Notices by Laurens Hof (laurenshof@fediversereport.com)

Fediverse Report – #117

Keynote speakers for FediForum announced, some new interesting updates for PieFed, and 15 years of the software group of Hubzilla, Friendica and others.

PieFed, a link aggregator platform for the fediverse, has made some interesting updates recently. It is one of the first (if not the first) platform to add support for Passkeys to the platform. It has also added flair (community-specific tags) to posts, that are federated as well. PieFed has also made a image hashing service available that can be used by any fediverse platform. This service generates a unique fingerprint of every image, and that fingerprint can be used to identity other posts that use the same or fairly similar images. This can be used for content moderation, PieFed has a demo video available on PeerTube showcasing how it can find and take down multiple posts that all contain a similar image.

FediForum has announced three keynote speakers and published a tentative agenda. On Thursday, June 5, Ian Forrester will give the opening keynote. Forrester has been a driving factor for the BBC R&D department to get the broadcaster to experiment with a Mastodon server. Later on Thursday, Cory Doctorow will give a keynote. On Friday June 6, Christine Lemmer-Webber will give the opening keynote. On Thursday, I will be hosting a session on Whats New at the Open Social Web, where I’ll be going over all the news and events that have happened since 2025.

The branch of fediverse software that consists of Friendica, Hubzilla and more, is now 15 years old. The main developer Mike Macgirvin lists the large number of features that the platforms have, including groups, nomadic identity, comment controls, and much more. When it comes to the large variety of features, no fediverse platform comes anywhere close to what this branch of platforms offer. The software platforms have managed to create their own small self-sustaining communities. While a number of the software platforms such as Streams do not publish any statistics, extrapolating data from what some servers running Hubzilla and Friendica publish, together I would estimate the active accounts to be less than 10k MAU. Still, these communities have managed to find long-term sustainability, exisiting over 15 years in various forms is no mean feat. As Macgirvin says: ‘if you think that this “alternative fediverse” is going away any time soon, you must be new here.’

• Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser – Flipboard’s Dot Social podcast
• My Dream Fediverse Platform – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
• Ben Werdmuller has been writing a four-part series on strategies for the open social web, with articles on product strategies for Mastodon, Bluesky, starting fresh, and now his most recent article on various funding strategies for the open social web.
• A detailed overview of how federation between Lemmy and Mastodon works in practice. It is a good indication that using the same protocol does not automatically guarantee good interoperability. Nor is it clear what good interaction pattern between two different types of platforms (microblogging and link-aggregators) would even look like.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Ghost’s weekly update on their fediverse integration, mentioning that ActivityPub is now also available at another vendor who offers Ghost hosting.
• Flipboard is federating another 124 accounts, this time from international publishers. Flipboard now federates over 1200 accounts of publishers.

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:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-117/

Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework

Programming note: every week I send out an email newsletter. It contains all the articles I published that week, as well as an additional essay that has been not been published elsewhere yet. This is a republication of last week’s essay I send out. If you’re interested, subscribe below to get all the updates directly in your inbox every week!

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

A network like the fediverse has an architecture that is easy to recognise as being decentralised: there are multiple independent servers that are all talking to each other, without one central entity. But there are other ways to create social networks that are decentralised, using a different architecture. Nostr is a good example of a decentralised social network that operates in a significantly different way, while also being clearly decentralised.

For the fediverse community, the mental model of decentralised networks such as the fediverse itself, but also email, became more dominant. There was less space to consider other ways to design a social network that is also decentralised. The size difference between the fediverse and the much smaller Nostr network made other alternatives easy to brush aside. But the growth of Bluesky and the ATmosphere network changed this dynamic.

The goal of Bluesky and ATProto is to create a decentralised social network, but with different characteristics and goals than the fediverse and ActivityPub have. For people on the fediverse, decentralisation became the main way how they analysed this competing network. As Bluesky is by far the largest app on the ATProto network, by multiple orders of magnitude, Bluesky not actually being decentralised became a common criticism. I made a similar argument in fall 2024, about how Bluesky has not meaningfully distributed power due to how clustered the people are around a single app. However, that is something different than the technological network architecture being (de)centralised. These criticisms became intertwined with each other, especially from the fediverse side.

In recent weeks, people have made some significant progress in using Bluesky (in technical terms: engaging with posts with Bluesky’s lexicon) with infrastructure that is entirely independent from the Bluesky company. This demonstrates the network being decentralised in a meaningful way. But as the term ‘decentralisation’ has become so intertwined with other meanings, both regarding other network architecture as well as the spread of the user base, that conversations around these developments became hopelessly confusing. The achievement of using Bluesky without using infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC became solely analysed through the frame of “is the network decentralised”.

In all this discourse, it has become lost that decentralisation is a description of a network topology, and not an intrinsic Good. People do not actually care about decentralisation itself. Decentralisation is valuable because it enables other properties, such as network resilience, and are more resistant to capture by oligarchs.

Within the ATProto developer community, the discourse that essentialised decentralisation led to a counter reaction, where decentralisation is not seen as a useful term anymore. Instead, other descriptors should be used, to consider specific features that the network enables. While the community seems largely in agreement that decentralisation has lost a lot of its usefulness as a way to analyse the network, there is less consensus on what other factors the network should be judged on.

As an observer of both networks this makes the current situation particularly interesting. One developer community seems to come to an agreement that one mental framework has lost some of its use, while the other developer community has not done so. Furthermore, it is not clear yet what framework should take its place instead. Is it a framework of analysing a network by its possible failure modes, or something else entirely?

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/decentralisation-as-a-shifting-mental-framework/

Fediverse Report – #113

When FediForum got cancelled a few weeks ago, I heard from multiple participants that they were planning to showcasing some new features or products that they’ve been working on. The sudden last-minute cancellation has caused uncertainty on how to proceed, and there has not been a new date set for FediForum (nor is it clear in what format it will continue, if any). However, by and large participants have decided not to showcase or present their work outside of FediForum. This shows the influential role that FediForum plays in the fediverse development ecosystem. It is important avenue for developers to showcase their work to the rest of the developer community, with no clear replacement for it. As such, the news for the fediverse is especially slow this week.

Two papers on the fediverse came out recently: Labour pains: Content moderation challenges in Mastodon growth talks about the challenges that moderators face on fediverse instances. Leading the Mastodon Herd: Analysing the Traits of Influential Leaders on a Decentralised Social Media Platform finds a relation between negative sentiment and influence on the network.

• Ghost now allows publications to set their own custom usernames. Staff user profiles is coming as well, but “is still a ways off”.
• Decentralizing Schemes – Tim Bray
• Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says that a viral Facebook post in Taiwan lead to some 20k new signups over 2 days.
• Fediverse House Highlight Reel, SXSW 2025
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• If I ran Mastodon – Ben Werdmuller
• Why Is Mastodon Using So Much Storage? – Fedihost tutorials
• An update from the Catodon project (a fork of a fork of Misskey), which is still on hiatus.

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:

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-113/

Bluesky Report – #112

The main news of this week is about the Turkish government pressuring Bluesky to hide accounts by political dissidents on the network. Yesterday I published an article about the situation, and how geographic-based moderation works on Bluesky. The other news of this week is that custom feed builder Graze raised 1M USD, and a new fork of the Bluesky app.

Custom feed builder Graze has raised 1 million USD in a pre-seed adventure round. Graze allows people to build their own custom feed, in a way that makes it accessible for non-coders. The platform also allows for feed builders to include ads into their feeds. The feature has been slowly rolling out recently, and feed operators are starting to use the advertisement options now. One example is the News Feeds by independent ATProto developer Ændra Rininsland, who recently shared plans at the ATmosphere Conference to reinvest the ad revenue back into the development of queer communities on ATProto. Graze is charging 1 dollar per 1000 impressions, a number the team expect to go up as Bluesky grows. Graze takes a 30% cut of this, which goes to hosting, payment processing and the development of the Graze platform. TechCrunch reports further on the revenue sharing:

“the team is considering doing a revenue share with Bluesky and other apps built on its underlying technology, the AT Protocol (ATProto). Today, Graze is working with other Bluesky ATProto-based apps, including photo and video apps like Skylight, Spark, and Flashes. “We’re very interested in figuring out what is the ethical revenue sharing model that helps everyone involved in the picture, including app developers,” said Graze co-founder and CEO Peat Bakke.”

Meanwhile, Graze is working further on making their feeds accessible outside of Bluesky as well, their latest update allows feeds to be embedded on any web page.

In last week’s update, I reflected on comments by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about Bluesky’s monetisation plans. Graber mentions marketplaces and subscriptions as the main plans for how Bluesky plans to make money. When it comes to marketplaces, Graber’s example is about Blacksky, where Graber imagines that people can subscribe to feeds and that Bluesky will take a cut of the transaction. Last week I already went about how that does not seem to line up well with the direction that Blacksky is taking. But Graze raising 1 million to build their own business also shows that the marketplace for feeds might just happen outside of Bluesky PBC instead.

Deer is a new client for Bluesky, and it is a fork of the official Bluesky app. What stands out about Deer is it focuses on some specific design choices that Bluesky has made, and giving users the ability to take different choices. For example, Deer allows people to turn various Bluesky features off, such as the go.bsky.app redirect, show posts where two other people have blocked each other (undoing the ‘nuclear block’), remove the geographic moderation labelers, or remove the main moderation labeler altogether.

An academic paper on Starter Packs: ‘Bootstrapping Social Networks: Lessons from Bluesky Starter Packs‘. The paper shows how big the impact of Starter Packs on the Bluesky network has been. The authors write: “Their impact [of Starter Packs] on the social graph increases over time surpassing 40 % of all the follow operations in December 2024. […] This represents a remarkable 19.95 % of all follow edges of the network, indicating a large impact of starter packs on the overall social graph. Follows resulting from starter packs are also long-lasting: we observe that by the end of 2024, 93.82 % of them are still present.”

Bluesky PBC is hiring for another two positions: a Senior Communications Manager and Developer Relations.

Newsletter platform Ghost has been working on an ActivityPub integration, allowing newsletters to show up in the fediverse. Combined with the Bridgy Fed, the connector software that allows posts to travel between the fediverse and the ATmosphere, posts from Ghost could already show up on Bluesky, but this can be a finicky process. Ghost is working on making this easier, with a simple one-click button to connect Ghost sites to Bluesky.

Stream.place is a video streaming platform that integrates with ATProto. It is grown out of the Livepeer ecosystem, a crypto DAO that focuses on livestreaming and video decoding. Stream.place has asked the Livepeer DAO for a grant of ~390k USD, with the DAO now voting on the proposal.

Some more ways and tools to interact with feeds this week. Summarising your Bluesky following feed via an LLM, with an MCP server. Transparant.se is building a Discover/For You type of algorithmic feed that is customisable. 777Bluesky gives 10 trending posts in audio format.

Bluesky PBC will apply stricter moderation to the usage of list as a vector for harrassment.

Bluecast is an audio room platform on ATProto, that mainly caters towards the Japanese community. Their latest update allows for recordings to be converted into 3minute videos and to be posted on Bluesky.

Tangled is a git collaboration platform on ATProto. In their latest blog post Tangled shares how they are building their own pull request system.

A scientific article on how to use Bluesky and Instagram for science professionals, in the Fisheries journal.

The International Journalism Festival held a panel called ‘Breaking on Bluesky: live news in a post-Twitter era’, with Emily Liu from Bluesky and Sarah Jeong from The Verge. The session can be rewatched here.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-112/

Fediverse Report #106

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 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.

One criticism that often gets put at Bluesky from people within the fediverse is that it has not federated yet. I do not think that ‘federation’ is a helpful term to help understand ATProto actually works, see this article for more context. However, the interoperability between Bluesky and Wafrn does involve interoperability between servers over ATProto, making that Bluesky and Wafrn are federated in the way people on the fediverse understand the term federation. The fact that an app called “We Allow Female Representing Nipples” is what makes Bluesky federated is honestly extremely funny to me.

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.

• 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
• Xenon is a new fediverse client app for iOS
• Fireside Fedi is a interview series on PeerTube, and this week they’re talking with one of the people behind ActivityPods.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

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:

#fediblock #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-106/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.d

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-2025feb-d/

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 24.11.a

One of the main goals of writing this newsletter is not only to share links, but more importantly, to give context to help you make sense of what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks. Yesterday and today I thoroughly exhausted my ability to make sense of things, and as such this edition is more of a collection links to everything.

For an in-depth analysis, earlier this week I wrote about how to think about how ATProto works, how that relates to governance and power, and what decentralisation and federation mean in this new context.

https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-and-activitypub/

In an update on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.

Atmosphere Stats and Blueview.app both allow you to show you statistics about your account. Blueview shows you your follower growth over time, and Atmosphere Stats assigns you an animal based on your posting style, as well as showing an overview of your posts by time of day.

Some updates on Bluesky:

• Bluesky will added the ability to post threads in one go soon, and the feature is already available to test, and a preview of what it looks like here.
• A short thread on how the Discover feed works, and some of the steps the Bluesky team is taking to improve the quality of it.
• Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shares some aspects about what the Bluesky team currently is working on.
• There is a renewed call for private data on ATProto: Bluesky Engineer Devin Ivy shares some ideas the team is considering, while Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold reiterates that the team understands the need for it, and says it is a ‘heavy lift’ to implement.

New additions to the wider ATProto ecosystem:

• GitHub will now allow you to display your Bluesky profile on your account.
• The Bluesky Directory has added a database of all Starter Packs, showing how often they are used to sign up as well.
• Bluesky Wall is a simple web app that shows you a realtime feed of posts with any given keyword.

Further integrations of ATProto applications

• Hagoromo is a third-party client for Bluesky, focusing on multi-column, and their latest update now also adds support for your Linkat.blue profile.
• Third-party client Klearsky now supports showing all other ATProto-powered profiles on your Bluesky profile (as well as other updates).
• Blogging platform WhiteWind has added support Frontpage; if a WhiteWind blog is posted on Frontpage, this now automatically shows up in the comment section of the WhiteWind blog as well.

Links for developers:

• Supercell is a lightweight and configurable atproto feed generator.
• Out-of-band tag support on third-party Bluesky client Ouranos.
• Display your Bluesky posts on your Astro sites.
• A (technical) reflection on a stalled attempted to build a Vine clone on ATProto.
• PDSls allows you to paste in bsky.app urls for easier searching.
• New tools to export your repo and blob, as well as viewing the PLC operations log.

Articles:

• Nobody cares about decentralization until they do. – Kye Fox.
• Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky – a paper for the Internet Measurement Conference.
• Bluesky gears up for Election Day as X goes pro-Trump – TechCrunch.

Podcasts:

• Bluesky COO Rose talked with the Quiet Riot podcast about elections and platform values.
• Bluesky board member Mike Masnick talks on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline about tech media and joining the Bluesky board.

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.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-24-11-a/

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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#fediverse

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/