Laurens Hof

Fediverse Report – #122 Fediverse Report is now Connected Places! You can read more about this in the announcement post. For this week’s news, Mastodon announces and retracts a new ToS for mastodon.social, Threads continues their streak of implementing ActivityPub in the most confusing way possible, and Wanderer is a new fediverse platform for sharing your hiking and biking trails. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!The News Mastodon introduced a new Terms of Service for the mastodon.social and mastodon.online instances, and then retracted the new ToS after criticism from the community about some of the conditions that are in the ToS. Mastodon announced the new ToS with a summary email that explained that the new ToS would “explicitly prohibit the scraping of user data for unauthorized purposes, e.g. archival or large language model (LLM) training. We want to make it clear that training LLMs on the data of Mastodon users on our instances, is not permitted.” It would also set a minimum age of 16 for everyone, and clarified rights regarding content licensing. There were multiple points of criticism with the ToS: It made the IP license grant irrevocable, and not even deleting the post or account would revoke the IP license. It had a binding arbitration waiver, which tech writer Cory Doctorow argued hard against. To whom do these terms actually apply? Federation is complicated, and the legal framework for how federation interacts with user content rights is untested. Two different posts (1, 2) go into some of open questions regarding how the ToS interacts with federation. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko noted in the Mastodon Discord that “the lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms”, which points to the challenge of writing a ToS for federated platforms. Rochko also said that he has taken up on Doctorow’s offer to have lawyers of the Electronic Frontier Foundation get involved. The first two concerns listed above seem fairly straightforward to handle. However the question of how Terms of Service apply in a federated network seem more complicated to resolve, as it is unclear if there is even a broad agreement on how the ToS should function in a federated context, let alone how to translate that into legalese. Meta, the company that relentlessly removes friction from their social apps to maximise engagement, has moved fediverse posts on Threads to a separate ‘fediverse’ feed. Posts from fediverse accounts will only appear in this new fediverse feed, and will not appear in the regular timelines on Threads. You can not reply on posts from the fediverse with your Threads account, Threads engineer Peter Cottle says that this feature (lol) is an ‘eventual goal’. The fediverse feed on Threads also shows top-level posts, not replies and reposts. Cottle says that this is to create a ‘cleaner product experience’. You can now also search for fediverse accounts in Threads, before this update users had to wait for a post by a fediverse account showed up in their feed so they could click on the profile and hit follow. David Imel from the MKBHD and Waveform channels asked Cottle about Threads’ plans for account portability, noting that this was an important point made by Threads’ Adam Mosseri. Cottle says that this is “top of mind for us”, but that they do not have a concrete timeline for this. Threads’ fediverse integration is also still not available in the EU, with no clear indication if or when it will launch in the region. Wanderer is a platform for managing and sharing your hiking, running and biking trails. It is self-hosted and open source, and the latest update for Wanderer has added ActivityPub, making it decentralised and federated as well. There is a demo instance of Wanderer available to try out what the platform actually looks like. Wanderer also has the option to import trails from other platforms like Strava and Komoot. Wanderer does face a familiar challenge that goes for a new type of platforms on the fediverse however: how does it bootstrap itself into becoming a community? Mastodon shared an update on their strategy for 2025. The organisation said they are still working on new non-profit organisation in Europe that will own the Mastodon assets. When Mastodon announced this in January 2025 they also said that the current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down and work on product strategy. The latest update by Mastodon does not share any news on a potential new CEO. Growth his one of the three key pillars of Mastodon’s strategy for 2025, and they are working on making Mastodon more accessible for general users, as well as some features that other organisations have asked for, such as greater customisation for instances. Regarding financial sustainability Mastodon said that they are working on offering additional commercial service, and that they’ll announce more on that soon. Related to Mastodon growing into a more mature and sustainable organisation, they also announced this week that Mastodon is registered as a digital public good. This registration is part of the Digital Public Good Alliance, a large multi-stakeholder organisation. In a speech during the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies‘s Open Source Week, Mastodon Board of Director member Hannah Aubry explains what it means for Mastodon to meet the DPG Standard: “adhering to privacy best practices, doing no harm, and contributing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. And it aids us in our mission to empower public institutions to speak directly to their citizens and constituents, without the filter of a corporation.” PieFed is officially out of beta, and has released the 1.0 version. The Reddit-like platform has grown significantly over recent weeks. Popular Lemmy instance Lemm.ee announced they would be shutting down, and PieFed has been one of the main recipients of users and communities looking for a new place. Lemmy app Voyager is also in the process of adding support for PieFed to the app. The growth of PieFed in recent weeks is instructive for understanding how community growth within the fediverse actually happens. PieFed has been around for over a year, with a compelling feature set (especially regarding moderation, as well as clustering communities in feeds and topics), but had a low adoption rate. It took an exogenous event for people to actually take the effort to give PieFed a serious consideration and migrate away from Lemmy to a different platform. Framasoft has successfully completed their crowdfunding campaign, raising over 75k EUR. The large majority of the funds are for further development of the PeerTubeapp , such as playing video on background, adding support for live streaming, and managing videos within the app. The final part of the campaign funds is for the support of the Framasoft organisation itself. Framasoft says that most new features will likely be released late this year or next year. Live broadcast is currently already in development and is scheduled to launch “fairly quickly”.In Other News Wafrn is a Tumblr-like platform with native support for both ActivityPub and ATProto. The platform developers have released an Android app for Wafrn on F-Droid. Manyfold is a fediverse platform for hosting and sharing 3D printer files, providing an alternative to platforms like Makerworld and Thingiverse. Manyfold was already available for self-hosting, and the 3dprint.social is the first publicly available instance that is now open for joining as well. Bonfire is fediverse (micro)blogging platform that is getting close to release, and the developers are hosting online install parties to help people get started setting up their own instance. FediThreat is a newly announced open source content moderation API for the fediverse by Pixelfed and Loops developer Daniel Supernault. There is not much publicly known yet on how FediThreat actually works. The project is scheduled for July. The Event Federation project shares what they’ll be working on in the future to make events more accessible within the fediverse.The Links The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix) – Tim Chambers ORCID and the Fediverse: What Can We Do with Public Information? – Julian Fietkau New Look, Faster Blocks in ActivityPub 6.0.0 delightful fediverse experience is a highly extensive overview of fediverse softwares. This week’s fediverse software updates. #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #122

Mastodon announces and retracts a new ToS for mastodon.social, Threads continues their streak of implementing ActivityPub in the most confusing way...

Bluesky Report – #121 Media discourse about how Bluesky is dying, a new type of moderation relay by Blacksky, and backing up your ATProto account with bsky.storage. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!The News US and UK media outlets (1, 2, 3, 4) have published various opinion articles these weeks about how Bluesky is dying, a narrative well-supported by the fact US Vice President JD Vance has joined Bluesky this week. The opinion pieces, as well as Vance joining Bluesky, illustrates that Bluesky has grown to the point where it is both part of mainstream culture, as well as one of the new battlegrounds for the culture wars. Bluesky does have an issue with retention rates, with the monthly active user numbers dropping by around 30% in the last three months. While this drop in user numbers is held up as the reason for the ‘Bluesky is dying’ discourse, the main frustration in the articles is about Bluesky, culture and audience. Sarah Perez wrote a response for TechCrunch, arguing that the main point of Bluesky is the open network and technology that it enables. While the protocol indeed matters, the main conflict is about the social capital and culture that Bluesky is creating, and who has influence over it. The impact on current culture and politics that Bluesky is having is illustrated by Wired’s coverage of the Tesla Takedown protest, documenting how a single post on Bluesky had led to widespread continuing protests. Blacksky has build a moderation relay, which takes all moderation actions by all labelers on the network, and bundles them into a single relay output. As Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser explains: “With this update, folks building custom feeds can leverage moderation actions from the whole network more easily in their algorithms. 🤖 Wanna exclude twitter screenshots, transphobia, AND anti-blackness from your feed? rsky-relay is now a one-stop-shop for all of those labels.” Blacksky also has reached their fundraising goal, and they will launch a Blacksky app. Some of the features for the Blacksky app will be the ability to set defaults for the Blacksky community, such as using the Blacksky moderation labeler by default and having the Blacksky Trending feed as default. Blacksky is also requesting feedback from the community on what they want from the app. Bsky.storage is a new service that allows people to store an hourly backup of their ATProto PDS. It also can generate a recovery key that allows people to take back control over their account even when they have lost access to that account or Bluesky becomes unavailable. Bsky.storage is made by Storacha, which stores the data on a decentralised storage network with IPFS and Filecoin. ATProto gives people the ability to take full control over their account’s PDS, and it feels like the design space that this allows has only just starting to be explored. Bsky.storage is such an example, the ability to always take back control of your account even when the service provider goes offline or becomes adversarial, is something genuinely new for the space of social networks. Publishing platform Leaflet has added the ability subscribe to publications via ATProto. Writers can create Bluesky posts with every new post, and when the audience subscribes to a publication, Leaflet generates a custom Bluesky feed for them that contains only the posts from all Leaflet publications they subscribed to. Leaflet is further exploring how to use the social graph for more ways to keep up to date with Leaflet. They are also working on email subscriptions, placing it in closer competition with other newsletter platforms such as Substack and Ghost. On the topic of email subscriptions, subs.blue is a new tool to create email notifications on ATProto. It allows people to create an email channel. When other people subscribe to that channel, they get email notifications for posts in that channel, on the email address that they registered their ATProto account with. OAuth remains one of the more challenging technical parts of ATProto to implement. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy posted an article that explains some of the design considerations that the team has made in their OAuth implementation design. Bluesky PBC also shared some of the improvements to OAuth that they are making. Relevant for non-developers: the time it takes before you need to log in again to a client is now two weeks, where it used to be one week. For developers that do use OAuth, check out the entire post. UFOs is a new dashboard and API for exploring the ATmosphere, measuring the activity of all the lexicons on the network. In practical terms, this gives visibility into which apps are used on the network, and how often. It shows unusual activity (such as blocks on Bluesky being up 100% day over day), as well as giving insight into what other apps are used. It shows how incredible dominant Bluesky is over the ATmosphere, and how much of a hard time other apps have getting traction. UFOs also gives an indication of how mass adoption of the open social web has some interesting side effects as well, such as that statistics about user behaviour becomes publicly visible for everyone. UFOs also has an API, and it is part of microcosm, a larger collection of projects by developer @phil that build on the aggregate data of the ATProto firehose. Smol.life is a new fork of the Bluesky web client, that has additional integrations with other ATProto apps. It has a section for games, where you can play Skyrdle and at://2048. These are two web-based games that have ATProto integrations, where you can keep track of your scores on your own PDS. Smol.life also has an integration with linkat.blue, a Linktree-clone on ATProto. This allows you to see someone’s linkat links while viewing their Bluesky profile on smol.life. atproto-os is a virtual desktop that runs in your web browser, where the current state of your desktop (which applications are you currently running, etc) is stored on ATProto in your PDS. It uses Open Web Desktop, a larger project for running desktops on the web. As the project says: “Each window with its metadata can eventually be broadcast via #atproto Jetstream to update real-time data about whoever is on your desktop”. What a use case would be for broadcasting your current desktop applications to the entire public internet is somewhat less clear to me however.The Links Custom feed creator platform BlueskyFeeds.com is winding down due to the complexity of maintaining the project. ATProto-powered publishing platform Leaflet writes about their tech stack. Featureparity.blue keeps an overview of feature parity between Bluesky and X. Git collaboration platform Tangled now has a commit tracker. Bluesky will now warn users when they click on links that are known to be malicious. Film review app Popsky can now automatically sync with your Letterboxd account. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky. #bluesky

fediversereport.com

Bluesky Report – #121

Media discourse about how Bluesky is dying, a new type of moderation relay by Blacksky, and backing up your ATProto account with bsky.storage.

Fediverse Report – #121 Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum available, and bridging to Bluesky op a per-server basis. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!The News Fediforum has published the videos of the keynotes and the software demos. For a list of all the demos, you can check out the website. Some thoughts on some of the demoes that stood out to me: The keynote by Christine Lemmer-Webber talks about how the social media style of the 2010s is no longer good enough. With this, she refers to both the fediverse as well as Bluesky. Lemmer-Webber makes the case we live in an age of surveillance, and both Bluesky and the fediverse do not meet the need for safety and privacy that comes with that. She says that shame is not an effective way to get people to use better platforms, and that we need to bring joy to the new platforms. Lemmer-Webber is now working on different protocols with the Spritely Institute, that use Object Capabilities. I’ll go into more detail on that once Spritely gets closer to public usage, but to hugely oversimplify: with Object Capabilities, you can enforce who has access to your data that you send out. Seeing one of the co-authors of ActivityPub actively advocating for further development of new open protocols indicates to what extend the space of the open social web is still in active development. BadgeFed is a platform for issues badges using the Open Badges standard and ActivityPub protocol, where the badges can later be verified cryptographically. There are some interesting parallels with how people are developing badges on ATProto, and it seems to me that both networks are now in the stage that there are solid proofs that you can build systems for credentials on decentralised protocols. The next stage is seeing how people will start using these new systems. For developers: ActivityFuzz is an upcoming project from Darius Kazemi, and builds upon the Fediverse Schema Observatory. These tools give a much greater insight into how all the different fediverse projects have implemented ActivityPub in practice, and shows all the differences. This makes building fediverse platforms that are compatible with other platforms more accessible. Gobo is a client that allows people to post to multiple different platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky. One of the challenges with cross-posting tools is that these platforms have different character limits, which Gobo has some nice ways of setting the cutoff-point for a longer text thats different for each platform. Encyclia is a recently-announced project to make ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) records connected to the fediverse, with the demo providing a first view of what this looks like in practice. The Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm takes your Mastodon timeline and uses various customisable algorithms to create custom clusterings for the post, allowing you to sort your timeline into various different topics. The team implementing the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has posted a blog with a roadmap what they are working on. The team has plans to majorly expand the plugin, and make WordPress a full member of the fediverse. So far, the interaction has mainly focused on publishing to the fediverse, which will now be expanded to also be able to follow, read and interact with the rest of the fediverse directly via a WordPress account. The main feature will be a reader experience, which is effectively a timeline feed within WordPress. It places WordPress into even more direct competition with Ghost, who also offers a timeline reader as part of their ActivityPub integration. The Social Web Foundation released a draft of their work to implement end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging over ActivityPub. Their plan uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS), a protocol for encrypting messages, that is designed to be used in combination with other protocols for sending the encrypted messages. One of the parts that is missing for ActivityPub is the ability to send real private messages to each other, and an integration with MLS can help with that. It might take a while before it gets there, this first version of the draft is now ready for proof-of-concept implementations and interoperability testing. Bridgy Fed, the bridging software that connects ActivityPub with ATProto, has gotten an update where server admins can opt-in to the bridge for their entire server. For some context: Bridgy Fed was originally designed to be opt-out, meaning that every fediverse account could automatically be bridged to the Bluesky network and visa versa. After massive pushback from the fediverse community, this was changed to opt-in, where people have to actively take action to have their account be connected to the other network. The debate laid bare to what extend the fediverse struggled with being a decentralised network, where decentralised means that there are different communities with values that at times are incompatible with each other. Instead the debate got largely framed in terms of what the value (opt-in or opt-out) should be for the entire network. However, with this latest update individual communities can now be independently decide for themselves if they want to be connected to other protocols by default.The Links Bonfire has added the ability to create a separate ‘Events’ feed for Mobilizon and Gancio events. Canvas is a yearly fediverse event where people can paint on a shared canvas, one pixel at a time, for 48 hours. This year’s Canvas event will start on July 12th. Mastodon has made some tweaks to smaller screen layouts on web. Fediverse Support Line #2 – Migrating – FediHost Podcast. Ghost talks about how they are making all replies show up. This week’s fediverse software updates. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below: #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #121

Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum av...

ATmosphere Report – #120 WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing digital badges and attestations, and more. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!The News The Linux Foundation has announced FAIR, a package manager project for WordPress. It is “a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” To achieve this independent and federated repository of tools for the WordPress ecosystem, FAIR uses ATProto underneath. FAIR has build their own protocol, the FAIR protocol, on top of ATProto. It uses DID PLC as an identifier for the packages, and ATProto for indexing and discoverability. As the project has just launched and some of the final parts are still being ironed out there are no packages yet that use the FAIR system. As such I cannot give yet a good context for what discoverability of WordPress packages over ATProto actually looks like. The chaos of the last year around the management of WordPress shows a need for decentralised repository of packages and plugins, and FAIR does already show that ATProto can be much more than only a microblogging network. Gnosco is a new tool for digital badges and attestations on ATProto. It acts as a secure middleman between the application that issues the badge and your PDS. This allows applications to create a signed record to award a badge of attestation for a user. This badge is then not yet placed into the user’s PDS, but instead held in escrow by Gnosco. Users can then log into Gnosco with their ATProto account and review the badges. If they approve, the signed badge then added to their own PDS. Gnosco took me a while to wrap my head around what the tool is and what it does, but it tackles the following problem. Badges and awards and other attestations need to be accepted and signed by both the issuer and the receiver. But not for all attestations that are issued it is known in advance if the user actually wants to receive this attestation and store it on their PDS. So there needs to be a way for the user to accept or reject a badge or attestation that is issued. Gnosco provides this interface that is platform-neutral, where users can accept and reject any attestation or badge. Photo-sharing platform Grain now has their own moderation system on their own infrastructure. Grain is building a social photo-sharing network on ATProto that is separate from Bluesky, using their own lexicon. One reason why image-sharing platforms so far tend to have been alternate Bluesky clients is that means that the client does not have to be responsible for moderation. For Grain, the goal is to build their own independent social network, and thus their own moderation system is mandatory as well. The Grain developer also released a stand-alone app to embed Grain galleries on your own website. Blacksky is proposing to make a soft-fork of the Bluesky client for the Blacksky community. With their own forked app, Blacksky can set some default values that benefit their community, such as setting the default feed to the Blacksky Trending feed, and setting the Blacksky moderation as default moderation. The organisation is looking for 2500 USD in recurring monthly donations, and they are close to reaching that goal. ATProto chatroom app Roomy has released the another alpha version. Besides offering public chatrooms, Roomy continues to experiment with features for collecting and aggregating chat messages into longer-lived places for text. In this update they included ‘boards’, where people can create simple markdown pages as well as collect ‘threads’ that are pulled out of the chat log. Roomy is on the bleeding edge of technology when it comes to using ATProto, by combining it with Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT). The Roomy blogs go into more detail on why they are building the architecture this way, but the current practical problem is that CRDTs are new enough that what Roomy needs is still in development.Tech updates and news ATStudio is a new developer-focused tool that allows people to interact with ATProto. It allows you to “experiment with the protocol and debug code paths by making direct XRPC requests and executing @ATProtocol SDK methods using the integrated dashboard.” Boost Blue is a new Bluesky client for Android and iOS, that has a few in-demand features that the main Bluesky client is missing, such as repost muting by user, drafts and bookmarks. Bluesky’s latest update adds a ‘share’ button on every post, and an announced update to get notification on likes on reposts is pushed back to the next update which contains more notification filters. An update by Skylight on how they are building their algorithm. Work on the Deer client is paused for the summer. Graze announced they are backing Party Starter with a 1k USD grant, a “toolkit for creating short-lived, location-aware events”. Not much else is known yet about Party Starter. A “minor change to the PLC Directory service, with the aim of expanding compatibility with non-atproto apps and services”. A tool to run raffles on Bluesky posts. A new PDS browser with a retro interface.The Links How to use Bluesky to grow your brand – a comprehensive guide for organisations on how they can use Bluesky. Feel the ATmosphere: it’s 1995 all over again – a writeup of last month’s Ahoy! conference Alumni Ventures is one of the companies who invested in Bluesky’s series A last October. They’ll be hosting a webinar next week on why they invested in Bluesky. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky. #bluesky

fediversereport.com

ATmosphere Report – #120

WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing digital badges and attestations, and more.

Fediverse Report – #120 Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!FediForum and related announcements The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week. Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months. Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story. Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.Shutdown of Lemmy and opportunity for PieFed Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server. The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.Platform updates Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’. Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May. PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app. Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.The Links I Posted to Mastodon 1 Mile Away from an Internet Connection – Tom Casavant Backfilling Conversations: Two Major Approaches – Julian Lam The Power of a Niche – FediHost This week’s fediverse software updates. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below: #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #120

Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts ...

Bounce, and how the Open Social Web is continually changing Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay that has been not been published elsewhere yet. This is a republication of last week’s essay I send out, slightly modified and expanded. If you’re interested, subscribe below to get all the updates directly in your inbox every week! When we talk about emerging technologies, especially social networks, we tend to seek clear definitions and boundaries. The question ‘what is the fediverse?’ quickly becomes ‘which platforms belong and which don’t?’ It indicates that definitions of terms like ‘Open Social Web’ and ‘fediverse’ are by their very nature contested. This theme, that the definition of what the open social web is continually contested, is of the core ideas behind a presentation I gave last week during FediForum. When the organisers asked me to host a session on ‘What’s New in the Open Social Web’ for newcomers to the space, I initially considered taking a straightforward approach, talking about software, and cool news apps people have been building. But I think that would have missed the trees for the forest. For people who want to get up to speed on what’s been happening in the space of the Open Social Web in the last half year or so, it seems much more helpful to understand how ideas about this space have evolved. The software and apps do not exist in a vacuum, but are built as a response to how people view the Open Social Web. To understand the open social web, the fediverse, the ATmosphere and the entire cluster of loosely related open protocols, platforms and software, I think the best way is to see it as a set of contested ideas. The large majority of people who are involved in this “thing” of the open social web have some shared idea about that open protocols and open social networks are important. But once you zoom in a little bit more, it is easy to see that there are a wide set of diverging opinions on what the open social web is, what is included, and how it should work. Furthermore, these different opinions are not static, but change over time. A clear example of this is what I recently wrote about the concept of decentralisation, and how people’s viewpoints on this have shifted recently. But the open social web is not just purely vibes and opinions, it is also shaped by technology and software. Technology sets the boundaries within opinions can be contested. Sometimes, technology comes along that changes what’s possible, and expands the understanding of what the open social web is. Bounce is a great example, of how a new technology changes and expands the contested boundaries of what the Open Social Web is Bounce is a newly announced tool by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, which allows people to move accounts across different networks and protocols. With Bounce, people can move their social network graph from Bluesky to ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed. This represents a significant technological development that was not possible before, as Bluesky uses a different protocol. For more information on how Bounce works, check out A New Social’s blog post. Bounce is one of those tools that is meaningful not only for the technical capabilities, but also for how it changes what people understand the space of the open social web to be. Up until now, the fediverse and the ATmosphere were two different places, only partially connected via Bridgy Fed. With the ability to transfer a social graph across different protocols, these two separate places move much closer together. One interesting property of a tool like Bounce is that it the existence of the tool matters more than people actually using the tool. A major part of building healthier social platforms is the ability to have a “credible exit”. That means that people can leave the platform if they want to, and take the valuable parts (their social graph and their data) with them. Bounce expands the ability to have a credible exit from Bluesky. One challenge that Bluesky PBC faces is that they’ve build the AT Protocol to give their users a credible exit to other apps using the protocol, but these hypothetical other apps are slow to emerge. Now users do have the possibility for a credible exit to another protocol, where there are multiple other communities and platforms to choose from. What makes this space of the open social web, the fediverse and the ATmosphere so interesting to me is how it is continually changing and evolving. And with the ability to move your social graph between protocols, how we can understand this space has changed yet again. This is why I framed my update on Whats New on the Open Social Web in terms of contested and evolving ideas. The most significant developments in this space are not always new software or apps, they are also shifts in how we think about what these networks are and how they operate. Bounce is an example of both: it presents a new technology, the ability to transfer a social graph across protocols, but it also changes how people understand the ATmosphere and fediverse to be two separate places. Choosing a platform is becoming less of a permanent choice, as the social graph you build becomes more portable. Tools like Bounce suggest the direction of the Open Social Web is less about specific protocols, and more about expanding user agency.

fediversereport.com

Bounce, and how the Open Social Web is continually changing

The Open Social Web is an ongoing debate about what open social networks should look like. New tools like Bounce change how we think about this space.

ATmosphere Report – #118 Making custom feed building blocks with Surf, transfer your account to a new PDS in style with ATP Airport, and Bluesky expands their verification system. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!The News ATP Airport is a new tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS, created by Spark developer Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg. Migrating to a different PDS was already possible, but required technical know-how. ATP Airport makes the process much more accessible, with an easy-to-use interface and striking design. What’s notable about the design of ATP Airport is that it takes a story-telling approach to explain and frame what is a fairly technically sophisticated operation. Moving a user’s repo with their social networking data from one server to another is an operation that has no clear equivalent in the current social networking landscape. This makes the process hard to explain to people: knowing what a repo transfer to a different PDS does, and why someone would want to do it, requires a significant amount of knowledge. ATP Airport is an interesting attempt to make this technical process more accessible, by using an analogy of airport transfers. Making the concepts of ATProto, and the new affordances that regular users now have access to will require a lot more education and explanation from a wide variety of actors. ATP Airport already refers to an upcoming new feature: the ability to set your own rotation keys for your PDS. This is another example of a complex technical feature, that requires technical know-how both in execution, as well as in understanding why a user would want to do such a thing. Storytelling and analogies to make features such as PDS transfers and PLC rotation keys legible are sorely needed, and ATP Airport is a cool way of making it more accessible. Bluesky is expanding their verification system, and people can now apply to be verified. Bluesky says that “notable and authentic accounts can apply for verification”. The eligibility guidelines for notability are quite broad, and each account is considered on a per-case basis. Bluesky also expanded their list of Trusted Verifiers, adding another set of news organisations as Trusted Verifiers. Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee describes one of the design goals of the verification system as “a healthy digital society should distribute power!” So far, Bluesky has limited their distribution of power over who should be verified to only American news organisations. When the system launched last month, I wrote how the system of Trusted Verifiers simply moves the power further up the chain. The way that Bluesky PBC limits Trusted Verifiers to a single specific type of news organisations, shows the limited extent that power is distributed so far when it comes to verification. I wrote the following about Surf this week’s fediverse newsletter, republished here as it is just as relevant for the ATProto community. Surf is a new app by Flipboard, that describes itself as a browser for the open social web. The app allows people to build and browse custom feeds, that take in content from across the open social web. It can combine Mastodon posts with Bluesky posts, as well as RSS and more, into a single feed. With their most recent update, Surf has created Starter Sets for building custom feeds. Starter Sets are organised around various popular themes, like News, Tech or Sports. Within these themes, people can choose from a large variety of data sources to get started with building their own custom feeds. These custom feed sources can be from across the open social web and are modular. This means that a list of Mastodon accounts can be combined with a Bluesky custom feed to create a new single custom feed that consists of both data source. These custom feeds can also be published to Bluesky, so people who are not using the Surf app can also view these feeds. Surf also now offers a variety of tools to manage the content of a custom feed. For example, a feed can be customised to include or exclude reposts, replies or adult content. There are also options to filter out posts about politics from the feed. The ability to filter about posts about Elon Musk is surely a popular feature as well. Surf categorises all posts via algorithmic clustering, which gives the ability to limit posts in a feed to a certain topic. This means that you can add an account to a feed, but only their posts related to the specified topic will be displayed. The app is currently in closed beta, and Flipboard is gradually onboarding more people from the waiting list.In Other News Graze, a tool to build and monetise custom feeds, recently started Graze Grants, where they fund 5 projects on ATProto with 1000 USD to grow the network. This week, Graze announced the first two recipients of these grants, SkyShrooms and Tomo. SkyShrooms is a mushroom-themed trading card and battle game built on ATProto. Tomo is an old-school guestbook that can be added to personal websites, powered by ATProto. Creator Ms Boba has regularly been live streaming her work on creating such a guest book as well. ATProto video app Spark has shared some of the features they are working on. They include a video editor, duets, a sound library, live streaming and more. It is an ambitious set of features that Spark is working on. Spark is not a video client for Bluesky, comparable to Skylight, instead they use their own data format (lexicon). Using a different lexicon than Bluesky is a tradeoff; it requires the app to build more infrastructure themselves, be responsible for moderation, and lose some of the interoperability with people using the Bluesky app. However, the planned features shown by Spark here also show the value doing so, it allows Spark to build a set of features that would not be possible as a Bluesky video client. Wormhole is a browser extension for ATProto that allows you to easily switch between apps while viewing the same data. If you have a post open in Bluesky, the extension allows you seamlessly to open that same post in a variety of other ATProto apps, from PDS browsers like atp.tools and PDSls to PLC log viewers like boat.kelinci and more. UFOs is a new tool and API which provides data and insight on how all lexicons are used on the network. It is made by the creator of microcosm, which they describe as ‘building blocks for ATProto’. One of these other building blocks is constellation, which keeps track of all links on the entire ATProto network, and the network consists now of over 5 billion backlinks. Links in this context means any form of interaction that happens on the network, as any interaction consists of a backlink to another piece of data. UFOs is effectively a filter on all of these data, to show which data types (and thus, which applications) are being used on the network. BlueArk is a tool to import Twitter/X posts into Bluesky with the original data. BlueArk tried to build a small business around the tool, as it was launched during the period in late 2024 where Bluesky saw a massive inflow of users. As this inflow has slowed down significantly, BlueArk says they are entering maintenance-only mode, as they cannot cover cost anymore. The service will remain available for the time being. A Working Group for a Commons European Moderation Relay has started, with the goal of figuring out how to build DSA-compliant moderation infrastructure. One major challenge for people and organisations that are currently considering is figuring out what compliance with European regulation like the DSA looks like. There is uncertainty both from a legal perspective (for example, how does the DSA apply to an infrastructure part like a common open relay) as well as technical practicalities (what is the best way to handle takedown requests for independent PDS hosting providers). Bluesky in the media: A podcast interview with Bluesky’s head of Trust & Safety Aaron Rodericks, in which Rodericks talks more about how to make decisions during phases of rapid growth with limited resources. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber spoke at the Web Summit conference, VOD here.Tech and tools Skyswipe is a new video client for Bluesky, that gives a TikTok-like interface. The app is available for beta testing on iOS Testflight. The developer says that there are no current plans for an Android version. A demo implementation of creating group chats on Bluesky chats. It works by creating a bot account that forwards the messages between all the different participants of the group chat. The PDS implementation in Rust by the Blacksky team now has full admin capabilities, similar to the Bluesky implementation. A new tool for ‘like’ statistics, and see which accounts have ‘liked’ the most of your posts, and which accounts have you ‘liked’ the most. A new tool to handle PDS admin via a web interface. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky. #bluesky

fediversereport.com

ATmosphere Report – #118

Making custom feed building blocks with Surf, transfer your account to a new PDS in style with ATP Airport, and Bluesky expands their verification ...

Fediverse Report – #118 The Surf app goes even deeper on building custom feeds for the fediverse and Bluesky, , a crowdfunding campaign for the PeerTube mobile app, and updates to the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!The News Surf is a new app by Flipboard, that describes itself as a browser for the open social web. The app allows people to build and browse custom feeds, that take in content from across the open social web. It can combine Mastodon posts with Bluesky posts, as well as RSS and more, into a single feed. With their most recent update, Surf has created Starter Sets for building custom feeds. Starter Sets are organised around various popular themes, like News, Tech or Sports. Within these themes, people can choose from a large variety of data sources to get started with building their own custom feeds. These custom feed sources can be from across the open social web and are modular. This means that a list of Mastodon accounts can be combined with a Bluesky custom feed to create a new single custom feed that consists of both data source. These custom feeds can also be published to Bluesky, so people who are not using the Surf app can also view these feeds. Surf also now offers a variety of tools to manage the content of a custom feed. For example, a feed can be customised to include or exclude reposts, replies or adult content. There are also options to filter out posts about politics from the feed. The ability to filter about posts about Elon Musk is surely a popular feature as well. Surf categorises all posts via algorithmic clustering, which gives the ability to limit posts in a feed to a certain topic. This means that you can add an account to a feed, but only their posts related to the specified topic will be displayed. The app is currently in closed beta, and Flipboard is gradually onboarding more people from the waiting list. PeerTube is starting a crowdfunding campaign for its mobile app. The first version of the PeerTube app was officially launched earlier this month. PeerTube is developed by Framasoft, a French non-profit organisation that builds a variety of open source software tools. The crowdfunding campaign is a way to raise money for the organisation, and also provides a way “to gauge public enthusiasm for the mobile application and the PeerTube project in general”. Some of the features that PeerTube wants to work on for its app are the ability to play videos in background, casting videos to TVs, managing channels and accounts directly from the app. Livestreaming from mobile is also being worked on, although Framasoft says they do not expect to release this in 2025. Framasoft says that these features will be worked on regardless of whether the fundraising goals are met, and that otherwise money from the generic Framasoft budget will be used, as a way to show their dedication towards PeerTube. Mastodon has announced some upcoming new features that help server admins with the legal side. Server admins will be able to set a Terms of Service (ToS), besides server rules and a privacy policy. Server admins will also be able to set the server rules into multiple different languages. There will also be the option to set a minimum age requirement for sign-up for servers. Having a ToS is standard fare for any online platform, and multiple countries require by law that platforms have these. Europe’s DSA is fairly explicit about this, which states: “Providers of intermediary services shall include information on any restrictions that they impose in relation to the use of their service in respect of information provided by the recipients of the service, in their terms and conditions.” In that context, it is high time that Mastodon has added the ability for servers to set a ToS. Mastodon also says that they will provide a template for a ToS that other servers can use if they so desire. A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, has launched a dedicated page for people to manage their account bridging. Bridgy Fed is a piece of software that allows people to ‘bridge’ their account across multiple protocols. This allows people on the fediverse to interact with people on Bluesky (using AT Protocol). For this, people need to manually opt-in their accounts to be bridged to other networks (largely due to cultural reasons from the fediverse communities). Up until now, doing so was a fairly confusing process that involved manually following other accounts. With the new update, people can log in to Bridgy Fed with the account they want to bridge, and simply turn it on or off. It also has an easier option to update the handles for Mastodon accounts that are bridged to Bluesky. For example, by default my Mastodon account on Bluesky can be found at @laurenshof.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy, which is a fairly cumbersome handle, to put it mildly. At the settings page I can now change it to any handle I want, similar to how any Bluesky account can change their handle. A New Social is also launching a Patreon as they are working towards financial sustainability, with plans to launch merch soon as well. Ibis is a federated wiki platform that is currently in development, made by nutomic, one of the Lemmy creators. With the most recent update, Ibis wiki articles are now compatible with Lemmy, and can be viewed directly from Lemmy. One of the driving reasons for making Ibis is that nutomic views Wikipedia as untrustworthy. He also says that other centralised Wikipedia alternatives have failed to gain traction, and sees federation as a solution for this. For now, Ibis has the same problem of getting traction. Tvmarks is a new self-hosted platform to keep track of shows you’ve watched. It gives you a clean overview of shows you are watching, which ones you’ve completed, and provide reviews and ratings per episode. This information can be federated via ActivityPub, allowing others to see what you’ve been watching.The Links WriteFreely creator Matt Baer shares some of his thoughts and plans for the write.as platform for 2025. This week’s fediverse software updates. Upcoming photo sharing platform Vernissage gives an update on the work and design considerations for the last month. A thread on how the name ‘ActivityPub’ came to be. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below: #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #118

The Surf app goes even deeper on building custom feeds for the fediverse and Bluesky, , a crowdfunding campaign for the PeerTube mobile app, and up...

Fediverse Report – #117 Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.The News PieFed, a link aggregator platform for the fediverse, has made some interesting updates recently. It is one of the first (if not the first) platform to add support for Passkeys to the platform. It has also added flair (community-specific tags) to posts, that are federated as well. PieFed has also made a image hashing service available that can be used by any fediverse platform. This service generates a unique fingerprint of every image, and that fingerprint can be used to identity other posts that use the same or fairly similar images. This can be used for content moderation, PieFed has a demo video available on PeerTube showcasing how it can find and take down multiple posts that all contain a similar image. FediForum has announced three keynote speakers and published a tentative agenda. On Thursday, June 5, Ian Forrester will give the opening keynote. Forrester has been a driving factor for the BBC R&D department to get the broadcaster to experiment with a Mastodon server. Later on Thursday, Cory Doctorow will give a keynote. On Friday June 6, Christine Lemmer-Webber will give the opening keynote. On Thursday, I will be hosting a session on Whats New at the Open Social Web, where I’ll be going over all the news and events that have happened since 2025. The branch of fediverse software that consists of Friendica, Hubzilla and more, is now 15 years old. The main developer Mike Macgirvin lists the large number of features that the platforms have, including groups, nomadic identity, comment controls, and much more. When it comes to the large variety of features, no fediverse platform comes anywhere close to what this branch of platforms offer. The software platforms have managed to create their own small self-sustaining communities. While a number of the software platforms such as Streams do not publish any statistics, extrapolating data from what some servers running Hubzilla and Friendica publish, together I would estimate the active accounts to be less than 10k MAU. Still, these communities have managed to find long-term sustainability, exisiting over 15 years in various forms is no mean feat. As Macgirvin says: ‘if you think that this “alternative fediverse” is going away any time soon, you must be new here.’The Links Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser – Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast My Dream Fediverse Platform – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute Ben Werdmuller has been writing a four-part series on strategies for the open social web, with articles on product strategies for Mastodon, Bluesky, starting fresh, and now his most recent article on various funding strategies for the open social web. A detailed overview of how federation between Lemmy and Mastodon works in practice. It is a good indication that using the same protocol does not automatically guarantee good interoperability. Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look like. This week’s fediverse software updates. Ghost’s weekly update on their fediverse integration, mentioning that ActivityPub is now also available at another vendor who offers Ghost hosting. Flipboard is federating another 124 accounts, this time from international publishers. Flipboard now federates over 1200 accounts of publishers. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below: #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #117

Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and ot...

Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay that has been not been published elsewhere yet. This is a republication of last week’s essay I send out. If you’re interested, subscribe below to get all the updates directly in your inbox every week! As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective. The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised. Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied. A network like the fediverse has an architecture that is easy to recognise as being decentralised: there are multiple independent servers that are all talking to each other, without one central entity. But there are other ways to create social networks that are decentralised, using a different architecture. Nostr is a good example of a decentralised social network that operates in a significantly different way, while also being clearly decentralised. For the fediverse community, the mental model of decentralised networks such as the fediverse itself, but also email, became more dominant. There was less space to consider other ways to design a social network that is also decentralised. The size difference between the fediverse and the much smaller Nostr network made other alternatives easy to brush aside. But the growth of Bluesky and the ATmosphere network changed this dynamic. The goal of Bluesky and ATProto is to create a decentralised social network, but with different characteristics and goals than the fediverse and ActivityPub have. For people on the fediverse, decentralisation became the main way how they analysed this competing network. As Bluesky is by far the largest app on the ATProto network, by multiple orders of magnitude, Bluesky not actually being decentralised became a common criticism. I made a similar argument in fall 2024, about how Bluesky has not meaningfully distributed power due to how clustered the people are around a single app. However, that is something different than the technological network architecture being (de)centralised. These criticisms became intertwined with each other, especially from the fediverse side. In recent weeks, people have made some significant progress in using Bluesky (in technical terms: engaging with posts with Bluesky’s lexicon) with infrastructure that is entirely independent from the Bluesky company. This demonstrates the network being decentralised in a meaningful way. But as the term ‘decentralisation’ has become so intertwined with other meanings, both regarding other network architecture as well as the spread of the user base, that conversations around these developments became hopelessly confusing. The achievement of using Bluesky without using infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC became solely analysed through the frame of “is the network decentralised”. In all this discourse, it has become lost that decentralisation is a description of a network topology, and not an intrinsic Good. People do not actually care about decentralisation itself. Decentralisation is valuable because it enables other properties, such as network resilience, and are more resistant to capture by oligarchs. Within the ATProto developer community, the discourse that essentialised decentralisation led to a counter reaction, where decentralisation is not seen as a useful term anymore. Instead, other descriptors should be used, to consider specific features that the network enables. While the community seems largely in agreement that decentralisation has lost a lot of its usefulness as a way to analyse the network, there is less consensus on what other factors the network should be judged on. As an observer of both networks this makes the current situation particularly interesting. One developer community seems to come to an agreement that one mental framework has lost some of its use, while the other developer community has not done so. Furthermore, it is not clear yet what framework should take its place instead. Is it a framework of analysing a network by its possible failure modes, or something else entirely? #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework

Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay tha...