#Tag
RDF/CBOR (https://openengiadina.codeberg.page/rdf-cbor/): Yet another RDF serialization.
But it has some new tricks:
- Optimized for small pieces of content (e.g. ActivityStreams objects)
- Allows content-addressing
It's designed for decentralized systems, passing around small pieces of RDF.
Fediverse Report – #137
AltStore, an alternative app store for iOS, is joining the fediverse. The store launched early last year as an alternative to Apple’s own App Store, thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. AltStore has been growing over the last year, and is now taking the next steps. AltStore is now connecting to the fediverse via their own Mastodon server. The integration that AltStore has build consists of every app on the store automatically also becoming a fediverse account, hosted on their AltStore Mastodon server. They explain: “Using ActivityPub, we plan to federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web. Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore.” For now, they are using the microblogging format (ActivityPub ‘Notes’), but AltStore plans to publish new native ActivityPub objects specifically for software releases, that can be used by other fediverse app market places.
The organisation also has raised 6M USD in VC funding for further development. They believe that the long-term success of the AltStore is tied closely to the success of the open social web, and they are donation 500k USD to various fediverse projects. AltStore is donating 300k USD to Mastodon, and the other 200k USD is split across various fediverse projects: the bridging software Bridgy Fed (which AltStore uses to also connect their store to Bluesky), the fediverse clients Ivory, Phoenix and Tapestry, the mastodon server mstn.social (as operator Stux is also a regular publisher to the AltStore), and the platforms Akkoma, PeerTube and Bookwyrm, as well as the Fedify ActivityPub software framework.
Recently I wrote about how the app stores are the most likely choke point that authoritarian governments will use to apply pressure to force open social web platforms into compliance. Alternative ways of distributing apps that fall outside of the control of two Big Tech platforms is a crucial part of keeping the open social web open. AltStore connecting their marketplace to the fediverse is a great step into taking back control from these two gatekeepers, although much more work remains to be done. Over on ATProto people are also experimenting with distributing apps and software packages via the protocol, and the space of app distribution via open protocols is primed for more experimentation and projects.
Mastodon has shared more information on their upcoming plans to introduce ‘Packs’ to Mastodon. The design is based on Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which is a list of accounts you can create and share for other people to easily follow. Mastodon is taking a careful approach to designing the feature, and is actively soliciting feedback from the community. The main change that Mastodon is making is in giving people control over if and when they can appear in a Pack, as well as giving people the ability to easily remove their account from a Pack if they so desire.
One of the pain points for Starter Packs on Bluesky is that people got included on Starter Packs with no easy way to remove them from the list. When the Starter Pack got popular, that resulted in an account getting lots of new followers, but in a way that collapsed the context of the account, resulting in conflict. One of the challenge points with Starter Packs is that the identity of an account does not always match with what they are actually posting about. For example, if someone has a PhD in philosophy and sometimes posts about that, they might get added to a philosophy Starter Pack. But in practice they might mostly post about US politics, or reposts anime, which creates a mismatch in expectation and friction between the original account and the new follower from a Starter Pack.
Bluesky’s Starter Pack have gotten a lot of praise for their effectiveness in onboarding entire communities at the same time during migration waves, when entire communities move from one platform to another all at once. This seems to be one of the major reasons for Mastodon to also adopt a similar feature with Packs. But for Bluesky, the feature has turned out to be a mixed bag, with the developer who created Starter Packs being decidedly mixed on the feature herself. She says that Starter Packs are indeed highly valuable during migration waves, but that in other times they are susceptible to abuse for engagement-hacking, as well as the context collapse earlier. Mastodon is taking a careful approach with their Pack feature, and they are actively engaging with the learnings from Bluesky, so it’ll be interesting to see how the feature will turn out in Mastodon.
You can soon transfer your social graph from Mastodon to Bluesky, with the new version of Bounce. Bounce is a tool by A New Social, the organisation behind the bridging software that connects various open social web protocol. With Bounce, you can move your account from one social networking protocol to another. The organisation earlier released a version which allows you to port your Bluesky account to the fediverse. With the new update, which will be available on October 20, you can now do the same in reverse: move from the fediverse to Bluesky.
The projects by A New Social, both Bounce and Bridgy Fed, represent an effort to give people more control over their own digital identity and social graph. Both ActivityPub and ATProto give people the option to move their account to a different platform on the same protocol. With tools like Bounce, this capability is enhanced even more, with the ability to move an account to a different protocol as well. For people more interested in moving from Bluesky to the fediverse, the tool Slurp now allows you to import your Bluesky posts into your fediverse account.
Fediverse podcasting platform Castopod now has a repository for plugins for the platform. With plugins people can customise their Castopod instance to their own needs. As anyone can create plugins, this allows for greater diversity in development of the software. Castopod also announced during this week’s Fediforum that there are now over 1000 podcasts using Castopod.
A pro-Russian propaganda network has targeted the fediverse and Bluesky, “promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations”, IFTAS reports. Their findings are based on the work of the antibot4navalny research team, which notes that the campaign makes use of the Bridgy Fed to get their accounts that impersonate news organisations into Bluesky.
The ActivityPub framework Fedify has gotten a 192K EUR grant by the Sovereign Tech Fund to further strenghten the ecosystem. The grant will be used for further development of the framework. Fedify is already in use by Ghost, and is also supported by Ghost.
Mastodon is soliciting feedback for their new Terms of Service for their mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers. The organisation originally proposed a new ToS in June, but retracted those after criticism from the community.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-137/
Fediverse Report – #137
AltStore, an alternative app store for iOS, is joining the fediverse. The store launched early last year as an alternative to Apple’s own App Store, thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act. AltStore has been growing over the last year, and is now taking the next steps. AltStore is now connecting to the fediverse via their own Mastodon server. The integration that AltStore has build consists of every app on the store automatically also becoming a fediverse account, hosted on their AltStore Mastodon server. They explain: “Using ActivityPub, we plan to federate apps, app updates, and news alerts from AltStore to the open social web. Each AltStore source will receive its own ActivityPub account, which can then be followed by any other open social web account. You’ll be able to like, boost, and reply to everything, and most importantly all these interactions will appear natively in AltStore.” For now, they are using the microblogging format (ActivityPub ‘Notes’), but AltStore plans to publish new native ActivityPub objects specifically for software releases, that can be used by other fediverse app market places.
The organisation also has raised 6M USD in VC funding for further development. They believe that the long-term success of the AltStore is tied closely to the success of the open social web, and they are donation 500k USD to various fediverse projects. AltStore is donating 300k USD to Mastodon, and the other 200k USD is split across various fediverse projects: the bridging software Bridgy Fed (which AltStore uses to also connect their store to Bluesky), the fediverse clients Ivory, Phoenix and Tapestry, the mastodon server mstn.social (as operator Stux is also a regular publisher to the AltStore), and the platforms Akkoma, PeerTube and Bookwyrm, as well as the Fedify ActivityPub software framework.
Recently I wrote about how the app stores are the most likely choke point that authoritarian governments will use to apply pressure to force open social web platforms into compliance. Alternative ways of distributing apps that fall outside of the control of two Big Tech platforms is a crucial part of keeping the open social web open. AltStore connecting their marketplace to the fediverse is a great step into taking back control from these two gatekeepers, although much more work remains to be done. Over on ATProto people are also experimenting with distributing apps and software packages via the protocol, and the space of app distribution via open protocols is primed for more experimentation and projects.
Mastodon has shared more information on their upcoming plans to introduce ‘Packs’ to Mastodon. The design is based on Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which is a list of accounts you can create and share for other people to easily follow. Mastodon is taking a careful approach to designing the feature, and is actively soliciting feedback from the community. The main change that Mastodon is making is in giving people control over if and when they can appear in a Pack, as well as giving people the ability to easily remove their account from a Pack if they so desire.
One of the pain points for Starter Packs on Bluesky is that people got included on Starter Packs with no easy way to remove them from the list. When the Starter Pack got popular, that resulted in an account getting lots of new followers, but in a way that collapsed the context of the account, resulting in conflict. One of the challenge points with Starter Packs is that the identity of an account does not always match with what they are actually posting about. For example, if someone has a PhD in philosophy and sometimes posts about that, they might get added to a philosophy Starter Pack. But in practice they might mostly post about US politics, or reposts anime, which creates a mismatch in expectation and friction between the original account and the new follower from a Starter Pack.
Bluesky’s Starter Pack have gotten a lot of praise for their effectiveness in onboarding entire communities at the same time during migration waves, when entire communities move from one platform to another all at once. This seems to be one of the major reasons for Mastodon to also adopt a similar feature with Packs. But for Bluesky, the feature has turned out to be a mixed bag, with the developer who created Starter Packs being decidedly mixed on the feature herself. She says that Starter Packs are indeed highly valuable during migration waves, but that in other times they are susceptible to abuse for engagement-hacking, as well as the context collapse earlier. Mastodon is taking a careful approach with their Pack feature, and they are actively engaging with the learnings from Bluesky, so it’ll be interesting to see how the feature will turn out in Mastodon.
You can soon transfer your social graph from Mastodon to Bluesky, with the new version of Bounce. Bounce is a tool by A New Social, the organisation behind the bridging software that connects various open social web protocol. With Bounce, you can move your account from one social networking protocol to another. The organisation earlier released a version which allows you to port your Bluesky account to the fediverse. With the new update, which will be available on October 20, you can now do the same in reverse: move from the fediverse to Bluesky.
The projects by A New Social, both Bounce and Bridgy Fed, represent an effort to give people more control over their own digital identity and social graph. Both ActivityPub and ATProto give people the option to move their account to a different platform on the same protocol. With tools like Bounce, this capability is enhanced even more, with the ability to move an account to a different protocol as well. For people more interested in moving from Bluesky to the fediverse, the tool Slurp now allows you to import your Bluesky posts into your fediverse account.
Fediverse podcasting platform Castopod now has a repository for plugins for the platform. With plugins people can customise their Castopod instance to their own needs. As anyone can create plugins, this allows for greater diversity in development of the software. Castopod also announced during this week’s Fediforum that there are now over 1000 podcasts using Castopod.
A pro-Russian propaganda network has targeted the fediverse and Bluesky, “promoting pro-Russian narratives and linking to Telegram channels associated with known state-aligned disinformation operations”, IFTAS reports. Their findings are based on the work of the antibot4navalny research team, which notes that the campaign makes use of the Bridgy Fed to get their accounts that impersonate news organisations into Bluesky.
The ActivityPub framework Fedify has gotten a 192K EUR grant by the Sovereign Tech Fund to further strenghten the ecosystem. The grant will be used for further development of the framework. Fedify is already in use by Ghost, and is also supported by Ghost.
Mastodon is soliciting feedback for their new Terms of Service for their mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers. The organisation originally proposed a new ToS in June, but retracted those after criticism from the community.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-137/
Fediverse Report – #136
Newsmast, the UK organisation that helps news organisations create their own social media places on the fediverse, has taken a new direction. In a blog post founder Michael Foster describes how news organisations do not gel well with the original approach of either Mastodon servers or the channel.org communities. The finding of Newsmast is that this is too confusing and tech-centric for news organisations to really grasp. Instead, Newsmast is now going in the direction of apps, as “independent news publishers and campaigning organisations love the idea of having an app.” The product offering is that Newsmast creates a white-label of an app that uses their (fediverse-enabled) backend, which the news organisation can theme and customise to their needs. This gives news organisations an app, which is what they want and conceptually relate to, while also giving them a community that can connect to the wider open social web if they want to. Newsmast has already rolled out one of such apps, for the Media Revolution campaign. Foster says that they are about to start working with a UK-based Fediverse community for another such project, where the Newsmast white-label app will be used to create a customised app for the community.
A new paper by Christina Dunbar-Hester about her experiences dealing with targeted harrassment on Mastodon, describing what some of the moderation practices in a decentralised system actually looks like. She writes: “As currently configured, Mastodon values noncentralization, but it stops short of rewriting power relations to encodeheterogeneity (Suchman, 2002). FLOSS universalism and FLOSS relations of domination pervade both the user base and many (certainly not all) “power users” who assume control of and take responsibility for many of the parts of the network through moderationand administration roles.” The entire paper is worth reading, Dunbar-Hester concludes: “a possibility for a more accountable decentralized social media network might resemble Mastodon, but prioritize intentional, self-organized choices about equitable online sociality that foreground social power”.
ActivityPub Fuzzer is a new tool to help ActivityPub developers test their interoperability with other fediverse projects. Fuzzer is a program that runs locally, and emulates how other fediverse projects structure their messages. This allows a developer to test interoperability against a large array of fediverse platforms. The open nature of ActivityPub makes it so that interoperability between platforms is trickier than it might be assumed, with various platforms all having their slightly different interpretations of the protocol. Fuzzer is created by Darius Kazemi at the Applied Social Media Lab.
IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust And Safety organisation has announced they are shutting down the IFTAS Connect community at the end of the month. The IFTAS Connected community was a place for fediverse moderators to come together and have conversations about moderation, share resources and more. IFTAS also runs their yearly moderator Needs Assessment survey, and one of the consistent findings is that fediverse moderators often struggle with guidance, toolings and burnout. Such a community was meant as a place for moderators to connect with each other and help towards those issues. However, IFTAS found that after 18 months of operating the place, usage remained low. It indicates one of the persistent challenges for fediverse moderation: moderation is largely done by each server independently, with little cooperation between communities which have a lot in common. There is a large potential in the fediverse for collaboration between communities, but making this collaboration happen has proven to be challenging.
WordPress is continuing towards becoming a full fediverse platform with their ActivityPub plugin. The latest update of the plugin now supports following a ‘reader timeline’, showing all the posts of accounts you follow from your WordPress account. There is now also support for Mastodon’s new quote posting feature, allowing you to quote post the WordPress post from Mastodon.
Matthias Pfefferle, developer of the WordPress ActivityPub integration, also talked on his podcast to Dave Weiner, creator of the RSS standard, about WordPress, textcasting and open web standards.
Bandwagon, the fediverse platform for music sharing, discovery and sales, shares their updates of the last few months, with various improvements to the platform across the board. Developer Ben Pate says that the next big priority is to add account migration. Elsewhere in fediverse music, a blog post on how to revive indie music videos on the fediverse.
A selection of tools for Lemmy, which gives you the option to view trends, threadiverse statistics, a leaderboard of most active users, stats on individual users, and more.
Fediverse advocate Elena Rossini has published an extensive fediverse starter guide. The guide explains what the fediverse is (via her excellent video), the various types of software that are available, the values of the fediverse, and why it matters. It is these last two points I think are noteworthy: the fediverse is inherently a political project, and it is important to understand the values of the network as a context of why the network exists and why people care about it.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-136-2/
Fediverse Report – #136
Newsmast, the UK organisation that helps news organisations create their own social media places on the fediverse, has taken a new direction. In a blog post founder Michael Foster describes how news organisations do not gel well with the original approach of either Mastodon servers or the channel.org communities. The finding of Newsmast is that this is too confusing and tech-centric for news organisations to really grasp. Instead, Newsmast is now going in the direction of apps, as “independent news publishers and campaigning organisations love the idea of having an app.” The product offering is that Newsmast creates a white-label of an app that uses their (fediverse-enabled) backend, which the news organisation can theme and customise to their needs. This gives news organisations an app, which is what they want and conceptually relate to, while also giving them a community that can connect to the wider open social web if they want to. Newsmast has already rolled out one of such apps, for the Media Revolution campaign. Foster says that they are about to start working with a UK-based Fediverse community for another such project, where the Newsmast white-label app will be used to create a customised app for the community.
A new paper by Christina Dunbar-Hester about her experiences dealing with targeted harrassment on Mastodon, describing what some of the moderation practices in a decentralised system actually looks like. She writes: “As currently configured, Mastodon values noncentralization, but it stops short of rewriting power relations to encodeheterogeneity (Suchman, 2002). FLOSS universalism and FLOSS relations of domination pervade both the user base and many (certainly not all) “power users” who assume control of and take responsibility for many of the parts of the network through moderationand administration roles.” The entire paper is worth reading, Dunbar-Hester concludes: “a possibility for a more accountable decentralized social media network might resemble Mastodon, but prioritize intentional, self-organized choices about equitable online sociality that foreground social power”.
ActivityPub Fuzzer is a new tool to help ActivityPub developers test their interoperability with other fediverse projects. Fuzzer is a program that runs locally, and emulates how other fediverse projects structure their messages. This allows a developer to test interoperability against a large array of fediverse platforms. The open nature of ActivityPub makes it so that interoperability between platforms is trickier than it might be assumed, with various platforms all having their slightly different interpretations of the protocol. Fuzzer is created by Darius Kazemi at the Applied Social Media Lab.
IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust And Safety organisation has announced they are shutting down the IFTAS Connect community at the end of the month. The IFTAS Connected community was a place for fediverse moderators to come together and have conversations about moderation, share resources and more. IFTAS also runs their yearly moderator Needs Assessment survey, and one of the consistent findings is that fediverse moderators often struggle with guidance, toolings and burnout. Such a community was meant as a place for moderators to connect with each other and help towards those issues. However, IFTAS found that after 18 months of operating the place, usage remained low. It indicates one of the persistent challenges for fediverse moderation: moderation is largely done by each server independently, with little cooperation between communities which have a lot in common. There is a large potential in the fediverse for collaboration between communities, but making this collaboration happen has proven to be challenging.
WordPress is continuing towards becoming a full fediverse platform with their ActivityPub plugin. The latest update of the plugin now supports following a ‘reader timeline’, showing all the posts of accounts you follow from your WordPress account. There is now also support for Mastodon’s new quote posting feature, allowing you to quote post the WordPress post from Mastodon.
Matthias Pfefferle, developer of the WordPress ActivityPub integration, also talked on his podcast to Dave Weiner, creator of the RSS standard, about WordPress, textcasting and open web standards.
Bandwagon, the fediverse platform for music sharing, discovery and sales, shares their updates of the last few months, with various improvements to the platform across the board. Developer Ben Pate says that the next big priority is to add account migration. Elsewhere in fediverse music, a blog post on how to revive indie music videos on the fediverse.
A selection of tools for Lemmy, which gives you the option to view trends, threadiverse statistics, a leaderboard of most active users, stats on individual users, and more.
Fediverse advocate Elena Rossini has published an extensive fediverse starter guide. The guide explains what the fediverse is (via her excellent video), the various types of software that are available, the values of the fediverse, and why it matters. It is these last two points I think are noteworthy: the fediverse is inherently a political project, and it is important to understand the values of the network as a context of why the network exists and why people care about it.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-136-2/
Guile Hoot IDE. My grant proposal for #nlnet, I didn't have much time to prepare it carefully this year, but I guess the primary ideas should be clear.
@cwebber, @dthompson, @wingo how it looks? :)
Guile Hoot IDE. My grant proposal for #nlnet, I didn't have much time to prepare it carefully this year, but I guess the primary ideas should be clear.
@cwebber, @dthompson, @wingo how it looks? :)
After a lot of researching and thinking, I finally started coding reaction's (upcoming) plugin system!
It will permit to write custom stream, filter and action logic, in Rust.
It'll make use of stabby, a crate easing the definition of a stable ABI in Rust, thus permitting reaction and its plugins to be compiled separately, at different times.
Roadmap: https://blog.ppom.me/en-reaction-v2/#plugin-system
stabby: https://docs.rs/stabby/
#reactionrust #reaction #rust #plugin #stabby #nlnet
(1/n)
After a lot of researching and thinking, I finally started coding reaction's (upcoming) plugin system!
It will permit to write custom stream, filter and action logic, in Rust.
It'll make use of stabby, a crate easing the definition of a stable ABI in Rust, thus permitting reaction and its plugins to be compiled separately, at different times.
Roadmap: https://blog.ppom.me/en-reaction-v2/#plugin-system
stabby: https://docs.rs/stabby/
#reactionrust #reaction #rust #plugin #stabby #nlnet
(1/n)
I'm excited to announce that #Convo, my #XMPP messaging app for #KaiOS has received a grant from @nlnet, or, more specifically, @NGIZero! 🎉 🤸
https://nlnet.nl/project/Convo/
I can now turn what began as a quick project made in a providential three weeks of free time into an app that can...actually do basic things like add contacts 😅
More importantly, it'll make the open and standardised messaging protocol available to a mobile platform where few large players have dared to tread 👟
Next Sosyal is a new Turkish social media platform that is based on Mastodon. The platform has not enabled federation, and is thus not accessible from the fediverse. Next Sosyal is endorsed by Turkish ruling party AKP, and president Erdogan recently made his first post on the platform. Erdoğan quoted a poem from a prominent Turkish poet, and posted “Are you ready?”, with the hashtag “We’re starting,” along with emojis of the Turkish flag, the Earth and a rocket.
Next Sosyal is developed by Selçuk Bayraktar, who owns military drone company Baykar and is the son-in-law of President Erdogan. The platform is branded as a “local and national” alternative to global platforms such as X and Facebook. Bayraktar describes the platform as a safer and cleaner space for constructive dialogue free from trolling, disinformation and Western platform algorithms.
The Nordic Monitor news site further reports: “Several ministries and public entities now maintain official Next Sosyal profiles. Staff in these offices report that social media guidance increasingly favors the platform. Press releases, bulletins and announcements are expected to appear on Next before being shared on global platforms. Some officials say internal memos suggested de-emphasizing X and Instagram entirely. In addition, some major corporations have reportedly started opening accounts on Next out of fear of government pressure.”
Bayraktar claims that the app now has over 1 million users. Since Next Sosyal is a slight reskin of Mastodon, it means that the same API also works. API calls to Next Sosyal on August 22nd showed an exact user count of 850.000, and as of September 2 the API claims a total of 1.100.000 accounts. Registering on the app requires a Turkish phone number, making it difficult for me to verify these numbers by looking at timeline activity, but the exact roundness of these numbers does raise some suspicions for me.
The platform was originally released without any reference to Mastodon’s source code. Mastodon is released under the AGPL license, which means that you can use, modify and distribute the software freely, as long as you publish the code under the same AGPL license. After some requests from the Mastodon organisation, Next Sosyal is now compliant with this, and explicitly mentions that “NSocial is an open source Mastodon-based social media platform developed by TEKNOFEST entrepreneurs.” on their About page.
We live in a world where authoritarian rulers seem to have a better grasp of current social media dynamics than many democratic leaders have. Both Trump and Erdogan understand the value of building a social media platform where they have a direct connection with their supporters, and can control message distribution. That both leaders use Mastodon for this, while democratic leadership shows little interest in building out their own social media distribution platforms on the open social web is painful.
Last week I wrote about SocialHub, a forum to discuss ActivityPub, and how it fits into a larger understanding of the ‘substrate’ layer of the fediverse. One of the points I made is that the communication layer underneath the fediverse (meaning places to discuss and collaborate on ActivityPub, for example) is fairly decentralised. The positive effect is that this creates a distribution of power, nobody can control all the conversations that happen about ActivityPub. This also means that coordination is more difficult, as developers are spread out over multiple places. There has been quite some movement this week in this space of “what are the places to talk about ActivityPub”:
Fediverse software updates:
And some more links:
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-132/
The main subject of discourse and conversation on the open social web this week has been regarding a statement published in the repository of the Social Web Community Incubator Group. The open letter says: “This statement is a call for cooling the temperature of discussions and a reminder to be respectful of each other and the huge amount of work everyone is putting in to build a better open social web. We do not win by tearing each other down, which only emboldens and empowers those who do not want either protocol to succeed.” Tomorrow I’ll put out a separate article with my thoughts on the discourse, and how I’m thinking about decentralisation, collaboration and building a resilient open social web.
The government of Nepal has blocked the majority of social media sites in the country over the weekend, including Mastodon. Nepal’s government required all social media sites to register with the government, with a deadline of September 3rd. This included the biggest sites like Instagram, YouTube and X, but also smaller platforms such as Mastodon. Most sites did not comply, and as a result blocked access to the sites. This move caused massive protests in the country, with at least 19 people killed by the police. The government has lifted the social media ban today after the mass protests. That the government banned Mastodon affected at least the mastodon.social server. It looks to me like this was the only server that was affected by the ban, but I’ve not been able to confirm this. Any additional information would be appreciated. The move by the Nepalese government indicates that governments are willing to put pressures on decentralised social networks as well to force legal compliance. While decentralisation can counteract this to some extend, it also indicates that governments are able to cause significant disruption to the usage of decentralised network in their country. That the impact in this case was only (likely) limited to the mastodon.social server is more of an indication of the heavy-handed and unsophisticated approach of the Nepalese government to the entire situation. DNS blockages on, lets say, the top 1000 fediverse servers would have disrupted fediverse usage in Nepal to a significant extend, and a government that is willing to DNS block popular platforms like Facebook and YouTube should not be assumed to have a lot of qualms about DNS blockages of a thousand small fediverse servers either.
Governments are starting to more actively interfere with the social internet, and TechCrunch has a closer look at the expanding age verification laws. It mainly focuses on the US, as well as UK’s Online Safety Act, but other countries like Brazil are also working towards such laws. This already has impact on a popular Bluesky client, and has impact for fediverse servers in Brazil as well. TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez also wrote about how the Mastodon organisation is handling this changing environment, and the Mastodon organisation said in the statement that ” while Mastodon’s own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” to its services.”
A.gup.pe was a system that added groups functionality to the microblogging side of the fediverse. The a.gup.pe domain got sold to a new ownership, and the new owner used the domain for an SEO spam website. This disabled the group functionality, and suddenly made this system people were still using for groups unusable. This was possible due to the .pe domain registrar allowing the sale of the domain before a domain registration expires. The organisation behind a.gup.pe had formally ceased operation in the fall of last year, but the system was still operational and actively in use by people. The group system such as a.gup.pe functioned by having people subscribe to an account related to a certain topic. Other people could then tag this account in their posts, and these posts would get send out to everyone who followed the group account. This functioned as an upgraded version of following a hashtag; if you follow a hashtag you won’t see posts made on other servers if nobody on your server follows that account, which is a major issue for accounts on small fediverse servers. Other platforms like Friendica offer improved versions of such group functionality with additional moderation features, but the a.gup.pe system still saw usage due to inertia and network effects.
Short-form video platform Loops now has the full source code available, as part of the first alpha 1.0 release. Creator Daniel Supernault has advertised the platform as open source for a while now, but while there was a code base available, it was missing core features that prevented other people from running their own Loops server. While Loops uses ActivityPub, federation has not yet been enabled.
FediForum will hold a book tour event for Robert W. Gehl’s new book about the fediverse, ‘Move Slowly and Build Bridges’. In the book, Gehl “tells the story of activists, software developers, artists, and everyday people who have built the fediverse”. The event will be on Thursday, September 11, 2025, 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time (19:00-20:00 CEST). Attendance is free, and can be registered here.
A New Social, the organisation behind the Bridgy Fed software which connects various protocols on the open social web, shares more information about their funding situation. The organisation has been self-funded so far, with CTO Ryan Barrett fronting the cost of running Bridgy Fed, which amounts to 2000USD per month. The organisation has introduced a small tier Patreon subscription in order to entire regular Bridgy Fed users (which is used by over 110k accounts) to pay for their usage. A New Social notes how “Bridgy Fed was slowly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the open social web”, and this is why the organisation is working to create sustainable forms of governance for the infrastructure. WeDistribute also has a podcast episode out this week where they talk with the people from A New Social, Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett, about the organisation, their new tool Bounce, and the open social web more broadly.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is back on Mastodon after a long hiatus. The EDPS was the main driving organisation behind the EU Voice project, where between 2022 and 2024 it ran a Mastodon server for some 40 EU organisations. This project came to an end after the EDPS could not find an organisation within the EU that would want to take up ownership responsibilities for the project. This lead to a shutdown of the server and project, although the most popular account, that of the European Commission, continued their presence with their own Mastodon server. Now the EDPS can finally put their talking points of data privacy and sovereignty in practice again, by having a social media presence they have ownership of.
IFTAS is holding their annual Moderator Needs Assessment, a survey among moderators, admins and community organisers for the fediverse to better understand their needs and priorities. These surveys give a great insight in what moderation and trust&safety on a decentralised open network actually entails, and what some of the main issues are that moderators experience. For some additional insight in these surveys, the report of last years assessment finds that the fediverse has roughly one moderator for every 1200 active accounts, and that only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage.
A fun interview with the operator of the misskey.id fediverse server, one of the only public Indonesian fediverse servers. The fediverse has an active user base in Asia, mainly in Japan with people using Misskey. There is however little interaction between the Western user base of the fediverse and the Asian community, due to language barriers. This conversation with the Indonesian community provides a good insight in how communities around the world are building their own places on the fediverse.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-133/
The main subject of discourse and conversation on the open social web this week has been regarding a statement published in the repository of the Social Web Community Incubator Group. The open letter says: “This statement is a call for cooling the temperature of discussions and a reminder to be respectful of each other and the huge amount of work everyone is putting in to build a better open social web. We do not win by tearing each other down, which only emboldens and empowers those who do not want either protocol to succeed.” Tomorrow I’ll put out a separate article with my thoughts on the discourse, and how I’m thinking about decentralisation, collaboration and building a resilient open social web.
The government of Nepal has blocked the majority of social media sites in the country over the weekend, including Mastodon. Nepal’s government required all social media sites to register with the government, with a deadline of September 3rd. This included the biggest sites like Instagram, YouTube and X, but also smaller platforms such as Mastodon. Most sites did not comply, and as a result blocked access to the sites. This move caused massive protests in the country, with at least 19 people killed by the police. The government has lifted the social media ban today after the mass protests. That the government banned Mastodon affected at least the mastodon.social server. It looks to me like this was the only server that was affected by the ban, but I’ve not been able to confirm this. Any additional information would be appreciated. The move by the Nepalese government indicates that governments are willing to put pressures on decentralised social networks as well to force legal compliance. While decentralisation can counteract this to some extend, it also indicates that governments are able to cause significant disruption to the usage of decentralised network in their country. That the impact in this case was only (likely) limited to the mastodon.social server is more of an indication of the heavy-handed and unsophisticated approach of the Nepalese government to the entire situation. DNS blockages on, lets say, the top 1000 fediverse servers would have disrupted fediverse usage in Nepal to a significant extend, and a government that is willing to DNS block popular platforms like Facebook and YouTube should not be assumed to have a lot of qualms about DNS blockages of a thousand small fediverse servers either.
Governments are starting to more actively interfere with the social internet, and TechCrunch has a closer look at the expanding age verification laws. It mainly focuses on the US, as well as UK’s Online Safety Act, but other countries like Brazil are also working towards such laws. This already has impact on a popular Bluesky client, and has impact for fediverse servers in Brazil as well. TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez also wrote about how the Mastodon organisation is handling this changing environment, and the Mastodon organisation said in the statement that ” while Mastodon’s own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” to its services.”
A.gup.pe was a system that added groups functionality to the microblogging side of the fediverse. The a.gup.pe domain got sold to a new ownership, and the new owner used the domain for an SEO spam website. This disabled the group functionality, and suddenly made this system people were still using for groups unusable. This was possible due to the .pe domain registrar allowing the sale of the domain before a domain registration expires. The organisation behind a.gup.pe had formally ceased operation in the fall of last year, but the system was still operational and actively in use by people. The group system such as a.gup.pe functioned by having people subscribe to an account related to a certain topic. Other people could then tag this account in their posts, and these posts would get send out to everyone who followed the group account. This functioned as an upgraded version of following a hashtag; if you follow a hashtag you won’t see posts made on other servers if nobody on your server follows that account, which is a major issue for accounts on small fediverse servers. Other platforms like Friendica offer improved versions of such group functionality with additional moderation features, but the a.gup.pe system still saw usage due to inertia and network effects.
Short-form video platform Loops now has the full source code available, as part of the first alpha 1.0 release. Creator Daniel Supernault has advertised the platform as open source for a while now, but while there was a code base available, it was missing core features that prevented other people from running their own Loops server. While Loops uses ActivityPub, federation has not yet been enabled.
FediForum will hold a book tour event for Robert W. Gehl’s new book about the fediverse, ‘Move Slowly and Build Bridges’. In the book, Gehl “tells the story of activists, software developers, artists, and everyday people who have built the fediverse”. The event will be on Thursday, September 11, 2025, 10:00am-11:00am Pacific Time (19:00-20:00 CEST). Attendance is free, and can be registered here.
A New Social, the organisation behind the Bridgy Fed software which connects various protocols on the open social web, shares more information about their funding situation. The organisation has been self-funded so far, with CTO Ryan Barrett fronting the cost of running Bridgy Fed, which amounts to 2000USD per month. The organisation has introduced a small tier Patreon subscription in order to entire regular Bridgy Fed users (which is used by over 110k accounts) to pay for their usage. A New Social notes how “Bridgy Fed was slowly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the open social web”, and this is why the organisation is working to create sustainable forms of governance for the infrastructure. WeDistribute also has a podcast episode out this week where they talk with the people from A New Social, Anuj Ahooja and Ryan Barrett, about the organisation, their new tool Bounce, and the open social web more broadly.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is back on Mastodon after a long hiatus. The EDPS was the main driving organisation behind the EU Voice project, where between 2022 and 2024 it ran a Mastodon server for some 40 EU organisations. This project came to an end after the EDPS could not find an organisation within the EU that would want to take up ownership responsibilities for the project. This lead to a shutdown of the server and project, although the most popular account, that of the European Commission, continued their presence with their own Mastodon server. Now the EDPS can finally put their talking points of data privacy and sovereignty in practice again, by having a social media presence they have ownership of.
IFTAS is holding their annual Moderator Needs Assessment, a survey among moderators, admins and community organisers for the fediverse to better understand their needs and priorities. These surveys give a great insight in what moderation and trust&safety on a decentralised open network actually entails, and what some of the main issues are that moderators experience. For some additional insight in these surveys, the report of last years assessment finds that the fediverse has roughly one moderator for every 1200 active accounts, and that only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage.
A fun interview with the operator of the misskey.id fediverse server, one of the only public Indonesian fediverse servers. The fediverse has an active user base in Asia, mainly in Japan with people using Misskey. There is however little interaction between the Western user base of the fediverse and the Asian community, due to language barriers. This conversation with the Indonesian community provides a good insight in how communities around the world are building their own places on the fediverse.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-133/
Next Sosyal is a new Turkish social media platform that is based on Mastodon. The platform has not enabled federation, and is thus not accessible from the fediverse. Next Sosyal is endorsed by Turkish ruling party AKP, and president Erdogan recently made his first post on the platform. Erdoğan quoted a poem from a prominent Turkish poet, and posted “Are you ready?”, with the hashtag “We’re starting,” along with emojis of the Turkish flag, the Earth and a rocket.
Next Sosyal is developed by Selçuk Bayraktar, who owns military drone company Baykar and is the son-in-law of President Erdogan. The platform is branded as a “local and national” alternative to global platforms such as X and Facebook. Bayraktar describes the platform as a safer and cleaner space for constructive dialogue free from trolling, disinformation and Western platform algorithms.
The Nordic Monitor news site further reports: “Several ministries and public entities now maintain official Next Sosyal profiles. Staff in these offices report that social media guidance increasingly favors the platform. Press releases, bulletins and announcements are expected to appear on Next before being shared on global platforms. Some officials say internal memos suggested de-emphasizing X and Instagram entirely. In addition, some major corporations have reportedly started opening accounts on Next out of fear of government pressure.”
Bayraktar claims that the app now has over 1 million users. Since Next Sosyal is a slight reskin of Mastodon, it means that the same API also works. API calls to Next Sosyal on August 22nd showed an exact user count of 850.000, and as of September 2 the API claims a total of 1.100.000 accounts. Registering on the app requires a Turkish phone number, making it difficult for me to verify these numbers by looking at timeline activity, but the exact roundness of these numbers does raise some suspicions for me.
The platform was originally released without any reference to Mastodon’s source code. Mastodon is released under the AGPL license, which means that you can use, modify and distribute the software freely, as long as you publish the code under the same AGPL license. After some requests from the Mastodon organisation, Next Sosyal is now compliant with this, and explicitly mentions that “NSocial is an open source Mastodon-based social media platform developed by TEKNOFEST entrepreneurs.” on their About page.
We live in a world where authoritarian rulers seem to have a better grasp of current social media dynamics than many democratic leaders have. Both Trump and Erdogan understand the value of building a social media platform where they have a direct connection with their supporters, and can control message distribution. That both leaders use Mastodon for this, while democratic leadership shows little interest in building out their own social media distribution platforms on the open social web is painful.
Last week I wrote about SocialHub, a forum to discuss ActivityPub, and how it fits into a larger understanding of the ‘substrate’ layer of the fediverse. One of the points I made is that the communication layer underneath the fediverse (meaning places to discuss and collaborate on ActivityPub, for example) is fairly decentralised. The positive effect is that this creates a distribution of power, nobody can control all the conversations that happen about ActivityPub. This also means that coordination is more difficult, as developers are spread out over multiple places. There has been quite some movement this week in this space of “what are the places to talk about ActivityPub”:
Fediverse software updates:
And some more links:
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-132/
SocialHub is one of the primary forum where fediverse developers can talk about ActivityPub, how to implement the protocol, and have conversations about how the technical interoperability can be improved with Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. The forum has been searching for new ownership, but making decisions on how to move forward has been challening. Most developers aren’t interested in taking responsibility of community management, while the current admin will only hand over control to a team of people who can not only do the technical administration but can also manage the community. There is also no shared vision for what SocialHub should become, and multiple developers openly wonder if it is even worth it to continue with the forum. Most crucially, nobody has clear authority to make final decisions, making it incredible hard to move past the phase of ‘making a forum post with some ideas and suggestions’.
One of the core challenges with building a decentralised network is that decentralisation is about building alternative power structures, where no single actor has control over the entire network. But power is hard to diffuse: when you build a system that spreads out power, from one control point to many nodes, often this means that new places of gatekeeping and centralisation pop up. The result is often a kind of governance vacuum where important decisions get stuck in endless discussion loops, or where informal power structures emerge that aren’t accountable to the broader community.
Building a decentralised network like the fediverse thus means not only building a social network that spreads out over many different nodes, but also building an infrastructure for the network to run on that is itself decentralised. What’s happening to SocialHub is symptomatic of this broader tension, where these decentralised systems promise to distribute power, but they still need coordination mechanisms to function.
In an essay titled The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization, tech writer Byrne Hobart wrote about decentralised networks, and how one of their paradoxes is that they require centralised substrates. One quote from the article regularly pops up, where Hobart writes: “Any decentralized order requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
With this, Hobart means that decentralised systems require a shared agreement on how to communicate with the system, usually via a set of agreed-upon protocols. For a decentralised system to work well, people have to agree to a single method of interaction. The internet cannot function if every website implements their own incompatible version of HTTPS, for example.
This leads Hobart to the observation that open networks are prone to being captured by companies that figure out an onramp to the network, writing: “these onramps are built on an open system, but part of their function is to close off some of it. And the better they do that, the more value they can capture.” Twitter and Facebook, but also crypto companies like Coinbase are examples for Hobart of this dynamic.
He writes: “This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a ‘decentralization sandwich,’ where there’s a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of that, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?”
On a surface-level reading, it feels straightforward enough: the fediverse is a decentralised network, and its technical function depends on the ActivityPub protocol. You can view the ActivityPub protocol as the centralised substrate to the decentralised network.
But when you start looking more closely, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated.
When you start looking more closely at how the fediverse operates in practice, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated than Hobart’s centralised substrate theory suggests. Rather than a single protocol that serves as the foundation for a decentralised network, there is fragmentation at multiple levels. Moreover, the more this network pushes towards decentralisation, the more fragmented it becomes.
On a protocol level, there is no singular ActivityPub. The ActivityPub protocol as maintained by the W3C is the official canon version of the protocol, but most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API. This means that the ‘centralised’ substrate is already fragmented in practice. While it is possible to make a case that developer adoption would go smoother if ActivityPub implementations were more standardised, the current fragmentation is a result of the network consisting of independent actors that coordinate with each other only to a limited extend.
Quote posts provide a concrete example of how this fragmentation plays out in practice. There are multiple different ways to implement quote posts. Misskey notably has a different method than the method that Mastodon is now using to implement quote posts. When Threads decided to implement quote posts, they decided on supporting both implementation methods for quote posts. This would seem like a good example of the value of a centralised substrate to a decentralised network: things would go smoother if everyone had agreed upon a singular implementation method of quote posts. So when a new fediverse platform that wants to be fully interoperable with other platforms would only have to implement one method, and know exactly in advance which one to use. But the reality shows that even basic features resist standardisation.
What the fediverse shows is that a decentralised network tends to split up into multiple different subnetworks. These networks themselves are also decentralised, and while technically part of the larger fediverse supernetwork, they are often quite separated. For example: The collection of Misskey servers are largely catering towards the Japanese audience. They are technically interoperable with the ‘Threadiverse’, a set of link-aggregator platforms (Reddit-likes, basically), but in practice interoperability and connections between these two sub-networks of the fediverse is negligible. Streaming software Owncast is seen as part of the fediverse, but the ActivityPub-enabled interactions between Owncast streamers and the Mastodon-verse are arguably even more limited.
What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree, such as Hubzilla’s Nomad protocol. And if we expand our perspective to look at the open social web as a set of decentralised social networks that are all interoperable with each other, we see even more protocols, such as ATProto and Nostr. At this level, the idea of a single centralised substrate becomes even more tenuous.
So what this means is that the more decentralised a network becomes, the network tends to split into subnetworks, where each cluster of this supernetwork becomes more distinct from each other. Interoperability and connections between these clusters is possible and happens occasionally, but for social and cultural reasons can be fairly limited.
From a technical perspective, Hobarts claim that “the more the decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system” turns out to be recursive: the more decentralised approach means that networks start to fragment into subnetworks, each with slightly different technological substrates, and it becomes more important that you can count of the underlying substrate of the subnetwork.
Hobart’s centralised substrate theory assumes that decentralised networks require centralised governance of their foundational protocols. But examining how the fediverse actually governs itself reveals multiple, overlapping authority structures that challenge this assumption. Rather than a single centralised point of control, there are competing forms of governance, spread out over multiple places and communities.
The W3C, the organisation that governs ActivityPub, usually focuses on protocol governance via W3C members, where these members are often required to be organisations. This represents the closest thing to Hobart’s “centralised substrate” – a formal institution with official authority over the protocol specification.
The SocialHub forum is one of the main places for structured long-form communications about ActivityPub. It is also the main place for conversations about Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP). A FEP is a document that gives structured information about ActivityPub and the fediverse, with the goal of improving interoperability and well-being of fediverse applications. Anyone can submit a FEP, and conversations about them on places like SocialHub is how they get legitimacy and buy-in for other projects to implement the proposals.
The grassroots system of the FEPs, in which the SocialHub plays a major part, shows that a single protocol can be used in a manner that is highly decentralized: there is no central authority that can mandate implementation of FEPs, yet they gain legitimacy through community discussion and voluntary adoption.
Conversations about ActivityPub and the fediverse are spread out fairly wide, over a variety of places on the network. Some of the notable places for conversation are the SocialHub forum and the Fedidev matrix channel. The SocialCG of the W3C has various places for discussion, including an email list, GitHub discussion boards and regular meetings. Other places include discussions on microblogging feeds, various (semi)private chat groups and Lemmy communities. Notably, each of these places for conversation only has a small subset of fediverse developers that are participating, and developers are spread out over all these places. This indicates that the ‘social substrate’ of the fediverse development is decentralised as well, there is no single place that owns or controls the conversations about protocol development.
Hobart is not the only one who has thought and written about how decentralised networks relate to the (potentially centralised) governance of the protocols that powers them, as well as how they are vulnerable to capture. But Hobart’s alignment with the tech-right political wing makes his writing relevant to me, specifically because I strongly disagree with his political views, and the people he aligns himself with. Understanding why this thesis appeals to certain political actors helps makes it all the more important to challenge this way of thinking.
Hobart is a techno-optimist, and his mode of thinking is illustrative of a wider thinking on technology and culture in Silicon Valley. His latest book, on why bubbles are actually good, got a foreword by Peter Thiel. This connection is not incidental, as Hobart represents a particular worldview about how technology, power, and governance should intersect.
Thiel fits well with the line of thinking of Hobart, both on the wider points of techno-optimism, as well as on the aformentioned quote, that decentralised networks require a centralised substrate. Thiel’s beliefs can be understood as techno-feudalism, where he wants to move power away from the political domain to domain of corporate tech, where power is held by a few corporate elites, not by a democracy. Decentralised networks in itself are an antithesis to the worldview of Thiel’s authoritarianism. The decentralisation of a network means divesting power away from the few corporate elites, and spreading it out over many individuals instead.
The line of thinking that decentralised networks often have a centralised substrate, and are vulnerable to being captured by building closed systems on top of the open systems, can be read as either a warning or as an instruction manual. And for noted democracy-hater Peter Thiel, whom Hobart seems to align himself with, it is much more likely that Thiel views this as an instruction manual on how to deal with open and decentralised systems.
The idea that a decentralised network still can have a single central point, namely the technological substrate that powers the network, is thus an attractive idea to an authoritarian figure. You might not be able to control a decentralised network directly, but by controlling or influencing the protocol that powers it, a chokepoint arises that the authoritarian feudalist overlord can leverage to extract rent.
Meta’s approach to the fediverse demonstrates the substrate capture strategy in action. By joining ActivityPub governance discussions while simultaneously building Threads as a massive onramp to the network, Meta places itself into a position to influence both the protocol, as well as to function as a primary gateway to the network. This follows the format of the “decentralization sandwich” that Hobart describes. Their sponsorship of the Social Web Foundation further embeds them in the governance substrate of the fediverse network.
In this context, Hobart’s quote takes on a new meaning. Hobart’s message resonates with the people and organisations who are building today’s social networks of extraction. They have built social networks where they are the gatekeepers, and with their gatekeeping power they have become richer than god. While decentralised networks might pose a threat to centralised networks, promising to take their gatekeeping power away, Hobart’s description points to a new place where they can extract rent. This is why it matters to understand how decentralised networks function matters: it also indicates that the substrates of decentralised network can be decentralised, and points to ways how corporate capture can be resisted.
Hobart’s statement that decentralised systems depend on centralised substrate makes it appealing to authoritarians, since it provides a guidebook on how to gain forms of centralised control over decentralised systems. But while the idea seems to fit well with a surface-level analysis, a closer look at how the fediverse operates in practice also shows that the substrate of the network is, and has the potential to be, a lot more decentralised than first might be assumed.
From a technological side, the assumption of ‘the fediverse is the decentralised network’, with ‘ActivityPub being the centralised substrate’ turns out to be a whole lot more complicated in practice. What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree. The ActivityPub protocol also turns out to contain multiple sub-protocols: most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API.
On the social side, ‘decentralisation’ is both a technical description of a network architecture, as well as a more general description of the distribution of authority in a network. The grassroots system of the FEPs shows that a single protocol can be worked on in a manner that is highly decentralised.
This intertwining of technical and social decentralisation reveals why Hobart’s thinking on decentralisation and substrate s fails to capture the reality of how these networks actually operate in practice. At the same time, Hobart’s thinking does provide a good way of understanding how authoritarian-minded people and organisations might approach decentralised systems, and how they think about capturing and controlling such networks. It is this dual combination that makes Hobart’s thinking interesting to me, specifically because I disagree with it on multiple levels.
As for the SocialHub: after a period of uncertainty, Pavilion, the organisation that also build the Discourse plugin which connects the forum software to the fediverse over ActivityPub, will become the new admins of the community.
https://connectedplaces.online/socialhub-and-the-substrate-of-decentralised-networks/
A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
