SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks

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.

Hobart and decentralised substrates

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.

The technological substrate

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.

The social substrate

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.

Decentralisation and political power

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.

Reframing decentralisation

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.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/socialhub-and-the-substrate-of-decentralised-networks/

Neville Park
just small circles 🕊
Neville Park and 1 other boosted
Fediverse Report – #129

The News

SocialHub is a Discourse forum that has served as the main ActivityPub discussion forum for a long time. The platform might shut down on September 10th, as the current platform operators have stated that unless they can find a community that is willing to take over the infrastructure, they will shut down the platform. SocialHub has been run since 2019 by the small organisation called Petites Singularités, although in effect the administration of the platform came largely down to a single administrator. The current administrator Hellekin is also explicit in looking for a team of multiple people to take over, not a single individual, and other requirements for the new team are implied as well. There have been offers from individuals to take over the technical aspect, but there is less interested in the community management type of work.

A number of fediverse developers also question the value that SocialHub still can bring, who see that most fediverse developers have already left SocialHub, or were never even a part of it in the first place. It is easy to hypothesise a ActivityPub developer platform that contains reference material, documentations and lively discussions. But as Arnold Schrijver points out, it is “much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.” Other efforts such as fedidevs.org have largely petered out, and it is unclear if there is enough interest from developers to collaborate on maintaining such a place.

Reading the conversations about SocialHub makes it clear that people can point to the various issues with how SocialHub functioned and what potential improvements could look like. But any changes to SocialHub beyond “a forum used by a sub-section of the community where people occasionally ask questions” requires community building, which takes significant time and effort by skilled people to do so. While there are people willing to contribute technical admin skills as well as financial support, it is the community management part that is more challenging to find.

The challenge remains that SocialHub, even though most ActivityPub developers do not participate in that forum, is the primary forum for discussing ActivityPub, by virtue of no other prominent other forum existing as a place for developer conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub. It leads to a challenging situation:

  • Most conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub do not take place on SocialHub.
  • There is value in having a place for conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub that is focused on longer conversations and not dependent on one’s social graph.
  • For a number of reasons a significant number of fediverse developers see SocialHub as not a great place for such conversations.
  • There is no consensus on what a different place would look like, what its purpose is, and who should run such a place.
  • Even if someone where to start a new place, or take over SocialHub, it is unclear if developers would actually participate in such an effort.
  • The current administrator of SocialHub is looking for a group of multiple people with a coherent idea of how to create SocialHub into a community platform, but with most developers acting as individuals all with slightly different ideas, it is unclear if such a group can be found.

As of right now it is unsure if a solution can be reached, either by rebooting SocialHub or by creating a new place for conversations about the fediverse. Last week I wrote that FediCon shows that there is value in having fediverse developers meet together. While it’s good to see this happening offline, having spaces for conversations online is important as well.


A list published by Drop News Site contains over 100k websites that Meta allegedly has scraped for their data to train their AI, and the list also contains a number of fediverse servers. A communications representative for Meta says that the list is ‘bogus’. While it is difficult to verify the correctness of this specific news story, that Meta is scraping fediverse data for AI training is certainly plausible: the data is publicly accessible and Meta so far has shown an insatiable hunger to ingest as much data as possible for AI training purposes. Meta has shown a willingness to acquire data via methods that seem legally questionable in the most optimistic reading possible. While collecting fediverse data for AI training may potentially fall within legal boundaries, it goes against the clear wishes of the fediverse community.

The story points to how difficult it has been to evolve the fediverse to a network where people can actually publish their consent on how their data can be handled by others. The privacy policy of a significant number of fediverse servers, including some servers on the published list above, explicitly state: “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” However, publicresponse to this news makes it clear that for a significant number of people, they do not want Meta to be handling their public social networking data to be used for AI training.

There has been some effort by the Mastodon organisation to update the their Terms of Service (ToS) to prohibit the use of that server’s data for AI training purposes, but Mastodon had to retract that new ToS due to various criticisms. It is unclear however if such a ToS would be binding to third parties who have not signed the ToS. What’s more notable for me is that there is still no easy way for fediverse users to indicate their consent how their data can be handled on a per-post level that is also distributed via ActivityPub and is machine-readable. A significant group of fediverse users do not want their data to be used for AI training, but so far their options are mainly limited to being on a server who prohibits this via regulation, and there are no easy ways to set consent on a per-user level.


Mastodon shared in their monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, that the organisation is working on adding Starter Packs. Starter Packs were first launched by Bluesky, and found great popularity late last year. It allows people to create lists of accounts, and other users can follow all these accounts with a single click of a button. The feature allowed new Bluesky users to rapidly on-board the platform and get a timeline full of content. However, the feature also had some major drawbacks, such as being used for spammy engagement-bait accounts to build large following networks. People also could not opt-out of being included on other people’s Starter Packs, which caused some people to get a large number of followers that they did not want or ask for, leading to clashes and context collapse. Mastodon has the advantage of being a second-mover, and being able to iterate on Bluesky’s implementation. The organisation already has said that they will let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack.


A new research paper on the lemmygrad.ml Lemmy instance, called “Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml“. Within Lemmy there exists a subculture of various instances, most notably Hexbear and Lemmygrad, that self-describes as Marxist and/or leftist, and partially intersects with the developers of Lemmy. There is interesting research to be done on how that sub-community impacts the wider culture of the Threadiverse. This published paper limits itself to data from 2019 to 2022, which misses out on how these communities and cultures have developed over the more recent years. For example, the Hexbear instance was not federating with the rest of the network for a while, only to turn federation back on over a year ago, and it would be interesting to explore how that has impacted other Lemmy servers.

The Links

  • IFTAS has opened their yearly Needs Assesment, where they “input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web” to find the needs of the people who are building communities on the social web.
  • All of the video’s of the recentFediCon conference have now been published on PeerTube.
  • Openvibe, a client that combines Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads into a single timeline, now also supports RSS, to be both a news and social app at the same time.
  • Ghost CEO John O’Nolan writes some reflections about Ghost’s recently launched ActivityPub integration, and how people have perceived it.
  • The WordPress ActivityPub team explains how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed.
  • The ‘delightful fediverse experience’ list tracks a large amount of fediverse-related projects, and has been expanded with some new categories around tools and extensions.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-129/

Fediverse Report – #129

The News

SocialHub is a Discourse forum that has served as the main ActivityPub discussion forum for a long time. The platform might shut down on September 10th, as the current platform operators have stated that unless they can find a community that is willing to take over the infrastructure, they will shut down the platform. SocialHub has been run since 2019 by the small organisation called Petites Singularités, although in effect the administration of the platform came largely down to a single administrator. The current administrator Hellekin is also explicit in looking for a team of multiple people to take over, not a single individual, and other requirements for the new team are implied as well. There have been offers from individuals to take over the technical aspect, but there is less interested in the community management type of work.

A number of fediverse developers also question the value that SocialHub still can bring, who see that most fediverse developers have already left SocialHub, or were never even a part of it in the first place. It is easy to hypothesise a ActivityPub developer platform that contains reference material, documentations and lively discussions. But as Arnold Schrijver points out, it is “much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.” Other efforts such as fedidevs.org have largely petered out, and it is unclear if there is enough interest from developers to collaborate on maintaining such a place.

Reading the conversations about SocialHub makes it clear that people can point to the various issues with how SocialHub functioned and what potential improvements could look like. But any changes to SocialHub beyond “a forum used by a sub-section of the community where people occasionally ask questions” requires community building, which takes significant time and effort by skilled people to do so. While there are people willing to contribute technical admin skills as well as financial support, it is the community management part that is more challenging to find.

The challenge remains that SocialHub, even though most ActivityPub developers do not participate in that forum, is the primary forum for discussing ActivityPub, by virtue of no other prominent other forum existing as a place for developer conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub. It leads to a challenging situation:

  • Most conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub do not take place on SocialHub.
  • There is value in having a place for conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub that is focused on longer conversations and not dependent on one’s social graph.
  • For a number of reasons a significant number of fediverse developers see SocialHub as not a great place for such conversations.
  • There is no consensus on what a different place would look like, what its purpose is, and who should run such a place.
  • Even if someone where to start a new place, or take over SocialHub, it is unclear if developers would actually participate in such an effort.
  • The current administrator of SocialHub is looking for a group of multiple people with a coherent idea of how to create SocialHub into a community platform, but with most developers acting as individuals all with slightly different ideas, it is unclear if such a group can be found.

As of right now it is unsure if a solution can be reached, either by rebooting SocialHub or by creating a new place for conversations about the fediverse. Last week I wrote that FediCon shows that there is value in having fediverse developers meet together. While it’s good to see this happening offline, having spaces for conversations online is important as well.


A list published by Drop News Site contains over 100k websites that Meta allegedly has scraped for their data to train their AI, and the list also contains a number of fediverse servers. A communications representative for Meta says that the list is ‘bogus’. While it is difficult to verify the correctness of this specific news story, that Meta is scraping fediverse data for AI training is certainly plausible: the data is publicly accessible and Meta so far has shown an insatiable hunger to ingest as much data as possible for AI training purposes. Meta has shown a willingness to acquire data via methods that seem legally questionable in the most optimistic reading possible. While collecting fediverse data for AI training may potentially fall within legal boundaries, it goes against the clear wishes of the fediverse community.

The story points to how difficult it has been to evolve the fediverse to a network where people can actually publish their consent on how their data can be handled by others. The privacy policy of a significant number of fediverse servers, including some servers on the published list above, explicitly state: “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” However, publicresponse to this news makes it clear that for a significant number of people, they do not want Meta to be handling their public social networking data to be used for AI training.

There has been some effort by the Mastodon organisation to update the their Terms of Service (ToS) to prohibit the use of that server’s data for AI training purposes, but Mastodon had to retract that new ToS due to various criticisms. It is unclear however if such a ToS would be binding to third parties who have not signed the ToS. What’s more notable for me is that there is still no easy way for fediverse users to indicate their consent how their data can be handled on a per-post level that is also distributed via ActivityPub and is machine-readable. A significant group of fediverse users do not want their data to be used for AI training, but so far their options are mainly limited to being on a server who prohibits this via regulation, and there are no easy ways to set consent on a per-user level.


Mastodon shared in their monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, that the organisation is working on adding Starter Packs. Starter Packs were first launched by Bluesky, and found great popularity late last year. It allows people to create lists of accounts, and other users can follow all these accounts with a single click of a button. The feature allowed new Bluesky users to rapidly on-board the platform and get a timeline full of content. However, the feature also had some major drawbacks, such as being used for spammy engagement-bait accounts to build large following networks. People also could not opt-out of being included on other people’s Starter Packs, which caused some people to get a large number of followers that they did not want or ask for, leading to clashes and context collapse. Mastodon has the advantage of being a second-mover, and being able to iterate on Bluesky’s implementation. The organisation already has said that they will let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack.


A new research paper on the lemmygrad.ml Lemmy instance, called “Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml“. Within Lemmy there exists a subculture of various instances, most notably Hexbear and Lemmygrad, that self-describes as Marxist and/or leftist, and partially intersects with the developers of Lemmy. There is interesting research to be done on how that sub-community impacts the wider culture of the Threadiverse. This published paper limits itself to data from 2019 to 2022, which misses out on how these communities and cultures have developed over the more recent years. For example, the Hexbear instance was not federating with the rest of the network for a while, only to turn federation back on over a year ago, and it would be interesting to explore how that has impacted other Lemmy servers.

The Links

  • IFTAS has opened their yearly Needs Assesment, where they “input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web” to find the needs of the people who are building communities on the social web.
  • All of the video’s of the recentFediCon conference have now been published on PeerTube.
  • Openvibe, a client that combines Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads into a single timeline, now also supports RSS, to be both a news and social app at the same time.
  • Ghost CEO John O’Nolan writes some reflections about Ghost’s recently launched ActivityPub integration, and how people have perceived it.
  • The WordPress ActivityPub team explains how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed.
  • The ‘delightful fediverse experience’ list tracks a large amount of fediverse-related projects, and has been expanded with some new categories around tools and extensions.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-129/

der.hans
der.hans boosted
Fediverse Report – #128

The News

Newsletter publishing platform Ghost has officially shipped their integration with the social web with update Ghost 6.0. Ghost has been working on integrating with ActivityPub for a while now, and the feature was already available in beta using Ghost Pro. With Ghost 6.0, everyone, including people who self-host, can now also use the integration with the social web, and use the social web reader client that comes with it.

Ghost’s integration with the social web consists of two parts:

  • The ability to connect with the fediverse over ActivityPub, which allows people to follow the publication from fediverse platforms and to comment, like and share the posts.
  • A social web reader client, which allows you to follow and interact with other long-form articles from across the social web, such as from WordPress, Flipboard, Ghost, as well as microblogging platforms.

Ghost also prominently mentions the integration with Bluesky, which is also part of their ActivityPub integration and uses A New Social’s Bridgy Fed to connect to Bluesky’s AT Protocol.

The challenging part for long-form publishing platforms like Ghost and WordPress is how to transition and grow the fediverse from a network where microblogging shapes and determines the mode of interaction for other types of platforms to a network where people can engage with long-form articles in a way that is specifically catered for it. Ghost’s connection to the fediverse currently means that following a Ghost blog from your fediverse account results in seeing a post with the article headline and a URL, which is not much different than following an RSS feed with your fediverse account. The social features such as comments and likes do add an additional dimension to it, creating a form of Social RSS (RSSS?).

Ghost has taken steps in that direction by creating a social web reader client, which does cater specifically for reading long-form writing of fediverse content. However, that client is tied up to having a (paid) account with Ghost, making it not yet accessible to a wider fediverse audience. The WordPress ActivityPub plugin also experiences some of the same problems as Ghost, where their native article design and layout have to be forced into a microblogging-compatible format, losing out on some of the more compelling features of natively reading long-form writing on the fediverse. Fediverse platform developers (including Mastodon, Ghost, WordPress, WriteFreely and more) are collaborating on creating a space on the fediverse that suites the need of blogging and articles well, and while Ghost’s official 6.0 release is a step in this direction, for now the fediverse remains a network that’s more about microblogging than (macro)blogging.


FediCon 2025 happened this weekend in Vancouver, the first edition of a new fediverse-focused conference organised by community member Charles Krempeaux (@reiver). Some thoughts and notes on FediCon:

  • A significant number of prominent NA-based fediverse developers were present at the event. Real-life meetings between platform developers significant increases the collaboration for improving support for features and communication modes. The collaboration between multiple platform developers on long-form writing as mentioned above largely grew out of multiple meetings that happened around FOSDEM 2025. The fediverse is largely developed by volunteers or small organisations, and trust and cooperation between these actors can be increased significantly by conferences and other meet-ups.
  • At the same time, getting new faces and increasing diversity into the group of core fediverse developers remains a challenge, and better accessibility support for such conferences can contribute to it.
  • In monetary terms, Krempeaux put in significant effort to make the conference happen and to make it accessible, funding FediCon largely out-of-pocket and keeping ticket prices low.
  • Recordings of the talks and presentations will be posted on PeerTube, and the first are already available: The Last Network Effect by A New Social’s Anuj Ahooja and Connecting the Social Web by ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou.
  • Krempeaux used FediCon to reveal CrowdBucks, a fediverse crowdfunding, tipping and payment platform. Information is still limited, and I’ll talk more about it soon.
  • Live blogging by NodeBB developer Julian Lam and WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley are a good watch to catch up with the event and it’s vibe.
  • There was also a space for a presentation on ATProto, by Boris Mann, who also runs the (Bluesky-independent) atprotocol.dev community. The theme was on joy, and how building apps should be fun for developers and bring joy to its users, echoing Christine Lemmer-Webber’s keynote at Fediforum this spring.
  • The amount of experimentation that happens on AT Protocol is a good indication for the value of an ActivityPub (C2S) Api, as Evan Prodromou points out.

Finally, speaking about fediverse conferences: FediForum announced that the next edition of this online unconference will be on October 7 and 8, 2025.

In Other News

Upcoming fediverse platform Bonfire has announced they are collaborating with Newsmast. Newsmast is a non-profit organisation that also runs their own fediverse platform, and is expanding to launch channel.org, which is a fediverse distribution platform catered to organisations. In their collaboration, Bonfire will provide better discovery and interoperability for channels made with channel.org, and Newsmast will provide Bonfire’s Mosaic (a spin-off of Bonfire to build a complete online presence for organisations) as an offering to their partner organisations.

The Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS) organisation has published an extensive guide on how to navigate the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for fediverse service providers.

The ForBetter newsletter takes a look at how scammers have used the new OSA age verification regulations, as well as that most Mastodon servers have taken little to no steps for compliance, as well as a lack of clarify on Mastodon what official staff accounts are, to launch a new spam wave attack on Mastodon.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has announced a new tool, Image Intercept, designed to help smaller platforms detect and block known CSAM, and IFTAS is exploring how this tool can be used by fediverse platforms.

Last week I wrote about some of the client app for fediverse platforms that I’m keeping my eye on, and requested some feedback from readers for interesting clients that I had missed. Thanks to readers for some great input!

  • Pachli is a Mastodon client for Android, which is supported by Nivenly, the organisation also behind the Hachyderm.io Mastodon server. Some features of Pachli that stand out to me are anti-harassment features for notifications and conversations, which go beyond what Mastodon standard offers, as well as supporting older versions of Android, back to Android 6.
  • Aria for Misskey is a Misskey client for both Android and iOS. I wrote that I couldn’t find any recently updated clients specifically for Misskey, but Aria is well-maintained, with updates as recently as last week.
  • Raccoon for Friendica is a Friendica client, that supports Friendica-specific feature implementations, such as photo galleries and event calendars.
  • Quiblr is a client for the Threadiverse. I noted that I could find little distinguishing unique features for Threadiverse clients, but Quiblr seems to prove me wrong, with a For You feed that runs an on-device recommendation engine.

And finally some links with software updates:

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/

Fediverse Report – #128

The News

Newsletter publishing platform Ghost has officially shipped their integration with the social web with update Ghost 6.0. Ghost has been working on integrating with ActivityPub for a while now, and the feature was already available in beta using Ghost Pro. With Ghost 6.0, everyone, including people who self-host, can now also use the integration with the social web, and use the social web reader client that comes with it.

Ghost’s integration with the social web consists of two parts:

  • The ability to connect with the fediverse over ActivityPub, which allows people to follow the publication from fediverse platforms and to comment, like and share the posts.
  • A social web reader client, which allows you to follow and interact with other long-form articles from across the social web, such as from WordPress, Flipboard, Ghost, as well as microblogging platforms.

Ghost also prominently mentions the integration with Bluesky, which is also part of their ActivityPub integration and uses A New Social’s Bridgy Fed to connect to Bluesky’s AT Protocol.

The challenging part for long-form publishing platforms like Ghost and WordPress is how to transition and grow the fediverse from a network where microblogging shapes and determines the mode of interaction for other types of platforms to a network where people can engage with long-form articles in a way that is specifically catered for it. Ghost’s connection to the fediverse currently means that following a Ghost blog from your fediverse account results in seeing a post with the article headline and a URL, which is not much different than following an RSS feed with your fediverse account. The social features such as comments and likes do add an additional dimension to it, creating a form of Social RSS (RSSS?).

Ghost has taken steps in that direction by creating a social web reader client, which does cater specifically for reading long-form writing of fediverse content. However, that client is tied up to having a (paid) account with Ghost, making it not yet accessible to a wider fediverse audience. The WordPress ActivityPub plugin also experiences some of the same problems as Ghost, where their native article design and layout have to be forced into a microblogging-compatible format, losing out on some of the more compelling features of natively reading long-form writing on the fediverse. Fediverse platform developers (including Mastodon, Ghost, WordPress, WriteFreely and more) are collaborating on creating a space on the fediverse that suites the need of blogging and articles well, and while Ghost’s official 6.0 release is a step in this direction, for now the fediverse remains a network that’s more about microblogging than (macro)blogging.


FediCon 2025 happened this weekend in Vancouver, the first edition of a new fediverse-focused conference organised by community member Charles Krempeaux (@reiver). Some thoughts and notes on FediCon:

  • A significant number of prominent NA-based fediverse developers were present at the event. Real-life meetings between platform developers significant increases the collaboration for improving support for features and communication modes. The collaboration between multiple platform developers on long-form writing as mentioned above largely grew out of multiple meetings that happened around FOSDEM 2025. The fediverse is largely developed by volunteers or small organisations, and trust and cooperation between these actors can be increased significantly by conferences and other meet-ups.
  • At the same time, getting new faces and increasing diversity into the group of core fediverse developers remains a challenge, and better accessibility support for such conferences can contribute to it.
  • In monetary terms, Krempeaux put in significant effort to make the conference happen and to make it accessible, funding FediCon largely out-of-pocket and keeping ticket prices low.
  • Recordings of the talks and presentations will be posted on PeerTube, and the first are already available: The Last Network Effect by A New Social’s Anuj Ahooja and Connecting the Social Web by ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou.
  • Krempeaux used FediCon to reveal CrowdBucks, a fediverse crowdfunding, tipping and payment platform. Information is still limited, and I’ll talk more about it soon.
  • Live blogging by NodeBB developer Julian Lam and WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley are a good watch to catch up with the event and it’s vibe.
  • There was also a space for a presentation on ATProto, by Boris Mann, who also runs the (Bluesky-independent) atprotocol.dev community. The theme was on joy, and how building apps should be fun for developers and bring joy to its users, echoing Christine Lemmer-Webber’s keynote at Fediforum this spring.
  • The amount of experimentation that happens on AT Protocol is a good indication for the value of an ActivityPub (C2S) Api, as Evan Prodromou points out.

Finally, speaking about fediverse conferences: FediForum announced that the next edition of this online unconference will be on October 7 and 8, 2025.

In Other News

Upcoming fediverse platform Bonfire has announced they are collaborating with Newsmast. Newsmast is a non-profit organisation that also runs their own fediverse platform, and is expanding to launch channel.org, which is a fediverse distribution platform catered to organisations. In their collaboration, Bonfire will provide better discovery and interoperability for channels made with channel.org, and Newsmast will provide Bonfire’s Mosaic (a spin-off of Bonfire to build a complete online presence for organisations) as an offering to their partner organisations.

The Independent Federated Trust and Safety (IFTAS) organisation has published an extensive guide on how to navigate the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) for fediverse service providers.

The ForBetter newsletter takes a look at how scammers have used the new OSA age verification regulations, as well as that most Mastodon servers have taken little to no steps for compliance, as well as a lack of clarify on Mastodon what official staff accounts are, to launch a new spam wave attack on Mastodon.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has announced a new tool, Image Intercept, designed to help smaller platforms detect and block known CSAM, and IFTAS is exploring how this tool can be used by fediverse platforms.

Last week I wrote about some of the client app for fediverse platforms that I’m keeping my eye on, and requested some feedback from readers for interesting clients that I had missed. Thanks to readers for some great input!

  • Pachli is a Mastodon client for Android, which is supported by Nivenly, the organisation also behind the Hachyderm.io Mastodon server. Some features of Pachli that stand out to me are anti-harassment features for notifications and conversations, which go beyond what Mastodon standard offers, as well as supporting older versions of Android, back to Android 6.
  • Aria for Misskey is a Misskey client for both Android and iOS. I wrote that I couldn’t find any recently updated clients specifically for Misskey, but Aria is well-maintained, with updates as recently as last week.
  • Raccoon for Friendica is a Friendica client, that supports Friendica-specific feature implementations, such as photo galleries and event calendars.
  • Quiblr is a client for the Threadiverse. I noted that I could find little distinguishing unique features for Threadiverse clients, but Quiblr seems to prove me wrong, with a For You feed that runs an on-device recommendation engine.

And finally some links with software updates:

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-128/

Fediverse Report – #127

Apps and clients I’m paying attention to

The summer months I’m experimenting with some different content for the weekly report articles. For more information on that, see this accompanying post. Today I’m taking a look at all the different client apps for the fediverse that I’m paying attention to. This is not meant as a recommendation on which client you should use; my experience is that people’s preferences for clients are highly individualistic. The best client for you is simply the client that you enjoy using the most. This is an overview of some the clients for the fediverse that do something differently, and stand out because of that. Part of the reason for making this list is that I do not have the time to keep a close eye on literally every client in the fediverse, and I’m curious to hear from readers if they feel like I missed some.

Microblogging

Phanpy (Web, Progressive Web App)
Phanpy is one of the most innovative clients for any social media platform. The Catch-up feature takes all the posts from your home timeline and gives you the ability to sort and filter them in any way you want. You can filter posts by replies, reposts, followed hashtags, sort them by date or engagement numbers, or group them by author. Another unique feature is the ‘boost carousel’, where boost are delegated in the timeline to a separate horizontal-scrolling ‘carousel’.

One thing that stands out to me about Phanpy is how these standout features have not really seen adoption by other clients, neither for the fediverse nor for Bluesky. Phanpy does have a crowd of hardcore fans (I’m one of them), but it seems to mainly resonate with power-users.

Ivory (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, paid)
Ivory is made by the small company Tapbots, who also created popular Twitter client Tweetbot. Ivory focuses on design, and has some additional features such as account statistics as well. Ivory is a popular client for Mastodon, even though it has a monthly subscription. That makes it also a client worth watching: is the Mastodon ecosystem large enough to support a small team of three developers? Tapbots recently announced that they are building a Bluesky client, and they were frank about needing another revenue stream besides Ivory.

Fedilab (Android, F-Droid)
Fedilab is one of the older clients for the fediverse, that supports multiple accounts on a variety of fediverse platforms. It can be used in combination with Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, PeerTube, Misskey, Friendica and even GNU Social. There are few other clients that I know of that focus on supporting a large variety of fediverse platforms, which indicates both the technical challenge of doing so with none of the platforms supporting the client-to-server part of ActivityPub, as well as it being unclear if there is a real demand for it.

Mastodon (Android, iOS)
The apps developed by the Mastodon organisation itself. Mastodon now has a full-time iOS developer as well as an Android developer, and the app is always up to date with Mastodon’s latest features, such as Mastodon’s recent work on quote post implementations. An ecosystem of third-party clients for Mastodon could proliferate partially because Mastodon was strapped for developer resources and the apps did not always get the highest priority. Third-party clients for Mastodon are often created by hobby developers, who now have to compete with Mastodon having full-time paid developers on their app, making it more important for other clients to show a clear value-add above the Mastodon client developed by the organisation itself.

Some other microblogging clients worth pointing out: Whalebird, (desktop client for Windows, Linux and macOS, supporting multiple platforms), IceCubes (free, open-source iOS app), Tusky (the most popular third-party Android app for Mastodon with half a million downloads), Trunks (web, Android and iOS, that has some cool additional timeline filtering features) and Elk (a popular web client for Mastodon)

Another thing that stands out to me is how there do not seem to be clients targeted specifically for Misskey that are popular. Clients like Kimis, Kaiteki and Milktea seem to have little use or no recent updates. The MissCat app might be more popular, but it is not available in the EU so it is hard for me to judge.

Multi-network clients

Openvibe (Android, iOS)
Openvibe is a multi-network client for Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads. It combines posts from these networks (provided you have an account on that network) into a single timeline, and you can post directly to all the different networks at once. Openvibe is the most popular of these multi-network clients, and is also the best funded of the clients on the new social networks: early in 2025 Openvibe announced an $800k funding round. The company expects to introduce a subscription plan at a later point to generate revenue.

SoraSNS (iOS)
SoraSNS is another multi-network client, that supports Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, Pleroma and Nostr. It also has a algorithmic timeline with the algorithm running locally on your phone. SoraSNS has more of such experimental features, such as analytics per-post and AI summaries.

Reader clients

Surf (Android, iOS, in beta)
Surf describes itself as a ‘browser for the open social web’. The app, made by Flipboard, integrates various platforms: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and RSS are supported. It centers around creating feeds for topics, and users can share these feeds with each other (either via Surf or as a custom feed on Bluesky). Surf stands out for pushing the boundaries on what a social media client can look like, and for the large amount of control that users get over which content they want to see.

Tapestry (iOS, iPadOS, in beta)
Tapestry is made by Iconfactory, the company behind popular Twitter client Twitterfic, and raised funds via a Kickstarter, raising $177k. It is a reader client that combines a large variety of sources: RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, podcasts, YouTube and more. Tapestry places all these sources into a single chronological timeline. The funding model for Tapestry is what stands out: making high-quality apps is not cheap, but getting a large enough paying user base to sustain development is hard. Iconfactory could lean upon their previous work to get a solid Kickstarter to fund development.

Rest of the fediverse

PeerTube is developing their own mobile apps, and have just completed a fundraiser of €75k for further features. I’ve covered the app in other places in more detail, and for here I think it’s noteworthy that no other major PeerTube app has gotten traction over the years.

For the Threadiverse, there are a variety of clients for Lemmy, with some of the most popular ones being Voyager, Thunder, Mlem, Jerboa and Photon. My sense is that the Threadiverse clients do not differ much in features, and mainly differ in platforms and terms of design. The main standout feature at this point seems to be support for PieFed, but a variety of clients (including Voyager, Mlem and multiple more now support PieFed). It points to an ecosystem where clients are aware of each other, and new innovations get rapidly copied by other clients, bringing them effectively to the entire ecosystem. If there are unique features in Threadiverse clients that you think I should pay attention to, let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.

Fediverse News and Links

  • Move Slowly and Build Bridges is the new book by Robert W. Gehl, in which Gehl documents the story of the fediverse and how everyday people have build a ‘noncentralized alternative social media system’ over the years. The book is now available for sale online, with physical copies shipping soon. I’ll definitely write more about the book once I’ve read it, so stay tuned!
  • Mastodon is adding an in-app donation request for the funding of Mastodon. Mastodon is rolling out this feature very carefully (only their own mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers for now), but they are already thinking about how to expand the feature and make it available for other server admins as well.
  • Some polishing updates for WordPress ActivityPub as their blog post explains how they are working towards more social integrations with the rest of the fediverse, with more coverage by WeDistribute.
  • How To Improve Your Privacy and Security on Mastodon is a highly extensive guide on Privacy Guides that goes into in-depth detail on all the possibilities people have on Mastodon for better security and privacy.

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-127/

Funding Update and Summer Schedule

Some practical updates for Connected Places:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve gotten a grant from NLnet’s Open Social Fund! The goal of the Open Social Fund is to promote and support the growth of ActivityPub and the fediverse. This is a great fit with the work I’m doing with Connected Places: I write about the ActivityPub and the fediverse because I care deeply about building healthier social online, and I think it is worth understanding in detail how these new networks function. As such, NLnet supports Connected Places with a grant to write weekly Fediverse Reports for the next year, as well as an in-depth analysis article every month.

Some practical details for accountability:

  • The grant covers 48 publications of a weekly Fediverse Report, and 12 in-depth articles about the fediverse.
  • The grant only covers these writings, and not my other publications.
  • NLnet does not have any say in my writing or editing, and I retain full editorial control of the output.
  • These articles will be published under CC-BY-SA. I’ll likely put all my articles under this license, but that’s still to be determined.
  • Articles funded by the NLnet grant will also be recognisable by a banner at the bottom of the page, for an illustration I’ve added the banner to this page as well.

For other practical news, I’m taking it a bit slower this summer to have some more time to chill and work on some other projects. I’ll be publishing something every week, but not necessarily according to the schedule of Tuesdays Fediverse Report, Thursdays Bluesky Report and Fridays the email newsletter essay. I’m also taking this opportunity to experiment a bit more with the format. For example, for this week’s Fediverse Report I’m taking a look at the various clients in the fediverse ecosystem. Feedback on what works and what does not work is much appreciated.

Thanks again for all your support, I’m super happy to be able to say that Connected Places will be around for another year to cover this interesting and dynamic space!

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/funding-update-and-summer-schedule/

marc0s
marc0s boosted

Here comes Movim 0.31, codename Kameny ✨

With this exciting new release you'll be able to share simultaneously your screen and webcam when calling your friends 👀, switch quickly between your one-to-one chats and chatrooms ⚡, add your pronoun in your profile 🏳️‍🌈...

Checkout our release note to discover all the other new features of this version 🗒️

https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/here-comes-movim-0-31-codename-kameny-yQUilX

Thanks again to @nlnet for their support on the video-conference features ❤️

#xmpp #movim #release #nlnet #webrtc #lgbtq

marc0s
marc0s liked this activity

Here comes Movim 0.31, codename Kameny ✨

With this exciting new release you'll be able to share simultaneously your screen and webcam when calling your friends 👀, switch quickly between your one-to-one chats and chatrooms ⚡, add your pronoun in your profile 🏳️‍🌈...

Checkout our release note to discover all the other new features of this version 🗒️

https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/here-comes-movim-0-31-codename-kameny-yQUilX

Thanks again to @nlnet for their support on the video-conference features ❤️

#xmpp #movim #release #nlnet #webrtc #lgbtq

Here comes Movim 0.31, codename Kameny ✨

With this exciting new release you'll be able to share simultaneously your screen and webcam when calling your friends 👀, switch quickly between your one-to-one chats and chatrooms ⚡, add your pronoun in your profile 🏳️‍🌈...

Checkout our release note to discover all the other new features of this version 🗒️

https://mov.im/community/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim/here-comes-movim-0-31-codename-kameny-yQUilX

Thanks again to @nlnet for their support on the video-conference features ❤️

#xmpp #movim #release #nlnet #webrtc #lgbtq

@hamiller_friendica @Fischblog @pikarl @feb
P.S. We're also working with @sciety to help them build a #bonfire flavour specifically for #preprints publications as part of their #nlnet grant: https://blog.sciety.org/sciety-secures-funding-from-nlnet-foundation-to-help-build-discourse-around-preprints/

The fediverse is definitely the right place for open science 🔥

⁂ Article

A conversation about money and the #openweb

Let’s talk about the tension at the heart of the modern #openweb, and why so many grassroots builders and radical technologists find themselves on the outside looking in. Scene: A typical “open internet” conference in Europe. Excited NGO-funded attendee toots:

“Just booked my place for ePIC in Lille! My first Eurostar trip! It’s where I started 10 years ago with Mozilla. Time flies. #OpenBadges #VerifiableCredentials”

Me (a social tech outsider):

“These things are […]

⁂ Article

Why most #geekproblem software fails: Trust vs. control

Almost all of our #geekproblem software fails because it’s built with a mindset of control.

Control over users.Control over systems.Control over outcomes.

But all good societies, and all durable communities, are based on trust. When we ignore this, we don’t just write bad code, we produce #techshit that nobody uses, that burns out developers, and that confuses users. Then we start over… and call it “innovation.” That’s #techchurn.Control-driven projects: Examples of […]

⁂ Article

Why most #geekproblem software fails: Trust vs. control

Almost all of our #geekproblem software fails because it’s built with a mindset of control.

Control over users.Control over systems.Control over outcomes.

But all good societies, and all durable communities, are based on trust. When we ignore this, we don’t just write bad code, we produce #techshit that nobody uses, that burns out developers, and that confuses users. Then we start over… and call it “innovation.” That’s #techchurn.Control-driven projects: Examples of […]

⁂ Article

A conversation about money and the #openweb

Let’s talk about the tension at the heart of the modern #openweb, and why so many grassroots builders and radical technologists find themselves on the outside looking in. Scene: A typical “open internet” conference in Europe. Excited NGO-funded attendee toots:

“Just booked my place for ePIC in Lille! My first Eurostar trip! It’s where I started 10 years ago with Mozilla. Time flies. #OpenBadges #VerifiableCredentials”

Me (a social tech outsider):

“These things are […]

⁂ Article

Talking about the #geekproblem in #openweb funding

Let’s be honest: we have a real and ongoing #geekproblem in how funding is allocated in the alt-tech and #openweb space, and it’s holding us back. The current push for infrastructure is important, but it’s not enough.

Yes, backend infrastructure is vital. You can’t build sustainable alternatives to #dotcons without solid plumbing. Funding projects like mesh networks, free firmware, and decentralised protocols, as #NLnet and others often do, is necessary work. BUT… If no one uses […]

⁂ Article

Talking about the #geekproblem in #openweb funding

Let’s be honest: we have a real and ongoing #geekproblem in how funding is allocated in the alt-tech and #openweb space, and it’s holding us back. The current push for infrastructure is important, but it’s not enough.

Yes, backend infrastructure is vital. You can’t build sustainable alternatives to #dotcons without solid plumbing. Funding projects like mesh networks, free firmware, and decentralised protocols, as #NLnet and others often do, is necessary work. BUT… If no one uses […]

@xoron

I should add that in particular the #EU funded @ngi @nlnet programs also give access to a range of services like the ones you mentioned.

See support service on the #NLnet website:

https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/services/

⁂ Article

Composting the EU Tech Mess: From #NLnet to #Eurostack