Last Week in the ATmosphere – 24.11.a

One of the main goals of writing this newsletter is not only to share links, but more importantly, to give context to help you make sense of what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks. Yesterday and today I thoroughly exhausted my ability to make sense of things, and as such this edition is more of a collection links to everything.

For an in-depth analysis, earlier this week I wrote about how to think about how ATProto works, how that relates to governance and power, and what decentralisation and federation mean in this new context.

A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub

If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

The News

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

Atmosphere Stats and Blueview.app both allow you to show you statistics about your account. Blueview shows you your follower growth over time, and Atmosphere Stats assigns you an animal based on your posting style, as well as showing an overview of your posts by time of day.

The Links

Some updates on Bluesky:

• Bluesky will added the ability to post threads in one go soon, and the feature is already available to test, and a preview of what it looks like here.
• A short thread on how the Discover feed works, and some of the steps the Bluesky team is taking to improve the quality of it.
• Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shares some aspects about what the Bluesky team currently is working on.
• There is a renewed call for private data on ATProto: Bluesky Engineer Devin Ivy shares some ideas the team is considering, while Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold reiterates that the team understands the need for it, and says it is a ‘heavy lift’ to implement.

New additions to the wider ATProto ecosystem:

• GitHub will now allow you to display your Bluesky profile on your account.
• The Bluesky Directory has added a database of all Starter Packs, showing how often they are used to sign up as well.
• Bluesky Wall is a simple web app that shows you a realtime feed of posts with any given keyword.

Further integrations of ATProto applications

• Hagoromo is a third-party client for Bluesky, focusing on multi-column, and their latest update now also adds support for your Linkat.blue profile.
• Third-party client Klearsky now supports showing all other ATProto-powered profiles on your Bluesky profile (as well as other updates).
• Blogging platform WhiteWind has added support Frontpage; if a WhiteWind blog is posted on Frontpage, this now automatically shows up in the comment section of the WhiteWind blog as well.

Links for developers:

• Supercell is a lightweight and configurable atproto feed generator.
• Out-of-band tag support on third-party Bluesky client Ouranos.
• Display your Bluesky posts on your Astro sites.
• A (technical) reflection on a stalled attempted to build a Vine clone on ATProto.
• PDSls allows you to paste in bsky.app urls for easier searching.
• New tools to export your repo and blob, as well as viewing the PLC operations log.

Articles:

• Nobody cares about decentralization until they do. – Kye Fox.
• Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky – a paper for the Internet Measurement Conference.
• Bluesky gears up for Election Day as X goes pro-Trump – TechCrunch.

Podcasts:

• Bluesky COO Rose talked with the Quiet Riot podcast about elections and platform values.
• Bluesky board member Mike Masnick talks on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline about tech media and joining the Bluesky board.

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

#bluesky

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 24.11.a

Visualise statistics about your account with multiple new tools, Bridgy Fed discusses governance, and further integration of the ATmosphere ecosystem with 3p clients

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 91

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

The News

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

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

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

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

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

The shutdown of the botsin.space server lead to some new experiments with bots on the fediverse:

• Ktistec is a single-user ActivityPub server that added support for bots in the form of scripts that the server itself periodically runs.
• A super simple server scripts for bots.

The Links

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

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

#fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 91

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

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub

If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? What would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?

This article is not a deep technical explanation about how either ActivityPub or ATProto work. Instead I want to explain to you have these two protocols have different conceptual models of what an open social network looks like. These conceptual models differ much more from each other than people expect, leading people to apply concepts that come from the ActivityPub world to the ATProto world, in a way that does not fit with the conceptual model that ATProto has.

One of the main subjects of discussion recently has been whether Bluesky is decentralised and if it is federated. I think answering these questions requires a clarity on how ATProto differs conceptually from ActivityPub. Decentralisation and federation are valued for how they impact power structures, but there are multiple ways to build other power structures in open social networks.

A bit of the summary at the top, since that might help during reading:

• The conceptual model of ActivityPub resembles that of email: independent servers sending messages to each other.
• The conceptual model of ATProto resembles that of the web: independent sites publish data, and indexers aggregate this data into different views and apps.

A conceptual model of ActivityPub and the fediverse

The fediverse¹ is a network of independent social networking sites that use the ActivityPub protocol with each other. The conceptual model of the fediverse is that each social networking site, often called a server or instance, is it’s own network that can exist independently. You can set up your own Mastodon server, not connect to any other server, invite some of your friends, and have a fully functional social networking site.

Because each server is its own independent and complete social networking site, it means that each fediverse server is a monolith, that puts all components together in a single place. A fediverse server:

• Owns your identity.
• Stores your data.
• Transforms protocol data into a site with a timeline that you can look at.

Most people run a fediverse server because they want their independent social networking site to join a super-network of interconnected social networking sites; the fediverse. This ‘anyone can run a fediverse server’ is the ‘decentralised’ part of the fediverse. In order for the server to communicate with the rest of the fediverse it does a fourth thing:

• Communicates with the rest of the network. In ActivityPub terms: the server gives you an inbox and outbox, and messages flow between these inboxes and outboxes on other servers.

This communication between servers is the ‘federation’ part of the fediverse.

Decentralisation and Federation in the fediverse

The reason to create a super-network of independent social networking sites is one of governance. The fediverse is in many ways a response to the centralised governance under a single billionaire of the current Big Tech platforms, and creates a governance structure where each social networking site is it’s own authority; it has authoritative control over the users on their site, but no authority over any of the other ~30k independent servers.

Decentralisation and federation are crucial for the functioning of the architecture of the fediverse. Decentralisation means that anyone can set up their own social networking site, and federation means that all these independent sites can connect with each other without a single central authority. While these terms often get used as being valuable in itself, I think they should be seen as technical solutions to solve a governance problem: how can we build a social network without a single central authority? Human nature is a funny thing however, and technical solutions to limit authoritative control usually means that chokepoints simply pop up in other places; whether that’s the software that’s used 75% of users being governed by a self-styled ‘benevolent dictator for life’, or server admins having full centralised control over the users on their server.

A conceptual model of ATProto and the ATmosphere

Bluesky PBC² is also building an open social network with the explicit goal that the network should not be owned by a single company. The protocol they use is called AT Protocol, often called ATProto. The network that is build on top of ATProto is called the ATmosphere. The approach they take to get there is quite different than the one the fediverse takes, however. The conceptual model of ATProto is that every account is it’s own independent place in the ATmosphere³, and every app is an aggregator that takes data from all the places in the ATmosphere and uses them to create their own service.

Every account has its own place to store their data, a Personal Data Server⁴. This PDS is a simply a database that contains all your own data on ATProto: the posts you made on Bluesky, as well as your RSVP to an event on Smoke Signal.

In turn, every application is an aggregator, similar to how Google is an aggregator of the web. An ATProto app (like Bluesky) takes the data from all the PDSes in the network⁵. The ‘app’ processes that data, and provides the end-user with a ‘view’ on that data. As such, these applications on ATProto are called AppViews.

In the case of Bluesky, they take all the microblogging posts stored on all the PDSes in the ATmosphere, aggregate them together. This aggregation allows Bluesky to give users the Discover feed, count the number of likes on a post, among other things. It is then presented (the ‘view’) to the user in a format that resembles Twitter⁶. But other AppViews are also possible: WhiteWind is a blogging platform build on ATProto: it allows you to write blogs, and if you use WhiteWind to write a blog posts, these posts are also stored in the same PDS that stores your Bluesky data. The WhiteWind application (AppView) aggregates data from the entire ATmosphere, and takes both WhiteWind-style blog posts, as well as Bluesky’s microblogs. The View WhiteWind presents on their site is blog posts, and with Bluesky’s microblogs functioning as a sort of comment section⁷.

In short, the conceptual model of ATProto is has some resembles to how the web works. The web has many independent websites, and indexers such as Google aggregate the websites and present it back to users in their own ‘view’. Similarly, the ATmosphere has contains of many PDSes, and AppViews aggregate this data into a product for users.

Independence, openness and power on ATProto

As the question ‘Is Bluesky decentralised and federated’ is the greatest thread in the history of forums, and the discussion is still not locked by moderators after 12,239 pages of debate, it’s worth taking a step back at what these concepts are meant to accomplish. Decentralisation and federation in the fediverse mean an open network that anyone can join without any without centralised control.

Anyone can run their own PDS and be a full part of the network, without needing any centralised permission. Anyone can run their own AppView⁸, and build their own product in the ATmosphere, without needing permission by any centralised authority. They can even reuse Bluesky’s data for their own purposes, like WhiteWind does. On first glance, this seems pretty decentralised.

The question of federation becomes more complicated: who can communicate with what exactly? Any AppView can communicate with the PDSes, is that federation? The PDSes cannot communicate with each other directly (so no federation?) but do so via AppViews (so maybe federation?) What about AppViews communicating with each other? Picosky and IRCsky are two different AppViews that both allow you to chat over ATProto, and see the same chat messages. Are these two AppViews federated? And how many individual parts of the system need to federate before you can describe the entire ATmosphere as federated? I don’t know the answer to all of this, but I’m personally trending towards: are we even asking the right questions here?

To make matters even more complicated; many people are not asking the question ‘is the ATmosphere decentralised’, but are wondering ‘is Bluesky decentralised’? Here the ATmosphere take a different direction than the fediverse. The answer for the ATmosphere is not: ‘there should be many versions of the Bluesky app so users can switch to another app’. Having many instances of the Bluesky app provides no real additional benefit to making the network more open and less controlled by a single point of authority.⁹ Instead, the conceptual model of how the ATmosphere is defending itself against an AppView turning ‘bad’, is to have competing different AppViews where people can switch to instead. Bluesky PBC hopes that there will be a hypothetical GreenCloud AppView, which does microblogging slightly differently than Bluesky. This way, people have a different app they can use, in case the Bluesky app does not suffice.

The hypothetical GreenCloud microblogging app build on ATProto does not actually exist. But the code for the Bluesky app is available as open source¹⁰, anyone can run their own Bluesky if they want to. The interesting problem here is that nobody has done so: running a competing service to Bluesky is totally possible, but why would you? It costs money, time and expertise to do so, and there is little gain to doing so.

How applicable the concepts of decentralisation and federation are to the ATmosphere is debatable, but they are used as an approximation for the core question: how is power distributed in the network? And Bluesky and the ATmosphere make it clear that technological architecture can only help so much here: Sure, you can be completely independent of Bluesky PBC on the ATmosphere, as everything is open. But in the end, 99% of users are exclusively on infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC. No technological architecture can compensate for that kind of the power distribution.

This is not lost on Bluesky PBC and their investors either. Blockchain Capitol, lead investor in the series A, has the investment thesis that the value is in growing the ATmosphere, writing that they are “investing in more than a product but rather a vision of what social infrastructure could be”. The challenge here is clear: get more people to build products on ATProto. The sales pitch is attractive: there is a social graph with 13 million accounts that are free for the taking for any developer to build on top upon. The sales pitch is also unusual though: Bluesky PBC is asking for other organisations and companies to be their competitors so that both can contribute to a growing ecosystem. How this will work out remains an open question.

On Identity

Technological solutions to prevent control of chokepoints usually mean that these chokepoints simply pop up in different places, and the ATmosphere is no different than the fediverse in this regard. This explanation of how the ATmosphere works, is missing a crucial part: how Decentralised Identity works on ATProto. Explaining how the system in detail is the subject of my next article. And that system might just be both more centralised than people expect, more decentralised than people think, and it’s most centralising aspect might just be… a clock.

Notes

1. The fediverse is defined here by the Mastodon-dominant supernetwork that mostly uses ActivityPub and is mostly is used for microblogging, with some link-aggregators on Lemmy, some video on PeerTube on the side. I’m aware that this definition does not cover the entirety of the network, as well as that you can contest every word in that definition. But its a close enough approximation for how the word is used in casual day-to-day life. ︎
2. For clarity, ‘Bluesky PBC’ refers to the Bluesky Public Benefit Company, while ‘Bluesky’ refers to the microblogging app made by Bluesky PBC. ︎
3. See also Paul Frazee’s thread on how every user is basically a website. I hesitate to use the term website here, as that comes with certain preconceived notions of what a website is, and a PDS repository is different in some manners. Maybe over time it will turn out that the equivalence of ‘PDS repo’ with ‘website’ will makes sense to people however, I’m unsure. ︎
4. Technically, a repository on a PDS, a PDS can contain the repositories for many different accounts. ︎
5. This is mostly done via a Relay. Relays are an optional part of the network, and can best be seen as an extension of an AppView. This extension is in itself also flexible, multiple AppViews can use the same Relay. ︎
6. The extra step here is that the AppView sends data to your client, such as the bsky.app website, the official mobile clients or a third-party client like deck.blue ︎
7. Example of a WhiteWind blog that combines Bluesky’s microblogs here. ︎
8. And/or run their own Relays, which multiple people are in fact doing. ︎
9. This is the problem that the fediverse has; there are 10k Mastodon servers, accounting for 80% of active users, but the software is controlled by a single person. Many concurrent deployments of the same software does not reduce the amount of control that this software has, it arguably increases the control instead. ︎
10. The core functionalities all are, some parts are not. ︎

#bluesky #fediverse

A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub

If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

On Bluesky and enshittification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Bluesky and enshittification

Bluesky has announced a $15M series A raise by a crypto venture capital fund, leading many people to talk about 'enshittification'. But is enshittification the right way to look at things?

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90

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

The News

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

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

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

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

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

GoToSocial is working on the ability to for servers to subscribe to allowlists and denylists. This makes it easier to create clusters of servers with a shared allowlist, such as the Website League. As I recently wrote about Website League, it is a cluster of federating servers that uses ActivityPub but exists separately from the rest of the fediverse, and it is started by people who build a new shared space after Cohost shut down. Website League servers predominantly use GoToSocial or Akkoma, and have been actively working on tuning the software to meet their needs.

The Links

• Flipboard is now federating accounts of publishers in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the UK.
• A long read on Content Warnings, that extensively touches on the culture on using Content Warnings in Mastodon and the Website League as well.
• Diving Into the World of Lemmy.
• One year after X: Embracing open science on Mastodon – a reflection by the University of Groningen Library.
• Mastodon, two years later – a continuation of the article ‘Mastodon – a partial history‘, by The Nexus of Privacy.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The Event Federation project has drafted a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for a common way to use the ‘event’ type in the fediverse.
• Setting up my federated fleamarket with flohmarkt.
• IFTAS October update.
• Ghost’s weekly update on their project to implement ActivityPub, mentioning that they have bridged their ActivityPub-based Ghost account to Bluesky as well.
• The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same. – Elena Rossini.
• How the ‘Fediverse’ Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media) – Lifehacker.

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

#fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90

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

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct wk 5

Some big news for Bluesky this week, as they raise $15M in their series A. Another new option to import your old tweets into Bluesky, and more.

Bluesky announces series A

Bluesky has announced their series A funding round, raising $15M, using the announcement to give a first look at some of their monetisation plans as well. The series A funding round is lead by Venture Capital firm Blockchain Capital. In summer 2023 Bluesky had an $8M seed round, and various investors of the seed round also returned for the series A. Kinjal Shah, a Partner at Blockchain Capital, will join the board of Bluesky.

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

Bluesky also announced two avenues they will start to explore for monetisation; a subscription model and payment processing. For the subscription model Bluesky will explore various additional features that do not touch on the core experience, such as higher quality video uploads, or profile customisations. Bluesky will also start working on payment services to support creators. Not much information is known yet on this, and Bluesky says they will share more information as it becomes available.

Kinjal Shah wrote the investment thesis for Blockchain Capital, which gives good insight in the vision of what Blockchain Capital hopes to get out of the investment. She writes: “With this investment, we’re investing in more than a product but rather a vision of what social infrastructure could be. A future where users own their identity and data, developers can innovate freely, and networks are as diverse as we are.” The reason for Blockchain Capital to invest into a social infrastructure is the new opportunities that an open developer ecosystem brings for (other) developers to build new products, which is also stated here by Bluesky developer Why.

On Enshittification

A common response to the news of Bluesky’s series A being lead by a VC firm called Blockchain Capital is that “the enshittification has started”. This response was dominant on the fediverse, and less so but still present on Bluesky. It’s been such a common response that I think it deserves a closer look at ‘enshittification’ and how it relates to Bluesky taking money from a blockchain VC firm. The meaning of the term enshittification has shifted over time, and both meanings provide an interesting lens to look at the news.

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

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

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

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

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

The News

Porto is a new free tool that allows you to import your Twitter archive into Bluesky. The tool asks you to download your tweets from X as an archive, and upload the folder with your archive into the tool, via a browser extension.

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

Last week I wrote that the “new wave has a higher retention rate than other waves”. Another week later and this effect still holds.

ProtoScript is a tool that lets you publish Javascript code directly to your PDS, and then view and execute code from any user directly in your browser. Conceptually it is similar to ATFile, which lets you store arbitrary files on your PDS, but this time with Javascript code instead. Both ProtoScript and ATFile are exploring the idea that the PDS is a website, and it seems like there is still a lot of design space left to explore here.

The ATProto Tech Talks is back, with a new event November 7th. This event will feature various ways people build blogs on ATProto, including by Bluesky developers Samuel and Hailey. Smoke Signal event to register is available here.

Tracking how the space of labelers for self-identification is evolving:

• The Games Industry Labeler now is now automated via DMs, where a chat interface walks a user through setting their labels.
• The permissionless nature of ATProto allows people to backdate posts. This feature allows people to import their Twitter archive to the original date of posting, but can also create confusion. The Backdated Labeler labels posts that have a different timestamp than the time they first become visible on the network.

The Links

• Some (Slightly Biased) Thoughts On The State Of Decentralized Social Media – Mike Masnick.
• Ucho-ten is a new Bluesky client (iOS and Android) with a focus on a clean and quiet interface, that does not show engagement numbers.
• ‘What is a PDS, anyways?’
• A Bluesky meetup in Fukuoka, Japan, on 2024-11-16, following earlier successful meetups in Kyoto and Tokyo.
• A visualisation of how the algorithm for ATProto-powered link-aggregator Frontpage works.
• Building your own feed that sorts posts by your mutuals by trending.

And some more links that cater towards developers:

• ‘React Native, and “the native feel’ – Bluesky developer Samuel.
• A tool to see which browser or mobile OS a Bluesky user uses.
• Post to Bluesky directly from the Command Line Interface.
• PDSIs is a tool to browse all the different PDSes.
• Tracking the rate at which all the different apps on ATProto get used.
• Parsing PDS Logs With OpenTelemetry.

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

#bluesky

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct wk 5

Some big news for Bluesky this week, as they raise $15M in their series A. Another new option to import your old tweets into Bluesky, and more.

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 89

Shortform video platform Loops opens a waitlist for signups, Mosaic is a service to help organisations create their custom version of upcoming platform Bonfire, and the new owners of event planning platform Mobilizon release a big new update.

The News

Loops is an upcoming fediverse platform for short form video, build by Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault. On the loops.video site there has been a countdown over the last month that ended this Monday, and with it, people can now sign up for Loops. Loops is currently still being worked on, with Supernault working on getting the apps out to release. The Android app will be made available as an APK, and the iOS app is waiting approval for TestFlight. Loops is currently developed as a mobile-first platform, and does not have a webUI yet, with Supernault saying that a webUI will come later. He also reports that emails welcoming people after they have signed on are rate-limited by the email provider, resulting in a long delay before people can be onboarded. Moderation services for Loops are currently being worked on as well, and Supernault is looking for moderators to help moderate the platform.

Mosaic is a new service by the Bonfire team, where the Bonfire team will help organisations build and set up their own digital federated spaces. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that focuses on customisation and extensibility, that people and organisations can customise to meet their needs. Mosaic is a way for the Bonfire team to help onboard organisations and customise the platform to their needs. Extensions and other improvements made with Mosaic are then available for the rest of the community to use as well, as part of their AGPL license, so that everyone benefits from contributions made by others. Bonfire is currently available for testing, but not for official release yet. The main blocker seems to be slow performance of Bonfire, and the developers have put out a bounty for other developers to help them improve performance.

An update by Newsmast on what they are working on with Channels.org. They relate Newsmast’s Channels to Bluesky’s custom feeds (as DYI algorithms) and Farcaster’s channels (‘Cozy corners’). For Newsmast, Channels are a way to onboard public organisations, giving them their own place (the channel) to distribute their content, where the space is clearly their own, but still part of the larger fediverse network. Newsmast also notes that they’ll focus on Channels for now, and that Patchwork, the plugin system for Mastodon servers is postponed to early next year to prevent the team from stretching themselves too thin. Newsmast’s Michael Foster also blogged about how we can build a different web together as well, reiterating my point that the current trend seems for AT Protocol to be used for public and global conversations, and ActivityPub for (semi)-private networked communities.

IFTAS held a 2024 Survey among fediverse moderators, and while they are preparing a full report they give some early highlights on the results. Based on their survey data IFTAS estimates that there are 5500 users per moderator on the fediverse, which is between three and ten times as many moderators compared to other Big Tech platforms.

An article by Techpolicy.press goes into detail on ‘The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media’. It draws attention to pravda.me as an example of the expanding threat landscape on decentralised social networks; a large Mastodon server that bears all the hallmarks of inauthenticity, but is barely blocked on or on the radars of the larger fediverse community. The article also makes a distinction between moderation questions where decentralisation empowers communities (often related to political or sexual content), and issues where centralisation is more beneficial, such as spam and CSAM. Accompanying the article is also a podcast interview with Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi about their fediverse governance report.

Fediverse event planning platform Mobilizon got transferred from developers Framasoft to a new organisation, Kaihuri, who have gotten a grant from NLnet to further expand the platform. They have now released v5 of Mobilizon, with new features such as a homepage redesign, a monthly calendar view, better management of recurring or ongoing events, and more. You can test out the new version of Mobilizon here.

The Links

• revealing the fediverse’s gifts – Erin Kissane.
• How Decentralization Benefits Publishers, with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and ProPublica’s Ben Werdmuller – Dot Social Podcast.
• ZonePane is an Android app that supports Mastodon, Misskey and Bluesky, and remembers your last place on the timeline.
• A blog post by a in response to Bengo’s ‘The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability’.
• A fediverse invitation for artists – Stefan Bohacek.
• A new allowlist-only instance for Black folks.
• Lemmy development updates for the last two weeks.
• A fediverse musicians starter pack.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Write.as is reopening itself to free accounts.
• An app to discover other accounts to follow based on hashtags you both like.
• Helping to build the open social web – Ben Werdmuller.
• Adding Lemmy comments to a blog.

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

#fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 89

Shortform video platform Loops opens a waitlist for signups, Mosaic is a service to help organisations create their custom version of upcoming platform Bonfire, and the new owners of event planning platform Mobilizon release a big new update.

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 2024 week 4

A new signup wave for Bluesky with 2 million new accounts, a way to store arbitrary files on your PDS, the Japanese Bluesky apps continue to build interoperability with each other, and more.

The News

Changes to blocking on X, as well as removing the ability to opt out of having your data being used for AI training, have lead to a new signup wave on Bluesky. Over 2 million accounts in the last week, with now more than 13 million accounts total being created. The inflow of new users created a significant flow of traffic, putting Bluesky high up the top of app store rankings in various countries. The surge in traffic took down Bluesky for a while, which seemed to have been related to an app that helps you find your X followers on Bluesky. One notable aspect of this surge in signups is how global it was, with various new communities in Asia being onboarded. This is clearly visible in this data set that shows the language composition of Bluesky per week, and it shows drastic changes. Brazil went from the dominant language to the third language in the span of two weeks. Bluesky became much more popular in Japan again. There are also new Asian communities that were barely present on Bluesky before, with Korean and Thai becoming the fourth and fifth most popular languages, while Thai did not show up at all in the week before. Bluesky developer Jaz says that this new wave has a higher retention rate than other waves. The elevated signup numbers have dropped to more stable levels again, but there are still some new ways to keep a close track of the numbers with these two new counters, as well as better statistics on the languages used on Bluesky.

Bluesky developer Paul Frazee posted a thread explaining atproto, saying that every user on atproto is effectively a website. A practical application of the idea that every user is a website is the new application ATFile. ATFile allows you to store and retrieve any data files directly on your PDS. The idea is quite straightforward: a PDS can accept arbitrary data, in order to have other apps beyond Bluesky build on top of a PDS. ATFile makes use of this property of a PDS to transform it into a simple place to store and retrieve files. It does not need to be your a self-hosted PDS either, you can also store files on a Bluesky-powered PDS. It shows a future of atproto with interesting questions regarding accountability and responsibility for hosting data; while all (decentralised) social networking platforms have to deal with the issue of people using the platform to host unwanted content such as copyrighted material, ATFile pushes this question front and center. It also shows indeed that atproto can be much bigger than a protocol for microblogging, and that you can indeed treat atproto accounts as websites. It gives a glimpse of a design space that is yet unexplored, and I’m curious to see where people will take it.

The integration of various products build on top of atproto continues, and it seems to be mainly pushed by Japanese developers. Klearsky is a third-party client for Bluesky, and with it’s latest update it now shows you your Linkat (a linktree-like product on atproto) profile on your Bluesky profile. As both products use atproto this can be seamlessly integrated. The developer said they are working Frontpage integration as well, you can see here what this looks like. Atproto-powered blogging platform Whitewind is also trending in this direction, their latest update also adds integration with Linkat.

In Other News

BlueArk is a new paid service to migrate your tweets from your X account to Bluesky, with the posts in Bluesky being shown on the original date they were posted. They are working on a feature where you can upload the entire archive file of your X account to be imported into Bluesky as well. There is also another free tool available that imports your X archive into Bluesky, but this does require some technical knowledge to use.

Earlier this year the Bluesky team published a paper ‘Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media’, this paper has been updated with some of the most recent statistics and developments.

Bluesky, and what Bluesky is not, is an article that explains atproto, and also compares to how it differs from ActivityPub. Some extra commentary and additions on the article by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold here.

For Developers

Bluesky published two new blog posts aimed at developers:

• A blog to introduce Jetstreams; which is effectively a simpeler and more efficient way of the Relay (firehose), which gives speed and simplicity to the projects that need it, at the cost of validating every record (the ‘Authenticated’ part in AT Protocol). Bluesky notes that the Jetstream is suitable for more casual projects, while warning against using it for more formal or research based operations.
• ‘Lexicons, Pinned Posts, and Interoperability’ is a reflection on the latest update to the Bluesky app, which caused some interoperability issues by third-party apps. Bluesky says that they are ‘planning to build an aggregator and automated documentation system for Lexicons’.

On the note of lexicon discoverability, Frontpage.fyi just published their lexicon.

The Links

• A real-time statistics of the amount of posts that does not have alt text on Bluesky.
• A practical way to get user feedback on what feature users actually need.
• The Japanese newspaper Nikkei adds a share-to-Bluesky button.
• Bluesky is AMAZING – a YouTube essay by Chris Titus Tech.
• A guide to manage your atproto DNS records with Cloudflare.
• ThreadSky is a web app to easily create threads on Bluesky.
• A replica and observer of the PLC Directory.
• Hosting an AT Protocol PDS without containerization.
• Is Bluesky Ready For The Future? – Garbage Day.
• FxBluesky is a way to embed Bluesky posts (and videos and more) on Discord and Telegram.

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

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 2024 week 4

A new signup wave for Bluesky with 2 million new accounts, a way to store arbitrary files on your PDS, the Japanese Bluesky apps continue to build interoperability with each other, and more.

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 3

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

Picosky

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

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

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

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

The News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep dive: Aviary.domains

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

To place Aviary in a larger context, a short explanation: It helps to understand as the central offering of the ATmosphere being a single digital identity. When you first sign up for Bluesky, two things happen:

• You join the ATmosphere, by creating a digital identity (a DID) that works with all other products that are build on atproto.
• You log in with this newly created identity into Bluesky, and use Bluesky with this digital identity.

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

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

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

What makes this different from projects like swifties.social, which also hand out subdomains for people to use as handles on Bluesky, is that it does not require the final step, changing settings in the app. It also gives the owner of the domain control over each subdomain, with the ability to subtract subdomains as well. This makes Aviary more useful for people who want to have more control over who identifies with the domain, and can show they are part of the community.

The Links

• A new FAQ for Blacksky.
• A minimal OAuth browser client implementation for atproto.
• Post to Bluesky with PHP.
• Post to Bluesky with the date of the post set to any arbitrary date in the past.
• Lexicon design techniques (in Japanese).
• Introduction to the AT Protocol: Understanding the ideas behind the protocol (also in Japanese).
• Audio spaces app Bluecast now can show your broadcasting history.

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

#atmosphere #bluesky

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 3

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

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 88

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

The News

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

Sub.club is a service that lets people create paid subscription feeds on the fediverse. The service recently launched with the ability to monetise Mastodon feeds, and has now expanded to also include long-form writing, by collaborating with write.as. Write.as is the flagship instance of fediverse blogging software WriteFreely. With this update, blogs on write.as can now set on a a per-blog basis if a blog is a premium blog, and where the cut-off is. People who follow the blog from a fediverse account will see an option to subscribe and view the full post; this post by the sub.club account shows how a premium blog will look like from various perspectives. Adding sub.club to a write.as blog is as simple as following this three-minute PeerTube video.

The Links

• How to buy shoes in the fediverse – Erin Kissane.
• “We can have a different web, if we want it” – Newsmast’s Michael Foster.
• Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, is out for September 2024.
• Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom – Soatok, who is working on implementing E2EE for ActivityPub.
• ForgeFed is continuing to work on adding Actor Programming.
• Positioning Micro.blog.
• How to join Mastodon – Stefan Bohacek.
• Mastodon has started selling a plushy.
• Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 2) – Elena Rossini.
• ‘I for one (cautiously) welcome the Social Web Foundation to the fediverses, but we really need to talk about the big elephant in the federated room’ – The Nexus of Privacy.
• The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability – bengo.
• Echo is a new iOS app for Lemmy.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• We Distribute Is On Temporary Hiatus.

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

#fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 88

self-hosted 3d printing app Manyfold joins the fediverse, and sub.club expands to longform blogging with write.as

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87

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

Mastodon launches version 4.3

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

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

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

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

ClubsAll has launched

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

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

The News

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

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

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

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

ActivityPods is a project that combines the Solid protocol with ActivityPub, and they have released their 2.0 version. ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple different apps; with ActivityPub you need a separate accounts for Pixelfed and Mastodon, for example. ActivityPods gives you one place to store your data, your Pod, based on the Solid protocol, and the Inbox and Outbox system of ActivityPub. This update of ActivityPods gives the ability to set granular permission levels for the access to data than an app has that is build on top of ActivityPods.

The Links

• IFTAS September 2024 Connect Community Round-Up.
• Prototyping Our First Native Components with LiveView Native – Bonfire app dev diary.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Lemmy Development Update for the past 2 weeks.
• Minutes from the Forum and Threaded Discussions Task Force meeting.
• Sub.club is teasing premium (for paid subscribers) blogs coming soon
• The two Fediverses – Ben Werdmuller.
• A proposal to enable portability of identity and object storage within ActivityPub through the use of DIDs.
• Event Organizers’ Needs for Publishing to the Fediverse via WordPress.
• The FediJam is a month-long game jam for users of the fediverse, and the results of the September jam our now available.
• Pixelfed has been working on adding push notifications, and other Pixelfed servers can now apply for access as well.
• An interview with Silverpill, who builds fediverse platform Mitra.
• Ghost’s latest update shows some more of their ActivityPub-powered reader.
• Tangerine is a custom UI for Mastodon servers, and v2 is now available for Mastodon servers on 4.3.
• The Author bylines feature is now also available for all Mastodon servers, with an explanation on how to set it up here.

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

#fediverse

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 87

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

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 2

The developer ecosystem for Bluesky and atproto keeps expanding, with easier labelers, a link-tree style app all on atproto, and more. Next week I’ll go more in-depth on two new applications build on atproto, a chat app and domain management, so stay tuned!

Third party moderation and labelers

The Bluesky developers have put out a new proposal to further expand the moderation system Ozone. Ozone is used both by Bluesky’s own moderation system, as well as by third party moderation who uses it for moderation via labeling. Currently, Ozone provided limited information to users, both the account who reported as well as the account who got reported. The aim of the proposal is to give users more insight in what is happening, such as seeing the status of a report, and a history of a reports made. As the moderation tools come with requirements about usability and safety (how to make sure that the update does not create any new attack surfaces) the proposed work to Ozone is open for feedback.

The Bluesky Labeler Starter kit is a repository that makes it easier for people to run their own labeler. It takes all the different components that are needed to start running your own labeler, and provides a demo labeler that allows you to set your favourite of the five elements (Earth, Fire, Air, Water, Love) to your profile.

These two news items show that the labeler and moderation system keeps diverging into two separate systems: A system for moderation, that uses Ozone and moderates via labelers, and a system that uses labelers for self-expression. The Labeler Starter kit actually does not include the Ozone moderation system at all anymore, and is not included in the kit, as an illustration of the extend how the labeler system has diverged into these two separate use cases.

The News

linkat.blue is a linktree-like app that is build on atproto. The app itself is simple to use, and offers the basic features you’d expect: a simple overview of your profile, as well as links to other sites and profiles you’ve added. It treats your Bluesky as your main account (displayed at the top), and also supports embedding Bluesky posts and feeds, as well as logging in with your Bluesky account with OAuth. Linkat.blue is build on top of atproto: the links you add are stored on your PDS. This meaning that you can take full control and ownership of your Linkat bio, and also provides interoperability with potential other similar types of apps.

Starrysky is a way for people to build their own custom feeds, and allows for people to create a simple custom feed without writing code with Basic Mode, or go into more advanced settings with Query Mode. Starrysky is written in Japanese, but mostly translated to English. Skyfeed is one of the more popular ways for people to easily create custom feeds, but the service has been struggling under the increased load recently. It seems like Starrysky offers the ability to transfer feeds from Skyfeed to Starrysky, but the language barrier made this a bit hard for me to figure out.

In Other News

Brazil has lifted the ban on X. As Bluesky was the major recipient of Brazilians looking for a new place, it is worth watching how large the group of Brazilians will be that will stop using Bluesky in favour of X again. While certainly a number of people will go back, in the month that X was banned, the Brazilian community has set up shop on Bluesky, with politicians, the Brazilian government, football clubs and esports organisations and major news organisations, all starting to use Bluesky. Meanwhile, research among 1400 Brazilians found out that one in three reported an improvement in their mental health in the month that X was banned.

Frontpage.fyi, a Hacker News-like link-aggregator build on atproto that is currently in closed beta, has added a new report system and moderation features. This brings the platform a step closer to general access.

Smoke Signal, an event planner platform on atproto has released their roadmap for Q4 2024. The goals mainly relate to more ‘complex’ events, such as recurring events, multi-day events and event hierarchies.

Emoji Stats for Bluesky is an overview that counts all the emojis that are posted on Bluesky in real time, showing you which emojis are the most popular (spoiler: it’s ), split out by language (the Japanese love even more).

BikSok is a video-only client for videos posted on Bluesky. It goes for a TikTok-like experience that simply scrolls through videos. It seems like it only recommends videos posted on Bluesky in Japanese.

Aviary is a ‘self-service tool to share domains with friends, family, communities, and organizations to use with ATProtocol’, and is now available in early access. I’ll go into more detail on Aviary next week when I’ve talked to the developer, who’s also behind Smoke Signal and Blue Badges.

The Links

• atcute, an ecosystem of lightweight TypeScript packages for atproto.
• Third party Bluesky client TOKIMEKI is now available on iOS TestFlight again.
• An atproto extension for Raycast.
• Three reasons why Bluesky didn’t adopt ActivityPub [in Japanese].
• Some more improvements to the Discovery feed.
• A handle validation tool.

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

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-oct-24-week-2/

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)

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/