Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Immigration agents visited residences looking for her.
Good on her for fighting this. Shame on the administration for making her fight this. I cannot wait for this to end up in the Supreme Court and for the administration to be smacked down for this blatant and illegal attempt to restrain free speech and punish dissidents.
good luck. I was feeling done with the program so switched to interactive intelligence specialization and took software development process instead. What’s your specialization?
@Schneems Computer Systems. I'm doing great in the program; very happy with the content and workload so far.
This is the first semester I've taken two classes -- on top of my full-time job and non-profit work. But the second class is ODA -- I didn't take CS for undergrad, so I wanted to to refresh my data structures and algorithms before going into IGA.
This is my 5th semester, so I'm on the downhill side. Really enjoying it so far!
I didn’t have a CS degree either (but now I do!). My undergrad is Mechanical Engineering.
I felt I got enough data structures and big O in High Performance Computing. That class was grueling but fun. In hind-site maybe I should have taken Algorithms and picked easier electives 😅
UPDATE: Officially the problem has been "fixed". But lets see....we will look for another provider and in case we will be forced to move, we should be able to do so in a day or two.
Our TROM.tf server was flagged by the hosting company as "Abuse: NetscanOutLevel: scansnarf-ng detected Netscan from: We have indications that there was an attack from your server." - and we have a few hours to fix the issue else they are going to shut down the server....
Please be aware of that since the websites may go down and we may have to move to another hosting provider...
This is very bad news but unaware what it can be. Please keep an eye on status.tromsite.com
We will try to update there in case anything happens.
We had a custom search with some JS scanning searx.space/ for best instances to search with. Maybe that was a red flag for the hosting. We have removed that and redirect now to searx.neocities.org. Lets see...
Ghost si apre al Fediverso per migliorare le newsletter
La piattaforma ha attivato la connettività al Fediverso, permettendo così agli utenti di condividere i propri contenuti su piattaforme social che supportano il protocollo ActivityPub, come Mastodon, Pixelfed e Friendica. Una novità non da poco, che mira appunto a rivaleggiare con alcuni nomi noti sulla scena come Substack.
Aggiungo anche un piccolo commento personalissimo sulla 💩💩💩💩💩 razzista che gira su Substack, per consigliare a tutti coloro che stanno utilizzando quella piattaforma di migrare altrove
Northsky is a new cooperative that is building their own space for the trans and queer community on Bluesky/ATProto, multiple apps are starting to work towards financial sustainability, and more.
Non c'entra con quello che hai scritto, ma ogni volta che vedo un tuo post e la tua foto di profilo, mi vengono in mente le Sturmtruppen e sono contento 😀 Mitico fumetto che non leggo da troppo tempo.
Ciao @botolo86 mi fa piacere che anche l'icona del mio profilo sia in qualche modo utile ma per la precisione, e con tutto il rispetto per Bonvi, rappresenta il buon soldato Sc'vèik protagonista dell'omonimo romanzo di Jaroslav Hašek ed è opera del grande illustratore ceco Josef Lada. L'ho scelta come simbolo dell'antimilitarismo... e in ricordo di quella che fu la birra ceca 😃 Qui l'incipit del romanzo: latradizionelibertaria.over-bl…
Il Buon Soldato Sc'vèik di Jaroslav Hašek Capitolo I - Come ebbe luogo l'intervento del buon soldato Sc'vèik nella guerra mondiale "Sicché ci hanno ammazzato Ferdinando", disse la fantesca al signor Sc 'vèik , che avendo lasciato da qualche anno il..
Uno dei capitoli più discussi della bozza delle nuove Indicazioni nazionali è quello che riguarda l’insegnamento della storia, capitolo redatto dalla sottocommissione coordinata dal professore Ernesto Galli Della Loggia.
Newsletter publisher Ghost is now connecting to the fediverse in public beta, updates about the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, and more.
Newsletter publisher Ghost is now connecting to the fediverse in public beta, updates about the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, and more.
The News
The public beta for connecting Ghost to the fediverse is here, and the ActivityPub integration is now available for Ghost Pro subscribers. Ghost is a publishing platform for sending out blogs via email. With this latest update, Ghost now has another method of distribution, namely via the fediverse. Ghost’s integration with the fediverse consists of two parts: sending out long-form articles published on Ghost into the fediverse, and a reader app to the fediverse from Ghost.
Publishing Ghost articles on ActivityPub makes them accessible to the rest of the fediverse, similar to how WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin works. For users of Ghost this is an easy sales pitch, it is simply another free and automatic distribution channel for their blog. The second part of Ghost’s integration with the social web is a reader app. This app allows Ghost users to browse and read posts on the fediverse. It is split up into two parts: an inbox for reading other long-form posts from Ghost or WordPress, and a feed for all other types of posts. This allows accounts on Ghost not only to send out posts via the ActivityPub integration, but also to connect, respond and follow their audience. It even allows you to post short-form microblogs (notes), just like you’d use on Mastodon, that do not show up on the Ghost website. This makes the Ghost integration a full fediverse experience.
A New Social is the non-profit organisation that builds and manages cross-protocol tools for the open social web. The organisation currently manages Bridgy Fed, the connector that allows accounts to ‘bridge’ between both ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr and more, and is currently in the process of setting up and launching the organisation. In their first update they shared this week, A New Social shared that they have a board of directors, consisting of Erin Kissane, Ben Werdmuller and Susan Mernit. Bridgy Fed Config is the first upcoming launch that they announced, scheduled for early April. To bridge their account, Bridgy Fed currently requires people to follow the Bridgy Fed account on their platform, which can be confusing and opaque for people as to what is actually happening and if it is working. The upcoming Config settings page allows people to log in with their social web account (Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed) and turn the bridging on with a simple switch. A New Social also mentions supporting Threads with the new Bridgy Fed Config update, which is currently not supported by Bridgy Fed.
Forte is a new fediverse platform, that comes from the lineage of Hubzilla and Streams, created by the same developer Mike Macgirvin. Forte’s major feature is that it has Nomadic Identity over ActivityPub. Nomadic Identity means that you can port your entire account, including your posts, settings, social connections, etc. It is slightly different than the account migration that Mastodon has, which transfers your social graph to a new account. With Nomadic Identity, you create a single identity that can be connected to multiple different servers, so when one server becomes unavailable, all your personal data can be transferred and accessed from another server linked to your account. Forte, as well as Hubzilla and Streams, remain on the bleeding edge on what’s possible with ActivityPub. However, Forte also suffers from the same issue that its predecessors have, namely that getting to use the software is surprisingly difficult. By design there is no way to see a list of Forte servers. Forte mainly targets people with technical know-how, as the code repository does not include guide on how to setup your own Forte server. It leads to the funny situation where I would like to give Forte a try because I’m interesting in trying out the new features, but I legitimately do not know how.
Myo is a new image-focused client for the open social web, and allows you to connect your Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr accounts into a single timeline. Combining multiple accounts into a single timeline is similar to OpenVibe, but Myo instead focuses media, in a design that is more reminiscent of Instagram than Twitter. Myo is made by the same developer as SoraSNS, which is also a multi-protocol app that focuses on microblogging instead. Myo and SoraSNS are both available for iOS.
ActivityPub badges is a new project that is currently in development to build a badges/credential system similar to Credly on ActivityPub. The project is currently at the proof-of-concept phase, where badges can be created and send over ActivityPub.
IFTAS, the non-profit for collaborative work on trust & safety on the fediverse, recently had to shut down various of their services due to a lack of funding. In their latest update, the organisation talks about how they are rescoping and moving forward, as the organisation itself is not shutting down. IFTAS will continue with various community support projects, such as their community platform IFTAS Connect. They will also continue providing insight into commonly blocked domains, in a scaled down version of the shut-down FediCheck program.
A new form of spam/scam has recently emerged on the fediverse, and it involves private messages from an account that identifies itself as ‘Nicole the fediverse chick’. So many people have gotten a variation of this message that it is quickly becoming a meme on the fediverse. It is unclear what the exact purpose of this spam is, with either a doxing ex or an elaborate 4chan troll as likely explainers.
This article by Fassbender examines how state surveillance treats federated and decentralised social networks, focusing on the BlueLeaks dataset, which contains a large amount of internal documentation of state surveillance organisations. Fassbender writes: “[…] surveillance actors are less interested in understanding decentralization within platforms, but rather look at organizations first, then take an interest in all platforms that they spread to. This means that any platform (or in the case of the fediverse, grouping of platforms that share a method for interconnecting) can become suspect.”
Sneak peek: Mastodon’s upcoming update will finally include the ability to show all replies on a post.
FEP Search Tool is a small web tool to search all the FEP’s.
Forum software Flarum got funding by NLnet in 2023 to implement ActivityPub, but recently decided that this effort would be postponed for the foreseeable future.
Notes on migrating an account from Mastodon to GoToSocial.
A Manyfold 3D viewer directly in a Mastodon timeline.
Roboherd is a tool to build automated Fediverse actors.
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:
We're excited to release version 7.1 of PeerTube, which continues to evolve graphically, but also to simplify your discoverability! Let's take a close...
Nei prossimi giorni dovrò ottimizzare le grandi tabelle del database di libranet.de e venera.social. Il database è cresciuto a tal punto che il server esaurirebbe lo spazio su disco nelle prossime settimane.
Questo è un processo che richiede molto tempo e risorse e che può bloccare altre query del database. Ecco perché attiverò prima la modalità di manutenzione.
Inizierò con le grandi tabelle del database di venera.social. Quando questo sarà fatto, continuerò con libranet.de.
I gruppi non sono una novità per Pixelfed, abbiamo il supporto webUI ma la funzionalità non era abbastanza perfezionata per l'uso, fino ad ora✨
:pixelfed:I gruppi saranno compatibili con #Lemmy, #Mbin, #Smithereen e altri progetti e assomiglieranno ai gruppi di Facebook nella nostra app ufficiale!
Restate sintonizzati, invieremo il supporto aggiornato per i gruppi nell'app e nell'interfaccia utente Web questo fine settimana🚀
Bluesky PBC shares their protocol roadmap, and a way to indicate user preference to how external parties can handle their data. Tangled is a newly launched Git collaboration platform built on ATProto, and much more news.
To frame making changes in preparation for #Bluesky permitting (selling???) user content for AI scaping as letting "people set their preference (‘user intent’) on how their data should be handled outside of the protocol," is manipulative garbage.
People do not want their content used for AI training. There is no one clamoring for this.
The most precious bit is that the default "undefined" category will be up to "downstream" (read AI companies that get/purchase/scrape Bluesky content) to determine what the user's intent actually is.
@mastodonmigration "But bsky is super cool and all the cool people are hanging out there, they couldn't possibly be trying to treat me like a product!" - plebs who have extremely short memories
Ma vabbe', l'articolo è un esempio del classico genere pedagogista "denuncia del nozionismo e centralismo del curriculum ministeriale". In effetti una volta letto Mario Alighiero Manacorda ogni successivo esempio è superfluo.
Tu dici, @macfranc? Io non lo trovo così malvagio.
Personalmente insegno matematica e con ogni classe prima o poi mi capita di dedicare un'oretta a mostrare che non in tutti i contesti 2+2=4. Oltre a dover ripetere spesso che il "principio di autorità" in matematica non vale gran ché.
Forse l'appunto che farei all'articolo è: personalmente uso la parola "verificabile" quando la verifica è un esperimento scientifico. In matematica userei invece "dimostrabile". @nilocram @scuola@a.gup.pe @scuola@poliverso.org @maupao
l'appunto che farei all'articolo è: personalmente uso la parola "verificabile" quando la verifica è un esperimento scientifico. In matematica userei invece "dimostrabile".
Ecco, hai fatto un esempio interessante. Ho iniziato a leggere la scorsa estate il libro di Chiara Valerio "Matematica eè politica" e ho trovato tante imprecisioni di questo tipo. Provenivo da letture di libri di Lucio Russo e di Carlo Rovelli e ho avuto la stessa impressione che ebbi quando passai dai libri di Luciano Canfora sulla democrazia al pamphlet di Massimo Fini. Con la differenza che Massimo Fini è un bravo scrittore e che conosce i propri limiti culturali.
@Pare sarei comunque curioso di sapere cosa ne pensa @mau di quell'articolo
Bisogna ammettere che la matematica è un terreno scivolosissimo da affrontare in contesti divulgativi (anche un vecchio furbacchione come Odifreddi certe volte non riesce a soddisfarmi), ma lo è ancora di più in contesti divulgativi legati alla pedagogia.
È lì che la discussione sulla pedagogia matematica deve districarsi tra la complessità vera e tentazione di stigmatizzare i luoghi comuni attraverso il contrario, altrettanto banalizzante, di quegli stessi luoghi comuni
Sull'articolo: a parte che nemmeno io avrei usato verificabilità (ma avrei preferito "deducibilità") secondo me Valerio ha detto una cosa giusta ma l'ha detta male.
Mi spiego: la mia lettura (politica) è questa. Valerio pensa "Valditara cerca di sfruttare la 'verità' della matematica come base per buttare a mare il relativismo: col cazzo che la matematica è vera, è relativa come tutto il resto". E giù dovizia di esempi.
Tutto condivisibile: ma se stai scrivendo su Repubblica devi esplicitare la tua tesi prima di demolire quella altri, altrimenti i lettori non ti seguono. Per me insomma non basta dire
«Usare il teorema di Pitagora per dire che esiste una verità perenne e immutabile è un pensiero che reprime la volontà di lottare per il futuro. »
cosa che tra l'altro non è nemmeno corretta. I matematici dopo aver dimostrato il teorema di Pitagora hanno detto " orpo, adesso non abbiamo più nulla per lottare?"
Mah, io so di avere dei limiti culturali, ma non sempre riesco a non varcarne i confini, per quanto io tenti di evitarlo.
Citi Carlo Rovelli. Ho presente almeno alcuni capitoli di suoi libri in cui a parer mio parla a sproposito di cose di cui non sa abbastanza. Ciò non mi impedisce di stimarlo e di apprezzarne i libri.
forse dettandolo proprio corretto, compreso l'articolo, lo strumento automatico avrebbe avuto una minore probabilità di inserire un refuso
Sì, è così. Quando una frase viene dettata per esteso il sistema riesce a interpretarla molto meglio. Uno dei problemi principali che ho si verifica quando devo dettare monosillabi fuori dal contesto, come gli "è" o gli "ho/ha". È in quei casi che la dettatura dà il meglio di sé con mostriciattoli come "ogni hanno", "ha casa", "non e bello"
Quante imprecisioni che scriviamo per "limiti culturali" o "limiti tecnici" o ...
Questa frase sarebbe formalmente corretta in sé, ma nel contesto della nostra discussione, non sono disposto a lasciarla passare senza una necessaria puntualizzazione: sarebbe infatti metodologicamente scorretto e sostanzialmente sbagliato porre sullo stesso piano il falso ricordo dell'articolo determinativo di un titolo letto otto mesi prima, con le approssimazioni e le banalizzazioni che si trovano in quel libro
Accettare le proprie e altrui debolezze è sempre un buon inizio.
Questa frase invece non mi convince affatto. Certo, potresti aver utilizzato il verbo accettare per errore, mentre avresti voluto dire "essere consapevole", ma, premesso che accettare non significa far finta di non vedere, l'accettazione di una propria debolezza (non di un limite, ma di una debolezza) è un atteggiamento sbagliato.
Quanto alle debolezze altrui, non sono disposto ad accettarle se si ripercuotono negativamente su di me o sull'ambiente in cui vivo.
Se invece —come immagino— parliamo di "limiti culturali" o "limiti tecnici", allora è epistemologicamente difficilissimo comprendere i propri limiti e quindi è altrettanto difficile accettarli. È invece molto più facile accettare i limiti altrui, ma anche in questo caso c'è un problema: saremmo in grado di accettare solo i limiti altrui che siamo in grado di riconoscere e non i limiti altrui che non siamo in grado di riconoscere come limiti, perché vanno al di là della nostra portata; il ché dovrebbe farci capire che forse tutta questa fatica è antieconomica per tutti, sia in termini di risorse sia in termini di tempo...
Limite, o debolezza?, dei miei messaggi è il voler restare nella brevità della piattaforma che uso: 500 caratteri.
Si potrebbe approfondire, ma vedo tanta di quella gente che pur di non accettar le proprie debolezze le nega o distrugge il mondo che ha attorno pur di nasconderle, che arrivo a preferire chi le accetta; e magari coopera, con chi ne ha di diverse per reciproca compensazione.
As well as Friendica, the app is also compatible with Mastodon and Glitch Mastodon.
Friendica is a Fediverse platform so you can follow and interact with Friendica users from Mastodon. If you've never heard of Friendica and want to know more, have a look at fedi.tips/friendica-a-flexible…
Guessing that might be a result of Google Play's weird rules?
Google Play and Apple App Store have very odd rules regarding federated social networks. Big tech app stores assume all apps will only be designed for centralised networks, and the rules make no sense for decentralised networks. They may require the app maker to take responsibility for content.
(Weirdly these rules don't apply to email, but I guess that is so common already that they don't want to exclude it.)
@Fedi.Tips content classification is the result of how I filled in the form while creating the application page on Google Play. As a developer of the mobile app, I can not take legal responsibility of what servers host, so I gave very "conservative" answers. And the result was a 18+ classification. Hope I won't go to jail at least... @Alper Çelik
I just downloaded it ... It's having issues logging into Facebook.space ... It goes to my instance and then says operation successful {?} ... And goes back to the login page
Hugz & xXx
Edit ... Sorted out, I had to remove the app as a connected app, and reconnect ... All good now
1. No, this isn't a dating app! It's just a general social media platform on the Fediverse. It has features somewhat similar to Facebook's.
2. The "18+ Extreme Violence" tag is totally misleading, this isn't an adult app and it doesn't contain any violence. The label is there just because Google Play's rules aren't really suited to apps which let you sign in on a server of your choice. Google effectively forces Fedi app makers to use restricted ratings.
I think it's because the web and email have already established themselves and Google Play's rules would look even more obviously silly if browsers and email were all rated "18+ extreme violence".
Hopefully at some point all federated apps will be exempt.
If I understand you about being "federated", there - could - be a dating server and a server for picture and short movies showing the... scantily clad.
Such a strange concept; "ecological computing networks" of cross connected servers hosting various "niches".
I heard social media apps are required to add a "url to report inappropirate content" when the dev want to publish it on Google Play, which makes it unnecessarily hard for fedi app devs. Fedilab has switched its category to general "tools" to avoid that.
@. ݁₊ ⊹ Juniper . ݁₊ ⊹Mastodon glitch-soc is a friendly fork of Mastodon that offers some improved features: - posts formatted in Markdown or HTML - enhanced features for publishing concatenated threads - more customizable interface, with the possibility to collapse long posts - publishing posts visible only from the instance
Of course the formatting options can be used to their full potential only if the 500 character limit is removed, but that can be done without using glitch-soc
Glitch is an unofficial customised version of Mastodon with extra features added, such as rich text formatting and making it easier to have higher character limits.
A lot of the features on Mastodon were originally created by Glitch Mastodon and then copied over to the official version of Mastodon.
Because Mastodon and Glitch Mastodon are both free open source software, they can use and contribute to each other's code like this.
Pixelfed raises 138k Canadian dollars for their project, and a new way to connect researchers to the fediverse with an upcoming ORCID bridge.
The News
The Pixelfed Kickstarter campaign has concluded, and the project has raised 138k Canadian dollar (88k EUR/95k USD). The campaign raised money from over 2100 backers, and reached far past it’s original goal of 50k CAD. The campaign has grown significantly in scope, and indicates that the Pixelfed campaign is much more than just about the image-sharing platform Pixelfed. Pixelfed itself has also grown, and there are now reportedly 8 people joining the team. With the money, the team is working on the following:
Further development of Pixelfed, as well as supporting the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art servers
Development of Loops, and getting it to a state where it can be made available as open source. In the most recent update Pixelfed says that this will be “once it is ready in 2025”.
Building a dedicated server environment around the world, that can handle “the 1000s of TBs of video traffic (plus storage requirements)”.
Building Fedi-CDN to host and serve Loops videos, as well as offering “excess compute/bandwidth to other fediverse platforms as a collaborative shared service.”
Building an E2EE messaging platform Sup, with the near future focused on development planning.
The latest update of the Kickstarter also notes that Pixelfed has started another side project, FediThreat, for fediverse admins to share information about lower-risk harmful actors such as spam accounts. This project is currently in the proof-of-concept stage.
Launching a Pixelfed Foundation. Setting up a foundation was originally put behind to a 200k CAD stretch goal, but it seems like this will still happen, even though the goal is not met. The latest Kickstarter update notes that a Pixelfed Foundation is currently being worked on, as a non-profit under the government of Alberta, Canada.
The amount of money that Pixelfed has raised is significant, especially by fediverse standards. At the same time, this is a lot of different types of projects that the team is undertaking. Pixelfed has a history of overpromising and underdeliving, for example the Groups feature has been announced to be released “soon” for over 2 years now, and this is a feature that they have gotten an NLnet grant for. The new projects that Pixelfed is working on, such as a shared CDN are definitely valuable for the fediverse. But with the attention of the Pixelfed team being pulled in so many different directions, and a lack of clarity on which projects will get focus, it is unclear on which timeline Pixelfed can deliver the planned features.
Encyclia is a newly announced project to make ORCID records available on the fediverse. ORCID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a unique identifier for researchers and scientists. Every researcher can have their own unique ORCID, and with it, every publication become records connected to that ORCID. With Encyclia, all these ORCIDS can be followed from your ActivityPub account, meaning that you can always keep up to date with research, even when the researcher does not have a fediverse account. Encyclia is currently still in pre-alpha, and not yet available for use by the public.
This weekend was the SXSW festival, and Flipboard hosted the Fediverse House, with quite some well-known names within the fediverse community, as well as representatives from Bluesky and Threads, as well. There does not seem to be recordings available, but Jeff Sikes was there and had a good live blog if you want to also experience some FOMO.
In my recent updates on Bluesky and ATProto I talk about how Bluesky is increasingly becoming a political actor, due to the presence of various high-profile people who are actively speaking out against the Trump/Musk regime. This impact so far is less visible on the fediverse, as there are no politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using the platform to speak out. But resistance does not only come from high-profile individuals, it comes from people on the ground that organise themselves. To that end, Jon Pincus wrote two articles on organising on the fediverse: If not now, when? Mutual aid and organizing in the fediverses, the ATmosphere, and whatever comes next has an overview of the current state of the networks in relation to organising. Notes (and thoughts) on organizing in the fediverses and the ATmosphere has a lot more practical details, examening various softwares that can be used in practice. Both articles are great sources of information to get more practical details for people who are considering using decentralised social networks.
The Links
Decentralized Social Networks & WordPress with Alex Kirk. The Open Web Conversations has a new Fediverse series, hosted by WordPress ActivityPub plugin creator Matthias Pfefferle. They discuss talk about how a WordPress blog can be build into a full decentralised social networking node with the Friends plugin by Kirk and the ActivityPub plugin by Pfefferle.
Standards War? – Robert W. Gehl. Gehl compares IFTAS’ funding struggles with the Free Our Feeds campaign, who are raising money to build alternative ATProto infrastructure, and describes it as an illustration of the emerging standards war between ActivityPub and ATProto.
The Software Sessions podcast did an interview with Hong Minhee. Hong is the developer for ActivityPub framework Fedify, as well as Hollo, a single-user microblogging platform.
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:
Sulla Forge des communs numériques éducatifs si può testare l'app #PDF2flip che permette di trasformare un #Pdf in un libro sfogliabile (#flipbook): pdf2flip.forge.apps.education.… Un grand merci à @eyssette 👏 Nella descrizione delle immagini la traduzione italiana delle istruzioni. #ALT
È tutto molto bello. Se ho capito bene si possono aggiungere PDF. Lo si può fare a beneficio di tutti? Un esempio è Ada & Zangemann, dove il PDF è ormai disponibile in moltissime lingue.
Friendica è una piattaforma social straordinaria e vanta una serie di caratteristiche che la rendono unica nel panorama della federazione: • supporto a post di grandi dimensioni, formattati, con titolo e spoiler; • supporto nativo ai gruppi ActivityPub; • messaggi diretti; • galleria multimediale dove è possibile gestire foto album; • possibilità di organizzare i contatti in cerchie; • possibilità di citare (cross-post) post altrui; • importazione di feed RSS; • calendario eventi integrato; • ovviamente molto altro (fare riferimento alla documentazione ufficiale).
L'interfaccia web è ottima per accedere a tutte queste funzionalità, ma su un dispositivo mobile ci sono vincoli diversi per usabilità e leggibilità, quindi è utile avere un'app per utilizzare le più importanti tra le funzioni offerte dalla piattaforma.
Funzionalità principali:
• visualizzazione timeline con la possibilità di cambiare tipo di feed (pubblica, locale, iscrizioni e liste personalizzate); • dettaglio post, visualizzare le risposte, le ricondivisioni e gli utenti che l'hanno aggiunto ai preferiti; • dettaglio utente con visualizzazione post, post e risposte, post fissati e multimediali, e possibilità di registrarsi per le notifiche, seguirlo, visualizzare elenchi di seguaci e seguiti; • supporto ai gruppi ActivityPub, con possibilità di aprire i thread in modalità forum; • visualizzare i post di tendenza, gli hashtag e i link in tendenza e i suggerimenti su chi seguire; • seguire/smettere di seguire un hashtag e visualizzare tutti i post che lo contengono; • interagire con i post (ricondividere, aggiungere ai preferiti o segnalibri) e – nel caso dei propri post – modificarli, cancellarli o fissarli sul profilo; • ricerca globale di hashtag, post e utenti in base a termini di ricerca; • personalizzare l'aspetto dell'app cambiando i colori, font o dimensione del testo, ecc. • effettuare l'accesso tramite il protocollo OAuth2; • visualizzare e modificare i dati del proprio profilo; • visualizzare e filtrare l'elenco notifiche; • gestire le richieste di essere seguito; • visualizzare la lista dei preferiti, segnalibri o hashtag seguiti; • creare post e risposte formattati, con allegati (e testo alternativo), spoiler e titolo; • schedulare post (e cambiare la data di schedulazione) o salvarlo nelle bozze; • segnalare post e utenti agli amministratori per la moderazione dei contenuti; • silenziare/bloccare utenti e gestire la lista dei propri utenti silenziati o bloccati; • gestire le proprie cerchie (liste personalizzate); • visualizzare i sondaggi (sola lettura); • supporto multi-account con possibilità di cambiare account (e, in modalità anonima, di cambiare istanza); • inviare messaggi diretti ad altri utenti e visualizzare le conversazioni; • gestire la galleria foto; • visualizzare il calendario eventi (sola lettura).
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.
Que massa, @Thiago Skárnio ! Eu nem acesso muito o Fediverso do celular, mas atualmente estou usando o Fedilab. Funciona bem, mas é genérico. Vou dar uma conferida nesse aí. Valeu!
@Aracnus @Thiago Skárnio Fedilab solo utiliza las API de Mastodon, por lo que se pierde la mayoría de las funciones de Friendica. Racoon, por otro lado, utiliza tanto la API de Mastodon (y de hecho funciona bien con Mastodon) como la API de Friendica. Y de hecho puedes gestionar casi todas las funciones web excepto las configuraciones estrictas y la creación de eventos. ¡Pruébalo y cuéntamelo! 😉
@aracnus @oigreslima Um dos motivos da nossa instância atual ser com Mastodon é a falta de um bom app mobile. Também uso o Fedilab mas ele não dá conta de tudo. Pelo visto não tenho mais desculpas para não retornar ao projeto inocial. Helele.
@Thiago Skárnio Estoy de acuerdo. También sé que el desarrollador @𝔻𝕚𝕖𝕘𝕠 🦝🧑🏻💻🍕 está trabajando en agregar notificaciones y traducciones, pero obviamente es una tarea compleja y la aplicación solo tiene unos meses, por lo que imagino que comenzará a trabajar en ello seriamente solo si su aplicación tiene una buena respuesta en términos de usuarios activos.
@Aracnus Me gustaría agregar que una de las características innovadoras de esta aplicación es la posibilidad de explorar los mensajes en tu cronología de derecha a izquierda y viceversa. Esta es una característica que ni siquiera las aplicaciones multimillonarias de Facebook, Instagram y X, tienen.
Quando abbiamo aperto la nostra istanza #SearXNG, speravamo di smuovere coscienze. Oggi in molti hanno seguito l’esempio, usando e creando istanze SearXNG! 🚀
Perché è rivoluzionario? Perché si è capito che l’indipendenza dai motori di ricerca centralizzati non è un sogno, ma un diritto.
A chi ha replicato il nostro modello, a chi ha condiviso la nostra guida, a chi ora cerca senza tracciamento: GRAZIE. Ogni istanza nuova è un nodo in più in una rete indipendente, un segnale contro le Big Tech.
IFTAS is shutting down most of their services following a lack of funding, and Tumblr-like platform Wafrn now has its own apps, and a Bluesky integration to boot.
The News
The fediverse trust and safety organisation IFTAS has announced it is shutting down most of its services, following a lack of funding. Last month the organisation said that they would soon run out of funding, and that they’d do a final effort at getting structural funds for the organisation. This has not happened, and now IFTAS will shut down most of their services. The biggest project to be shut down is IFTAS’ Content Classification Service, a service which handled CSAM scanning and reporting for fediverse servers. When fediverse server admins encounter CSAM, most countries have mandatory reporting requirements that admins are obliged to follow. Another project that is shutting down is FediCheck, which provides shared deny lists that server could use to build their own deny lists for their servers.
IFTAS shutting down their services is a double blow to the fediverse. The obvious one is that functions like IFTAS’ Content Classification Service were aiming to provide a service that filled an crucial gap in the operations of many fediverse servers. Scanning for CSAM, and handling the legal requirements on reporting to the relevant agencies is a challenging task for server admins to execute, and many fediverse servers do not have good procedures in place to handle this delicate process. IFTAS’ CCS would have provided a way for smaller fediverse server to handle the legal obligations they have regarding handling CSAM.
The second blow to the fediverse is in that IFTAS fills an important role in building a collaborative structure for moderation across fediverse servers. The fediverse is a network of independent places (servers), and while they are interconnected on a technical level via a protocol, building connections between servers for collaborations is proving to be much harder. Over the years there have been many suggestions and ideas on how fediverse servers could work together, for example regarding on sharing information on which servers to block. These conversations currently take place mainly via admin backchannels or via the #fediblock hashtag, and a more structural interface could help streamline this process. For such a process to work trust is needed between fediverse server admins to participate with such infrastructure. IFTAS, as a grassroots fediverse organisation, is one of the best-placed organisations to have build trust and provide a nexus around which such infrastructure could be build. IFTAS got pretty far with their rollout of FediCheck, which was building such a place for collaboration between server admins. Now that IFTAS will not be the center around which shared moderation infrastructure can be build, will there be another organisation in the future to do so? Especially when IFTAS found out that getting funding for such a project is so difficult?
Fediverse platform Wafrn has announced they now have apps for Android and iOS available in testing. I have not talked about Wafrn much, but it is one of the more interesting fediverse platforms that is currently being worked on. Wafrn is a Tumblr-inspired platform that clearly does not take itself too seriously: the name stands for “We Allow Female Representing Nipples“. It is a reference to a decision by Tumblr to ban adult content, and they used the phrase “Female-presenting Nipples” in their community guidelines which became a target of ridicule. Wafrn has a variety of unique features, such as a place to ask and answer questions for the Wafrn community. The most standout feature of Wafrn however is a native integration of both ActivityPub and ATProto. A Wafrn account allows you to have a full connection with the fediverse, as well as with Bluesky. On the fediverse, your account is visible as @name@app.wafrn.net, while on Bluesky your account is visible as @name.at.wafrn.net. Because this is not a bridge, and instead a native integration, a Wafrn account can interact with any Bluesky and fediverse account, other accounts are not required to opt-in in order to connect. In a real way, this means that Bluesky is now indeed federated, it just took an app called “We Allow Female Representing Nipples” to get there.
Link aggregator platform PieFed has added support for feeds. Feeds on PieFed are similar to how multi-reddits work on Reddit: it allows you to create a custom feed that displays posts from multiple communities. Feeds can also be shared, allowing people to follow a feed that others have created. Feeds on PieFed are somewhat similar to their Topics feature. Topics are also a collection of multiple fediverse communities around a certain theme. The main difference between topics and feeds is that topics are created by the server owner, and set for the entire server. With feeds, anyone can create and share one, and you can also follow feeds from other PieFed servers.
The Links
Timeline app Tapestry has gotten an investment by Tumblr.
WeDistribute writes about Funkwhale and their decision to filter out far-right music.
Ghost‘s weekly update on their ActivityPub implementation
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:
Automattic-owned blogging site and social platform Tumblr has financially backed Tapestry, the newly launched app designed to organize feeds from across
Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again on Bluesky and it’s surrounding ecosystem of media apps. The News Constellation is a project that recently released that provides a database of […]
Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again on Bluesky and it’s surrounding ecosystem of media apps.
The News
Constellation is a project that recently released that provides a database of all backlinks in the entire network. Constellation now has a database of over 1.2 billion links, and an accompanying website with statistics to slice through. The Constellation API is now also getting integrated into multiple PDS browsers, both PDSls and atp.tools show backlinks to the ATProto records now. This puts PDS browsers more into their own specific place on the network: not a full AppView, but more than just a way to view the content of a PDS.
Bluesky PBC has put out a new proposal for ATProto, Sync 1.1. The proposed update concerns the relays, and the validation work they do. As part of the Authenticated Transfer, which ATProto is named after, relays validate every event on the firehose. This validation process currently requires a relay to store the entire repo, which can take up a lot of space. This is one of the aspects that make hosting a relay more expensive. The proposed update changes the way validation works, which allows a relay to validate the integrity of all the data going through the firehose without having to store the entire repo. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy provides an explainer thread on how this works here. This update makes it much more feasible for people to self-host relays.
Another proposal by Bluesky PBC is for moderation routing report. The new feature allows labelers to select which type of report they want to receive. A common problem that labelers currently face is that users tend to receive reports that are not relevant for their specific labeling service, which causes them unnecessary extra work, as well as getting unnecessarily exposed to awful content. The new proposed update allows labelers to opt-out of specific reporting categories. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold says Bluesky PBC is currently working on implementing the feature, aiming to ship it soon.
In Other News
Bluesky has posted some new job vacancies, and they are now hiring a System Integrity Engineer, Product Designer and Senior Trust and Safety Lead. Both the System Integrity Engineer and Trust and Safety Lead indicate that Bluesky is expanding their Trust and Safety work: both of these jobs are newly created positions, with the engineering position explicitly focused on moderation systems and regulatory compliance.
Some podcasting news: two podcasting apps, Transistor and TrueFans, both added support for displaying Bluesky comments on the podcast episode page. TrueFans also supports fediverse comments, so that a podcast episode page can display comments and reactions from both networks.
Bluesky engineer Jaz wrote an article about ‘lossy’ timelines. The summary is that to maintain performance, the home timelines of accounts that follow more than 4k accounts will not always see all posts on the timeline.
Upcoming ATProto short-form video platform Spark shared their outline on some of the limits they’ll set. Spark aims to allow videos of 300 MB or 3 minutes long (compared to Bluesky’s 50MB or 1 minute), and 12 files for image posts (5MB each). This is part of the reason why Spark is not using Bluesky’s lexicon, instead developing their own. Setting these limits higher will also require Sparks to provide their own PDSes, as the file size limit is set by the Bluesky PDS. Hosting video is expensive, and it is not yet clear how Spark will finance this.
A short tutorial on how to publish lexicon verification. The first verified lexicons are now starting to show up on lexidex.
Roomy has posted a deep dive on their tech stack, how they are combining ATProto and Automerge to build public chatrooms.
Web browser Opera adds Bluesky integration, allowing you to more easily doom scroll in the sidebar of the browser.
Bluesky video client Skylight is now available in beta on Android, after Skylight had trouble with Google to get the Android beta approved.
Some events: Feed builder Graze will hold a meetup in New York this Friday the 28th, and at SXSW (March 10th, Austin) there will be Bluesky meetup.
The Links
An interview with Game Industry Labeler developer Trazy on how builds a community of thousands of game devopers on Bluesky.
A guide (in Japanese) on how to upload videos using Bluesky API (XRPC)
An interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at Knight Media Forum.
A podcast interview with the developer of the ATProto art platform Pinksea
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 the articles of this week, 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.
Un video di protesta generato tramite intelligenza artificiale, che mostra Donald Trump mentre bacia i piedi di Elon Musk, è diventato virale dopo essere stato trasmesso in un ufficio governativo. Il video, condiviso su Bluesky dall'utente Marisa Kabas. è stato rimosso dalla piattaforma, classificandolo come "non consensuale", dato che né Trump né Musk avevano acconsentito alla sua creazione. Bluesky ha notificato Kabas via email, spiegando che il video violava le linee guida della comunità. Kabas ha contestato tale decisione, argomentando che il contenuto fosse di interesse pubblico e costituisse una forma legittima di informazione... ma nulla!
Sebbene le politiche di moderazione dei contenuti sui social generalmente consentano critiche verso figure pubbliche, la rimozione del video appare utilizzare la presunta neutralità delle policy come giustificazione per proteggere Trump, attraverso una poderosa captatio benevolentiae.
Bluesky has deleted the most viral post reporting on an internal government protest agains the President of the United States and the world's richest man.
a parte le linee guida e merito a Bluesky, che differenza c'è se fosse stata una vignetta che mostra Trump che bacia i piedi a Musk? Sarebbe stato non consensuale cqe. La vignetta sarebbe stata rimossa? È da molto che mi chiedo la differenza tra disegnare a mano e usare l AI ( quando sai che è falso ovviamente) per la satira. Però io non trovo corretto mettere il nome della persona nell' articolo che l ha messo online: a cosa serve? A cosa serve un minimo di privacy ?
Non è così. La notizia non è la condivisione del video, ma la condivisione di un video riprodotto sugli schermi televisivi all'interno di un edificio per uffici del governo federale, un ovvio atto di protesta. Se volessimo mantenere la similitudine della vignetta, qui non si tratta di diffondere una vignetta, ma di mostrare la vignetta che è stata appesa in tutte le bacheche del ministero. Non è la condivisione di un meme, ma la condivisione di una notizia!
> non trovo corretto mettere il nome della persona nell' articolo che l ha messo online: a cosa serve? A cosa serve un minimo di privacy ?
La persona in questione è una giornalista e non credo che abbia nulla in contrario alla pubblicazione del suo nome
While the news in the world is louder and intenser than ever, the fediverse has had one of it’s most quiet news weeks in a long time. But as compensation I’ll have another article out tomorrow, that I did not manage to finish for today.
The News
Some updates for GoToSocial: GoToSocial published the documentation that would also allow other fediverse platforms to implement their Interaction Policies. And Slurp is a new CLI tool to import your posts from other fediverse servers into GoToSocial. A guide to import your Pixelfed posts into GoToSocial with Slurp is available here.
Last week I wrote extensively about Mastodon’s plan to implement quote post. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed in a follow-up that Mastodon will not display quote posts if they are made using another implementation than Mastodon proposes. This means in practice that even when Mastodon has added support for quote posts, it will not display quote posts made by Misskey, unless Misskey also implements Mastodon’s new proposed system for quote posts.
Elgg is an old-school open source social network that started in 2004. It added a plugin for ActivityPub this week.
The Identity Graph Explorer is a simple tool to find out how “identifiers on the Fediverse / Social Web are connected to one another”.
The Hexbear Lemmy community recently lost control of their domain, leading to a bidding war for the domain name for thousands of dollars. The admins now report that they have gotten back control of their domain.
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:
Howdy, folks. It’s time once again for the Website League update; our work continues. Most of what we’ve accomplished in the time since the last update has...
English writer Hanif Kureishi from his wheelchair begins his article entitled Why I am becoming a fascist in this way: "If I could raise my arms, I’d be doing a Nazi salute right now. If I could walk, I’d be goose-stepping." #trumpism #autocracy #fascism #democracy #MAGAHat #liberalism
Social platforms are not, and can not, be neutral in a context of authoritarianism, and Bluesky cannot avoid this dynamic either. On a lighter note, many experiments with building image and video clients for Bluesky are ongoing, more insight in how ATProto can scale down, and more.
Quando autocrati come Donald Trump prendono il potere, le istituzioni, le aziende e le organizzazioni della società civile non possono semplicemente continuare come prima. Quello in cui Google e Apple sbagliano, l'organizzazione no-profit Wikipedia riesce a fare meglio. Un commento di Leonhard Dobusch.
Il nome che da 500 anni viene dato al mare tra la costa meridionale degli Stati Uniti, il Messico e Cuba sembra essere uno dei problemi più importanti degli Stati Uniti. O almeno, così si potrebbe pensare. Perché uno dei primi atti di Donald Trump nel suo secondo mandato è stato quello di rinominarlo. Con un decreto, ha fatto rinominare il “Golfo del Messico” in “Golfo d'America”, secondo l'interpretazione ufficiale del governo statunitense.
Google e Apple rinominano il Golfo del Messico
In primo luogo, la “cambio di nome” è ovviamente un atto altamente simbolico che risponde a riflessi nazionalistici. Fa parte della strategia Flood-the-zone-with-shit-Strategie (Inonda il campo di merda) della nuova destra di Trump & Co. Ma è più di uno stupido scherzo, più di un semplice simbolo. Il cambio di nome costringe gli altri a relazionarsi con Trump.
Questo pone un problema ai produttori di mappe mondiali. Il mare deve essere chiamato come Trump lo immagina o come il resto del mondo e la maggioranza delle persone lo conoscono da secoli? I giganti della tecnologia statunitensi, Google e Apple, hanno deciso: si allineano ai rispettivi governi del paese - in questo caso anche a Trump. Negli Stati Uniti, questo è l'unico nome che utilizzano nei loro servizi di mappe. Ma nella versione in lingua tedesca di Google Maps, il “Golfo del Messico” è stato recentemente etichettato anche come “Golfo d'America”.
La propaganda autocratica non è normale
Quanto più assurda è l’azione di autocrati come Trump, tanto più forte è se gli altri potenti coinvolti si comportano come se questo fosse normale, come se si trattasse di faccende quotidiane. Questo è esattamente ciò che hanno fatto Google e Apple. Lutz Mache, responsabile degli affari governativi e delle politiche pubbliche di Google, ha risposto alle critiche sull’immsdiato cambio di nome di Google Maps: “In questo caso viene rispettata la legge in vigore. Nulla di più, nulla di meno”.
Inoltre, Mache ha citato una dichiarazione ufficiale (naturalmente su X-Twitter, dove se no?) in cui Google fa riferimento alla “prassi di lunga data” di adottare i cambiamenti di nome se sono stati modificati in fonti governative ufficiali (negli Stati Uniti si tratta del “Geographic Names Information System” (GNIS)). Può darsi che sia così, ma tale consuetudine non è una legge. E finché il GNIS non è stato usato impropriamente per la propaganda nazionalistica del governo, non è stato un problema.
Ma se i politici autoritari abusano delle istituzioni statali per scopi propagandistici, allora anche l'abitudine di continuare a fidarsi ciecamente di queste istituzioni deve essere messa in discussione.
Senza resistenza, gli autocrati vanno sempre più lontano
Questo è importante perché tutto ciò che funziona senza resistenza è visto dagli autocrati come un invito a mettere una marcia in più. È così anche in questo caso: un deputato repubblicano ha presentato una mozione per rinominare la Groenlandia “Red, White and Blueland”.
Ci sono certamente delle alternative a questa reazione. Wikipedia, ad esempio, non solo è più resistente alla disinformazione rispetto alle piattaforme orientate al profitto, ma anche agli interventi propagandistici delle forze autoritarie.
Wikipedia è più resistente
Nella Wikipedia in lingua inglese, il “Golfo del Messico” viene ancora chiamato così. Il motivo è da ricercare nelle convenzioni di denominazione di Wikipedia: ciò che conta è il modo in cui ci si riferisce prevalentemente a un luogo, non come qualcuno pensa che debba essere chiamato.
È quindi giunto il momento che Google riconsideri la sua “prassi consolidata”. Perché non adottare semplicemente i termini geografici di Wikipedia? In ogni caso, il tempo del “Business as usual” è finito. Questa non è un’esercitazione.
Grazie per la segnalazione. Aggiungo un po' di osservazioni:
Trump, almeno per il momento, non è un "autocrate" al modo dello zar di tutte le Russie. Il suo regime è cominciato come una democrazia autoritaria - è stato eletto, dopo tutto, ed è da oligarchici in pectore dimenticarselo - anche se può condurre a una sorta di destrutturazione/dissoluzione dello stato;
I poteri distribuiti e non aziendali resistono meglio di quelli centralizzati e aziendali (i cui interessi al lucro sono concentrati oligarchicamente o anche autocraticamente)
anche per questo non è una buona idea aziendalizzare e accentrare i poteri sulle e nelle istituzioni che si occupano della ricerca della verità - a meno che non si sia cultori in pectore di forme autoritarie;
ma tutto questo lo avevamo già detto, e in tempi non sospetti, quando i più fischiettavano.
A new P2P group chat with Roomy, Microcosm makes ATProto even more modular, other new tools and much more!
Welcome to this week’s edition of all the news that happens in the wider ATProto ecosystem. This edition is somewhat more technical, next week I’ll focus again on Bluesky and the growing ecosystem of video and image apps around it.
@Ernesto Wong García estaba pensando en hacer algo así para los hashtags, a ver... ¿qué te parece?
Se va a poder hacer clic en cada elemento (por ej. "linux" aquí) y abrir la pantalla correspondiente con todos los post que contienen el hashtag seleccionado.
This week I'm zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they'll run out of funding soon, indicating the challenges with funding Trust & Safety in the network.
This week I’m zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they’ll run out of funding soon, indicating the challenges with funding Trust & Safety in the network.
On bridging and fediverse culture
Erin Kissane wrote an excellent article this week, about ‘bridging’ (connecting separate networks), fediverse culture, and why this regularly leads to drama and blowups. Kissane gives three explanations as to why this type of drama keeps happening, of which I want to highlight one: ‘Conflicting models of what the fediverse “really” is’. Kissane focuses on two different cultures on the fediverse regarding how connections between different places on the fediverse should be made, and how they should deal with consent.
I agree with Kissane’s observation, both that these competing models exist, as well as that a lack of acceptance that there are different models leads to conflict. Just last week I wrote about two separate cases of drama between various people about fediverse software that deals with these conflicting models on what the fediverse really is. In general I think that it is highly important to have a good understanding of what the fediverse truly is, and not only what people want the fediverse to be.
This Sunday was the NFL Superbowl, with the halftime show by Kendrick Lamar. Lamar made some powerful visual statements in his show, such as a flag of America that consists entirely of Black men. Browsing both the fediverse and Bluesky this Monday morning served as a good indication of how different the cultures of these two networks are.
On Bluesky, 20 of the most liked 25 posts of the entire network 1 discussed the Superbowl, and of those 20, 12 were specifically about Lamar’s halftime show. Shortly after the end of the show, network traffic spiked to almost double the traffic for a short period as people logged in to talk about the show.
On the fediverse, I had a hard time finding any posts discussing the Superbowl. I saw one post on the trending page of mastodon.social. Browsing through all posts made with the hashtag #superbowl gave me more than five times as much superb pictures of owls as it gave me posts about the halftime show.2 There is a long tradition of posting pictures of owls with the tag SuperbOwl, that far predates the fediverse.
It shows two social networks with very different cultures: one as a place to discuss mainstream cultural events, and one as a place for counterculture and the subversion of mainstream culture. I do not think this difference is an anomaly either, in general I see significantly less conversations about pop culture on the fediverse. This specific example with the Superbowl halftime show is just a clear example of a larger trend
To be clear here: this is not a criticism of the fediverse, nor is it a call for the fediverse to change and suddenly start posting about Lamar. The reason I’m highlighting these difference is to show what the fediverse actually is. There is a significant group of people that have an interest in the fediverse for the potential that it can be. This group frames the fediverse as an alternative to platforms like X, as a way to build social media platforms that are welcoming for everybody. This is a laudable goal to strive for. The ongoing coup in the US illustrates the urgent need for social platforms that are not owned by the oligarchy. But I also think that working towards such goals requires a good understanding what the fediverse currently actually is.
That is why I’m placing this observation in the context of Kissane’s post, who notes that people having ‘conflicting model of what the fediverse “really” is’ leads to conflict, and hampers potential for change in the fediverse. To me, how the fediverse responded to the Superbowl is a good illustration of the current culture of the network. What the fediverse currently is, is a countercultural network with little interest in mainstream pop culture. This is an absolutely fine identity to have! But for the people who are working to bringing the fediverse into the mainstream, it is important to realise that this countercultural identity clashes with with bringing a mainstream cultural identity to the fediverse.
The News
IFTAS has announced that they are running out of funding, and that barring new funding sources that will come through this month, the organisation will have to scale down their activities significantly. IFTAS says that they are currently focused on getting funding for their Content Classification Service (CCS). CCS is an opt-in system which helps fediverse server admins with CSAM detection and reporting. Running a social networking server comes with a fair amount of requirements regarding reporting CSAM, which are difficult to do for fediverse admins. CCS is intended to help with that, but IFTAS describes it as an “a ridiculously expensive undertaking, far beyond what the community can support with individual donations”. If IFTAS cannot secure funding by the end of the month, they will have to suspend the operation of CCS and its CSAM detection service. Other work that IFTAS will have to halt if no funding comes through is giving policy guidance, like their recent work for server admins on how to navigate the new UK Online Safety Act.
Funding Trust & Safety has been a major challenge for the fediverse. Recently, Mastodon tried a fundraiser for a new Trust & Safety lead, where Mastodon only managed to raise 13k of the aimed 75k. It is a concerning situation for the fediverse. One of the selling points of the network is that it can be a safer place for vulnerable people. But it turns out that actually funding the work that can make the fediverse a safer place is a lot harder than it should be.
Tapestry is a new iOS app by Iconfactory, who once made the popular Twitter client Twitterific. Tapestry is a combination of a news reader and a social media site. It allows you to combine many feeds into a single timeline. Tapestry supports social feeds like Mastodon, Bluesky and Tumblr, as well as RSS, YouTube, and more. The app was funded via Kickstarter last year. In a review, David Pierce from The Verge describes Tapestry as a ‘timeline app’, in a similar category as apps like feeeed and Surf. In his review, Pierce describes how timeline apps are about consuming information and new in a different way, and help manage the information overload that social media feeds present us with. I think that is also why I find these types of apps interesting, as they also frame the fediverse in a different way. Most popular fediverse software like Mastodon and Pixelfed are wired around social interaction. However, they follow the same patterns as the Twitters and Instagrams that came before, and over the last 15 years society has reshaped itself so that platforms like Twitter became not only used for talking, but also as a way to distribute news. So far, the fediverse is repeating this structure; Mastodon is used both for organisations that just want to send out a link to their news article as well as for people to chat with their friends. Timeline apps like Tapestry help split out these use cases, and allow people to take one part of the interaction pattern of Mastodon (following news and updates) without the other pattern (chatting with friends).
The Links
Some more videos of fediverse presentations that happened at FOSDEM last week were published online:
The Brazilian Institute for Museums, a Brazilian government agency, is hiring two people to expand their integration with ActivityPub.
Flipboard has published more information and a schedule for Fediverse House, a conference about the social web. It will be held in Austin, Texas, on Sunday March 9th and Monday March 10th.
I checked at 6am PST, and looked at the past 12 hours. ↩︎
Also checked on 6am PST, and checked all posts made with that hashtag as visible from the mastodon.social server. I saw 61 pictures of owls, and less than 10 pictures by non-automated accounts of the show by Lamar. I’m saying less then 10 here because there were some automated bot accounts in there who mirror posts from news websites. Due to the size difference in userbase between Bluesky and Mastodon I’m less interested in the absolute numbers as in the relative difference between them. ↩︎
Oggi, la National Security Agency (NSA) sta pianificando una "Big Delete" di siti web e contenuti di rete interni che contengono una qualsiasi delle 27 parole vietate, tra cui "privilegio", "parzialità" e "inclusione". La "Big Delete", secondo una fonte della NSA e la corrispondenza interna esaminata da Popular Information, sta creando conseguenze indesiderate. Sebbene i siti web e gli altri contenuti siano presumibilmente cancellati per rispettare gli ordini esecutivi del Presidente Trump che prendono di mira diversità, equità e inclusione, o "DEI", la rete a strascico sta eliminando il lavoro "relativo alla missione". Secondo la fonte della NSA, che ha parlato a condizione di anonimato perché non è autorizzata a parlare con i media, il processo è "molto caotico", ma sta comunque andando avanti.
Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
@carini è normale. La lamentela sulla cenZura del politicamente corretto è diventata un meme
Chi può lamentarsi di una presunta censura, se non chi la censura vorrebbe farla egli stesso?
È quindi fisiologico che i nuovi censori pratichino la censura esattamente così come immaginavano nella propria fantasia malata che la censura venisse esercitata dai loro odiati liberal
Eh ... la censura è sempre quella degli altri. Poi c'è chi ha l'onestà di protestare sempre e quelli che protestano solo quando fa comodo alla loro parte.
@carini allo stesso modo, le religioni più totalitarie ed eversive sono quelle che rivendicano spazi pubblici in base alla libertà di religione. Salvo poi, una volta giunti al potere, cancellare ogni libertà religiosa o non religiosa... O la tirannia con la democrazia. È un gioco antico dal quale Popper ricavò il suo famoso paradosso della tolleranza
Peccato che il "gioco della tolleranza" di popper viene spesso citato (a sproposito) dagli intolleranti, esattamente nello stesso modo in cui l'effetto Dunning-Kruger viene costantemente citato proprio dai meno competenti.
In ogni caso non si applica alle religioni che non possono, per definizione, essere tolleranti.
Il tutto è molto utile per personalizzare il proprio account affiancando al nome alcune emoji significative o per indicare i propri interessi nella descrizione.
Se manca qualche emoji che usereste molto volentieri segnalatela e la renderemo disponibile.
Bluesky’s public launch was one year ago today, and here you can see how the network has grown and changed over this first year. In that year, Bluesky has managed to find a serious role in the larger media ecosystem. The media ecosystem itself has shifted rapidly as well: outlets like Wired and 404 Media, and independent reporters like Marisa Kabas and Nathan Tankus at the forefront of reporting what is happening in the US. I do not think it is an accident that they are all active on Bluesky
Note: I’ve been sick for the past few days, so this edition is a bit shorter and a day late, apologies. Next week’s edition will be focused again on the more technical side of AT Protocol (ATProto).
Credible exit
One of the core concepts why Bluesky is build on the open ATProto is to give users ‘credible exit’. The Bluesky company (Bluesky PBC) is mindful of how companies turn bad over time, and CTO Paul Frazee explicitly talks about how he sees his own company as a ‘future adversary‘. The idea is that in a future where Bluesky has become an adversary to its users, people can have a ‘credible exit’ away from Bluesky towards another microblogging app. People can take their digital identity (the DID, in ATProto terms), social graph and posts with them, and seamlessly continue microblogging on ATProto using another app. Such another competitor microblogging app on ATProto currently does not exist, and an important factor in that is the incentives to build such an app currently are not there. Bluesky is currently not an adversary, has a well-designed app and some significant funding, and it is hard to compete with that. Still, the assumption made by Bluesky PBC is that over the years, Bluesky PBC will gradually turn ‘bad’ in some way, and at some point the incentives are such that another company will build a microblogging competitor on ATProto, and people will have the option to have a credible exit.
The ongoing coup in America changes the dynamic however. Autocratic regimes are not particularly compatible with platforms that allow for free speech by people that oppose the regime. This creates a possibility that either the Musk or the US government will force Bluesky to censor speech or ban accounts that they don’t like, or that either party will come after Bluesky directly. Musk has called Bluesky ‘pedosky’ multiple times, indicating his feelings of contempt for the network that rivals his X platform. Such actions would likely be wildly illegal and should be fought in court, but in a world where an unelected private citizen can decide to shut down entire US government departments, it is prudent to account for the possibility that other illegal stuff might happen as well.
This new political environment changes the understanding of Bluesky having a credible exit as well. So far, Bluesky PBC frames credible exit as a way for people to move to a different app on the same network when the company becomes an ‘adversary’. But in the current political climate, it might just be that the US government becomes an adversary which prompts a need for a credible exit.
Bluesky clients
Bluescreen is the latest video app for Bluesky, made by the creator of the popular Bluesky client Skeets. It is similar to apps like Skylight and Videos for Bluesky, all three apps provide a TikTok-like interface to watch videos that are posted on Bluesky. Over at TechCrunch, Sarah Perez wrote an overview of all the video apps for ATProto that are currently being developed.
Now that I’ve gotten to play around with all three video apps for Bluesky, I am not convinced that Bluesky video clients are the way forward to build a ‘TikTok for Bluesky’. Bluesky’s recent update for video feeds have turned the official Bluesky app into a suitable video client as well, and I find that the video watching experience on the official Bluesky app is better than on any of these three apps. Part of it is that the competitor client apps are all still early in development, and this may change over time. But more importantly, videos on Bluesky get posted in an environment where there are lots of non-video content as well. If I watch a video on Bluesky and I want to see that account’s profile, I’m want to be able to see all of their posts, not just their videos. I can do this with the official Bluesky app, but not with any of the Bluesky video-focused clients.
There are now multiple image-focused Bluesky clients as well. Pinksky was recently released with an interface that is heavily inspired by Instagram. Bluescreen also now has a Bluesky client specifically for photo-sharing, Flashes, that entered open beta this week. Atlas is a Bluesky client for images that has collections similar to Pinboard. These image-focused Bluesky clients all bring something to the table that the official Bluesky client does not have, by restructuring the interface around images. But just with video, I’m wondering if it is enough to build a steady user base.
The Links
Two RSS readers added Bluesky support this week: Feedly and Inoreader.
handles.net allows for large-scale managing of Bluesky handles, similar to other services like Aviary.
Another way to add bookmarks to Bluesky, this time with a separate app.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.
FOSDEM and the fediverse match well together, some issues regarding data privacy and consent, and multi-network client Openvibe gets 800k in funding.
The News
FOSDEM, the free event for open source software was this weekend in Brussels, with a large presence for the fediverse and the social web. There were three events, presentations by various fediverse software developers in the SocialWeb Devroom, an extra smaller event on Sunday for more presentations, and a more casual event on Sunday evening at Brussels Hackerspace. All the events were fully packed, showing the large amount of interest from the community for the fediverse and the social web. The Social Web Foundation has been the main initiator of these events.
Some thoughts and observations:
Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) are documents with the goal to improve applications on the fediverse. People can write proposals, and developers can decide to support and implement proposals as they see fit. There are some great technical FEPs, but one of the challenges of such a grassroots system is getting buy-in from developers to support specific FEPs. NodeBB developer Julian Lam held a presentation ‘The Fediverse is Quiet — Let’s Fix That!’ as an advocacy for a specific FEP. The proposal Lam talks about is about fixing the problem of missing replies, where people do not see all replies on a post. What I think is noteworthy about Lam’s presentation is that it frames a FEP not only as a technical document, but as a process that needs community buy-in for other developers to support and implement a FEP. Hopefully, more of such advocacy might help see more FEPs implemented as well.
Mastodon presented the progress on their Fediverse Discovery Provider project. The project builds an opt-in decentralised service for better discovery and search. In the presentation (and on the website), Mastodon stressed that the project is not only a Mastodon project, but is intended to be used by the entire fediverse. Mastodon developer David Roetzel said that he hoped that the goal is that many servers will run a “Fediverse Auxillary Service Provider”. Personally I think that it is instructive to look at Bluesky here. While the AT Protocol is decentralised, in practice everyone uses infrastructure owned by the Bluesky company. I’m not convinced yet that the Fediverse Discovery Provider project will not run into the same problem, as I’m unclear on what the incentives are for people to run competing Fediverse Discovery Provider projects.
Some of the more interesting presentations I saw were about the integration of different types of protocols with ActivityPub. The ActivityPods project combines ActivityPub with Solid Pods, which shows quite some similarities with how the PDS system of ATProto works. All your data is stored on your Pod, multiple types of apps can connect to your Pod, and communicate via ActivityPub. It allows you to have a single account that is used for multiple platforms, similar with how your ATProto account can be used for multiple types of apps.
One of the most valuable parts of a conference like FOSDEM is getting developers together in a room to meet and build relationships. Fediforum has provided such a place for people to gather digitally, but meeting people in real life remains one of the best ways to build trust and relationships. Some practical ways this was visible this FOSDEM was by getting the NodeBB, WordPress ActivityPub plugin, WriteFreely and Ghost developers together and recognising themselves as the ‘longform’ people. This group of developers getting together this way helps with the various projects becoming more interoperable, and better support for longform content in the fediverse.
Two issues regarding consent and data processing this week. The first is with GoToSocial and fediverse statistics sites like fedidb.org and fediverse.observer. Some GoToSocial servers have blocked statistics sites from indexing their platforms via robots.txt, but the crawlers of fedidb.org and fediverse.observer ignore those. In response, the main GoToSocial server decided to serve up randomised numbers, messing up the statistics of these sites. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault removed GoToSocial altogether from the statistics site, but does not seem to be willing to respect the opting out of crawling via robots.txt. The second is regarding the shutdown of FediOnFire, that displayed public posts from a relay in a format similar to one of Bluesky’s firehose visualisation tools.
How the fediverse treats consent for public posts is unusual, and make it stand out from other networks. For a significant group of people, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-out bases if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a full 2-way interacting fediverse server. In contrast, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-in basis if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a crawler. The line between these two situations is hard to draw, even more so in an internally coherent way. Still, this line clearly exists, and ignoring it leads to high-profile blowups such as with Searchtodon and Bridgy Fed. Defining the permissions clearly for posts would help here, and it is frustrated to see that the situation has not meaningfully improved in years. Furthermore, that fediverse stats sites have ignored the opt-out on a server level via robots.txt indicates that servers setting permissions is not a panacea either.
The Pixelfed Kickstarter has seen some updates this week. First was the update that setting up a Pixelfed Foundation is now moved to the stretch goal of $200k CAD, and that for $300k CAD the stretch goal is to expand the team to hire additional developers. A few days later, developer Daniel Supernault said that the $300k CAD stretch goal is now to build a Tumblr alternative. That brings the goal of the Pixelfed Kickstarter to build four platforms: Pixelfed, Loops, Sup (an encrypted messaging platform) and an unnamed Tumblr alternative, as well as building a foundation and a developer testing kit with Pubkit. Moving the foundation to a stretch goal that has not been met yet does not feel great to me, as good governance of such large platforms is highly important. Adding a Tumblr alternative to another later stretch goal also makes me concerned that Supernault is taking on too much here, as that is a lot of products to build and maintain.
Openvibe, a client that combines your Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads account into a single feed, has raised 800k USD in outside investment, with Automattic among the investors. Openvibe is an early mover in the space, and it’s a name I regularly see pop up when people recommend clients. However, open networks and open APIs means that it is hard to build a competitive moat. Still, most apps are hobby projects, and I’m curious how far Openvibe can push their app with the new funding.
For the past two years, Radio Free Fedi has held a special place in my heart. The community operation started as a small experiment, but quickly grew into a Fediverse institution. In the time that it
Groups will be compatible with Lemmy, Mbin, Smithereen and other projects, and will resemble Facebook Groups in our official app!
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Dave Neary
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lakelady
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