Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, I’ve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into it’s own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.
The news
The fourth edition of FediForum happened this week, a three-day unconference with speed demos of fediverse projects as well as some 40 open sessions about anything related to the fediverse. There were 14 demos, of which the video recordings should be available soon. Two demos stood out to me, showing products that have not been seen before, with Newsmast with channel.org, and Darius Kazemi’s ActivityPub Data Observatory. While there were lots of other great demos as well (Bandwagon for example), these mainly featured existing products.
Channel.org is the latest project by Newsmast, and is a way for organisations, nonprofits, and news publishers to build their own channel for outreach. It is fully connected to the fediverse with the front-end providing a clear and simplified interface that simply shows the latest posts by a channel. This can be seen with the demo Channel for the Kamala Harris Group, which recently got switched over to use Patchwork, Newsmast other fediverse project. Channel.org is based on Patchwork, which is a plug-in architecture that Mastodon server admins can run on top of their Mastodon server. Patchwork is getting close to being released, and Newsmast is currently looking for admins who are willing participate. Patchwork is free and publicly available, while Channel.org will require a paid membership and targets larger public organisations.
The ActivityPub Data Observatory allows fediverse developers to scan the structure (not the content!) of data that gets send around on the fediverse, allowing developers to easily compare how different sofware structures their ActivityPub data. For example, you can easily compare how Misskey structures the ActivityPub code of a note, versus how Mastodon sends the ActivityPub code for a note. The open-ended nature of ActivityPub allows developers to give their own spin on implementing ActivityPub
As for the sessions, one recurring theme I noted is the need and demand for spaces to discuss the governance and social side of the fediverse and fediverse developments. While there are spaces for the technical aspects of the discussion of the fediverse and the protocol with the SocialCG, the SocialHub and the Fediverse Developer Network, these communities are less accessible to the technical inclined people. This is a conversation that also has come up during previous FediForum sessions. The Fediverse Governance Report also notes a lack of formal channels for Federated Diplomacy. While the need and demand is clearly there, it seems to be hard to figure out a way to establish such communications channels in a way that also establishes them as legitimate places for discussions and diplomacy.
Another aspect that stood out to me is the lack of discussions that I noticed about Bluesky during FediForum, and what lessons can be learned that can be applied to the fediverse. Bluesky has managed to grow significantly bigger than the fediverse at this point, with around 5 times as many monthly active users, as well as onboarding the Brazilian community. It seems to me that it is worth reflecting on why that is, and how the fediverse can better show itself as a good, ethical social network that people would like to join.
Fediverse Discovery Providers
The organisation behind Mastodon (Mastodon gGmbH) has announced a new project, Fediscovery, that explores decentralised search and discovery for the fediverse. The project got funded by NGI Search, and “explores the possibilities for better search and discovery on the Fediverse in the form of an optional, pluggable service. This service should be decentralized, independent of any one specific Fediverse service and respect user choice and privacy.” Mastodon gGmbH is explicitly not building only for Mastodon, they make it clear that they intend Fediscovery to be used by the wider fediverse, not only Mastodon.
What Mastodon gGmbH is building here is what they call a ‘Fediverse Auxiliary Service Providers’. These auxiliary service providers can potentially do a variety of different services. The Fediscovery project is about building one of these service providers, a disovery provider, as a minimum proof of concept and as a demonstration what types of services other people can build as well. The plans are currently still in the very early stages, and more information expected at the end of September. For my own understanding I think of a Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider as pretty much a Relay, with some minor yet-to-be-announced differences.
Mastodon gGmbH is also explicit in focusing on opt-in consent for the service, stating that it will “only ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place. Instances sending content to discovery providers should make sure to only send such content in the first place as well. All other information a discovery provider gathers should be anonymous.”
During a FediForum session about Fediscovery, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed that between 8% and 10% of active accounts have opted into Mastodon’s search, a year after it has been released. It indicates one of the fundamental challenges of any design that is opt-in: very few people will change the default settings, irregardless of what the settings are about. As Discovery and Search systems gain value by covering a bigger network, it shows the fundamental tensions that Mastodon gGmbH will have to grapple with while building Fediscovery.
Mozilla shuts down mozilla.social fediverse server
Mozilla has announced that they will shut down the mozilla.social server in December 2024. The server was announced in December 2022 as a way to ‘explore healthy social media alternative’. The project was originally quite big in scope, with planned integrations to log in with Firefox, and the GitHub repo showed their own mobile clients, and a custom front-end based on Elk. In 2023 Mozilla started to very slowly open up in a private beta, but the number of people getting access has been low. In February 2024 Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox, scaling back their investments in various products, including their mozilla.social fediverse server. In an accompanying memo Mozilla stated at the time: “The actions we’re taking today will make this strategic correction, working through a much smaller team to participate in the Mastodon ecosystem and more rapidly bring smaller experiments to people that choose to live on the mozilla.social instance.”
It seems like these more rapid smaller experiments never came, nor did it seem that Mozilla was particularly interested in growing the server. I honestly cannot find out if the server ever opened up for open registrations after they ran a waitlist for a long time, but it seems like it they have not. At any rate, the experiment stayed small, and mozilla.social currently has just below 300 active users.
The shutdown of Mozilla.social does raise questions about the server-centric model that the fediverse is based around: are there organisations that are willing to run large general-purpose fediverse servers, and have the ability to handle the infrastructure costs and moderation requirements that come with it. Mozilla seemed like it would be a good organisation to potentially do that. With Mozilla now pulling back, focusing on smaller servers might be a more logical direction going forward.
In Other News
Threads has figured out how maximise publicity by making minimal incremental updates to their ActivityPub implementation, edition 501.
Bonfire showcases how with third-party extensions scientists can display ‘relevant data about their work and research topics directly on their profiles.’ Bonfire does not yet know when the platform will launch.
The client Kaiteki, which focused on being a client for all the different microblogging platforms in the fediverse, stops development.
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research had stopped using their Mastodon account in October 2023, and after not posting for most of the year they said they’d close the account. After a large pushback from the community they reconsidered the decision and said they’d continue using the account again.
The new Trust and Safety Taskforce with the SocialCG has set up an issue tracker for protocol level and/or specification changes to improve trust and safety on the fediverse.
The Fediverse Berlin Day had multiple sessions about, well, the fediverse. Full live stream available here, with the German publisher ARD talking about their fediverse experience and strategy. Evan Prodromou also gave a talk about a ‘bigger, better fediverse’, which you can watch here. I do want to note that I find it very hard to square Prodromou’s estimation of 10 million federated Threads account with the fact that Mastodon.social (which accounts for a quarter of the entire fediverse’ monthly active users) currently knows about 18000 federated Threads accounts.
In This Issue
* A Note From The Editor
* Features
* Feature: RFF's August Fediwave Retrospective
* Feature: Owncast On Lemmy
* Featured Streamer: Pretok.
Welcome to the weekly update on everything that’s happened on Bluesky and the broader network called the ATmosphere. A short introduction for people who might not know me: I’m Laurens Hof, and the last year I’ve written a monthly update on all the news that’s happened on Bluesky. I’ve written a weekly newsletter about everything that is happening in the fediverse, the other decentralised social network, as well over the last year and a half. And now you can expect even more regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere as well, coming out every Wednesday. It’s been a busy week* with video, 10 million accounts, and more!
The News
Bluesky has added support for video. The feature has been often requested, especially from the Brazilian community. Over the last few weeks the team has made it their top priority to launch the feature as soon as possible. Videos have indeed been very popular on Bluesky, with 169 years of videos being served within 2 days, and half a million videos posted within 4 days. Each video can be one minute long, and people can upload 25 videos per day.
There are two things that stand out to me about Bluesky’s video support: videos have shown to be highly popular on Bluesky, and the openness of the ATmosphere network allows people to build new types of network that are more catered towards watching videos specifically. I’m curious to what extend this will actually happen. Furthermore videos require significantly more resources than text posts, so it is worth watching how this impacts Blueskys thinking about costs and monetization.
Bluemotion is a video hosting app for Bluesky, by the same developer that also makes the audio spaces Bluecast for Bluesky. The developer announced that Bluemotion will be shut down as it has fulfilled its role.
Bluesky crossed 10 million accounts this week, of which around 4 million came in the last month or so after the ban in Brazil on X. It now has around 5.5 million monthly active users. User retention after this new signup wave is also notably high, with daily active users peaking at 1.91 million, and staying at 1.57 million some two weeks later. Every signup wave has a significant amount of churn, as it is very difficult to get people to change their habits and start regularly using a new social platform, and Bluesky’s churn seems low to me. Bluesky celebrated this milestone by letting everyone know which number they joined the network with, and how early they were. The amount of people sharing it shows that people on Bluesky definitely like to show off their early-adopter status.
The adoption of Bluesky by the Brazilian community as the default social network after the ban on X has continued. After the dust has settled it looks like the Brazilians now fairly consistently represent three quarters of the total posts on the network. President Lula (‘s social media team) shows that they’re aware of the features that Bluesky offers, and has used a Starter Pack to promote different candidates for elections. Some of the biggest football clubs in Brazil have established an official presence as well, such as Corinthians and Vasco da Gama. When goals get scored during the games, this is now clearly visible in significant spikes in posts, with the number of posts per second doubling temporarily. Another developer made a directory of Brazilian accounts on Bluesky, sorted by various categories, to help people onboard as well. A Brazilian esports organisation now sells handles with their (sub)domain to raise money for the organisation as well as for people to show they support the team.
The Brazilian Bluesky community also had their first major cultural moment this week. During a televised debate between electoral rivals for mayor of Sao Paolo, one of the candidates hit one of the other candidates with a chair. Videos of the event went viral, and over the last two days the majority of the network’s top posts have been memes about the event. One of the most popular posts described it as ‘a really canonical event on this social network’. This is also in contrast with Threads, where the event seems to have not gone viral at all.
Skyware is a new lightweight labeler server. Originally, the labeling system was designed by Bluesky to be a content moderation system. Over time, the labeling system has slowly transformed, away from content moderation, and towards labelers that you can self-apply for silly or more practical use-cases as indicating your pronouns (or to recreate Orkut). Skyware is the next evolution in this, where the software is only for labeling accounts, and the moderation part of the system is stripped away altogether. Still, other organisations are experimenting with using labelers for content moderation: News Detective is a fact checking organisation that now has a labeler on Bluesky as well. How effective a fact-checking system is when people have to opt into receiving the fact checks on a social network remains to be seen however.
A research paper that studies how Bluesky has evolved from invitation-only to being open to the public. One of their findings is that Bluesky is a chatty network, something that was already the case before the arrival of the Brazilians: users tend to create more posts than reshare other posts, in contrast with Twitter/X where the dynamic is the other way around.
For the people interested in the nitty-gritty of protocols: NodeInfo is a standardized way of exposing metadata about a server running one of the distributed social networks, and it is currently mainly used for ActivityPub servers. Now there is an effort to expand NodeInfo so it can also be used for a PDS on atproto.
Bridgy Fed is a way to connect Bluesky to other decentralised social networks such as Mastodon. The latest update now also bridges video between the network, and you can let the bridge ask an account via a DM if they want to opt-in to the bridge. Bridgy Fed will only send a DM once, even if someone else also asks.
Graphtracks allows you to check the statistics of atproto accounts, allowing you to see a graph of your follow and likes over time. It shows the power of a completely open API, where anyone can now have full detailed statistics about their account.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
* 10 days actually, I switched from publishing on Sunday to publishing on Wednesday this week as well.
Mozilla certainly has the capacity to run a server but decided that it didn't further their business goals. Plenty of other organizations will see the benefit of fediverse participation, whether on their own servers or hosted space.
CassandraVert
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •