficult parts of effective filtering via mute words is selecting all the different misspellings of words that people use. If someone does not want to see content about Elon Musk, effective mute filters would also have to add terms like ‘elmo’ or ‘el*n’. Those variations and deliberate misspellings is what makes effective muting difficult, and it is a feature that MuteSky currently does not provide.

DrawAt is a collaborative canvas for people to draw upon, build on ATProto. You log in with your ATProto account and see a shared canvas that you can draw on. It differs from other shared ATProto canvas drawings like Blue Place in that your drawing itself is not stored on your PDS. It does allow you to draw as much as you want, where Blue Place is for placing individual pixels. Pinksea.art is another place to draw on ATProto; this Oekaki board gives you your own place to draw on.

ATProto on Glitch is an app for Glitch to get people familiar working with ATProto. Glitch is a platform for building and hosting web apps, and allows people to easily copy and remix other apps. ATProto on Glitch does not listen to the firehose, but does allow people to read and write data using the API client, as well as making their own custom lexicons.

rsky is an alternative PDS implementation by Blacksky creator Rudy Fraser, which has just taken another big step closer towards completion. Blacksky is working towards a full independent implementation of all their ATProto infrastructure. Millipds is another example of an from-scratch PDS implementation.

Atproto-pictures is a simple image CDN for ATProto, build by Bluesky developer Samuel Newman. So far, other apps on ATProto seem to have mainly used Bluesky’s CDN, and with this tool they can now easily run their own CDN.

On 19th february will be the virtual DWeb Meetup: Bluesky & Beyond, for both Bluesky and ATProto. It will feature talks by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold, Boris Mann who organises the upcoming ATmosphere conference, and Mallory Knodel of the Social Web Foundation. The meetup will be on February 19, 2025 11:30am PT, and is free to attend.

PDSls is an excellent tool for browsing and managing ATProto PDS data, and the tool has gotten some more updates recently. It can now query individual labels by labelers, SubscribeRepos on the firehose, and a Jetstream viewer with filtering options.

Bryan Newbald shared some more thoughts how Bluesky is thinking about implementing private data on ATProto. It helps give an idea of how Bluesky might approach the problem, although Newbold also stresses that Bluesky is not fully committed to the proposed solutions yet, and that these are early design discussions. Bluesky will finish other work on ATProto first before giving private data more attention, such as auth scopes and tweaks for a cheaper relay.The Links
Technical design for Bridgy Fed, which bridges ATProto with ActivityPub.
Building a cognitive layer on top of ATProto data with cominds.
Some DID:PLC tools
Crafting Your Own Personal Data Server on a Raspberry Pi.
A guide to set up a fresh account on a PDS completely from scratch, using a new manually-created did:plc.
consuming the jetstream firehose correctly.
An overview of the many projects that independent developer Kuba Suder is working on.
Adding Record Editing with History to ATProtocol.

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-the-atmosphere-2025feb-b/

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/

Fediverse Report – #102 FOSDEM and the fediverse match well ...

2025-02-04T21:37:32Z

Fediverse Report – #102

FOSDEM and the fediverse match well together, some issues regarding data privacy and consent, and multi-network client Openvibe gets 800k in funding.The News

FOSDEM, the free event for open source software was this weekend in Brussels, with a large presence for the fediverse and the social web. There were three events, presentations by various fediverse software developers in the SocialWeb Devroom, an extra smaller event on Sunday for more presentations, and a more casual event on Sunday evening at Brussels Hackerspace. All the events were fully packed, showing the large amount of interest from the community for the fediverse and the social web. The Social Web Foundation has been the main initiator of these events.

Some thoughts and observations:
Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) are documents with the goal to improve applications on the fediverse. People can write proposals, and developers can decide to support and implement proposals as they see fit. There are some great technical FEPs, but one of the challenges of such a grassroots system is getting buy-in from developers to support specific FEPs. NodeBB developer Julian Lam held a presentation ‘The Fediverse is Quiet — Let’s Fix That!’ as an advocacy for a specific FEP. The proposal Lam talks about is about fixing the problem of missing replies, where people do not see all replies on a post. What I think is noteworthy about Lam’s presentation is that it frames a FEP not only as a technical document, but as a process that needs community buy-in for other developers to support and implement a FEP. Hopefully, more of such advocacy might help see more FEPs implemented as well.
Mastodon presented the progress on their Fediverse Discovery Provider project. The project builds an opt-in decentralised service for better discovery and search. In the presentation (and on the website), Mastodon stressed that the project is not only a Mastodon project, but is intended to be used by the entire fediverse. Mastodon developer David Roetzel said that he hoped that the goal is that many servers will run a “Fediverse Auxillary Service Provider”. Personally I think that it is instructive to look at Bluesky here. While the AT Protocol is decentralised, in practice everyone uses infrastructure owned by the Bluesky company. I’m not convinced yet that the Fediverse Discovery Provider project will not run into the same problem, as I’m unclear on what the incentives are for people to run competing Fediverse Discovery Provider projects.
Some of the more interesting presentations I saw were about the integration of different types of protocols with ActivityPub. The ActivityPods project combines ActivityPub with Solid Pods, which shows quite some similarities with how the PDS system of ATProto works. All your data is stored on your Pod, multiple types of apps can connect to your Pod, and communicate via ActivityPub. It allows you to have a single account that is used for multiple platforms, similar with how your ATProto account can be used for multiple types of apps.
One of the most valuable parts of a conference like FOSDEM is getting developers together in a room to meet and build relationships. Fediforum has provided such a place for people to gather digitally, but meeting people in real life remains one of the best ways to build trust and relationships. Some practical ways this was visible this FOSDEM was by getting the NodeBB, WordPress ActivityPub plugin, WriteFreely and Ghost developers together and recognising themselves as the ‘longform’ people. This group of developers getting together this way helps with the various projects becoming more interoperable, and better support for longform content in the fediverse.

Two issues regarding consent and data processing this week. The first is with GoToSocial and fediverse statistics sites like fedidb.org and fediverse.observer. Some GoToSocial servers have blocked statistics sites from indexing their platforms via robots.txt, but the crawlers of fedidb.org and fediverse.observer ignore those. In response, the main GoToSocial server decided to serve up randomised numbers, messing up the statistics of these sites. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault removed GoToSocial altogether from the statistics site, but does not seem to be willing to respect the opting out of crawling via robots.txt. The second is regarding the shutdown of FediOnFire, that displayed public posts from a relay in a format similar to one of Bluesky’s firehose visualisation tools.
How the fediverse treats consent for public posts is unusual, and make it stand out from other networks. For a significant group of people, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-out bases if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a full 2-way interacting fediverse server. In contrast, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-in basis if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a crawler. The line between these two situations is hard to draw, even more so in an internally coherent way. Still, this line clearly exists, and ignoring it leads to high-profile blowups such as with Searchtodon and Bridgy Fed. Defining the permissions clearly for posts would help here, and it is frustrated to see that the situation has not meaningfully improved in years. Furthermore, that fediverse stats sites have ignored the opt-out on a server level via robots.txt indicates that servers setting permissions is not a panacea either.

The Pixelfed Kickstarter has seen some updates this week. First was the update that setting up a Pixelfed Foundation is now moved to the stretch goal of $200k CAD, and that for $300k CAD the stretch goal is to expand the team to hire additional developers. A few days later, developer Daniel Supernault said that the $300k CAD stretch goal is now to build a Tumblr alternative. That brings the goal of the Pixelfed Kickstarter to build four platforms: Pixelfed, Loops, Sup (an encrypted messaging platform) and an unnamed Tumblr alternative, as well as building a foundation and a developer testing kit with Pubkit. Moving the foundation to a stretch goal that has not been met yet does not feel great to me, as good governance of such large platforms is highly important. Adding a Tumblr alternative to another later stretch goal also makes me concerned that Supernault is taking on too much here, as that is a lot of products to build and maintain.

Openvibe, a client that combines your Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads account into a single feed, has raised 800k USD in outside investment, with Automattic among the investors. Openvibe is an early mover in the space, and it’s a name I regularly see pop up when people recommend clients. However, open networks and open APIs means that it is hard to build a competitive moat. Still, most apps are hobby projects, and I’m curious how far Openvibe can push their app with the new funding.The Links
ActivityPub server framework Fedify is now on Open Collective.
Hosting a fedi instance on a .arpa domain.
Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time – Elena Rossini.
Flipboard and Surf are planning an event, Fediverse House, in Austin, Texas, on March 9 and 10, with more information available soon.
Remembering Radio Free Fedi – WeDistribute.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-102/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025jan.d Welcome to this edition ...

2025-01-30T21:14:54Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025jan.d

Welcome to this edition of Last Week in the ATmosphere, focused on everything that is happening in the wider ATProto network, the ATmosphere. Next week will be focused on Bluesky again. Bluesky continues to grow in users, and there are now 30 million Bluesky accounts. The wider ATmosphere is tiny in comparison, this dashboard gives a good indication of how small all other apps are. While Bluesky is a polished product ready for regular people to use, other ATmosphere apps are in a phase of experimentation. This week’s newsletter shows the variety of things people are building on ATProto. And while most apps are not ready for mainstream adoption yet, they do showcase the wide range of possibilities that ATProto affords.ATmosphere

Streamplace is a new platform for livestreaming that is integrated with ATProto that is now entering an invite-only testing phase. Streamplace is the software that allows people to livestream, either via a mobile app or desktop client, that people can host themselves. The integration with ATProto means that you log in with your ATProto account via Oauth. It does not store the video live stream on your PDS, that is hosted on a different server, your PDS only contains the signing key to verify that it is indeed your ATProto account who is doing the livestreaming. In this way it differs from Grayhaze. Grayhaze is also building livestreaming on ATProto, where it also stores the actual video files on your PDS.

Roomy is a newly announced P2P group app for ATProto that is currently in development. The project is one of the first recipients of a grant by Skyseed, a VC fund for ATProto. Roomy has a roadmap for the next month, in which they aim to have a working MVP. One of the main limitations for building chatting apps on ATProto is that ATProto does not handle private data. Roomy’s solution is to focus on public group chats for now. A short video of what Roomy will look like can be seen here. What makes Roomy so interesting is in that it shows that ATProto does not have to exists on its own, and can be combined with other protocols (or in this case, Automerge‘ data structures) to unlock new capabilities.

Pinksky is a new 3rd-party photo client for Bluesky that focuses on images, with an interface that resembles Instagram. Pinksky has great front-end design, but the connection to ATProto is could be better supported. At this point I feel that ATProto apps should support the features that make the network decentralised, meaning the app should support accounts that are not hosted by Bluesky, or use a did:web account. Pinksky also has a tab with ‘Pinksky only’ posts, but those are in fact Bluesky posts with a specific hashtag. Pinksky not using their own Lexicon here feels like a missed opportunity.

Reelo stands out among the apps building a ‘TikTok for Bluesky’ – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch

Reelo is an upcoming video app for ATProto, and one with the goal of building its own platform. It does so by using it’s own Lexicon, not that of Bluesky. I explain the more technical side of that choice here. Reelo building it’s own platform gives it independence from Bluesky, but also creates significant responsibilities for the single developer: not only will the developer have to build an video app, it will also have to have a moderation system, as Reelo cannot depend on Bluesky’s moderation.

Openvibe, a client that combines your Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads account into a single feed, has raised 800k USD in outside investment, with Automattic among the investors. Openvibe is an early mover in the space, and it’s a name I regularly see pop up when people recommend clients. However, open networks and open APIs means that it is hard to build a competitive moat. Still, most apps are hobby projects, and I’m curious how far Openvibe can push their app with the new funding.

Stellar is a new 3rd-party client for Bluesky that has emoji reactions on posts. It uses Bluemoji as the emoji’s for reactions. Bluemoji is a project that allows people to add their own custom emoji’s to ATProto, store them on a PDS, and then let other people also use those emoji’s. This is what makes Stellar so interesting, it takes an existing project by other developers that incorporates that into their own project. It is this interplay of independent projects that can build of each other that makes open protocols so exciting.

Skylight, the video app for Bluesky, continues to add updates. The app has gotten a lot of attention on Bluesky, and it shows the impact of having the Skylight team do consistent video updates. Another video apps for Bluesky that recently launched is videos for bluesky, by the same developer who made the SoraSNS multi-network client for Bluesky.

Some more ATProto projects that feel like they are more in a prototype phase than a final product phase:
Ruthub is a Kanban board on ATProto
Newdin is a sort of wiki-like collaborative timeline?
Leaflet is an existing tool for collaborative document editing, that is experimenting with adding Bluesky comment support.

And some more links:
Some community members have been exploring and reviewing what products are currently out there in the ATmosphere (1, 2)
atproto site allows you to create an HTML page from your ATProto records.Community

Blacksky is becoming it’s own independent company, Blacksky Algorithms Inc. What started as a custom feed for Black people is quickly growing into something much bigger. Blacksky now has multiple code contributors, 8 active moderators, all with a 44k USD yearly budget. Fraser will now be working full-time on Blacksky. The move to incorporate, as well as long-term plans to build Blacksky’s own AppView, make it clear that Blacksky is its own place in the ATmosphere. It shows that digital spaces can be build that are not dependent on Bluesky, but can be their own space instead.

The first in-person ATProto conference is planned to take place on March 22 and 23 in Seattle. The conference is organised by some active members of the atproto dev community, and some of the same people who run the regular ATProto Tech Talks. Skyseed, the ATProto venture fund, is also sponsoring the conference. Conferences are a great way to build a more cohesive sense of community among developers, something that I feel has been lacking over on the ActivityPub side. I’m hopeful that regular ATProto conferences can help build a better developer ecosystem for the ATmosphere.Protocol

PinkSea is now running its own CDN. A true decentralised network means that all the components of the network are decentralised. Some components such as Relays haven gotten the most attention in conversations about decentralisation. CDNs are much less discussed, and virtually all content depends on the CDN of Bluesky. PinkSea is an ATProto platform for drawing and sharing images, and the platform now runs their own CDN that is independent of Bluesky. As far as I know this is the first ATProto platform that has their own CDN, marking another small step towards the network becoming more decentralised.

And some more links:
Graze has open-sourced it’s core algorithm engine.
A user script to store bookmarks on your PDS in an encrypted form.
A vanity DID:PLC Miner.
A script that gives “statistics about which users make how many posts/RTs on average”.
You can just hack on ATProto – Vicky Boykis
A discussion on Lexicon Versioning.

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-the-atmosphere-2025jan-d-2/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025jan.d Welcome to this edition ...

2025-01-30T21:08:00Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025jan.d

Welcome to this edition of Last Week in the ATmosphere, focused on everything that is happening in the wider ATProto network, the ATmosphere. Next week will be focused on Bluesky again. Bluesky continues to grow in users, and there are now 30 million Bluesky accounts. The wider ATmosphere is tiny in comparison, this dashboard gives a good indication of how small all other apps are. While Bluesky is a polished product ready for regular people to use, other ATmosphere apps are in a phase of experimentation. This week’s newsletter shows the variety of things people are building on ATProto. And while most apps are not ready for mainstream adoption yet, they do showcase the wide range of possibilities that ATProto affords.ATmosphere

Streamplace is a new platform for livestreaming that is integrated with ATProto that is now entering an invite-only testing phase. Streamplace is the software that allows people to livestream, either via a mobile app or desktop client, that people can host themselves. The integration with ATProto means that you log in with your ATProto account via Oauth. It does not store the video live stream on your PDS, that is hosted on a different server, your PDS only contains the signing key to verify that it is indeed your ATProto account who is doing the livestreaming. In this way it differs from Grayhaze. Grayhaze is also building livestreaming on ATProto, where it also stores the actual video files on your PDS.

Roomy is a newly announced P2P group app for ATProto that is currently in development. The project is one of the first recipients of a grant by Skyseed, a VC fund for ATProto. Roomy has a roadmap for the next month, in which they aim to have a working MVP. One of the main limitations for building chatting apps on ATProto is that ATProto does not handle private data. Roomy’s solution is to focus on public group chats for now. A short video of what Roomy will look like can be seen here. What makes Roomy so interesting is in that it shows that ATProto does not have to exists on its own, and can be combined with other protocols (or in this case, Automerge‘ data structures) to unlock new capabilities.

Pinksky is a new 3rd-party photo client for Bluesky that focuses on images, with an interface that resembles Instagram. Pinksky has great front-end design, but the connection to ATProto is could be better supported. At this point I feel that ATProto apps should support the features that make the network decentralised, meaning the app should support accounts that are not hosted by Bluesky, or use a did:web account. Pinksky also has a tab with ‘Pinksky only’ posts, but those are in fact Bluesky posts with a specific hashtag. Pinksky not using their own Lexicon here feels like a missed opportunity.

Reelo stands out among the apps building a ‘TikTok for Bluesky’ – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch

Reelo is an upcoming video app for ATProto, and one with the goal of building its own platform. It does so by using it’s own Lexicon, not that of Bluesky. I explain the more technical side of that choice here. Reelo building it’s own platform gives it independence from Bluesky, but also creates significant responsibilities for the single developer: not only will the developer have to build an video app, it will also have to have a moderation system, as Reelo cannot depend on Bluesky’s moderation.

Openvibe, a client that combines your Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads account into a single feed, has raised 800k USD in outside investment, with Automattic among the investors. Openvibe is an early mover in the space, and it’s a name I regularly see pop up when people recommend clients. However, open networks and open APIs means that it is hard to build a competitive moat. Still, most apps are hobby projects, and I’m curious how far Openvibe can push their app with the new funding.

Stellar is a new 3rd-party client for Bluesky that has emoji reactions on posts. It uses Bluemoji as the emoji’s for reactions. Bluemoji is a project that allows people to add their own custom emoji’s to ATProto, store them on a PDS, and then let other people also use those emoji’s. This is what makes Stellar so interesting, it takes an existing project by other developers that incorporates that into their own project. It is this interplay of independent projects that can build of each other that makes open protocols so exciting.

Skylight, the video app for Bluesky, continues to add updates. The app has gotten a lot of attention on Bluesky, and it shows the impact of having the Skylight team do consistent video updates. Another video apps for Bluesky that recently launched is videos for bluesky, by the same developer who made the SoraSNS multi-network client for Bluesky.

Some more ATProto projects that feel like they are more in a prototype phase than a final product phase:
Ruthub is a Kanban board on ATProto
Newdin is a sort of wiki-like collaborative timeline?
Leaflet is an existing tool for collaborative document editing, that is experimenting with adding Bluesky comment support.

And some more links:
Some community members have been exploring and reviewing what products are currently out there in the ATmosphere (1, 2)
atproto site allows you to create an HTML page from your ATProto records.Community

Blacksky is becoming it’s own independent company, Blacksky Algorithms Inc. What started as a custom feed for Black people is quickly growing into something much bigger. Blacksky now has multiple code contributors, 8 active moderators, all with a 44k USD yearly budget. Fraser will now be working full-time on Blacksky. The move to incorporate, as well as long-term plans to build Blacksky’s own AppView, make it clear that Blacksky is its own place in the ATmosphere. It shows that digital spaces can be build that are not dependent on Bluesky, but can be their own space instead.

The first in-person ATProto conference is planned to take place on March 22 and 23 in Seattle. The conference is organised by some active members of the atproto dev community, and some of the same people who run the regular ATProto Tech Talks. Skyseed, the ATProto venture fund, is also sponsoring the conference. Conferences are a great way to build a more cohesive sense of community among developers, something that I feel has been lacking over on the ActivityPub side. I’m hopeful that regular ATProto conferences can help build a better developer ecosystem for the ATmosphere.Protocol

PinkSea is now running its own CDN. A true decentralised network means that all the components of the network are decentralised. Some components such as Relays haven gotten the most attention in conversations about decentralisation. CDNs are much less discussed, and virtually all content depends on the CDN of Bluesky. PinkSea is an ATProto platform for drawing and sharing images, and the platform now runs their own CDN that is independent of Bluesky. As far as I know this is the first ATProto platform that has their own CDN, marking another small step towards the network becoming more decentralised.

And some more links:
Graze has open-sourced it’s core algorithm engine.
A user script to store bookmarks on your PDS in an encrypted form.
A vanity DID:PLC Miner.
A script that gives “statistics about which users make how many posts/RTs on average”.
You can just hack on ATProto – Vicky Boykis
A discussion on Lexicon Versioning.

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-the-atmosphere-2025jan-d/

Fediverse Report #101 Its another massive week for Pixelfed, ...

2025-01-28T18:49:09Z

Fediverse Report #101

Its another massive week for Pixelfed, growing by another 100k active users and doubling their Kickstarter goal, raising over 100k CAD. The News

Pixelfed continues to grow rapidly, adding almost 100k monthly active users in a week, and has now almost 300k monthly active users. Just over a month ago, Pixelfed had around 20k monthly active users. Developer Daniel Supernault launched a Kickstarter this week for Pixelfed,Loops and Sup. The Kickstarter proved popular, raising 100k CAD, double its 50k CAD goal. The Kickstarter is mainly for to fund the continuous development of the platforms, with the primary goals listed as ‘acceleration development’ for Pixelfed and Loops, and starting the development of messaging platform Sup. Sup is a planned encrypted messaging app that is supposed to compete with WhatsApp and Snapchat. Supernault has mentioned working on the project in the past, but it is unclear how far along the project is.

Supernault says that the operational costs for running all of his projects is now over 4000 USD per month. The large majority of people joining the flagship servers pixelfed.social and loops.video, which are both run by Supernault. Still, it seems like Supernault is not particularly interested in sharing out the load of users to other servers, saying that people unfamiliar with the fediverse want to join a a flagship instance. He also says that “using random servers to register on is very dangerous, because not all of them are as dedicated to this as I am, some of them don’t update frequently or handle mod reports as fast as we do.” Supernault is currently the only moderator for both the pixelfed.social server as well as the pixelfed.art server. He also says that Pixelfed.social needs to establish a mod team. One barrier to adding extra moderators is that Pixelfed does not have a specific ‘moderator’ role in the software, there is only the possibility to give someone full admin rights. Supernault says that he is working on adding such a feature.

The Pixelfed Kickstarter also lists a Pixelfed Foundation as its stretch goal. It is not particularly clear what such a Foundation would entail: the Kickstarter describes it as both a foundation and a corporation, as says that it “hopefully” would be a not-for-profit. Some of the potential work of the Pixelfed foundation would be to grow the Pixelfed and Loops social networks, and also support other developers in the wider fediverse ecosystem.

Tumblr has reconfirmed that it is working on connecting to the fediverse. In late 2022, Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the site was going to add ActivityPub support ‘soon’. Plans changed for Tumblr, including staff layoffs, and for a long time it was unclear if this plan was actually going to happen. In summer 2024, Tumblr announced that they would be working on moving the backend of Tumblr to WordPress. In an AMA this week, the company said that this migration of Tumblr to WordPress means that Tumblr can also use the plugins of WordPress, including the ActivityPub plugin. This means that people will be able to add ActivityPub to their Tumblr blogs. Not much is known about how this would work in practice. The Analysis

Editor’s note: I wrote the section below before Supernault published his latest update on Kickstarter a few hours ago. In the latest update the Pixelfed Foundation is now moved towards a new stretch goal of 200k CAD. This changes my analysis, but I currently do not have the time to properly analyse and write about it before this newsletter will go out. I’ll write more about this next week.

Some more thoughts on Pixelfed:
I worry about the moderation side for Pixelfed, and specificially the flagship pixelfed.social. Pixelfed.social is now a server with over 200.000 monthly active users, and Supernault is the only moderator for the server. 1 moderator for over 200k active accounts is not a whole lot, to put it mildly. One of the main goals of the Kickstarter is to “expand the moderation, security, privacy and safety platforms”, and my hope is that the financial success of the Kickstarter can help get a bigger moderation team for the servers as quickly as possible.
One of the consistently most difficult aspects of fediverse platforms is the governance of the software. Mastodon has gotten a lot of pushback for its ‘Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life‘, and correspondingly, a lot of praise when Mastodon recently moved away from this model. For Pixelfed and Loops the power concentration into a single person is even more pronounced, with a single developer running two different platforms, two flagship servers as well as various other prominent fediverse projects such as fedidb. It shows the incredible amount of work that Supernault has contributed to the fediverse, but it also indicates the centralisation of power that has resulted from this. The Kickstarter promises a Pixelfed Foundation, but it does not say anything about how the Foundation will deal with governance. The short description of the Foundation mainly seems to be focused on financial sustainability and growth of fediverse projects. The section on the Pixelfed Foundation ends with a quote from Mastodon’s blog post: “The people should own the town square”, but it does not explain in any way how “the people” will get to “own the town square”.
Over on Bluesky, the short-lived TikTok ban in the US has put video front-and-center. As a response, people are starting to take Bluesky posts that contain video, and build a TikTok-like UI around it. Bluesky launched video feeds in their app last week, and SkyLight is a high-profile project to build a video-only UI for Bluesky posts. I’m curious if Pixelfed’s renewed prominence will lead to more interest in similar image-viewing fediverse clients that less bound to server platforms, whether that is Pixelfed, Mastodon or other fediverse platforms.
The dominance of Mastodon and microblogging over the wider fediverse has led to a situation where Mastodon and the fediverse get equated as mostly the same in coverage of larger news outlets. The growth of Pixelfed, and the mainstream attention that it brings now changes this dynamic. This Forbes article about Pixelfed is a good example, where the fediverse gets introduced from the perspective of Pixelfed instead of from a perspective of Mastodon.
The Kickstarter states an “Commitment to open source and open principles”, and says that “all of the source code for Pixelfed is licensed under the AGPL license and is publicly available on GitHub”. I am not clear why Loops is not mentioned here for a commitment to open source. Loops is not currently neither open source nor federating, according to the official Pixelfed account. While Supernault also says that he is “working on that”, I find it strange that Loops is not mentioned under the commitment to open source.
Building an encrypted messaging app is difficult, to put things mildly. Building an encrypted messaging as a solo developer, while also building an Instagram competitor as well as a TikTok competitor is just wildly optimistic. I fear that Supernault is spreading himself too thin here, committed to too many different products. Supernault’s shifting attention makes it difficult for him to ship features he has promised. Notable example of this is the Groups feature for Pixelfed, which Supernault has promised as coming “very soon” since summer 2023. His latest estimation for groups is now for Q2 2025.

Tumblr saying that they are working on their fediverse integration is great news for the fediverse. For a quite a while it seemed that Tumblr would not actually follow through on early announcements by CEO Mullenweg. The answer by Tumblr that ActivityPub support will depend on a plugin makes it plausible to me that Tumblr blogs will likely have to opt-in to connecting themselves to the fediverse by adding the plugin. So based on the limited information available it seems likely to me it will not be a situation where the fediverse instantly grows by millions of active users.The Links

In the media:
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy – Jason Koebler/404Media
Meta and X are going rogue. Here is what Europe should do now. – EDRi/EDRi
The Challenge of Upward Momentum – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
Forum software NodeBB joins the fediverse – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch
Teaching Mastodon Through Practical Interactions – Lety Does Stuff

Tech links:
A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website) – Part 8 – Maho Pacheco
Hosting a new ActivityPub Relay for the Fediverse including Mastodon and snac – gyptazy
Lemmy bi-weekly development update.
Running GoToSocial on your car.
Upcoming fediverse music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information on how discovery will work on the platform.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-101/

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 100 Welcome to the 100th edition of ...

2025-01-21T18:42:52Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 100

Welcome to the 100th edition of Fediverse Report! It’s been a wonderful and strange 2 years to report on all the developers in the fediverse and the wider open social web. The current state of the open social web is nothing like I expected it to be when I started writing. When I first started I expected the fediverse to slowly gain wider adoption over the years. Instead, adoption has dropped compared with 2 years ago. At the same time, the current state of the internet and social platforms make it loud and clear that there is a huge need for better social platforms. I do not know what role the fediverse and the open social web will play in all of it, but I do strongly belief in the importance of helping people understand what is going on in the space. Thank you all for reading and the support over the years!The News

Pixelfed has seen massive growth over the last week. The photo sharing platform grew from some 20k monthly active users in December to almost 200k MAU right now. The inflow of new people is driven by a combination of three things: people are actively looking for an alternative to Instagram, as well as renewed media attention to Pixelfed as a result of the official app release. Pixelfed’s launch of the official apps has gotten significant media attention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The reviews of the Pixelfed apps show that there are two reasons for people to look for an Instagram alternative: not only are people looking to ditch Meta products due to their alignment with Trump, people are also looking for another photo sharing app that has not gotten as bloated as Instagram has. The title of the Lifehacker review makes that point clear, describing Pixelfed as a “Return to Instagram’s Glory Days”.

Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault says he has gotten multiple offers from VCs to chat about Pixelfed, but that he has rejected them all. Instead he will launch a Kickstarter on January 22nd. Not much is clear yet about the Kickstarter, but in the introduction Supernault makes it clear he has big plans, saying: “We aim to be the first Fediverse app with a billion people by taking on the worlds biggest players using open source standards.” Loops got critiqued for it’s “predatory” Terms of Service, which Supernault responded to a few days later by changing the ToS of Loops to be the same as those of Pixelfed.

Forum software NodeBB has officially launched their 4.0 version, which includes ActivityPub support. NodeBB has been working on adding ActivityPub for almost a year, and been testing it for a while as well. The community.nodebb.org forum has been connected to the fediverse for a while now, showing what a connection between forums and microblogging looks like in practice. Developer Julian Lam says that existing NodeBB forums will have to opt-in to the fediverse connection, while it will be enabled by default for new forums going forward. Lam also says that the work on ActivityPub also helped connect NodeBB with competitor Discourse, saying “NodeBB and Discourse have been vying for the exact same market share (forums, community-building, self-started or enterprise) for over 10 years, and it was only after ActivityPub came around that the dev teams even started talking to one another.” By both working on ActivityPub, these competitors are now also collaborators, and both their forums can connect with each other.

BotKit by Fedify is a new framework for building bots on ActivityPub. It is powered by Fedify, a TypeScript library for building with ActivityPub. Using BotKit allows people to easily build bots for ActivityPub, instead of building bots on Mastodon or Misskey.

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin now gives you the ability to show fediverse engagement on the page itself. I’ve enabled it below as well, go check it out!The Analysis

Some stray thoughts on Pixelfed’s growth:
It has been a long time since the fediverse has seen a notable increase in users and new signups: the last major event was in July 2023 with people looking for Reddit alternatives. Over time, Bluesky became the default destination for people looking to migrate away from X. The ATmosphere does not have a dedicated place for sharing photos, giving all the more opportunity for Pixelfed to be the new home of people looking for an Instagram alternative.
One of the advantages of the fediverse is in the interoperability between different platforms, even when two platforms are focused on a different modality of communications. Mastodon and Pixelfed can interoperate with each other, but the much more question is: will this be feature that will be actively used, or more of a niche nice-to-have? Mastodon does have an active traditions for the sharing of photos with hashtags such as #silentsunday, and I’m curious if/how these traditions will evolve with a more active photo sharing platform.
Supernault is now responsible for the development of two different types of platforms: Pixelfed and Loops, and is also responsible for running the flagship servers for both platforms: pixelfed.social and loops.video. The amount of work that Supernault puts into the fediverse is incredibly impressive. At the same time, it does give me cause for concerns for governance of the platforms. It is an incredibly amount of load and responsibility that is all placed on a single person. Supernault would do well to delegate a significant amount of responsibility here. However, previous cases where other developers have tried to work together have not gone well, for various reasons. I’m concerned that the fediverse is replicating the same problems that Mastodon has had with governance here.
Pixelfed looks to replicate the same power dynamic that Mastodon has with the mastodon.social server. The large majority of new signups are going to the main pixelfed.social server. The power dynamics of Pixelfed are even more skewed than they are with Mastodon: 75% of Pixelfed’s current monthly active users are on the pixelfed.social server.

One of the fundamental challenges of building a decentralised social network with ActivityPub is in the tension between local and global. The fediverse is a super-network of connected social networks: you can see mastodon.social as its own social network, that has joined the larger fediverse. This theoretically allows for benefits such as local digital communities with local norms and moderation. In practice, most fediverse software is not interested in the local communities part, and actively discourages using the software as such: Mastodon explicitly prohibits posting only to your local server, for example. As such, the fediverse as it currently is, is mainly a singular global network, and less a network made of a plurality of spaces. This current dynamic in the fediverse is what makes forums like NodeBB adding ActivityPub to their platforms so interesting. Forums like NodeBB are understood to be local communities. When you go to a forum, you expect to see only people and posts from that specific forum. Forums are often tied around a specific topic or community, making much easier to define what the local forum community is all about. Now these forums that understand the value of having a clear local community have an additional connection to a wider network. It is effectively the reverse sales-pitch of most current fediverse servers. Mastodon says: join the larger fediverse, and you might have some additional benefits if you join the fediverse via a specific community/server. NodeBB says: join our specific forum community, and you might have some additional benefits by being connected to a larger fediverse network.

TechCrunch checked in with Threads on their plans to add account portability to their fediverse integration, writing: “A Meta spokesperson couldn’t confirm that the topic was even on the Threads roadmap, let alone when it was due to be addressed.” I recently published that I do not have a satisfying answer as to “Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?”. Last week I also reported that the Threads-fediverse connection is seeing incredibly low uptake from the side of Threads; in total at best only a few thousand people on Threads follow someone from the fediverse. As Meta is quickly aligning itself politically with Trump, and applying censorship accordingly, the question becomes louder and louder: why is the fediverse still bothering with Threads? In practice nobody on Threads is interested in connecting with the fediverse, it does not allow for people to migrate their account from Threads to the fediverse, and it is bad optics for the fediverse to boot.The Links
Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update, Trunk & Tidbits, for December 2024
PieFed roadmap for 2025.
Mastodon’s CEO Eugen Rochko gave an interview with on the TechCrunch Equity Podcast.
My year of Fediverse explorations – Elena Rossini
ActivityPods published a roadmap for 2025.
Ghost’s weekly update on their ActivityPub integration.
Firefox had an interview with developer Takiyoshi Hoshida, who is behind the multi-protocol app Sora.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Owncast January 2025 newsletter.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.

#fediverse #silentsunday

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-100/

Last Week in Bluesky and the ATmosphere -2025jan.b A busy news ...

2025-01-16T19:36:09Z

Last Week in Bluesky and the ATmosphere -2025jan.b

A busy news for Bluesky, and the wider AT Protocol (ATProto) network, with a new governance initiative, Mark Cuban calling for a TikTok alternative on ATProto, and much more. This week also features a deep dive on ATProto, explaining what Lexicons are and why they matter.The News

Free Our Feeds is a newly launched campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The goal of the project is to raise 30M USD over 3 years to set up an independent public benefit Foundation for ATProto. The funds will go to setting up the foundation, building out independent infrastructure and fund independent developers. The Foundation will be led by 9 “custodians”, including Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation and more. The announcement has drawn some major media attention. In an article on Project Syndicate, Robin Berjon, one of the initiators behind Free Our Feeds, describes more the thinking of the project, saying: “Infrastructure may be privately provided, but it can be properly governed only by its stakeholders – openly and democratically. For this reason, we must all set our minds on building institutions that can govern a new, truly social digital infrastructure.” The initiative got some high-profile names on board, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, artists such as Mark Ruffalo, Alex Winter and Brian Eno.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has become a more and more active cheerleader for Bluesky, and it is clear that he sees the possibilities that the protocol allows. Cuban posted a TikTok this week where he said he would be “open to investing and supporting in anybody or somebody who creates a TikTok replacement build on the AT Protocol”.

The developer behind third-party Bluesky iOS/iPad client Skeets announced that they are working on another client for Bluesky called Flashes. The app focuses on images, and describes itself as a ‘photo viewing client for Bluesky‘. The news got broadly picked up by news after a TechCrunch article headline made it sound like it was an official app by the Bluesky team, and tapped into broad sentiment for people looking for an Instagram alternative.

A Russian bot network is now active on Bluesky, which seems to be related or part of the Doppelgänger disinformation campaign. The bots target the general public with messages aimed to reduce support for the Ukraine. There are other issues with spam as well, such spammers now creating ‘no-more-bots’ block lists which weaponise lists to hide some accounts of people posting about disinformation and spam in the block list. Tools for community moderation are still limited, as demonstrated by this feedback by some community labelers.

The Bluesky team wrote a reflection for 2024 about the developments on ATProto, to chalk up how work has progressed. The big picture is that Bluesky states that “most of the public data aspects of the protocol have now been designed and implemented”, and that “the last missing pieces are nearing completion”. Regarding the implementation of OAuth, it is still in its first phase, and the team hopes to share more information soon on adding Auth Scopes. Auth Scopes allow for “more granular and flexible Authorization grants”. For future work, Bluesky says that private content on ATProto is a priority for the team to add. They are also thinking about improvements to the plc.directory system, which currently functions well but is a centralised part of the network. For plc.directory the team is working on both technical as well as governance improvements. The Analysis

In the email newsletter introduction (subscribe below if you also want to get all updates weekly in your inbox, with added commentary!) last week I wrote that I was unhappy with the state of governance for the open social web. Things have already rapidly changed this week, with Mastodon making major changes and the Free Our Feed initiative focusing on governance for ATProto. Some thoughts on the Free Our Feed (FOF) initiative:
Probably the largest impact of FOF is in the validation towards other organisations and people that ATProto does not have to be exclusively a network that is run by a VC-backed company. Bluesky’s ties with (crypto) VC money has been a major hesitation for some public-benefit organisations that work on a better internet to promote Bluesky, and have been mainly focused on Mastodon and the fediverse so far. The existence of another public organisation with no VC funding that works on ATProto can help alleviate these concerns.
The site only mentions a GoFundMe, which has raised 57k USD so far. A healthy sum of money, but significantly short of the 4M USD they are seeing to set up the foundation. It is unclear to me if FOF is also pursuing other ways for raising funds.
One of the main goals of FOF is to “fund developers to create a vibrant ecosystem”. The common response that I’ve seen and gotten by the existing ATProto developer community however is a confusion about the existence of FOF and disconnect with the people behind it. The ATProto developer community largely runs on volunteer labor, and it has been difficult to find even tiny amounts of funding for crucial projects. From the perspective of some of the developers, it is unclear what FOF adds as an intermediary for getting funding.
The main purpose of the FOF is to provide independent governance for ATProto. It is understandable that people are uncomfortable with protocol governance by a for-profit VC-backed company. But providing an alternative is that much harder. Unilaterally declaring nine people to be ‘custodians’ for protocol governance is not a form of governance that feels particularly democratic to me. Why these nine people exactly? FOF has not given any reason as to why it should be these nine persons that are responsible for “major governance decisions”. What makes them qualified to be responsible for the major governance decisions for ATProto? It is clear that there are some skilled people that are part of FOF, but the lack of justification and unilateral declaration as ‘custodian’ does not feel great to me. I strongly agree with Berjon that internet infrastructure governance should be done “openly and democratically“, and that part is exactly where Free Our Feeds, with nine predetermined and unelected custodians making the major decisions, falls flat for me.

It has been almost a year since Bluesky opened up to the public, and so far, the network is highly centralised around Bluesky. While there has been a significant amount of experimentation by developers, no other larger company or organisation has built another AppView on ATProto yet. I think part of the problem here is a chicken-and-egg situation: the perception is that ATProto is a network that is owned by Bluesky, making other organisations hesitant to build their own platform on the protocol. But as nobody else is building on the protocol, the perception that ATProto is only for Bluesky gets reinforced. In that light I find Mark Cuban’s announcement that he is encouraging people to build on ATProto, and willing to invest in a TikTok alternative on the protocol to be noteworthy. Cuban has a high reputation build up with Shark Tank about knowing when and where to invest. If he signals to the community that ATProto is a good place to build upon and invest in, it makes it all the more likely that people will listen and start exploring building on the protocol. I personally think it is likely that the impact of Cuban signalling that ATProto is a good protocol to build upon might just have a bigger impact than a potential investment by Cuban in a TikTok alternative.

The bigger story about the announcement of 3rd-party Bluesky client Flashes is not in the app itself, but in the media attention and enthusiasm around it. The headline by TechCrunch ‘Bluesky is getting its own photo-sharing app, Flashes’ is not incorrect, but seems to have given a lot of people a wrong impression of what Flashes was planning to be. Part of the problem is that the difference between a third party client app, and a complete AppView is a new type of language that people are not accustomed to. It seems like that will take some time for people and the media to catch up to. On the other hand, it shows that there is significant interest by people for an Instagram alternative. People have been posting the suggestion to build an Instagram on ATProto literally every day for quite a while on Bluesky, but nobody has pulled the trigger to actually build such a thing. Seeing the interest by the media in such a project might just convince some people to actually start building a real Instagram competitor on ATProto.The Deep Dive – Lexicons

This tech deep dive is a pretty wonky (we’re gonna talk about data formats, whoohoo!), but I think it matters. Lexicons play part of quite a bit of the news that lots of people on Bluesky have an opinion about, but can be difficult to understand. Lexicons explain why it is hard to build another microblogging app on ATProto that has a 500 character limit, for example. It also explain the difference between an Instagram-like ATProto app that is another Bluesky client such as the just-announced Flashes, versus a complete application that is truly separate from Bluesky.

Lexicons are about formatting data, but more importantly, they are about power: who gets to decide how public data is structured?

To explain what Lexicons are, a simplified explanation of ATProto. There are two core parts: A Personal Data Server (PDS) which contains all your data, and AppViews, which are 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.

Which brings us to 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 first major community Lexicon proposal is for Calendar and Location types, and provides generic Lexicons for things like events. Smoke Signal is an event planner app on ATProto, and developer Nick Gerakines is one of the driving forces behind the community project. He also has the intention to use the community Lexicons for the Smoke Signal app, to put community Lexicons first in use.

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.

The big challenge for any community project like this is governance, and how to get buy-in from the rest of the developer community. The project has a technical steering committee, consisting of some well-known developers in the ecosystem, such as Rudy Fraser who is behind Blacksky, Ryan Barrett the creator of Bridgy Fed and Tom Sherman who builds Frontpage.fyi. The real next step for the Lexicon.community is in getting other ATProto projects to actually start using the Lexicons. Lexicon.community also published a Lexicon for bookmarks. Asked for feedback from Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold said that “there are no hard blockers” for the team to use Lexicons that are not owned by Bluesky, and said that it is “part of the atproto vision to enable borrowing and cross-namespace use of Lexicons”.The Links
A first look at Altmetric insights from Bluesky – Mike Taylor/Altmetric
Meet the Mayor of GreenSky – Henry Carnell/MotherJones
An unofficial Bluesky roadmap based on all GitHub issues that have a roadmap-related label.
Graze gives a few more notes and updates on their work on adding sponsored content to custom feeds.
Setting up a PDS on RISC-V.
A Typescript service for creating lists based on a Bluesky labeler’s labels.
How to migrate your Bluesky account to self-hosted – Justin Garrison/YouTube.
The Atrium-rs Rust package is looking for organisational support and maintainers.

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-and-the-atmosphere-2025jan-b/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 99 A major news for governance this ...

2025-01-14T18:33:58Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 99

A major news for governance this week on the open social web, with Mastodon shaking up their organisational structure and more.The News

Mastodon published plans for their new governance structure, with control of Mastodon moving to a new non-profit organisation, and moving ownership away from CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon will set up a new top-level non-profit organisation. This new organisation will become owner of various Mastodon related assets, including names and copyrights. These assets are currently still held by Eugen Rochko, and Mastodon says that this is not the intent of Mastodon. Rochko and the Mastodon organisation believe that “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

Rochko has been a major driving force in growing Mastodon into the platform and product that it is today. While his singular ownership in his name of Mastodon does not fit with the current state of the platform, it is indicative of the outsized influence and impact his work has had over the years. In a thread, Rochko also explains his own perspective, writing about how Mastodon has become tightly integrated with his own identity. He also says that the last two years have taken a toll on him, both mentally and physically. Stepping away from a leadership position that has become so tightly integrated with a sense of self is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and Rochko deserves recognition for both his work, and knowing when to take a step back.

Even for the Mastodon organisation, there are still multiple unknowns, and the organisation is still in the process of figuring it all out. The short summary of what the organisation of Mastodon will look like: There will be a new top-level organisation for Mastodon. This will be a non-profit organisation that is based in Europe. Mastodon does not know yet which European country. The organisation will be led by a new CEO. The new CEO has already been picked, but Mastodon is waiting for a few final practical details before they will be announced. Under this top-level organisation will be 2 other organisations, the US-based Mastodon non-profit and the current Mastodon GmbH organisation. For the US-based Mastodon non-profit nothing will change, this organisation is mainly for fundraising purposes. The current Mastodon GmbH organisation has become a for-profit organisation due to unclear German bureaucracy. This organisation will involve itself with the daily operations, both of running the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers as well as development of Mastodon software.

404 Media reported this week that Meta is blocking links to Pixelfed on their apps, after various fediverse users reported that links on Meta platforms to their Pixelfed account immediately got taken down as spam. Meta later admitted to Engadget that “removing the posts was a mistake and that they’d be reinstated.” Meta’s actions have been beneficial for Pixelfed, which has been at the centre of a news cycle. Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault said that the pixelfed.social was seeing “unprecedented levels of traffic“, and according to fedidb.org (also created by Supernault) monthly active users for Pixelfed jumped from 20k in December to 27k as of right now. Supernault also reports that pixelfed.social had 11k people joining in the last 24 hours, which also is validated by fedidb.org. I’m not clear on what the correct statistics are here, but a sudden jump in interest after all the media attention is clearly happening. Pixelfed also got the official apps finally out of testing and available in the Android Play Store and iOS App Store. The move has been announced and teased for a long time, and the app has been available in testing for a while.

Meta and Zuckerberg decided this week to go fully mask-off, making significant changes to their platforms and rules around hate speech. Most notably are the rules around hate speech, where Meta is now explicitly allowing hate speech against various minorities. The move sparked a wide backlash, and various Mastodon servers who previously federated with Threads decided to cut defederate from Threads. Notable examples include Hachyderm and mstdn.social. Other servers such as mastodon.social and indieweb.social condemned the move by Meta, but refrained from defederating from Threads. The Analysis

In last week’s email introduction I wrote that I was unhappy with the state of governance of both the fediverse as well as the ATmosphere. This week’s news regarding Mastodon is a great step in the right direction. Mastodon has clear ambitions and values about decentralisation, and having a self-styled dictator-for-life who runs the software just does not fit at all with the stated values. The Mastodon Operations organisation now being a for-profit organisation is also interesting. While this happened outside of the control of Mastodon GmbH as a result of opaque Germany bureaucracy, I think it is potentially a good thing. Running a social media server with 250k monthly active users costs real money. Having servers be financially sustainable is an integral part of having fair and equitable social media platforms. So far, the fediverse has struggled making this happen on a donations model.

It is the next moves that are the real important ones: what form of governance will the non-profit holding organisation take? Will it allow for real community ownership, as implied by the title of the blog? Who will be the new CEO? What new sets of strategic priorities for Mastodon will be set? Many things are still up in the air, even for the people at Mastodon itself, and those aspects will be where we will see the most impactful changes. Still, this is a great step in the right direction.

I do find the contrast between the moves that Rochko has made and how Supernault approaches Pixelfed and Loops notable. Rochko has been aware of the downsides of his model of governance for Mastodon, and has made the necessary changes, while Supernault seems determined to go at it alone. Supernault has a wild number of projects on his plate: building the Pixelfed platform as well as mobile apps, as well as video platform Loops with it’s mobile apps, running the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art server, running fedidb.org and more. It is incredibly impressive what Supernault has managed to build, all by himself in his spare time. Supernault has high ambitions, explicitly positioning his platforms as competitors to Instagram and TikTok. But as the looming TikTok ban in the US shows: one of the most important aspects of social media platforms these days is how they are governed, and by whom. Having a single developer governing the development of two different types of platforms, as well as their flagship servers, seems like a form of governance that is not particularly sustainable.

Rochko shared some more statistics about the connection between Threads and mastodon.social in a conversation on the Mastodon Discord, writing: “For some context, 81,745 people follow at least one Threads account from their mastodon.social account (and we are aware of 25,042 Threads account that federate), with some of the most followed accounts being MKBDH, Barack Obama, and Nilay Patel.” He also noted that only 811 Threads accounts follow at least one mastodon.social account. These statistics only represent mastodon.social, not the entire fediverse. But considering mastodon.social is by far the largest server and many other servers do not federate with Threads at all, it does provide a good indication of the actual usage of Threads. Hachyderm also shared some statistics on the connection between Threads and Hachyderm: “There were 2033 unique Hachyderm accounts following 919 unique Threads accounts and 26 unique Threads accounts following 22 unique Hachyderm accounts.”

Last month I wrote an article ‘Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?’, going through the various reasons for Meta to add federation to Threads. I did not have a clear single answer to that question. The data above provides at least an indication that users are also not clear on why Threads should have fediverse interoperability. It turns out that in practice, marginally few people are interested in the two-way connection between Threads and the rest of the fediverse.

In conversations last week regarding whether or not servers should defederate from Threads, one argument that got brought up repeatedly that connecting with Threads allows people to migrate away from Threads to Mastodon, while still keeping connections with people on Threads. Seeing the statistics on how few people actually use the Threads fediverse connections this argument rings hollow to me. The Links
The 5th edition of online unconference FediForum will take place on April 1st and 2nd this year.
Threads is slowly making their fediverse integration available for a small number of EU users.
Castopod has made a demo server available where people can test out the fediverse podcasting platform.
PeerTube is slowly making more servers available in their official apps, being careful to comply with app store regulations.
Hachyderm shares their monthly operations costs breakdown.
Biweekly Lemmy development update.
Ghost’s update on implementing ActivityPub and reflection on their work in 2024.
Piefed held a community vote for their roadmap for 2025.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-99/

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025jan.a The year has only just ...

2025-01-09T18:59:16Z

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025jan.a

The year has only just started, and already the owners of the current Big Tech social networks have made it abundantly clear why open social networks matter. While it was never really true that networks, such as Twitter, were neutral platforms, we could at least collectively agree to that polite fiction. But in 2025, social networks are political, and have political alignments. Over the holidays I’ve taken some time away from all of my socials, and it’s been nice to have some space for reflection. Two articles came out this week that touch on some of my thoughts. The first is Henry Farrell’s ‘We’re getting the social media crisis wrong’, in which Farrell says: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” He takes the perspective of information and how it shapes beliefs, but his core observation is powerful and worth repeating. In effect, social media is a tool of collective sense-making. We have let a few tech billionaires control our tools that we globally use to collectively make sense of the world, and it turns out that has some negative consequences, to put it mildly.

This is why I care about social networks, because they are one of the main tools that we use in 2025 to come to a collective understanding of how the world works. I think that it is bad that these extraordinary powerful tools are in the hands of a few fascist billionaires, allowing them unprecedented control over how society sees and understands the world. The value of open social networks is in creating new forms of governance for our collective sense making tools.

Bluesky Won’t Save Us by Katharina Alejandra Cross touches on more of the risks that having access to collective sense making tools bring, as well as the issues that Bluesky has to truly be a different place. I agree with all the major points here: Being on X is a severe risk for many reasons, but a major one is that it warps your perspective of collective thought, shaped by a fascist billionaire. Bluesky has struggled to adapt to what it wants to be exactly, and while it is clearly a much better place than X, it has not yet provided a good answer to the tension between building a safe (centralised) platform and a decentralised open protocol. Cross writes: “Our best hope, then, is that Bluesky acts as a halfway house—most especially for politicians, journalists, academics, influencers, and other people who clearly spend way too much time online to their detriment.” I also hope that Bluesky acts as a halfway house, although maybe in a slightly different way than Cross is talking about here. I think we need to invent new types of social networks that better serve their role as collective tools for sense-making. Bluesky is a good step in the right direction, but I think we can do more than ‘decentralised microblogging’. ATProto can provide a powerful substrate for people to experiment on with new forms of social networking, and I’m excited to see what 2025 will bring for that.The News

Business Insider reports that Bluesky is now valued at 700 million USD, and that they are close to finishing another funding round, this time led by Bain Capital Ventures. It is not known how much money Bluesky would raise in this new round. The previous funding round, the series A, was led by Blockchain Capital for 15 million, just barely 3 months ago. The series A did not provide a valuation for Bluesky. The series A also was just before the massive inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and Bluesky has doubled its user base in the 3 months since, from 13 million to 26 million. The new inflow of users also led to significant extra costs for Bluesky, which quadrupled its moderation team from 25 to 100 people, as well as the additional technical costs that comes with the growing user base. Bluesky got critiqued during the previous funding round for Blockchain Capital’s ties with cryptocurrency. In Blockchain Capital’s investment thesis they describe investing in a ‘vision of social infrastructure’ more than investing into a specific product. Crypto-themed VC funds tend to be more open to investing into lower-level internet infrastructure. Bain Capital Ventures seems to be a more generic VC fund: it does not have the connections to crypto that a significant part of the Bluesky user base finds noxious, but does not have a clear indication of a willingness to invest in social infrastructure over products either.

Bluesky has recently added Trending Topics as a new feature to their app. When you hit search on the app, you’ll now see a list of the most talked about topics. The feature is also visible in the Discover feed. Trending Topics has been a long-requested feature, and especially the Brazilian community was asking for it a lot during their time on Bluesky in fall 2024. The technological underpinning of how Trending Topics work on Bluesky is noteworthy: every trending topic is a custom feed. Every time a new topic is trending, a new custom feed gets created, giving the team better control over the topic. It also allows for new possibilities that have not yet been explored, such as archiving and documenting feeds after the trend is over, or other options that have not yet been explored. One of the more interesting trends on Bluesky is the emergence of (some) custom feeds as digital places, with Blacksky as the most notable example. I am interested in seeing how Trending Topics also being custom feeds interacts with that dynamic.

Graze is a tool for people to create their own custom feeds on ATProto. It has an extensive feature set allowing for a great amount of customisability, complex logic and the ability to moderate content that appears in a feed. Graze recently published their plans for monetisation. Graze says that the project is experiencing explosive growth, and is escalating quickly from a small gamble, with the tool now serving over 170k unique people every day. Graze expects that they can host 90-95% of custom feeds for free, and view it as a priority to keep making feeds as accessible as possible. Operating the infrastructure for custom feeds is not free however, and Graze plans to make money as follows: they will allow feed operators to run sponsored posts in their Graze feeds, at a cost specified by the feed operator. Feed operators are free to run their own sponsored content or find their own sponsors. If feed operators decide to monetise their custom feed, Graze will take a cut of the transaction. Graze has not specified yet how that transaction cost will be determined.

Bluesky has seen a large increase in the number of bot and spam accounts in recent weeks. There are roughly three groups of bots active: porn and romance scams, inauthentic accounts posing as Democratic defenders, content farms, and Russian disinformation networks. The Bluesky team has finally managed to crack down on the current spam wave. As spam is an eternal cat-and-mouse game between spammers and moderation, the reprieve is likely temporarily however. The spam has significant impact on how community moderation functions, as the tools that are available are not up to the task of handling such a massive inflow of reports. More automod functions are needed for community labeling projects to deal with the spam.The Analysis

There are multiple connections between these four different news stories. Early in 2024, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave an interview with The Verge, in which she talked about potential ways for Bluesky to make money. She described the idea of marketplaces that Bluesky could operate, such as marketplaces for algorithms. While she did not go into much detail on this, the basic idea seemed to be that people could create valuable systems (algorithms, moderation layers, custom feeds) and sell access to those systems to other people. Bluesky could then potentially operate these marketplaces, take a cut of every transaction as payment for providing the infrastructure, and make money this way. What we are seeing now with Graze is some version of this idea: Graze provides a marketplace for custom feed operators to put sponsored content in their feed, and Graze takes a cut of every transaction as payment for operating the infrastructure. It shows the interesting challenge for Bluesky PBC that is ahead: in an open system it is not actually guaranteed to be the first one to build marketplaces and become the default/largest operator of such a marketplace. If the potential is high enough, other organisations might just get there first.

There has been a lot of conversation about whether or not Bluesky will have advertisement in the future. The large majority of these conversations, and even remarks by Bluesky CEO Graber herself, imply a direct connection between people seeing advertisement when they open the Bluesky app, and the actions of Bluesky PBC. People assume that if they were to see ads on Bluesky, that is because Bluesky PBC put those ads there. The plans by Graze however show that this assumption is not always correct. In the near future, any ads people will see on the Bluesky app will likely be outside of the control of Bluesky PBC. Instead, the trend is towards ads being connected to the community/place/feed that shows the advertisement. I think this has a lot of implications for how we conceptualise advertisements on social networks that are hard to fully grasp right now, but certainly something I’m keeping an eye on.

One factor that has contributed to the bot spam in recent weeks is the inflow of a specific type of accounts, often called resistlibs in a derogatory manner. This is a group of people who identify as Democrat, and want to resist the Trump presidency by being active on social media. A defining characteristic is that they tend to engage in follow-back campaigns such as the ‘NoDemocratUnder1k‘ hashtag, where they follow all accounts that have that hashtag. Using Starter Packs this group can very quickly build up accounts that are followed and follow tens of thousands of people. This behaviour is easily hijacked by bad actors however, it is easy for spam networks to make accounts that look similar to resistlibs. Following Starter Packs, participating in follow-back culture and using the right hashtags makes it particularly easy for spam networks or other bad actors to build up large accounts on Bluesky. This has contributed to the influx of spam and bots on Bluesky recently, although it is far from the only factor.The LinksReading
How Jay Graber Is Making Sure Bluesky Never Turns Into Elon Musk’s X – Emily Baker-White/Forbes
The Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities – Mike Masnick/Techdirt
As academic Bluesky grows, researchers find strengths—and shortcomings – Kai Kupferschmidt/Science
Bluesky Proves Stagnant Monopolies Are Strangling the Internet – Ryan Cooper/The American Prospect
In the social media wars, Bluesky is destroying Truth Social – Henry Chandonnet/Fastcompany
The age of Sports Bluesky is upon us – Devin Raab/Announcing Awful
Bluesky’s Rose Wang on Subscriptions, Creator Monetization, and More – Buffer/Buffer ChatATProto links

Editors note: I’m experimenting with alternating the weekly newsletters with prioritising Bluesky and prioritising ATProto. I’ve found that especially ATProto tech needs more context. If you are an ATProto dev, here are some interesting tech to check out. And if you are not, next week I’ll give some more context on what is happening in the wider ATmosphere
Recipes.blue is a recipe manager build on ATProto.
Plonk.li is a pastebin clone that stores your pastes in your PDS, and shows a timeline of all pastes.
Atpaste is another pastebin clone, that ties in with ATFile by using the same lexicon.
Skywatched is a movie review site on ATProto.
Tech Talk: Building Long Form Blogging with WhiteWind
An experiment in an online video sharing network that combines ATProto with storacha.network.Bluesky Tools
ByeSky allows you to filter the people you follow, for example by removing all non-mutual follows.
UnfollowPack allows you to unfollow entire Starter Packs with one click.
Hopper is a tool that lets you customize the websites and services used to view AT-URIs.
Convert a Bluesky post to Markdown or HTML.
Uksnowmap uses hashtags to display an interactive map of the UK to display where it is showing. The tool has been around for a while, and has now fully transitioned from Twitter to Bluesky.
BlueskyTimeline allows you to embed a Bluesky timeline on your site.

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-2025jan-a/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 98 Welcome back to Fediverse ...

2025-01-07T18:16:23Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 98

Welcome back to Fediverse Report! I’ve had a great holiday break spending time with family and friends, and that has given me some more time to think about why I care about the fediverse, the open social web and why I spend all this time writing Fediverse Report. Explaining to family members what I do was helpful to make this clear: telling an uncle that I write about decentralised technology mainly leads to confusion. But even extremely offline family members easily understand and agree with the idea that having all of our big social platforms being owned by billionaires leads to significant social problems.

As such, it has helped for me to make it more explicit that I care about decentralisation insofar it is a tool to get somewhere else: I care about better forms of governance and ownership of the social web. I want a social web where people are in control, not a few billionaires (nor nationstate governments, for that matter). Building social networks with decentralised technology is a way to get there.

The idea that the value of alternative social networks is in governance is far from new. I’ve regularly posted hot takes on my Mastodon to the same effect as well. But for 2025 I want to bring this more into focus for this newsletter. Writing a newsletter that is a weekly update tends to amplify shiny new software that has recently been released. In contrast, explaining how governance works on the fediverse does not align well with ‘this happened in the last 7 days’, as it involves more structural and slower moving forces. I’m experimenting with ways to bring coverage of governance in the fediverse better into focus. Expect more like this newsletter, where I zoom in on an offhanded comment by Misskey developer Syuilo as an illustration of the issues that come with interoperability between different places on the open social web.The News

Mastodon has belatedly published their Annual Report for 2023. The organisation acknowledges the delay, and says that the Annual Report for 2024 is planned to be released in Q1 of this year. Mastodon had a total of 545k euro in donations in 2023, with 476k in costs. The large majority of costs go to personnel expenses, in total 343k was spend on salaries, 72% of the total budget. The popularity of Mastodon’s own servers also come with significant costs, in 2023 they spend 75k on servers and hosting. With a rough estimate of averaging around 250k active users on mastodon.social, this means mastodon.social costs roughly 30 cents per active user per year. The Annual Report also looks at the updates Mastodon has made to the site and apps. Mastodon also shares more about their hiring process, and in a great move for transparency, also published all the salaries of everyone in the organisation.

Back in the present, Mastodon is hiring again, this time for a senior front-end developer. The organisation also held a crowd-funding campaign in late last year to fund and hire a Trust and Safety lead. The community seemed to have had little appetite for funding such an endeavour, with funding barely pushing past the 12k after a month. It is an indication of the difficult spot the organisation is in; the community has been asking for more safety features in Mastodon, but is not funding a Trust and Safety Lead. The organisation could clearly use someone who writes clear policy and design goals for the direction the software should go in. Currently, not even a Mastodon employee can explain why a safety feature for Mastodon that is fully developed and waiting to be approved has been waiting for approval for over 2.5 years. It turns out that writing the code is often the easy part of making changes in the fediverse, and navigating the social structures to get the code used by people is much harder, and a dedicated Trust and Safety Lead could have certainly helped here. Instead, even after large community outcry we still do not know why Mastodon has not merged this safety feature developed by their own employee.

Surf is a new app by Flipboard for the open social web. It is a beautifully designed app that allows people to build their own custom feeds. The power of Surf is in that it supports many networks, and you can combine posts from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, YouTube and Flipboard all into a single custom feed. How Flipboard markets Surf is interesting, describing it as a ‘browser for the social web’. The way Flipboard CEO Mike McCue sees it, Surf pulls in content from the social web, and gives you the possibility to display that content in custom feeds of your choice. Surf also allows you to filter a custom feed by content: for example, you can scroll through an entire feed, or switch over to a different tab that shows only videos in that feed, for example.

For more info on Surf, WeDistribute has a closer look at all the features, and The Verge has more context and comments by McCue. Custom feeds on Bluesky have mainly gone in the direction of the power user and community builder: tools like Graze offer an huge potential in programmability and flexibility. This is especially useful for those who want to build custom feeds that other people will also use. Surf takes a different approach, by instead prompting people to build their own feeds as much as possible. It’ll be interesting to see which approach will gain traction, and if there is space for both ways of building custom feeds.

Misskey developer Syuilo made some comments contemplating breaking federation with Mastodon. Misskey is mainly used in Japan, and has a wide feature set that differs notably from Mastodon. The main reason that Syuilo gave is that she feels Misskey development is constrained by having to meet the needs and requirements of maintaining federation with other (types) of software. That Misskey is considering letting federation between Mastodon and Misskey break is an indication of one of the downsides of how ActivityPub is designed: You can send out anything you want with ActivityPub, but it is exceedingly difficult to know how other software will actually receive and display the things you send out with ActivityPub. There is a significant freedom for fediverse software in how they implement and support even more basic functions. For example, see this comparison table for how the different platforms support hashtags, and how many variations there are.

Personally, I think it would be healthy for the fediverse as a whole if more fediverse software would start publishing what they deem as necessary for other software to federate with them. The fediverse mainly currently works on the assumption that any form of federation between projects is fine, even if that means that another federated platform will stripping out all markup and images of a post. It might be healthy for a platform to state minimum functional requirements, such as ‘we only want to federate with software that also shows the emoji reactions as we view this to be an integral part of a message’. For now, Syuilo’s post mainly seems to be to vent some frustrations, so it remains to be seen where any of this will actually go.The Links
A guide for small websites regarding the UK’s Online Safety Act, with some extra clarification for fediverse sites.
TheIndieBeat.fm is a new radio station for showcasing indie music from the fediverse, that picks up where radiofreefedi left, and will use upcoming fediverse audio platform Bandwagon.
The first 12 plugins of Castopod.
FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse.
“Event Bridge For ActivityPub” plugin released on WordPress.org.
rdf-pub – generic Activity-Pub Server that focuses on using C2S.
Manyfold got a new round of NLNet funding, and published a roadmap of what they’ll be working on.
PieFed development update for December 2024.
Fediverse tech roadmap reflection on developments in the past year, by Mitra developer Silverpill.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-98/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2412.c Investors are starting to ...

2024-12-18T17:29:56Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2412.c

Investors are starting to eye Bluesky, a new governance organisation for the bridge for the social web, no resolution but more tension around moderation questions, new platforms for the ATmosphere, and more!

Editors note: I’ll be on holiday break for the next two weeks. The next edition of Last Week in the ATmosphere will be out on January 8th. Thank you for reading and supporting me in 2024!The NewsATProto draws investors

The success of Bluesky is starting to draw the attention of investors to the potential that ATProto and the ATmosphere have. Skyseed is the first fund that is dedicated exclusively to Bluesky and the ATmosphere. The fund is started by Peter Wang, who is the cofounder of popular Python package Anaconda, and has 1 million USD in committed capital. Wang says that Skyseed will be doing developer grants as well as pre-seed and seed funding. In the press release, Wang says that the main appeal of ATProto is the open social graph that ATProto enables, which allows people to build all kinds of new social apps. Even in this week’s newsletter, we are already seeing multiple new apps being made on ATProto that utilise the open nature of the network in some way.

Other investors are also aware of the possibilities, billionaire (and active Bluesky user) Mark Cuban said in an interview this week that he is not yet investing in Bluesky, but that he is ‘working on it’.Bridges and A New Social

A New Social is a newly launched non-profit for the open social web, that focuses on bridging the different platforms and protocols. The organisation will house the governance of Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects Bluesky with the fediverse and Threads. Bridgy Fed creator Ryan Barrett has spoken before about the bridge becoming critical infrastructure and the need for governance. Anuj Anooha will be the Executive Director of A New Social, with Ryan Barrett as CTO. The new organisation has already buy-in from the major players that are affected by it: Bluesky, Meta, Mastodon and Flipboard are all supporters. I wrote more about A New Social and Bridgy Fed yesterday in the weekly fediverse update, but the news is just as relevant for Bluesky and the ATmosphere. In general I think what the space of the open social web needs most right now is more organisations and groups that are focused on governance, and I’m excited to see it happen this way with A New Social.Singal and digital spaces

The presence of Singal on Bluesky continues to be a major source of controversy. It is drawing attention from the media, and a petition ‘Bluesky Must Enforce its Community Guidelines Equally’ has gotten over 25 thousand signatures. It has prompted the Bluesky Trust & Safety team to put out a statement, although the statement is carefully crafted to avoid mentioning any specifics. Instead, Bluesky’s T&S said that they “do not currently take action on accounts that share Bluesky screenshots with commentary, unless that commentary violates our Guidelines”. In practice this means that Bluesky’s T&S is choosing not to act on the situation.

It is hard not to feel that Bluesky PBC has majorly stumbled here, and the organisation has lost a lot of goodwill and trust, with some high-profile people leaving the platform as well. It is also unclear what Bluesky PBC has gained from the decision to keep allowing Singal on the platform. To me it also feels that Bluesky PBC is struggling to adopt and understand what the Bluesky platform actually is. One of the core strengths of ATProto is that it allows people to build multiple platforms on the same underlying open protocol. Theoretically Bluesky PBC really wants there to be multiple platforms on their protocol, and that is a point that they keep reiterating. But when push came to shove, when Bluesky PBC had the opportunity to define Bluesky as a specific platform with a specific culture that includes trans people and excludes transphobes, Bluesky PBC did not take the opportunity. Instead the company opted for a more generic web 2.0 platform thinking, where Bluesky PBC views Bluesky as a platform for everyone.

One of the original sins that has led to the current situation is that we have tied our digital identity to a single platform. Instead, people should be able to exist on multiple platforms at the same time, allowing us to express ourselves in different ways depending on which community and platform we are using. This mode of thinking is what allows communities and platforms to have opinionated forms of moderation, where moderation can be used to shape community and culture. One of the coolest things about ATProto is that it allows us to be part of multiple platforms and communities simultaneously, with a single digital identity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the company that is building this protocol refused to take the opportunity to get there, and instead caused major harm to their own community instead.Blacksky

While I’m disappointed by Bluesky PBC’s (lack of) action, I do find encouragement in how Blacksky is building online community. It is becoming clearer that Blacksky can be seen as its own space in the ATmosphere, connected to but different from Bluesky. To me it provides a great model and vision of where the open social web is heading towards. It shows the power of opinionated moderation that is intended to keep vulnerable people safe. People are starting to pay attention to Blacksky: with media coverage in Wired, NonProfitQuarterly and BlackGirlNerds, an extensive dev interview with creator Rudy Fraser, and people within the fediverse community pointing to Blacksky as an example on how to build digital place on the open social web (1, 2, 3)Graze.social updates

Graze.social is a tool that allows you to build your own custom algorithmic feed, that has added various new features this week. You can now migrate custom feeds made in another place to Graze, add a blocklist to your feed, or made a feed only visible to a member list. Graze also published a mission statement. In their statement, they call algorithmic feeds the original sin of web 2.0, and that the way to counter-act the negative effects of The Algorithm is to provide anyone access to easily build their own custom feeds. Domain extortion

Bluesky is pushing using your website domain as your handle as a form of verification. The implied expectation here is that famous people will often have a domain in the form of firstnamelastname.com. Not all well-known people do actually have such a website domain (or even any personal website at all), and an entrepreneurial scammer saw an opportunity here. The scammer set up an extortion scheme, where they registered the domain name of various public individuals in the form of firstnamelastname.com, and tried to sell the domain back to the affected individual for thousands of dollars. Tedium has a more extensive overview of the situation, as it took some more chaos before the scammer was banned from Bluesky. Tedium also goes into more detail on how this is an indication that domain names are not a good way to do verification.

In that context, I found it interesting that Bluesky’s communication head Emily Liu has pivoted slightly in her framing of using a website as a handle. In a recent post she describes using your website domain name as your Bluesky handle as a way to connect your social audience with your web presence. Personally I think this makes more sense; using your website domain as your social handle is a powerful and useful feature, but its usefulness does not come from the ability to prevent scamming and impersonation.

Bluesky also announced a new feature this week: if you update your accountname.bksy.social handle to your own website domain name, the original .bsky.social handle will stay reserved for you, allowing you to switch back anytime you want. People have expressed concern that the original .bsky.social handle became available for others to use. For some this was a reason not to use a custom domain name, and now they can set a custom domain name with more peace of mind.Bluesky and the DSA update

The European Commission Spokesperson confirms that the EC has been in contact with Bluesky about Bluesky’s “DSA obligations and the Commission’s presence on the platform.” The spokesperson says that all online platforms need to have a legal representative in the EU. It is unclear how the DSA deals with the specific affordances of ATProto. ATProto allows for multiple different AppViews which all can act on the same underlying data, does that mean that they are all different platforms according to the DSA? At any rate I’m glad that the EC opted for a direct line of communication with Bluesky, although I did find their original approach of asking all member state instead to be very funny.The ATmosphere

Recipe.exchange is a new platform for sharing your recipes. The platform is build on ATProto, meaning that you own the recipes you post, and can view and share recipes by others. The platform is straightforward and simple to use, allowing you to easily browse through the recipes without clutter.

Woosh.link is a new link-in-bio platform for ATProto, created by a new design studio Federation Studio. The product is easy to understand and well designed, and functions similar to how other Linktree products work. Federation Studio says that they are working on adding more features, such as analytics and tracking, and more customisation options. Woosh is similar to Linkat.blue, but does not seem to be interoperable with each other.

Review platform Skylights has added support for reviewing movies and TV shows, in addition to reviewing books. Skylights takes data from open APIs instead of the more popular paid APIs: open-library instead of GoodReads for books, and TMBD instead of IMDB.

AniBlue is a review platform for anime, on ATProto. The platform is currently only available in Japanese. It functions similar to the other review platforms such as Bookbuzz and Skylights, focusing on anime instead.

GrayHaze is a live streaming service that is being build on top of ATProto. GrayHaze is still in development, but the developer published an extensive blog about the product and how it works. Live video streaming is not a possibility that has come up often in conversations about ATProto yet, and GrayHaze takes a bit of a different approach from a technical perspective, which makes the blog worth checking out for people who are interested in the technical side of ATProto.

WhiteBreeze is a front-end for WhiteWind, allowing people to self-host their WhiteWind blog posts without them having to go to the WhiteWind website.

Autoblue adds ATProto support to a WordPress website, allowing you to automatically share your WordPress posts to Bluesky, and display reactions and comments made on Bluesky on your WordPress site.The LinksWhat I’ve been reading
The Matthew Effect of Post-Twitter Social Networks – Joan Westenberg/Westenberg
Shaping the Future of Social Media with Middleware – Luke Hogg and Renée DiResta/Foundation for American Innovation
All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky – Joanne McNeil/FilmMakerMagazine
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization – Christine Lemmer-Webber/Dustycloud.Tools
Butterfly for Bluesky allows you to browse Bluesky from your Apple Watch.
Bluesky Later is an open source post scheduler for Bluesky.
Post to Bluesky from Obsidian.
List updater for Bluesky.
Changelog.blue is a changelog for your software that lives on Bluesky.
Experience Bluesky’s firehose in VR.For developers
Friday December 20th will be an ATProto Tech Talk with the developer of WhiteWind.
Hopper is a tool that lets you customize the websites and services used to view AT-URIs.
AtomPDS is an independent PDS implementation in .NET.
A relay/proxy service for the PLC directory.

That’s all for this year! Thank you for reading and the support. I’ll be back in January. In the meantime, you can follow me on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-2412-c/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 97 A new non-profit for governance ...

2024-12-17T18:11:23Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 97

A new non-profit for governance of Bridgy Fed, PeerTube releases their yearly update with a complete redesign, and the organisation behind Mammoth and sub.club winds down due to a lack of funding.The NewsA New Social

A New Social is a new non-profit that launched today. The goal of A New Social is to build cross-protocol tools and services for the open social web. The organisation consists of Anuj Ahooja (CEO) and Ryan Barrett (CTO). The main project that they will be focused on is Bridgy Fed, the service that lets people connect their social accounts across a variety of networks and protocols.

Barrett wrote in early November about the possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Up until now, Bridgy Fed was his personal one-man side project. Conversations with other organisations like Flipboard and Meta gave Barrett a sense of urgency that the project was quickly trending towards becoming critical infrastructure for the open social web. Heated conversations earlier this year about how people should interact with the bridge (opt-in versus opt-out) also made it clear that such a tool should have cohesive governance, where Barrett writes: “it is about who makes those decisions, and how they should be made.”

Ahooja has come in as the new leader, to help build a structural organisations that can deal with the conversations around governance and decision making. Ahooja describes his vision as that of the ‘last network effect‘, which is worth reading in its entirety. In his view, the current state of the open social web is that of the exploratory phase, where neither ActivityPub nor ATProto have yet fully proven themselves at mass scale yet. Protocol bridges such as Bridgy Fed can bridge the gap: not only allows it for compatibility between platforms, it also bridges the gap in time. It allows us to commit to a platform now, without knowing for certain it the protocol that platform uses will be an important protocol in the future. This is possible because with bridged platforms and networks, you can take your own social graph with you.

In a conversation with Ahooja and Barrett, they say that people have rallied around A New Social very quickly, and that people have been very supportive of the organisation. The organisation has the support of Mastodon, Meta, Bluesky, IFTAS, SWF and Flipboard. It shows that there is a broader awareness that the open social web needs more organisations that are concerned with governance. The ATProto project of lexicon.community (not affiliated with A New Social) is another such example of people starting to work towards governance of internet infrastructure.

A New Social is looking to recruit a Board of Directors, as well as reaching out to developers to collaborate on tools and services that are needed for cross-protocol platforms. For development work, the main focus is on making the bridge more accessible and easier to understand: Barrett and Ahooja will be working on making the bridge easier to user with a cleaner UX, as well as on awareness and education what Bridgy Fed actually does. Ahooja is also clear on separating a protocol network from the platforms that make up a network. Each platform has its own culture and policies, and A New Social will be working with each individual platform on what approach to bridging fits their specific platform best.

Personally I think the fediverse has struggled for a while to make a clearer distinction between the fediverse as a single place and the fediverse as a network of different platforms. For me, the value of the fediverse is in the ability to build connecting platforms that each have their own culture, governance, moderation, and sense of place. A New Social is aware and mindful of this, and their approach of treating each platform as its own space can help further the fediverse towards a true super-network of interconnected digital places.PeerTube v7

PeerTube v7 has officially been released, and the update brings a major redesign. Framasoft has been working on two major projects this year for PeerTube: mobile apps for Android and iOS (released last week), and a complete remodeling of the PeerTube interface. Framasoft has worked with designers for a thorough UX research, with tests and user interviews. Based on this the interface of PeerTube has been redesigned from the ground up. Framasoft has prioritised accessibility, they completed a full accessibility audit and used the findings to create the improvements and changes to the interface. Menus and pages have also been remodeled and simplified, to counteract some of the organic growth of all the options that has been build up over the years. The interface also looks a lot cleaner and calmer, with a more modern look.

As a sidenote: Framasoft says that they now refer to PeerTube servers as platforms, not instances. They give inclusion as a reason, saying that this term is easier to understand for people who are less well-versed in technology and the fediverse. I think this is a great change, and something that other fediverse software should consider as well. Platforms better communicates that each fediverse server is its own social network, that can have its own culture and governance. The value of the fediverse is that each platform can be its own separate digital space, and I find that the term platform communicates this better than instance does.Shutdown of Mammoth and sub.club

The BLVD, the organisation behind three fediverse projects, has announced that they are shutting down due to a lack of funding. The BLVD has created the Mastodon iOS app Mammoth, fediverse creator payment platform sub.club, and the moth.social Mastodon server. All three projects will be shut down at the end of January 2025. The BLVD depended on Mozilla for their funding, and Mozilla announced in September that they are shutting down their fediverse projects. In November the organisation already said that they were now operating without any funding. Any community member that is interested in taking over the maintainance of one of the projects can get in touch. Bart Decrem, the founder of BLVD, said to The Verge that sub.club had more than 150 creators on the platform.Nomadic Identity

Nomadic Identity is a mechanism that allows people to have their fediverse identity to be separate from the fediverse platform that they are using, which results them in being able to seamlessly switch their fediverse account to a different platform. The mechanism has been available in fediverse software Streams for multiple years, but it uses the fediverse protocol Nomad. The Nomad protocol has undergone some renaming (orginally Zot) over the years. Recently a new documentation website was launched for the Nomad protocol, which gives some more background information. The site also published an article explaining the concepts of Nomadic Identity.

There has been a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for bringing Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub, and that proposal is now seeing it’s first implementation: fediverse software Mitra and Streams recently announced the first form of communications between them using the new nomadic implementation of ActivityPub. Account portability is a feature that is regularly used as an example of the valuable features that an open protocol such as ActivityPub enables, but using the actual implementation currently comes with frictions. Early adopters like the new product Weird are already thinking about offering Mitra as their fediverse platform of choice due to the new abilities that Nomadic Identity bring.IFTAS needs assesment

IFTAS just published their Needs Assesments report, that gives a detailed overview of the state of moderation on the fediverse. They published this report just before I send out this article, but I want to include it because I think it’s important. So here are the key findings, in IFTAS’ own words:
Resource gaps – only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage, and nearly half of moderator teams lack formal guidance. That said, we see roughly one moderator for every 1,200 active accounts.
Top ranked priorities – moderators need tools for CSAM detection, spam prevention, and legal guidance for compliance with regulations like GDPR.
Burnout is a persistent issue – one in five moderators report experiencing trauma or burnout this year, underlining the need for wellness and resilience resources.
Financial struggles – most communities operate on donations, and overall our survey participants are not generating enough money to cover costs. Very few moderators are receiving any compensation for their labour.The Links
Trunk & Tidbits for November 2024, Mastodon’s monthly engineering update.
Sharkey: a Fediverse project that is beautiful inside & out – Elena Rossini
How to Make Your First Loops Video – WeDistribute.
what people in the global majority need from networks – wreckage/salvage
A proposal for a working group for Integrating ActivityPub within Solid specs.
Event Bridge for ActivityPub: Upcoming 1.0 Release.
IFTAS December update.
Why Flipboard Looks to the Fediverse for Its Next Big Evolution – thelettertwo
Mastodon now gives server admins the possibility to opt-in to adding referrers to links. This allows other websites to see the traffic that a Mastodon server is sending.
Weekly fediverse software updates.
Alt Text Health Check image accessibility report #2.
Creating a generic “Log-in with Mastodon” service.
ActivityPub in Minecraft.
Loops ‘Unwrapped’ with some statistics about how Loops has been growing since launch.
Ghost’s weekly development update shares more about the reader client as well as their database design.

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

Subscribe to our newsletter!

#2 #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-97/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – The Links -2411.d A short ...

2024-11-27T19:17:04Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – The Links -2411.d

A short introduction: I’ve been writing these Last Week newsletters for a while, and they consists of a News section and a Links section. The News section focuses on the social side of the network, along with the more impactful tech news. The Links section gives all the links to other articles, tech and tools that are relevant to the network. Bluesky is growing so much now that it is not really feasible for me to include both sections in a single newsletter; so today you’ll get all the Links, and tomorrow I’ll send out all the News that has happened in the ATmosphere.

Enjoy, I’m sure there is more than enough interesting links in here.The Links

Bluesky has been doing community outreach this week:
A second Twitch livestream for Q&A with COO Rose Wan, CTO Paul Frazee and CEO Jay Graber. Hip hop artist Flavor Flav also joined in as a cheerleader for Bluesky.
Paul Frazee and Emily Liu (who does communications for Bluesky) held a Reddit AMA

Decentralisation remains a point of conversation:
Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub, wrote a very extensive article, asking ‘How decentralized is Bluesky really?‘
Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold wrote a reply to Lemmer-Webber’s article.

While viewpoints differ on decentralisation from a technical perspective, they are in agreement that Bluesky and the ATmosphere is currently not decentralised in a social sense: the vast majority of people exclusively use Bluesky’s infrastructure. This echoes what I wrote about Bluesky and decentralisation here last week. The concept of Relays remains a significant part of the discussion of whether or not Bluesky is decentralised. Because of the increased load on the Relay due to the amount of new people joining, Bluesky stopped taking in posts from the fediverse bridge for a few days this week, indicating the amount of power that Bluesky has over the network.

PDSls, the tool which allows you to inspect and see every PDS on the network, has gotten a variety of updates. You can now log in, and edit and delete posts from your own PDS. Edited posts mostly do not show up on Bluesky anymore, barring some exceptions. For other services such as Picosky or WhiteWind edits do show up.

More organisations are playing with the concept of letting people set their handle on their subdomain, with Newgrounds and Neocities, as well as itch.io already providing the option last week. Bluesky Tools
AT Orbital Laser is a tool to instantly block and account, as well as all that account’s followers, similar to Blockenheimer.
Vanity.blue gives you a variety of free custom handles.
StarterPacks.net allows you to see and search through all Starter Packs.
BlueskyStarterPacks.com also allows you to see and search through all Starter Packs, and also shows traffic information on them.
DarkSky is a Windows client for Bluesky.
Skitter is a Bluesky client in the theme of the old Twitter web client.
Analyse your Bluesky statistics with SkyStats.
Beeskie is a another Windows app for Bluesky.
BlueHorizon gives you analytics of your account, as well as the ability to schedule posts.
Bluesky User Search allows you to search for accounts with some more accessible search filters.
Bluesky Follow Scanner analyses the accounts that follow you.
BlueskyMeter is another analytics tool.
Blucerne is an advanced search tool for Bluesky that is currently in development.For Developers
SDK.Blue is ‘a list of all libraries/SDKs for building things on ATProto, grouped by language’.
Extending Also Known As.
Tandem is a tool to create a backup key for your PDS.
Tech Talk held a session with the creator of the Game Industry Labeler, recording here.
Browser.blue lists all Lexicon record types.
DASL (Data Addressed Structures and Links) is a new standard for data formatting that uses the same data structure as ATProto.
This Website is Hosted on Bluesky.
Using Bluesky posts as blog comments.
Hosting Bluesky with Coolify
A RFC on Lexicon Resolution.
Posting to Bluesky from a Microcontroller.
Adding Bluesky-powered comments to any website in five minutes
Self-hosting Bluesky PDS.
How to setup a Bluesky PDS Server on Digital Ocean cloud.
Next steps with Bluesky – hosting your own data and more on the API.
How to run your own Bluesky PDS Server.
bsky-bc, a music discovery contraption.

Hosting your PDS on increasingly esoteric hardware:
A PS4
A KindleUpdates
OpenVibe is an cross-platform app that supports Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Nostr. Their latest update supports for tagging users on multiple platforms.
Bluesky client TOKIMEKI adds direct support for Audio Spaces app Bluecast.
The SkyFollowerBridge is working on support for Threads.
Discord has been working on better integration with Bluesky. Discord now also allows you to link your Bluesky and Mastodon profiles.
Clearsky, the tool that allows you to see information such as blocks, as well as lists and starter packs you are on, is back online after it had been offline for a while due to increased network traffic.
Third-party Bluesky client Ouranos now shows your profile on other ATmosphere platforms as well, such as Frontpage, WhiteWind and Linkat.
Blacksky is expanding.
Blue Badge 0.2.0An open firehose

ATProto allows everyone to tap into the ‘firehose’, the eventstream that broadcasts every single event on the network. This allows anyone to build tools and visualisations that utilise this data, ranging from serious and helpful to deeply silly. Last week I already covered a long list, and here are some more:
Show all links to Bandcamp.
Bluesky WebSocket Firehose – Simon Willison.
How to Extract Analytics from Bluesky, the New Open Social Network
Bluesky Mosaic shows an continually updating gallery of all images (note: NSFW images are not filtered out).
Bluesky hashtag Tracker keeps track of hashtags, but only as long as you got the website open.
SwearSky shows you all profanity on the network, and helpfully provides a voice-over for all curse words.Misc
Social Media Manager Tools for Bluesky
An open source app we can all learn from
A very extensive Obsidian website with explainers on how Bluesky works.
Benefits of an open network – Bluesky employee Emily Liu.
BlueSheep is a simple game that uses your Bluesky profile to ‘deploy your own sheep’.
Bluesky has more than 21 million users. Where does it go from here? – Morning Brew
A Note About the Knight Institute, X, and Bluesky.
Open-source champion Kelsey Hightower on the promise of Bluesky.

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-the-atmosphere-the-links-2411-d/

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 the ATmosphere – 2411.c Bluesky now has 20 million ...

2024-11-20T18:57:42Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411.c

Bluesky now has 20 million accounts, there is a large media attention to Bluesky, people are exploring the firehose, and much more.The News

Bluesky has continued to grow significantly this week, and it now has more than 20 million accounts, and almost 12 million Monthly Active Users. The growth has gotten significant attention of the media and the public at large, with the large majority of news publications covering Bluesky and Bluesky’s growth. A short random collection of some of the coverage: WP, The Guardian, CNN, The Verge, 404 Media, The Hollywood Reporter, NYT, The New Statesman, NBC, NPR, and at some point I stopped collecting all the links. I won’t rehash what these articles have written about Bluesky’s growth, I’ll focus some additional observations from my side:

The added growth of the platform has posed challenges for the Trust & Safety team, who are handling a significant growth in moderation requirements as well. They are currently handling over 42k reports per day, in contrast with 360k reports for the entirety of 2023.

Threads is clearly feeling the heat of the popularity of Bluesky. In response to Bluesky getting 15 million accounts, Threads boss Adam Mosseri stated that Threads has gotten more than 15 million new accounts in November alone. As Olivier Simard-Casanova points however, this does mean that Threads has not gained any surge in November as a result of people leaving X, as Threads also said that they gained around 1 million users per day in October, same as they now do in November.

Statistics from SimilarWeb also indicate that the gab in activity between Bluesky and Threads may be much smaller than it appears by looking at user totals. SimilarWeb claims that daily visits worldwide to Bluesky and Threads are on a similar level, and that Bluesky might have slightly overtaken Threads in Daily Active Users in the USA. Mosseri denies that SimilarWeb’s data is accurate, but does not provide other statistics. Threads is taking the competition with Bluesky serious however, and has just added custom feeds as well, launching the feature 5 days after Threads started testing it

The increase in usage of Starter Packs had me recently voice concerns on how this impacts the dynamics of the network. Early data suggests that the current migration is actually breaking the trend of the rich-get-richer dynamics. This is somewhat surprising to me, but encouraging nonetheless, and I’m curious to see how research develops.

As an additional note, I’m leaving these two posts that comment on how the media has covered Bluesky, who is happy to describe Bluesky as a ‘nice’ social platform, but is less clear in explaining the role that various minority communities have had in shaping the culture of Bluesky, and where this ‘niceness’ came from.Some more links
Bluesky COO Rose Wang and CTO Paul Frazee held a Twitch livestream with a dev Q&A.
Bluesky has ‘the juice’ — but it still doesn’t have the normies.
Bluesky is emerging as the new platform for science.
Bluesky is trying to tell everyone that posts are called posts and not skeets, with some mixed results.
20 facts about Bluesky by CEO Jay Graber.
Jay Graber was interviewed on CNN.
New York City has ordered all city agencies to set up accounts on BlueSky.The LinksATmosphere

NBC spend time on Blacksky, asking: ‘Black Twitter helped define the internet — so where will the exodus from X lead?’. As both Bluesky and Blacksky grow, Blacksky starts to become more own it’s own place in the network. Popularity of Blacksky has skyrocketed, with now over a million views in a single day, and a usage graph that goes straight vertical. The growth of Blacksky also comes with extra moderation requirements, and creator Rudy Fraser is looking for additional moderators. Fraser also gave a Tech Talk this week, talking about the technology behind Blacksky, VOD here.

Teal.fm is a new platform on ATProto that is currently in development, and it is a music tracker. The goal is to provide functionality similar to Last.fm, but with the change that all your listening data is stored on your own PDS.
Latest updates for Smoke Signal, ATFile, and 1k drawings on PinkSea.App Updates

Bluesky’s latest app update brings a redesigned settings screen, as well as a visual indication that posts are imported into Bluesky. ATProto allows people to create posts with an arbitrary date, which people have used to import their Twitter archive and add the date the post was made on Twitter as the same date on ATProto. Bluesky now indicates that this is an archived post, adding the time that the post was actually seen on the Relay as an indication of when the post was actually made on the ATmosphere.Custom Feeds
A custom feed that only shows you posts from people on the same PDS as you. This feed is not particularly useful for most people, but does demonstrate an interesting direction of how more ‘localised’ communities can develop on ATProto.
Building Transparent Algorithmic Filters in AT Protocol with Sky Feeder.
Create feeds with Telescope via DMs.
Members-only feeds with supercell.Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a highly-requested feature for the official Bluesky app, and other apps like Tokimeki and Skeets have implemented them. Other people are building more elaborate work-arounds to bookmark posts as well:
Bookmarks with this browser extension.
Bookmarks with a labeler, which require you to ‘report’ the post you want to bookmark to that specific labeler.
The 📌 feed is a popular way to bookmark posts, but this does clog up replies. Posts with only the pin are now at the bottom of a thread.
3rd party client Tokimeki now allows you to set different folders for bookmarks.Tools
Third-party client Skeets demonstrates how it allows post editing for 10 minutes after the post was created.
Convert a Starter Pack into a moderation list.
SkyDigest shows you the trending news in your Bluesky network.
Automatically expand the account switcher on Bluesky’s new settings page.
Real-time background push notifications for Bluesky posts.For Developers
Call for Developer Projects.
You can now login and delete records from your PDS with PDSls.dev
consuming the firehose for less than $2.50/mo*
Notes on Self Hosting a Bluesky PDS Alongside Other Services.
How to Extract Analytics from Bluesky, the New Open Social Network.
An independent PDS implementation with millipds.
Exploring AT Protocol with Python.
Relay Operational Updates by Bluesky developer Bryan Newbold.
Bluehook is a webhook for the firehose.
progress report on “local full bsky stack”.Firehose experimentations

The design of ATProto is such that everyone can access the ‘firehose’. Firehose is the casual term for ‘Relay’, a part of the network that continually broadcasts every event that happens on the entire network in real-time. This gives everyone the possibility to see what happens on the entire network. With the new inflow of people, quite some developers are experimenting with building small apps on the firehose, here is a list:
Firesky.tv is the full firehose.
Visualise posts as stars in the sky.
Skymood shows the emoji pulse of Bluesky.
Explore the firehose in 3d.
A stream of all heart emojis.
Digital rain.
Showing the emotion distribution of the network.
Emojirain.
I am …
Rainbow Sky.
New account butterflies.
Show all images of the firehose (serious epilepsy warning on this one)Misc links
Tech Talk: Trezy and the Games Industry Labeler and Game Dev Feed – on Thursday 21th of November.
Maybe Bluesky has “won”.
Exploring Bluesky Numbers.
Here’s some cool stuff you can do with Bluesky – The Verge.
Bluesky-migrate.com has a simple explanation people can follow to migrate from X to Bluesky.
Itch.io allows you to use your itch.io account name as your handle on ATProto.
Yes, There Is a TweetDeck for Bluesky – Lifehacker.
YouTube essay BlueSky for Beginners (part 2).
The Great Bluesky Migration: I Answer (Some) Of Your Questions.
Even more Bluesky Growth.
The silence of the orcs.

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-the-atmosphere-2411-c/

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/

Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power Bluesky ...

2024-11-18T19:11:47Z

Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power

Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and a significant amount of media attention as well. All that attention to Bluesky has also led to a renewed conversation around the question of whether Bluesky is decentralised or not.

The terms decentralisation and federation are used in multiple ways: to describe the technological architecture details of an internet protocol, but just as often as a shorthand to describe whether or not a (digital) network is open and not under the control of a central authority. The second definition is the one I care about: I write about decentralised social networks because I care about an internet that is open, accessible, and not under the control of a few tech oligarchs. My interest in federation and decentralisation is pragmatic; I view it simply as the most likely option of getting there.

Once you view decentralisation and federation as tools to achieve a more equal power structure of the social web, conversations about Bluesky and decentralisation can become clearer, as there are multiple dimensions at play.Technological decentralisation

The first dimension is technological, and the questions here relate to the architecture that the network uses. The concerns here are around the implementation of ATProto, the protocol that powers the network that Bluesky is a part of. This network is called the ATmosphere, and it includes Bluesky as well as other apps that use ATProto, such as Frontpage.

Technological details matter, as small decisions can have large impact on power and authority, but I’m not looking to hash out all of the details in this post. What I do want to point out is that even on the matter of technology there are multiple aspects to it:
Are we talking about Bluesky the microblogging app, or the larger ATmosphere network?
Are we concerned about whether decentralisation has happened, or whether it is possible?

It turns out that once you start peeling back the layers of the technological side of decentralisation, more and more questions start to arise. This is because ATProto splits up the network into separate components, and makes each component open and accessible for others to use and run. This is good for making the network more decentralised, but funnily enough it makes understanding decentralisation all the more difficult.

Taking control of your own data on ATProto is possible by hosting your own PDS. Building and hosting your own app on ATProto is possible. Streaming data from the entire network is possible by running your own Relay. Verifying digital identities and owning one yourself is possible.

All of these options are possible, and people are doing them to a varying extent. But a single, agreed-upon definition of ‘once ATProto conforms to these specifications it counts as decentralised’ is not available.Social Distribution

Decentralisation is a way to distribute power, and power is gained by people bestowing it on you. Technology changes the ways power can be distributed, but it is a sideshow to the thing that matters: where are the people, and on whom are they distributing power.

The above conversation about the technological side of ATProto matters much less than how people actually use the network. Here it becomes clear that for any meaningful way to describe distributed power, the ATmosphere is not decentralised at all: over 99% of people exclusively use infrastructure that is owned by Bluesky PBC.

The technology allows for decentralisation, and there are other parts of the network. But the user count for the other apps is in the thousands at best, compared to the tens of million for Bluesky. Even the other apps that do exist reuse infrastructure owned by Bluesky. While they could run their own relay instead of using Bluesky’s relay, why would they spend money when they can also not spend money?

Furthermore, what the protocol affords is not equal to what the average person can actually use. ATProto allows people to take full control of their own data by either self-hosting their PDS or using a hosting provider.1 Doing so currently requires technical knowledge: easy from the perspective of an experienced programmer, but out of reach from the majority of the population. Structure and structureless

Control and authority in decentralised and distributed systems is a hard problem to solve. In the Tyranny of Structureless, Jo Freeman writes:

“This apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.”

I took Freeman’s quote from this essay about systems design, which adds2:

“‘Informal, unacknowledged, and unaccountable’ control is just as common in distributed computing systems as it is in human social systems. The truth is, nearly every attempt to design a hierarchy-free, ‘flat’ control system just moves the central control around until you can’t see it anymore. Human structures all have leaders, whether implicit or explicit, and the explicit ones tend to be more diverse.”

Decentralised social networks are capable of distributing power to a certain extent, but control does pop up in other places. The fediverse is very decentralised with over 30k servers, but virtually all software is dependent on the Mastodon API, and every Mastodon competitor quickly realises that implementing the Mastodon API is mandatory in order to be part of the fediverse. The Mastodon API is not part of the ActivityPub protocol, and the code is owned by a self-styled dictator for life. Every human structure has leaders after all, and in the case of the fediverse, it is more implicit.

ATProto has chokepoints too, but what stands out to me about them is that they are so much more explicit:
There is the development of ATProto itself: the protocol is open-source, but it is clear that it is the Bluesky company who is doing the development work
Within the protocol there is the PLC.Directory, which is effectively a giant address book of everyone on the network.

These two chokepoints show that Bluesky PBC has some centralised control over the ATmosphere. But the explicit nature of the control points also makes it easier to deal with them by recognising them for what they are. It also indicates that technological decentralisation might not always be the answer, and that we can look for other ways to make sure that control over critical infrastructure is done in an democratic manner. Bluesky PBC is working towards bringing the PLC.Directory under control of a different organisation. Although it is not clear yet that which organisation that will be, Bluesky PBC is looking for an ‘ICANN-style’ consortium.Incentives

Networks do not become decentralised purely by having a technical architecture that enables decentralisation. The people who together constitute a network need to have incentives to organise themselves in a manner that results in a distribution of power. On this front, Bluesky has an attractive value proposition for start-ups that are looking to launch a social product: Bluesky comes with a multimillion user social graph that new apps can plug into and build on top of.

This makes the ATmosphere much more likely to become decentralised the more the network grows in popularity and Bluesky becomes a household name. Building Instagram on ATProto is just such an obvious idea that every techbro is going to try it once the realisation starts to settle in what ATProto actually enables. 3

Assuming (still an if!) this comes to pass, conversations about decentralisation and the distribution of power in the ATmosphere will start to look quite differently. In a situation where there are multiple apps in the network, power is decentralised and distributed between the owners of these apps. That would create some type of decentralised power structure of the broader network, but not necessarily one where the power of Bluesky the microblogging app is concerned.

So while competitive incentives might lead to a decentralised network, it might not necessarily lead to decentralised microblogging within that network. Not everything needs to be left to market forces however. We can built other, cooperative structures that lead to an even better distribution of power on the ATProto network, and fully intend to pursue that direction further.A Personal Data Server, which stores all your data on the ATProto network. ↩︎I found out about this article via this post by Bluesky developer Jaz, which seems relevant here. ↩︎I use a custom feed on Bluesky to count how many people have posted this idea as a suggestion, and it’s a lot. Wish I had kept screenshots. ↩︎

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-decentralisation-and-the-distribution-of-power/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411.b Bluesky and the ATmosphere ...

2024-11-13T19:19:44Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411.b

Bluesky and the ATmosphere have had a busy week in the wake of the US election, with new inflows from a variety of communities. The developer community has been busy as well, with tons of new tools, feeds and more.The NewsGrowth

Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users in the last week, and crossed the 15 million total accounts this week. More than a million accounts have joined in the last week, and the results of the US election seems to have played a significant factor in people looking for an alternative to X. Active users are up a lot as well, with over 7 million Monthly Active Users.1 The Bluesky app has shot up to the top of the download charts as well.

This is not the biggest inflow of users that Bluesky has seen, that was a while ago when X was banned in Brazil. This time it got much more media attention, which seemed to have started when The Verge reported on it. The Verge also reactivated their account and a good number of Verge reporters also started posting again. This seemed to have functioned as a permission structure for the rest of the media to also focus on Bluesky, and all the other media organisations have joined in on reporting about Bluesky’s growth.

The inflow of users, and attention paid by some media, started already a few days earlier, when there was a flow of Swifties that signed up to Bluesky, and Wired reporting on it. It’s hard to get accurate statistics on how large this movement of Swifties was, but it seems that around 3k of them registered as their swifties.social handle.

The draw for new people to join Bluesky is that it is becoming clearer to many people that Bluesky offers a large amount of engagement with real people. Bluesky COO Rose shared some statistics on how chatty people on Bluesky are, and Bluesky engineer Hailey collected posts of people sharing their experience how Bluesky is seeing more engagement for them compared to other platforms.Starter Packs

Starter Packs have been around for a few months now, but have massively taken off in the last week. It seems to have been a major contributing factor to the current inflow of people that are happening: much more people are sharing and using starter packs. This increases the density of the connections on the network, and people get much busier timelines and their follower count can go up drastically. This increases the perception of people that the network is indeed active, and makes them more likely to get the word out to other people. Social networking communities are always changing, and Bluesky is no exception in that regard. What does seem uncommon however, is the speed at which Starter Packs allow these changes to happen: it facilitates the shift of entire communities towards Bluesky, who can easily find their old connections. It means that changes to the culture to Bluesky can happen faster than ever before, and that is something the Bluesky community will have to adjust to as well.PinkSea

PinkSea is a new platform on ATProto, for drawing and sharing pictures. It is an Oekaki board, and for those who just like me don’t know what that is: Oekaki (Japanse diminutive for ‘drawing’) is a forum where people share pictures they drew with the tools that are included with the forum. PinkSea works the same way: you cannot upload pictures or drawings, you draw them with the tools that PinkSea provides. This limitation is what makes an Oekaki board attractive, as you know that the artist has drawn the picture by hand themselves.

PinkSea is another step in expanding the ATmosphere, and helping shape it in ways that are different from microblogging. Like other platforms in the ATmosphere, being built on ATProto means that you log in with your ATProto account, and your data gets stored in your PDS. As Bluesky does not show posts from other ATProto platforms, PinkSea will crosspost your drawings on Bluesky as well, with a link back to the PinkSea platform.The LinksCommunity development features
Bluesky-labelers.io allows you to browse through and search all labelers on Bluesky.
You can upload custom gifs to Bluesky with this tool. It also brought us longcat on Bluesky.
bsky-widget allows you to create profile cards for your websites / blogs.
bluesky.ms is a crowdsourced database of anyone and everyone in the Microsoft community on Bluesky.
Check out your user stats with SkyKit.
Convert a Starter Pack to a List.
The Sky Follower Bridge, which allows you to find people on Bluesky that you follow on X, has a new website to get started.Feeds
Democratizing Algorithmic Feeds on Bluesky – Devin Gaffney.
Building a Bluesky Timeline Feed.
Newsfeed is a new feed with only posts with links, only from various journalists on starter packs.
Skygram is an experiment in bringing feeds outside of the Bluesky app towards a separate site instead.
Smoke Signal has a new type of feed, which shows the most popular events on Event planning app Smoke Signal.
A new feed which shows Trending Links on the network.Community

The independent ATProto dev community held a Tech Talk with three developers showcasing what they are building on ATProto. Video of the talk here. Two showcases where how people build their own blogs on top of ATProto, using the PDS as a data store. It also showcased Ouranos, a third-party client for Bluesky. Ouranos showed the ability to add out-of-bound tags to posts (similar to Tumblr), as well as showing Smoke Signal Events feeds on your Bluesky profile.
Thursday Nov 14th is the next Tech Talk, with Rudy Frasier talking about Blacksky.For Developers
A Discord bot for a Bluesky/ATProto integration.
How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView – alice.
What does an AppView implementation entail? – Bryan Newbold.
A new GitHub labeler that shows the name of the repository you contributed to. People in the community are currently experimenting with labels that are fully customised per user, but there seem to be some limitations in the system to scale this.
Embed Bluesky posts in your Astro web pages.
Bluesky did:web generator.
How to get a recovery key from your PDS.Software updates
Bluesky adds a thread composer and gives people the ability to self-apply content warnings on posts.
Frontpage adds notifications.Misc
Bluesky’s AT Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers – The New Stack.
Visualizing 13 million BlueSky users.
A YouTube short by Pirate Software about Bluesky.
A list of free subdomains you can use as your ATProto handle.
A usage chart of Buffer shows that Bluesky is quickly catching up with Threads.
For if you need a physical keycap button that says Skeet to Post better.

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.For the stats people: this is based on firehose data, which only registers activity such as commenting or liking a post. It does not count people logging in to the app and reading but never taking any action. This makes it harder to compare this number to centralised platforms, which usually do count people who log in without further action as an active user. ↩︎

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-2411-b/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 92 Simple bots, updates to Loops, ...

2024-11-12T17:43:52Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 92

Simple bots, updates to Loops, and Flipboard takes over some automated RSS accounts.The News

The upcoming shutdown of the botsin.space server has lead to some renewed experimentation and development work around bots on the fediverse. Terence Eden has built a bot to be as simple as possible, needing only 2 files to run. This bot can be bridged to Bluesky as well.

Some more updates on Loops, with some crucial missing features now being added: tapping the Home button brings you to the top of the feed, a pull to refresh, and tabs for notification, search and explore. Loops is also taking a decidedly different approach from other fediverse platforms; while many fediverse platforms pride themselves on not having an algorithmic feed, developer Daniel Supernault is working on placing For You Page is becoming front-and-center for Loops. In turn this makes it difficult for new Loops servers to set up and compete, and Supernault is actively considering having the flagship loops.video server function as the centralised service for the For You algorithm.

Flipboard is taking over the accounts on the press.coop server. Press.coop was a fediverse server that mirrors the RSS feeds of news organisations, and republished them on an unofficial press.coop account. In the press release, press.coop owner Dick Hardt says that he noticed that now that Flipboard is part of the fediverse, these news organisations already have a more official presence on the fediverse via Flipboard. ActivityPub allows for an easy transfer here, if you followed a press.coop account you are now automatically following the corresponding Flipboard account instead.

The fediverse has tied up user names quite strictly to fediverse servers: your username handle contains the server name itself, following the convention of @username@serverdomain.tld. This means your account is tied up to the server and server domain, which does occasionally lead to issues with servers disappearing because the domain is not available anymore. This convention is not in fact mandated by ActivityPub, and the ‘WebFinger Split-Domain Canary‘ is a showcase that it is possible to have an account where the domain in the username is different from the server that the account is on. For developers interested in experimenting what is further possible in the fediverse this might be an interesting direction to look at.

Heise.de has consistently been sharing statistics on the sources of traffic to their news site, and for the last two weeks Mastodon has overtaken X in traffic, with Bluesky and Threads far behind.The Links
The rebellion will be federated – Elena Rossini.
Bridges & The Last Network Effect – Anuj Ahooja.
Fighting Enshittification with ActivityPub – A presentation by Manyfold developer James at the London Ruby User Group.
Castopod has updated their new user guide.
Fediverse Tumblr clone Wafrn is working on a Bluesky integration.
Letterbook is a fediverse platform that is currently in development, and it has published an overview the current state of development.
Ghost’s weekly update is about how they are working on performance improvements with queues.
Owncast Newsletter November 2024.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-92/

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/

On Bluesky and enshittificationEditor’s note: this is a ...

2024-10-31T18:02:16Z

On Bluesky and enshittificationEditor’s note: this is a slightly modified and extended version of the analysis I wrote in the Last Week in the ATmosphere newsletter.

Last week, Bluesky announced their series A funding round, raising $15M in a round that is led by a venture capital fund Blockchain Capital. The seed round already had investors from the crypto world, but this drew much more attention with the series A, as the headline of Blockchain Capital as a lead investor made the connection loud and clear. Bluesky is aware of the negative connotations that many people have regarding blockchains and crypto, explicitly stating that “the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).”

The negative associations that people have with both blockchains and venture capital made that a common response to the news was that “the enshittification has started”. This response was dominant on the fediverse, and less so but still present on Bluesky. It’s been such a common response that I think it deserves a closer look at ‘enshittification’ and how it relates to Bluesky taking investment from a blockchain VC firm. The meaning of the term enshittification has shifted over time, and both meanings provide an interesting lens to look at the news.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, he used it to describe a process of platform decay. A platforms subsidises growth by operating at a loss, and places themselves in between the suppliers and customers on a two-sided marketplace. Once suppliers and customers are locked in on the platform and cannot easily leave, the enshittification cycle happens: the platform uses their control of the marketplace to take an ever increasing part of the value while while making the experience on the platform worse, for both suppliers and consumers.

What is interesting here is that in earlier interviews, Jay Graber has mentioned the idea of building marketplaces on Bluesky as a way to make money. If enshittification is used to describe platform decay, it stands out that a marketplace is not present in the Series A announcement as a way for Bluesky to monetise. For a platform to become enshittified in this meaning of platform decay, a platform needs to have exclusive control of a marketplace on the platform. However, Bluesky is currently not taking the direction of a marketplace for monetisation, instead opting for subscriptions and payment processing. This is still open to change at a later point, as Graber has expressed interest in it before.

Doctorow also mentions two principles to combat platform enshittification. Platforms should be interoperable, allowing users to switch to a different provider. Users should also have the ability to control the content they see, and not be dependent on an opaque algorithm owned by the platform. As both of these principles are deeply embedded in the design of ATProto, Bluesky is an interesting case study if the principles that Doctorow mentioned are indeed good enough to stave off enshittification.

The meaning of the term enshittification has drifted and expanded over time. Enshittification is now commonly used to refer to any business practice that makes the company or product, well, shit. There is a fairly widespread negative attitude towards both venture capital as well as blockchains and crypto. People perceive that these systems have not brought benefits they promised, and enriched a small elite instead, all the while degrading the experience of using the internet. This is not a newsletter to deconstruct blockchains or VC (I’m sure you can find your own sources for that), but I do want to point out that public perception of both venture capital and blockchains matter here. Bluesky is in an active growth phase, and part of the sales pitch to get people to join the network is that Bluesky is a ‘better’ place, for various interpretations of ‘better’.

Getting people to join Bluesky while also being associated with technologies and organisations that many people perceive as ‘not better’ is much harder. People want to join a new network because they hope that the new network is a better experience for them. Judging from the outside if a network is a suitable place is hard, so people tend to fall back to simple heuristics to determine if a network is a good place for them. BlockChain Capital might provide valuable support to Bluesky, but this hard to see as an outsider that is considering joining Bluesky. Instead, it is more likely that they will fall back on their preexisting opinions about startups that take VC money or affiliated with blockchains.

Neither the crypto industry or venture capitalists have build up a track record over recent years that make it easy for people to trust them to deliver technology that meaningfully improves people’s lives. A skeptical assessment of why (crypto-based) VCs are investing into a company is warranted. Blockchain Capital’s investment thesis is clear about why they are investing into Bluesky: their interest is in an expanded ecosystem, where developers can build new products, while leveraging the social graph that ATProto provides. Their investment thesis falls far outside the framework of enshittification, both as a way to describe platform decay as well as a more generic ‘products gets bad’. Critically evaluating the positive and negative impacts that Blockchain Capital can have on Bluesky and the ATmosphere, might just require a different framework than ‘enshittification’ can provide.

https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90 The Fediverse Schema Observatory ...

2024-10-30T18:58:19Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90

The Fediverse Schema Observatory helps to improve interoperability, the botsin.space server will shut down, and more.The News

The Fediverse Schema Observatory is a new project by Darius Kazemi, who runs the Hometown fork of Mastodon as well as co-wrote to Fediverse Governance paper this year with Erin Kissane. The Observatory collects data structures from the fediverse; it looks how different fediverse softwares use and implement ActivityPub. It explicitly does not gather any personal data or posts; instead it looks at how the data is formatted in ActivityPub. ActivityPub and the fediverse has a long-standing problem in that the selling point is interoperability between different software, but every software has their own, slightly different implementation of ActivityPub, making good interoperability difficult to pull off. Kazemi has posted about the Observatory as a Request for Comments. The Observatory is explicitly not a scraper, but considering how sensitive the subject can be in the fediverse community, Kazemi has taken a careful approach of informing the community in detail beforehand about the proposed project, and how it deals with data. The easiest way to see and understand how the Observatory is works is with this demo video.

The botsin.space Mastodon server for bots will shut down in December. The botsin.space server is a server dedicated to running bots, with a few thousand active bots running. The server is a valued part of the community, with the wild variety of bots running on the server contributing to the Mastodon in both useful and silly ways. The admin states that over time running the servers has become too expensive over time, and that is was not feasible to keep the project going. The shutdown of botsin.space showcases an ongoing struggle in the fediverse, running a server is expensive and time-consuming, and every time a server shuts down the fediverse loses a block of its history.

Sub.club is a way to add monetization options to fediverse posts. Sub.club started with being able to add paywalls to Mastodon posts, recently expanded to long-form writing with support for Write.as, and now has added support for WordPress blogs as well. Sub.club has posted a tutorial on how to add the plugin to WordPress, making it an easy system to set up.

Bridgy Fed, the bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto has gotten some updates, with the main new feature is that you can now set custom domain handles on Bluesky for fediverse accounts that get bridged into Bluesky. This brings the interoperability between the networks closer to native accounts, and makes having a bridged account more attractive.

Upcoming fediverse platform for short-form video, Loops, got some press by The Verge and TechCrunch. Creator Daniel Supernault said that there are now 5k people on the waiting list, and that a TestFlight link will go out soon for the first 100 people. An Android APK will be made available at some point as well.

GoToSocial is working on the ability to for servers to subscribe to allowlists and denylists. This makes it easier to create clusters of servers with a shared allowlist, such as the Website League. As I recently wrote about Website League, it is a cluster of federating servers that uses ActivityPub but exists separately from the rest of the fediverse, and it is started by people who build a new shared space after Cohost shut down. Website League servers predominantly use GoToSocial or Akkoma, and have been actively working on tuning the software to meet their needs.The Links
Flipboard is now federating accounts of publishers in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the UK.
A long read on Content Warnings, that extensively touches on the culture on using Content Warnings in Mastodon and the Website League as well.
Diving Into the World of Lemmy.
One year after X: Embracing open science on Mastodon – a reflection by the University of Groningen Library.
Mastodon, two years later – a continuation of the article ‘Mastodon – a partial history‘, by The Nexus of Privacy.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
The Event Federation project has drafted a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for a common way to use the ‘event’ type in the fediverse.
Setting up my federated fleamarket with flohmarkt.
IFTAS October update.
Ghost’s weekly update on their project to implement ActivityPub, mentioning that they have bridged their ActivityPub-based Ghost account to Bluesky as well.
The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same. – Elena Rossini.
How the ‘Fediverse’ Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media) – Lifehacker.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-90/

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 88 A quieter news week: self-hosted ...

2024-10-16T16:32:47Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 88

A quieter news week: self-hosted 3d printing app Manyfold joins the fediverse, and write.as now offers paid subscriptions for fediverse accounts with sub.club.The News

Manyfold is a self-hosted open source web app for organising and managing your collection of 3d files, and in particularly 3d printing. With their latest update, Manyfold has now joined the fediverse by adding ActivityPub support. With the new integration, you can now follow a Manyfold creator from your fediverse account of choice, and get notified when the Manyfold account uploads a new 3d file. New Manyfold uploads appear as short posts with a link in the rest of the fediverse. To demonstrate, here is the Manyfold account from the creator Floppy as visible from Mastodon, and here is the profile on their Manyfold instance itself. The Manyfold server also has a button to follow the account on the fediverse.
Manyfold implementing ActivityPub support is an illustration of how ActivityPub can be viewed as a form of ‘Social RSS’: it allows you to follow any Actor for updates, and adds social features (sharing/liking to it).

Sub.club is a service that lets people create paid subscription feeds on the fediverse. The service recently launched with the ability to monetise Mastodon feeds, and has now expanded to also include long-form writing, by collaborating with write.as. Write.as is the flagship instance of fediverse blogging software WriteFreely. With this update, blogs on write.as can now set on a a per-blog basis if a blog is a premium blog, and where the cut-off is. People who follow the blog from a fediverse account will see an option to subscribe and view the full post; this post by the sub.club account shows how a premium blog will look like from various perspectives. Adding sub.club to a write.as blog is as simple as following this three-minute PeerTube video.The Links
“We can have a different web, if we want it” – Newsmast’s Michael Foster.
Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, is out for September 2024.
Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom – Soatok, who is working on implementing E2EE for ActivityPub.
ForgeFed is continuing to work on adding Actor Programming.
Positioning Micro.blog.
Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 2) – Elena Rossini.
‘I for one (cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses, but we really need to talk about the big elephant in the federated room’ – The Nexus of Privacy.
The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability – bengo.
Echo is a new iOS app for Lemmy.
This week’s fediverse software updates.

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

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-88/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87 Mastodon has officially launched ...

2024-10-09T18:06:53Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87

Mastodon has officially launched a new version, a new Reddit-like with ClubsAll has launched, and IFTAS has started rolling out their content classifier system.Mastodon launches version 4.3

Mastodon has released version 4.3, and the update comes with a better notification system, design improvements, displaying follow recommendations in the following feed for new accounts, and the ability to highlight the fediverse profile of the authors of shared articles.

There are two updates to the notification system: notifications are now grouped, and the ability to filter notifications. Grouped notifications means that you’ll see a summary of the number of people who liked and boosted your post, instead of getting each notification individually. This is especially helpful for posts that go viral, as your notifications become unusable without grouping. Third party clients also support grouping notifications of new followers, which Mastodon does not do. With notification filters, you can limit specific types of notifications, for example from people who are not following you, from new accounts, or to filter out unsolicited private mentions.

With the new carousel that displays follow suggestions for new accounts, Mastodon leaned on transparency. For each suggestion it is also displayed why an account is suggested. It seems there are four different reasons for an account to be suggested: ‘Popular on your server’, ‘Popular among people you follow’, ‘Similar to profiles you recently followed’ and ‘Handpicked by your server admins’.

For future plans Mastodon mentions three parts: working on adding quote posts, the ability for server admins to subscribe to managed deny-lists and improving how long-form text is displayed in Mastodon. Mastodon also features a request for donations at the end, noting that they are supported by donations and operate on less than 500k per year. It showcases the difficult spot that Mastodon is in: as the post highlights, their competitors have access to significant capital, which allows them to ship features significantly faster. While it is remarkable what Mastodon has accomplished with their budget, the small team also means that it has taken a year to ship this update 4.3, while the competition can move significantly faster. Not taking venture capital, not selling ads, and not selling data are great things to do, but the update cadence of Mastodon versus that of Bluesky or Threads shows that not doing so puts a significant limit on what the organisation can accomplish during this period of protocol wars.ClubsAll has launched

ClubsAll is a new fediverse project, a Reddit-alternative similar to Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. ClubsAll main goal is to provide a clean and easily-accessible UI, and explicitly positions itself as a Reddit alternative. The other focus is on live comments and live chat, where new comments that are made on a post flow in directly visible. The comment section includes both the traditional threaded view as well as a chatbox to invite more chat-like realtime reactions. Other features are easy cross-posting of new posts to up to three communities, and having multiple profiles under a simple login.

With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the fediverse community on lemmy.ml and the fediverse community on lemmy.world. PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘topics’, which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.The News

IFTAS has been working on a Content Classification System, and the first classifier is now active. A few select server are working together with IFTAS, where all the media of these servers now get scanned for CSAM. In case of a hit, IFTAS handles the mandatory requirement and record-keeping, and issues a takedown. CSAM moderation is a difficult task for server admins to keep track of, both of the toll it takes on the humans, as well for the complex legal requirements that come with it.

NLnet has been a major sponsor of fediverse projects over the years. They announced the results their latest funding round this week in which they sponsor a large variety of open source project. The fediverse project that got funded is Loops, a TikTok-like short video platform by Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault. Loops was scheduled for a public beta launch on Wednesday the 9th, but this has been delayed for 11 days. Supernault attributes the delay to the rumour that Threads is working on a Communities feature that is also supposedly called Loops, as well as to further polish the app and platform.

The SocialCG, the W3C Community Group for ActivityPub has agreed on starting work to form a charter to transition towards a Working Group. The details require some knowledge of W3C processes (that I don’t fully grok either), but the very short summary is that a Working Group has more impact on making changes to the ActivityPub protocol.

FediMod FIRES is both a protocol for distributing moderation advisories and recommendations and a reference server implementation. Emelia Smith, who is behind the project, has updated the website with more information as well as a general timeline for when work on the project happens.

ActivityPods is a project that combines the Solid protocol with ActivityPub, and they have released their 2.0 version. ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple different apps; with ActivityPub you need a separate accounts for Pixelfed and Mastodon, for example. ActivityPods gives you one place to store your data, your Pod, based on the Solid protocol, and the Inbox and Outbox system of ActivityPub. This update of ActivityPods gives the ability to set granular permission levels for the access to data than an app has that is build on top of ActivityPods. The Links
IFTAS September 2024 Connect Community Round-Up.
Prototyping Our First Native Components with LiveView Native – Bonfire app dev diary.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Lemmy Development Update for the past 2 weeks.
Minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force meeting.
Sub.club is teasing premium (for paid subscribers) blogs coming soon
The two Fediverses – Ben Werdmuller.
A proposal to enable portability of identity and object storage within ActivityPub through the use of DIDs.
Event Organizers’ Needs for Publishing to the Fediverse via WordPress.
The FediJam is a month-long game jam for users of the fediverse, and the results of the September jam our now available.
Pixelfed has been working on adding push notifications, and other Pixelfed servers can now apply for access as well.
An interview with Silverpill, who builds fediverse platform Mitra.
Ghost’s latest update shows some more of their ActivityPub-powered reader.
Tangerine is a custom UI for Mastodon servers, and v2 is now available for Mastodon servers on 4.3.
The Author bylines feature is now also available for all Mastodon servers, with an explanation on how to set it up here.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-87/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86 Threads degrades their fediverse ...

2024-10-02T17:14:24Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86

Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.Threads delays posts for 15 minutes before federating

Threads’ latest update has degraded the value of their fediverse integration. Posts made on Threads will now always be delayed by 15 minutes before they are delivered to the rest of the fediverse, if fediverse sharing is turned on. The 15 minute delay is added for the purpose of post editing; posts on Threads can now be edited for 15 minutes after they are created. This used to be 5 minutes, both as a window for editing posts as well as the delay to be send out to the rest of the fediverse.

A 15 minute delay is a long time in microblogging, and significantly impacts things like breaking news, and live-posting sports events. It also meaningfully impacts the ability to have a back-and-forth conversation with people in a comment section. The delay itself is already an issue, but things get even more problematic when taken into consideration that during live events, Threads posts with a 15 minute delay are now mixed with fediverse posts without a delay and presented as happening during the same time. This was already noticeable during yesterday’s U.S. VP debate, an event where people use microblogging for the real-time reaction. But part of the real-time reactions was actually 15 minutes delayed, while another part was not, which creates even more confusing experience. A Threads engineer says that they will want to solve this problem ‘eventually’, but that it will probably come after Threads has implemented full bi-directional interoperability.

This news is not a great start for the Social Web Foundation either, which launched last week with criticism from the wider fediverse developer community for having Meta as one of their supporting members. There is a distrust of Meta’s intention within the fediverse, and them degrading their fediverse integration is likely not helping.Website League

The Website League is a new social networking project that has arisen out of the demise of Cohost. Cohost was a social media site for the last 2 years, that has shut down, and on October 1st the website entered read-only mode. Cohost had a dedicated user base who appreciated the community that they’ve build on the site. Website League is a new project by users of Cohost (the Cohost staff is not involved) to build a successor network in Cohost’s place.

What makes Website League stand out is that it is a federated Island Network, described by Website League themselves as ‘a bunch of smallish websites that talk to each other’. This federated social network is using ActivityPub, but deliberately does not connect to the rest of the fediverse. Instead, it is an allowlist-based form of federation, where only websites/servers who agree to the Website League’s central set of rules can join.

The Website League has a big focus community organisation and governance. Even though the project is very young, and launched under time pressure of the deadline of Cohost closing, there are already multiple systems in place with an active Loomio for Stewardship, a wiki and more. The Website League provides a different vision of what a federated social network build on top of ActivityPub can look like, and I’m very curious to see where the project will go.Ghost and Fedify

Ghost published their latest update on their work on adding ActivityPub, with more information about their upcoming beta. Ghost is slowly starting their beta process soon, making it clear that this is indeed a testing program, and data loss should be expected for people who are participating. They also said more about the performance and scaling of Ghost and ActivityPub. Sending out a newsletter over ActivityPub to 5000 subscribers turned out to need 10 servers, which indicates how resource-intensive and expensive ActivityPub can be. As a result, ActivityPub followers will count towards Ghost Pro billing, as Ghost Pro charges based on the number of members an account has.

Fedify, an open-source framework that simplifies building federated server apps, is now officially in version 1.0. Ghost’s ActivityPub integration is build on top of Fedify, and Ghost is sponsoring the Fedify developer as well.The Links
Flipboard is connecting another 250 accounts of publishers to the fediverse.
Bonfire is building a native app, and a series of developer diaries with it.
The first release candidate for Mastodon 4.3 is now available.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 1) – Elena Rossini.
Mastodon Announces Fediverse Discovery Providers – WeDistribute.
fedi vs web – on the distinction between social network and social web, where activitypub straddles both.
Mallory Knodel, the Executive Director for the new Social Web Foundation, writes about the new foundation.
The Mastodon server strangeobjects.space will shut down, and in the announcement post the admins explain the emotional cost and impact that comes with being a server admin.

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

Subscribe to our newsletter!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-86/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85 It’s been an eventful week in ...

2024-09-25T18:12:50Z

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85

It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down

The Swiss Government will shut down their Mastodon server at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a pilot that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.The Social Web Foundation has launched

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large grant, and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.

The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:
adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a grant for.
Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.
A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.
Working on long-form text in the fediverse.

The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they state that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.

Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.

As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?Software updates

There are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:

GoToSocial’s v0.17 release brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”

Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.
Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.In Other News

IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum. The Links
All the speed demo videos of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.
Evan Prodromou’s book about ActivityPub, ‘ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web‘ has officially launched.Lemmy Development Update.
PieFed’s Development update for September 2024.
A tool to make sure you see all replies on a fediverse posts (and an explanation on how it differs from FediFetcher).
A work-in-progress Rust library for ActivityPub.
The German Data Protection Office updated their Data Protection Guidelines for running a Mastodon server.
The Revolution Will Be Federated – WeDistribute.
This week’s updates for fediverse software.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-85/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Sept 24 week 3 Welcome to this ...

2024-09-25T17:13:59Z

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Sept 24 week 3

Welcome to this week’s update, with lots of news regarding T&S on Bluesky, managed PDS hosting, and a deeper dive into the Jetstream!The News

Bluesky released an update on their current efforts on Trust and Safety, listing all the features the team is currently working on. There are quite a few features being worked on that are great (better ban evasion detection, moderation feedback via app), and I want to highlight two of them:
Geography-specific labels. Bluesky is working to add the ability to remove posts only in certain countries, if they violate local laws but are allowed by Bluesky’s own guidelines. This is a feature that I’ll certainly be writing more about once more about it becomes known, as it poses tons of interesting questions about decentralised protocols and national internet sovereignty. As Bluesky’s own labels can be avoided in an open protocol by running your own infrastructure, it poses the questions of whether people actually do this to circumvent local laws, as well as the extend local governments will accept this (or understand it, to be honest).
With toxicity detection experiments, Bluesky aims to detect rude replies and potentially reduce their visibility, possibly by hiding them behind a ‘show more comments’ button. It puts Bluesky closer to what other networks are doing, which is hiding bad or spammy comments behind a button you have to click to see. My guess is that Bluesky also eventually will end up in this position, skipping the labeling part altogether.

A report by Brazilian investigative researchers finds that Bluesky is having difficulty moderation CSAM in Portugese, mapping 125 accounts that sell or share CSAM. Bluesky’s head of Trust & Safety already reported in early September that the sudden inflow of new users lead to a 10x increase in reported CSAM, as well as a more general strain on the moderation. Bluesky’s Emily Liu also stated in response to the report: “we’re taking this extremely seriously, and since the recent influx of users started, we’ve hired more human moderators (who are also provided mental health services) + implementing additional tooling that can quash these networks faster and more effectively”.

Bluesky has appointed a legal representative in Brazil, and will make an official announcement in the next few days. X not having a legal representative in Brazil is what ultimately led to a ban on X in Brazil. This week, X finally caved and appointed a representative, and X might become unbanned in the next few days again. It is worth watching how X becoming available again in Brazil will impact the current userbase of Brazilians on Bluesky. While some will undoubtedly go back to using X, the open question is how large this group will be. In other news

With a maturity of the ecosystem, companies are starting to offer managed hosting of a PDS, both in the US as well as in Japan. It also raises interesting question regarding branding and marketing: both of these services explicitly advertise themselves as offering a Bluesky PDS: while that makes sense from the company’s perspective (very few people will understand what an atproto PDS is), I am entirely unclear if this desirable from the perspective of the Bluesky company.

Last week I wrote about a directory of Brazilian Bluesky accounts, and it turns out there is also a Japanese equivalent: the Bluesky Feeds Navigator lists a large variety of custom feeds (mainly in Japanese) for Bluesky.

Brazilian tech YouTuber Gabs Ferreira interviewed Bluesky engineer hailey about developing on Bluesky, focusing specifically on mobile and React Native (in English). Ferreira interviewed Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee last week, and will talk with Dan Abramov on 26-09.

Altmetric, which tracks engagement with academic research, is working on adding support for Bluesky.

EmbedSky is a new tool to ’embed the last thirty posts and reposts from your BlueSky timeline in your blog or website’. It works with OAuth, which facilitates that the tool can only be used to embed posts from your own account. On Relays, Jetstreams and costs

Some semi-technical protocol discussion about relays is worth mentioning, since I see people on the other networks talk about it. First, a super simplified description of how atproto works: everyone’s data is stored in a simple database, which does not much else besides storing your data, called a PDS. A Relay scrapes all the PDS’s on the entire network, and turns it into an unending stream of updates, often colloquially called a firehose. An AppView takes all the data from the firehose and makes it presentable for a user (counting all the ‘likes’ on a post, for example).

People on other networks often assume that running a Relay is prohibitively expensive, and it turns out it is not: Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold ran an extra full-network Relay for 150 USD/month, and recently someone confirmed this is still possible after the massive influx of new users.

Relays can be ‘expensive’ in another way though: a lot of the data that goes through a Relay is dedicated to making sure that the data is authenticated. This is the ‘Authenticated’ part in the name ‘Authenticated Transfer Protocol’. However, there are quite some use cases for which it is not necessary to validate every single event that comes through the firehose, such as a simple bot that listens for certain keywords. In that case, they can get by with a simpler version of the firehose.

Two versions of such a simpler version, called a Jetstream, launched this week. Bluesky engineer Jaz released their own version of a Jetstream, accompanying with an extensive blog post in which they describe how it works. They note that this reduces traffic activity by 99%, all while running on a 5$/month VPS. Jaz also says that an official Bluesky version of a Jetstream is coming soon.

Skyware (who recently released a lightweight labeler as well) also has their own version of a Jetstream available as well.The Links
Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Proto Firehose by >99%
A complete and follow-along guide to ‘Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS and using your domain as your handle’.
Buttondown’s CEO writes about Bluesky.
Growth of Bluesky also comes with additional needs for protection for the Blacksky community.
The Government of Brazil now also has their own verified Bluesky account.
Bluesky could become Brazil’s next big social media platform. It has Elon Musk’s X to thank – Fast Company.
Frontpage, a HackerNews-like build on top of atproto, now has OAuth login.

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.

#bluesky

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