@Comrade Ferret

tbf that goes for a lot of instances, though. I've found ones run by straight up fascists that nevertheless MLs still decide to call their home.

Yes, I know.

On a related note: are you aware that despite the left-wing ecosystem being a negligibly minuscule corner of the Fedi, hit pieces swaddled in academic jargon have already started appearing? (Came across this one just now, there may be more.) This paper has received some coverage, and I came across at least one thread discussing it.

MLs should be proud of this achivement 😉

A few more hit pieces like this cleverly clustering together terms such as tankies, lefties, extreme left, china, communism, dprk, castro, authoritarianism, autocracy, nazis, anti-zionism, antisemitism, and so on and so forth; and you will soon have most of the liberal/fascist instances virulently defederating the "tainted" instances and en masse banning "tankie" accounts. The Fedi is dominated by colonialists and white supremacists masquerading as liberals, these kind of papers will encourage them to jump out of their closets and practice their imperialism in the open. Better a fash in my bed than a commie as my ally—they will proclaim! I routinely check out the "explore" sections on popular mastodon instances, and I can see a good deal of this already happening, though the language so far is not blatant.

Only today saw this very popular post by the admin of one of the most prominent mastodon instances proclaiming (white) European civilizational supremacy in a language that strongly appeals to liberals and stokes all their complexes and biases.

It's something I'd like to solve, but I'm not entirely sure how; shilling WotW certainly isn't the answer lol

I am afraid my answer is going to enrage you—I don't think you can solve that on the Fediverse, given the material reality of today's world.

My earlier tentative feeling—that the Fediverse, in its present state, is useless for left-wing organization and agitation—has more or less hardened into a strong opinion. (Personally, I find it useless for socializing too, but that could be just me.) I see no way of changing that with my own actions. I see no way of connecting with enough number of like-minded folks. In fact, I see no way of finding a decent number of like-minded folks, assuming that they do exist on the Fedi. Putting in a lot of hashtags or mentioning guppe groups in posts has no effect; neither does following and interacting with the posts of hundreds of people—been there, done all of that. (I have also noticed the close to zero responses to many of your excellent posts.) In my opinion, the only possible solution is community-owned algorithms that surface in other posts based on the content of an user’s posts, and their preferences/likings as expressed in the profile. Yes, I am talking of the infamous personally tailored feeds, only in this case curated by an open algorithm selected by the user. But I know there will be very noisy opposition to anything like that; I am neither motivated enough to fight for that option, nor do I have the bandwidth to work at it.

Related issue: the Fedi discourse is entirely dominated by white liberal imperialists, and they don’t have the slightest interest in understanding other viewpoints or ideologies. Or even in interacting with people with differing viewpoints. The discourse can only change (for the worse or for the better) if there is an influx of a very large number—a number many many times larger than the present user base of the Fedi—of new users. But there are far too many structural sociotechnical barriers preventing this from happening.

All in all, being on the Fediverse is, at present, an unproductive use of time for a left-winger. Also especially dangerous is the sense of security and belonging that many left-wingers hallucinate on the Fedi. At least on Facebook or on eX-Twitter or on YouTube, you know you are on enemy territory, and can strategize accordingly.

ps: I personally very much like Hubzilla as software, but it has neither people nor algorithms )-:

Laurens Hof

2025-08-12 16:24:19

Fediverse Report – #129

The News

SocialHub is a Discourse forum that has served as the main ActivityPub discussion forum for a long time. The platform might shut down on September 10th, as the current platform operators have stated that unless they can find a community that is willing to take over the infrastructure, they will shut down the platform. SocialHub has been run since 2019 by the small organisation called Petites Singularités, although in effect the administration of the platform came largely down to a single administrator. The current administrator Hellekin is also explicit in looking for a team of multiple people to take over, not a single individual, and other requirements for the new team are implied as well. There have been offers from individuals to take over the technical aspect, but there is less interested in the community management type of work.

A number of fediverse developers also question the value that SocialHub still can bring, who see that most fediverse developers have already left SocialHub, or were never even a part of it in the first place. It is easy to hypothesise a ActivityPub developer platform that contains reference material, documentations and lively discussions. But as Arnold Schrijver points out, it is “much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.” Other efforts such as fedidevs.org have largely petered out, and it is unclear if there is enough interest from developers to collaborate on maintaining such a place.

---

A list published by Drop News Site contains over 100k websites that Meta allegedly has scraped for their data to train their AI, and the list also contains a number of fediverse servers. A communications representative for Meta says that the list is ‘bogus’. While it is difficult to verify the correctness of this specific news story, that Meta is scraping fediverse data for AI training is certainly plausible: the data is publicly accessible and Meta so far has shown an insatiable hunger to ingest as much data as possible for AI training purposes. Meta has shown a willingness to acquire data via methods that seem legally questionable in the most optimistic reading possible. While collecting fediverse data for AI training may potentially fall within legal boundaries, it goes against the clear wishes of the fediverse community.

The story points to how difficult it has been to evolve the fediverse to a network where people can actually publish their consent on how their data can be handled by others. The privacy policy of a significant number of fediverse servers, including some servers on the published list above, explicitly state: “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” However, public response to this news makes it clear that for a significant number of people, they do not want Meta to be handling their public social networking data to be used for AI training.

There has been some effort by the Mastodon organisation to update the their Terms of Service (ToS) to prohibit the use of that server’s data for AI training purposes, but Mastodon had to retract that new ToS due to various criticisms. It is unclear however if such a ToS would be binding to third parties who have not signed the ToS. What’s more notable for me is that there is still no easy way for fediverse users to indicate their consent how their data can be handled on a per-post level that is also distributed via ActivityPub and is machine-readable. A significant group of fediverse users do not want their data to be used for AI training, but so far their options are mainly limited to being on a server who prohibits this via regulation, and there are no easy ways to set consent on a per-user level.

---

Mastodon shared in their monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, that the organisation is working on adding Starter Packs. Starter Packs were first launched by Bluesky, and found great popularity late last year. It allows people to create lists of accounts, and other users can follow all these accounts with a single click of a button. The feature allowed new Bluesky users to rapidly on-board the platform and get a timeline full of content. However, the feature also had some major drawbacks, such as being used for spammy engagement-bait accounts to build large following networks. People also could not opt-out of being included on other people’s Starter Packs, which caused some people to get a large number of followers that they did not want or ask for, leading to clashes and context collapse. Mastodon has the advantage of being a second-mover, and being able to iterate on Bluesky’s implementation. The organisation already has said that they will let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack.

---

A new research paper on the lemmygrad.ml Lemmy instance, called “Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml“. Within Lemmy there exists a subculture of various instances, most notably Hexbear and Lemmygrad, that self-describes as Marxist and/or leftist, and partially intersects with the developers of Lemmy. There is interesting research to be done on how that sub-community impacts the wider culture of the Threadiverse. This published paper limits itself to data from 2019 to 2022, which misses out on how these communities and cultures have developed over the more recent years. For example, the Hexbear instance was not federating with the rest of the network for a while, only to turn federation back on over a year ago, and it would be interesting to explore how that has impacted other Lemmy servers.

The Links

• IFTAS has opened their yearly Needs Assesment, where they “input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web” to find the needs of the people who are building communities on the social web.
• All of the video’s of the recent FediCon conference have now been published on PeerTube.
• Openvibe, a client that combines Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads into a single timeline, now also supports RSS, to be both a news and social app at the same time.
• Ghost CEO John O’Nolan writes some reflections about Ghost’s recently launched ActivityPub integration, and how people have perceived it.
• The WordPress ActivityPub team explains how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed.
• The ‘delightful fediverse experience’ list tracks a large amount of fediverse-related projects, and has been expanded with some new categories around tools and extensions.

#nlnet

connectedplaces.online/reports…

delightful fediverse experience

Delightful curated lists of free software, open science and information sources.

^{delightful.coding.social}

@Feral Ferment Hmm, I'm still finding a few contradictions here. You open with saying that MLs ought to be proud of being featured a frankly horribly written study about them on fedi (using the term 'tankie' unironically would disqualify it instantly from any real scholarly journal, and the paper's entire conclusion is that "they exist"; they don't use any real sociological measures at all), but close stating that Fedi is not only useless for any form of organization, but also socialization — while socializing with me on Fedi. You also warn against the feeling of security one gets in an echo-box, and follow by suggesting an opt-in algorithm to ensure the creation of an echo-box. So I'm not really sure what to make of this.

While my posts don't get a ton of direct engagement, some of them do get shared upwards of half a dozen times, which is decent for someone with only 80 followers. More importantly, the lack of an algorithm means that I can see and then directly address liberals who believe they're on the same side — the 'left' — but don't understand where socialists are coming from. The whole "Trump has become socialist because he bought Amazon shares!" or whatever has been, while frustrating, ultimately helpful in communicating to people what socialism is, and I've gotten a few very positive responses to that communication.

As for getting socialists off of fascist-run servers, 'material conditions' is going to need a little bit more explaining if you're to describe why it cannot happen. The only way material conditions would prevent that would be if servers were by and large owned by fascists as with the means of production, which, uniquely of the decentralized web, is actually not true.

Welcome to Mastodon and the Fediverse! We all get excited when new people come on board.

We're all here to help, you need anything!

English garum, aka Worcestershire* Sauce, is anchovies.

* Pronounced Wooster, as in Bertie.

The image shows a screenshot of two tweets on a dark background. The first tweet is from a user named Kur, with the handle [@]ShakursWorld. The tweet reads: "Your bladder hit DIFFERENT when you're putting the key in the door" followed by several laughing emojis. The second tweet is from a user named Tristan, with the handle [@]AyoTristan. It reads: "That bladder connect to the home wifi and it's time to GO." Both tweets are presented in a typical social media format, with the user's name, handle, and profile picture visible above the text. The overall tone of the tweets is humorous, focusing on a relatable situation.

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