Nostr notes by Laurens Hof

FR#154 – Search and Community Last week, Holos Social quietly ...

2026-02-20T17:50:40Z

FR#154 – Search and Community

Last week, Holos Social quietly shut down Holos Discover, a fediverse search engine built on ActivityPub. It had put in serious effort to allow for user consent, it only indexed public posts from accounts with the indexable flag enabled, appeared as a visible follower, processed deletions and edits in real time, and excluded accounts that were locked or had #nobot in their bio. This is about as close you can get to building a consent-respecting search engine in the current fediverse.

Community members pointed out that the indexable flag is enabled by default on many instances, which means that a significant number of accounts with the flag set never made a deliberate choice to be indexed. The flag that’s supposed to signal “this person consents to being searchable” frequently signals “this person’s server admin didn’t change the default”, and on a protocol-level, there is no difference between these two options.

Search and indexing projects on the fediverse tend to end the same way, from early full-text indexing attempts through Searchtodon‘s careful experiment with personal timeline search in 2023, to FediOnFire‘s relay-based firehose display earlier this year. Not all of this resistance was unjustified: Maven imported over a million fediverse posts without notice and ran AI sentiment analysis on them, which is a far cry from what Holos was building. But the community response has rarely distinguished between projects that deliberately violate consent and projects that try to respect it. Bridgy Fed survived a similar cycle by shifting to an opt-in model, but it’s the exception. The norm against search was established during periods of intense community backlash that sometimes crossed into coordinated harassment. These backlashes have grown less intense as people seem to have largely moved on. See for example how Searchtodon got an intense backlash in early 2023, and I explicitly flagged an offline-first client that could do effectively the same in fall 2025 that did not get any backlash. Still, the expectation for backlash persists as internalized caution.

The community correctly identified that the indexable flag doesn’t reliably represent individual consent. Helen Nissenbaum’s work on contextual integrity makes the case that privacy isn’t about secrecy but about appropriate information flows: posting on Mastodon carries an implicit norm about who will encounter that post and why, and violating that norm is a privacy breach even if the post was technically public. Daniel Solove and Woodrow Hartzog make a similar legal argument, saying that publicly available data is still regularly protected by privacy law, and that accessibility alone doesn’t license arbitrary downstream use.

But the only available response to discovering that the indexable flag is unreliable, treating all defaults as non-consent, has some major side effects. It removes the possibility that a server admin could legitimately say “our community values public discovery, so we set defaults that support that.”The protocol has no way to represent whether a default was set deliberately or by inertia. So the community norm treats them the same, which in practice means that a server admin who says ‘our community is about public discovery’ gets treated identically to one who never looked at the settings page. This results in a view of fediverse servers that only contains individual choices, and where a community deciding collectively to be discoverable is not an available category.

This is a strange outcome for a network that’s supposed to enable governance diversity across communities. Mastodon published a blog post this week where Executive Director Felix Hlatky says the mission is to “connect the world through thriving online communities”. But this current structure for how to signal consent for data processing can only recognise the individual, and has no mechanism for a community to signal anything.

There is also something patronizing about the framing that treats defaults as equivalent to non-consent. If we take seriously the idea that servers are communities with governance, then an admin who configures their server for public discovery is making a governance decision on behalf of their community, not failing to notice a checkbox. Treating all defaults as non-consent refuses to recognize that decision as legitimate, which undermines exactly the kind of community-level agency that a decentralized network is supposed to enable. As I argued in another article this week, where community lives in these networks is an open question, but it can’t be answered if the architecture only recognizes individuals.

Meanwhile, there are about half a dozen ways to harvest fediverse data with no accountability and no opt-out attached, and all of them are effectively condoned because they happen out of sight. What the current setup actually does is push practices for data gathering out of sight, where no opt-out mechanisms exist, instead of creating conditions where accountable tools can be built in the open. The current system is better at protecting the community’s idea of itself as a place that takes consent seriously, than it is at actually protecting users.

Mastodon’s Fediverse Discovery Providers project, or Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers (FASP), is building a specification for pluggable search and discovery services that any fediverse server can connect to, funded by an NGI Search grant. It aims to solve the same problem as Holos, providing discovery infrastructure that can be used by other servers.

The FASP specification explicitly states that providers will “only ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place” and will “respect this setting,” referring to the same indexable signal that Holos relied on. The spec is well-designed in other respects: it is decentralized, allows servers to choose among competing providers, separates content URIs from content fetching in ways that limit data exposure, and requires signed fetch requests so servers can identify and block specific providers. But the problem is that the consent mechanism at its foundation is one the community has already explicitly said it doesn’t trust.

If the Holos episode established that the indexable flag is insufficient because it can’t guarantee individual deliberate consent, then FASP’s privacy model has the same hole. It shows that the lack of search and discovery is a governance problem, not a technical problem. Holos and their experience building a search engine shows that the ‘indexable’ flag is not sufficient. The technical infrastructure for discovery is being built, but the governance infrastructure for consent, a way to distinguish deliberate community choices from defaults, is not discussed at all.

#nobot

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr154-search-and-community/

Where Does Community Live? What’s always interested me about ...

2026-02-18T18:01:19Z

Where Does Community Live?

What’s always interested me about Ostrom’s work is that she showed how governance of communities is very diverse, with rules that look chaotic on the surface but share deep structure underneath. What’s more, her understanding of how communities self-organize and govern themselves is relevant to the social web today. Across the open social web there are new types of communities being built, and people actively experimenting with how governance works in these communities.

At the Eurosky conference in Berlin in November 2025, technologist Robin Berjon made a statement that referenced Ostrom, and tied to protocols: “The properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same.” I think that’s largely true, but I also think we can be even more specific.

The open social web today consists primarily of two protocols, ActivityPub and ATProto, each with very different ideas about how to organize social life online. Neither prescribes a single network topology, and both leave fundamental choices about how social space should be structured to the people building on top of them. But their architectural decisions are not neutral: they shape and constrain the topologies that can emerge, the kinds of communities that can form, and the governance tools available to those communities.

That specificity matters because what’s actually happening across ActivityPub and ATProto right now looks, at first glance, like chaos. There are dozens of different applications, community experiments, and governance arrangements, each making different choices about where boundaries fall and who controls what. But just as Ostrom found that the diversity of community governance systems can be generalized into a number of shared structural rules, the diversity of the open social web also has a common set of questions: where does membership begin and end, who sets the rules, how are violations monitored, and what happens when someone breaks the agreement. Protocols don’t answer these questions, but they do determine which answers are even possible.

The simplest way to understand ActivityPub is that servers send messages to each other. A person on one server can follow a person on another server, and when either of them posts something, their server delivers that message to the other. That simplicity hides a deeper question though: what is a server actually for?

The answer that dominated for most of Mastodon’s history is that a server is infrastructure. In a 2023 interview with The Verge, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko described the product in terms that made servers sound like an implementation detail. “Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.” When users complained about having to choose a server at signup, Rochko’s response was to make the choice disappear: sorting the server list to show larger servers first, adding a “pick for me” button, and keeping mastodon.social open as a default funnel. He acknowledged this moved Mastodon closer to the Gmail problem he said he wanted to avoid, but framed it as necessity, saying: “However, I’ve learned over the years that there is no replacement for having a default, right?”

In this model, the server boundary is administrative rather than social. Users experience a single network where the fact that their account lives on one server rather than another is, ideally, something they never have to think about, with the server handling uptime, storage, and moderation enforcement. The social graph extends freely across server boundaries and the home feed pulls in content from everywhere, making it feel like a single network.The topology is functionally centralized even though the infrastructure is distributed. This solves some problems regarding engineering and the distribution of power, but does so without creating distinct social spaces.

Mastodon’s current leadership is trying to move away from this. Their new community director, Hannah Aubrey, describes Mastodon as “a front door, not the whole house,” and talks about surfacing and supporting other servers rather than funneling everyone into mastodon.social. Director Felix Hlatky has made distributing users away from mastodon.social an explicit priority, noting that concentrating users on one server is “not the purpose of building a social network.” The target is ambitious: going from roughly 10,000 servers to 100,000, which Hlatky says “needs a mindshift in what it means to start a server.”

In this newer model, the server boundary becomes a social boundary, and your experience of Mastodon is supposed to be shaped by the community you joined rather than just by who you follow across the wider network. Aubrey envisions server starters as “leaders and organizers” who want to build something for their community, whether that community is defined by language, identity, geography, or shared interest, framing the value proposition in terms of belonging: “you can still be in community with people in a safe and healthy way.”

Instead of one network with distributed infrastructure, it is a network of networks where each node has meaningful social coherence. Newsmast, a UK-based organization building ActivityPub infrastructure for publishers and communities, is pushing this further by creating branded apps on top of individual server communities that combine community feeds with a publisher’s content. The logical conclusion of their approach is one app per community, with federation as the connective tissue between them.

Lemmy and PieFed, the Reddit-style link aggregation platforms on ActivityPub, complicate this further. Communities (the equivalent of subreddits) exist on servers but are accessible from other servers, creating a double layer of social boundaries: a community has its own topic, its own moderators, and its own norms, but it also lives on a server that has its own administrators and its own moderation policies. When users from one server participate in a community hosted on another, it is genuinely unclear whose norms apply. The server boundary and the community boundary overlap without aligning, producing a topology of mixed jurisdictions that nobody has fully figured out how to govern.

(PieFed also has a feature called ‘Topics’, which aggregates posts from multiple communities into a single feed around a single theme, making jurisdiction a truly joyful mess: a single post can be made by someone on server A, posted into a community hosted on server B, and then aggregated into a Topic hosted on server C. What happens when rules between servers A, B and C conflict is anyone’s guess.)

The point here is that ActivityPub does not prescribe a single topology. The protocol is flexible enough that each application makes a fundamentally different choice about how much the server boundary matters socially. Mastodon circa 2023 treated servers as invisible plumbing; Mastodon in 2026 wants servers to be communities. PeerTube treats them as institutional containers for self-hosted video libraries, with federation as a secondary feature. Lemmy layers communities on top of servers, creating overlapping boundaries.

In ATProto, every user has a Personal Data Server (PDS) that stores their content as structured records, and applications don’t host this data but read from it. The mental model is something like a shared lake of public data: every PDS contributes its stream, and every application draws out the subset relevant to its purpose. A microblogging app reads posts, while a video app reads video records and a code hosting platform reads repositories, all from the same pool of data, through different lenses. Where ActivityPub organizes around the server as the social unit, ATProto organizes around data.

Bluesky is the dominant application built on ATProto, and for most users it is simply a Twitter-like social network. Community formation in Bluesky is supposed to happen through custom feeds, and Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has framed these as the platform’s core innovation. “The algorithm, more than the content type or the app’s appearance, is the core of social media because it directs how you spend your attention there,” she wrote in 2023, describing Bluesky’s goal as replacing the “master algorithm” controlled by a single company with an open “marketplace of algorithms.” The language is consistently about individual choice and control: what you see, what you scroll, what you subscribe to. Bluesky’s own FAQ makes the contrast with Mastodon explicit: “On Mastodon, your instance, or server, determines your community… On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation.”

But community is not an attention problem. Feeds organize what individuals see without creating shared spaces, shared governance, or shared membership. In Bluesky’s default implementation, you scroll a feed but you don’t belong to it. The absence of community infrastructure at the feed level follows directly from what feeds were designed to do: they solve for individual curation, not collective organization. This is not a protocol-level constraint, though, as the case of Blacksky demonstrates: a feed can carry community infrastructure when it is deliberately built to do so, with dedicated moderation and explicit membership. But Bluesky’s affordances push toward the passive-consumption model rather than the community-building one.

This is a problem for anyone trying to build actual community on ATProto. Blacksky, which serves the Black community on Bluesky, shows what it actually takes. Their approach was to construct community identity first, starting with a custom feed that created a sense of shared space, then progressively building their own PDS hosting, their own moderation system, and their own relay, their own appview. Their moderation relay is particularly significant because it means any application on the network can plug into Blacksky’s moderation rather than relying solely on Bluesky’s, and their recent work on private posts represents the most explicit departure from ATProto’s default assumption that all data is public, carving out enclosure where the protocol assumes openness.

Other community-oriented applications face similar tensions. Gander (Canada), Eurosky (EU), and Northsky (queer community) each target specific populations while maintaining a full-network view, and it remains unclear how these will develop in practice: whether the community identity or the full-network access becomes the primary experience. They are attempting to create bounded social spaces on top of a protocol that was designed to be boundaryless.

Then there are applications that don’t focus on creating social community spaces at all, and these may be where ATProto’s architecture is most naturally suited. Tangled is a code hosting platform with social features, more comparable to GitHub than to Twitter. Margin.at allows users to write annotations on web pages that are visible to other users, an interesting reversal where the application layer spans the entire web and ATProto functions as invisible plumbing underneath. Germ, a messaging app, uses ATProto’s identity system (DID:PLC) for user identity but builds its actual messaging infrastructure off-protocol entirely. Blento allows you to create a personal websites, with the data stored on your own PDS.

While ATProto’s architecture trends towards a flat social topology with global data, this is not a hard constraint, and it can be used to create distinct social spaces as well.

The two protocols create mirror-image problems for community formation: ActivityPub provides boundaries but makes them difficult to experience from the outside, while ATProto makes the entire network navigable but provides no natural boundaries at all.

In ActivityPub, servers are supposed to be communities, but the architecture does not support the social mechanics through which communities actually form. You can’t visit another server or browse a different community’s conversation the way you might walk into a neighborhood bar. And while you can follow individuals across server boundaries, you can’t be present in a space without committing your identity to it. Communities, as sociologists have long observed, tend to form through encounter, through showing up at the same place at the same time and discovering shared interests through proximity. ActivityPub supports following but not presence, and the server boundary, while it matters in theory, is not something a user can experience in practice.

Another challenge with a ‘server as community’ is that the person running a server is simultaneously the infrastructure administrator and the community leader, and these are fundamentally different roles requiring different skills. Hlatky is frank about the reality: most people who start servers “have no idea what moderation means”. They come from tech background, experience a spam wave, and gradually find out what responsibilities come with running a server. Aubrey’s vision of server starters as “leaders and organizers” building something for their community describes a different population than the people who actually run servers, and the overlap between sysadmin skills and community stewardship skills is small. Mastodon’s plan to make server hosting technically easier may widen this gap rather than close it, because the bottleneck is not the technical complexity of running Docker but the social complexity of cultivating a community.

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, server operators are potentially regulated entities with compliance obligations around content moderation, transparency, and user protection. Mastodon’s own recent strategy announcement acknowledges this tension, committing to a regulatory audit for “our own servers” and exploring “how this knowledge can be shared with the community,”. The person running a Mastodon instance is now expected to be a sysadmin, a community steward, and a legally compliant service provider.

The cross-server interaction problem shows the limits of the server-as-community model. When someone from server B replies to someone on server A, and server A has cultivated specific norms around content warnings and topic sensitivity, the person on server B has never encountered those norms. Server A’s admin can react after the fact by deleting the reply, blocking the account, or defederating from server B entirely, but there is no mechanism for communicating norms before the interaction happens. There is no door to walk through, no house rules posted at the entrance. In Ostrom’s framework, functioning institutions require that participants understand the rules before they act, that monitoring is possible, and that graduated sanctions exist for violations. An ActivityPub server-as-community has sanctions but lacks the prior steps: rules aren’t visible to outsiders and monitoring is purely reactive, which means the institution has enforcement powers but not constitutive ones.

The standard counter-argument is that visiting other servers is narrowly possible: you can browse a local timeline through the web interface and follow people from a specific community. There is a difference, though, between technical accessibility and social experience. A local timeline is a raw chronological feed with no context about what the community is, what its norms are, or what makes it distinct. Compare this to Reddit, where arriving at a subreddit immediately presents the community’s identity as a first-class interface element: its name, description, rules, moderators, visual identity. The community is a navigable object that you can encounter, evaluate, and choose to join. In ActivityPub, the community is metadata on a username, and even when you follow a cluster of people from one server, their posts appear in your home timeline mixed with everything else, the community context stripped away by the presentation layer. Community does not survive aggregation, because the interface does not preserve it.

None of this means ActivityPub servers cannot function as communities. Some do, particularly when the community existed before the server: a podcast audience, an existing forum, a professional network that migrated together. But in those cases, the community coheres despite the architecture rather than because of it, with the server providing infrastructure for something that was already socially real. Building community through encounter, the way most communities actually form, is much harder when the architecture provides no mechanism for encounter.

For ATProto, where community lives is an even more open question. In ActivityPub, the answer is at least clear: community lives on the server. That answer may be structurally difficult to realize, but everyone in the ecosystem shares a common understanding of where community is supposed to be. In ATProto, different projects are testing fundamentally different answers, and the protocol itself is agnostic between them. Applied through Ostrom’s lens, the question becomes: which of these answers can actually produce functioning institutions with clear rules, meaningful monitoring, and graduated sanctions?

The first candidate is the feed. Bluesky’s own framing positions feeds as the primary mechanism for user agency: a marketplace of algorithms replacing the singular Algorithm, giving individuals control over their attention. But as Bluesky’s FAQ itself makes clear, the design priority is participation in the “global conversation,” with feeds as personalization layers on top of that global view rather than as bounded spaces. In institutional terms, a feed has no rule-making capacity, no monitoring function, and no sanctions. It organizes attention but does not organize people.

The second candidate is the appview, which aggregates network data and presents it as a coherent application, making choices about indexing, display, moderation, and features. This is why Blacksky building their own appview is significant: it created a fully independent social space governed by community-chosen moderators and presenting community-curated content. If community lives in the appview, then the appview operator is the place-maker, and ATProto communities form around whoever is willing to build and maintain that aggregation infrastructure.

The third answer is the full infrastructure stack. Again Blacksky provides the example, building not just an appview, but also PDS hosting, a relay, a moderation system, and eventually private posts. Community, in their model, is not a single layer but an assembly data hosting, moderation, application experience, and boundary enforcement. This is the most institutionally complete answer, the one that comes closest to satisfying Ostrom’s full framework, while it is also the most demanding for community builders.

It is also worth noting that this approach looks somewhat similar to the ActivityPub server model, where a single operator controls data storage, moderation, and application experience. The difference is in easier data portability and interoperability, as well as keeping identity separate from data, that ActivityPub’s server-bound architecture lacks. The implication is that the demands of community governance may impose their own architectural requirements, regardless of what the underlying protocol provides.

The last option is to focus on ATProto as a digital identity system, where your identity and data persists across applications, and your data lives on your PDS. This works as a kind of portable individual place: a blogger’s “place” follows them, with software being swappable while identity and data remain stable. Here, communities only become emergent and ephemeral, defined by your social connections. In Ostrom’s terms, this is the weakest institutional answer: it provides continuity of identity but no mechanism for collective rule-making, monitoring, or enforcement. Community becomes something that happens to you through your connections rather than something you participate in governing.

Each of these answers implies a different topology. If community lives in feeds, ATProto is flat: one network, many lenses, no boundaries. If community lives in appviews, the topology resembles ActivityPub’s server model but with explicit role separation and data portability. If community lives in full infrastructure stacks, the topology fragments into a small number of heavily invested community platforms surrounded by a large number of lightweight applications that don’t attempt community at all. If community lives in identity, there is no collective community topology at all, only individual nodes.

After several years of development, the ATProto ecosystem has produced exactly one fully realized community (Blacksky) and a collection of promising projects that have not yet demonstrated they can sustain the institutional demands that community requires.

ActivityPub and ATProto are not two implementations of the same idea. They represent two different shapes of answers to the questions how should social life be organized online, where should boundaries fall, who should govern what happens within them, and what does it mean to belong? Ostrom spent a career studying how communities develop institutions to manage shared resources, and one of her central findings was that the most resilient arrangements evolved through local experimentation rather than external imposition. The successful communities she documented did not adopt a single governance template, instead they tried things, failed at most of them, and arrived at rules fitted to local condition. What worked in one context did not necessarily transfer to another, even when the resources and stakes were similar.

The open social web is in this experimental phase, and different projects are testing different answers. But these answers are not equally viable, and topologies that concentrate institutional functions, that combine rule-making, monitoring, and enforcement in a coherent operator, produce more resilient governance than those that distribute these functions across layers or leave them to emerge organically. This holds whether the starting point is an ActivityPub server or an ATProto infrastructure stack. The protocol shapes the available answers, but community governance has its own structural demands, and those demands are not infinitely flexible.

But experimentation is not the same as success, and neither protocol has yet demonstrated a scalable, repeatable model for community formation. ActivityPub has a clear answer to where community lives that turns out to be structurally difficult to realize. ATProto’s architecture suggest a more individualised and global network, but projects like Blacksky also show that building communities is possible, even if it requires extending the protocol.

Robin Berjon, speaking in Berlin, observed that the structural properties of a protocol and the structural properties of an institution are the same. If he is right, and the evidence increasingly suggests that he is, then the question facing the open social web is not which protocol wins, but whether either ecosystem can produce the institutional designs that the communities forming within them actually need.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/where-does-community-live/

FR#150 – On ICE, Verification, and Presence As Harm The U.S. ...

2026-01-23T16:53:42Z

FR#150 – On ICE, Verification, and Presence As Harm

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, became one of the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky within days of receiving its verification badge handed out by Bluesky PBC. The account itself has not posted anything, because it does not need to, with the presence being the point. ICE joining Bluesky was part of a moment in November 2025 where the US regime decided to antagonize the ATProto network by having multiple organisations, including the White House, join the network. They quickly lost interest again however, and most accounts have not posted anything over the last two months.

The decision by Bluesky PBC to verify the ICE account, two months after registration and without the account being active, lead to quite different responses for the fediverse and for the ATmosphere. On the fediverse, the choice by Bluesky PBC to lend legitimacy to ICE was a final nail in the coffin, with loud declarations to disconnect from Bluesky and block the bridge between these two networking protocols. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko was the most notable account, who publicly declared to disconnect from the bridge.

Within the ATmosphere, the response focused on two parts, both a frustration with Bluesky PBC verifying the ICE account, as well as a call to block the account en-masse, which led to the ICE account quickly becoming one of the most-blocked accounts on the network.

The difference in response between the networks provide an insight in how both the ActivityPub network and the AT Protocol network have very different underlying assumptions, where these obscure difference in network architecture lead to diverging outcomes in social structure and behaviour.

In the ActivityPub model, servers are understood as opinionated communities or places, that choose to connect with other communities. Federation is optional and based on a match in values between the connecting servers. This value-question is baked into it’s network structure, and makes it clear that every individual server is a non-neutral place.

(As a side-note, the fediverse as-it-exists struggles with this model, with Mastodon being uncomfortably stuck between the marketing material promoting a network-of-communities with shared values, but the software having a deeply ingrained mental model of ‘lets-federate-with-everyone’, which in itself explains a fair amount of conflict in the fediverse over the years).

ATProto takes a different approach, by separating the base layer of data storage from the application layer. The base data storage layer is designed to be neutral infrastructure, where data lives in Personal Data Servers. This data is ‘neutral’, in the sense that it is permisionless and anyone can set up a PDS without permission. The applications built on top of that infrastructure are assumed to be opinionated and not neutral. Every ATProto application takes a subset of the entire network of data, and can be opinionated about what they surface and to whom they present this.

This creates a sense of ‘neutrality’ at the base layer (hello to all the people whose eyes start twitching every time they read the claim that social software can ever be neutral), with value-based and opinionated apps build on top of this base layer.

When fediverse users say they don’t want to be bridged to Bluesky, they’re applying an ActivityPub mental model to ATProto infrastructure. In one sense this is a bit of a category error, the bridge connects to networking infrastructure, not the application. This way your’e not just refusing to federate with the Bluesky-the-app but with the entire ecosystem, including apps with different values, such as Blacksky or Leaflet.

But in another sense, this shows the issue with bridging between these two networks, and how this is not just a matter of networking architecture, but of how network architecture leads to different mental models that are not always compatible with each other.

The choice by Bluesky PBC to give ICE a verification checkmark shows that while the company has built systems that enable the ‘neutral infra, opinionated apps’ model, their operational choices fall back to a 2010s mental model where the platform itself is the neutral ground, where everyone, including Trump, is welcome.

Bluesky’s Community Guidelines lists the two major principles as ‘Safety First’ and ‘Respect Others’. It is somewhat unclear how the presence of a fascist police force that is actively working to instigate civil war aligns with the principles of safety and respect that Bluesky supposedly champions.

When it comes to actual rules in the guidelines, it is all about user behaviour and the content on Bluesky. The problem is that it is the presence of ICE itself that is already causing the harm. The intimidation of ‘we are here, you cannot escape us’ is the point, and the accounts by the regime are deliberately trying to provoke an outrage. The account doesn’t need to post anything that violates the rules because the intimidation is the presence itself. Bluesky’s Community Guidelines emerged from a moderation paradigm that moderates content (its called content moderation for a reason), and has a structural blind spot for presence-as-speech. Fascists intuitively understand this difference, and are skilled at exploiting it.

The problem is that there is no easy fix for this either. Bluesky board member Mike Masnick formulated this as Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well. And if content moderation on a platform is already impossible to do well at scale, it is even more impossible to do well at scale when off-platform behaviour were to be considered. Which makes it understandable why a Trust & Safety team would not want to consider off-platform behaviour when enforcing rules.

But Bluesky’s own open protocol makes this all the more difficult the further the network grows. If a fascist publishes a nazi blog under the standard.site lexicon on their own self-hosted PDS, should Bluesky PBC let this account use their Bluesky app? According to the current Community Guidelines the answer is yes: “These Guidelines only apply to social networking that happens on Bluesky. If you’re using another social networking application on the AT Protocol that isn’t Bluesky Social (a “Developer Application”), the terms and conditions of that Developer Application will govern your experience. We are not responsible for the content or practices of Developer Applications.”

The fundamental problem is that the way Bluesky is set up, both the company and the app, it is virtually impossible to do moderation that takes off-platform behaviour into account. But if you don’t take off-platform behaviour into account, your principles in the Community Guidelines of Safety and Respect lose their meaning.

The second issue here is that not only let Bluesky have ICE have an account, but that they felt the need to verify this account, after the account had been dormant for a while. Verifications via checkmarks are ostensibly to prevent against misinformation and impersonation, but in practice their main use case is to signal social status, endorsed by the verifier.

Bluesky’s verification system was explicitly designed to distribute trust rather than concentrate it. When launching the system in April 2025, the company wrote that trust “emerges from relationships, communities, and shared context,” not just top-down from platforms. The Trusted Verifiers feature allows independent organizations to issue verification badges directly.

This design of the verification system is a good example of the infrastructure/application separation of ATProto, where verification doesn’t have to be a network-wide decision made by Bluesky PBC. Instead the system allows for multiple verification sources with different values and criteria, letting users decide which verifiers they trust.

For government accounts, Bluesky had options. They could have delegated verification to a news organization, a government accountability group, or some other entity willing to take on that role. They could have let ICE exist as an unverified account, authenticated only by its domain handle. Instead, after nearly two months of apparent deliberation, Bluesky PBC verified ICE directly.

Bluesky PBC built a system designed precisely for moments like this, where verification decisions could be distributed and delegated to other actors, rather than centralized. And then, the first time it could have meaningfully applied that distinction, the company defaulted to acting like the platform that decides who gets legitimacy, where they themselves wanted to be the ones that verified ICE.

Let’s be clear here: ICE is conducting a reign of terror, committing excessive violence and murder, with the blessing of the state for its officers to not be bound to the law, with the explicit purpose of baiting people into committing violent responses and stoke the flames and possibility of civil war. The very presence of ICE is to cause terror.

And if your social networking guidelines say “sorry we can’t do anything about this”, something has gone pretty wrong somewhere, in a way that goes beyond just this individual decision itself.

So when fediverse people apply an ActivityPub-style mental model of networked communities to an ATProto model that separates infrastructure from application, how wrong exactly is that, when the company that has built the tools for that distinction does not operate according to them when the pressure is on?

The case of ICE shows two unresolved problems that will only intensify as the ecosystem grows: how to deal with abusive behaviour that happens outside of the app (and especially if it happens outside of the app but on-protocol) but causes harm on it, and how in a world where fascism is a real and existential threat, harms on social networks have evolved from not only being content-based but also being presence-based.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr150-on-ice-verification-and-presence-as-harm/

Fediverse Report – #149 – On Protocol Governance The W3C has ...

2026-01-16T16:28:26Z

Fediverse Report – #149 – On Protocol Governance

The W3C has announced a new Social Web Working Group, starting January 15, 2026, to maintain and update the ActivityPub protoocol. The group will be chaired by Darius Kazemi, who created Hometown Mastodon fork and the Fediverse Schema Observatory. The aim of the Working Group is to release updates to ActivityPub, and its specifications such as Activity Streams and Activity Vocabulary. Most of the work on the protocol is scheduled to be done by Q3 2026, with the Working Group running until January 2028.

To understand why this matters, some context on how the W3C operates is necessary. The standards organisation distinguishes between Community Groups and Working Groups. Community Groups are open to anyone and serve as incubation spaces for ideas. Since 2018, the Social Web Incubator Community Group (SocialCG) has been the steward of ActivityPub. While Community Groups serve as a grass-roots place, they are very limited in publishing official documentations and formal updates to protocol standards. Working Groups, by contrast, are the bodies that can actually publish official W3C Recommendations, meaning formal standards. Participation in Working Groups is restricted to representatives of W3C member organisations (which pay membership fees on a sliding scale) and invited experts approved by the chair.

ActivityPub became a W3C Recommendation in January 2018, and the protocol work was done by a Working Group. After ActivityPub became an official W3C specification, this Working Group disbanded, and the SocialCG was formed. Since then, the specification has not been formally updated, despite significant implementation experience revealing ambiguities and missing features. The SocialCG has maintained an errata document and developed extensions through the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process, but these carry no official W3C status. The new Working Group changes this by providing a formal path to update the core specification.

Fediverse advocates regularly point to ActivityPub being a W3C standard as a mark of legitimacy, but for the past seven years the organisational structure that created the protocol has also prevented necessary updates to it. The W3C has done a massive service to the community by holding space for the creation of the protocol in 2018. But since then, the same organisational structure that allowed the protocol to be created also slowed down necessary further work on ActivityPub. This shows up both in errata documents not becoming part of the formal documentation, but also larger work on the Client-To-Server part of the ActivityPub needing more work in order to be suitable for larger adoption.

The new Working Group for ActivityPub changes this situation, and there now a formal path to update the core specification, incorporate errata, and potentially advance new work like LOLA (Live Online Account Portability) to official status. LOLA is a proposal for server-to-server account migration that would allow users to move between ActivityPub servers while retaining both their posts and their social graph. Unlike the current Move activity that only migrates followers, LOLA would enable full content portability. The charter includes LOLA as a potential deliverable, which means it could become an official W3C specification rather than remaining a community proposal.

The are some major complicating factor however, and that is about who actually gets to make decisions. The Community Group lacked power to make official chances to ActivityPub, but it did provide an open place for anyone to participate. In contrast, the Working Group requires participants to either be a paid W3C member or to be an Invited Expert. There are only two organisations that are active in the fediverse that are a paid member of the W3C: Meta and the Social Web Foundation. With the Social Web Foundation also receiving funding from Meta, the company that built Threads now has more institutional standing in ActivityPub governance than any of the organisations actually building open fediverse software. Mastodon gGmbH, Framasoft, and others are not W3C members and cannot participate in the Working Group unless they are invited.

This is by all accounts an extremely funny outcome for a network that aims to be independent of Big Tech’s power.

A few nuances to this. It is unclear if Meta will actually participate in the Working Group, and considering they recently put their Threads<>fediverse integration on maintenance mode, there is a good change that Meta has no interest in actually participating. The Working Group also has yet to communicate who the Invited Experts will be. It could theoretically be that Meta is absent from the group, while Mastodon and Framasoft employees are invited to be part of the Working Group.

Another challenge for the W3C Working Group is that there has long been a disconnect between ActivityPub protocol development and the people creating ActivityPub software. While the above makes it sound that fediverse developers are excluded from the protocol development process, the practical reality is also that the developers of the main fediverse platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy have shown very little interest in engaging with the process when it was openly accessible under the SocialCG. This is illustrated by the meeting last year in which the SocialCG voted to charter a Working Group, where no member of any of the fediverse platform developers was actually present. There has long been a disconnect between the people who develop ActivityPub software and the people who maintain the ActivityPub protocol, with only a few notable exceptions.

This matters because of how W3C standards work. The charter’s success criteria states that updating the Recommendation requires “at least two independent implementations of every feature defined in the specification, where interoperability can be verified by passing open test suites.” The Working Group can propose whatever changes it wants, but for those proposals to become part of the official ActivityPub standard, they need to be implemented in actual software.

LOLA, the proposal to improve account portability, is a clear example of this challenge. Already in fall 2024, Lisa Dusseault, the author of the proposal, said that the specification was ready for developers to start testing implementations. The main bottleneck since then has been getting organisations like Mastodon interested in actually building it. The protocol work is largely done, but what remains is the persuasion and coordination to get implementers interested in using it.

The importance of protocol maintenance and further development of ActivityPub points towards responsibilities for software implementors, especially Mastodon as the dominant ActivityPub implementation. Mastodon’s choices become de facto standards whether or not the project engages with formal standardisation processes. The most clear example is how the Mastodon API has effectively taken over from ActivityPub’s Client-to-Server as the dominant protocol that other softwares have to implement. That position comes with obligations, and when Mastodon doesn’t participate in protocol governance, it creates a vacuum where the largest implementer (in this case also Mastodon) is able to set standards for the rest of the network, but without the governance or formal documentation. When protocol development and maintenance in the Working Group happens disconnected from the largest implementations, the specifications that may not reflect implementation realities.

What this situation reveals is that using network architecture to solve issues of power distribution simply shifts bottlenecks rather than eliminating them. A decentralised protocol does not automatically produce decentralised governance, it also moves power to different, less visible places. The W3C membership structure concentrates formal power in ways that don’t reflect the fediverse’s values, while the implementers who could counterbalance that power have largely opted out of the process. The new Working Group creates an opportunity to address both problems, but who gets to shape the specifications of ActivityPub depends on both who is allowed to participate, as well as who is willing show up and do the work.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-148-on-protocol-governance/

Fediverse Report – #144The News The Bristol Cable has launched ...

2025-11-28T16:39:09Z

Fediverse Report – #144The News

The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.

WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.

Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.

I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.

FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!The Links
This week’s fediverse software updates.
The Fireside Fedi show talks with Ryan Barrett and Anuj Ahooja from A New Social and Bridgy Fed.
The WordPress-focused podcast The PublishPress talks with Evan Prodromou about how the fediverse and WordPress can be better connected.
Owncast Newsletter November 2025.
Mastodon has some new merch in store.
Mastodon partners with WE AID to offer donors tax-deductible contributions in Germany.
A demonstration of Emissary’s upcoming data migration tool using the LOLA data portability spec.
Loops has published a roadmap of their planned and in-progress features.
Bridgy Fed now has expanding blocking capabilities.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/fediverse-report-144/

Fediverse Report – #138The News WeDistribute has published an ...

2025-10-14T16:37:31Z

Fediverse Report – #138The News

WeDistribute has published an extensive overview and review of Wafrn, the Tumblr-like platform that is both on the fediverse as well as on ATProto. Wafrn is a unique platform in the open social web, and it is the first and only platform that fully integrates both protocols. The name Wafrn explains the tone of the project well: it stands for ‘We Allow Female Representing Nipples’, which is a reference to the language Tumblr used when they banned porn. Because Wafrn natively integrates both protocols, there is no bridging involved like there is with Bridgy Fed, and a Wafrn account connects with all accounts on both networks, although the ATProto features are somewhat limited and not all implemented. Wafrn also recently released a new feature to migrate your Bluesky account to a Wafrn server. This gives another option for people who are looking to move away from Bluesky and are interested in the fediverse, without having to give up their connection to the rest of the Bluesky network.

Short-form video platform Loops has announced it is joining the fediverse. In an announcement post, creator Daniel Supernault explains that Loops has now implemented support for ActivityPub. The marketing on Loops and the fediverse was always a bit fuzzy, while it was advertised as a fediverse platform, the actual fediverse integration was still in development. With this update, Loops is now using ActivityPub. However, this does not go for the main Loops server, Loops.video, just yet, as Supernault says that he is “working on an updated app build that supports the new APIs and other servers besides just the hardcoded loops.video server!” Supernault says that this will happen ‘this week’, although the project has missed deadlines before. Still, for those people who are self-hosting a Loops server, the code for federation is now indeed available.

In the update, Supernault also talks about some of the technical design choices that he’s made for federation with Loops. Loops servers use the ‘Note’ content type to send out the videos. This means that a Loops video is effectively quite similar to a microblog made on a platform like Mastodon or Misskey, which also use the ‘Note’ type. Most platforms indeed use ‘Note’, as this allows for compatibility with Mastodon. ActivityPub allows for a wide variety of content types (called Activities, which is where the protocol gets its name from), but in practice most platforms fall back to ‘Note’, even when other types (like ‘video’ for Loops) would make more sense. It indicates one of the challenges of the open-ended nature of how ActivityPub works: the protocol allows for a diverse set of Activities, but in practice it is more beneficial for most platforms to fall back to a single type, that all other platforms also use.

An excellent overview of last week’s FediForum by Richard MacManus for The New Stack. MacManus covers the keynote speech, as well as some of the products that were demoed at the event: alternative app store AltStore, how you can now move your Mastodon account to Bluesky with Bounce, as well as two platforms currently in development that are getting close to release: the privacy-focused photo sharing app Frequency, and the monetisation platform CrowdBucks.

Pandacap is a single-user artwork gallery and feed reading platform, that supports a wide range of protocols. It supports ActivityPub, ATProto, RSS. It also has the option to crosspost your image posts and text posts to attached DeviantArt, Fur Affinity, or Weasyl accounts. Pandacap does not have a timeline like most platform, instead opting for a design that centers around an inbox, similar to feed reading apps for RSS. Pandacap has been around for a bit, but I had completely missed it and don’t think I had ever covered it before.

PeerTube is now officially recognised as a Digital Public Good. A digital public good recognized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance is an open-source resource that uses approved open licenses and demonstrably supports at least one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). For PeerTube this means that it contributes to SDG 9, which aims to “significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries. PeerTube also contributes to the SDG for developing “effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels” and ensuring “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.”

Fedify, the ActivityPub server framework that secured two sources of funding last week, has a major new update, with security enhancements, improved DX, and expanded framework support.

An extensive interview with the creators of event planning app Mobilizon. Mobilizon got created by Framasoft, the organisation who also builds PeerTube. Framasoft saw the project as completed, and handed the further development over to Kaihuri, a small French organisation who also runs one of the most active Mobilizon instances. The Project Libres podcast interviews Alexandra, one of the two people behind Kaihuri, in French, but a transcript in English is available. The Links
This week’s fediverse software updates.
The Solo Instance Problem – a PeerTube video by FediHost in which they talk about some of the challenges for self-hosting a solo instance for the fediverse.
The Social Web Foundation talks with Ghost CEO John O’Nolan about Ghost 6 and ActivityPub.
DiscoverFedi.app is a new site that lets you explore other instance’s timelines in various manners, with an accompanying blog post explaining the project.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-138/

Fediverse Report – #137The News AltStore, an alternative app ...

2025-10-09T14:17:37Z

Fediverse Report – #137The News

AltStore, an alternative app store for iOS, is joining the fediverse. The store launched early last year as an alternative to Apple’s own App Store, thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. AltStore has been growing over the last year, and is now taking the next steps. AltStore is now connecting to the fediverse via their own Mastodon server. The integration that AltStore has build consists of every app on the store automatically also becoming a fediverse account, hosted on their AltStore Mastodon server. They explain: “Using ActivityPub, we plan to federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web. Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore.” For now, they are using the microblogging format (ActivityPub ‘Notes’), but AltStore plans to publish new native ActivityPub objects specifically for software releases, that can be used by other fediverse app market places.

The organisation also has raised 6M USD in VC funding for further development. They believe that the long-term success of the AltStore is tied closely to the success of the open social web, and they are donation 500k USD to various fediverse projects. AltStore is donating 300k USD to Mastodon, and the other 200k USD is split across various fediverse projects: the bridging software Bridgy Fed (which AltStore uses to also connect their store to Bluesky), the fediverse clients Ivory, Phoenix and Tapestry, the mastodon server mstn.social (as operator Stux is also a regular publisher to the AltStore), and the platforms Akkoma, PeerTube and Bookwyrm, as well as the Fedify ActivityPub software framework.

Recently I wrote about how the app stores are the most likely choke point that authoritarian governments will use to apply pressure to force open social web platforms into compliance. Alternative ways of distributing apps that fall outside of the control of two Big Tech platforms is a crucial part of keeping the open social web open. AltStore connecting their marketplace to the fediverse is a great step into taking back control from these two gatekeepers, although much more work remains to be done. Over on ATProto people are also experimenting with distributing apps and software packages via the protocol, and the space of app distribution via open protocols is primed for more experimentation and projects.

Mastodon has shared more information on their upcoming plans to introduce ‘Packs’ to Mastodon. The design is based on Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which is a list of accounts you can create and share for other people to easily follow. Mastodon is taking a careful approach to designing the feature, and is actively soliciting feedback from the community. The main change that Mastodon is making is in giving people control over if and when they can appear in a Pack, as well as giving people the ability to easily remove their account from a Pack if they so desire.

One of the pain points for Starter Packs on Bluesky is that people got included on Starter Packs with no easy way to remove them from the list. When the Starter Pack got popular, that resulted in an account getting lots of new followers, but in a way that collapsed the context of the account, resulting in conflict. One of the challenge points with Starter Packs is that the identity of an account does not always match with what they are actually posting about. For example, if someone has a PhD in philosophy and sometimes posts about that, they might get added to a philosophy Starter Pack. But in practice they might mostly post about US politics, or reposts anime, which creates a mismatch in expectation and friction between the original account and the new follower from a Starter Pack.

Bluesky’s Starter Pack have gotten a lot of praise for their effectiveness in onboarding entire communities at the same time during migration waves, when entire communities move from one platform to another all at once. This seems to be one of the major reasons for Mastodon to also adopt a similar feature with Packs. But for Bluesky, the feature has turned out to be a mixed bag, with the developer who created Starter Packs being decidedly mixed on the feature herself. She says that Starter Packs are indeed highly valuable during migration waves, but that in other times they are susceptible to abuse for engagement-hacking, as well as the context collapse earlier. Mastodon is taking a careful approach with their Pack feature, and they are actively engaging with the learnings from Bluesky, so it’ll be interesting to see how the feature will turn out in Mastodon.

You can soon transfer your social graph from Mastodon to Bluesky, with the new version of Bounce. Bounce is a tool by A New Social, the organisation behind the bridging software that connects various open social web protocol. With Bounce, you can move your account from one social networking protocol to another. The organisation earlier released a version which allows you to port your Bluesky account to the fediverse. With the new update, which will be available on October 20, you can now do the same in reverse: move from the fediverse to Bluesky.

The projects by A New Social, both Bounce and Bridgy Fed, represent an effort to give people more control over their own digital identity and social graph. Both ActivityPub and ATProto give people the option to move their account to a different platform on the same protocol. With tools like Bounce, this capability is enhanced even more, with the ability to move an account to a different protocol as well. For people more interested in moving from Bluesky to the fediverse, the tool Slurp now allows you to import your Bluesky posts into your fediverse account.

Fediverse podcasting platform Castopod now has a repository for plugins for the platform. With plugins people can customise their Castopod instance to their own needs. As anyone can create plugins, this allows for greater diversity in development of the software. Castopod also announced during this week’s Fediforum that there are now over 1000 podcasts using Castopod.

A pro-Russian propaganda network has targeted the fediverse and Bluesky, “promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations”, IFTAS reports. Their findings are based on the work of the antibot4navalny research team, which notes that the campaign makes use of the Bridgy Fed to get their accounts that impersonate news organisations into Bluesky.

The ActivityPub framework Fedify has gotten a 192K EUR grant by the Sovereign Tech Fund to further strenghten the ecosystem. The grant will be used for further development of the framework. Fedify is already in use by Ghost, and is also supported by Ghost.

Mastodon is soliciting feedback for their new Terms of Service for their mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers. The organisation originally proposed a new ToS in June, but retracted those after criticism from the community. The Links
Getting started with Mastodon’s Quote Posts – technical implementation details for servers
Lemmy development update for September 2025.
How Decentralized Social Platforms Grew from Identica to Modern-Day Mastodon – a podcast interview with Evan Prodromou by WordPress-ActivityPub developer Matthias Pfefferle.
Trunks & Tidbits, Mastodon’s monthly engineering blog, for September 2025.
A new forum for the Brazilian fediverse community.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-137/

Fediverse Report – #133The News The main subject of discourse ...

2025-09-09T14:49:17Z

Fediverse Report – #133The News

The main subject of discourse and conversation on the open social web this week has been regarding a statement published in the repository of the Social Web Community Incubator Group. The open letter says: “This statement is a call for cooling the temperature of discussions and a reminder to be respectful of each other and the huge amount of work everyone is putting in to build a better open social web. We do not win by tearing each other down, which only emboldens and empowers those who do not want either protocol to succeed.” Tomorrow I’ll put out a separate article with my thoughts on the discourse, and how I’m thinking about decentralisation, collaboration and building a resilient open social web.

The government of Nepal has blocked the majority of social media sites in the country over the weekend, including Mastodon. Nepal’s government required all social media sites to register with the government, with a deadline of September 3rd. This included the biggest sites like Instagram, YouTube and X, but also smaller platforms such as Mastodon. Most sites did not comply, and as a result blocked access to the sites. This move caused massive protests in the country, with at least 19 people killed by the police. The government has lifted the social media ban today after the mass protests. That the government banned Mastodon affected at least the mastodon.social server. It looks to me like this was the only server that was affected by the ban, but I’ve not been able to confirm this. Any additional information would be appreciated. The move by the Nepalese government indicates that governments are willing to put pressures on decentralised social networks as well to force legal compliance. While decentralisation can counteract this to some extend, it also indicates that governments are able to cause significant disruption to the usage of decentralised network in their country. That the impact in this case was only (likely) limited to the mastodon.social server is more of an indication of the heavy-handed and unsophisticated approach of the Nepalese government to the entire situation. DNS blockages on, lets say, the top 1000 fediverse servers would have disrupted fediverse usage in Nepal to a significant extend, and a government that is willing to DNS block popular platforms like Facebook and YouTube should not be assumed to have a lot of qualms about DNS blockages of a thousand small fediverse servers either.

Governments are starting to more actively interfere with the social internet, and TechCrunch has a closer look at the expanding age verification laws. It mainly focuses on the US, as well as UK’s Online Safety Act, but other countries like Brazil are also working towards such laws. This already has impact on a popular Bluesky client, and has impact for fediverse servers in Brazil as well. TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez also wrote about how the Mastodon organisation is handling this changing environment, and the Mastodon organisation said in the statement that ” while Mastodon’s own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” to its services.”

A.gup.pe was a system that added groups functionality to the microblogging side of the fediverse. The a.gup.pe domain got sold to a new ownership, and the new owner used the domain for an SEO spam website. This disabled the group functionality, and suddenly made this system people were still using for groups unusable. This was possible due to the .pe domain registrar allowing the sale of the domain before a domain registration expires. The organisation behind a.gup.pe had formally ceased operation in the fall of last year, but the system was still operational and actively in use by people. The group system such as a.gup.pe functioned by having people subscribe to an account related to a certain topic. Other people could then tag this account in their posts, and these posts would get send out to everyone who followed the group account. This functioned as an upgraded version of following a hashtag; if you follow a hashtag you won’t see posts made on other servers if nobody on your server follows that account, which is a major issue for accounts on small fediverse servers. Other platforms like Friendica offer improved versions of such group functionality with additional moderation features, but the a.gup.pe system still saw usage due to inertia and network effects.

Short-form video platform Loops now has the full source code available, as part of the first alpha 1.0 release. Creator Daniel Supernault has advertised the platform as open source for a while now, but while there was a code base available, it was missing core features that prevented other people from running their own Loops server. While Loops uses ActivityPub, federation has not yet been enabled.

FediForum will hold a book tour event for Robert W. Gehl’s new book about the fediverse, ‘Move Slowly and Build Bridges’. In the book, Gehl “tells the story of activists, software developers, artists, and everyday people who have built the fediverse”. The event will be on Thursday, September 11, 2025, 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time (19:00-20:00 CEST). Attendance is free, and can be registered here.

A New Social, the organisation behind the Bridgy Fed software which connects various protocols on the open social web, shares more information about their funding situation. The organisation has been self-funded so far, with CTO Ryan Barrett fronting the cost of running Bridgy Fed, which amounts to 2000USD per month. The organisation has introduced a small tier Patreon subscription in order to entire regular Bridgy Fed users (which is used by over 110k accounts) to pay for their usage. A New Social notes how “Bridgy Fed was slowly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the open social web”, and this is why the organisation is working to create sustainable forms of governance for the infrastructure. WeDistribute also has a podcast episode out this week where they talk with the people from A New Social, Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett, about the organisation, their new tool Bounce, and the open social web more broadly.

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is back on Mastodon after a long hiatus. The EDPS was the main driving organisation behind the EU Voice project, where between 2022 and 2024 it ran a Mastodon server for some 40 EU organisations. This project came to an end after the EDPS could not find an organisation within the EU that would want to take up ownership responsibilities for the project. This lead to a shutdown of the server and project, although the most popular account, that of the European Commission, continued their presence with their own Mastodon server. Now the EDPS can finally put their talking points of data privacy and sovereignty in practice again, by having a social media presence they have ownership of.

IFTAS is holding their annual Moderator Needs Assessment, a survey among moderators, admins and community organisers for the fediverse to better understand their needs and priorities. These surveys give a great insight in what moderation and trust&safety on a decentralised open network actually entails, and what some of the main issues are that moderators experience. For some additional insight in these surveys, the report of last years assessment finds that the fediverse has roughly one moderator for every 1200 active accounts, and that only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage.

A fun interview with the operator of the misskey.id fediverse server, one of the only public Indonesian fediverse servers. The fediverse has an active user base in Asia, mainly in Japan with people using Misskey. There is however little interaction between the Western user base of the fediverse and the Asian community, due to language barriers. This conversation with the Indonesian community provides a good insight in how communities around the world are building their own places on the fediverse.The Links
This week’s fediverse software updates.
This week’s edition of WeDistribute’s new newsletter with a round-up overview of events in the open social web.
A goodbye to Kbin.
The Threadiverse app Photon now supports PieFed.
pl-fe is a new web client that supports an variety of fediverse platforms, including Mastodon, Akkoma, GoToSocial, Hollo, IceShrimp and more.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-133/

Fediverse Report – #129The News SocialHub is a Discourse forum ...

2025-08-12T16:24:19Z

Fediverse Report – #129The News

SocialHub is a Discourse forum that has served as the main ActivityPub discussion forum for a long time. The platform might shut down on September 10th, as the current platform operators have stated that unless they can find a community that is willing to take over the infrastructure, they will shut down the platform. SocialHub has been run since 2019 by the small organisation called Petites Singularités, although in effect the administration of the platform came largely down to a single administrator. The current administrator Hellekin is also explicit in looking for a team of multiple people to take over, not a single individual, and other requirements for the new team are implied as well. There have been offers from individuals to take over the technical aspect, but there is less interested in the community management type of work.

A number of fediverse developers also question the value that SocialHub still can bring, who see that most fediverse developers have already left SocialHub, or were never even a part of it in the first place. It is easy to hypothesise a ActivityPub developer platform that contains reference material, documentations and lively discussions. But as Arnold Schrijver points out, it is “much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.” Other efforts such as fedidevs.org have largely petered out, and it is unclear if there is enough interest from developers to collaborate on maintaining such a place.

A list published by Drop News Site contains over 100k websites that Meta allegedly has scraped for their data to train their AI, and the list also contains a number of fediverse servers. A communications representative for Meta says that the list is ‘bogus’. While it is difficult to verify the correctness of this specific news story, that Meta is scraping fediverse data for AI training is certainly plausible: the data is publicly accessible and Meta so far has shown an insatiable hunger to ingest as much data as possible for AI training purposes. Meta has shown a willingness to acquire data via methods that seem legally questionable in the most optimistic reading possible. While collecting fediverse data for AI training may potentially fall within legal boundaries, it goes against the clear wishes of the fediverse community.

The story points to how difficult it has been to evolve the fediverse to a network where people can actually publish their consent on how their data can be handled by others. The privacy policy of a significant number of fediverse servers, including some servers on the published list above, explicitly state: “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” However, public response to this news makes it clear that for a significant number of people, they do not want Meta to be handling their public social networking data to be used for AI training.

There has been some effort by the Mastodon organisation to update the their Terms of Service (ToS) to prohibit the use of that server’s data for AI training purposes, but Mastodon had to retract that new ToS due to various criticisms. It is unclear however if such a ToS would be binding to third parties who have not signed the ToS. What’s more notable for me is that there is still no easy way for fediverse users to indicate their consent how their data can be handled on a per-post level that is also distributed via ActivityPub and is machine-readable. A significant group of fediverse users do not want their data to be used for AI training, but so far their options are mainly limited to being on a server who prohibits this via regulation, and there are no easy ways to set consent on a per-user level.

Mastodon shared in their monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, that the organisation is working on adding Starter Packs. Starter Packs were first launched by Bluesky, and found great popularity late last year. It allows people to create lists of accounts, and other users can follow all these accounts with a single click of a button. The feature allowed new Bluesky users to rapidly on-board the platform and get a timeline full of content. However, the feature also had some major drawbacks, such as being used for spammy engagement-bait accounts to build large following networks. People also could not opt-out of being included on other people’s Starter Packs, which caused some people to get a large number of followers that they did not want or ask for, leading to clashes and context collapse. Mastodon has the advantage of being a second-mover, and being able to iterate on Bluesky’s implementation. The organisation already has said that they will let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack.

A new research paper on the lemmygrad.ml Lemmy instance, called “Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml“. Within Lemmy there exists a subculture of various instances, most notably Hexbear and Lemmygrad, that self-describes as Marxist and/or leftist, and partially intersects with the developers of Lemmy. There is interesting research to be done on how that sub-community impacts the wider culture of the Threadiverse. This published paper limits itself to data from 2019 to 2022, which misses out on how these communities and cultures have developed over the more recent years. For example, the Hexbear instance was not federating with the rest of the network for a while, only to turn federation back on over a year ago, and it would be interesting to explore how that has impacted other Lemmy servers.The Links
IFTAS has opened their yearly Needs Assesment, where they “input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web” to find the needs of the people who are building communities on the social web.
All of the video’s of the recent FediCon conference have now been published on PeerTube.
Openvibe, a client that combines Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads into a single timeline, now also supports RSS, to be both a news and social app at the same time.
Ghost CEO John O’Nolan writes some reflections about Ghost’s recently launched ActivityPub integration, and how people have perceived it.
The WordPress ActivityPub team explains how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed.
The ‘delightful fediverse experience’ list tracks a large amount of fediverse-related projects, and has been expanded with some new categories around tools and extensions.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-129/

Fediverse Report – #128The News Newsletter publishing platform ...

2025-08-05T17:26:23Z

Fediverse Report – #128The News

Newsletter publishing platform Ghost has officially shipped their integration with the social web with update Ghost 6.0. Ghost has been working on integrating with ActivityPub for a while now, and the feature was already available in beta using Ghost Pro. With Ghost 6.0, everyone, including people who self-host, can now also use the integration with the social web, and use the social web reader client that comes with it.

Ghost’s integration with the social web consists of two parts:
The ability to connect with the fediverse over ActivityPub, which allows people to follow the publication from fediverse platforms and to comment, like and share the posts.
A social web reader client, which allows you to follow and interact with other long-form articles from across the social web, such as from WordPress, Flipboard, Ghost, as well as microblogging platforms.

Ghost also prominently mentions the integration with Bluesky, which is also part of their ActivityPub integration and uses A New Social’s Bridgy Fed to connect to Bluesky’s AT Protocol.

The challenging part for long-form publishing platforms like Ghost and WordPress is how to transition and grow the fediverse from a network where microblogging shapes and determines the mode of interaction for other types of platforms to a network where people can engage with long-form articles in a way that is specifically catered for it. Ghost’s connection to the fediverse currently means that following a Ghost blog from your fediverse account results in seeing a post with the article headline and a URL, which is not much different than following an RSS feed with your fediverse account. The social features such as comments and likes do add an additional dimension to it, creating a form of Social RSS (RSSS?).

Ghost has taken steps in that direction by creating a social web reader client, which does cater specifically for reading long-form writing of fediverse content. However, that client is tied up to having a (paid) account with Ghost, making it not yet accessible to a wider fediverse audience. The WordPress ActivityPub plugin also experiences some of the same problems as Ghost, where their native article design and layout have to be forced into a microblogging-compatible format, losing out on some of the more compelling features of natively reading long-form writing on the fediverse. Fediverse platform developers (including Mastodon, Ghost, WordPress, WriteFreely and more) are collaborating on creating a space on the fediverse that suites the need of blogging and articles well, and while Ghost’s official 6.0 release is a step in this direction, for now the fediverse remains a network that’s more about microblogging than (macro)blogging.

FediCon 2025 happened this weekend in Vancouver, the first edition of a new fediverse-focused conference organised by community member Charles Krempeaux (@reiver). Some thoughts and notes on FediCon:
A significant number of prominent NA-based fediverse developers were present at the event. Real-life meetings between platform developers significant increases the collaboration for improving support for features and communication modes. The collaboration between multiple platform developers on long-form writing as mentioned above largely grew out of multiple meetings that happened around FOSDEM 2025. The fediverse is largely developed by volunteers or small organisations, and trust and cooperation between these actors can be increased significantly by conferences and other meet-ups.
At the same time, getting new faces and increasing diversity into the group of core fediverse developers remains a challenge, and better accessibility support for such conferences can contribute to it.
In monetary terms, Krempeaux put in significant effort to make the conference happen and to make it accessible, funding FediCon largely out-of-pocket and keeping ticket prices low.
Recordings of the talks and presentations will be posted on PeerTube, and the first are already available: The Last Network Effect by A New Social’s Anuj Ahooja and Connecting the Social Web by ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou.
Krempeaux used FediCon to reveal CrowdBucks, a fediverse crowdfunding, tipping and payment platform. Information is still limited, and I’ll talk more about it soon.
Live blogging by NodeBB developer Julian Lam and WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley are a good watch to catch up with the event and it’s vibe.
There was also a space for a presentation on ATProto, by Boris Mann, who also runs the (Bluesky-independent) atprotocol.dev community. The theme was on joy, and how building apps should be fun for developers and bring joy to its users, echoing Christine Lemmer-Webber’s keynote at Fediforum this spring.
The amount of experimentation that happens on AT Protocol is a good indication for the value of an ActivityPub (C2S) Api, as Evan Prodromou points out.

Finally, speaking about fediverse conferences: FediForum announced that the next edition of this online unconference will be on October 7 and 8, 2025.In Other News

Upcoming fediverse platform Bonfire has announced they are collaborating with Newsmast. Newsmast is a non-profit organisation that also runs their own fediverse platform, and is expanding to launch channel.org, which is a fediverse distribution platform catered to organisations. In their collaboration, Bonfire will provide better discovery and interoperability for channels made with channel.org, and Newsmast will provide Bonfire’s Mosaic (a spin-off of Bonfire to build a complete online presence for organisations) as an offering to their partner organisations.

The Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS) organisation has published an extensive guide on how to navigate the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for fediverse service providers.

The ForBetter newsletter takes a look at how scammers have used the new OSA age verification regulations, as well as that most Mastodon servers have taken little to no steps for compliance, as well as a lack of clarify on Mastodon what official staff accounts are, to launch a new spam wave attack on Mastodon.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has announced a new tool, Image Intercept, designed to help smaller platforms detect and block known CSAM, and IFTAS is exploring how this tool can be used by fediverse platforms.

Last week I wrote about some of the client app for fediverse platforms that I’m keeping my eye on, and requested some feedback from readers for interesting clients that I had missed. Thanks to readers for some great input!
Pachli is a Mastodon client for Android, which is supported by Nivenly, the organisation also behind the Hachyderm.io Mastodon server. Some features of Pachli that stand out to me are anti-harassment features for notifications and conversations, which go beyond what Mastodon standard offers, as well as supporting older versions of Android, back to Android 6.
Aria for Misskey is a Misskey client for both Android and iOS. I wrote that I couldn’t find any recently updated clients specifically for Misskey, but Aria is well-maintained, with updates as recently as last week.
Raccoon for Friendica is a Friendica client, that supports Friendica-specific feature implementations, such as photo galleries and event calendars.
Quiblr is a client for the Threadiverse. I noted that I could find little distinguishing unique features for Threadiverse clients, but Quiblr seems to prove me wrong, with a For You feed that runs an on-device recommendation engine.

And finally some links with software updates:
This week’s fediverse software updates.
Lemmy development update for July 2025.
PieFed releases version 1.1, and their description indicates how the platform is maturing: “There are now 32 PieFed instances, serving 1750+ MAU. Voyager, Summit, Blorp and Interstellar are mobile apps that connect to PieFed.”

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/

Fediverse Report – #127Apps and clients I’m paying attention ...

2025-07-29T18:21:46Z

Fediverse Report – #127Apps and clients I’m paying attention to

The summer months I’m experimenting with some different content for the weekly report articles. For more information on that, see this accompanying post. Today I’m taking a look at all the different client apps for the fediverse that I’m paying attention to. This is not meant as a recommendation on which client you should use; my experience is that people’s preferences for clients are highly individualistic. The best client for you is simply the client that you enjoy using the most. This is an overview of some the clients for the fediverse that do something differently, and stand out because of that. Part of the reason for making this list is that I do not have the time to keep a close eye on literally every client in the fediverse, and I’m curious to hear from readers if they feel like I missed some.Microblogging

Phanpy (Web, Progressive Web App)
Phanpy is one of the most innovative clients for any social media platform. The Catch-up feature takes all the posts from your home timeline and gives you the ability to sort and filter them in any way you want. You can filter posts by replies, reposts, followed hashtags, sort them by date or engagement numbers, or group them by author. Another unique feature is the ‘boost carousel’, where boost are delegated in the timeline to a separate horizontal-scrolling ‘carousel’.

One thing that stands out to me about Phanpy is how these standout features have not really seen adoption by other clients, neither for the fediverse nor for Bluesky. Phanpy does have a crowd of hardcore fans (I’m one of them), but it seems to mainly resonate with power-users.

Ivory (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, paid)
Ivory is made by the small company Tapbots, who also created popular Twitter client Tweetbot. Ivory focuses on design, and has some additional features such as account statistics as well. Ivory is a popular client for Mastodon, even though it has a monthly subscription. That makes it also a client worth watching: is the Mastodon ecosystem large enough to support a small team of three developers? Tapbots recently announced that they are building a Bluesky client, and they were frank about needing another revenue stream besides Ivory.

Fedilab (Android, F-Droid)
Fedilab is one of the older clients for the fediverse, that supports multiple accounts on a variety of fediverse platforms. It can be used in combination with Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, PeerTube, Misskey, Friendica and even GNU Social. There are few other clients that I know of that focus on supporting a large variety of fediverse platforms, which indicates both the technical challenge of doing so with none of the platforms supporting the client-to-server part of ActivityPub, as well as it being unclear if there is a real demand for it.

Mastodon (Android, iOS)
The apps developed by the Mastodon organisation itself. Mastodon now has a full-time iOS developer as well as an Android developer, and the app is always up to date with Mastodon’s latest features, such as Mastodon’s recent work on quote post implementations. An ecosystem of third-party clients for Mastodon could proliferate partially because Mastodon was strapped for developer resources and the apps did not always get the highest priority. Third-party clients for Mastodon are often created by hobby developers, who now have to compete with Mastodon having full-time paid developers on their app, making it more important for other clients to show a clear value-add above the Mastodon client developed by the organisation itself.

Some other microblogging clients worth pointing out: Whalebird, (desktop client for Windows, Linux and macOS, supporting multiple platforms), IceCubes (free, open-source iOS app), Tusky (the most popular third-party Android app for Mastodon with half a million downloads), Trunks (web, Android and iOS, that has some cool additional timeline filtering features) and Elk (a popular web client for Mastodon)

Another thing that stands out to me is how there do not seem to be clients targeted specifically for Misskey that are popular. Clients like Kimis, Kaiteki and Milktea seem to have little use or no recent updates. The MissCat app might be more popular, but it is not available in the EU so it is hard for me to judge.Multi-network clients

Openvibe (Android, iOS)
Openvibe is a multi-network client for Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads. It combines posts from these networks (provided you have an account on that network) into a single timeline, and you can post directly to all the different networks at once. Openvibe is the most popular of these multi-network clients, and is also the best funded of the clients on the new social networks: early in 2025 Openvibe announced an $800k funding round. The company expects to introduce a subscription plan at a later point to generate revenue.

SoraSNS (iOS)
SoraSNS is another multi-network client, that supports Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, Pleroma and Nostr. It also has a algorithmic timeline with the algorithm running locally on your phone. SoraSNS has more of such experimental features, such as analytics per-post and AI summaries.Reader clients

Surf (Android, iOS, in beta)
Surf describes itself as a ‘browser for the open social web’. The app, made by Flipboard, integrates various platforms: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and RSS are supported. It centers around creating feeds for topics, and users can share these feeds with each other (either via Surf or as a custom feed on Bluesky). Surf stands out for pushing the boundaries on what a social media client can look like, and for the large amount of control that users get over which content they want to see.

Tapestry (iOS, iPadOS, in beta)
Tapestry is made by Iconfactory, the company behind popular Twitter client Twitterfic, and raised funds via a Kickstarter, raising $177k. It is a reader client that combines a large variety of sources: RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, podcasts, YouTube and more. Tapestry places all these sources into a single chronological timeline. The funding model for Tapestry is what stands out: making high-quality apps is not cheap, but getting a large enough paying user base to sustain development is hard. Iconfactory could lean upon their previous work to get a solid Kickstarter to fund development.Rest of the fediverse

PeerTube is developing their own mobile apps, and have just completed a fundraiser of €75k for further features. I’ve covered the app in other places in more detail, and for here I think it’s noteworthy that no other major PeerTube app has gotten traction over the years.

For the Threadiverse, there are a variety of clients for Lemmy, with some of the most popular ones being Voyager, Thunder, Mlem, Jerboa and Photon. My sense is that the Threadiverse clients do not differ much in features, and mainly differ in platforms and terms of design. The main standout feature at this point seems to be support for PieFed, but a variety of clients (including Voyager, Mlem and multiple more now support PieFed). It points to an ecosystem where clients are aware of each other, and new innovations get rapidly copied by other clients, bringing them effectively to the entire ecosystem. If there are unique features in Threadiverse clients that you think I should pay attention to, let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.Fediverse News and Links
Move Slowly and Build Bridges is the new book by Robert W. Gehl, in which Gehl documents the story of the fediverse and how everyday people have build a ‘noncentralized alternative social media system’ over the years. The book is now available for sale online, with physical copies shipping soon. I’ll definitely write more about the book once I’ve read it, so stay tuned!
Mastodon is adding an in-app donation request for the funding of Mastodon. Mastodon is rolling out this feature very carefully (only their own mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers for now), but they are already thinking about how to expand the feature and make it available for other server admins as well.
Some polishing updates for WordPress ActivityPub as their blog post explains how they are working towards more social integrations with the rest of the fediverse, with more coverage by WeDistribute.
How To Improve Your Privacy and Security on Mastodon is a highly extensive guide on Privacy Guides that goes into in-depth detail on all the possibilities people have on Mastodon for better security and privacy.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-127/

Fediverse Report – #123 Tumblr will not connect to the ...

2025-07-01T18:23:18Z

Fediverse Report – #123

Tumblr will not connect to the fediverse over WordPress after all, new grants with NLnet and Mastodon 4.4 gets closer to release.

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

Tumblr’s move to WordPress on the backend, and with it, the ability to integrate with the fediverse is “on hold”, says Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg. Automattic announced the plan last August, and news on the move has been sparse ever since. In an interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Mullenweg says that fediverse integration was “one of the arguments for migrating everything to WordPress.” On the fediverse integration, Mullenweg also said: “I think if there was a big push to implement fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr code base”. The plans to connect Tumblr to the fediverse never seemed to have found much trust within the community that it would actually happen, and I’ve seen very few references to it in the last year on the fediverse. Mullenweg seems more interested in the Matrix protocol currently, calling it “the dark horse in the corner”. Automattic acquired universal messaging client Beeper last year, which uses Matrix.

Mastodon’s upcoming update 4.4 is getting closer to launch, and the release candidate of the software is now available. Mastodon is taking a gradual approach to implementing quote posts, and 4.4 will release the first part: the display of quote posts made on other platforms. A later update will include the ability for Mastodon to also create quote posts. Mastodon also published an overview of update 4.4 aimed at developers, which goes into details for all the new features and functions.

NLnet’s latest grant round includes support for various platforms, including better interoperability for Events on the fediverse, an ActivityPub-based poll plugin for WordPress, and for various improvements to NodeBB and Funkwhale.

Bonfire has added support for long-form articles, and also created a separate feed on the platform for articles as well as RSS. They also added the ability to write blog posts from Bonfire itself, making it a platform that can be used for both microblogging as well as long-form writing with the same account.

Radio Free Fedi was a community radio for fediverse artists, that shut down operations early this year. It is back for the summer, with this July being Radio Free Fedi Fest, a month-long event with shows featuring artists from the fediverse.

The ActivityPub for WordPress team shared what they’ve shipped so far in 2025, which includes a new onboarding flow, more robust scaling past a thousand users, as well as the basis for supporting account migration. The team notes that due to spotty support of the ‘Move Activity’ (ActivityPub vocabulary which facilitates account migration) within the larger fediverse this work is currently on hold.

Wafrn, the fediverse platform that’s Tumblr-like and also supports ATProto natively without bridging, has added support for account migration, allowing fediverse accounts to migrate to and from Wafrn. The team also shared a guide on how to self-host Wafrn.

Tim Chambers wrote a 2-part series on issues facing the fediverse from a user’s perspective, and how to fix them. WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley also wrote a response further expanding on the ideas in there. I have some of my own thoughts on this, mainly related to the question of the nature of the fediverse itself: to what extend are servers portals that all lead to the same place, and to what degree are servers separate places? I’ll write more on that in this week’s email essay, so subscribe below to get it in your inbox this Friday.The Links
Rediscovering the Magic of the Blogosphere, with John O’Nolan and Matthias Pfefferle – Dot Social Podcast
Digital Belonging: Why Language and Locality Matter – Jaz-Michael King
The PieFed project now has their own chatrooms.
Mastodon has created a sticker pack that can be used in Signal.
The Newsmast organisation is close to launching channel.org, a custom feed and community builder for the fediverse, and they already shared a demo video of what it looks like to create a channel.
Lemmy Development Update June 2025.
This week’s fediverse software updates.
FIRES is an in-development project for building moderator servers that advise T&S actions for other servers to take. A demo video for the update on locatisation also gives an impression on what the admin flow looks like to use.
Fireside Fedi hosted an Owncast livestream with James Smith, the creator of 3d file sharing fediverse platform Manyfold.
Owncast Newsletter July 2025.

Connected Places is a labor of love. Want to support the work I’m doing? You can click here to donate, or scan the QR code.

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-123/

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

2025-06-24T18:17:09Z

Fediverse Report – #122

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-122/