Last Week in Fediverse – ep 89

Shortform video platform Loops opens a waitlist for signups, Mosaic is a service to help organisations create their custom version of upcoming platform Bonfire, and the new owners of event planning platform Mobilizon release a big new update.

The News

Loops is an upcoming fediverse platform for short form video, build by Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault. On the loops.video site there has been a countdown over the last month that ended this Monday, and with it, people can now sign up for Loops. Loops is currently still being worked on, with Supernault working on getting the apps out to release. The Android app will be made available as an APK, and the iOS app is waiting approval for TestFlight. Loops is currently developed as a mobile-first platform, and does not have a webUI yet, with Supernault saying that a webUI will come later. He also reports that emails welcoming people after they have signed on are rate-limited by the email provider, resulting in a long delay before people can be onboarded. Moderation services for Loops are currently being worked on as well, and Supernault is looking for moderators to help moderate the platform.

Mosaic is a new service by the Bonfire team, where the Bonfire team will help organisations build and set up their own digital federated spaces. Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that focuses on customisation and extensibility, that people and organisations can customise to meet their needs. Mosaic is a way for the Bonfire team to help onboard organisations and customise the platform to their needs. Extensions and other improvements made with Mosaic are then available for the rest of the community to use as well, as part of their AGPL license, so that everyone benefits from contributions made by others. Bonfire is currently available for testing, but not for official release yet. The main blocker seems to be slow performance of Bonfire, and the developers have put out a bounty for other developers to help them improve performance.

An update by Newsmast on what they are working on with Channels.org. They relate Newsmast’s Channels to Bluesky’s custom feeds (as DYI algorithms) and Farcaster’s channels (‘Cozy corners’). For Newsmast, Channels are a way to onboard public organisations, giving them their own place (the channel) to distribute their content, where the space is clearly their own, but still part of the larger fediverse network. Newsmast also notes that they’ll focus on Channels for now, and that Patchwork, the plugin system for Mastodon servers is postponed to early next year to prevent the team from stretching themselves too thin. Newsmast’s Michael Foster also blogged about how we can build a different web together as well, reiterating my point that the current trend seems for AT Protocol to be used for public and global conversations, and ActivityPub for (semi)-private networked communities.

IFTAS held a 2024 Survey among fediverse moderators, and while they are preparing a full report they give some early highlights on the results. Based on their survey data IFTAS estimates that there are 5500 users per moderator on the fediverse, which is between three and ten times as many moderators compared to other Big Tech platforms.

An article by Techpolicy.press goes into detail on ‘The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media’. It draws attention to pravda.me as an example of the expanding thread landscape on decentralised social networks; a large Mastodon server that bears all the hallmarks of inauthenticity, but is barely blocked on or on the radars of the larger fediverse community. The article also makes a distinction between moderation questions where decentralisation empowers communities (often related to political or sexual content), and issues where centralisation is more beneficial, such as spam and CSAM. Accompanying the article is also a podcast interview with Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi about their fediverse governance report.

Fediverse event planning platform Mobilizon got transferred from developers Framasoft to a new organisation, Kaihuri, who have gotten a grant from NLnet to further expand the platform. They have now released v5 of Mobilizon, with new features such as a homepage redesign, a monthly calendar view, better management of recurring or ongoing events, and more. You can test out the new version of Mobilizon here.

The Links

• revealing the fediverse’s gifts – Erin Kissane.
• How Decentralization Benefits Publishers, with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and ProPublica’s Ben Werdmuller – Dot Social Podcast.
• ZonePane is an Android app that supports Mastodon, Misskey and Bluesky, and remembers your last place on the timeline.
• A blog post by a in response to Bengo’s ‘The Challenge of ActivityPub Data Portability’.
• A fediverse invitation for artists – Stefan Bohacek.
• A new allowlist-only instance for Black folks.
• Lemmy development updates for the last two weeks.
• A fediverse musicians starter pack.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Write.as is reopening itself to free accounts.
• An app to discover other accounts to follow based on hashtags you both like.
• Helping to build the open social web – Ben Werdmuller.
• Adding Lemmy comments to a blog.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

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fediversereport.com/last-week-…

IFTAS

2024-10-16 22:58:49

We are now reviewing the fantastic responses from our 2024 Needs Assessment participants. Thank you to everyone who participated! A very special thank you to everyone for whom English is not your first language – we hope to offer the survey in additional languages next year, but we really appreciate all the people who took the survey despite any language barriers.

We selected 50 participants at random to receive a small thank you reward valued at $20 USD; recipients will be able to choose from a range of local currency gift cards including supermarkets, pet shops, rail travel, app stores and more, as well as an option to donate the reward to a number of global charities.

UPDATE: If you participated, please be sure to check your spam folder and inbox for mail from “rewards@reward.tremendous.com”

Although the final report will take some time, here’s a few quick hits…

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We asked for input from any and all federating platforms. Along with 87 Mastodon operators we saw responses from a range of platforms. We count one of each per response – so this is the number of moderators who actively moderate a given platform, even if they operate multiple instances of the same platform.

Some of our participants noted that they also moderate as volunteers on Reddit and IRC!

Special personal treat: I was reminded that flohmarkt is a thing!
Platform moderators: Akkoma 6, Bluesky 5, Bookwyrm 8, Firefish 2, flohmarkt 1, Forgejo 1, Friendica 3, GoToSocial 2, Hometown 3, Hubzilla 1, Iceshrimp 3, Lemmy 13, Matrix 4, mbin 4, Misskey 2, Mobilizon 3, OwnCast 1, PeerTube 10, PieFed 2, Pixelfed 8, Pleroma 2, Sharkey 3, WordPress 5, Writefreely 4. Not shown: Mastodon 87.

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We heard from communities and servers of all shapes and sizes, including a number of single-person servers, some very large service providers, and everything in between. At first glance it looks like we have a very broad view of the Fediverse.
Number of hosted accounts: <10 24, 10-100 20, 100-1,000 23, 1,000-10,000 19, 10,000-100,000 15, >100,000 6

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The communities that responded host a collective 4.4 million accounts, roughly a third of all known accounts. Their moderator teams identified being from 24 countries, including Costa Rica, Egypt, Slovenia and South Korea.

Based on the reported moderator team sizes, we are seeing one moderator for every 5,500 accounts. This is an increase in coverage from last year where we saw one moderator for every 6,200 accounts.

Contrast this with industry best guesses that X has one per 60,000, TikTok has one per 22,500, Meta has one per 17,600 (reference). A major piece of that finding is that the Fediverse predominantly moderates by hand with very little automation.

Almost a fifth of the services (not including single-person servers) provide 24 hour moderation coverage, a slight improvement from last year.

Keep an eye out for our full report, and in the meantime you can review last year’s findings. Once we have the data deidentified and aggregated we will share the overall findings with the community, and use the report to focus our resources going into 2025, and you’ll be able to track those priorities on our public Activity Tracker.

If you didn’t take the survey in time to be included in this year’s report, no fear! The survey is open year round, we value your input and feedback and will incorporate any new responses into our ongoing work. Take the survey today!

about.iftas.org/2024/10/16/202…

Data Shows X Has Significantly Fewer Moderation Staff Than Other Platforms

The latest EU transparency reports provide insight into the comparative moderation staff numbers.

^{Andrew Hutchinson (Social Media Today)}