Tillbaka

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 78

Welcome back to another edition of the weekly-ish news of the fediverse. This edition contains the news of last week, as well as some news items from the previous few weeks that I’ve spotted while I was on holiday break. My holiday was indeed fully offline out of the feeds, but I could not resist afterwards to dig in to find out what happened while I was offline.

As a teaser: I’ve started working behind the scenes to launch something new with Fediverse Report, that will be in addition to the weekly newsletters. Stay tuned!

The News

GoToSocial’s latest release adds comment-controls, which allows people to determine who can reply to their posts. GoToSocial explains: ‘you’ll be able to configure your account so that new posts created by you will have an interaction policy set on them, which determines whether your instance drops or accepts replies, likes, and boosts of your posts, depending on the visibility of the post, and whether or not an account trying to interact with you is in your followers/following list.’

Safety has been a major conversation on the fediverse feeds recently, especially with Black people pointing out the lacking safety tools and major harrassment they experience on the fediverse. One aspect that facilitates the harassment is the default opt-out approach to federation; where racists and other bigots will simply spin up a new fediverse server and send (semi)-private messages with hate speech to Black people. This is why ‘just switch to a server with better moderation’ is such a problematic response; it does not actually fix one of the main ways Black people experience on the fediverse, while placing the onus on them to solve the problem. One interesting response is in building a separate network with ActivityPub based on allow-list federation, and I’m keeping a close eye on how this evolves.

PeerTube’s latest update adds ‘automatic video transcription using Whisper , a new comment policy “requires approval first”, auto-tagging/labelling of videos and comments based on specific rules and a comment moderation page for video publishers’. This blog post provides more details about the development story on adding the transcription feature.

Patchwork is an upcoming plugin system for Mastodon that is developed by Newsmast, that is tentatively scheduled to be released next month. The latest update by Newsmast showcases the variety of plugins that they’ll offer, including setting local-only posts, changing post length, and scheduling posts. The bigger part is also the addition of Channels, custom timelines that will allow external parties to hook into as well.

Some statistics that relate compare the different platforms. A comparison of sources of traffic to news site heise.de, showing the fediverse can keep up with Threads in clicks, while Bluesky is not a source of traffic at all. A new comparison by Kuba Suder shows the different ways people post on Bluesky that is not done via a PDS that is hosted by Bluesky company. In February this year, Bluesky started support for having people self-host their own Personal Data Server (PDS) that is not managed by their company. The amount of people who do so is small, with less than 100 active account. Significantly more people post onto Bluesky via their bridged ActivityPub account. Speaking of bridged accounts: Eugen Rochko has now bridged his Mastodon account to Bluesky. Rochko has been outspokenly critical of Bluesky in the past, saying that they should adopt ActivityPub instead of building their own protocol.

Some more updates by Ghost, who is getting along further with their ActivityPub implementation. The newsletter is now getting better connected to the fediverse, allowing you to follow it directly from your Mastodon account.

Mastodon moves their iOS app development in-house, and is recruiting a full-time iOS app developer. Up until now, the Mastodon iOS app was developed by two freelance developers.

A slightly obscure news update because I love interoperability: Guppe Groups have been around for a while, and are a way to get some semblance of Groups added onto microblogging platforms, functioning similar to hashtags. Now link-aggregator platform PieFed has added support for these types of groups, you can see an example here. I’m mentioning this news here because I think there is a lot more space to experiment with different platform designs that take inspiration from both microblogging, link-aggregators and forums, and this is a small example of it. PieFed added support for community wikis as well.

Bluesky released Starter Packs a month ago as a way to easy the onboarding process, and reactions on the rest of the fediverse were that this was a good idea that could potentially be copied. Statistics show however that the feature has not been actively used by the community. Part of the reason could be that signups to decentralised social networks in general have mostly stopped.

WeDistribute wrote about NeoDB, calling it ‘a review system for culture’. NeoDB is one of the more interesting platforms available in the fediverse, with an incredible wide variety of features. NeoDB themselves describes by drawing comparison to other platforms, saying ‘NeoDB integrates the functionalities of platforms like Goodreads, Letterboxd, RateYourMusic, and Podchaser, among others.’ NeoDB’s own pitch is taking fediverse platforms tendency to be ‘centralised platform concept + ActivityPub’ to the extreme, and I enjoy the simplicity of NeoDB is a fediverse review platform for culture more.

What is the fediverse? This question is answered by a tech-free explainer video by Newsmast, a new video series by WordPress.com, or a podcast episode by TheNewStack with Evan Prodromou.

The latest update for software forge Forgejo has foundational parts of ActivityPub based federation, and the first forgejo instances that have federation in some alpha form are starting to appear.

The Links

• Privacy and Consent for Fediverse Developers: A Guide – by WeDistribute.
• ‘Rethinking Trust and Safety in the Fediverse, with Samantha Lai and Jaz-Michael King’ – the latest podcast episode by Flipboards dot social podcast.
• An update on the Bridgy Fed, the bridge between the fediverse, Bluesky and the web, and websites can now be bridged directly onto Bluesky.
• A tool to view all labels applied on your Bluesky. posts and account.
• Replies from the fediverse can now be read on Threads.
• The history of the fediverse logo.
• The third party app for Pixelfed Vernissage has been renamed to Impressia. Vernissage is now exclusively the name for the fediverse photo sharing platform that is currently in development by the same developer.
• A tool to temporarily mute words in Bluesky.
• An experimental demo of how a “Sign in with the Fediverse” mechanism might work.
• IceShrimp originally started as a Misskey fork, but they have changed so much it is starting to make more sense to see it as their own project: a full rewrite of the backend, and now the added support for plugins.
• Smoke Signal is a new event planner platform that is in development and build on top of atproto.
• The newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ has a showcase of the interoperability between Mastodon and WordPress.
• An extensive comparison how different apps for Lemmy display content correctly.
• This week’s overview of fediverse software updates.
• Activitypub.academy is ‘a modified Mastodon instance that allows you to study the ActivityPub protocol in real life’ that has gotten some new features.
• In the main Bluesky app, if you block someone and you have a thread in which both you and the blocked account have posted replies, it prevents other people from viewing those posts, which often breaks the thread. This system, the ‘apocalypseblock’ is intentional for Bluesky, but the openness of the protocol allows people to build other thread viewers that do not have this feature.

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

EDIT 2024-08-05: an earlier version misstated that statistics for heise.de showed that Bluesky surpassed the fediverse in traffic. This was due to a misreading of the chart, and has been corrected.

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-78/