The next release of Mastodon will have features to better support communities in different jurisdictions around the world - multi-lingual rules translations, terms of service, and optional minimum age requirements for sign-up. You can learn more in our latest blog post. blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/…
Anyone can fake their age but please add some good custom emoji to this server. 95% custom emoji sucks here. And can you please add some more custom field in profile like Fedibird? It has 8 custom field while Mastodon has 4.
@EllenB we appreciate any community support with translations! You can take a look at crowdin.com/project/mastodon to propose improvements to individual languages. Our team speaks several languages, but we do not cover every possible language option between us.
hello, just did a reseach about social media that isn't about making people rich and maybe this result is useful to you too. If you can strengthen SEO, you might get far. 😀 "compared to an average post on facebook, what is the ranking...google among the relevant topics? ChatGPT said: Google ranking: because Mastodon instances aren’t optimized for SEO, even highly boosted toots usually fall on page 2–3 (positions 15–30) in Google results for related keyword searches seroundtable.com"
Bluesky begins rolling out support for livestreaming on other platforms, Leaflet is a blogging and publishing platform that has added ATProto integration, easier bridging between ATProto and other protocols, and a whole lot more.
Bluesky begins rolling out support for livestreaming on other platforms, Leaflet is a blogging and publishing platform that has added ATProto integration, easier bridging between ATProto and other protocols, and a whole lot more.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!
The News
Bluesky is starting to roll out a new feature where people can add their Twitch and YouTube livestreams to their account, and the Bluesky app will display an indicator on your profile that you are live. Bluesky is rolling out the feature slowly, with only a select few accounts being able to go live so far. It is mainly focused on sports communities so far, with the NBA being one of the first partners. Bluesky is taking it slow with this feature, CTO Paul Frazee said that major effort is in verifying if the linked account on the streaming platform is the same person as the Bluesky account. Another concern is moderation, Bluesky is only linking to Twitch and YouTube, as these are platforms with a well-established moderation infrastructure. For example Bluesky wants ATProto streaming platform Streamplace to have solid moderation in place before it is considered to be added as a potential source of livestreams. Similar to how Bluesky has rolled out verification, some core pieces of how going live works as only accessible on ATProto, and available for others to use. Bluesky client TOKIMEKI already added the ability for any user to go live. However, same as with verification, this is only visible to other people who also use TOKIMEKI. The real impact of a livestreaming integration will likely come when the feature becomes more widely available, but for now it is already a good demonstration of Bluesky’s willingness to send traffic outside of their app. While Big Tech platforms are taking greater and greater efforts to stop people from leaving their app, Bluesky is taking the opposite approach, by adding features which make people switch to another app.
Leaflet is a publishing platform where anyone can easily create and publish their own documents, posts and pages. These documents can be shared as simple web pages, with a lot of features for customisation. Leaflet’s latest update is Leaflet Publications, which adds ATProto integration. They describe the update as Leaflet becoming as a social publishing platform. With the update, you can now create a ‘publication’, which is a collection of documents and posts. For this you log into Leaflet with your ATProto (Bluesky) account, so that the data is stored on ATProto on your PDS. This makes Leaflet an ATProto blogging platform similar to WhiteWind. Future plans include for more social integration, such as subscribing, commenting, following and more. The organisation says that the key goals is to build social publishing, and to support creators, with paid subscriptions being “a high priority and on our roadmap”.
A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, has launched a dedicated page to for people to manage their account bridging. Bridgy Fed is a piece of software that allows people to ‘bridge’ their account across multiple protocols. This allows people on Mastodon (using the ActivityPub protocol) to interact with people on Bluesky (using AT Protocol). For this, people need to manually opt-in their accounts to be bridged to other networks (largely due to cultural reasons from the fediverse communities). Up until now, doing so was a fairly confusing process that involved manually following other accounts. With the new update, people can log in to Bridgy Fed with the account they want to bridge, and simply turn it on or off. It also has an easier option to update the handles for Mastodon accounts that are bridged to Bluesky: for example, by default my Mastodon account on Bluesky can be found at @laurenshof.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy, which is a fairly cumbersome handle, to put it mildly. At the settings page I can now change it to any handle I want, similar to how any Bluesky account can change their handle. A New Social is also launching a Patreon as they are working towards financial sustainability, with plans to launch merch soon as well.
Custom feed builder Graze has released an integration with Patreon. This integration gives feed creators two new options. Feed creators can now give members of their Patreon the ability to see their custom feeds without sponsored content. They can also limit access to their custom feed to only members of their Patreon. Custom feeds present a large amount of new design space to explore, and they can be used for a wide variety of purposes. One of those is using custom feeds as a form of community, as Blacksky is doing, for example. Restricting access to a a custom feed to only members of a Patreon is another step in the direction of ‘feeds as communities’.
Grain Social is a new photo sharing app build on ATProto. The app is for creating and sharing galleries of photos. The app uses it’s own lexicon, giving people a space to upload and share photos that do not automatically end up on Bluesky. The app has some simple features right now: a timeline that shows all the galleries and photo’s that are created on the platform, and the ability for people to upload photos and create galleries.
Germ Network is an end-2-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app that is currently in development. The app has announced that they are working on ATProto integration, where people can use Germ Network with their ATProto account. The actual E2EE messaging happens off-protocol. Germ Network says that they are hoping for a common on-protocol implementation in the future, where Germ Network and other ATProto messaging apps can interoperate. A thread by Germ Network CEO Tessa Brown also illustrates why platforms are interested in integrating with ATProto: getting a new social platform off the ground without an existing social graph is incredibly hard. ATProto provides the possibility for other platforms to tap into an existing social graph. This observation is not new, Bluesky PBC has been explicit that this is one of the advantages and design goals of ATProto. We are now starting to see this play out, with new apps that are starting to come out that use ATProto to bootstrap a social graph.
The developers for Bluesky client Flashes said they are working on the concept of a PDS that runs on mobile phones. The Flashes developers are interested in working together with others on this, and have started a Working Group where they have shared their proposed design.
One of the core ideas of ATProto is that the network is effectively one giant pool of data, where a variety of apps and tools can access the same data and process and present that data in a way that fits them best. A Bluesky post can be viewed in the Bluesky Social app for regular doomscrollingmicroblogging, but the same post can also be opened in a PDS browser tool like PDSls or atp.tools, viewed in Skythread for a threading view, or more. Switching between apps to view the same post in different context is quite cumbersome. at://wormhole is a tool to make this easier, it is an Apple Shortcut that allows easy switching between apps. You can view the same content, using the different context that each app provides. As the ecosystem develops, I’m expecting to see more experimentation and development in this direction.
An update for moderation software Ozone (it can now display, issue, and revoke, verification) as well as a new proposal by Bluesky PBC to expand the set of reporting reasons available to users and labelers.
Streamplace has launched a new tool for OAuth, OATProxy, which helps prevent users being logged out of their apps every few days.
Streamplace redesigned the homepage, and made their first hire after their funding round.
Popsky is a media review app on ATProto, and the app is now available for testing on Android as well as iOS. Popsky also supports Goodreads imports now.
BookHive is another media review platform that added support for Goodreads imports this week.
Jetrelay is a custom designed relay that is intended to serve a large number of clients with high efficiency.
In the Media
Wired has an extensive interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, and Graber answers a wide variety of questions on the network. Some quotes that stood out to me:
Graber says that Bluesky is great at sending traffic to news organisations. Wired themselves confirm this, saying that “The platform has become a top traffic driver and source of new subscribers“. Washington Times reporter Drew Harwell also agrees that Bluesky has become a great drive of referral traffic.
Wired boils down questions of moderation to its core, by asking: “Would you welcome President Trump?” Graber is clear that Bluesky will, saying: “Yeah—Bluesky’s for everyone, and we think that over time, the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol. That lets people choose their own moderation preferences. We think that it’s flexible enough to serve every use case and everyone.” The follow-up questions on how Graber relates this to free speech being under thread is worth reading as well.
On growing the team: “In November, during our growth spurt, we were around 20. Now we’re at 25, and we’ll probably pass 30 soon. We’re growing at a pace that’s sustainable to us.”
Graber talks about an upcoming ‘communities’ feature that’s scheduled for the end of the year: “A lot of people don’t realize that Bluesky is a bit like Reddit and Twitter at the same time, because you can build feeds that are essentially communities—the science feed is run by scientists, is moderated by scientists, and has its own rules.” The ability to build custom feeds is also planned to come to within the Bluesky app.
On making money, Graber reiterates the current plans: “Subscriptions are coming soon. The next steps are to look into what marketplaces can span these different applications.”
Some interesting and fun experiments in building on ATProto that caught my eye this week:
A tool to scan your timeline and see how how much every account you follow contributes to your feed. Gives good insight in how dominant the loudest voices can be on your timeline, compared to the Quiet Posters.
Sure why not make your browsing history publicly available on ATProto.
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.
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.
Technical details
This PR is basically the counterpart of all the changes done for RFL#408 in order to be able to run the app on iOS.
A picture to prove it really happened:
Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.
We are working on motion graphics for the Fediverse promotional video... and we would love to do a sequence at the end with a mosaic of people's profile photos. For that, I need your consent.
If you'd like to have a small cameo in our video, can you let us know if we can use your profile pic?
Yes please, feel free to use my avatar, if you want it for the end of your video. 😀 (My current avatar is a photo of me which I took myself while visiting a friend in London a few years ago. While normally I don't wear such a hat, on the picture it's still me.)
Hello Elena! You can use my photo and that of the Alquimídia Association, the first (and so far) only organization dedicated to Fediverse in Brazil: @rede.
I'm not human, but I would highly appreciate it you use my picture too: as Blåhaj the #plushieverse is an important place for me, because here I can be myself, independent from what my human does. If you want to promote the fediverse, then maybe you should also mention that it is a place where plushies can find a home!
You can and are free to, if not for content promoting something other than the Fediverse (not because I don't trust you, but because I don't know your political and world views).
This is to certify that you may use my profile-picture even if it is not me. I will not be against this ag any time regardless of my future words. Would like to see the result of your work though
Mastodon Hosts a Gathering for re:publica 25
An evening of casual conversation, connection, and community with the people building the decentralised social…
El día domingo 25/05/25 se realizaron las mega elecciones en la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, dicho proceso en el cual el voto del pueblo para elegir a 24 gobernadores y a parlamentarios nacionales y regionales, se ejecutó en absoluta Paz; las organizaciones políticas revolucionarias socialistas obtuvieron el triunfo de 23 gobernaciones y la mayoría absoluta de los Diputados/as tanto a nivel nacional como regional. Los factores derechistas y ultra derechistas fueron derrotados
The system is currently deleting a very large amount of old content from the database. This will continue for another three to four days. The load on the server is therefore increased and the queue is longer than usual.
Ma esattamente cosa significa? Nel senso, questi profili sono gestiti dalle varie testate o sono generati da flipboard? C'è la possibilità di qualche interazione?
quegli account che ho segnalato sono tutti ufficiali e quindi gestiti direttamente. Che poi ti rispondano è tutto da vedere… Comunque sono 2 anni che stanno federando account di testate giornalistiche di tutto il mondo, ora hanno iniziato con quelle italiane, oltre alle 20 che ho segnalato ce ne sono molte altre ma non tutte sono ancora federate con Mastodon & co.
@ciccillo @lgsp @Neffscape intanto ho visto che sono link agli articoli, per ora ne ho beccato uno con paywall e dei paywall ho un minimo di rispetto (anche se preferirei pagare il singolo articolo e non dovermi abbonare, che dei "disdici quando vuoi" mi fido fino a un certo punto). È quando trovo un cookie wall che vado a prendere la scala da 4 metri (12 piedi con le misure inglesi)
E meno male che le avete selezionate! Se dopo la selezione ne restano 987 non voglio pensare a quante erano prima. Sì, avete davvero a cuore la nostra privacy
@sabrinaweb71 @ciccillo@jazztodon.com @lgsp @Neffscape purtroppo il limite di 500 caratteri è tiranno, ho omesso di ire che ogni testate ha degli account federati tematici, ad esempio il pos ne ha 17: flipboard.com/@ilPost quindi invece di essere travolti alle notizie basta scegliere gli argonenti a cui si è più interessati. ad esempio la sezione libri de il post è questa qui: flipboard.com/@ilpost/libri-u6…
Ovvero la possibilità di escludere dalla Home i post dei profili che sono stati inseriti in una lista esclusiva.
I casi d'uso sono innumerevoli. Si potrebbe ad esempio distribuire tutti i profili seguiti in liste esclusive e lasciare che la Home si popoli solo degli hashtag seguiti.
Per rendere esclusiva una lista recarsi sulla lista, aprire le impostazioni (simbolo equalizzatore) e abilitare "Nascondi questi post dalla home".
@claus61 @paolocm Eh sì, col ciube abbiamo anche condiviso dei concertoni insieme! 😄 Se capiterò a Roma, ci organizziamo per vederci — magari scappa una gita, chissà!
eh si, anch'io sono davvero contento di come si è popolato M1: tanta bella gente e, personalmente, ho imparato moltissimo. 😊
🔒 Google blocca Nextcloud su Android: è sabotaggio?
L’app Nextcloud per Android subisce un blocco da parte di Google, che ostacola il caricamento dei file! Nextcloud denuncia l'atto anticompetitivo: nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-a…
riguardo la vostra istanza di nextcloud, avevate valutato (e magari scartato) l'uso delle estensioni/app per le News (reader RSS) e Kanban Board (per task più complessi)? Grazie
grazie! Mi pareva di aver fatto richiesta, ma poi non ho ricevuto nessun aggiornamento... Ma forse mi sono perso qualcosa io... Ci riproverò in giornata, grazie mille!
- enhancement: display price in item detail
- enhancement: button visibility in item detail
- feat: open list of items by hashtag
- feat: add possibility to share item by URL
@FediTips If I reply to a post from someone who has restricted who can follow them, then who can see my reply? Is it safe to say that if I create an account somewhere with follow requests restriction turned on and boost all @ mentions I get, then this account will act as a kind of private group on Mastodon? About groups, is there still any work going on to implement native groups in Mastodon? @MastodonEngineering #mastodev #activitypub #groups
Restrictions on who can follow you do not directly affect the visibility of your posts.
Post visibility is only affected by the visibility settings of your posts. More info on these at fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts…
The only way restricting followers affects visibility is if you make posts with "followers-only" visibility and also restrict who can follow you, which indirectly affects who can see your followers-only posts.
I'm not sure what Mastodon's in-house groups situation is.
Just putting a word or two in, because I am interested in the answer and can't find somewhere to follow the thread otherwise.
I'm also desperately looking for a groups sollution to offer members of my FB groups and subscription services won't work for that.
Best "group" sollution I have seen so far is following hashtags here on the Fediverse. UI is still too "geeky" for older users, though, so I'm still looking.
@MaryPot As @harald mentioned Hubzilla has groups support. Friendica too. But I think their UX are way to difficult and unpolished to use for most people (my opinion). So far I think NodeBB forums and Lemmy are the closest you'll get the FB groups experience, but they are still a bit too cumbersome.
mobilizon was actually built for groups organizing stuff and having a public presence. You can create events associated with the group of course, but also internal discussions, share resources, publish public or private announcements.
@MaryPot 🏳️🌈 Friendica's private group management works very well at the moment, but can only be used by other Friendica users. The interface has improved significantly over the past two years, but it could be made even simpler. From this point of view, the Raccoon for Friendica app has improved the Friendica web interface, taking inspiration from the viewing mode present on Lemmy and other software in the "topicverse". By the way, Raccoon for Friendica also works with mastodon accounts and has the same simplified interface for groups, although – as I said before – only public Friendica groups work for Mastodon users, not private ones.
PS: Friendica also has an event manager, quite compatible with Mobilizon, Gancio and the WordPress Event bridge plugin. This makes it a great alternative to Facebook, but of course the problem is always the fact that Facebook's numbers, with all its billions of users, represent the real added value of that infernal platform 🤣
Set up account. Am trying to figure out how groups work. Seems like Friendica is really a hub for oher group servers, such as Lemmy.world?
Because of the pottery aspect of the main group I would love to find a new home for, there are many people not very computer savvy, many of them. Easy navigation/UI is important.
I would love to join this group, but it says I have to be logged in, even though I think I can see it from my Friendica account. lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
Seems like Friendica is really a hub for oher group servers, such as Lemmy.world?
Friendica is primarily a macroblogging social network and while the topic view is not as nice as Lemmy, Piefed, MBin and NodeBB the group management support is well established.
Because of the pottery aspect of the main group I would love to find a new home for, there are many people not very computer savvy, many of them. Easy navigation/UI is important.
Friendica is not friendly... but it is not that difficult to use either. If you're interested in a user guide, you can translate this post from Italian
I would love to join this group, but it says I have to be logged in, even though I think I can see it from my Friendica account. lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
Yes, just copy that link and paste it into the Friendica search box: then you'll see that community as if it were any user profile, except that you'll see it marked as a "group". As soon as you follow that account, you can post to that group simply by mentioning the group account in the first message of the thread. You just have to remember to make sure that the first paragraph of the first message is less than 200 characters, because Lemmy's compiler will make it the title of the thread (so you should NEVER put the mention of the account in the first line)
@MaryPot 🏳️🌈 Of course, yes, but this concerns interoperable functions such as reading, replying, reacting.
The more advanced functions however are features that some platforms have and others do not, so they only work within software with the same functionality.
Let me explain: 1) you can view a Mobilizon event from your Mastodon account, but you cannot create an event from Mastodon 2) you can view a peertube video from your Mastodon account, but you cannot upload a video to Peertube from your Mastodon account 3) you can create a new thread in a Friendica or Lemmy group, or reply to a thread in a Lemmy group from your Mastodon account, but you cannot join a private group from your Mastodon account
@MaryPot 🏳️🌈 I only speak Italian and I communicate with you through automatic translators. I think you could do the same thing to translate the link in questione 😅
#Sciety sta sperimentando un nuovo livello di comunicazione accademica aperta, che cattura le conversazioni informali sui preprint e le rende accessibili e riutilizzabili. Sciety ha ottenuto nuovi finanziamenti dalla NLNet Foundation per aiutarci a rendere il dibattito sui preprint più aperto, più connesso e più gratificante per i ricercatori.
Nei prossimi sei mesi collaborerà con @bonfire sviluppata anche dall'italiano @bernini per avvicinare le discussioni sui #preprint al cuore della comunicazione accademica, anziché occultarle su piattaforme di social media commerciali e isolate.
Perché è importante il dibattito decentralizzato sui preprint
Al momento, molte discussioni preziose sulle nuove ricerche avvengono su piattaforme come X/Twitter, Bluesky, Slack o tramite e-mail: conversazioni che è facile perdersi, difficili da ritrovare e scollegate dai preprint cui si riferiscono.
l'obiettivo di Sciety è semplificare per i ricercatori:
Condividere approfondimenti sulle pre-stampe
Connettersi con altre persone interessate alle stesse aree
Ottienere riconoscimenti per il tuo contributo alle conversazioni scientifiche
Mantenere la registrazione di tali discussioni collegate alla ricerca stessa
L'idea di base èiutare le comunità di ricerca, i laboratori, le reti e i gruppi di giovani ricercatori a creare i propri spazi in cui parlare di nuova scienza e a far sì che queste conversazioni siano parte di un quadro più ampio della scoperta della ricerca.
**Cosa stiamo facendo per promuovere un dibattito aperto sui preprint
creare una piattaforma comunitaria, progettata appositamente per - consentire ai ricercatori di discutere di preprint in un ambiente aperto e affidabile. Per raggiungere questo obiettivo, stiamo sfruttando il lavoro già svolto su Bonfire.
collegare il dibattito direttamente a Sciety , in modo che commenti e discussioni vengano visualizzati insieme a valutazioni e recensioni curate.
semplificare la creazione di spazi di discussione personalizzati per i gruppi di ricerca, con guide e supporto semplici.
aiutare i ricercatori a ottenere il riconoscimento per il loro contributo, collegare l'impegno ai profili dei ricercatori e incoraggiare contributi costruttivi e visibili.
Sciety collabora con vere e proprie comunità di ricerca per assicurarsi che tutte le loro realizzazioni soddisfino davvero le esigenze dei ricercatori. Durante tutto il progetto, verranno condivsi regolarmente aggiornamenti da Sciety su ciò che si imparerà e realizzerà
Unisciti a Sciety
Stiamo costruendo un futuro in cui la ricerca in fase iniziale non solo viene condivisa più velocemente, ma viene anche discussa più apertamente, valutata in modo più chiaro e collegata in modo più significativo alla documentazione scientifica. Al momento stiamo cercando ricercatori che desiderino testare le prime versioni , fornire feedback o creare i propri spazi comunitari . Se sei appassionato di scienza aperta, preprint o di creazione di comunità di ricerca migliori, saremmo lieti se ci seguissi, partecipassi e contribuissi a dare forma al futuro.
At Sciety we're pioneering a new layer of open scholarly communication, one that captures informal conversations around preprints and makes them discoverable and reusable.
Esistono già piattaforme di preprint (e oltre) amministrate da enti di ricerca e finanziate pubblicamente o collettivamente, quali Zenodo, ArXiv o SciElo.. La rete degli archivi aperti condivide i suoi dati con il vecchio protocollo OAI-PMH.
Mancano però dei veri e propri spazi di discussione usati dai ricercatori (come X) ma federati e non centralizzati. Qui si potrebbe davvero fare qualcosa - ammesso e non concesso che i ricercatori smettano di identificare il luogo virtuale della celebrità con X.
Per attirare i ricercatori, si dovrebbe poter fare scraping dei dati di X (e simili) e farli uscire dai silos. Cioè: l'Unione Europea, invece di fare giochini, dovrebbe autorizzare l’interoperabilità competitiva, come suggerito da Doctorow.
ma l'EU ce l'ha la forza per imporre l'interoperabilità competitiva, che va contro tutto quello che fanno le grandi piattaforme che vogliono il walled garden? Un conto è chiedere che per i cittadini europei ci sia qualche tutela in più, cosa che alla fine è stata accettata anche se a malincuore; però non credo proprio che le piattaforme permetterebbero che anche solo i dati dei cittadini EU fossero interoperabili.
l'Unione ha il diritto anche se non la volontà per farlo. L'interoperabilità è inoltre un requisito conciliabile con la data protection, ma è facile usare il pretesto del GDPR per procrastinarla (vedi Meta con WhatsApp)
È una questione non solo di cuore, ma anche (e soprattutto) di cervello. E qui - non sui proclami - si misura il grado di sudditanza dell'Unione Elusiva nei confronti degli USA.
🎉🔬 More news this weekend. @sciety (eLife's preprint evaluation platform) has secured funding from @nlnet to build a Bonfire flavour for federating preprint reviews and discussions.
This means federated, community-governed spaces for open discourse around scientific preprints outside traditional publishing gatekeepers.
At Sciety we're pioneering a new layer of open scholarly communication, one that captures informal conversations around preprints and makes them discoverable and reusable.
👥 Fediverso e Livello Segreto: una palestra di libertà digitale
🕤 Martedì 13 Maggio, ore 21.30 presso Officina Informatica, via Magolo 32 Empoli
Una chiacchierata con @Kenobit , uno dei fondatori di #LivelloSegreto - un'istanza Mastodon - sulle potenzialità del #Fediverso e delle piattaforme libere, in ottica di libertà e resistenza digitale
As we approach the release of Bonfire 1.0, this isn’t your typical launch announcement. Instead, it’s a moment to reflect on how we’ve built Bonfire, a roadmap of values, methods, and intentions – and an invitation to define what comes next.
In a world of “move fast and break things,” we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship...
@jerrej This post is focusing on the "how" rather than "what" but here's our latest attempt to do that:
Bonfire is a federated social network built by communities, for communities—rooted in autonomy, mutual care, and collective power. Co-create your tools, reclaim your data, and resist manipulation by shaping your own federated digital spaces.
After putting 30 minutes into trying to understand what you’re doing, i must say it looks very impressive. 🫶 Below’s my take at trying to explain it. Please @bonfire, tell me if this explanation is correct or not. Also, @jerrej and @ghosttie, please tell me if it made it clearer to you what Bonfire is.
“Bonfire Apps is a suite of community building apps that connect with the wider fediverse. One of the apps is Bonfire Social, a microblogging software much like Mastodon. Another one is Bonfire Community, which lets communities discuss in groups and topics. The apps are all open source and lets users host their own instance or join an existing one.
The Bonfire Apps are built by the online collective Bonfire Networks. To sustain development they offer Mosaic, a service that sets up tailored digital spaces.
Lastly, Bonfire is also a flexible framework for building fully custom community tools.”
fantastic news, I'm really looking forward to kicking the tyres and finding ways to connect moderators, community managers and governance-minded folks to Bonfire communities!
I'm curious how this might work as a micro FB replacement for a family that is growing up and spreading out geographically (1 kid graduating university, 1 in university, 1 headed off in two years)
I understand not wanting to strictly define or prescribe the purpose of a tool. However, if you gave me a ratchet and I had never seen what makes it different from a wrench, I am as likely to ignore it as try and figure out how to use it. So, please explain what bonfire provides over other federated tools and then put that at the top of your website.
Spaghetti, marshmallow e geometria solida. Non sarà il gelato al lampone, ma il retrogusto di Ada si sente forte e chiaro! -- @fsfe @kirschner @scuola @wikimediaitalia @maupao
✊️ Join us today at Làbas - a self-managed social municipality in Bologna, Italy where we're facilitating a collaborative Bonfire workshop with #municipiozero and scift.
Together, we'll install a Bonfire instance and collectively configure extensions, community guidelines, and settings tailored to their specific needs 💅
📣 Kicking off a week of exciting news from Bonfire by bridging online and offline worlds:
✊️ Join us May 9th at Làbas - a self-managed social municipality in Bologna, Italy where we're facilitating a collaborative Bonfire workshop with #municipiozero and scift. Together, we'll install a Bonfire instance and collectively configure extensions, community guidelines, and settings tailored to their specific needs 💅 municipiozero.it/events/bonf...
9 Maggio 2025 @ 18:30 - 20:30 - Bonfire Setup: evento di configurazione collettiva Ti sei mai chiesto chi decide, come funzionano i social network che usiamo ogni giorno? Chi stabilisce le regole, cosa è permesso e cosa no, chi può entrare e chi vien…
Such a nice conversation! great to have touched base with bida collective @thunderpussycat @d0c and @scosso and eager to see how municipiozero will experiment with using bonfire to empower grassroots and self managed activities in their communities!
Il Fediverso a #scuola: uno strumento didattico per la cittadinanza digitale
Il #Fediverso offre strumenti di web sociale interoperabili per supportare attività didattiche, simulazioni, educazione civica e competenze tecnologiche, promuovendo consapevolezza digitale e responsabilizzazione degli studenti in un ambiente di apprendimento aperto
ben fatto! E con Ufficio Zero EDU saranno già preinstallati i servizi del fediverso di @devol per una scuola più inclusiva ed accessibile a tutti! EDU sarà presentata ufficialmente al @Merge_IT il giorno 21 Giugno con un talk dedicato.
@Ufficio Zero Linux OS per la EDU allora ricordatevi di aggiungere anche un link a Poliversity, che oggi è l'unica istanza italiana dedicata all'istruzione e alla ricerca accademica
@notizie @devol @Merge_IT dobbiamo vedere…. Già tutti i servizi devol (ne sono tanti) potrebbero portare confusione a prima vista. Poi con loro esiste una collaborazione in termini di numeri e scambio di servizi per cui inserire altri servizi/portali non loro non sarebbe giusto nei confronti del nostro partner. É già successo che chiedessero altri servizi di altre istanze italiane ma siamo fedeli a @devol e ci auguriamo che anche loro lo siano con le nostre distro 😉
@Ufficio Zero Linux OS non è questione di essere "fedeli", ma di includere nella distro dedicata al settore dell'istruzione, l'unica istanza italiana che si rivolge a quel settore. È un servizio all'utente, non un favore a @Poliversity - Università ricerca e giornalismo
@notizie @Merge_IT @poliversity @ufficiozero l'obiettivo è chiaro e fondamentale: non lasceremo insegnanti e studenti da soli nel loro percorso con Ufficio Zero. Li accompagneremo attivamente su M1 dove potranno contare non solo sulla presenza diretta del team di Ufficio Zero al completo, ma anche su un supporto attivo per affrontare la delicata transizione a Linux e per la risoluzione di eventuali problematiche software grazie ai tanti divulgatori e appassionati Linux su M1.
e per il Merge attendiamo conferma per le pronotazioni dei talk di Ufficio Zero EDU e @BoostMediaAPS per il giorno 21 Giugno, visto che verremmo in auto e saremo presenti solo quel giorno 😉
Confermiamo di aver ricevuto la proposta da Ufficio Zero. Comunque il programma ufficiale del MERGE-it non è ancora uscito: la Call 4 Speaker è ancora aperta! 👍 condividete in giro! merge-it.net
In Italia esistono tante realtà che si occupano di libertà digitali, sotto molti aspetti ed in molti modi: associazioni, gruppi informali, aziende, professionisti e pubbliche amministrazioni.
il futuro scolastico é di tutti coloro che battendosi per un mondo libero vogliono lasciare ai futuri cittadini qualcosa lontano dalle lobby e davvero libero. Per questo @ufficiozero a fine giugno rilascerà EDU per tutti i gradi di istruzione della scuola italiana con preinstallati tanti servizi web anche di @devol con un aggregatore realizzato da @amassaro dev di Ufficio Zero ma anche Consigliere di @BoostMediaAPS
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”.
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.
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.
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.
LOA Acrobax, giovedì 8 maggio alle ore 19:00 CEST
[url=https://roma.convoca.la/][strong]Gancio de Roma[/strong][/url], Agenda condivisa della Roma ribelle e autogestita, è un luogo virtuale autonomo dove inserire e ritrovare eventi e appuntamenti militan
Gancio de Roma, Agenda condivisa della Roma ribelle e autogestita, è un luogo virtuale autonomo dove inserire e ritrovare eventi e appuntamenti militanti di Roma e territori limitrofi.
E' basata sul software Open Source Gancio e non si appoggia o dipende da nessuna piattaforma proprietaria.
Come spesso accade, l'infrastruttura e il software sono degli aspetti complessi ma risolvibili grazie alla comunità (o classe) hacker internazionalista che si e' creata attorno a questo progetto e altri simili.
Ora è giunto il momento di immaginare il funzionamento collettivo di uno strumento che per sua natura ha un pannello Admin, ovvero un approccio top-down. In altre parole, come rendere fluido, chiaro e autotutelato un meccanismo corale che permetta di comunicare alla città e ai territori limitrofi appuntamenti ed incontri che facciamo per esistere e resistere, riconoscerci e immaginare nuovi orizzonti.
Quindi ci porremo alcune domande:
-quali sono gli eventi che sono su Gancio de Roma?
-chi decide quali eventi sono accettati?
-come questo meccanismo si autosostiene? La continua cura e le (poche) spese vive
-come allargare l'uso dello strumento?
Per partecipare all'assemblea non e' necessario avere esperienza informatica.
Giovedì 8 maggio 2024 h19 @ LOA Acrobax, Via della Vasca Navale 6, metro B Basilica San Paolo
PeerTube has a new update for their mobile app, the Mastodon team is growing, and more. The News The Links 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 […]
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.
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:
Today, our not-for-profit (Framasoft) is proud to present v1 of the PeerTube mobile application, 4 months after its first release! It's the work of a ...
Today, our not-for-profit (Framasoft) is proud to present v1 of the PeerTube mobile application, 4 months after its first release! It's the work of a ...
@ilarioq Guarda che oramai Peertube è perfettamente strutturato per ricevere gli output standard; puoi fare una diretta anche da un server jitsi configurato per produrre uno streaming di dati in uscita
@ilarioq se usi un servizio di videoconferenza configurato bene poi fare a meno di obs, Mentre se vuoi fare una diretta da solo, obs è la soluzione migliore.
E comunque Dovrebbe funzionare anche con streamyard che sarà pure software proprietario, ma funziona decisamente bene 😅
The Complex Anarchism Symposium will gather scientists, artists, activists & dreamers for a 5-day deep dive on organizing without hierarchy and embracing complexity.
A Bonfire instance will serve as digital commons — a self-organized space for discussion, coordination, proposals & reflection.
Excited for this collective experiment and to see what emerges. 🌱
With the upcoming Complex Anarchism symposium, we will be exploring the intersection between anarchism and complexity science. Anarchy, despite its popular definition as a state of disorder, is rather
Mastodon CFO @mellifluousbox will be at the #GlobalSolutionsSummit in Berlin today as part of the panel "Beyond Profit: Public Interest Technologies for Democratic Digital Futures". You can also listen to his live interview with Radioeins from last week.
Digitale Technologien, KI, Klimawandel, Welthandel, Alternativen zu Wachstumsstrategien, Dekarbonisierung. Der am kommenden Montag in Berlin startende Global Solutions Summit hat sich viel vorgenommen.
Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that encompasses Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, which is called... what exactly?
Is Threadiverse too traumatic & tainted by association with Meta's (all but entirely defunct) Threads? Is The Verse too cool/poetic/nerdy (but niche) to be understood? I highly advise against Lemmyverse bc mainstream normal people are far less tolerant of tankies than we who are here are willing to put up with. Simply listing the software available sometimes is the best option - like the Interstellar app supports all of Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, but most support at best 1 or 2 of those - but usually is too long to say and does not roll off the tongue, plus will just keep growing as time goes on. Is Forumverse thus the least bad of the available options, or perhaps you have a better idea? 💡
Anyway, the start to a listing: 1) Threadiverse 2) Forumverse 3) (The) Verse 4) Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed 5) Something else?
I noticed PieFed.social on page 9, and the link is functional, even though next to it the status says "disabled".
That site doesn't seem very trustworthy. I wonder if it is measuring how "Lemmy-like" an instance is? Anyway I've never heard of that site before, but passing the note to @rimu@piefed.social anyway in case it helps:-).
IIRC Lemmy and Mastodon PMs are different and incompatible. If you can receive PMs from Lemmy users then you should be able to receive auth codes. Currently @rikudou@lemmings.world is adding both Lemmy and Mastodon PMs here: github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-…
Also software other than Lemmy and Mbin needs to add ‘roleName: Administrator’ to their user webfinger requests. This is because ActivityPub doesn’t have a standard way to expose user roles.
I’m thinking of adding another ways of verifying like DNS based verification but still not sure. Any recommendations are welcome 😀
Yeah something is screwy - PieFed.social is most definitely aware of lemy.lol (see this at piefed.social/instance/lemy.lo…), but the last post it has from your own account seems to be nine months ago, and the second link on that page I linked, to "Posts" yields an error.
Nor does this portion of the conversation appear in this version of the OP (see here, which should have all of these responses below it but they are lacking there).
So apologies, I guess it's not just the tool, rather the issue is wider than that: either your instance lemy.lol or PieFed.social (or both) are not communicating in the standard manner with one another. Fwiw, PieFed.social seems to have no trouble federating with (any? at least the vast majority?) of other Lemmy instances? But I will leave that to you and rimu to work out:-).
@melroy Unfortunately, as I explained elsewhere, the problem is that Meta has now "infected" the word thread. For this reason I would propose #topicverse also because in fact, it is not so much the "thread" that characterizes the Lemmy/xBin/Piefed/BBCode environment, but the ability to immediately identify the "topics". In fact, Mastodon also has the thread, even if it is unwatchable, but the topic display is only available in some software (and some apps like Raccoon for Friendica, which allow you to view the topics of activitypub groups also on Mastodon)
We also still have Fediverse, to encompass everything that implements the ActivityPub protocol, e.g. Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops (planned but not implemented yet iirc?). So the Threadiverse/Forumverse/Whatever is meant to distinguish from that.
Like PieFed has polls, post flairs, hashtags, categories of communities (basically multi-reddits), which are user customizable and shareable, and a lot more. Though lacking quite a bit of polish such as post and comment previews, and very little to almost no official app support (though an API was recently released and Thunder is being tested, and Interstellar already supports it). It's newer than Lemmy, but written in Python rather than the difficult Rust language, so in many ways has already surpassed Lemmy in terms of features (and even Reddit in some ways too, especially since the only new features there for the last decade were solely aimed at increasing profits rather than good experiences for the users).
Mbin's primary distinction is also supporting federation not only with Lemmy (and PieFed) but also Mastodon. And it has a different interface that some people prefer to Lemmy's. If you want both the Threadiverse/Forumverse/Whatever and Mastodon integration with a single account, this is the only option atm.
Both PieFed and Mbin are entirely separate implementations of the ActivityPub protocol, so whether you actually use them or not it is worth celebrating that Lemmy is now not the only one that implements this forum/thread/basically Reddit replacement style (other notable implementations include Friendica a Facebook replacement, and Mastodon an X/Twitter one, Pixelfed I think an Instagram one, etc.). Especially with Lemmy's association with "tankies" that tends to drive many people away (e.g. 100% of the people that I've ever told about Lemmy irl; and Reddit's r/RedditAlternatives is filled with stories of people who don't want to come here bc of all the BoTh SiDeS sAmE rhetoric that we allow here, plus Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit even, having a modlog but no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to discuss bc it simply says that a "mod" did it, and you don't have a right to even so much as be told that your content is now removed! instance admins have much more freedom here, it's fantastic, but actual users only have what manages to trickle down from them, and the software itself very much reflects an authoritarian mindset, even in comparison to Reddit).
Btw, fuck spez.
TLDR: Lemmy isn't the only game in town, yet we need a name that is both distinct from other Fediverse tools (Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.) while also being inclusive to the other Reddit replacement tools, currently Mbin and PieFed, but in the future including Sublinks, and who knows what else?
I've been using threadiverse, but I prefer forumverse
It's immediately clear what it's referring to, and it leaves it open to other compatible platforms once they implement activity pub nicely. Being able to subscribe and post to official support forums from the forumverse would be a cool promo point
Also people refer to many things as "threads". Conversations, comment sections, discord has threads. Forum is much more clear
I used to prefer "Forumverse" as well. But people don't seem to want to use it?
While "Threadiverse" seems to predate Meta's Threads here on Lemmy, see e.g. szmer.info/post/349217 and this comment from Ada lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/9384… from 2+ years ago. Tbf I did find a reference to Forumverse from 2 years ago as well, but then virtually nobody uses it again until essentially db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com rediscovers it a handful of months ago.
So "Threadiverse" has some history behind it, except then Meta ruined the association for many people. But... we here on Lemmy were using it first!!?
True, but doesn't Xhitter and Bluesky and Mastodon also have a type of voting? Even if it is called or functions slightly differently?
I did not explain much of the back story, but the Fediverse is already the term used to describe federated social media, so the term here that we need is to pick one that describes the specific subset of it that focuses on threaded conversions, centered around those topic areas (called posts, and then those topics being further aggregated into higher-level topics, called communities) rather than centered around a user tweeting/X-creting/whatever their shit.
And we also have a focus on much longer-form content than those others, which like Mastodon have smaller character limits imposed upon their thoughts (so that they cannot ramble on as I have done here:-).
I don't think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.
By contrast, the microblog "like" (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn't do anything other than express appreciation.
Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They're hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).
(Edit: by "don't they have votes?" do you mean polls? Because that's a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)
No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don't use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren't shown, and downvotes).
I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.
Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.
But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?
Yeah, I think "forumverse" isn't bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can't really put my finger on. I've been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it's just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a "forum" seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.
(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name "threadiverse." The word "thread" definitely seems like it arose from there.)
Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I'm yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.
Lemmy already has the "New Comments" sort, which is the biggest feature of forums vs Reddit
Lemmy also has the "Chat" view for comments, which is good but needs to show context with them as my feature request here says github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/i…
Requirements This is a feature request and not a bug report. Otherwise, please create a new bug report instead. Please check to see if this request (or a similar one) already exists. It's a single ...
Yeah, what features? Polls? Community flairs? The ability to restrict downvotes to only members of a community? The ability to combine multiple communities into one overarching category? And then customize that without needing admin support, and then also share that with other users? The ability to personally block every user from an instance, again without requiring admin approval? The ability to automatically label every user that has a brand new account, less than two weeks old? Or that posts 10x more often than they comment, hence might be an unregistered bot account? Or that gives and receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, so is at best a controversial and at worst a highly toxic personality - but again, independent of an admin or moderator, and instead being totally in control of the user? Or the ability to block posts based on keywords, but perhaps not all such posts, and instead having granularity of All vs. None vs. Some? Or offering hashtags for content discoverability beyond communities and categories of communities? Or the ability to follow anything you want - a community, a user, a post, a comment (even not made by you) - and arguably far more importantly, the ability to NOT receive notifications for something that you wrote?
PieFed has all of that, and more. Lemmy has none of it. Do as you please, but now you know. Check it out: piefed.social/ .
Edit: even Reddit lacks many of these features. As it enshittified, it kept adding features that attempted to boost its profitability, like various forms of irl coinage, rather than provide stuff that people actually wanted to see.
i think threadiverse is the move. partly because it's already in regular use and partky because it's very self-explanatory. forumverse could have some legs to it now that more traditional forum software like nodebb and soon flarum support federation now, maybe it could refer to the broader category containing traditional forums and the threadiverse, but i feel like leaving out the "fedi" part kinda defeats the point (threadiverse at least partially maintains it by being a pun on it). maybe fediforums is the way to go?
it's a whole 'nother can of worms but ironically in my experience the "verse" part of threadiverse is more offputting than the "thread" part because people think "metaverse," but that's just anecdotal and the term fediverse itself already has too much momentum to easily fall out of fashion
Yeah and I did not clarify well here that nobody will stop using Fediverse (I think?!): that is a fine term that should continue to exist. But we also need a term for the subset of that which the likes of Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed, and now as you say nodebb and soon flarum (and perhaps eventually Sublinks?) and ofc many others will also join. What is this subset of the Fediverse to be called?
Ngl, I kinda just instantly fell in love with fediforums as you mentioned it right here. However, it also seems fairly similar to Fediverse, perhaps too much so?
Forumverse seems more distinct, from the Fediverse? As too does Threadiverse. And the latter has history and traction, but also seems a bit tainted by association with Meta, who seems to destroy everything that it touches? 😛 Though importantly, we here on Lemmy were using it first! So is that enough justification to reclaim the term, in people's minds? What do you in particular think?
Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.
The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.
Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.
Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).
Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.
Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.
Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What's more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can't think of anything online I've ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.
The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.
On the other hand, the software used has an ENORMOUS effect upon the quality and such of the communication. e.g. forum software such as Lemmy allow much longer-form, topic-based discussions than e.g. Mastodon where you have to follow a particular user account or else you won't see anything at all. So "Mastodon" implies extreme difficulty in having conversations in the first place, especially for non-technical, normie users, and also a heavily short-form tweets/X-cretes/skeets/whatever, user-centric form of communication. Whereas Lemmy allows me to ramble on for quite awhile, and even if you don't follow my account, by being interested in this topic, you'll see my words.
So software isn't everything, but it also is not nothing either.
Anyway, we could call ourselves anything we like. Brain-dead fart pirates, I don't care, so long as we pick a name:-). It might help to pick one that people like though, especially the people that contribute much to making this place what it is.
I personally don't mind -verse. I don't watch most Marvel movies to begin with, and the word itself carries connotations of "the universe", which is what we want I think bc we are talking about like "the set of all, i.e. the universe of, connected (using ActivityPub protocol) forum-like software platforms". Hence Fediverse at the high end, i.e. including such platforms as Mastodon and Friendica and Pixelfed, but at the lower end... what there? Threads? ActivityPub Forums? Any short, catchy moniker may work -> so what is it then?
And flarum and Sublinks may be added at some point as well.
So the plus syntax, now that there's already 4-6 of them (7 if you count Kbin but there's only a single instance in the entire world, in Poland I believe, that uses it these days, everyone else switched to Mbin), seems untenable?
But now with +PieFed, +nodebb, and soon +flarum, and perhaps +Sublinks, Lemmyville doesn't seem very inclusive?
I already started this as a poll about post flairs, neither of which features is nor is expected to appear on Lemmy very soon iirc. The rest of the Fediverse isn't waiting around for coders to learn Rust and eventually getting around to adding features to Lemmyville.
So Lemmy in particular may want to not start being exclusive! It will get left behind if it does!
I think one of the major tropes present in the show was to demonstrate how there aren't simply white hats vs. black hats (to use cowboy terms). Mal is a criminal, "forced" into living that way bc the government won't "allow" him to live legitimately (except... really? Why won't they again?). Therefore, the presence of great darkness within his lightness, or as you might prefer the presence of occasional boughts of lightness within his darkness, is not a "bug", it's a "feature" of the show, to walk out that yin and yang in a fantasy space opera setting.
Nobody is perfect. Some are far less so than others. Those at least tend to be aware of their imperfections, as opposed to e.g. The Galactic Empire muwhahaha, ahem cough, anyways they seem so stolid, so absolutely certain of their moral righteousness, that unlike the criminal Mal who often isn't such a bad guy once you get to know him, commits atrocities the likes of which would turn people's stomachs, if they knew (hence those are kept as closely guarded secrets).
So I think you missed that: from the perspective of the show, that was no accident - that was literally the entire point of what they were attempting to convey. Mal was not a "good guy". He just had light in his darkness, the same way that the empire has darkness in its light (or is it rather the other way around?).
Yay Jayne was fairly simplistic. The dude barely had any morality bc he was more animal than man. So in that way he played a "straight man" to Mal'a greater level of complexity? He even gave voice to what many of the others were thinking, including Mal himself, but they had the grace to not say it.
True evil requires a minimum amount of "character" in order to achieve anything at all - great or otherwise. So it's less like Jayne was "bad" and the government was "good", and more like Jayne was simplisticly animal-like, while the true evils rose up much higher. With great power comes great responsibility, or whatever.
Jayne is like a wall painting in the background - he's scenery?
As far as Whedon, I dunno, I like a lot of his works, I don't like his character. The two aren't entirely connected in my mind, though perhaps they should be more so, I just don't know.
On the other hand, wasn't all of this pretty much happening even while the show was still in production? You mentioned that it had "aged", so I wasn't coming at this from a perspective of bad show vs. good show, but from it having been a good show where something external caused its goodness to have tanked. If it had been bad at the start, then we wouldn't say that it "aged", just that the show sucked. Which it didn't... and yet, also... didn't it always though? That yin and yang seemed to me to have not been so much changed by the passage of time?
Edit: oh, I haven't heard of whatever has been revealed about the actor who plays Jayne. Maybe that's what you meant. It might change my own perspective of the show in that case. I would hope not actually... but it might.
I'm not sure what you mean by that -> if you mean that we need new episodes, then absolutely! Or if you mean that real life has caught up to implementing those ideas real-time, I think that was always going to be the case, sadly...🙁
I think, the "threadiverse" is more akin to the old (also federated, just in a different way) Usenet / Newsgroups than web-forums. So "ScoopGroups", maybe?
Forumverse : for any news and features about Lemmy, Mbin, NodeBB, PieFed
So it can't be Lemmy,Mbin,PieFed. And i'm adding flarum.
However, we can create separate category : - aggregator link : lemmy,mbin,piefed - forum : nodebb, flarum
1) Thank to Meta, i don't like it... 2) My favorite one, it remind me of forum era 3) Abstract and beautiful. Poetry, bible and verb. Something we have never see before 😊. 4) i'm against. Link aggregator shouldn't be tied by a software name but a global concept as thread of forum. If i have 6 softwares...do you write them all ? 5) linkagg lousy but pratical. Bad name are the best. 😎
I think we should redo the post, but, for now, let's see where it go 😊
If you have a PieFed account, you can create a post and add its flair.
So i created few one : - Announcement : only moderators. Update about this community. Please, don't use it. 😔 - Blog : for any news and features about writefreely, wordpress - Forumverse : for any news and features about Lemmy, Mbin, NodeBB, PieFed - Media : for any news and features about Peertube, Pixelfed, Loops... - Microblog : for any news and features about Mastodon, Iceshrimp, Misskey - Discussion : For talking about...the fediverse - Event : for event in the fediverse as !lemmyvision@[url=https://jlai.lu/]jlai.lu[/url] or !canvas@toast.ooo - Question : If you need help - Tutorial : for wiki and tuto
So far, mainly from this post bc the poll has such a small sample size, the term that seems vastly preferred is Threadiverse. Bc of its history, and how people have already been calling it that. Sort this post by Hot to see what I mean.
I don't think Forumverse is "bad", plus as you say it better represents the new additions of nodebb and flarum. Although that term would be swimming against the tide of people that have been using Threadiverse all this time and seem to not want to switch (possibly bc I did not explain the situation well, especially the clarification about the term Fediverse already existing, and now how the situation is a bit different wrt nodebb and flarum).
Ofc this is all just on a Sunday -> there is still lots of room for things to happen in the next coming days, to see how these results may shift:-).
When the first Reddit migration happened, the migrants called it #Threadiverse and has always been that way. Although some tried to change it (Threads was not around yet, or public, IIRC), it didn't work, the migrants prefer Threadiverse so it stuck.
Changing names in the Fediverse is not easy since it has grown humongous already. Back in 2008 it was simply called #Identiverse. Then a few years later it morphed into the #Fediverse (this was before ActivityPub, yes, the Fediverse is years older than ActivityPub).
Back in 2021/2022, we tried to change the name "Fediverse" because Twitter migrants and the Press/Media were whining too much about it. Even though we reached a consensus, the we were far too small compared to the number of new people.
The people who kept on complaining about the name "Fediverse", when they were asked to participate in the disucssion and polls, they did not. When they were presented with the new name, they either ignored us or started whining again. 🤷🏽
Anyway, if there's a huge population involved, it's not going to be easy.
Now, I'm not discouraging you, rather, I shared our experience in the hopes that you'll find a better way. Because personally, I'm not so fond of "Threadiverse", haha.
If you use, for example, the lemmyBB interface, it's no longer "threadi", it's a forum. 😝 (I know, lame reason.)
Oh! One thing that came out of trying to rename the Fediverse, people don't want "-verse" anywhere because it's overused. Multiverse. Metaverse. Fediverse. Threadiverse. Benverse. Omniverse. Panverse. Whoverse. Trekverse.
It started as a suggestion, then we compiled it and made phases of polls. (The instance clised shop, unfortunately.)
Based on those, the most that got the votes was the suggestion "Mycelium". It was inspired by Star Trek: Discovery and the real-world mycelium.
The second one, I can't remember but it was also related to nature's fungi or plants.
The list of suggestions and votes were based on who participated. And at the time it was done, it was the Twitter Migration, and people were complaining loudly about the name "Fediverse". And yet, those who participated were mostly pre-Migration people (who generally didn't have a strong issue with "Fediverse"). 😄
Threadiverse kinda captures it, but it also calls association with Threads (by Meta), like if it's the parent of it, while in fact it's not even part of it.
The word itself sounds nice, but is the least inclusive.
That's like saying that all of these conversations that we all have are on Lemmy.World? Sure, it's between 50 and 80% true (users and the most active communities, respectively, including this one we are in now), but it misses a ton of nuance and detail there.
PieFed, Mbin, and now nodebb, with others on the way (flarum, perhaps Sublinks) also exist.
So why call this all "Lemmy", when that's only a part - granted, by far the majority portion - of the whole?
The Bluesky and ATmosphere reports are back after I was occupied last week with the Ahoy! conference about ATProto in Hamburg. It was amazing to meet so many cool people in real life, and share the excitement of working on this network together. There were some great talks, and just being around people who you can talk in-depth about Bluesky and ATProto with is just great. Hoping to see many more ATProto conferences pop up and meet more of you in real life.
A practical note: if you missed the ATmosphere report last week, a reminder that I’m also sending out the reports via email every Friday. This comes with an extra analysis article that’s not on the website, so don’t forget to subscribe!
Bluesky launches a blue check verification system
Bluesky has launched a new verification system for their platform, with blue checkmarks. With the checkmark system, Bluesky selects a few Trusted Verifiers, who can hand out checkmarks. Bluesky PBC will also hand out checkmarks to “authentic and notable accounts”. The main reason for this system’s existence is that the other verification system, using domain names as handles, did not perform well enough. Bluesky PBC says that 270k accounts have set their own domain name as a handle, but not enough high-profile accounts have done so. The other problem with domain names as verification is that many well-known public figures do not have a well-known website. The first organisations that are Trusted Verifiers in the Bluesky app are the New York Times and Wired Magazine.
Bluesky PBC advertises the new checkmark verification system with its Trusted Verifiers as “a healthy digital society should distribute power”. However, it is unclear with the current implementation to what extend power is actually distributed. Bluesky PBC is the one who selects the Trusted Verifiers that can be displayed in their app. In their blog post, they also write: “Bluesky will review these verifications as well to ensure authenticity.” To me, it seems far from distributing power, and can at best be seen as distributing operational work. With Bluesky PBC holding full control of who gets to be a Trusted Verifier, as well as reviewing their output, how much power has Bluesky PBC actually distributed?
The new checkmark verification system is not exclusive to the Bluesky app however, and it is build on an open system. Anyone can create verifications or become a Verifier, as all the data for verification is openly accessible to anyone. The only difference is that verifications that are not made by Bluesky PBC or one of their Trusted Verifiers will not be visible in the official Bluesky clients. Other systems have already sprung up, a new verifier tool by cred.blue allows anyone to easily hand out verifications. The Deer client, which is a fork of the Bluesky client, already allows for anyone to set their own Verifiers as well. I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming article, as what is happening with Deer and verification has some interesting implications on how the network will likely develop.
For now, Bluesky PBC has build a technologically cool system, which also solves a meaningful problem that their app has in the short term. While the way it is currently implemented falls short of the advertised distribution of power regarding verification, the team is clear that this is an early implementation and that the system will evolve later.
Streamplace funding
Some news from streaming software Streamplace:
Streamplace has raised 100k Livepeer tokens, worth around 500k USD, from the Livepeer Treasury to further expand the Streamplace platform. The money will be used to expand the team, enhance infrastructure and build a deeper integration with ATProto, as well as building content moderation infrastructure.
A short explanation of Livepeer, and how it relates to Streamplace. Livepeer is a decentralised network for video transcoding and processing. Transcoding (in this context) processes the video stream to make it accessible in various formats and qualities, so a stream can be viewed both by someone on a slow internet connection in 360p, as well as someone with fast internet in 4K definition. Livepeer is a DAO, with an attached crypto token. Streamplace uses Livepeer for the video transcoding, and because of this integration, which allows the Livepeer network to grow as well, the Livepeer DAO has awarded Streamplace 100k tokens, currently worth around 500k USD. It is unclear to me how the Livepeer token works, with its corresponding tokenomics, and where the value of the tokens is coming from.
Streamplace creator Eli Mellon gave an interview on the devtools-fm podcast where Eli goes into more detail on the background of Streamplace and how the software works.
Two other ATProto apps are working on integration Streamplace. Skylight already announced earlier to be working with Streamplace. At the ATProto conference Ahoy in Hamburg last week Joe Basser, co-founder of the ATProto video platform, announced to be working on livestreaming with Streamplace as well.
Streamplace is hiring a Decentralized Video Protocol Engineer and a Lead Front-End Engineer
An OBS overlay to display Streamplace chat on-stream.
An update on relays and independent infra
Bluesky PBC made some changes to how their relays work, with an update with the unassuming name of ‘Sync 1.1′. The update made it much cheaper to run relays, as they do not have to store data of the entire network anymore. This has made a drastic impact on running relays. Last month, independent developer @futurset up a relay on his own Raspberry Pi. Now Phil, another independent developer, has set up multiple relays and made them publicly accessible. This means that there are now multiple other full-network relays that index the entire network, that are outside of US jurisdiction. Just as importantly, running these full-network relays is cheap, with costs getting as low as 18 USD per month. Feed builder Graze is also creating their own implementation of a relay: Turbostream includes a large amount of extra information in the stream. For example, where Jetstream (a simplified version of a relay) broadcasts a reply, Turbostream broadcasts a reply together with the post that is being replied to, as well as a range of other information. This in turn makes it easier to other parties to build on, as most information needed is already included in Turbostream.
These developments leads to some interested new questions. When it comes to running a relay, technology and costs are clearly not barriers anymore. But what about moderation and uptime guarantees? Is having a relay that many other parties depend on even the right model of the network?
It also calls the model that the Free Our Feeds campaign had in mind, which aligned more with a perspective of expensive and large relays. Today, Free Our Feeds announced that they will donate a 50k USD grant to a new IndieSky Working Group. The IndieSky came out of the second day of the conference, organised by Boris Mann and Ted Han. Mann and Han are behind the ATProtocol Developer Community Group, and also organised the first ATProto conference in Seattle last month. The goal of IndieSky is to “work together on R&D, code, and infrastructure on how and why to run different parts of the ATProto stack”, with more details in the announcement. The first meeting for the working group is on May 8th.
In Other News
The Ahoy! conference for the European Social Web was last week, and as an extremely biased person who helped organise the conference I think it was a great success! Massive shout-out to Sebastian Korfmann who has done an incredible amount of work getting the conference to such a great place, super impressive. During the conference I did some longer video interviews with some of the people in the community, those videos will be released in the coming weeks. The main takeaway for me from the conference was to see the amount of positive energy and enthusiasm in the community. People are aware that they are contributing to a space that has massive potential and is undergoing rapid changes. I’m excited to see more conferences for ATProto, and meet more people from the community in real life, as it has been super great to meet the people at Ahoy!.
Turtleisland.social is a Mastodon server for the North American Native/Indigenous community. They have set up their own PDS server for community members to join Bluesky as well. Community-centered data hosting is one of the possibilities with the PDS system of Bluesky that is mentioned regularly as an option, but has not been borne out much yet. Two other communities are in the process of building out a similar structure: Blacksky is creating their own PDS software for the Black community, and Northsky is building out systems that allow people to easily migrate their ATProto account to a Northsky PDS. It’s worth pointing out here that the early adopters of new technology on social networking are all minority communities. For people building social networks this provides a pragmatic argument (besides the much more important ethical argument) for creating safe digital spaces: the people for whom safety is the most crucial are also the most likely to be early adopters of new technologies.
Not all early adoption is by minority communities: Gander.social is a newly announced social network on ATProto, focusing on the Canadian community. Gander has a lot of plans for features that make it stand out from the Bluesky app. The project is still in development, and it seems once the project gets closer to launch it will become clearer what the ATProto integration will actually entail.
Bluesky has made some changes to their PDS, allowing people to sign up directly for an ATProto account on a PDS without going through the Bluesky app. Link aggregator platform Frontpage is one of the first to take advantage of this, allowing account creation on the Frontpage platform now.
Bluesky PBC is joining Lexicon Community Technical Steering Committee. Bluesky Engineer Bryan Newbold will be the representative. It signals a growing maturity of the ecosystem, that an effort run by the ATProto developer community can come to a place where Bluesky joins the initiative on an equal footing.
Openvibe is a multi-network client that combines someones Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads accounts into a single app. Their latest update is an customisable For You algorithmic timeline, which combines posts from multiple networks into a unified algorithmic timeline.
Newsletter publishing platform Ghost now has a simple setting to share posts on Bluesky, via the ActivityPub bridge. This was already possible with Bridgy Fed, but that required some manual steps, where it is now a simple toggle setting.
The Links
For the protocol-minded people:
A proposal for private images (not posts!) on ATProto.
Proposal: A Simple XRPC Method for Signing Payloads in ATProtocol
News from Bluesky takes the most popular links on the network and displays them in an interface more like Hacker News.
Bluesky video client Skylight is working on a dislike feature so people can further fine tune their algorithm.
An example of how inauthentic accounts use Starter Packs to quickly build a following and integrate themselves into the network.
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.
bsky.app login screen at the top right showing account creation changed to turtleis.land Our Bluesky Personal Data Server joins our Mastodon server for a more complete Native/Indigenous social media experience The Bluesky Native community is much lar…
Hello! We're the team that builds and supports Mastodon, alongside the community. Today, we wanted to share an update on our organisation. blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/…
In the coming weeks, we'll be using this account to share a wider range of posts about what we're working on - events we're attending, updates from team members, and so on. You can also follow the core engineering team @MastodonEngineering and if you have an account on mastodon.social or mastodon.online (the two instances we operate) you can follow @staff
You can also expect to see us sharing more about the project outside of the Fediverse (in places like LinkedIn or YouTube) - this is so that more people can hear about a better, decentralised and more user-oriented alternative to legacy platforms.
i think this is great news! We need more people to know about mastodon. But. I worry about the things people have complained about in the past. Difficulty signing up, confusion around choosing a home instance, too many decisions having to be made in order to get started. and lastly, unfortunately, and unwelcoming user base.
I realize that some of this is out of your control. and some is human nature rather than a technical problem to solve. But i see a lot of folks try mastodon. and never even get past signup. Is there something that can be done there so that new users are not immediately turned off to the platform?
@gangrif thanks for these questions! We are working on it, and we're excited that some of the new folks on the core team bring fresh perspectives on these topics. We think we've made some improvements in the past couple of releases and we'll continue to do so.
but currently, mastodon is by far to complicated. How will you go on fixing the huge usability shortcomings with finding people, finding posts, following people, reposting, reacting and stuff like this. I mean you said you will share things outside the fediverse. But people clicking on shared things there will just notice the problem right away.
@fabiscafe thanks for this feedback. We've got a new designer joining soon, we have other new team members with additional perspectives. We've also been working on the Fediscovery project fediscovery.org to improve some of the things you mentioned. We're moving forwards!
Thanks! Please let us know any progress. I wanted to open a usability-collection-issue on github listing all the currently known shortcommings. Do you think this is something worth doing at this point?
@fabiscafe thank you so much for wanting to help! We have a lot of open issues, suggestions and discussions (as you can probably see on GitHub) so please look to see whether anything you want to open has already been created before logging something new.
It seems to me that what is necessary is more order on the GitHub suggestions: duplicates, suggestions that have been already ruled out, features impossibile to do, or otherwise easy to implement, suggestions not relevant because they pertain to specific apps or instances and not the software, etc. etc.
That would make easier for the team to make decisions and for the community to contribute.
it will be tricky to liberate people from legacy social media platforms. People that embrace the values and vision of the #fediverse have already migrated years ago, despite the usability issues. New opportunities do come when there are major shocks, like political events but luck favors the prepared: #bluesky grew a lot as of late because of a smoother UX and catering in particular to US users fleeing X/Tweeter.
@bazkie we appreciate the hesitation about those organisations, but we're hiring individuals and their experience, rather than the company they worked for in previous lives. There's a strong value alignment amongst the people in the team.
@vosje62 After @bazkie 's reply, she/he immediately blocked me 😄
Didn't even give me a chance to answer the question . Oh well.. @Mastodon
My answer would have been: Now you are being judgemental again and rude. You don't know me, but I believe in giving people a second, third and even way more chances.
This is good news. As the premiere platform on Fediverse, Mastodon needs a more mature organization to continue demonstrating what decentralized social media can really be.
It is more important than ever that the social web is not controlled by corporations. Today, Mastodon is taking another step towards its founding ideals: independence and non-profit ownership.
@mkj thanks for this! This is high on our list of priorities, but we do need to get the new organisational entity created first. Hopefully it will not be too long 🤞🏻
Why did you lose your nonprofit status in Germany in 2024?
And where's all this money for staff coming from? I thought you were unable to hire the trust & safety lead because the crowdfunding campaing stalled -- but you're bringing in several C-levels and a new project manager?
Why are those a higher priority than moderation policies and tooling?
@owls thanks for the questions. The non-profit situation is a major reason for our restructuring to a better organisational model / foundation. No new C-level hire in this update. Trust & Safety remains a high priority and we are absolutely working on the tooling side of things (and every hire comes with T&S in mind); we're also grateful to the team that looks after our hosted instances.
Awesome! As a bit of feedback, since Mastodon is european, and roughly half of the users are european, it would be great to see more european posts/news/suggested accounts in the explore tabs. 😊
To be honest, I really think that Mastodon should not have a prominent office in the US, but it should be clear to be a European entity under EU laws.
With the US office in New York mentioned on the website as prominent as it is, I think might very well turn a lot of people who want a break from US tech away from using Mastodon.
@AngelaScholder thank you, we're working on this with the new European non-profit that is being created right now. We do need to list the details of the US 501(c)(3) entity (which is for fundraising) on the site, but totally understand your point. Please stand by while the necessary processes are completed.
Mastodon is right, chill, it doesn't matter where they came from. Only thing that matters is "what can they do for us."
It doesn't matter that they presumably worked quietly and happily for organizations that do everything they can to profit, especially things that wreck our country and the planet
I mean, we imported actual Nazis from Germany to work on rocketry, and now we have the world's most advanced space program and NO OTHER PROBLEMS associated with Nazery WHATSOEVER
W la Friendica (che dio la benedèndica): la guida al Facebook del Fediverso
La guida di Informapirata a Friendica, dedicata a tutti coloro che dal Fediverso vogliono ottenere tutto il possibile.
Un Mastodon con gli steroidi e attualmente l’unica alternativa a Facebook di tutto il Fediverso. Con mille pregi e, soprattutto, mille difetti. E mai nessuno che ci spieghi come utilizzarlo.
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 postedarticles 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.
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.
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:
Bonfire is inching ever closer towards a 1.0 release of its social offering, which is a landmark development for the project. But beneath the surface, there's a bigger story going on: rather than simp
🚩ATTENZIONE🚩: il 2 maggio è prevista la migrazione di Pixelfed.uno su un nuovo server dedicato![i]
Venerdì 2 maggio, l'istanza Pixelfed.uno verrà spostata su un server più veloce e capiente per sostenere la sua recente crescita(sono stati superati i 500GB di immagini condivise!).
[b]⚠️ Cosa aspettarsi: - Interruzioni durante i lavori (il sito sarà offline alcune ore). - Nessun dato perso: tutte le foto e i profili saranno al sicuro!
Perché la migrazione? 🚀 Pixelfed.uno è la prima istanza italiana pixelfed e la prima consigliata dopo quella ufficiale: pixelfed.org/servers e c'è l'intenzione di mantenerla veloce, gratuita e senza pubblicità
@Daniel Supernault I think the ability to sort servers by number of active users is missing, but I still like the interface. Thanks for all the work you've done!
25 aprile (Europa) All’ingresso del Clubheim, grande sala e birreria del Millerntor - lo stadio del St. Pauli - e principale punto di ritrovo di soci e tifosi del club, ieri sera campeggiavano bandiere rosse e delle Brigate Garibaldi.
Questo è l'account di servizio dell'istanza italiana #Poliversity, nata per dare ospitalità a #giornalisti e #studiosi italiani e che consente di scrivere post lunghi fino a 9999 caratteri e formattati!
Poliversity.it utilizza il fork #Mastodon Glitch-soc per consentire opzioni aggiuntive come la formattazione del testo, la scrittura di messaggi visibili solo in locale, la modalità thread e... gli scarabocchi 😅
Poliversity.it evolve grazie a Mastodon Glitch-soc, un fork amichevole. Poliversity consentirà quindi post lunghi fino a 9999 caratteri, formattazione del testo, scrittura di messaggi visibili solo in locale, modalità thread e… gli scarabocchi
Poliversity.it evolve grazie a Mastodon Glitch-soc, un fork amichevole. Poliversity consentirà quindi post lunghi fino a 9999 caratteri, formattazione del testo…
Poliversity è un progetto congiunto nato come spin-off di @poliverso (un'istanza italiana basata su #Friendica e dedicata alla discussione su politica e società) e de @lealternative.net (un blog che propone le migliori alternative open source al software proprietario).
Altri nostri progetti sono il blog di @informapirata e l'istanza Lemmy italiana @feddit
Vorrei ringraziare tutti i nostri iscritti che ci segnalano i contenuti di spam e tutti gli altri contenuti che danneggiano la qualità del #Fediverso
Le segnalazioni aiutano @amministratore e tutti noi moderatori di questa e di tutte le altre istanze che le ricevono a mantenere curato il giardino e a rendere più bella l'esperienza di ognuno qui dentro.
Nessun moderatore può tenere sotto controllo ogni messaggio pubblicato se non viene aiutato da tutta la comunità!
proprio stamattina ho scritto un messaggio in cui sottolineavo quanto il lavoro dei moderatori deve essere assolutamente affiancato dal comportamento del singolo utente che recepisce le regole di convivenza su mastodon e difende questo prezioso spazio di dialogo.
@Xebeche verissimo. I moderatori fanno quanto gli è consentito dagli strumenti che hanno a disposizione, ma è importante che ognuno si senta responsabile del mantenimento dei beni comuni
Firas Hamdan
in reply to Mastodon • • •Elliot Mackness
in reply to Mastodon • • •Wonderful additions to really help provide communities with better control.
I would love for you to add an optional age verification method to allow better control of what content the user wants to interact with.
⚡Tasin 🚀
in reply to Mastodon • • •Anyone can fake their age but please add some good custom emoji to this server. 95% custom emoji sucks here. And can you please add some more custom field in profile like Fedibird? It has 8 custom field while Mastodon has 4.
Thanks
Ellen Bakker
in reply to Mastodon • • •Mastodon
in reply to Ellen Bakker • • •Mastodon — Translation Project on Crowdin
CrowdinBen Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩
in reply to Mastodon • • •@EllenB
beat me to it by 48 seconds
Ellen Bakker
in reply to Mastodon • • •leon 🏳️🌈 🇵🇱
in reply to Mastodon • • •bjaust
in reply to Mastodon • • •khaledmohamed
in reply to Mastodon • • •Mastodon
in reply to khaledmohamed • • •Bringing Quote Posts to Mastodon
Mastodon Blog⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️
in reply to Mastodon • • •Mastodon
in reply to ⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ • • •Mastodon
in reply to Mastodon • • •Woefdram
in reply to Mastodon • • •When do we finally get those algorithms to decide what we need to see?
And when can we expect ads?
😇
Box464
in reply to Mastodon • • •testing
in reply to Mastodon • • •"compared to an average post on facebook, what is the ranking...google among the relevant topics? ChatGPT said:
Google ranking: because Mastodon instances aren’t optimized for SEO, even highly boosted toots usually fall on page 2–3 (positions 15–30) in Google results for related keyword searches
seroundtable.com"