ATmosphere Report – #116 Resilient relays, a web interface to manage your ATProto account directly on your PDS, and a new upcoming ATProto platform with Speakeasy. 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!Relays, Free Our Feeds and IndieSky Free Our Feeds, the campaign to build independent infrastructure for ATProto, has provided IndieSky with 50k USD funding. IndieSky is a working group that arose from within the ATProto developer community, at the Seattle ATmosphereConf and Hamburg’s Ahoy! conferences. As phil, an independent ATProto developer who runs three separate relays, points out, there is little value in using an alternative relay. They are commoditised by design, and the important part of relays is that they are it is easy for apps to switch to another relay if the relay that is used by Bluesky PBC becomes unreliable. With relay costs now solidly under 50USD/month (as acknowledged by Free Our Feeds), people speed-running the setup in minutes, and multiple other independent relays that have popped up in recent weeks the relay part of the ATProto network is at this point resilient. Free Our Feeds switching their focus away from relays makes sense in that context. That does not mean however that all parts of ATProto are as resilient as relays are, nor that other parts will be able to scale down to such low costs as relays can. AppViews and moderation remain costly in a way that scales with the amount of users. Relays have gotten an overly large amount of attention due to various cultural and historical reason. Relays are smartly designed part of the system, and it is impressive that passing through the network traffic of tens of millions of accounts can be done for such little amount of money. But not all parts of the network will scale that way. Free Our Feeds goes into the question of why they want to raise 30M USD, saying: “We are supporting the development of fully independent infrastructure that enables the development and running of social apps that can serve tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. […] We think this is a fraction of the money that will be needed to remake the social web from where it is today – with the dominance of Big Tech – to a future where billions of internet users control their online lives. We need many more initiatives – public, non-profit and private to make this happen.” Taken all the news together, of Free Our Feeds taking a broader approach to support independent infrastructure, a multiple independent public relays being available, and people collaboration on independent infrastructure with the IndieSky working group, makes it feel the network is getting to a new phase in the road towards full independence. Over the last year the conversation around network decentralisation has been overly dominated by relays, more than it fully deserved. Now that the relay part of the network can now be seen as sufficiently resilient, more focus can be put on other, more challenging, parts of the network. The next meeting of the IndieSky working group will be on May 22nd, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 1800 CEST.In Other News Bluesky has updated their PDS reference implementation, and it now has a web interface to manage and create accounts directly on the PDS themselves. ATProto apps that use the OAuth for login did not have a way to get new users to create an account yet. The work-around up until now was to refer people to the Bluesky app to login. This is not a great user experience, and also gives Bluesky PBC an outsized role in the ecosystem. With the latest update, apps can now create accounts directly on a PDS, even a PDS owned by Bluesky PBC if so desired. The web interface (for accounts on a Bluesky PDS, accessible at https://bsky.social/account/), gives people some basic account management options, such as the ability to sign out of specific devices or revoke access of connected apps. For this web interface Bluesky PBC expects more features to be implemented here in the future. These features are related to account management that are not tied to a specific app, such as email updates and password changes. Bluesky PBC is encouraging other PDS implementations to innovate and differentiate with new features as well, speculating that PDS hosting could be bundled with other hosted networking services. Speakeasy is an upcoming social media platform build on ATProto, and is compatible with Bluesky. An early version of Speakeasy can already be accessed, and it is a fork of the Bluesky web client. Speakeasy is building private posts as a distinguishing feature. Founder Chris Jensen says that private messages are stored outside of the network for now, and that he believes that private posts are an urgent needed feature for the network. Jensen also says that once Bluesky PBC has an official implementation for private data, they will merge their implementation. Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines has created a local developer environment for ATProto. It gives developers the option to run a local PDS and PLC that can resolve DNS handles. Gerakines describes it as a “turnkey dev stack with full ATProtocol flows, HTTPS everywhere, and DNS-backed handle resolution—without needing to expose anything publicly.” Flashes, a client app for Bluesky that focuses on images, has received funding from Skyseed. The funding will be used to build an Android version, as well as further infrastructure in Europe to make the app more independent from Bluesky PBC. Creator Sebastian Vogelsang says that they have begone designing a mobile PDS. Two independent ATProto developers are taking a stab at guestbooks: Ms Boba has been livestreaming her development of a guestbook on ATProto that can be embedded on websites. Dame has an approach of creating welcome messages for people who view their PDS on a PDS viewing tool like PDSls or atp.tools. Software updates Event planning app Smoke Signal is now open sourced, and available on Tangled. Tangled has added OAuth support. Various updates to the Streamplace interface and new documentation. ATProto Audio room platform Bluecast now has a public mode for live streams, so that audio streams can be listened to without logging in. One of the challenges for ATProto app developers is that users are regularly asked to log back into their client. Graze recently released a tool that helps with this, in collaboration with Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines. Skylight is now implementing this tool to prevent this pain point. UX and search updates for Spark. A short update by Northsky on their current state of development.Tech Links Demesme is an app that is currently in development by Bluesky engineer Samuel Newman to store your account keys on your phone. Authr is an ATProto OAuth server that’s currently in development, with a demo available here. ATSyntaxTools is “a lightweight Swift library for handling validations for various identifiers within the AT Protocol.” A MCP server for ATProto docs. A template for deploying a PDS on Railway. A web app to search all the posts on Bluesky that you’ve liked. Creating a paper key for a PLC rotation key.Further reading Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee held a talk about Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech at the The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which can be viewed here. A three-part article series exploring how ATProto can be combined with local-first software (1, 2, 3) Block Party now has support for Bluesky. Block Party became well-known as a tool for Twitter that offers advanced safety tools. With changes to Twitter’s API, Block Party became a “browser extension that helps users update their privacy and security settings and clean up their content across 12+ platforms, including Bluesky.” Notes on migrating a Bluesky 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

ATmosphere Report – #116

Resilient relays, a web interface to manage your ATProto account directly on your PDS, and a new upcoming ATProto platform with Speakeasy.

Taking control of your timeline – in different ways One of the main ways that decentralised social networking platforms like Bluesky or Mastodon use to advertise themselves is that they gives people control over their timelines. Bluesky’s website highlights this as its primary feature, saying “Your timeline, your choice – Stay focused on your friend group, keep up-to-date on the latest news, or explore with an algorithm that learns what you like. On Bluesky, there’s a feed for that.” Mastodon takes a similar approach, and puts it front and center on the joinmastodon.org website, saying “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see.” Both platforms share a common critique, namely that Big Tech’s control over algorithmic feeds results in systemic problems, and both see a solution in giving people control over their feeds. But examining the different approaches taken by platforms in the fediverse and ATmosphere1 shows that both networks take quite different approaches. Moreover, these approaches seem compatible with each other, and it’s been surprising to me that no platform has really tried to unify these yet.How Bluesky gives you choice Bluesky is focused on giving people choice. Instead of one ‘For You’ feed with an opaque algorithm that Big Tech platforms have, Bluesky offers the users to subscribe to any number of feeds. New users start with a simple following feed, as well as an algorithmic feed, the Discover feed. AT Protocol (ATProto) allows people to create any type of feed, that others can subscribe to. Other tools and businesses have popped up to take advantage of this, such as Graze and Skyfeed. These tools give people the option to build their own custom feeds. ATProto can be understood as one massive pool of data, that is publicly accessible to everyone. Users control their data, but it’s visible to any app. Every application build on top of ATProto takes a portion of that data, restructures it and presents it to the user via a client. A custom feed is effectively a application that is build on ATProto. It takes a small portion of the data of the entire network, and presents it to the user. For example, the News Feed is a custom feed made by an independent developer, which shows articles posted made by news organisations. It functions by taking only the Bluesky posts made by news organisations from the giant data pool that is the ATmosphere network, and orders the post in chronological order, and presents that to the user. Another example is the Moss Feed, which looks for all the Bluesky posts that contain pictures of moss in the entire network, and show those moss pictures to people who subscribe to the feed.. This gives us an answer as to what Bluesky means when the company says “your timeline, your choice”. The choice is that people can choose which part the entire network they want to see. They can choose to see the posts from the accounts they follow, they can choose to see posts from news organisations. The choice is in the data, and people express that choice by using a custom feed.Fediverse platforms and choice Fediverse platforms take a different approach to user choice over their timeline. Mastodon2 gives a user three feeds, the home timeline, which is the feed of what you follow, and by far the most important feed in Mastodon. (Mastodon also a few other feeds, which are significantly deprioritised.3) Where Bluesky wants to give people control by letting them pick any subset of the entire data of the network to see, Mastodon wants users to only see the content you opted in by following. This is the user choice that Mastodon advertises with on their site, where they say that “your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most”, meaning posts from accounts you follow. Mastodon has a fairly strict idea of what content should be shown in your Home timeline: only content you follow. This is often the accounts you follow, but can also be hashtags. Nor does it have to be microblogging posts: Mastodon will happily show you content from other types of software, from WordPress articles to PeerTube videos to podcast episodes to RSS. As long as you can follow it via ActivityPub, it shows up in your Home timeline. It does not even have to abide by Mastodon’s own restrictions: a Mastodon post is limited to 500 characters by default, but other servers can set different limits. A Mastodon server with a 500 character limit will still show posts with a much higher character limit. The only restriction is that it has to be content you followed, or got boosted by an account you follow. Mastodon also has a stronger focus on control over the content in your Home timeline. As the Home timeline is so important, there are many ways for users to take granular control over what they see. You can mute accounts you follow for a time period (helpful if someone is live blogging an event you are not interested in), turn off boosts from specific accounts if they have a tendency to boost too many posts, and a variety of other features. Other fediverse software takes this a step further: Phanpy is a client for Mastodon, with a unique Catch-Up feature. This takes all the posts from your Home timeline from the last few hours, and gives you the option to display them in any way you want. You can group the posts by Author, sort them chronologically or reverse-chronologically, only display boosted posts sorted by boosts, and much more. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform which shares quite some of the design features with Mastodon. It also has a strong focus on a Home timeline with content you follow, but with even more features to give users control over how the content on that Home timeline is displayed. The screenshot below displays the wide variety of options that people have to change how their Home timeline is displayed. The wide variety of options that Bonfire gives represent the ideal vision of fediverse platforms on what user choice for your timeline looks like: the content you follow, with all the tools you need to organise that content.Two approaches to a similar problem Comparing these two networks, I find it interesting to see that their approaches to control over your feeds are quite different. Bluesky’s approach is great for discoverability. There is a lot of posts on the network that I’m interested in seeing that are made by accounts that I don’t follow. Custom feeds are absolutely great for that. Mastodon is great for giving me control over how I see the content I already decided to follow. There are a great many ways to shape and fine-tune my home feed exactly the way I want, and deal with annoyances as they pop up. Tools like Phanpy’s CatchUp give an unparalleled amount of control that no other platform even come close to. People have been looking for alternatives to how Big Tech platforms handle their algorithmic feeds. Bluesky’s answer is to give people a maximum amount of control over which data they want to see, with fairly limited ways to control how that data is then displayed. Various fediverse platforms take a different approach: the only data you see is what you have deliberately selected for, with a maximum amount of control on how that data is displayed. That both networks have taken a different approach and focus on how to build better timeline, is a reflection on the belief systems of the people building these new social networks. Bluesky is focused on open and public data, and the custom feeds allow anyone to access that data. Mastodon sees the problem as that corporations control what you see, and as such only shows content that you have deliberately opted in to see.  What’s interesting to me is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is totally possible to build a system that provides both: The discoverability of custom feeds, with the customisability of Bonfire’s filtering system. It’s what I’m looking for, at least. Every week, I publish two reports about everything that is happening in the fediverse and in the ATmosphere. 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:The network that consists of platforms that use ATProtocol. Bluesky is by far the biggest platform on this network. ↩︎Other fediverse microblogging platforms like Misskey or Pleroma operate the same. ↩︎Mastodon also has a local timeline, which shows all posts that are made on your server, and the federated timeline, shows posts from all accounts that everyone on your server follows. This does not scale particularly well: on Mastodon’s flagship server mastodon.social the local timeline and federated timeline update every second with a dozen new posts, making it literally impossible to read the timelines. There is also a Trending feed, which shows popular posts from across the network. ↩︎ #bluesky #fediverse

fediversereport.com

Taking Control of Your Timeline – in Different Ways

Both Mastodon and Bluesky advertise themselves that they give people control over their timelines. They both take a different approach, with Bluesk...

Fediverse Report – #116 FediForum will be next month, Discourse talks about their fediverse integration, and an update on Bonfire.The News FediForum has a new date and a new board The fifth edition of FediForum has been rescheduled, and will be held on June 5-7. The event was originally planned for early April, but got cancelled at the last-minute after transphobic posts by one of the co-organisers of the event were surfaced. FediForum held two sessions in the meantime with the community on how the event should move forward. One of the outcomes is that there is now an advisory board for FediForum with people from the community. For this edition of FediForum, I will be hosting a session on what’s been going on in the fediverse in 2025. The network is constantly changing and evolving, and this session is intended to get you up to speed on what’s been happening in the last half year. More information on that soon. Discourse and the fediverse Forum software Discourse has posted a blog talking about how they have integrated ActivityPub into their forums. They explain how Discourse forums can now select per category if it is federated, and thus followable by other fediverse software. It also shows what Discourse-to-Discourse federation looks like, allowing 2 forums to cooperate with each other. Federated forums require a mindset shift as have to get used to seeing forum posts in their microblogging timelines. Forum software like Discourse and NodeBB have made great strides in the technological capabilities regarding what’s possible with federated forums. Now people have to find out and experience what these technological features enable in practical use cases for people. Bonfire slowly moves towards a 1.0 release Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform, with a core functionality of microblogging with a focus on extensibility. In their latest update about how the platform is moving to a 1.0 release, Bonfire talks about the values and intentions of the platform, writing: “In a world of ‘move fast and break things,’ we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.” Bonfire has taken a deliberate and mindful approach to software development, but their own description of “Slow Software” seems fairly accurate as well, as the team has talked about getting ready for a 1.0 release in the next few months since at least September 2023. FediDB onboarding Fediverse statistics site FediDB, operated by PixelFed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, now has an onboarding tool to help people get started with the fediverse. It asks the user a few simple questions: first to select the type of content they are interested in, such as microblogging, video or forums. Based on that choice, it recommends various platforms. Based on the platform choice it asks for a few simple filters, such as region and community size, before presenting the user with a list of servers to choose from for registration. The onboarding tool is sleekly designed, and streamlines the signup process by boiling it down to a few essential questions that the user needs to answer. However, this also showcases the issues that the fediverse has with onboarding new users: picking a platform and picking a server are meaningful choices that are hard to fully grasp the impact from as a new user. When it comes to picking a platform, the tool lists a few features for each platform, but comparing the relevance of these features is hard to do as an outsider. And when it comes to picking servers, the challenge is that servers themselves often do not publish relevant information that is needed to make an informed choice of which server to pick. Mastodon: Giving Journalists Options Away From Big Tech Saskia Welch from Newsmast writes about Mastodon and the fediverse at the recent International Journalism Festival. A consistent challenge remains to put all the lofty ideals about healthy social networks into practice, with Welch noting: “However, joining the platform continues to be a barrier for many users. A group of Italian women who attended the event abandoned their short effort to join the platform half-way into the presentation, confused about where to go and which app to use.” – WeDistribute/Saskia Welch Owncast turns 5 The fediverse streaming platform Owncast turns 5 years this month, with a new merch store. One of the challenges of FOSS projects such as Owncast is the sustainability, and Owncast creator Gabe Kangas “at one point exhausted his personal savings so he could work on Owncast full-time.” Kangas says that now “people want to be around in meaningful ways. From the newsletter, core code contributions, the Roku app, people answering questions in chat, people brainstorming in GitHub, it’s important for it to be bigger than myself”. – Owncast Newsletter/Kit Rhett Aultman Bandwagon talks about monetisation and sustainability Bandwagon is a fediverse music sharing platform that’s currently in development, where artists can share their music. They are currently working on online album sales, and Bandwagon is committed to making this feature available without taking any transaction fees. In order for the project to be sustainable, Bandwagon is a paid 10$/month paid premium plan which will enable online album sales and higher bitrate streaming. At the same time, creator Ben Pate is also committed to keeping the software open source, and says that the project needs other Bandwagon servers to exist if the project is to be successful. – Bandwagon.fmThe Links Test your knowledge of ActivityPub with this quiz. Search engine Kagi now has the option to find and filter for PeerTube videos. Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunks & Tidbits for April 2025, where the organisation announces that they’ve hired another front-end developer. Lemmy development update for April 2025. Domain blocking and notification improvements for Ghost. FediAlgo, a self-hosted algorithmic timeline for Mastodon, is now available as a web app as well. Flohmarkt is a fediverse market place, and Flohra is a new Android app for the platform. The Social Web Foundation released their first annual report. An interview with Christine Lemmer-Webber about the future of decentralised networks. 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 – #116

FediForum will be next month, Discourse talks about their fediverse integration, and an update on Bonfire.

Bluesky Report – #115 Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants. 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!Independent Infrastructure news Over the last week, the effort towards decentralisation and running independent pieces of ATProto infrastructure has sped up significantly. There are now multiple relays that are publicly accessible. Other people also have made alternate AppViews that are Bluesky-compatible. Combined, this makes it now possible to fully use Bluesky without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC, and the first people have done so. To do so means using a separate PDS, relay, AppView and client. Some of the updates regarding relays: Blacksky has built their own relay, using their own custom implementation. This relay is publicly accessible, meaning that other people can use this relay instead of the relay that Bluesky PBC uses. A writeup on how to set up your own relay by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold, for some 34 USD/month. Making relays cheaper has been due to the Sync 1.1 update, Bluesky PBC goes into more detail in a blog post what this entails. And the updates regarding clients and AppViews: Two clients now support the ability for users to set their own AppView, Deer and TOKIMEKI. AppViewLite is another AppView for Bluesky that has been around for a while, that focuses on being cheap to run. It also heavily optimises for network data storage, with creator Alnkq running AppViewLite that contains full network data on a cheap 10 year old machine. So far, AppViewLite only worked with a custom frontend. An update this week now make it possible to use AppViewLite in combination with other clients. Some further thoughts: The way ATProto works, is that it takes the software that runs a social network and splits it up into separate components, with each of those components being able to be run independently. This has made self-hosting any component possible since the beginning of the network opening up. But to tak advantage of this, and get to a state of full independence, it means running multiple pieces of software. This has created a bit of a catch-22 in the ecosystem: you could run your own relay, but without another independent AppView to take advantage of this, it is not super useful. You could run your own (focused on the Bluesky lexicon) AppView, but without a client that allows you to set your own AppView it is not particularly useful either. What happened now in the last weeks is that all these individual pieces are starting to come together. With Deer allowing you to set your own custom AppView, there is now a use to actually run your own AppView. Which in turn also gives more purpose to running your own relay. For building features in a Bluesky client that Bluesky itself does not have, a different AppView is needed. Now that these are starting to become available, there is new space to experiment with clients that have features that Bluesky does not have. Deer has already started going in this direction by allowing people to set any account as a trusted verifier, for example. There has been skepticism around Bluesky PBC’s claims regarding decentralisation, especially from people within the ActivityPub community. Part of this distrust has come from people applying a mental framework of how ActivityPub works to how ATProto works. In this framework, Bluesky being decentralised would mean that there are other software platforms that are interoperable with the Bluesky lexicon. I’ll be writing more about those different mental frameworks, and how that relates to decentralisation later. But for now these developments strengthen the claims of Bluesky PBC around decentralisation and building a network that is ‘billionaire-proof’.In Other News at://2048 is the game of 2048, integrated with ATProto. 2048 is a sliding tile puzzle game where players combine numbered tiles to reach the 2048 tile, that has gotten popularity years ago and has been reimplemented a number of times. What makes the at://2048 version stand out is that the scores of the game are stored on your ATProto PDS. This creates new features and challenges: it gives the game a more social element, with features like leaderboards. It also creates a new challenge, of how to verify that a score on someone’s PDS is actually legit. at://2048 is experimenting with verified badges to authenticate if a score is legit. Integrating games with ATProto is one of the areas that is under-explored, and this reimplementation of 2048 is worth watching to get a sense of how the integration of games with ATProto will further develop. Bluesky differs from other social networks in one significant way, namely that users blocking each other is public information. This creates new dynamics, from people being able to see who have blocked them, to leaderboards of the most blocked accounts on the network. A new paper, ‘Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding blocking behavior on Bluesky‘, takes advantages of data on blocks being public to study user behaviour. Some of their findings: “users who receive a high number of blocks exhibit distinctive behavioral traits that set them apart from the general user population. These patterns are not necessarily linked to toxicity or misinformation, indicating that block-worthy behavior is more nuanced and complex than traditional moderation markers might suggest. Second, these distinctive traits can be effectively encoded and leveraged by machine learning models, suggesting the feasibility of early-warning or flagging systems able to assist moderation teams by surfacing potentially problematic users even before issues escalate.” Custom feed builder Graze is giving out 5 grants of 1k USD for other projects in the ATProto ecosystem. Explaining why the startup is giving out grants, Graze says: “First, we want to help accelerate growth in the ATProto / Bluesky ecosystem. Projects that help *others* are vital. Second, we want to empower communities to sustain themselves. Third, we want to help give people & orgs direct access to their audiences. Broadly, those are *our* goals as an org.”Bluesky in the media Time Magazine talks with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and COO Rose Wang after they both got recognised as rising leaders in the Asian Pacific Community by Gold House. On monetisation, Graber says “she’s considering subscription models or monetizing Bluesky’s marketplaces of custom tools, but no concrete plans have been set in motion.” Wired published an article on how digital archivists are racing to save Black History while the Trump administration is trying to erase it. Wired talks with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser, who describes “Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years”. How the San Francisco Standard uses Graze to hone their social media strategy – GrazeATProto tech news The two developers behind Git collaboration platform Tangled, the brothers Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, gave an interview on the devtools.fm podcast about Tangled. The platform also got various feature updates this week, and customisable profiles. Graze has made their ATProto authentication tool open-source and available for everyone to use. The ‘ATmosphere Authentication, Identity, and Permission Proxy‘ allows developers to easily add ATProto authentication to their software as a separate micro-service. WhiteBreeze is a self-hostable frontend for WhiteWind, allowing people to build their own blog on ATProto. ATProto Migrator is a tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS. It does so via a web application, without people having to touch the Command Line Interface (CLI). This makes account migration more accessible, as other tools until now (such as goat by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold) require people to use the CLI. Flashes is a Bluesky client focused on images, and they are experimenting with some new ways to deal with the limitations that come from using Bluesky’s data. A Bluesky post can contain a maximum of 4 images and 300 characters. Flashes has upgraded that limit to 900 characters and 12 images. It works by actually creating 3 separate Bluesky posts in a thread, and displaying this as a single post in the Flashes app. A guide on Publishing ATProto Lexicons. 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 – #115

Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants.

Fediverse Report – #115 PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more.The News PeerTube has officially launched their apps as a v1, some four months after the apps became available in beta. Some new features include the ability to log in with an existing PeerTube account (up until now you’d log in with a local account that only existed in the app itself), commenting from the app, and playlist and channel management options. Mastodon announced some updates on how their team is evolving. The organisation is currently in the process of setting up a Foundation in Europe. Mastodon is also growing their team, and the organisation now consists of 15 employees. Mastodon’s news update is a followup on their announcement from January 2025, in which Mastodon said that current CEO Eugen Rochko would step down. A new CEO has not been announced yet by Mastodon. In the previous update, Mastodon also said that they would need a €5 million annual operating budget. There are some new team members related to fundraising, but Mastodon has not made a clear statement yet on how exactly they will raise the money needed for this budget. Evan Prodromou of the Social Web Foundation has published a first version of places.pub. It is a service that “makes OpenStreetMap geographical data available as ActivityPub objects.” The goal is for other fediverse software to integrate with places.pub to have a standardised way to refer to geospatial objects via ActivityPub. A follow-up on last week’s news regarding the Fosstodon server: the server administration will be taken over, with an update and introduction by the new admin here. The Links A recommendation algorithm for PeerTube videos. It is a browser extension that records your PeerTube viewing history, and uses that to generate recommendations to watch. PieFed development updates for April. The fediverse statistics site FediDB is getting an update, and can now be self-hosted as well. Talking Protocols With Evan Prodromou – FediHost Podcast. How To Make Your Mastodon Feed More Algorithmic – FediHost Tutorial. Ghost now gives blog authors the ability to block users. 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 – #115

PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more.

Fediverse Report – #114 Posts made by a Fosstodon server moderator on Reddit has caused some drama, leading to both Fosstodon admins to call it quits, a number of servers (threatening to) defederate from the Fosstodon server, leading to an uncertain future for the Fosstodon server.Fosstodon drama A few days ago someone published a post on Mastodon, with screenshots and links to posts made on Reddit by one of the Fosstodon moderators. In the linked posts, the Reddit account in question, which seemingly belongs to the Fosstodon moderator, holds various right-wing beliefs, ranging from defending the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil to claiming Democrat supporters are in a cult. Backlash to the Fosstodon server was swift and strong, with various calls and plans from other servers to defederate from Fosstodon, members of the Fosstodon server looking for other servers to move their account to, and a general condemnation from the wider community. Both Fosstodon admins have posted articles declaring they are stepping down, citing not only the current drama as a reason, but that they see the work of being server admins as frustrating with little pay-off. One Fosstodon community member is considering to take over the administration of the server, though as of writing, that process is still ongoing and the outcome unclear. Some thoughts and takeaways about what this drama says about the social side of federation on the network, and how different communities interact: When a server moderators holds opinions other people view as problematic, the social cost of these views is partially extended to server users as well. See for example the account for fediverse streaming platform Owncast, which has an account on the Fosstodon server. Owncast says that they are getting messages that say they need to move servers, otherwise people will see them as Nazis. This blog post about another Fosstodon user explains a similar thought process, where it is rational for them to move to a different server, because they will be associated with the politics of the server moderator in question otherwise. This behaviour has an impact on how people on the fediverse should find an instance they want to join. It turns out that knowing the political affiliations of server moderators is important, and that this is something that people should know about before joining a server. People will be judged for being on a server that has a moderator with toxic political views. As such, it becomes important for people to know this information beforehand: both that they will get judged for the politics of server moderators, as well as knowing what those political views actually are. This is another indication of why the process of selecting a server when someone joins the fediverse is actually a challenge: important information that should impact server choice is not made available to users, nor is it made clear that this information is important in the first place. The second takeaway from the situation is that it shows a need for fediverse servers to have a federation policy. How federation currently works on the fediverse is that servers are connected with each other by default, and the assumption is that servers can disconnect from each other for any reason, but will mostly do so only if one of the servers is misbehaving in some way. Freedom of association is one of the valuable features of the fediv erse. Server operators should be free to defederate from any other server, for any reason. Being able to defederate from another server because you strongly disagree with the politics from one of the server moderators is a good thing. But if this is a consistent policy of the server, it would do well to make this policy public and explicit. Servers defederating from each other can have significant impact on users, who suddenly can lose connections with their friends. A policy of defederating from other servers based on the expressed beliefs of server moderators is something that is not immediately obvious to new people joining the fediverse. There are absolutely valid reasons to do so, but it seems to me that formalising such a policy would be a good step towards making the culture on the fediverse more sustainable. The third takeaway is that running a fediverse server is challenging, especially over longer periods of time. Both Fosstodon admins have called in quits in response to the most recent drama. Their blog posts explaining their perspectives is that this has been a long time coming, and that the Fosstodon server has been uncompensated work that they do not love doing for years now. Regardless of one’s perspective on how the admins handled the latest situation, it is a further indication that being a fediverse server admin is a challenging job, one that should not be expected that someone can do forever. This means that servers like Fosstodon need governance systems that allow for better and earlier rotation of administrative power. Fediverse software should also be better at dealing with the realities of admin burnout. The users who are transferring from Fosstodon to another server will lose their posts; Mastodon does only transfer the social graph, and not posting history. While ideally the majority of servers would have extensive governance systems in place that can help deal with admin burnout, the reality is that most servers do not. More fediverse software should provide better support for users having to move to different servers, including with their posts.The Links NLnet, a fund that contributes to many open-source initiatives with a long track record of support fediverse projects, has published the beneficiaries of their latest funding round. PeerTube has gotten another grant, and publisher Framasoft talked about more how the money will be spend in their 2025 roadmap. The other fediverse beneficiary is an OpenScience flavour of Bonfire. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform with a broad range of features, but the platform has struggled to get to an actual release. Bonfire published a blog post about their ‘road to Bonfire 1.0’ in September 2023, and an update in October 2024 where they announced a bounty program to get contributions to improve performance of the app. Flipboard uploaded more videos from last months Fediverse House event at SXSW on their PeerTube channel, including an interview with Cory Doctorow and a demo of the Surf app. The Doo the Woo podcast, hosted by WordPress ActivityPub plugin developer Matthias Pfefferle, interviewed André Menrath. Menrath is working on a plugin to bring WordPress events to ActivityPub. The Bad Space is a project where various fediverse servers share their blocklists to build an aggregate of fediverse servers that are potentially worth blocking. The project is now available for self-hosting. Some new features for FediAlgo, a customisable timeline algorithm for Mastodon, including a ‘What’s Trending’ feature. A writeup on how to make a blog site using Lemmy as data storage. 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 – #114

Instance drama, with some reflection on how federation could be improved on the fediverse.

Fediverse Report – #113 When FediForum got cancelled a few weeks ago, I heard from multiple participants that they were planning to showcasing some new features or products that they’ve been working on. The sudden last-minute cancellation has caused uncertainty on how to proceed, and there has not been a new date set for FediForum (nor is it clear in what format it will continue, if any). However, by and large participants have decided not to showcase or present their work outside of FediForum. This shows the influential role that FediForum plays in the fediverse development ecosystem. It is important avenue for developers to showcase their work to the rest of the developer community, with no clear replacement for it. As such, the news for the fediverse is especially slow this week.The News Two papers on the fediverse came out recently: Labour pains: Content moderation challenges in Mastodon growth talks about the challenges that moderators face on fediverse instances. Leading the Mastodon Herd: Analysing the Traits of Influential Leaders on a Decentralised Social Media Platform finds a relation between negative sentiment and influence on the network. Ghost now allows publications to set their own custom usernames. Staff user profiles is coming as well, but “is still a ways off”. Decentralizing Schemes – Tim Bray Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says that a viral Facebook post in Taiwan lead to some 20k new signups over 2 days. Fediverse House Highlight Reel, SXSW 2025 This week’s fediverse software updates. If I ran Mastodon – Ben Werdmuller Why Is Mastodon Using So Much Storage? – Fedihost tutorials An update from the Catodon project (a fork of a fork of Misskey), which is still on hiatus. 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 – #113

A slow news week in the fediverse, with some new research papers on Mastodon and more.

Bluesky Report – #112 The main news of this week is about the Turkish government pressuring Bluesky to hide accounts by political dissidents on the network. Yesterday I published an article about the situation, and how geographic-based moderation works on Bluesky. The other news of this week is that custom feed builder Graze raised 1M USD, and a new fork of the Bluesky app.Graze raises 1 million USD Custom feed builder Graze has raised 1 million USD in a pre-seed adventure round. Graze allows people to build their own custom feed, in a way that makes it accessible for non-coders. The platform also allows for feed builders to include ads into their feeds. The feature has been slowly rolling out recently, and feed operators are starting to use the advertisement options now. One example is the News Feeds by independent ATProto developer Ændra Rininsland, who recently shared plans at the ATmosphere Conference to reinvest the ad revenue back into the development of queer communities on ATProto. Graze is charging 1 dollar per 1000 impressions, a number the team expect to go up as Bluesky grows. Graze takes a 30% cut of this, which goes to hosting, payment processing and the development of the Graze platform. TechCrunch reports further on the revenue sharing: “the team is considering doing a revenue share with Bluesky and other apps built on its underlying technology, the AT Protocol (ATProto). Today, Graze is working with other Bluesky ATProto-based apps, including photo and video apps like Skylight, Spark, and Flashes. “We’re very interested in figuring out what is the ethical revenue sharing model that helps everyone involved in the picture, including app developers,” said Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke.” Meanwhile, Graze is working further on making their feeds accessible outside of Bluesky as well, their latest update allows feeds to be embedded on any web page. In last week’s update, I reflected on comments by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about Bluesky’s monetisation plans. Graber mentions marketplaces and subscriptions as the main plans for how Bluesky plans to make money. When it comes to marketplaces, Graber’s example is about Blacksky, where Graber imagines that people can subscribe to feeds and that Bluesky will take a cut of the transaction. Last week I already went about how that does not seem to line up well with the direction that Blacksky is taking. But Graze raising 1 million to build their own business also shows that the marketplace for feeds might just happen outside of Bluesky PBC instead.In Other News Deer is a new client for Bluesky, and it is a fork of the official Bluesky app. What stands out about Deer is it focuses on some specific design choices that Bluesky has made, and giving users the ability to take different choices. For example, Deer allows people to turn various Bluesky features off, such as the go.bsky.app redirect, show posts where two other people have blocked each other (undoing the ‘nuclear block’), or remove the geographic moderation labelers. An academic paper on Starter Packs: ‘Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs‘. The paper shows how big the impact of Starter Packs on the Bluesky network has been. The authors write: “Their impact [of Starter Packs] on the social graph increases over time surpassing 40 % of all the follow operations in December 2024. […] This represents a remarkable 19.95 % of all follow edges of the network, indicating a large impact of starter packs on the overall social graph. Follows resulting from starter packs are also long-lasting: we observe that by the end of 2024, 93.82 % of them are still present.” Bluesky PBC is hiring for another two positions: a Senior Communications Manager and Developer Relations. Newsletter platform Ghost has been working on an ActivityPub integration, allowing newsletters to show up in the fediverse. Combined with the Bridgy Fed, the connector software that allows posts to travel between the fediverse and the ATmosphere, posts from Ghost could already show up on Bluesky, but this can be a finicky process. Ghost is working on making this easier, with a simple one-click button to connect Ghost sites to Bluesky. Stream.place is a video streaming platform that integrates with ATProto. It is grown out of the Livepeer ecosystem, a crypto DAO that focuses on livestreaming and video decoding. Stream.place has asked the Livepeer DAO for a grant of ~390k USD, with the DAO now voting on the proposal. Some more ways and tools to interact with feeds this week. Summarising your Bluesky following feed via an LLM, with an MCP server. Transparant.se is building a Discover/For You type of algorithmic feed that is customisable. 777Bluesky gives 10 trending posts in audio format. Bluesky PBC will apply stricter moderation to the usage of list as a vector for harrassment. Bluecast is an audio room platform on ATProto, that mainly caters towards the Japanese community. Their latest update allows for recordings to be converted into 3minute videos and to be posted on Bluesky. Tangled is a git collaboration platform on ATProto. In their latest blog post Tangled shares how they are building their own pull request system. A scientific article on how to use Bluesky and Instagram for science professionals, in the Fisheries journal. The International Journalism Festival held a panel called ‘Breaking on Bluesky: live news in a post-Twitter era’, with Emily Liu from Bluesky and Sarah Jeong from The Verge. The session can be rewatched here. 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 – #112

Custom feed builder Graze raises 1M USD, and Deer is a new fork of the main Bluesky app.

ATmosphere Report – #111 Bluesky CEO Jay Graber hints some more at Bluesky PBC’s plans for monetisation, on ATProto’s ethos, and more. Note for regular readers: since 2025 I’ve experimented with alternating this weekly newsletter, with one with focusing on Bluesky and more of the cultural and social side of the network, and the other week on ATProto and the more technical side. For this week, I went back to a combination, with both news about Bluesky and culture, as well as some more technical ATProto news. I’d love to hear some feedback if you prefer the newsletters to keep alternating between Bluesky and ATProto, of if this week’s format of putting everything together is better. And another reminder: Thursday April 24th is Ahoy!, the European ATProto and Bluesky conference in Hamburg. The conference announced some more great speakers this week! You can hear Bluesky developer Samuel Newman, Ændra Rininsland about building resilient queer spaces, Anirudh Oppiliappan about Tangled, a git platform on ATProto, Paul Sharratt, about Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency, Marc Faddoul about the Free Our Feeds campaign, and much more! I’ll be there as well, and doing some interviews with people. Would be great to meet you there!The NewsOn Bluesky and monetisation The New Yorker published an extensive long read with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, about her personal life and what led her to this place. The entire article is worth reading, and gives a good insight into Graber, and how Bluesky came to be. I want to zoom in on one single sentence, where the article talks about how Graber thinks about making money with Bluesky PBC. The New Yorker writes: “Graber envisions sustaining the business by eventually charging subscription fees, and by monetizing its marketplace of custom tools—users would pay, say, five dollars a month for Blacksky, and Bluesky would take a cut.” Bluesky PBC originally announced that they would have an optional subscription model back in October 2024, as part of their funding round. In December 2024 COO Rose Wang said that this was planned to be launched at the end of 2024. The period of late 2024 was also one of unrest within the Bluesky community, a significant part of the community was unhappy with how the company handled moderation regarding Jesse Singal. That translated into a vocal part of the community loudly proclaiming they would not want to participate in a subscription program for Bluesky PBC as long as the company would not take action to create a safer community. Since then there have been very few updates on Bluesky PBC launching a subscription model. This interview with Graber confirms that Bluesky PBC still is planning on launching such a service. However, Graber also couches it in an “eventually”, indicating that such a subscription model will likely not launch in the near future. Graber also mentions Bluesky PBC making money by functioning as a marketplace. This is one of the core ideas on how she sees Bluesky PBC making money, and she has mentioned it interviews since at least early 2024. So far, Bluesky PBC has not actually build a marketplace yet. As the ecosystem develops, Bluesky PBC runs the risk of other organisations building marketplaces first. Custom feed builder Graze already contains a marketplace for ads. Graber’s example of people paying for access to Blacksky and Bluesky PBC taking a cut of the transaction seems to imply that other organisations will depend on Bluesky PBC for such a transaction. But observing the actual behaviour of Blacksky Algorithms Inc, the company behind Blacksky, shows a different picture. Blacksky is building infrastructure to be fully independent from Bluesky PBC. The company already has their own PDS implementation, a grant to work on their own relay implementation, and announced a few months ago that their longer term plans are to also have their own frontend apps as well as their own AppView. Earlier this year, the Blacksky company transitioned away from being fiscally hosted by Open Source Collective to being an independent fiscal host, to save 10% in fiscal host fees, and Blacksky advertised the move as being fiscally independent. Together it paints a picture of Blacksky as a company that values their independence, both in technological as well as financial infrastructure, a company that will put in effort to avoid another organisation taking a cut of the transaction. While not every organisation and community on ATProto will have the same characteristics as Blacksky, it shows some of the limitation of Graber’s proposal. There is a financial incentive to avoid Bluesky PBC taking a cut of transactions, and Bluesky PBC has provided all the tools with the openness of ATProto to make it as easy as possible to do so. Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser responded to the quote by Graber with a simple “👀”.Turkey and censorship requests Turkish news agency Bianet reports that X users in Turkey are migrating to Bluesky, “after X has restricted visibility to dozens of accounts in the country following nationwide protests sparked by the detention of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on Mar 19.” Censorship by the Turkey’s government is also reaching Bluesky however, and Bianet further writes: “According to the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), at least 44 Bluesky accounts have already been blocked in Turkey under the same Article 8/A of Law No. 5651. These restrictions were enacted by various judicial decisions, again citing concerns over national security and public order. Despite the rulings, Bluesky has not taken any action to suspend or block these accounts, and they remain accessible from within Turkey. However, if the platform refuses to comply with Turkish court orders to restrict access to certain users, authorities may consider a full ban on the platform, a possibility that past precedents suggest is not unlikely.” In order to comply with local regulations, Bluesky has set up moderation services for various countries. These moderation services are mandatory for accounts that are currently located within that country, but not for accounts that are outside that country. Bluesky has had local moderation services for Germany and Brazil for a while. Recently a local moderation service for Russia became active as well. Local moderation services for Turkey have been set up, but are not active yet.ATProto Ethos Bluesky engineer Daniel Holmgren wrote about the ATProto ethos, based on his talk at the recent ATmosphere conference in Seattle. For technical people I can definitely recommend reading the entire article (and/or watching Holmgren’s talk). Holmgren describes the core ideas of ATProto as follows: Atproto is situated as the synthesis of these three movements. From the web: an open, permissionless, and universal network of interconnected content. From peer-to-peer: location-independent data, self-certifying data, and skepticism of centralized control of any aspect of the user’s experience. From data-intensive distributed systems: a splitting of read and write load, application-aware secondary indices to facilitate high-throughput and low latency, streaming canonical data, and the decomposition of monoliths into microservices. From this basis, atproto adds two core innovations: identity-based authority and the separation of data hosting from the rich applications built on top of it. Holmgren also describes two other ideas that are underlying ATProto: The idea that structure gives freedom, and lazy trust. On structure, Holmgren writes: “While there’s something empowering about the idea of being able to do anything, it’s also easy for this to fall into the tyranny of structurelessness – a collapse in coordination that prevents anything from actually getting done. Without structure in the network, energy that could go into novel development gets redirected into facilitating interoperation, fixing edgecases between implementations, building up defenses to bad actors or security issues from other parties, and trying to coordinate evolution without a clear leader.“ One of the main topics that I keep coming back to when covering the fediverse is in this tyranny of structurelessness. The recent news about Pixelfed’s vulnerability that affected other software, and the lack of responses by the affected servers, is a good example of this collapse in coordination between the different parties in the network. Lazy trust is the idea that often, it is enough to know that every post and signature can be verified, without actually having to be verified on the spot. ATProto allows a cryptographic verification (the Authentification Transfer part in AT Protocol) that every post you see is the correct post as created by the author. But when a regular person opens up the Bluesky app, it is less important for them to know that the post at the top of their feed has been verified. Instead, it is often enough to know that the app they are using is staking their reputation on serving the correct data. Anyone can prove if a service is behaving correctly, since the data is locked open.Bluesky culture Two articles and observations on Bluesky’s culture this week. Adobe joined Bluesky this week, and got relentlessly bullied of the platform. The software company has been widely unpopular in broader culture for a while now, due to their monopolistic pricing practices, as well as their pivot to AI. Both characteristics which are widely unpopular on Bluesky as well, and when Adobe made their announcement post, they got heavily ratio’ed and yelled at. The company ended up taking down their post again. As Ryan Broderick points out in Garbage day, this does point to an issue for Bluesky PBC: advertising is one of the marginally few ways in which social media companies can make money at scale. Brand accounts are an integral part of advertising on social networks, and to make it work brand accounts getting bullied off the platform is slightly contra-productive. That said, the interview with Graber (see above)shows that she is currently not thinking about advertisement as a way to to make money with Bluesky PBC. Furthermore, the state of Bluesky’s culture is such that, if people believed that Bluesky PBC was considering advertising on the platform, brand accounts would likely get yelled at even more. The second article is by Wired, ‘Bluesky Can’t Take a Joke’. It is about the shift in culture that Bluesky has experienced in the last half year or so, where the replies on popular posts tend to get obnoxious. One of the main complaints is that lots of replies tend to take a joke seriously. Another phenomenon is when a big account shares a piece of news, there is a group of people that sees that as an opportunity to yell in the replies about how bad Trump, Musk or any other conservative is, regardless of what the shared news is actually about.In Other News Some updates on Skylight, the Bluesky client for shortform video: Skylight has now over 150k users, in the week since the app first launched to the public. The app is currently not available worldwide, and Skylight CEO Tori White says that they are working to make sure they are complying with local laws before launching globally. White specifically points to Europe’s GDPR as a point of uncertainty. It is unclear which parts of the GDPR Skylight is potentially not yet in compliance with. Other Bluesky clients like Flashes have not noted major problems with GDPR compliance. Skylight shared a short video with their story of why they are building a TikTok alternative on ATProto. Skylight CTO Reed Harmeyer shared that the main things Skylight is working on are the video editor and the algorithm. WhiteWind development is paused for the foreseeable future, creator K-NKSM has said, due to changes in their personal life. WhiteWind is a blogging platform on ATProto, but it has not seen active development for quite a while. WhiteWind was one of the earliest AppViews on ATProto that used a different lexicon and built a platform outside of Bluesky. It has surprised me that no other blogging platforms on ATProto have sprung up so far. There is a wide market appeal for long-form writing, as people looking for alternative platforms. PinkSea can now be selfhosted. PinkSea is an Oekaki board, a platform where people can draw pictures on the platform itself with simple tools and share them. So far, platforms that are building on ATProto mainly are a single app, and there have not been many cases yet where a new software platform (AppView) gets hosted by multiple providers. PinkSea is now a decentralised network in itself as well, with multiple other PinkSea instances out there. For some more information on PinkSea, creator Kacper “prefetcher” Staroń had an interview on the Software Sessions podcast this week. Roomy is a group chat app that uses ATProto, and has opened up again for its second alpha testing version. Some new updates include the ability give rooms custom handles, similar to how ATProto uses custom handles, themes for the UI, wiki pages for chat rooms. For an introduction to Roomy, developer Zeu held a talk at the recent ATmosphere conference. Atproto.garden is one of the first communities to use Roomy, and it is a place for creators who are working on ATProto in some way. The DAIR Institute released a paper on the role that social media plays in genocide, focusing on the 2020-2022 Tigray war. They are shared a 10 minute video explaining the context and their main findings. The organisation is warning that they are now seeing an “seeing an acceleration of the same type of warmongering on social media platforms that we documented at the beginning of the catastrophic Tigray war in 2020.” The reason I’m sharing this in this ATProto newsletter is the same reason what Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser says about the paper. Fraser points out that there are very valid “concerns about how atproto’s shape would fair any better at preventing this kind of thing“. I share those concerns, Bluesky and ATProto are aiming to rebuild a social network for the entire globe. And with that come some very difficult challenges, such as that people will use a social network to instigate war and genocide in a cultural context that is far removed from the people who are building the network. Statusphere is the demo application by Bluesky PBC to help people start building their own ATProto app. Independent developer Baily Townsend has taken the Statusphere example and remade it in Rust. He released it as a full tutorial for people looking to get started on ATProto using Rust. Custom feed builder Graze has added a new feature where people can share and reuse components of their custom feeds. For example, many custom feeds will want to use a NSFW filter, and now people can take someone else’s NSFW filter without having to build one themselves. 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 – #111

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber hints some more at Bluesky PBC's plans for monetisation, on ATProto's ethos, and more.

Fediverse Report – #111 A new security fund for the fediverse, and the Lemmy developers held an AMA.The News The Nivenly Foundation, the organisation that administers the Hachyderm.io instance, is opening a new security fund to sponsor contributors who disclose security vulnerabilities. All software has security vulnerabilities, and the fediverse is no exception. The recent Pixelfed vulnerability, which affected non-Pixelfed servers, is a clear example of how fediverse software can make software vulnerabilities more complex due to the interaction between different software platforms. The Nivenly Fediverse Security Fund will sponsor $250 USD for vulnerabilities that are rated as high risk (7-9 CVSS score) and $500 USD for vulnerabilities with a critical score (9+ CVSS). The program will run until the end of September 2025. Nivenly members “hold a member vote to determine if we want to continue the program, and to establish a longer-term committee to steward and maintain the program.” Last week, I wrote how Pixelfed’s vulnerability actually showed three different problems: The main problem is Pixelfed’s software vulnerability itself, but there were also two other problems: other software like Mastodon do not make it clear which risk comes with their private posts feature. And once a leak like this one happens, very few fediverse software admins communicated to their users that they might have been affected. A security fund contributes to combating software vulnerabilities, but it can also help with communication to the rest of the fediverse once a vulnerability is found. It incentives that standard industry practices regarding software vulnerability get followed, and make communication clearer to a wider audience. For example, if Pixelfed’s recent vulnerability had gotten a CVSS classification, it might have been easier to make the severity of the vulnerability explicit to other fediverse software admins. In turn, this might have made it more likely that server admins would communicate the situation with their users. In last week’s email essay I also wrote about how the fediverse is missing governance infrastructure that connects the various independent nodes and communities. One way to view the fediverse is as a response to centralised Big Tech platforms. These platforms have centralised governance, and are under the control of few people. The fediverse’s response to this is to build a social network that consists of tens of thousands of independent communities, all with their own governance structure. The fediverse has been successful in decentralising the single entity that oversees a social network into many pieces that all oversee a small portion of the network. But it has struggled to build a governance structure that ties all these individual pieces together again. The Nivenly Fediverse Security Fund is a good example of this problem: software security impacts all the thousands of independent fediverse communities, but there is no overarching structure to collaborate and improve the security. It took one server taking the initiative into their own hands and provide a service for the entire network, at their own cost. Ideally, communities would collaborate on such a security fund instead. Nivenly’s announcement does leave space for such a future direction of the fund, saying that they are open to “establish a longer-term committee to steward and maintain the program”. Note: if you sign up for my email newsletter, you get a weekly essay about the open social web that I do not publish anywhere else. You can sign up right here: The Lemmy developers, Dessalines and nutomic, held an Ask Me Anything recently, and here are some of the answers that stood out to me: Lemmy is working towards their 1.0 release. This is currently expected to be in the fall, although nutomic also says that “these things always take longer than expected”. He also expects some instances like lemmy.ml already to upgrade some months before. One of the main features for Lemmy 1.0 is private communities, where only approved accounts can browse and posts to the community. This type of closed group functionality is in high demand, and both Mastodon and Pixelfed have tried to implement it. Mastodon got a grant for it, but the proof-of-concept code has been sitting there since 2022. Pixelfed has announced and teased a group feature multiple times over the year and showed screenshots of it, but it also is not publicly available yet. Lemmy posts are interoperable with Mastodon, but the interoperability is not great: a Lemmy post appears on Mastodon as the title plus the URL. There has been many conversations about how Mastodon handles content from other platforms, with no changes so far. In this AMA, nutomic is explicit in saying that it is up to Mastodon to change this. While Mastodon seems open to the idea, and has been in conversations with developers from platforms like Ghost and NodeBB on how to show their content better on Mastodon, there has been little indication that Mastodon is taking steps towards making Lemmy content also better visible on Mastodon. On the subject of how Lemmy can grow, Dessalines describes it as an organic progress, saying: “niche communities on reddit will keep getting fed up with the changes, and migrate to lemmy.” Nutomic describes a similar dynamic for fedi and Bluesky more broadly, saying that he expects that over the long term the fediverse might grow in a similar manner: “when the Bluesky admins make decisions that the community doesnt like, and then there may be another migration wave to the Fediverse”. Both replies indicate Lemmy’s vision of how the project can grow in the long run: stay consistently working on your product, and because platforms like Lemmy are not beholden to investors, they can have a longer lifespan, and outlive platforms who are beholden to shareholder expectations. Grouping of communities (similar to PieFed’s topics or Reddit’s multireddits) “will be implemented soon“. Ahoy! is a one-day conference for the European Social Web, and will be held on April 24th 2025 in Hamburg, Germany. The conference is mainly focused on Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and has some super fascinating speakers of people who are in the forefront of building new communities on the open social web. If you’re around I can definitely recommend it. I’ll be doing some interviews with people there, so if you are considering joining, let me know and we can say hi!The Links More notes on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism on decentralized social networks – Jon Pincus/The Nexus of Privacy Ghost says there are now over a 1000 Ghost servers who have connected with the rest of the fediverse. Mastodon’s monthly engineering updates, Trunk & Tidbits, is now available for March 2025. A dataset with over 900 verified accounts of media organisations on Mastodon. 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 – #111

A new security fund for the fediverse, and the Lemmy developers held an AMA.