Last Week in Fediverse – ep 76

People asking ‘Letterboxd but on ActivityPub’ has been a bit of a meme, but it turns out, a fully functional platform that does this and much more, already exists! Also two updates for Mastodon that pushes the platform in a direction of better supporting journalism, and a first version of Ghost is now active on the fediverse.

NeoDB

The main story this week needs some introduction, as it involves a platform that seems to be virtually unknown in the English-speaking side of the fediverse, even though it has been around for a while, and actively being used in the Chinese-speaking side of the fediverse. NeoDB is an platform that allows people to ‘manage and explore collections, reviews, and ratings for various cultural products, including books, movies, music, podcasts, games and boardgames’. It is a huge scope, and NeoDB has a large amount of integrations with other products.

NeoDB has had a full fediverse integration for a while, with reviews federating out, and comments/likes federating inwards to the platform, as well as the ability to sign up for NeoDB with an existing fediverse account. All of this is not news in itself, but worth mentioning, both for context as well as a suggestion for people to check it out.

What is news about NeoDB is that their English documentation site was published last month, which should help significantly with discoverability of the platform, which so far has mainly been used by a Chinese audience. The second part of the news is that this week, NeoDB shipped Bluesky and Threads integration, allowing you to log in with your Bluesky or Threads account. Furthermore, the developers are publicly pondering if they should be ‘dual-stack’, meaning that they fully integrate with both ActivityPub and atproto. The direction of the larger social web seems to be trending in the direction of platforms that span multiple protocols, with NeoDB being another example.

The News

Mastodon has made two updates this week that helps highlight journalism on the fediverse. The first update is that underneath some links that are shared on Mastodon, “the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account”. Mastodon says that this highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work”. The feature is rolling out slowly: only a few publications are included, and other publications can manually opt-in. It is currently also still only visible on mastodon.social, and currently requires admin approval. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says that wants to “avoid the risk of malicious sites framing users as their authors, but we intend to build out a self-serve system to manage which sites you can be featured from very soon.” While the feature is only visible on Mastodon so far, it works with other fediverse accounts: I linked my federated WordPress account to this blog, for example. Already apps are starting to implement this feature, such as Pachli.

The second feature update for Mastodon is that articles which appear in the trending News tab, allow you to see what people are writing about that article. This respects privacy settings, so not all posts will be visible. Both Phanpy and IceCubes already implemented the feature into their clients as well.

Ghost has taken two major steps in their work for implementing ActivityPub. They have made the repository for their work on ActivityPub available as open source, under the MIT license. Secondly, Ghost’s own newsletter about their fediverse integration has become the ‘first federated Ghost instance on the internet’, and you can follow @index via your own fediverse account.

Interoperability between different types of platforms on the fediverse can be quite unreliable, but the link-aggregator side of the fediverse is seeing some improvements recently: Mbin has added PeerTube support, after PieFed also did so a few weeks ago. Furthermore, Lemmy has made it easier to follow communities from the microblogging platforms in their recent 0.19.4 update: All posts (not comments) made on Lemmy get added a hashtag based on the community name. So if you want to follow the asklemmy community from your Mastodon account for example, you can simply follow the hashtag #asklemmy.

Pixelfed and Loops developer Dansup says that Loops, an platform for short-form videos that is currently in development, will first come to the Pixelfed app, and that only later it will become a separate app.

Casey Newton interviewed Adam Mosseri on Threads’ first anniversary, and posted his answer on Threads work on fediverse integration. Mosseri says that is not driving a lot of growth (by my own estimates it seems likely that like less than 10k people have turned on fediverse sharing), and that it “is proving very difficult just to do the basics, particularly from a compliance and a privacy perspective”.

Newsmast has released their ‘Amplifier‘ feature, which gives you more control over your timeline. With it, you can select to see if you want posts, reposts or comments in your timeline. It also allows you to shift your timeline to a different ‘timezone’, for example 12 hours back. You can see what that looks like with a short video here.

Shreyan Jain published an in-depth article about atproto and Nostr. It’s a long read, well-researched and places the protocols in a larger historical context. If you want to understand how these protocols work and how they compare to each other, I can definitely recommend the article. It seems to me we are far from the end of innovation and change in the space of decentralised social networking protocols, making it worthwhile to learn and build upon other protocol’s choices.

The Links

• Last Month in Bluesky – June 2024.
• Mastodon has expanded their core engineering team, and consists now of three people.
• Newsletter software Buttondown confirms that ActivityPub support is scheduled for their Q3 roadmap.
• Ghost recently funded Fedify, and Fedify developer Hong Minhee wrote some more details about the development process and funding.
• The first release candidate for PeerTube 6.2 adds automatic video transcription based on Whisper, auto-tags on video, as well as a comment moderation system page.
• A web app to search and explore your own Mastodon bookmarks.
• Newsmast’s Michael Foster writes about how to reach the potential of the fediverse with storytelling.
• ActivityPods published ‘a guide to create your first social app with ActivityPods 2.0′.
• A weekly overview of the fediverse software updates.
• Kookie is a new Misskey fork that focuses on the Brazilian community.

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

#activitypub #asklemmy #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-76/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85

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

Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down

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

The Social Web Foundation has launched

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

The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:

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

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

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

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

Software updates

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

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

Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.

• Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
• The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
• Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.

In Other News

IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum.

The Links

• All the speed demo videos of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.
• Evan Prodromou’s book about ActivityPub, ‘ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web‘ has officially launched.Lemmy Development Update.
• PieFed’s Development update for September 2024.
• A tool to make sure you see all replies on a fediverse posts (and an explanation on how it differs from FediFetcher).
• A work-in-progress Rust library for ActivityPub.
• The German Data Protection Office updated their Data Protection Guidelines for running a Mastodon server.
• The Revolution Will Be Federated – WeDistribute.
• This week’s updates for fediverse software.

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

#fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85

Swiss government Mastodon server shuts down, the Social Web Foundation launches among controversy and much more.

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)