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.
The News
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.
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.
The News
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...
Mastodon has officially launched a new version, a new Reddit-like with ClubsAll has launched, and IFTAS has started rolling out their content classifier system.
Mastodon launches version 4.3
Mastodon has released version 4.3, and the update comes with a better notification system, design improvements, displaying follow recommendations in the following feed for new accounts, and the ability to highlight the fediverse profile of the authors of shared articles.
There are two updates to the notification system: notifications are now grouped, and the ability to filter notifications. Grouped notifications means that you’ll see a summary of the number of people who liked and boosted your post, instead of getting each notification individually. This is especially helpful for posts that go viral, as your notifications become unusable without grouping. Third party clients also support grouping notifications of new followers, which Mastodon does not do. With notification filters, you can limit specific types of notifications, for example from people who are not following you, from new accounts, or to filter out unsolicited private mentions.
With the new carousel that displays follow suggestions for new accounts, Mastodon leaned on transparency. For each suggestion it is also displayed why an account is suggested. It seems there are four different reasons for an account to be suggested: ‘Popular on your server’, ‘Popular among people you follow’, ‘Similar to profiles you recently followed’ and ‘Handpicked by your server admins’.
For future plans Mastodon mentions three parts: working on adding quote posts, the ability for server admins to subscribe to managed deny-lists and improving how long-form text is displayed in Mastodon. Mastodon also features a request for donations at the end, noting that they are supported by donations and operate on less than 500k per year. It showcases the difficult spot that Mastodon is in: as the post highlights, their competitors have access to significant capital, which allows them to ship features significantly faster. While it is remarkable what Mastodon has accomplished with their budget, the small team also means that it has taken a year to ship this update 4.3, while the competition can move significantly faster. Not taking venture capital, not selling ads, and not selling data are great things to do, but the update cadence of Mastodon versus that of Bluesky or Threads shows that not doing so puts a significant limit on what the organisation can accomplish during this period of protocol wars.
ClubsAll has launched
ClubsAll is a new fediverse project, a Reddit-alternative similar to Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin. ClubsAll main goal is to provide a clean and easily-accessible UI, and explicitly positions itself as a Reddit alternative. The other focus is on live comments and live chat, where new comments that are made on a post flow in directly visible. The comment section includes both the traditional threaded view as well as a chatbox to invite more chat-like realtime reactions. Other features are easy cross-posting of new posts to up to three communities, and having multiple profiles under a simple login.
With their simplified communities, ClubsAll takes in posts from multiple communities from Lemmy, PieFed and Mbin, and brands them under a single club. This does solve a practical problem, namely that communities can get split over multiple servers, creating duplicates without a clear distinction between the different communities. It is unclear what the practical difference is between the fediverse community on lemmy.ml and the fediverse community on lemmy.world. PieFed solves this problem by having both communities (similar to Lemmy), as well as ‘topics’, which aggregates different communities into a single topic. PieFed makes it explicit that it aggregates posts from multiple communities. ClubsAll however, mostly hides this information, making it less clear that posts come from different platforms. I’m curious to see what the response to this by the community will be, as there are no clear norms so far on what is an acceptable use of federation, and what isn’t. When you take in posts from a different platform, what form of attribution is necessary? ClubsAll clearly attributes the original author, but should the original community also be accredited? The answer is unclear to me, and I’m watching to see how this evolves.
The News
IFTAS has been working on a Content Classification System, and the first classifier is now active. A few select server are working together with IFTAS, where all the media of these servers now get scanned for CSAM. In case of a hit, IFTAS handles the mandatory requirement and record-keeping, and issues a takedown. CSAM moderation is a difficult task for server admins to keep track of, both of the toll it takes on the humans, as well for the complex legal requirements that come with it.
NLnet has been a major sponsor of fediverse projects over the years. They announced the results their latest funding round this week in which they sponsor a large variety of open source project. The fediverse project that got funded is Loops, a TikTok-like short video platform by Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault. Loops was scheduled for a public beta launch on Wednesday the 9th, but this has been delayed for 11 days. Supernault attributes the delay to the rumour that Threads is working on a Communities feature that is also supposedly called Loops, as well as to further polish the app and platform.
The SocialCG, the W3C Community Group for ActivityPub has agreed on starting work to form a charter to transition towards a Working Group. The details require some knowledge of W3C processes (that I don’t fully grok either), but the very short summary is that a Working Group has more impact on making changes to the ActivityPub protocol.
FediMod FIRES is both a protocol for distributing moderation advisories and recommendations and a reference server implementation. Emelia Smith, who is behind the project, has updated the website with more information as well as a general timeline for when work on the project happens.
ActivityPods is a project that combines the Solid protocol with ActivityPub, and they have released their 2.0 version. ActivityPods allows users to create a single account for multiple different apps; with ActivityPub you need a separate accounts for Pixelfed and Mastodon, for example. ActivityPods gives you one place to store your data, your Pod, based on the Solid protocol, and the Inbox and Outbox system of ActivityPub. This update of ActivityPods gives the ability to set granular permission levels for the access to data than an app has that is build on top of ActivityPods.
Mastodon has officially launched a new version, a new Reddit-like with ClubsAll has launched, and IFTAS has started rolling out their content classifier system.
Mastodon launches version 4.3
Mastodon has released version 4.3, and the update comes with a better notification system, design improvements, displaying follow recommendations in the following feed for new accounts, and the ability to highlight the fediverse profile of the authors of shared articles.
Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.
Threads delays posts for 15 minutes before federating
Threads’ latest update has degraded the value of their fediverse integration. Posts made on Threads will now always be delayed by 15 minutes before they are delivered to the rest of the fediverse, if fediverse sharing is turned on. The 15 minute delay is added for the purpose of post editing; posts on Threads can now be edited for 15 minutes after they are created. This used to be 5 minutes, both as a window for editing posts as well as the delay to be send out to the rest of the fediverse.
A 15 minute delay is a long time in microblogging, and significantly impacts things like breaking news, and live-posting sports events. It also meaningfully impacts the ability to have a back-and-forth conversation with people in a comment section. The delay itself is already an issue, but things get even more problematic when taken into consideration that during live events, Threads posts with a 15 minute delay are now mixed with fediverse posts without a delay and presented as happening during the same time. This was already noticeable during yesterday’s U.S. VP debate, an event where people use microblogging for the real-time reaction. But part of the real-time reactions was actually 15 minutes delayed, while another part was not, which creates even more confusing experience. A Threads engineer says that they will want to solve this problem ‘eventually’, but that it will probably come after Threads has implemented full bi-directional interoperability.
This news is not a great start for the Social Web Foundation either, which launched last week with criticism from the wider fediverse developer community for having Meta as one of their supporting members. There is a distrust of Meta’s intention within the fediverse, and them degrading their fediverse integration is likely not helping.
Website League
The Website League is a new social networking project that has arisen out of the demise of Cohost. Cohost was a social media site for the last 2 years, that has shut down, and on October 1st the website entered read-only mode. Cohost had a dedicated user base who appreciated the community that they’ve build on the site. Website League is a new project by users of Cohost (the Cohost staff is not involved) to build a successor network in Cohost’s place.
What makes Website League stand out is that it is a federated Island Network, described by Website League themselves as ‘a bunch of smallish websites that talk to each other’. This federated social network is using ActivityPub, but deliberately does not connect to the rest of the fediverse. Instead, it is an allowlist-based form of federation, where only websites/servers who agree to the Website League’s central set of rules can join.
The Website League has a big focus community organisation and governance. Even though the project is very young, and launched under time pressure of the deadline of Cohost closing, there are already multiple systems in place with an active Loomio for Stewardship, a wiki and more. The Website League provides a different vision of what a federated social network build on top of ActivityPub can look like, and I’m very curious to see where the project will go.
Ghost and Fedify
Ghost published their latest update on their work on adding ActivityPub, with more information about their upcoming beta. Ghost is slowly starting their beta process soon, making it clear that this is indeed a testing program, and data loss should be expected for people who are participating. They also said more about the performance and scaling of Ghost and ActivityPub. Sending out a newsletter over ActivityPub to 5000 subscribers turned out to need 10 servers, which indicates how resource-intensive and expensive ActivityPub can be. As a result, ActivityPub followers will count towards Ghost Pro billing, as Ghost Pro charges based on the number of members an account has.
Fedify, an open-source framework that simplifies building federated server apps, is now officially in version 1.0. Ghost’s ActivityPub integration is build on top of Fedify, and Ghost is sponsoring the Fedify developer as well.
Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.
Threads delays posts for 15 minutes before federating
Threads’ latest update has degraded the value of their fediverse integration. Posts made on Threads will now always be delayed by 15 minutes before they are delivered to the rest of the fediverse, if fediverse sharing is turned on. The 15 minute delay is added for the purpose...
While we’re busy enjoying the summer (or the Olympics), here is this week’s fediverse news.
The News
Mike 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.
While we’re busy enjoying the summer (or the Olympics), here is this week’s fediverse news.
The News
Mike 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...
A busy week in the fediverse, with Threads launching their open beta, as well as Fediforum happening this week.
Threads has entered the fediverse
Threads has officially entered the fediverse, by entering an open beta where people in the US, Canada and Japan can now opt in to connect their profile to the fediverse. The feature was first demoed on the Fediforum this week by Threads employees, who were there to show the feature and participate in the discussions. A video of the demo can be seen here, which showcases how the connection between Threads and the fediverse works.
Threads accounts that opt-in to the connection will get a few popups that explain what the fediverse is, and what it means to be connected.
In the announcement post, Meta goes into more detail, explaining how this open beta is part of their phased approach to the fediverse. In the current phase of this open beta, only public posts are federated out towards other servers that connect with Threads, with Meta saying:
“Certain types of posts and content are also not federated, including:
- Posts with restricted replies.
- Replies to non-federated posts.
- Post with polls (until future updates).
- Reposts of non-federated posts.“
The blog also goes into more detail on how Threads has approached quote posts, by adopting both the Misskey-style of quote posts as well as the FEP-a232 style of quote posts. I wrote about this in more detail a while ago. It indicates the impact that Threads has on the entire fediverse by participating with ActivityPub. The status of how the FEP process relates to the formal specification of the protocol has never been fully formalised, but the participation of Meta in this process changes the dynamics.
On Instagram, Adam Mosseri posted a story where he explains why Threads is joining the fediverse, listing multiple reasons. He states that it is an ‘interesting way for social networks to operate’, and the ‘direction the internet is going’, calling it a paradigm shift that he wants Threads to lean into. He also describes Threads as the challenger to Twitter, and thus willing to take on more risk.
Threads’ phased approach to federation is as much a technical challenge as it is a regulatory challenge. Currently, Threads accounts do not see individual likes on their federated posts, instead getting a notification that says ‘4 fediverse users from 3 servers liked this post’, for example. According to Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput, Threads cannot use profile info from fediverse accounts on Threads yet because they are not allowed to do so yet by their Legal department.
With Threads and the fediverse being a main topic of conversation again, some short bits of news:
- Threads does not connect to all servers in the fediverse either, and they published their guidelines on which servers Threads will not connect to here.
- FediDB has also added support for Threads to the database that tracks the fediverse, and now Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed account on the fediverse.
- The developer of GoToSocial wrote about the social and power dynamics of when a large corporate implementation of a protocol is incompatible with the implementation by a small independent group.
- Threads uses a their own logo to denote the fediverse, not the coloured 5-pointed one. Whether or not a server federates with Threads is a major mark of separation within the fediverse, and Liaizon Wakest uses the different logos to distinguish between an ‘open fediverse’ and a ‘Corporate Fediverse’.
Fediforum
Fediforum was this week, a 2-day digital unconference where everyone could call sessions, as well as a variety of speed demos at the beginning. The event consists of speed demos of 5 minutes, and sessions that anyone could convene.
The speed demos were a good showcase in the incredible projects that people are building on top of the fediverse. It also indicated a need for better ways for people to share what they are building with the rest of the fediverse, as there are some amazing projects that have not gotten the attention yet that they deserve. I don’t have the space (nor time) for this edition of the newsletter to go over all of the demos, but you watch them on the Fediforum Youtube channel. TheNewStack has a good write-up of the event as well, and if you are really interested you can scroll through WeDistribute’s liveblog of the event. I’ll give one sneak peak, that I was impressed by Emissary, a stand-alone fediverse server and RSS reader, which easily allows you to build custom apps on top as well. To understand what that really means, I’ll recommend you check out the demo video. I’ll go over the demo videos some more in a separate article, as I want to say more about how Fediforum highlighted the need for more ways for the fediverse to showcase itself.
Threads has been a significant presence at this edition of Fediforum as well, with the first public demo of how the Threads’ fediverse integration, ahead of their open beta launch a few days later, as well as multiple employees who participated both days in the sessions as well. The employees talked about that they understand the widespread skepticism about Threads joining the fediverse, with one employee saying: “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
There has been a clear interest in collaboration projects on the fediverse as showcased by the various sessions held during Fediforum. A session on the Threadiverse led to the start of a Threadiverse working group. As a side note, the Thread on NodeBB about the Threadiverse working group is a great showcase for the integration of ActivityPub into NodeBB as well.
There were sessions about the Fediverse Developer Network as well as Evan Prodromou organised a session about a potential Fediverse Advocacy Group. It is clear that the interest is there, with the more difficult next step being to put this into practice.
In other news
IFTAS has been hard at work behind the scenes, and with it some of the things that they will release this month:
- FediCheck, a Moderation-as-a-Service app that can monitor denylists from your trusted sources and automatically update your server. This was also demoed at Fediforum, but a video is not yet available.
- DSA Guidebook for Micro Services. Everything you wanted to know about the EU’s Digital Services Act and were too afraid to ask.
- A moderation community portal
- Moderation Documentation Support
- Moderator Advisory Council
It is a massive list, and something I’ll certainly cover more when things are released.
Two podcasts episodes (one, two) on the work of connecting ActivityPub and ActivityStreams in the podcasting specification. Some fascinating things are happening in the podcasting space that I have not really been able to fully check out and report on yet, but for people interested in the topic, this is definitely something that is worth diving deeper into.
The links
- Donald Trump’s Truth Social runs a forked version of Mastodon, and it seems that it has not patched the vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Mastodon.
- WeDistribute has written about the state of ActivityPub, and the efforts to extend the protocol.
- The Mastodonusercountbot reported that Mastodon now has 15 million accounts. This bot is likely not accurate, with other sources listing somewhere between 7 and 9 million Mastodon accounts.
- @Box464 has written an extensive walkthrough for completing a Bonfire installation. For more information about the upcoming platform, check out this article by WeDistribute, or my recent reporting on how they are involved with the launch of a new Open Science Network.
- Pixelfed developer Dansup is working on Loops, a federated platform for short form vertical video. A video demonstrating how Loops will look like is available here.
- A blog by the European Broadcasting Union with a call for all public broadcasters to join decentralised social networks, based on the experiences by Deutsche Welle on Mastodon.
- Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media.
- Last week I reported about Fedify, a fediverse server framework. They released another demo of what is possible with Fedify, this time with fedi badges. Fedify also released a tutorial, here.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- The latest update on NodeBB’s fediverse implementation.
That’s all for this week. If you want more, you can subscribe to my fediverse account or to the mailing list below:
A busy week in the fediverse, with Threads launching their open beta, as well as Fediforum happening this week.
Threads has entered the fediverse
Threads has officially entered the fediverse, by entering an open beta where people in the US, Canada and Japan can now opt in to connect their profile to the fediverse. The feature was first demoed on the Fediforum this week by Threads employees, who were there to show the feature and participate in the discussions. A video...
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