What was the inspiration to build #Mitra a micro-blog for the #Fediverse?
fediverse
Do you use Flipboard to stay up on the latest news in tech? If so, your experience just got better. Now you can follow people on Threads and Mastodon, like Marques Brownlee, Mark Cuban, David Imel, Kara Swisher, and Taylor Lorenz, right from your Flipboard, and get their latest social posts on all things tech.
Learn more about these new features in this blogpost. And if there's a cool account you'd like us to highlight, let us know in the comments below.
https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/fediverse-tech-voices-on-flipboard/
#Mastodon #MastodonMigration #Federation #Fediverse #Threads #Flipboard
For us, 2024 was a year of building on the social web.
✔️ Expanded federation in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Germany, and the U.K.
✔️ Enabled following accounts from the social web in the Flipboard app.
✔️ Announced @surf, a new browser for the social web.
✔️ Produced new episodes of Dot Social, the fediverse podcast hosted by @mike
Thanks for being on this journey with us! 🚀
Did you do cool stuff in the fediverse this year? Tell us all about it in the comments, where we'll also link to the Dot Social PeerTube account and our Surf signup page.
#Flipboard #Federation #Fediverse #Surf #ActivityPub #DotSocial #SocialWeb #OpenSocialWeb
Has anyone put together a curated list of #fediverse servers (preferably open source or at least with a public API) that:
- want to be found by the general public (I’m looking for a source of recommendations for a server picker in a client app)
- meet at least some reasonable minimum moderation/reliability standards?
I know #mastodon has joinmastodon.org/servers and pixelfed also has their own curated server list, but is there anything that isn’t software-specific?
📢 Diese Woche haben wir einige spannende Persönlichkeiten, Initiativen und Museen aus der Mastodon-Community auf Flipboard vorgestellt!
Falls du es verpasst hast: Du kannst jetzt allen aus dem Fediverse in der Flipboard-App folgen. Wir freuen uns, wichtige Stimmen aus den Bereichen Wissenschaft, Politik, Journalismus, Klima, Kultur und Geschichte dabei zu haben, darunter @dieKadda, @nicholaspotter, @ueckueck, @pneutig, @digiges, @NatureMC, @lenaschimmel, @DerLeiermann, @pfefferle, @histmus und @nszwangsarbeit.
Lade die App herunter, besuche den Fediverse-Tab unter Entdecken und folge diesen Accounts. Ihre Beiträge findest du im neuen Fediverse-Aktivität-Karussell im „Für dich“-Feed.
https://about.flipboard.com/download-flipboard
#Mastodon #Flipboard #Fediverse #Wissenschaft #Politik #Journalismus #Klima #Tech #Kunst #Kultur #Geschichte
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 98
Welcome back to Fediverse Report! I’ve had a great holiday break spending time with family and friends, and that has given me some more time to think about why I care about the fediverse, the open social web and why I spend all this time writing Fediverse Report. Explaining to family members what I do was helpful to make this clear: telling an uncle that I write about decentralised technology mainly leads to confusion. But even extremely offline family members easily understand and agree with the idea that having all of our big social platforms being owned by billionaires leads to significant social problems.
As such, it has helped for me to make it more explicit that I care about decentralisation insofar it is a tool to get somewhere else: I care about better forms of governance and ownership of the social web. I want a social web where people are in control, not a few billionaires (nor nationstate governments, for that matter). Building social networks with decentralised technology is a way to get there.
The idea that the value of alternative social networks is in governance is far from new. I’ve regularly posted hot takes on my Mastodon to the same effect as well. But for 2025 I want to bring this more into focus for this newsletter. Writing a newsletter that is a weekly update tends to amplify shiny new software that has recently been released. In contrast, explaining how governance works on the fediverse does not align well with ‘this happened in the last 7 days’, as it involves more structural and slower moving forces. I’m experimenting with ways to bring coverage of governance in the fediverse better into focus. Expect more like this newsletter, where I zoom in on an offhanded comment by Misskey developer Syuilo as an illustration of the issues that come with interoperability between different places on the open social web.
The News
Mastodon has belatedly published their Annual Report for 2023. The organisation acknowledges the delay, and says that the Annual Report for 2024 is planned to be released in Q1 of this year. Mastodon had a total of 545k euro in donations in 2023, with 476k in costs. The large majority of costs go to personnel expenses, in total 343k was spend on salaries, 72% of the total budget. The popularity of Mastodon’s own servers also come with significant costs, in 2023 they spend 75k on servers and hosting. With a rough estimate of averaging around 250k active users on mastodon.social, this means mastodon.social costs roughly 30 cents per active user per year. The Annual Report also looks at the updates Mastodon has made to the site and apps. Mastodon also shares more about their hiring process, and in a great move for transparency, also published all the salaries of everyone in the organisation.
Back in the present, Mastodon is hiring again, this time for a senior front-end developer. The organisation also held a crowd-funding campaign in late last year to fund and hire a Trust and Safety lead. The community seemed to have had little appetite for funding such an endeavour, with funding barely pushing past the 12k after a month. It is an indication of the difficult spot the organisation is in; the community has been asking for more safety features in Mastodon, but is not funding a Trust and Safety Lead. The organisation could clearly use someone who writes clear policy and design goals for the direction the software should go in. Currently, not even a Mastodon employee can explain why a safety feature for Mastodon that is fully developed and waiting to be approved has been waiting for approval for over 2.5 years. It turns out that writing the code is often the easy part of making changes in the fediverse, and navigating the social structures to get the code used by people is much harder, and a dedicated Trust and Safety Lead could have certainly helped here. Instead, even after large community outcry we still do not know why Mastodon has not merged this safety feature developed by their own employee.
Surf is a new app by Flipboard for the open social web. It is a beautifully designed app that allows people to build their own custom feeds. The power of Surf is in that it supports many networks, and you can combine posts from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, YouTube and Flipboard all into a single custom feed. How Flipboard markets Surf is interesting, describing it as a ‘browser for the social web’. The way Flipboard CEO Mike McCue sees it, Surf pulls in content from the social web, and gives you the possibility to display that content in custom feeds of your choice. Surf also allows you to filter a custom feed by content: for example, you can scroll through an entire feed, or switch over to a different tab that shows only videos in that feed, for example.
For more info on Surf, WeDistribute has a closer look at all the features, and The Verge has more context and comments by McCue. Custom feeds on Bluesky have mainly gone in the direction of the power user and community builder: tools like Graze offer an huge potential in programmability and flexibility. This is especially useful for those who want to build custom feeds that other people will also use. Surf takes a different approach, by instead prompting people to build their own feeds as much as possible. It’ll be interesting to see which approach will gain traction, and if there is space for both ways of building custom feeds.
Misskey developer Syuilo made some comments contemplating breaking federation with Mastodon. Misskey is mainly used in Japan, and has a wide feature set that differs notably from Mastodon. The main reason that Syuilo gave is that she feels Misskey development is constrained by having to meet the needs and requirements of maintaining federation with other (types) of software. That Misskey is considering letting federation between Mastodon and Misskey break is an indication of one of the downsides of how ActivityPub is designed: You can send out anything you want with ActivityPub, but it is exceedingly difficult to know how other software will actually receive and display the things you send out with ActivityPub. There is a significant freedom for fediverse software in how they implement and support even more basic functions. For example, see this comparison table for how the different platforms support hashtags, and how many variations there are.
Personally, I think it would be healthy for the fediverse as a whole if more fediverse software would start publishing what they deem as necessary for other software to federate with them. The fediverse mainly currently works on the assumption that any form of federation between projects is fine, even if that means that another federated platform will stripping out all markup and images of a post. It might be healthy for a platform to state minimum functional requirements, such as ‘we only want to federate with software that also shows the emoji reactions as we view this to be an integral part of a message’. For now, Syuilo’s post mainly seems to be to vent some frustrations, so it remains to be seen where any of this will actually go.
The Links
A guide for small websites regarding the UK’s Online Safety Act, with some extra clarification for fediverse sites.
TheIndieBeat.fm is a new radio station for showcasing indie music from the fediverse, that picks up where radiofreefedi left, and will use upcoming fediverse audio platform Bandwagon.
The first 12 plugins of Castopod.
FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse.
“Event Bridge For ActivityPub” plugin released on WordPress.org.
rdf-pub – generic Activity-Pub Server that focuses on using C2S.
Manyfold got a new round of NLNet funding, and published a roadmap of what they’ll be working on.
PieFed development update for December 2024.
Fediverse tech roadmap reflection on developments in the past year, by Mitra developer Silverpill.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
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I’m kinda done with Mastodon. It’s been my main spot, but it’s missing quote posting, which drives me nuts—I just wanna comment on posts without resharing everything! Also, it’s eating up my server’s resources, and I’m running a bunch of stuff on one machine, so I need something that doesn’t hog CPU or disk space.
I used Akkoma with Mangane frontend before and really liked how light and customizable it was. Problem? The database got huge, and I couldn’t find simple tools to clean out old stuff. It was like digging through a messy closet. I’m thinking of trying Akkoma again, but is there a way to keep the database under control?
I’m also looking at Misskey—it seems fun with quote posting and a cool community. But does it use a lot of server resources? How hard is it to back up or move to another server? I’d love Mastodon API support since my clients need it.
#Mastodon #Fediverse #FediPoll #Poll #Akkoma #Pleroma #Misskey
Options: (choose one)
The good thing with federation is that I as an individual can make decisions about who I federate with - be it an individual or an entire instance. There's even some middle ground to customize your choice (silence vs block).
And now, the "federated islands" concept is kicking up, which is really cool. We have many choices - the decision is not mandated for us.
https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/islands-an-opt-in-federated-network
So this is apparently NOT enough for mastodon.social to defederate Threads.
What a complete and utter betrayal.
#mastodonSocial #meta #threads #moderation #fediverse #mastodon #mastodonGGMBH #lgbt #lgbtq #humanRights
Edited 1y ago
Some technical details for those interested:
The entire FediMeteo setup runs on a FreeBSD VM costing around 4 euros per month. It supports almost all major EU countries (plus the UK), with just a few left to complete. Currently, there are 25 separate jails, each running its own instance of snac, totaling 25 instances. The VM load typically stays around 10%, which increases to 30% when updates are published for countries with larger numbers of cities (currently Germany and Italy). The only time the load spikes is when new countries are announced; during that time, all remote instances connect to all cities to download their details.
As for RAM usage, excluding the ZFS cache, it's currently a total of 213 MB. Yes, MB.
Increasingly time-sensitive #MutualAidRequest (profanity) ($175/$350)
Edited 1y ago
The Social Web Foundation launched today. This non-profit is dedicated to making connections between social platforms with ActivityPub, and was co-founded by @evan @mallory and @tomcoates.
The foundation's focus is educating the public and policy makers about the social web, enhancing and extending the ActivityPub protocol, and building tools and plumbing to make the social web easier to use. “With this program, The Social Web Foundation can catalyze more growth on the Fediverse while improving user experience and safety,” says Prodromou. “Our goal is to unblock users, developers and communities so they can get the most out of their social web experience.”
We are proud to support the work of the foundation. Read more about the it here:
https://socialwebfoundation.org/
#ActivityPub #Federation #Fediverse #OpenSocialWeb #SocialWebFoundation #SpreadMastodon
RaveNation.club is a Mastodon server for all the ravers in the universe. Anyone who listens to electronic music (or not) is welcome:
You can find out more at https://ravenation.club/about or contact the admin @main
#FeaturedServer #Raves #Rave #Music #ElectronicMusic #Electronica #Techno #Mastodon #Fediverse #FreeFediverse
Edited 1y ago
Mastodon 🌤️ on your wrist ⌚️
Try SoraSNS!
✨ Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, Nostr all in one
✨ Native on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro
✨ Clean and beautiful UI
https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/sorasns-for-mastodon-bluesky/id6450969760?l=en-US
#applewatch #ios #apple #iphone
#appstore
#fediverse
#indiedev
#iosdev
#mastodon
#misskey
#sorasns
#マストドン
#ブルースカイ
#ミスキー
What a whirlwind 72 hours in #Brussels for #FOSDEM! Everyone I met has been working so so hard to build technology explicitly trying to break out of a broken system of corporate hegemony. There were so many different fields present here but I primarily focused on the #fediverse track.
Because of X and Meta fucking things up once again, people are talking about abandoning social media, because there are no corporate free alternatives. Right.
A few days ago, I boosted a photo I liked, posted by someone who shares many photos and with whom I've never interacted. Yesterday, this person blocked me. Considering that I haven't posted anything, I am really puzzled trying to figure out the reason behind it. Maybe it's because I don't show the number of followers and following?
#Fediverse
#Fediverse
Bluesky founder and CEO @jay.bsky.team says social media is stagnating because "we're in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out." She talked to @mike for the Dot Social podcast about building a healthier internet, how Elon impacted Bluesky's trajectory, innovating on social identity, and how different protocols can come together.
Read more about the episode here: https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse/jay-graber/
Watch the video and listen to the podcast on PeerTube here, or listen wherever you get your podcasts: https://flipboard.video/w/ophhJTECuL7fcBNbUitV3q
Discover past interviews here: https://flipboard.com/@mike/dot-social-the-future-of-the-social-web-3r0pl8ge5dju9965
#DotSocial #Flipboard #Federation #Fediverse #Bluesky #ActivityPub #ATProtocol #OpenSocialWeb #JayGraber #MikeMcCue #SocialMedia
Edited 1y ago
I’m proud to have once again played a small role in pushing  #Mastodon and the #Fediverse forward. Today’s announcement is an important step in bringing greater community ownership and governance to @Mastodon
RE: https://hannahaubry.online/on-community-governance-for-mastodon
Edited 1y ago
Hi everyone,
I just migrated to this instance from elsewhere in space and time, so I'm feeling kind of woozy, but please give me a chance and I will be a great Follow.
Thanks to those who got migrated over with me; hello to new folks on here; can I get a WOOT?.
I hope I mostly did it right.
I will spend the next week looking over new Follows and such. Please no DMs.
🍸 🐲 🚬
#DragonAfterDark
#Fediverse
🧶 La Nostra Rete in tour! 🇮🇹
(English version in the following post)
Da domani partirà il fantasmagorico imperdibile tour de La Nostra Rete, che porterà il workshop in giro per l’Italia! ⛵
Se sarete nei luoghi in cui si terrà il laboratorio siete assolutamente invitatз, 🆓 l’ingresso è libero e gratuito. Se non foste nei paraggi, condividete appppalla con amicз tecnoscetticз, tecnoinnamoratз, tecnoasceticз, tecnorepellenti o tecnoindifferenti. Sono tuttз benvenutз 💕
Grazie alle persone stratopiche che mi ospiteranno! @collettivodemand @reclaimthetech
✨ Nota speciale: mentre sarò a Bologna, ci stiamo organizzando per trovarci di persona e partecipare collettivamente al @fediforum, tuttз insieme da Scift, la nuova officina che aprirà domani a Làbas!
ℹ️ Per info aggiornate, visitate https://ournet.rocks/it/
#LaNostraRete #LaNostraReteTour #OurNetTour #Milano #FaLaCosaGiusta #Napoli #Roma #Velletri #Làbas #UrbanArtLab #Bologna #Bolo #Verona #KnittingOurInternet #Internet #InternetHistory #Web #DWeb #Zero81 #Fediverse #decentralization #decentralizzazione #Demand #laboratorio #lab
Edited 1y ago
"Summer Colors" is my latest effort...hope you enjoy!
ART - https://peggy-collins.pixels.com/featured/summer-colors-peggy-collins.html
#flowers #floral #flower #sunday #garden #colorful #color #art #arte #buyintoart #kunst #wallartforsale #wallart #artprints #artforsale #fineart #decor #gifts #giftideas #interiordesign #homedecor #contemporaryart #modernart #creativetoots #artbooster #fediverse #fedigiftshop #mastodonart #mastoart
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 99
A major news for governance this week on the open social web, with Mastodon shaking up their organisational structure and more.
The News
Mastodon published plans for their new governance structure, with control of Mastodon moving to a new non-profit organisation, and moving ownership away from CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon will set up a new top-level non-profit organisation. This new organisation will become owner of various Mastodon related assets, including names and copyrights. These assets are currently still held by Eugen Rochko, and Mastodon says that this is not the intent of Mastodon. Rochko and the Mastodon organisation believe that “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”
Rochko has been a major driving force in growing Mastodon into the platform and product that it is today. While his singular ownership in his name of Mastodon does not fit with the current state of the platform, it is indicative of the outsized influence and impact his work has had over the years. In a thread, Rochko also explains his own perspective, writing about how Mastodon has become tightly integrated with his own identity. He also says that the last two years have taken a toll on him, both mentally and physically. Stepping away from a leadership position that has become so tightly integrated with a sense of self is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and Rochko deserves recognition for both his work, and knowing when to take a step back. Rochko will focus on his original passion of product strategy for Mastodon.
Even for the Mastodon organisation, there are still multiple unknowns, and the organisation is still in the process of figuring it all out. The short summary of what the organisation of Mastodon will look like: There will be a new top-level organisation for Mastodon. This will be a non-profit organisation that is based in Europe. Mastodon does not know yet which European country. The organisation will be led by a new CEO. The new CEO has already been picked, but Mastodon is waiting for a few final practical details before they will be announced. Under this top-level organisation will be 2 other organisations, the US-based Mastodon non-profit and the current Mastodon GmbH organisation. For the US-based Mastodon non-profit nothing will change, this organisation is mainly for fundraising purposes. The current Mastodon GmbH organisation has become a for-profit organisation due to unclear German bureaucracy. This organisation will involve itself with the daily operations, both of running the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers as well as development of Mastodon software.
404 Media reported this week that Meta is blocking links to Pixelfed on their apps, after various fediverse users reported that links on Meta platforms to their Pixelfed account immediately got taken down as spam. Meta later admitted to Engadget that “removing the posts was a mistake and that they’d be reinstated.” Meta’s actions have been beneficial for Pixelfed, which has been at the centre of a news cycle. Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault said that the pixelfed.social was seeing “unprecedented levels of traffic“, and according to fedidb.org (also created by Supernault) monthly active users for Pixelfed jumped from 20k in December to 27k as of right now. Supernault also reports that pixelfed.social had 11k people joining in the last 24 hours, which also is validated by fedidb.org. I’m not clear on what the correct statistics are here, but a sudden jump in interest after all the media attention is clearly happening. Pixelfed also got the official apps finally out of testing and available in the Android Play Store and iOS App Store. The move has been announced and teased for a long time, and the app has been available in testing for a while.
Meta and Zuckerberg decided this week to go fully mask-off, making significant changes to their platforms and rules around hate speech. Most notably are the rules around hate speech, where Meta is now explicitly allowing hate speech against various minorities. The move sparked a wide backlash, and various Mastodon servers who previously federated with Threads decided to cut defederate from Threads. Notable examples include Hachyderm and mstdn.social. Other servers such as mastodon.social and indieweb.social condemned the move by Meta, but refrained from defederating from Threads.
The Analysis
In last week’s email introduction I wrote that I was unhappy with the state of governance of both the fediverse as well as the ATmosphere. This week’s news regarding Mastodon is a great step in the right direction. Mastodon has clear ambitions and values about decentralisation, and having a self-styled dictator-for-life who runs the software just does not fit at all with the stated values. The Mastodon Operations organisation now being a for-profit organisation is also interesting. While this happened outside of the control of Mastodon GmbH as a result of opaque Germany bureaucracy, I think it is potentially a good thing. Running a social media server with 250k monthly active users costs real money. Having servers be financially sustainable is an integral part of having fair and equitable social media platforms. So far, the fediverse has struggled making this happen on a donations model.
It is the next moves that are the real important ones: what form of governance will the non-profit holding organisation take? Will it allow for real community ownership, as implied by the title of the blog? Who will be the new CEO? What new sets of strategic priorities for Mastodon will be set? Many things are still up in the air, even for the people at Mastodon itself, and those aspects will be where we will see the most impactful changes. Still, this is a great step in the right direction.
I do find the contrast between the moves that Rochko has made and how Supernault approaches Pixelfed and Loops notable. Rochko has been aware of the downsides of his model of governance for Mastodon, and has made the necessary changes, while Supernault seems determined to go at it alone. Supernault has a wild number of projects on his plate: building the Pixelfed platform as well as mobile apps, as well as video platform Loops with it’s mobile apps, running the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art server, running fedidb.org and more. It is incredibly impressive what Supernault has managed to build, all by himself in his spare time. Supernault has high ambitions, explicitly positioning his platforms as competitors to Instagram and TikTok. But as the looming TikTok ban in the US shows: one of the most important aspects of social media platforms these days is how they are governed, and by whom. Having a single developer governing the development of two different types of platforms, as well as their flagship servers, seems like a form of governance that is not particularly sustainable.
Rochko shared some more statistics about the connection between Threads and mastodon.social in a conversation on the Mastodon Discord, writing: “For some context, 81,745 people follow at least one Threads account from their mastodon.social account (and we are aware of 25,042 Threads account that federate), with some of the most followed accounts being MKBDH, Barack Obama, and Nilay Patel.” He also noted that only 811 Threads accounts follow at least one mastodon.social account. These statistics only represent mastodon.social, not the entire fediverse. But considering mastodon.social is by far the largest server and many other servers do not federate with Threads at all, it does provide a good indication of the actual usage of Threads. Hachyderm also shared some statistics on the connection between Threads and Hachyderm: “There were 2033 unique Hachyderm accounts following 919 unique Threads accounts and 26 unique Threads accounts following 22 unique Hachyderm accounts.”
Last month I wrote an article ‘Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?’, going through the various reasons for Meta to add federation to Threads. I did not have a clear single answer to that question. The data above provides at least an indication that users are also not clear on why Threads should have fediverse interoperability. It turns out that in practice, marginally few people are interested in the two-way connection between Threads and the rest of the fediverse.
In conversations last week regarding whether or not servers should defederate from Threads, one argument that got brought up repeatedly that connecting with Threads allows people to migrate away from Threads to Mastodon, while still keeping connections with people on Threads. Seeing the statistics on how few people actually use the Threads fediverse connections this argument rings hollow to me.
The Links
The 5th edition of online unconference FediForum will take place on April 1st and 2nd this year.
Threads is slowly making their fediverse integration available for a small number of EU users.
Castopod has made a demo server available where people can test out the fediverse podcasting platform.
PeerTube is slowly making more servers available in their official apps, being careful to comply with app store regulations.
Hachyderm shares their monthly operations costs breakdown.
Biweekly Lemmy development update.
Ghost’s update on implementing ActivityPub and reflection on their work in 2024.
Piefed held a community vote for their roadmap for 2025.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
Edited 1y ago