Notices by Laurens Hof (laurenshof@fediversereport.com)

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90

The Fediverse Schema Observatory helps to improve interoperability, the botsin.space server will shut down, and more.

The Fediverse Schema Observatory is a new project by Darius Kazemi, who runs the Hometown fork of Mastodon as well as co-wrote to Fediverse Governance paper this year with Erin Kissane. The Observatory collects data structures from the fediverse; it looks how different fediverse softwares use and implement ActivityPub. It explicitly does not gather any personal data or posts; instead it looks at how the data is formatted in ActivityPub. ActivityPub and the fediverse has a long-standing problem in that the selling point is interoperability between different software, but every software has their own, slightly different implementation of ActivityPub, making good interoperability difficult to pull off. Kazemi has posted about the Observatory as a Request for Comments. The Observatory is explicitly not a scraper, but considering how sensitive the subject can be in the fediverse community, Kazemi has taken a careful approach of informing the community in detail beforehand about the proposed project, and how it deals with data. The easiest way to see and understand how the Observatory is works is with this demo video.

The botsin.space Mastodon server for bots will shut down in December. The botsin.space server is a server dedicated to running bots, with a few thousand active bots running. The server is a valued part of the community, with the wild variety of bots running on the server contributing to the Mastodon in both useful and silly ways. The admin states that over time running the servers has become too expensive over time, and that is was not feasible to keep the project going. The shutdown of botsin.space showcases an ongoing struggle in the fediverse, running a server is expensive and time-consuming, and every time a server shuts down the fediverse loses a block of its history.

Sub.club is a way to add monetization options to fediverse posts. Sub.club started with being able to add paywalls to Mastodon posts, recently expanded to long-form writing with support for Write.as, and now has added support for WordPress blogs as well. Sub.club has posted a tutorial on how to add the plugin to WordPress, making it an easy system to set up.

Bridgy Fed, the bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto has gotten some updates, with the main new feature is that you can now set custom domain handles on Bluesky for fediverse accounts that get bridged into Bluesky. This brings the interoperability between the networks closer to native accounts, and makes having a bridged account more attractive.

Upcoming fediverse platform for short-form video, Loops, got some press by The Verge and TechCrunch. Creator Daniel Supernault said that there are now 5k people on the waiting list, and that a TestFlight link will go out soon for the first 100 people. An Android APK will be made available at some point as well.

GoToSocial is working on the ability to for servers to subscribe to allowlists and denylists. This makes it easier to create clusters of servers with a shared allowlist, such as the Website League. As I recently wrote about Website League, it is a cluster of federating servers that uses ActivityPub but exists separately from the rest of the fediverse, and it is started by people who build a new shared space after Cohost shut down. Website League servers predominantly use GoToSocial or Akkoma, and have been actively working on tuning the software to meet their needs.

• Flipboard is now federating accounts of publishers in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the UK.
• A long read on Content Warnings, that extensively touches on the culture on using Content Warnings in Mastodon and the Website League as well.
• Diving Into the World of Lemmy.
• One year after X: Embracing open science on Mastodon – a reflection by the University of Groningen Library.
• Mastodon, two years later – a continuation of the article ‘Mastodon – a partial history‘, by The Nexus of Privacy.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The Event Federation project has drafted a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for a common way to use the ‘event’ type in the fediverse.
• Setting up my federated fleamarket with flohmarkt.
• IFTAS October update.
• Ghost’s weekly update on their project to implement ActivityPub, mentioning that they have bridged their ActivityPub-based Ghost account to Bluesky as well.
• The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same. – Elena Rossini.
• How the ‘Fediverse’ Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media) – Lifehacker.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-90/

On Bluesky and enshittification

Editor’s note: this is a slightly modified and extended version of the analysis I wrote in the Last Week in the ATmosphere newsletter.

Last week, Bluesky announced their series A funding round, raising $15M in a round that is led by a venture capital fund Blockchain Capital. The seed round already had investors from the crypto world, but this drew much more attention with the series A, as the headline of Blockchain Capital as a lead investor made the connection loud and clear. Bluesky is aware of the negative connotations that many people have regarding blockchains and crypto, explicitly stating that “the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).”

The negative associations that people have with both blockchains and venture capital made that a common response to the news was that “the enshittification has started”. This response was dominant on the fediverse, and less so but still present on Bluesky. It’s been such a common response that I think it deserves a closer look at ‘enshittification’ and how it relates to Bluesky taking investment from a blockchain VC firm. The meaning of the term enshittification has shifted over time, and both meanings provide an interesting lens to look at the news.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, he used it to describe a process of platform decay. A platforms subsidises growth by operating at a loss, and places themselves in between the suppliers and customers on a two-sided marketplace. Once suppliers and customers are locked in on the platform and cannot easily leave, the enshittification cycle happens: the platform uses their control of the marketplace to take an ever increasing part of the value while while making the experience on the platform worse, for both suppliers and consumers.

What is interesting here is that in earlier interviews, Jay Graber has mentioned the idea of building marketplaces on Bluesky as a way to make money. If enshittification is used to describe platform decay, it stands out that a marketplace is not present in the Series A announcement as a way for Bluesky to monetise. For a platform to become enshittified in this meaning of platform decay, a platform needs to have exclusive control of a marketplace on the platform. However, Bluesky is currently not taking the direction of a marketplace for monetisation, instead opting for subscriptions and payment processing. This is still open to change at a later point, as Graber has expressed interest in it before.

Doctorow also mentions two principles to combat platform enshittification. Platforms should be interoperable, allowing users to switch to a different provider. Users should also have the ability to control the content they see, and not be dependent on an opaque algorithm owned by the platform. As both of these principles are deeply embedded in the design of ATProto, Bluesky is an interesting case study if the principles that Doctorow mentioned are indeed good enough to stave off enshittification.

The meaning of the term enshittification has drifted and expanded over time. Enshittification is now commonly used to refer to any business practice that makes the company or product, well, shit. There is a fairly widespread negative attitude towards both venture capital as well as blockchains and crypto. People perceive that these systems have not brought benefits they promised, and enriched a small elite instead, all the while degrading the experience of using the internet. This is not a newsletter to deconstruct blockchains or VC (I’m sure you can find your own sources for that), but I do want to point out that public perception of both venture capital and blockchains matter here. Bluesky is in an active growth phase, and part of the sales pitch to get people to join the network is that Bluesky is a ‘better’ place, for various interpretations of ‘better’.

Getting people to join Bluesky while also being associated with technologies and organisations that many people perceive as ‘not better’ is much harder. People want to join a new network because they hope that the new network is a better experience for them. Judging from the outside if a network is a suitable place is hard, so people tend to fall back to simple heuristics to determine if a network is a good place for them. BlockChain Capital might provide valuable support to Bluesky, but this hard to see as an outsider that is considering joining Bluesky. Instead, it is more likely that they will fall back on their preexisting opinions about startups that take VC money or affiliated with blockchains.

Neither the crypto industry or venture capitalists have build up a track record over recent years that make it easy for people to trust them to deliver technology that meaningfully improves people’s lives. A skeptical assessment of why (crypto-based) VCs are investing into a company is warranted. Blockchain Capital’s investment thesis is clear about why they are investing into Bluesky: their interest is in an expanded ecosystem, where developers can build new products, while leveraging the social graph that ATProto provides. Their investment thesis falls far outside the framework of enshittification, both as a way to describe platform decay as well as a more generic ‘products gets bad’. Critically evaluating the positive and negative impacts that Blockchain Capital can have on Bluesky and the ATmosphere, might just require a different framework than ‘enshittification’ can provide.

https://fediversereport.com/on-bluesky-and-enshittification/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 89

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-89/

Last Week in Fediverse and Bluesky – ep 77

This edition of Last Week is a combination of the weekly fediverse newsletter, as well as the monthly Bluesky update. The next two weeks there will not be a newsletter, as I’ll be busy touching grass rocks in the Alps. I’ll be back again in August. Feel free to tag me in posts/news items that you think I should know about, as I will not be reading any feeds for these two weeks.

The Dutch Government’s Mastodon pilot celebrates their one-year anniversary this week, and as part of the 1-year mark they’ve posted some reflections and a major announcement. They announced that the plan is to start offering Mastodon to all governments organisations at all layers of the government (national, provincial and local) as a shared service of the government, stating that this project will contribute to a reduction in dependency on commercial social media platforms and strengthens the government’s digital autonomy. In a reflection on the first year of the pilot, organisations that participated particularly mention the community as a positive aspect, although one of the main points of improvement is a current lack of reach, as well as integration of Mastodon in current tools that organisation uses.

Fediverse platform Streams has added nomadic identity to their platform, based on ActivityPub. Nomadic Identity makes your identity independent from a server. For the protocol-people: Streams is using FEP-ef61. For the non-protocol-people, this means that the implementation that Streams is using has been discussed in the community for a while, and gives space for other platforms to implement the same feature as well.

OpenVibe is a social media client for multiple networks, that combines ActivityPub, Nostr and Bluesky into a single app and a single feed. This week, OpenVibe added support for Bluesky for their multi-protocol app. TechCrunch has more details on the app. I’ve mentioned previously a few times the idea that ‘federation happens in the client’, and OpenVibe is the clearest example yet. What protocol and platform people use matters less for federation than what client people use, since clients can combine multiple protocols into a single feed.

BTS ARMY, the fanbase for the massively popular boy band BTS, is starting to join Bluesky. While it is only a small portion of the fandom, it immediately has a noticeable effect on the culture of Bluesky, as they started showing up in the Discover feed. FORBetter, a new blog about a better social internet by Newsmast’s Saskia, has been covering the migration of ARMY, and answering their questions about what the fediverse is.

In the June update for Bluesky I wrote about how near-term use-case of labelers will likely be more for specific services than broad content moderation decisions. Two recent new labelers illustrate this further, by using labelers to allow people to self-apply information about themselves that they want to showcase via a label: One labeler allows you to set a country flag on your profile, and the other labeler allows you to set your own preferred pronouns on your profile.

While Ghost is adding ActivityPub, Npub.pro has taken the concept of Ghost and applied it to Nostr. Npub.pro is a personal website based on your Nostr content, that uses Ghost themes. It takes your current Nostr posts (you can use either your shortform microblogs, longform articles, or both), and displays them as a website. Because it is based on Nostr, you do not need an extra CMS, any client that you use to publish Nostr content works. I think this is an interesting evolution in the thinking of the space of decentralised social networks, and what it means to view content separately from the platform that it is published on.

Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold decided to run an extra Relay for atproto, to help alleviate concerns that doing so would be prohibitively expensive. In the current setup he runs an extra Relay of the entire network for 150 USD/month, and has written up notes on the setup. The more expansive part is running an AppView, and Newbold estimates that running your own AppView will ‘a bit more expensive, but not much more’.

• Mastodon is hiring a part-time Finance/Ops Associate.
• Mastodon’s monthly update, Trunk & Tidbits, for their engineering and development work of the last month.
• Buffer, a popular social media scheduling tool, now has posting to Bluesky in beta.
• The PeerTube Livechat plugin got some major updates, including live polling during streams.
• The Open Science Initiative is currently in development, and updates will now be shared from their own Bonfire instance.
• Some statistics on the usage of the bridge between ActivityPub and Bluesky, courtesy of Kuba Suder.
• Two articles about Threads: the Threads Creator Paradox, and Mike Masnick questions how open Threads’ fediverse intergration actually is.
• WeDistribute takes a closer look at the ActivityPods example app to help developers.
• The newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ writes about the power of owning your data.
• Newmast writes about how the UK government’s new digital policy could affect the fediverse.
• An Admin’s Guide to Fixing PeerTube.
• fedv.link is a way to share fediverse links that open on your preferred server.
• The latest update for the Bluesky app will now add suggested follows in the Discover feed.
• The software updates in the fediverse for the last week.

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

#bluesky #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-and-bluesky-ep-77/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 75

Threads expands their fediverse connections, a place for musicians on the fediverse with Bandwagon, and more.

Threads has expanded their fediverse connection, meaning that people on Threads will now see likes and replies made from other fediverse platforms. It is only limited to replies and likes on posts made on Threads, and not yet full federation. Threads has also expanded the number of countries that can turn on fediverse sharing: originally it was limited to the US, Canada and Japan, and now over 100 countries have the option. European countries are notably missing from the list, and Meta has not officially commented on how the list is determined and why some countries are not included yet.

As part of expanding their fediverse connections, Threads had to implement quite a few new systems, as a Threads engineer explains here. One of the things that Threads implemented is making their block list publicly visible, together with an appeal form. Threads still has some issues to work out with their systems, as mastodon.social appeared on the list for a short while as well, even though it was not actually blocked in practice, and it seemed to be an error. Threads’ block list does leave with some questions, as their description of ‘Violated our Community Guidelines or Terms of Use’ leave some servers with unclear answers as to why they got blocked by Threads. The fediverse, especially larger servers, could learn from Threads by also providing a way to appeal blocking decisions, while Threads could definitely improve by being clearer as to why exactly they block servers. The list of servers that Threads moderates also provides an interesting comparison for other provides of block lists.

Bandwagon is a new app for musicians on the fediverse. It is built on top of Emissary, a new standalone fediverse server platform. Emissary allows a new type of apps to be developed on top of the platform, and Bandwagon is the first example of what is possible. Musicians can create their own pages for their band, their albums, and tours, and you can stream audio via Bandwagon as well. Bandwagon is now open for registration for early testers.

The Dot Social podcast interviewed Ghost CEO John O’Nolan on building a publishing platform on the fediverse. The excitement that Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue and Nolan have for federating long-form content over ActivityPub shows a few different things to me: there is a clear potential for the fediverse to shift more towards long-form writing, and I think ActivityPub is actually more suited to this than it is for microblogging. Long-form writing that is embedded in a feed-like format has long been possible on the fediverse, as software like Hubzilla and Friendica have shown, but the dominance of Mastodon and how it shaped the thinking of what the fediverse can do make it so that it takes time for that realisation to settle in. Newer fediverse implementations are now leading the way in making this happen, as NodeBB, Discourse, WordPress and more are actively working towards compatibility, and actively courting Ghost and Flipboard for this collaborative effort as well.

A new Fediverse Enhancement Proposal with a roadmap for Actor and Object Portability. While I don’t cover every proposal, this one sticks out to me, mainly for the part of the ‘bring-your-own Actor ID’. In the current way fediverse server software works is that your identity (@username@servername.tld) is directly connected to the server itself. This is in contrast with the other open protocols (atproto, Nostr and Farcaster) who all separate the user’s identity from the actual operations of the network in some form. I agree with Erlend Sogge Heggen here, who says that “[bring-your-own Actor ID] really all I ever needed from the notion of a ‘single-user instance’. All I want to manage on my own is my identity; I don’t want to take on the full burden of managing a whole AP server.”

Newsmast’s Michael Foster writes about how they are building fediverse channels. There are a lot of ideas in the article, and there is clear inspiration of Farcaster’s channels. Farcaster’s channels are basically a more powerful version of Bluesky’s custom feeds, and I hope to be able to write about it more soon. The wider ecosystem of four different protocols building and competing with each other leads to interesting cross-pollination of ideas that I hope to see more of.

TechCrunch has an article called ‘Welcome to the fediverse: Your guide to Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and more’. I already wrote last week about how the meaning of the term ‘fediverse’ is expanding, and here is another clear example of how the term fediverse is starting to encompass more than just the ActivityPub protocol.

PixelFed has a new app for Android and iOS, that is open source and AGPL license, and available for Android beta testers and on iOS Testflight.

Canvas, the fediverse event where people can place a pixel on a large shared canvas (similar to /r/place) will be held again from Friday July 12th to Monday July 15th.

• Hollo, the new single-user microblogging app now is available to easily deploy for yourself.
• A monthly update on the work that has been done on Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, with lots of new features and improvements in the background.
• The first beta for IceShrimps complete rewrite into .NET is available.
• A short update on the Event Federation project.
• Owncast’s monthly newsletter.
• PieFed monthly development update.
• An outline for building Habitat, a decentralised social network based on your current location.
• Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirms that reply controls will not be coming in the near future to Mastodon due to a lack of resources.
• A Mastodon domain block exporter script.
• Dave Winer advocates for a one-click fediverse subscription button.
• A weekly overview of the fediverse software updates.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-75/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 70

An interesting news week, that fits Newsmast’s description of the fediverse as a hub for the social web: the trend for the fediverse is clearly in the direction of how other products and platforms can be connected together in order to form a larger network.

Digiday writes “why publishers are preparing to federate their sites“, and in the article they break the news that both The Verge and 404 Media “are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.” The Verge has been interested in the fediverse for a while now, and 404 Media are also active users. Both sites are very aware of the risks that come from depending on Big Tech platforms for reaching their audience, and are looking to secure that connection without an intermediary. The Verge has been working on switching to using WordPress, but it is not clear if they will be using the current ActivityPub plugin or are developing their own solution. The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel said in response to Ghost’s announcement earlier this month that The Verge is also interested in having paid newsletters that connect to the fediverse. The interest of 404 Media to connect to the fediverse is directly linked to Ghost as well, as their site runs on Ghost.

Newsmast has posted an update on how the fediverse can be “a hub for the social web”, and how Newsmast can play a role in that. Newsmast is focused on bridging, and how connections between differnet platforms, products and protocols can all be connected to form a larger social web, in which the fediverse can function as a central hub. As a first step, the communities on Newsmast now start featuring posts by people on Bluesky and Threads as well.

Openvibe is a social media client that supports both Nostr and Mastodon. The client was originally for Nostr, but now fully supports Mastodon, and is working on adding support for Bluesky next. What stands out about the way Openvibe supports multiple networks is that Openvibe tries to integrate multiple platforms into a single experience. This means that you can have a single timeline on your homescreen that combines both posts from Nostr and Mastodon. Posting also allows you to easily post to both networks at the same time. There have been clients that allow you to connect multiple accounts before, but Openvibe’s vision of integrating different networks into a single feed represents a new steps towards how the different decentralised social networks relate to each other.

Another update by Bridgy Fed on improvements towards the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky. Last week the news got picked up that the bridge was used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messages that originated from Nostr, and Bridgy Fed is now working on implementing spam filters.

Bart Decrem, co-founder of Mastodon app Mammoth, offers a 10k USD seed funding for anyone to build a DeviantArt alternative on top of ActivityPub. This comes after a recent article by Slate about “The Tragic Downfall of the Internet’s Art Gallery”, explaining how bots with AI generated content have overrun the revenue-sharing programs of the platform. Decrem focuses on the community aspect of DeviantArt, saying that “the critical thing here is to truly understand what DA is/was all about, what this community needs”.

• FediVision 2024 is live, with musicians all over the fediverse sending in over 70 tracks in a song contest.
• Owncast creator Gabe Kangas wrote a blog post marking four years of fediverse streaming platform Owncast.
• Vivaldi hosted a community talk “Why does being on the Fediverse matter to us?”. Notably they used fediverse audio platform Audon.space for the talk, which integrates with ActivityPub.
• The open Podcasting index at podcastindex.org now allows you to follow podcasts directly on ActivityPub with the PodcastAP bridge.
• Email platform Buttondown recently announced that they’ll work on adding ActivityPub support, and they’ve now updated their roadmap to schedule this work for Q3.
• Shihab Mehboob is building a new Mastodon app called Friendzone. Mehboob also build a Mastodon app a few years ago, which he sold to Mammoth.
• WeDistributes about their future plans and how they handle the distribution of news on the fediverse.
• Two more tables will fix me, with the weekly update of Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub.
• “Call to Action: Fediverse Media Server”.
• Micro.blog now allows for audio voices to be added to posts.
• A brief video explainer on how the fediverse works.
• A new Mastodon command line client.
• Lemmy’s biweekly development update.
• The Weekly overview of all software updates in the fediverse.
• A blog article by Raphael Lullis, ‘A Plan for Social Media – Rethinking Federation’.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-70/

What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD?

Farcaster, a crypto-based decentralised social networking protocol hit the news this week, by raising an eye watering 150 million USD, with a valuation of 1 billion USD, all the while sporting around 80K daily active users. For context, Bluesky has around 300k daily active users. The news raises a few questions: What exactly is Farcaster, how does it differ from the other decentralised social networking protocols, and why did it get such a massive valuation?

A short history of the name Farcaster:

• 1989: The Hyperion Cantos is a science fiction novel series from the 1990’s, in which a farcaster network allows instantaneous travel between different worlds. The farcaster network is build and maintained by an AI Civilization called the TechnoCore. In later books it is revealed the TechnoCore was planning to use the farcaster network to destroy humankind.
• 2020: 2 ex-Coinbase directors, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, start their own company, and start working on a product called RSS+.
• Late 2021: a viral tweet sets a new standard for naming tech products.
• Summer 2022: Romero and Srinivasan rebrand their product Farcaster, and announce a 30M funding around led by a16z.
• May 2024: Farcaster announces a 150 million USD investment with a valuation of 1 billion USD.

There are two main parts to understanding how the Farcaster protocol works: Integration with the Ethereum Blockchain, and decentralisation via relays (called Hubs).

A Farcaster account is registered on the Ethereum blockchain, and you create an account by having your Ethereum account making a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain (called an onchain transaction). This means that you’ll have to pay transaction fees in order to create an account. If you use Warpcast, the microblogging app for Farcaster build by the Farcaster team, they will handle the transaction for you, charging you a roughly 4 USD fee to cover the blockchain transaction costs.

Hubs are the core part of the network. If you send out a message, or like a cast (posts are called casts on Farcaster), or follow another account, then you send this data to a single Hub. The Hub is automatically selected by the App you use to. Hubs contain and process all the data of the entire Farcaster network. Your Hub then sends out your data to all other Hubs on the entire Farcaster network, and Hubs are responsible for making sure that their data is in sync with all other Hubs in the network.

Another feature of Farcaster is that you have to pay to store your data in Hubs. It costs around 7 USD per year to store 5000 posts. If you make more than 5000 posts your oldest posts will get deleted, or you have to pay for more storage. Farcaster claims that “charging rent prevents users from spamming the network.” Considering X’s succes in fighting spam bots by charging 8 USD/month for a blue checkmark, charging more than 10 times less will surely also be successful in preventing spam on a network that has build financial incentives into its core architecture.

The Ethereum blockchain is involved in various other parts of the network:
When you want to use a new app on Farcaster, you’ll have to authorize that app with a transaction on the blockchain. With current pricing it costs around 0.1 USD to use a new app within the Farcaster network.

Another feature of Farcaster is Frames, which allow you to turn a post into an interactive app. These Frames/apps can be integrated with blockchains as well, and by far the most popular usecase I see for Frames is for minting NFTs, with airdropping memetokens being another option.

Warpcast is the most popular usecase of Farcaster, and the official microblogging app made by the same people who are building the Farcaster protocol. Other products are also possible to build with Farcaster; Paragraph.xyz is a web3 newsletter platform that has integrated with the Farcaster protocol. If the crypto wallet you used to register with Farcaster is the same as the wallet you used to register with Paragraph, your followers relationships carry over and you can see the long-form writing of your Farcaster followers in Paragraph. There is also a button in Warpcast that apparently mints Paragraph articles as an NFT, but for the sake of my own sanity I’ve decided not to press that button.

The various ways that Farcaster integrates with crypto and blockchains make the network especially popular with the web3/NFT crypto crowd. Notably this is a different crowd than the people on Nostr. A rough summary is that Nostr is for people who like Bitcoin and are into libertarianism, and Farcaster is for people who like Ethereum and are into NFTs.

Farcaster raised 150M USD this month, with a valuation of 1 billion USD, with the funding round led by Paradigm, and joined by a16z crypto. Paradigm is a crypto VC fund (with a Coinbase co-founder) and a16z crypto is the crypto VC fund of 16z.

Farcaster’s valuation of 1 billion USD raised some eyebrows for being just ever so slightly on the high side. With an estimate of 45k DAU at the time of raise, this translates to a completely normal and sensible valuation of 22k USD per user. Even by a16z’s own standards this is an exceptional valuation: in spring 2021 a16z invested in audio app Clubhouse, valuing it at 4 billion. Clubhouse had 10 million weekly active users at the time, and had clearly broken through into mainstream awareness, an more importantly, was free to use at the time.

That said, I think there are some reasons why Farcaster is valuable to Paradigm and a16z crypto:

• The uptake of Farcaster shows hockeystick growth over the last few months. This is especially noteworthy considering that growth on other decentralised social networks has stalled over the last months, and it costs money to join Farcaster. Being able to show hockeystick-type of growth considering these two added difficulties makes Farcaster worth paying attention to.
• Usage of Farcaster increases usage of crypto, of which crypto exchanges, especially Coinbase, are major benefactors. More specifically, much of Farcaster uses a derivative of the Ethereum blockchain called Optimism. There are many links between Farcaster and Coinbase, both in the people who work on the project as well as investors who funded both organisations. An increase in usage of the Optimism blockchain is directly beneficial to Coinbase.
• There are a ton of crypto projects that have been build over the years that do not have any users, often with VC investments. Providing a social graph to integrate crypto projects into can help these crypto projects gain a user base.

Overall I think there are clear reasons why Farcaster is valuable to VC Crypto companies such as a16z and Paradigm. Whether ‘valuable’ also means ‘1 billion USD valuable’ is less clear, however.

Thank you for reading. I write about what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks, with a weekly newsletter on the fediverse and a monthly newsletter about Bluesky. You can subscribe here, or follow me on the fediverse:

#crypto #farcaster

https://fediversereport.com/what-is-farcaster-and-why-did-it-raise-150m-usd/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 68

A bit of a slower news week, where everyone’s feeds turned purple with pictures of the aurora borealis. Still, work on (and interest in) bridges, curated content and new products in development show that things are dynamic all the same.

Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy Fed and the new bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky, has given another update on the Bluesky-fediverse bridge that recently was quietly launched. He says that now more than 2500 accounts have bridged now. Barrett also explains that there are still many bugs with the bridge, and that he is busy working on it.

A week after Threads launched their beta version of federation, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput said that mastodon.social knew about 2800 federated Threads accounts. While the total number of federated Threads account will have been higher, it will likely not have been that much higher either. Comparing this to the 2500 bridged account for a service that is still in active testing and development, indicates that there is significant interest in connections between the fediverse and Bluesky. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also bridged her account this week.

The bridge between Bluesky and the fediverse also allows Nostr to connect to Bluesky, with a case here where a post is made on Bluesky, replied to from Nostr, and then replied to again from Mastodon.

Bridge Finder is a new tool to help people with using the bridges between the networks, providing an easy visual interface with an explanation on how to use the bridges, as well as the requirements for opting into using them.

Ghost recently announced their major push for ActivityPub support, and published their first update this week. Ghost explains the history and background of why they are working on the project, and why now specifically, saying: “In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new.” Molly White’s response, saying “is this feeling… hope?” captures the sentiment well. Ghost also shared a first screenshot of their new ActivityPub powered reader app:

Recently Mastodon announced their new U.S.-based non-profit board members. People had quite some questions about it, and Mastodon has updated the blog with a detailed FAQ. One point of contention was why Biz Stone and Amir Ghavi are on the board. The FAQ explains that Ghavi has provided pro-bono legal council to Mastodon over the last year, with specific knowledge about open-source licensing and further connections to the tech industry. About Biz Stone Mastodon says that “as a Twitter co-founder [Stone] has invaluable experience scaling a social media platform to its first few million users and many connections to experts who are familiar with the problems Mastodon is facing”.

Flipboard announces that they have enabled federation for another 100 curators this week, briding the total of federated Flipboard magazines over 2500. Flipboard also announces that they have had over 100k social interactions on all the federated magazines in the last month.

Forgejo has set their first step towards federation, with the ability for federated likes. What makes this stand out is that Forgejo is a self-hosted software forge. While the fediverse is predominantly understood as a (microblogging) social network, Forgejo shows that federation can also be used for very different types of software products.

Fedihosting Foundation is a non-profit that was recently founded by the admins of the .world (lemmy.world, mastodon.world) cluster and mstn.social has expanded to include the toot.community server as well.

• Trunk & Tidbits is a new series by the Mastodon engineering team. This edition shows what they’ve been working on in April 2024.
• How many fediverse servers know about my server?
• Last week I wrote about some conversations about a hard fork for Mastodon. WeDistribute wrote about the trouble forking Mastodon, going into more detail about previous attempts that place it into a historical context.
• Upcoming short video platform Loops has started to roll out the first invites for a closed beta test.
• ActivityPub server framework Fedify has some more updates.
• Documentation to get starting on a plugin for Lemmy.
• PieFed gives an overview of their work of the last few weeks.
• Biweekly development update for Lemmy.
• List of all server and client updates of the last week.
• Catodon development update, the work is put on hold until IceShrimp finishes the rewrite of the code.

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-68/

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 60

The fediverse stays in the theme of announcing projects that are a copy of a well-known platform, but with ActivityPub added to it. This week its a proof-of-concept of a federated version of Wikipedia, as well as the announcement that Dansup will now work on creating a Loops, a federated version of TikTok.

Lemmy developer Nutomic has announced Ibis, a federated wiki platform. Ibis is a proof-of-concept that allows anyone to run their own wiki, and connect them via ActivityPub. In the announcement post, Nutomic frames Ibis explicitly not just as any wiki, but as a Wikipedia alternative specifically, outlining some of the problems that he sees with the way that Wikipedia is run. Nutomic’s solution is for different places to host their own wiki, where articles and edits can be shared across different wiki instances via ActivityPub. The problems that Nutomic sees with Wikipedia are mainly regarding the moderation policies of Wikipedia and how they are executed. Ibis does not have any moderation tools yet, nor a vision of how moderation policies and privileges will be federated across different instances.

Commenters in the announcement post point out that Ibis might have a target audience with the Wikia/Fandom wikis, wikis for specific/niche topics that are heavily ad-driven. What personally surprised me is Ibis does not have any connection with Lemmy communities, in the same way that Reddit has wikis for subreddits. Nutomic says that Ibis in a very early stage of development, and will not be able to work on in it the near term as his daughter will soon be born, and hopes that other developers will help contribute to the project.

Pixelfed developer Dansup has announced that he is working on Loops, a new fediverse platform for sharing short videos. Dansup says that Loops is based on an old web UI for videos for Pixelfed that is getting repurposed into a new app. Not much other information is known about the project, expect that Dansup expects that the project will ship ‘soon’.

A paper on hashtag activism on Mastodon, titled ‘Showing your ass on Mastodon’. It is an autoethnographic narrative about how a fight about a hashtag used to show pictures of donkeys highlights issues with hashtag activism on decentralised social networks. The article is fun to read, and there is also a good commentary by Robert W. Gehl.

There is some tensions brewing below the surface at Lemmy. This blog by @db0 explains the issues and gives a good overview. The Beehaw community is actively thinking about moving away from Lemmy to a different fediverse platform, and with the upcoming platform Sublinks as well as Piefed there are now new intereresting options to choose from.

The San Francisco International Airport museum has joined the fediverse, and they have put some serious effort into the project. They published an extensive blog post explaining their thinking, and how this has been a long time in the making. The SFO museum had thought about years earlier about possibilities of making every museum object into a social media presence, either on Twitter or on FourSquare. Their fediverse presence starts calmer, with only a few accounts, build with their own custom code.

• Hatsu is a new self-hosted bridge that interacts with Fediverse on behalf of your static site.
• Streams developer Mike Macgirvin has started work on adding Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub. Fediverse platform Streams already has Nomadic Identity, but Streams internally uses a different protocol to handle this.
• Fedify is a fediverse server framework that’s currently in development. This week the creator showed a demo of what it can do.
• Micro.blog leans into the Indieweb and adds blogrolls.
• Mozilla has recently scaled down their involvement with the mozilla.social server, and now they have ditched the custom front-end based on Elk for their server.
• Manyfold is a place to organise your 3d-printing files, is actively thinking about adding ActivityPub.
• Piefed has added the ability to opt-out of search.
• Owncast’s newletter for March.
• Piefed showcases how their ’tile’ interface is a great way to browse memes on the treadiverse.
• Social address instead of handle.
• The Lemmy developer’s bi-weekly update.
• A simple fediverse subscribe feature for static sites.

That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-60/