Posts
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FediForum hot take -
Here's an interesting "natural experiment": #FediForum attendees who want to be found on the fediverse are posting to #FediForumAttendee hashtag.Another interesting natural experiment with #FediForumAttendee: @j12t said that there were 25 posts to the hashtag. Of cours, more might be coming in but still it's worth asking: How many are you seeing on your instance?
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Here's an interesting "natural experiment": #FediForum attendees who want to be found on the fediverse are posting to #FediForumAttendee hashtag.Here's an interesting "natural experiment": #FediForum attendees who want to be found on the fediverse are posting to #FediForumAttendee hashtag.
- what's the gender ratio?
- what percentage are white? Black? Indigienous?
- how many women of color?
Of course, this isn't completely representative -- it only got mentioned at the wrapups session, and some people don't want to be so visible. Still it's an intersting data point!
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News Detective is an interesting startup that's trying to combine moderated crowdsourcing and professional fact-checking to combat misinformation on social media. https://newsdetective.org/aboutBonfire has also done some interesting work on labeling, and @[email protected] led a very interesting session at #FediForum today on this. As I said during the session, I think there are some great opportunities for decentralized social networks in fighting disinfo (although we also have to play defense, because the #fediverse is also a channel where disinfo gets spread), so it's great to see all this work happening.
Safer social networking - Bonfire's recent experiment with Prosocial Design Patterns
To better understand the workflow involved in building Bonfire extension from scratch, we implemented a design pattern from the Prosocial Design Network: label misleading content; add links to reliable, related content.
(bonfirenetworks.org)
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News Detective is an interesting startup that's trying to combine moderated crowdsourcing and professional fact-checking to combat misinformation on social media. https://newsdetective.org/aboutNews Detective is an interesting startup that's trying to combine moderated crowdsourcing and professional fact-checking to combat misinformation on social media. https://newsdetective.org/about
And, now they've got a labeler on Bluesky! https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:qezlipqc4yfk2lebu7533zyr
This is an interesting use case for the stackable moderation approach, so it'll be interesting to see how it works out
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I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!
And what better way to do that than with a long post about it?
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it's so extremely goofy that control of post visibility is tied to post boostability and vice versa. why can't i write unboostable public posts huh@inherentlee oh as with so many things on the fediverse, there's actually a very simple reason for that ... see the attached diagram. (1/275)
(274 posts later)
... just like email! (275/275)
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Two million Brazilians joined Bluesky over the weekend. Here’s why that’s good news for the #Fediverse.Yeah, I think this is a core tension in today's fediverse -- an extension of what I wrote about in https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/ The fediverse could be grounded in opposition to surveillance capitlasm and big tech. But, it turns out that a lot of fediverse influencers actually are okay with surveillance capitalism and big tech as long as it federates -- Eugen for example calling Meta's plans to embrace, extend, and exploit the fediverse as a "huge victory for our cause."
But I think if you look at Bluesky in terms of this overall dynamic, it's still a net positive for what I think of as the "free fediverses" (the term's originally from @ophiocephalic who runs https://freefediverse.org ). The existing power structure of the ActivityPub fediverse is not only mostly pro-Meta, it's also a huge barrier to innovation. Bluesky's venture-funded, and it's not clear they can come up with a business model that's not exploitative ... but they're a lot better than Meta! So I'd rather see people looking for Twitter alternatives join Bluesky than Threads (where they'd only reinforce Meta's explitative genocidal business model). And I'd rather see people looking for Twitter alternatives join Bluesky (which is a pretty good Twitter alternative) than mastodon.social (which isn't).
Of course there's a lot more to the fediverse than Twitter alternatives. @kissane and @darius's report on fediverse governatnce focuses on the opportunity for thoughtfully-managed medium-sized servers; there isn't any equivalent to that on Bluesky. But the fediverse as a whole doesn't have a good answer on how new people can find the thoughtfully-managed medium-size servers that are good matches for what they're looking for -- and Mastodon in particular has been very hostile to improving things. So hopefully Bluesky's success in attracting the Brazilian wave will lead the rest of the fediverse to build on what it's good at and address the challenges holding it back.
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Is anyone tracking the Brazilian Twitter exodus?Most Brazlians leaving Twitter seem to be going to Bluesky -- they've had a million signups in the last few days. Lula tweeted his Bluesky link along with other platforms, which set things into overdrive, although it had already started before that.
Threads is also benefitting but I saw a compare-and-contrast that Lula's posts on Bluesky are getting more traction than on Threads, which is suprising giving the relative size of the user bases.
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Is BlueSky similar to the Fediverse? No.@FediTips I disagree. vivaldi.social, bbc.social, and me.dm are all part of the fediverse despite being run by corporations. Flipboard, Wordpress, Ghost, and Discourse are all part of the fediverse,
There's plenty of historical precedent for this too -- Evan Prodromou's StatusNet (which evolved into GnuSocial, the basis of the early fediverse) took VC funding in 2009. Diaspora joined YCombinator for a while. etc etc etc -
If you'e been wondering how to monetize your fediverse posting ...ah, Lemmy.
@Sarahp's article is currently at #4 in https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse with +61 votes.
Meanwhile my post starting this thread is just barely in the top 10 ... at -57!
OK, sure, her artcile's a lot better than my post, fair enough ... but -57 ?
From the comments, it looks like some people thought my post was self-promotional spam ... which is pretty funny actually. No, I was just reporting the facts. Good times.
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If you'e been wondering how to monetize your fediverse posting ...Here's @Sarahp's coverage of sub.club in TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/29/sub-club-aims-to-fund-the-fediverse-via-premium-feeds/
And see, I was iright about the VC aspects!
"The potential for sub.club could grow alongside the open social web. When Meta’s Threads fully integrates with ActivityPub, it would bring a new class of creators into the fediverse, and they may be looking for alternative means of monetization beyond advertising, which the fediverse generally avoids. (Threads, however, may not).
That’s a potentially monetizable activity, Decrem thinks, which is why Mammoth and sub.club’s parent company, The Blvd. Inc., is seeking to raise a seed round.
“If people start building little apps, you’ll start seeing entrepreneurial activity and money flowing through the system. And I think that’s exciting to a class of investors,” Decrem said."
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If you'e been wondering how to monetize your fediverse posting ...If you'e been wondering how to monetize your fediverse posting ... https://sub.club has good news for you!
"If you post quality content and you've developed a loyal audience, you should be able to ask your most passionate followers to support you with a premium subscription.
That's a promise not available on the Fediverse ...until now."
@dimillian has a short threa announcing availabiilty in @IceCubesApp and sub.club advisor @quillmatiq has more info here.
sub.club's a project of The BLVD, Inc, the makers of @mammoth. I know there was a lot of skepticism when Marc Benioff, Mozilla, Long Ventures et al, funded Mammoth ... with so many good apps out there, how are they expecting to get VC-level returns on their investment? But if sub.club can tap into the creator economy, there's clearly money to be made!
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Bluesky introduces anti-toxicity features -- including permission on quote postsBluesky introduces anti-toxicity features -- including permission on quote posts
New Anti-Toxicity Features on Bluesky - Bluesky
Trust and Safety (T&S) affects everything — from community policy and spam detection, all the way to the order that replies show up on a post. At Bluesky, the product team works hand-in-hand with T&S to design features that balance safety, ease of use, and fun.
Bluesky (bsky.social)
Some of the other highlights:
"hiding" replies, meaning they don't show up in the thread (aka conversation) view
timed word mutes
seeing where a post has been quoted, and the ability to "detach" a specific quote (so that you can't get to it from the original post)
notification filtering (somewhat similar to in Mastodon 4.3)
only showing replies from people you follow in the "following" feed (their equialent of the Home feed) if it's a reply to somebody you also follow (this matches Mastodon's behavior; previously, Bluesky showed all replies from people you follow in the home feed)
All in all, it's serious progress, and builds on their previous work with reply permissions. It'll be interesting to see how #mastodon's upcoming quote boost feature compares.
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The latest governance report:Although also, according to fedidb's stats: 9.5 million users in February 2023, 10.4 million today. So there was a huge spike in late 2022/early 2023 with the Twitter acquisition, a smaller spike in June/July 2024 (when Twitter put in rate limiting and Reddit declared war on their moderators) but since then things are fairly flat.
Also according to fedidb the number of monthly active users has been decreasing for the last year, and is now < 1 million. So fedi's literal organic growth is still somewhat mythological.
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Can I bridge from NodeBB to Bluesky?@jon Hmm, I didn't get the notification. ANd when I look at the message, @bsky.brid.gy isn't a link to the account which is kind of weird. What happens if I reply?
I'll tag @jdp23 as well just for luck.
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I'm looking at setting up an instance with allow-list federation, and am wondering if anybody's got good suggestions on how to make it work well. A couple of specific questions:@julian Yes, it is, and I realize that, thanks! Did you see db0's suggestion at https://hachyderm.io/@db0/112873675233486067 ?
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I'm looking at setting up an instance with allow-list federation, and am wondering if anybody's got good suggestions on how to make it work well. A couple of specific questions:Yes, if it's interesting enough I'll certiainly write it up.
I wasn't planning on adding individual accounts to the allowlist, as well as the cumbersomeness I don't think the technology exists to do that in the underlying system. So that leaves a problem with big instances like .social, putting them on an allowlist will lead to a lot of drive-bys but leaving them off cuts a lot of very reasonable people out of the conversation. In general though I think instance blocking only gets you so far, so it makes sense to defer that issue to approaches like reply-limiting and better control over whether to accept followers -- or @thisismissem's "firewall" model allowing much more flexibility than blocking/limiting.
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I'm looking at setting up an instance with allow-list federation, and am wondering if anybody's got good suggestions on how to make it work well. A couple of specific questions:@noiob @thisismissem @julian @Lady @ophiocephalic you all seem like folks who might have some thoughts about this -- https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/112873026679067520 has the deets
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I'm looking at setting up an instance with allow-list federation, and am wondering if anybody's got good suggestions on how to make it work well. A couple of specific questions:I'm looking at setting up an instance with allow-list federation, and am wondering if anybody's got good suggestions on how to make it work well. A couple of specific questions:
what to use as an initial allow list? Since awoo.space has (as far as I know) the most experience with allow-list federation, I might just start with theirs and augment it with some instances hosting accounts I have connections with
how to let people from instances not on the initial allow list request to be added? A cryptpad form could make sense, but how to make it discoverable?
@erincandescent's suggestion of "Letters of Introduction" (in A better moderation system is possible for the social web) seems to me like it could make a lot of sense at the instance level as well, and @db0's "feeler network" idea in Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model? is also an interesting approach. Are there ways to experiment with these on top of an allow-list system?