Fediverse Report – #144

The News

The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.

WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.

Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.

I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.

FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The Fireside Fedi show talks with Ryan Barrett and Anuj Ahooja from A New Social and Bridgy Fed.
• The WordPress-focused podcast The PublishPress talks with Evan Prodromou about how the fediverse and WordPress can be better connected.
• Owncast Newsletter November 2025.
• Mastodon has some new merch in store.
• Mastodon partners with WE AID to offer donors tax-deductible contributions in Germany.
• A demonstration of Emissary’s upcoming data migration tool using the LOLA data portability spec.
• Loops has published a roadmap of their planned and in-progress features.
• Bridgy Fed now has expanding blocking capabilities.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/fediverse-report-144/

Fediverse Report – #144

The News

The Bristol Cable has launched a mobile app that bundles their journalism with the fediverse in a single app. It’s built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation and available to members from £1/month. While their journalistic articles remain free, The Bristol Cable sees the social fediverse integration as the premium additonal option. The app consists of three layers: a home screen with news articles by the Bristol Cable, a dedicated member space for connecting with journalists and other supporters, and curated channels that pull in content on themes like climate change, linking Bristol’s local work to wider discussions. The app functions as a fediverse server, with the dedicated member space functioning as a local-only posting place, and the curated channels as a way to connect with the rest of the fediverse network, via Newsmasts’ channel.org network.

WebSocialBR is the first fediverse event that will be held in Brazil, on December 3rd in Brasília. The event wants to “bring together community administrators, managers, parliamentarians, researchers, and communicators to exchange experiences and strengthen decentralized networks in the country”. The event draws backing from Brazil’s Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and FediForum. ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou and FediForum co-founder Johannes Ernst will participate virtually. WebSocialBR is organisated by Alquimídia, who has been coordinating Brazilian instances on age-restriction legislation and pushing for a “.social.br” domain category for federated networks.

Bonfire talks more about their platform and crowdfunding, by writing about their Mutal Aid stretch goal for the project. Bonfire also talks more about what the project is, and how it is “plural by design”. The opening sentence points is a clear statement by the project: “Bonfire is difficult to pin down with a single definition, and that’s a feature, not a bug.” The article then lists various features of the project, such as how it’s extensible, and that it’s a framework for building community platforms. Bonfire even quotes some people saying that they’re interested in the project, but find it confusing as to what it actually is. Bonfire has chosen for the approach that they do not want to run a flagship server for Bonfire Social. That however is now leading to the situation where there are no people running a Bonfire server in production for a community yet, making it hard to demonstrate in practice what Bonfire Social actually looks like. This poses a challenge for their crowdfunding effort. When potential backers try to understand what they’re funding, they encounter a platform that exists primarily as possibility rather than demonstration. The project’s own article quotes would-be supporters expressing this confusion directly: “I do wish they could get a little better at communicating what exactly their project is though, it took a hot minute, reading, and also asking folks on lemmy to try and figure out kinda-sorta-vaguely what they’re building…” Another notes, “I wish them the best, but I think they really need to work on their sales pitch. It’s hard to tell what it is.”Without a clear accessible demonstration of how Bonfire can operate in practice, it is a hard pitch to ask backers to fund an abstract framework based on its potential applications.

I usually don’t write about Threads, but this caught my eye: The latest PewResearch study on social media usage by Americans find that 8% of adult Americans have ever used Threads. This is in contrast with 21% of adults for X, and 4% for Bluesky, with Mastodon not measured. Meanwhile, Threads claimed a few months ago to have over 400M monthly active users, and another study from this summer found that Threads and X have almost the same number of daily app users (115M vs 130M). I’m really not sure what’s going on with these numbers: 8% of American adults is around 21M people who say they have ever used Threads. This leaves at least 380M monthly active users that are not in the US, but it is unclear where they are located. It seems that Europe also does not have a large number of Threads users, as the app launched much later on the continent. The most likely explanation seems to me that Threads aggressively counts people who use Instagram and get shown a Threads post on Instagram as a user of Threads, which would go a long way towards explaining both why the user numbers for Threads are so large while also explaining why so few people actually know about Threads.

FOSDEM has the Social Web Devroom about ActivityPub, hosted by the Social Web Foundation, and the deadline to submit talks is December 1st. There is still space for more talks to be hosted, so consider submitting a talk if you’re going to FOSDEM!

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• The Fireside Fedi show talks with Ryan Barrett and Anuj Ahooja from A New Social and Bridgy Fed.
• The WordPress-focused podcast The PublishPress talks with Evan Prodromou about how the fediverse and WordPress can be better connected.
• Owncast Newsletter November 2025.
• Mastodon has some new merch in store.
• Mastodon partners with WE AID to offer donors tax-deductible contributions in Germany.
• A demonstration of Emissary’s upcoming data migration tool using the LOLA data portability spec.
• Loops has published a roadmap of their planned and in-progress features.
• Bridgy Fed now has expanding blocking capabilities.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/fediverse-report-144/

Fediverse Report – #143

I’ve just gotten back from the Eurosky conference in Berlin this week, and it was great to meet so many people working on the open social web. As a reflection on that, I wrote here about building on open protocols creates new challenges for governance. This week’s fediverse news ties right in to that. I’m still tired from all the talking and writing, so next week I’ll catch up to the rest of this week’s news again.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko steps down

Mastodon’s long-time CEO and founder Eugen Rochko stepping down, after the organisation had announced back in January 2025 that the organisation would be transitioning both its legal and organisational structure. Now, the leadership team of Mastodon consists of:

• Felix Hlatky as Executive Director. Hlatky has been working on Mastodon for over 5 years, initially in the evenings alongside a full-time job, and was the driving force behind incorporating the German non-profit. He has been working for Mastodon on the fundraising and financial side, and was the CFO for Mastodon before now becoming the Executive Director. Mastodon says his priorities are on making server operations more efficient, growing the Mastodon team, and keeping the organisation financially sustainable.
• Hannah Aubry as Community Director. Aubry joined the Board of Directors of Mastodon in early 2025, and the switch in organisational structure now puts her in the Community Director role full time. Aubry will be involved with growing the Mastodon community and overseeing the trust and safety programmes.
• Renaud Chaput as Technical Director. Chaput has been the CTO over the last few years, and he has grown the engineering team to 9 people in that period.

Eugen Rochko stays within the extended leadership team as Strategy & Product Advisor, together with Andy Piper as Head of Communications, and Philip as Chief of Staff. Rochko says the restructuring was prompted by the stress of leading a social media project, and that he feels that he does not “have the right personality for it”. He describes that these negative interactions chip away at you, ranging from being compared to the tech billionaires but with none of the money or resources, to the challenging interactions with the user base. A particularly difficult interaction with a user last summer was the catalyst for stepping back. Rochko acknowledges that ‘there are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities,’ and the restructuring provides better guardrails to ensure Mastodon stays true to its values. Rochko is staying involved because of his passion for the project, calling the fediverse ‘an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape’ and saying Mastodon is ‘our best shot at bringing this vision of a better future to the masses.

Mastodon is also transitioning into a Belgium non-profit entity as the future home of the Mastodon organisation. The current Mastodon organisation is in Germany as the Mastodon gGmbH entity. This organisation automatically become a for-profit organisation after its charitable status were stripped away. The new Belgium entity (an AISLB) allows Mastodon to become a non-profit organisation again. The organisation does not know yet when exactly the transfer to this new Belgium entity will happen. Meanwhile, Mastodon will also continue to operate an US-based 501(c)(3), as a “strategic overlay and fundraising hub”.

Another important change is that the Mastodon organisation now owns the Mastodon brand and assets, which used to be owned by Rochko. The organisation has attracted various larger donations, with Mastodon listing Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark. These donations are partially used to fund acquisition of the Mastodon brand and assets from Rochko. Rochko is receiving a one-time compensation of EUR 1M for transferring the Mastodon brand trademark and assets to the organisation, which also compensates him for 10 years of work on the project at a below-market rate. Hlatky noted that Rochko turned down earlier acquisition offers worth more than 10 times this amount to keep Mastodon as a non-profit and open-source project. Mastodon says that individual community donations, which amounted to EUR 337k over the last 12 months, have not been used for this compensation.

When Rochko reflects on his legacy, he writes:

As for what the legacy of my run will be, I find hard to answer. For one, I think it is not up for me to judge. On the other hand, it is as much about what didn’t happen as it is about what did. I’ve always thought that one of the most important responsibilities I had was to say “no”. It is not a popular thing to do, nor is it a fun thing to do, but being pulled into too many different directions at once can spell disaster for any project. I’d like to think I avoided some trouble by being careful. But I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity.

A few observations on this transition:

The sheer grit and determination by Rochko to start the project a decade ago, and continue working and growing the project and organisation on such limited resources in extremely impressive. Daring to let go of the ownership of a project as a founder that has become integral and integrated with who you are is super hard, and I respect for Rochko for being able to say “I need to step back”. He’s clearly aware of the risks of founders not doing this properly, saying that there “are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities”.

Rochko does not mention the drastic change in late 2022, where, due to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Mastodon (and Rochko) got put in the global spotlight as the alternative to Twitter. This event drastically changed the course of the open social web, and many people joined Mastodon with the vision that it could replace Twitter. That vision did not come to pass. Hlatky’s vision is also not one of rapidly replacing X, instead describing the goal as “slow user & server growth”. The open question remains if that vision, of Mastodon becoming the main replacement for Twitter, could have actually unfolded, and if the momentum of late 2022 and early 2023 could have resulted in Mastodon becoming a main player in the space. While there are clearly many factors that contributed to this, as the leader of the biggest fediverse platform during that crucial period, it would be interesting to hear Rochko’s perspective on this. Could different decisions by Mastodon about onboarding, moderation, or discovery have capitalised on that momentum?

I find it striking that Rochko describes his own role and responsibility as mainly to say “no”, listing it as one of his most important responsibilities. He also sees one of the main risks to the project as being “pulled into too many different directions at once”. Mastodon does have a reputation for being difficult to get contributions (code or otherwise) accepted, and the reason for that is clearly on display when the CEO describes his role as saying “no”.

This approach points to a fundamental tension in Mastodon that Rochko was never able to fully resolve: is Mastodon a single network that is installed on many servers, or is it many community places connected with each other, some of which run the Mastodon software? While Mastodon’s vision and communications often advertise the ‘many independent communities’ part, in practice the software trended more in the direction of being a single platform.

Rochko’s insistence on maintaining a single coherent vision for Mastodon conflicts with the idea of giving digital communities independence where they have control over the rules of their community. If communities are supposed to be independent, they need to be able to set their own rules. But if protocol software embodies community rules, and that software is controlled by someone with a tendency to say “no” to changes, then communities struggle to be truly independent places. This feeds into what I wrote the other day on how protocol architecture is the same as institutional rules.

Mastodon’s vision is one of community ownership, and grassroots efforts that depends on the community to be sustainable. But relying on donations also show how this funding model introduces fragility and dependency: A single donation by the Atwood family is nearly 7 times as large as all the individual donations for the last year combined. This imbalance has real consequences. The €1M compensation for Rochko’s assets and 10 years of work is fair, but paying it from community donations was clearly not feasible, either financially or politically. Instead, the ownership transition depended on a few large donors willing to contribute sums far beyond what the community could provide. It also leads to the question: why the Mastodon assets were owned by Rochko, and not by the Mastodon organisation in the first place? Hlatky’s vision for Mastodon is to work on financial sustainability, but there is a tension here: if major organisational changes require large donors rather than community funding, is Mastodon truly community-owned?

I’ll be talking with Hlatky soon to explore his vision in more depth, so expect a follow-up on that. For now, I want to acknowledge what Rochko accomplished, building and maintaining Mastodon for a decade. He kept it non-profit and open-source despite offers that would have made him much wealthier. His impact on the broader ecosystem, on proving that alternatives to corporate social media are possible, and on building a community and network that has clear power to sustain itself in the long run, shouldn’t be understated, even as the project now moves into new hands.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-143/

Also, here's a blog post about our plans to federate Mirlo!

https://mirlo.space/team/posts/funding-federating-mirlo

#Federation #Fedi #FediMusic #Music #NLNet #News #Musicians #MusicNews #Blog #Blogs

Fediverse Report – #143

I’ve just gotten back from the Eurosky conference in Berlin this week, and it was great to meet so many people working on the open social web. As a reflection on that, I wrote here about building on open protocols creates new challenges for governance. This week’s fediverse news ties right in to that. I’m still tired from all the talking and writing, so next week I’ll catch up to the rest of this week’s news again.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko steps down

Mastodon’s long-time CEO and founder Eugen Rochko stepping down, after the organisation had announced back in January 2025 that the organisation would be transitioning both its legal and organisational structure. Now, the leadership team of Mastodon consists of:

• Felix Hlatky as Executive Director. Hlatky has been working on Mastodon for over 5 years, initially in the evenings alongside a full-time job, and was the driving force behind incorporating the German non-profit. He has been working for Mastodon on the fundraising and financial side, and was the CFO for Mastodon before now becoming the Executive Director. Mastodon says his priorities are on making server operations more efficient, growing the Mastodon team, and keeping the organisation financially sustainable.
• Hannah Aubry as Community Director. Aubry joined the Board of Directors of Mastodon in early 2025, and the switch in organisational structure now puts her in the Community Director role full time. Aubry will be involved with growing the Mastodon community and overseeing the trust and safety programmes.
• Renaud Chaput as Technical Director. Chaput has been the CTO over the last few years, and he has grown the engineering team to 9 people in that period.

Eugen Rochko stays within the extended leadership team as Strategy & Product Advisor, together with Andy Piper as Head of Communications, and Philip as Chief of Staff. Rochko says the restructuring was prompted by the stress of leading a social media project, and that he feels that he does not “have the right personality for it”. He describes that these negative interactions chip away at you, ranging from being compared to the tech billionaires but with none of the money or resources, to the challenging interactions with the user base. A particularly difficult interaction with a user last summer was the catalyst for stepping back. Rochko acknowledges that ‘there are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities,’ and the restructuring provides better guardrails to ensure Mastodon stays true to its values. Rochko is staying involved because of his passion for the project, calling the fediverse ‘an island within an increasingly dystopian capitalist hellscape’ and saying Mastodon is ‘our best shot at bringing this vision of a better future to the masses.

Mastodon is also transitioning into a Belgium non-profit entity as the future home of the Mastodon organisation. The current Mastodon organisation is in Germany as the Mastodon gGmbH entity. This organisation automatically become a for-profit organisation after its charitable status were stripped away. The new Belgium entity (an AISLB) allows Mastodon to become a non-profit organisation again. The organisation does not know yet when exactly the transfer to this new Belgium entity will happen. Meanwhile, Mastodon will also continue to operate an US-based 501(c)(3), as a “strategic overlay and fundraising hub”.

Another important change is that the Mastodon organisation now owns the Mastodon brand and assets, which used to be owned by Rochko. The organisation has attracted various larger donations, with Mastodon listing Jeff Atwood and the Atwood Family (EUR 2.2M), Biz Stone, AltStore (EUR 260k), GCC (EUR 65k), and Craig Newmark. These donations are partially used to fund acquisition of the Mastodon brand and assets from Rochko. Rochko is receiving a one-time compensation of EUR 1M for transferring the Mastodon brand trademark and assets to the organisation, which also compensates him for 10 years of work on the project at a below-market rate. Hlatky noted that Rochko turned down earlier acquisition offers worth more than 10 times this amount to keep Mastodon as a non-profit and open-source project. Mastodon says that individual community donations, which amounted to EUR 337k over the last 12 months, have not been used for this compensation.

When Rochko reflects on his legacy, he writes:

As for what the legacy of my run will be, I find hard to answer. For one, I think it is not up for me to judge. On the other hand, it is as much about what didn’t happen as it is about what did. I’ve always thought that one of the most important responsibilities I had was to say “no”. It is not a popular thing to do, nor is it a fun thing to do, but being pulled into too many different directions at once can spell disaster for any project. I’d like to think I avoided some trouble by being careful. But I’m also aware that my aversion to public appearances cost Mastodon some opportunities in publicity.

A few observations on this transition:

The sheer grit and determination by Rochko to start the project a decade ago, and continue working and growing the project and organisation on such limited resources in extremely impressive. Daring to let go of the ownership of a project as a founder that has become integral and integrated with who you are is super hard, and I respect for Rochko for being able to say “I need to step back”. He’s clearly aware of the risks of founders not doing this properly, saying that there “are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities”.

Rochko does not mention the drastic change in late 2022, where, due to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, Mastodon (and Rochko) got put in the global spotlight as the alternative to Twitter. This event drastically changed the course of the open social web, and many people joined Mastodon with the vision that it could replace Twitter. That vision did not come to pass. Hlatky’s vision is also not one of rapidly replacing X, instead describing the goal as “slow user & server growth”. The open question remains if that vision, of Mastodon becoming the main replacement for Twitter, could have actually unfolded, and if the momentum of late 2022 and early 2023 could have resulted in Mastodon becoming a main player in the space. While there are clearly many factors that contributed to this, as the leader of the biggest fediverse platform during that crucial period, it would be interesting to hear Rochko’s perspective on this. Could different decisions by Mastodon about onboarding, moderation, or discovery have capitalised on that momentum?

I find it striking that Rochko describes his own role and responsibility as mainly to say “no”, listing it as one of his most important responsibilities. He also sees one of the main risks to the project as being “pulled into too many different directions at once”. Mastodon does have a reputation for being difficult to get contributions (code or otherwise) accepted, and the reason for that is clearly on display when the CEO describes his role as saying “no”.

This approach points to a fundamental tension in Mastodon that Rochko was never able to fully resolve: is Mastodon a single network that is installed on many servers, or is it many community places connected with each other, some of which run the Mastodon software? While Mastodon’s vision and communications often advertise the ‘many independent communities’ part, in practice the software trended more in the direction of being a single platform.

Rochko’s insistence on maintaining a single coherent vision for Mastodon conflicts with the idea of giving digital communities independence where they have control over the rules of their community. If communities are supposed to be independent, they need to be able to set their own rules. But if protocol software embodies community rules, and that software is controlled by someone with a tendency to say “no” to changes, then communities struggle to be truly independent places. This feeds into what I wrote the other day on how protocol architecture is the same as institutional rules.

Mastodon’s vision is one of community ownership, and grassroots efforts that depends on the community to be sustainable. But relying on donations also show how this funding model introduces fragility and dependency: A single donation by the Atwood family is nearly 7 times as large as all the individual donations for the last year combined. This imbalance has real consequences. The €1M compensation for Rochko’s assets and 10 years of work is fair, but paying it from community donations was clearly not feasible, either financially or politically. Instead, the ownership transition depended on a few large donors willing to contribute sums far beyond what the community could provide. It also leads to the question: why the Mastodon assets were owned by Rochko, and not by the Mastodon organisation in the first place? Hlatky’s vision for Mastodon is to work on financial sustainability, but there is a tension here: if major organisational changes require large donors rather than community funding, is Mastodon truly community-owned?

I’ll be talking with Hlatky soon to explore his vision in more depth, so expect a follow-up on that. For now, I want to acknowledge what Rochko accomplished, building and maintaining Mastodon for a decade. He kept it non-profit and open-source despite offers that would have made him much wealthier. His impact on the broader ecosystem, on proving that alternatives to corporate social media are possible, and on building a community and network that has clear power to sustain itself in the long run, shouldn’t be understated, even as the project now moves into new hands.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-143/

I forgot how tedious it is to chase code coverage when writing tests.

However this was part of the reason that made me include the "boring" parts of building a robust library into the goals set for the #nlnet grant.

So after a couple of days of work I finally got the first of the storage backends for the #GoActivityPub library go past 80% test coverage.

I hope I can reuse some of the test logic in the other backends, as they need to perform identically.

#go #ActivityPub #fedidev

I forgot how tedious it is to chase code coverage when writing tests.

However this was part of the reason that made me include the "boring" parts of building a robust library into the goals set for the #nlnet grant.

So after a couple of days of work I finally got the first of the storage backends for the #GoActivityPub library go past 80% test coverage.

I hope I can reuse some of the test logic in the other backends, as they need to perform identically.

#go #ActivityPub #fedidev

Fediverse Report – #142

The News

More on Bonfire, which is currently doing a crowdfunding campaign (for an extensive look at Bonfire, see last week’s report):

• Erin Kissane has written an article on Bonfire, and why building blocks for communities matter. She writes: “The work that comes next for Bonfire—that their funding campaign is about—evolves around the needs of real humans in our exact moment, including collective governance, shared moderation, mutual aid networks, living archives, and end-to-end encryption. It also, to my absolute delight, foregrounds maintenance—the thing no institutional funder ever wants to help with, because the incentives are for the innovative and new, not the stable and thriving. The code is open source, yes, but it’s all specifically conceived as a public good. “
• Bonfire writes about ‘Matters of care – why maintenance comes first’: “Maintaining, continuing and repairing are care work. They’re foundational to any open‑source project. Maintenance is the unglamorous work that keeps people safe, tools usable, and the commons alive.”
• On more practical matters, Bonfire is working together with A New Social on building the connections between Bonfire and Bluesky: “With Bridgy Fed, users will be able to bridge on a per-circle and per-post basis. This means that you can have a circle where you specifically post to the ATmosphere while others only distribute to users on the Fediverse! Users sometimes want to broadcast as loudly as possible, while other times they want to enclose a post for a community, and we’re so excited to see Bonfire tackle this problem directly.”

One thing that strikes me about Bonfire’s approach, both to how they develop their software and how they run their crowdfunding campaign, is that they explicitly do not want to run a flagship server of Bonfire. Instead, they are heavily focused on the role of communities that can set up their own server. However, what that approach misses is that the concept of a community setting up their own fediverse server seems to be heavily tied to specific moments in time. Between 36 months and 30 months ago, over 120 new Mastodon servers have been started that have more than 100 active accounts. Between 30 months and now, 24 new Mastodon servers have been started that have more than 100 active accounts. For the most recent year this effect is even more pronounced, with 10 Mastodon servers started in the last year that have more than 100 active accounts.

This shows that the movement of starting a new fediverse server was heavily tied to the Mastodon migration effect that started after Elon Musk took over, in the fall of 2022. After that period, much fewer communities have started a new Mastodon server. This poses a challenge for the approach of Bonfire: the Bonfire Social software is now officially released in a 1.0 version, but there is not a single publicly accessible server that runs Bonfire. And sure, over time this will likely come and people will start to run a Bonfire Social server. But the momentum for people to start new fediverse servers has ebbed away for now. Hopefully, new software such as Bonfire can bring some of that energy back.

Mastodon has updated and simplified the roadmap of what they are working on, as the old version of the roadmap has not been updated for a while. Mastodon is currently working on three features:

• Packs, now named Collections, which is Mastodon’s spin on Bluesky’s Starter Packs. More information on Mastodon’s current design for Collections here.
• Mastodon is also working on giving institutions more control over the landing page.
• Better onboarding, with “improvements to how new users first arrive on Mastodon so they understand what that can do easily.”

Personally I’m confused on why giving admins control over the landing page of a Mastodon server is labeled as “Institution support”, and not just support for any Mastodon server. Mastodon, and the fediverse more broadly, has struggled for a long time with the concept of ‘server’. Servers are interchangeably seen as ‘just a way for people to access the fediverse network’ and ‘individual places of community in a wider social web’. While the second interpretation is how people want the fediverse to be understood, in practice it is often much closer to the first interpretation. Giving any server a way to customise the landing page, making it clearer why Mastodon server A is different from Mastodon server B, is a great way to push the network to a network of connected places. That Mastodon is only adding this customisation because of institutional support feels like even the Mastodon organisation itself has trouble sometimes to truly commit to the idea that Mastodon servers can be unique individual communities in a larger social network.

Features further down the line that Mastodon is exploring is the better support for private messages and moderation tools. More support for stuff like shared blocklists is highly needed, and I’m curious to see what comes out of it. Showing private messages as real messages and not have them show up in the feed is also long overdue. I’ve missed a fair number of private messages that way (apologies to everyone I’ve responded late to due to this), so its good to see that this eventually might change.

Mastodon is not alone in working on better moderation tooling for Mastodon and the fediverse. The Fedimod FIRES project by independent developer Emelia Smith also gives fediverse servers the option to share moderation information with each other. It is still in development, and Smith released the latest version this week, saying that she hopes this will be the final version before an 1.0 launch.

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• A progress update on ActivityPubGo.
• A Fedify tutorial for creating your own federated microblog.
  

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-142/

Sciety is bridging preprints and open social networks. Our latest integration with @bonfire enables you to start a discussion on Sciety and federate anywhere; meeting researchers wherever they already are.

https://blog.sciety.org/bridging-preprints-and-the-fediverse/

#Fediverse #ActivityPub #NLnet

Fediverse Report – #142

The News

More on Bonfire, which is currently doing a crowdfunding campaign (for an extensive look at Bonfire, see last week’s report):

• Erin Kissane has written an article on Bonfire, and why building blocks for communities matter. She writes: “The work that comes next for Bonfire—that their funding campaign is about—evolves around the needs of real humans in our exact moment, including collective governance, shared moderation, mutual aid networks, living archives, and end-to-end encryption. It also, to my absolute delight, foregrounds maintenance—the thing no institutional funder ever wants to help with, because the incentives are for the innovative and new, not the stable and thriving. The code is open source, yes, but it’s all specifically conceived as a public good. “
• Bonfire writes about ‘Matters of care – why maintenance comes first’: “Maintaining, continuing and repairing are care work. They’re foundational to any open‑source project. Maintenance is the unglamorous work that keeps people safe, tools usable, and the commons alive.”
• On more practical matters, Bonfire is working together with A New Social on building the connections between Bonfire and Bluesky: “With Bridgy Fed, users will be able to bridge on a per-circle and per-post basis. This means that you can have a circle where you specifically post to the ATmosphere while others only distribute to users on the Fediverse! Users sometimes want to broadcast as loudly as possible, while other times they want to enclose a post for a community, and we’re so excited to see Bonfire tackle this problem directly.”

One thing that strikes me about Bonfire’s approach, both to how they develop their software and how they run their crowdfunding campaign, is that they explicitly do not want to run a flagship server of Bonfire. Instead, they are heavily focused on the role of communities that can set up their own server. However, what that approach misses is that the concept of a community setting up their own fediverse server seems to be heavily tied to specific moments in time. Between 36 months and 30 months ago, over 120 new Mastodon servers have been started that have more than 100 active accounts. Between 30 months and now, 24 new Mastodon servers have been started that have more than 100 active accounts. For the most recent year this effect is even more pronounced, with 10 Mastodon servers started in the last year that have more than 100 active accounts.

This shows that the movement of starting a new fediverse server was heavily tied to the Mastodon migration effect that started after Elon Musk took over, in the fall of 2022. After that period, much fewer communities have started a new Mastodon server. This poses a challenge for the approach of Bonfire: the Bonfire Social software is now officially released in a 1.0 version, but there is not a single publicly accessible server that runs Bonfire. And sure, over time this will likely come and people will start to run a Bonfire Social server. But the momentum for people to start new fediverse servers has ebbed away for now. Hopefully, new software such as Bonfire can bring some of that energy back.

Mastodon has updated and simplified the roadmap of what they are working on, as the old version of the roadmap has not been updated for a while. Mastodon is currently working on three features:

• Packs, now named Collections, which is Mastodon’s spin on Bluesky’s Starter Packs. More information on Mastodon’s current design for Collections here.
• Mastodon is also working on giving institutions more control over the landing page.
• Better onboarding, with “improvements to how new users first arrive on Mastodon so they understand what that can do easily.”

Personally I’m confused on why giving admins control over the landing page of a Mastodon server is labeled as “Institution support”, and not just support for any Mastodon server. Mastodon, and the fediverse more broadly, has struggled for a long time with the concept of ‘server’. Servers are interchangeably seen as ‘just a way for people to access the fediverse network’ and ‘individual places of community in a wider social web’. While the second interpretation is how people want the fediverse to be understood, in practice it is often much closer to the first interpretation. Giving any server a way to customise the landing page, making it clearer why Mastodon server A is different from Mastodon server B, is a great way to push the network to a network of connected places. That Mastodon is only adding this customisation because of institutional support feels like even the Mastodon organisation itself has trouble sometimes to truly commit to the idea that Mastodon servers can be unique individual communities in a larger social network.

Features further down the line that Mastodon is exploring is the better support for private messages and moderation tools. More support for stuff like shared blocklists is highly needed, and I’m curious to see what comes out of it. Showing private messages as real messages and not have them show up in the feed is also long overdue. I’ve missed a fair number of private messages that way (apologies to everyone I’ve responded late to due to this), so its good to see that this eventually might change.

Mastodon is not alone in working on better moderation tooling for Mastodon and the fediverse. The Fedimod FIRES project by independent developer Emelia Smith also gives fediverse servers the option to share moderation information with each other. It is still in development, and Smith released the latest version this week, saying that she hopes this will be the final version before an 1.0 launch.

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• A progress update on ActivityPubGo.
• A Fedify tutorial for creating your own federated microblog.
  

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-142/

Fediverse Report – #136

The News

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.

The Links

• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• A blog post on how to map your bike rides using the fediverse wanderer.to platform.
• A blog post reflecting on the Labeling politics on Mastodon.
• The Fireside Fedi livestream had episodes talking about ActivityPub, the W3C and more with Ben Goering, and with Reiver about FediCon and CrowdBucks.
• Utrecht University (shout-out to my alma mater) wants their students to use Mastodon.
• Fediverse advocate Chris Trottier is in the process of setting up a PeerTube co-op.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-136-2/

Also, here's a blog post about our plans to federate Mirlo!

https://mirlo.space/team/posts/funding-federating-mirlo

#Federation #Fedi #FediMusic #Music #NLNet #News #Musicians #MusicNews #Blog #Blogs

Also, here's a blog post about our plans to federate Mirlo!

https://mirlo.space/team/posts/funding-federating-mirlo

#Federation #Fedi #FediMusic #Music #NLNet #News #Musicians #MusicNews #Blog #Blogs