Last Week in Fediverse – ep 97
A new non-profit for governance of Bridgy Fed, PeerTube releases their yearly update with a complete redesign, and the organisation behind Mammoth and sub.club winds down due to a lack of funding.
Editors note: I’ll be on holiday break for the next two weeks. The next edition of Last Week in Fediverse will be out on January 7th. Thank you for reading and supporting me in 2024!
The News
A New Social
A New Social is a new non-profit that launched today. The goal of A New Social is to build cross-protocol tools and services for the open social web. The organisation consists of Anuj Ahooja (CEO) and Ryan Barrett (CTO). The main project that they will be focused on is Bridgy Fed, the service that lets people connect their social accounts across a variety of networks and protocols.
Barrett wrote in early November about the possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Up until now, Bridgy Fed was his personal one-man side project. Conversations with other organisations like Flipboard and Meta gave Barrett a sense of urgency that the project was quickly trending towards becoming critical infrastructure for the open social web. Heated conversations earlier this year about how people should interact with the bridge (opt-in versus opt-out) also made it clear that such a tool should have cohesive governance, where Barrett writes: “it is about who makes those decisions, and how they should be made.”
Ahooja has come in as the new leader, to help build a structural organisations that can deal with the conversations around governance and decision making. Ahooja describes his vision as that of the ‘last network effect‘, which is worth reading in its entirety. In his view, the current state of the open social web is that of the exploratory phase, where neither ActivityPub nor ATProto have yet fully proven themselves at mass scale yet. Protocol bridges such as Bridgy Fed can bridge the gap: not only allows it for compatibility between platforms, it also bridges the gap in time. It allows us to commit to a platform now, without knowing for certain it the protocol that platform uses will be an important protocol in the future. This is possible because with bridged platforms and networks, you can take your own social graph with you.
In a conversation with Ahooja and Barrett, they say that people have rallied around A New Social very quickly, and that people have been very supportive of the organisation. The organisation has the support of Mastodon, Meta, Bluesky, IFTAS, SWF and Flipboard. It shows that there is a broader awareness that the open social web needs more organisations that are concerned with governance. The ATProto project of lexicon.community (not affiliated with A New Social) is another such example of people starting to work towards governance of internet infrastructure.
A New Social is looking to recruit a Board of Directors, as well as reaching out to developers to collaborate on tools and services that are needed for cross-protocol platforms. For development work, the main focus is on making the bridge more accessible and easier to understand: Barrett and Ahooja will be working on making the bridge easier to user with a cleaner UX, as well as on awareness and education what Bridgy Fed actually does. Ahooja is also clear on separating a protocol network from the platforms that make up a network. Each platform has its own culture and policies, and A New Social will be working with each individual platform on what approach to bridging fits their specific platform best.
Personally I think the fediverse has struggled for a while to make a clearer distinction between the fediverse as a single place and the fediverse as a network of different platforms. For me, the value of the fediverse is in the ability to build connecting platforms that each have their own culture, governance, moderation, and sense of place. A New Social is aware and mindful of this, and their approach of treating each platform as its own space can help further the fediverse towards a true super-network of interconnected digital places.
PeerTube v7
PeerTube v7 has officially been released, and the update brings a major redesign. Framasoft has been working on two major projects this year for PeerTube: mobile apps for Android and iOS (released last week), and a complete remodeling of the PeerTube interface. Framasoft has worked with designers for a thorough UX research, with tests and user interviews. Based on this the interface of PeerTube has been redesigned from the ground up. Framasoft has prioritised accessibility, they completed a full accessibility audit and used the findings to create the improvements and changes to the interface. Menus and pages have also been remodeled and simplified, to counteract some of the organic growth of all the options that has been build up over the years. The interface also looks a lot cleaner and calmer, with a more modern look.
As a sidenote: Framasoft says that they now refer to PeerTube servers as platforms, not instances. They give inclusion as a reason, saying that this term is easier to understand for people who are less well-versed in technology and the fediverse. I think this is a great change, and something that other fediverse software should consider as well. Platforms better communicates that each fediverse server is its own social network, that can have its own culture and governance. The value of the fediverse is that each platform can be its own separate digital space, and I find that the term platform communicates this better than instance does.
Shutdown of Mammoth and sub.club
The BLVD, the organisation behind three fediverse projects, has announced that they are shutting down due to a lack of funding. The BLVD has created the Mastodon iOS app Mammoth, fediverse creator payment platform sub.club, and the moth.social Mastodon server. All three projects will be shut down at the end of January 2025. The BLVD depended on Mozilla for their funding, and Mozilla announced in September that they are shutting down their fediverse projects. In November the organisation already said that they were now operating without any funding. Any community member that is interested in taking over the maintainance of one of the projects can get in touch. Bart Decrem, the founder of BLVD, said to The Verge that sub.club had more than 150 creators on the platform.
Nomadic Identity
Nomadic Identity is a mechanism that allows people to have their fediverse identity to be separate from the fediverse platform that they are using, which results them in being able to seamlessly switch their fediverse account to a different platform. The mechanism has been available in fediverse software Streams for multiple years, but it uses the fediverse protocol Nomad. The Nomad protocol has undergone some renaming (orginally Zot) over the years. Recently a new documentation website was launched for the Nomad protocol, which gives some more background information. The site also published an article explaining the concepts of Nomadic Identity.
There has been a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for bringing Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub, and that proposal is now seeing it’s first implementation: fediverse software Mitra and Streams recently announced the first form of communications between them using the new nomadic implementation of ActivityPub. Account portability is a feature that is regularly used as an example of the valuable features that an open protocol such as ActivityPub enables, but using the actual implementation currently comes with frictions. Early adopters like the new product Weird are already thinking about offering Mitra as their fediverse platform of choice due to the new abilities that Nomadic Identity bring.
IFTAS needs assesment
IFTAS just published their Needs Assesments report, that gives a detailed overview of the state of moderation on the fediverse. They published this report just before I send out this article, but I want to include it because I think it’s important. So here are the key findings, in IFTAS’ own words:
Resource gaps – only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage, and nearly half of moderator teams lack formal guidance. That said, we see roughly one moderator for every 1,200 active accounts.
Top ranked priorities – moderators need tools for CSAM detection, spam prevention, and legal guidance for compliance with regulations like GDPR.
Burnout is a persistent issue – one in five moderators report experiencing trauma or burnout this year, underlining the need for wellness and resilience resources.
Financial struggles – most communities operate on donations, and overall our survey participants are not generating enough money to cover costs. Very few moderators are receiving any compensation for their labour.
The Links
Trunk & Tidbits for November 2024, Mastodon’s monthly engineering update.
Sharkey: a Fediverse project that is beautiful inside & out – Elena Rossini
How to Make Your First Loops Video – WeDistribute.
what people in the global majority need from networks – wreckage/salvage
A proposal for a working group for Integrating ActivityPub within Solid specs.
Event Bridge for ActivityPub: Upcoming 1.0 Release.
IFTAS December update.
Why Flipboard Looks to the Fediverse for Its Next Big Evolution – thelettertwo
Mastodon now gives server admins the possibility to opt-in to adding referrers to links. This allows other websites to see the traffic that a Mastodon server is sending.
Weekly fediverse software updates.
Alt Text Health Check image accessibility report #2.
Creating a generic “Log-in with Mastodon” service.
ActivityPub in Minecraft.
Loops ‘Unwrapped’ with some statistics about how Loops has been growing since launch.
Ghost’s weekly development update shares more about the reader client as well as their database design.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
#2 #fediverse
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-97/
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