Gregory's ServerLast Week in Fediverse – ep 79
While we’re busy enjoying the summer (or the Olympics), here is this week’s fediverse news.
The NewsMike Masnick, author of the ‘Protocols, not Platforms‘ paper has joined Bluesky’s Board of Directors. There has been a seat available since Jack Dorsey suddenly left the board a few months ago. In his personal announcement post, Masnick says that ‘Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality‘. Masnick also explains that one of the key aspects that excites him about Bluesky is how ‘they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat.’
With the current implementation of Bluesky, two parts of the architecture (the Relay and the AppView) are theoretically decentralised, but with no incentive structure for other people to also run an alternative part of the infrastructure, nobody actually has done so. Furthermore, the Identity part of Bluesky is still fully centralised and under control of Bluesky, with no clear path to change this. This places Bluesky significantly behind other major fediverse software, who are all already fully resistant to future self-harm. As Masnick values this principle, it is worth seeing how his position on the board will influence the direction of the development of the AT Protocol.
Two new fediverse projects that stand out to me for a similar reason; they both shift away from ‘microblogging about anything you want’ to a community that is clearly defined by interests or topics. CollabFC is a football-based social network, that creates a specific network for football clubs. When you join a hub for a club, such as Liverpool for example, you have the possibility for a ‘local’ feed dedicated to Liverpool, as well as a feed for all other football instances. Gush is a platform that is in development for talking about video games. Part review site similar to BookWyrm and NeoDB, it focuses on posting about specific games. What is different about it is that each game ‘a first-class object that you can reference and share across the fediverse’. Both of these platforms are early in their lifecycle, but point in a direction of more focused discussion on fediverse platforms.
Bonfire shared some more information about their upcoming platform Mosaic. Full details will be available in September, but it looks like a front-end UI for displaying posts as a website instead of the regular feeds. Something similar is Servus, a CMS for Nostr, or Npub.pro, which are both experiments for Nostr to display posts not as a feed but a website as well. Meanwhile, the main aspect that is holding up the release of the ‘main’ version of Bonfire is a slow performance, and the Bonfire team put out two bounties for developers to help them fix this issue.
Threads held an AMA about the fediverse with Flipboard’s Mike McCue and Blockparty’s Tracy Chou. It seems relevant that Threads wants to promote their fediverse connection by hosting an AMA on their main account, but there were little answers that stood out or provided new information, with most answers talking more about a conceptual understanding of what the fediverse could be, more than what the actual rest of the fediverse outside of Threads actually looks like.
Manyfold is an open source self hosted platform for sharing your 3d printer files. They have been working on adding ActivityPub support, and the latest update added experimental early stage support for ActivityPub.
Link aggregator platform Kbin is getting closer and closer to being completely dead, with the main flagship instance kbin.social now also being offline. The lead developer could not keep up with work on the platform due to personal reasons for a while now. The project has been superseded by the hard fork Mbin, which has been around for a while now, and got another update this week.
The Links- Newsmast’s Michael Foster writes about ‘how can we persuade organisations and creators that it makes sense to federate using tools they already have in place’.
- Bandwagon, the upcoming fediverse music sharing platform, is expanding their beta test.
- Buffer recently added support for Bluesky, and the Buffer CEO wrote a blog post about the significance of Bluesky and decentralised social networks.
- Elena Rossini’s newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ does an extensive deep dive into Friendica.
- WeDistribute takes a closer look at the successful ‘Mastodon for Harris’ campaign, which raised over half a million USD.
- Bluesky is summoning a community marketing manager.
- The new video series Fediverse Files by WordPress.com has a second episode in which they interview Evan Prodromou about ActivityPub.
- Font Awesome for the fediverse, with Decentralised Social Icons, by WeDistribute.
- A blog by Smoke Signal, an upcoming event platform build on top of atproto, about building communities with atproto.
- Mastodon posted an update about the first half of 2024 for their Patreon supporters.
- A closer look at the new features in Newsmast latest update.
- For the atproto devs: an atproto browser.
- Owncast Newsletter August 2024.
- TechLinked discusses the fediverse and how the web is different now in their podcast.
- IFTAS Connect July 2024 roundup. IFTAS is also looking for admin support while they are seeking funding to continue their work on building an opt-in content classifier to detect CSAM.
- A proof of concept for fediverse spam filtering.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-79/