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Bugs, breakthroughs and BlueSky

[Ghost]

"Last week we officially started the ActivityPub private beta and sent invitations to our first 3 publishers to start testing things out. This was the first big milestone we've been working toward for months, and it felt great to get there! 🚀"

The Ghost team continues to build their ActivityPub integration in the open. It's really fun to see.

This update goes into the kinds of bugs you discover when you start showing your work to early adopters, and I love the joyul attitude here. I also particularly love the animated preview of the ActivityPub-aware profile viewer.

It's all coming together nicely - and it looks like it'll be one of the slickest Fediverse apps out there. I can't wait.

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Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media

[Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth at Tech Policy Press]

"Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web."

Most major decentralized and federated platforms don't have the necessary tooling "for scalable management of harmful content and conduct — or even the enforcement of their own rules."

For some, of course, this is by design: the same version of "free speech" which animates Elon Musk and in effect prevents speech from anyone except for in-groups and the loud and powerful. To have truly free speech - where people from vulnerable communities can have a voice and real debate can be held without threat of violence - there must be trust and safety and moderation.

The piece rightly calls out IFTAS for the great work it's doing in this area. More must be done - which in part means convincing federated communities that these ideas are important.

Unfortunately a common attitude is that "we don't have these problems" - a common refrain when your bias makes you blind to your lack of inclusion. As many Black users found when they joined Mastodon and were asked to hide the details of their lived experiences under content warnings, or when people told them that these were American-only experiences (which, of course, they aren't), a predominantly white and male Fediverse that seeks to maintain the status quo rather than learning and growing can be quite a conservative place.

This is an important piece, and an important finding, which everyone working on decentralized tech should pay attention to.

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Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesday announced it would be ending its experiment in running a server on the fediverse. The server, Mozilla.social, today connects users with the Mastodon social network, an open source rival to Twitter/X. It will be shut down on December 17."

I wish Mozilla had taken a more ambitious approach to the fediverse, rather than running a Mastodon instance for a handful of people. An organization of its size could have prototyped different kinds of social media on the fediverse, or incubated disparate projects running on the protocol. It could even have experimented with adding social functionality directly to Firefox. Instead, precisely none of that happened, and its instance was apparently used by 270 people or so.

Sarah Perez points out that this isn't the only initiative that's been shuttered recently:

"Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down."

Mozilla itself has a lot of potential but never seems to quite realize it: it doesn't seem to be very good at building a joined-up product strategy, which has led its existence to become increasingly at risk. The vast majority of its funding (nearly 90%) has come from Google's payments to the organization in exchange for being the default search engine pick - and now that's under threat.

There's a need for a mission-driven organization with Mozilla's values that executes more fearlessly, where product voices hold more weight vs open source engineering discussions. But, right now, I don't think it exists.

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Open Call: Join the Open Social Incubator | Media Economies Design Lab

[Media Economies Design Lab at University of Colorado Boulder]

"The Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is launching a 5-month process of mentorship and peer-to-peer learning, empowering veteran community builders to adopt emerging open social networks."

This seems like a wonderful initiative for the right people, as well as for new social networks. The incubator covers a broad set of networks that include the fediverse, Matrix, Bluesky, and Nostr.

From the site:

"Participants will meet as a full group monthly and receive ongoing, 1:1 project-specific technical support as they seed and grow new communities using open social media tools of their choosing. Participation is fully remote and all sessions will be conducted in English. All participants should commit to making strides toward community-building in open social media by the end of the program. Completion of the full program, from November 2024 to April 2025, will be compensated with a stipend of $3,500 USD."

No prior experience is needed.

I love that the Media Economies Design Lab is doing this. I'm very curious to see the cohort as it emerges!

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I like the way you like it like that

[Ghost]

"It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond."

This is a big step: a Ghost publication puts something out on the web, and then anyone on any ActivityPub-compatible network (Flipboard, Mastodon, micro.blog, soon Threads) can respond and the publisher can see it straight from their dashboard.

This is not just limited to Ghost: any platform can implement this using ActivityPub without asking anyone for permission. And they will. Expect to see this functionality across both publishing and social networks within the next few years. Anyone who doesn't have this functionality will be left out - it'll more be about the level of sophistication with which they implement it, and the nuances of how they make it right for their respective userbases.

The web, finally, is becoming social. Let's go.

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A Developer's Guide to ActivityPub and the Fediverse

[Martin SFP Bryant at The New Stack]

"How do you get started if you want to integrate your own software with ActivityPub? [Evan] Prodromou has written a new book on this very topic, and we caught up with him to explore the practicalities of linking up with the fediverse."

I'm convinced that ActivityPub is the underlying standard that all future social software will be built on. Evan is one of the founding parents of the fediverse, and this article is a great overview. His new book will be an invaluable resource for everyone who wants to embark upon this journey.

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Fediverse Governance Drop

[Erin Kissane]

"Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re releasing our findings. We found so much."

This is an impressively in-depth report by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi, which has some important conclusions about how moderation can work in a federated system (including the not-insignificant conclusion that it can work). There's room for more tooling, and better communication between instances - but this is all doable stuff.

The shorter satellite documents - opportunities for funders and developers who want to serve this ecosystem and a quick-start guide to fediverse governance - are super helpful, too.

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Flipboard Users Can Now Follow Anyone in the Fediverse

[Anuj Ahooja and Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Starting today, Flipboard will let users search for and follow accounts from across the Fediverse from the comfort of their own dashboards. [...] This new feature isn’t just limited to Mastodon or PixelFed, but includes Threads profiles that opted in to Fediverse Sharing, such as MKBHD, Molly Jong-Fast, and Nilay Patel. You won’t need to have a Threads account to cross this boundary, but will still be able to see what your favorite creators are up to. This is a neat way of letting people dip their toes into the wider network, without needing to fully commit to it on day one."

This is the power of the open social web: you can follow someone who's publishing on social network A from social network B, and interact with them as if they were on the same network. Everyone can choose which social platforms that fit them best without having to sacrifice reach or the ability to follow people they care about.

Flipboard has been a leader in this space, and this is a major step forward. It, Threads, Mastodon, Ghost, Micro.blog and others are pushing the social web forward by embracing these standards - and there's a lot more to come. No company and no developer needs to ask anyone permission to join the network; they can opt to support the protocols and - boom! - they're in.

Every media company and every individual publisher should be jumping on this. I could not be more excited about the possibilities.

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"Mastodon for Harris" is a Success Story for Fediverse Activism

[Sean Tilley at We Distribute]

"Following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election, Democratic supporters have gained a massive influx of energy and support all over the Web. Hours after the president made his announcement, Heidi Li Feldman, a law professor emeritus at Georgetown University, launched an ActBlue fundraiser comprising of Mastodon users."

It's been pretty successful: almost half a million dollars at the time this article was written. It's another example of how Mastodon users are politically engaged, more active per capita than any other social network, and ready to contribute.

It's also a facet of Mastodon's wider userbase that there were some criticisms this money was being raised for the Presidential election than, say, local mutual aid. From my perspective, both are important: perhaps there's a way to learn from this in order to fund a wider mutual aid campaign, but contributing to an election campaign to stop an authoritarian, nationalistic second Trump administration feels incredibly important.

Political purity tests and fractions unfortunately are a feature of Mastodon's communities, and will likely continue to be - but one positive way of looking at it is that it means they care, a lot, and are interested in ways to improve the lives of vulnerable people. That's an incredibly good thing that should give us all hope for the future.

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The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media

[Joel Gascoigne]

"The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term."

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne talks about how the rise of the new, decentralized / federated social networks allow publishers to retain control.

"They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to."

I'm a Buffer customer. I love that it works with both Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as every other major social network. More than that, I've long admired Joel's approach while running Buffer: it's a transparent company that works in the open and genuinely values independence. Alongside excellent ventures like micro.blog, I wish there were more like it.

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Flipboard Brings Local News to the Fediverse

[Carl Sullivan at Flipboard]

"Flipboard has worked with local papers and websites since its inception. Now, as part of the gradual federation of our platform, we’re bringing some of those publications to the fediverse."

Flipboard turns the fediverse on for a whopping 64 US-based local and regional publications. This is big news - if you'll pardon the pun - and an enormous step forward for bringing journalism onto the fediverse. I love how easy Flipboard has made it.

I also really like this approach:

"To learn more about what fedi folks actually want when it comes to local outlets, we simply asked them. They told us the specific publications they’d like to see, and voted in a poll on the region they were most interested in. (The Midwest, it turns out!)"

Asking people is always the best approach. And as I've learned, the fediverse is full of highly-engaged, well-informed people who are hungry for great journalism.

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Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start."

I'm certain that this is a large part of the future of how information will be disseminated on the internet - and how publishers will run subscription programs. Subscribers who use the fediverse see the benefit of rich content that they can reshare and comment on; publishers get to understand a lot more about their subscribers than they would from the web or email newsletters.

Ghost's reader will certainly be augmented by other, standalone readers that work a bit like Apple News. Its fediverse publishing capabilities will be followed by other content management systems. Notably, Automattic has been working on fediverse integration, for example, and Flipboard has been doing amazing work in this area.

I'm also convinced there's room for another fediverse-compatible social network that handles both long and short-form content in a similar way to Substack's articles and Notes. If someone else doesn't build that, I will.

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What if we worked together

"Remember! If you only signed up to hear when this feature is available, or you're wondering what ActivityPub even is: This probably is not the newsletter for you. This is a behind-the-scenes, engineering-heavy, somewhat-deranged build log by the team who are working on it."

And I love it.

Ghost's newsletter / blog about building ActivityPub support into its platform is completely lovely, and the kind of transparent development I've always been into. Here it's done with great humor. Also, they really seem to be into pugs, and that's cool, too.

In this week's entry the team is investigating using existing ActivityPub libraries and frameworks rather than building the whole thing from scratch themselves - and doing it with not a small amount of humility.

And they're building a front-end to allow bloggers to consume content from other people who publish long-form content onto the web using ActivityPub. I'm excited to see it take shape.

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Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed

"An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved."

Bridgy has always been a useful product; Bridgy Fed is an easy way for folks on the fediverse and on Bluesky to be able to interact with each other. I've opted in and I expect many other people to do the same.

Ideally it wouldn't be an opt-in - I think this kind of bridge is incredibly useful in its own right. I know it's been fraught on the Mastodon side because of Bluesky's provenance and former relationship to both Twitter and Jack Dorsey. I personally don't see the issue at all: the more the merrier.

Ryan Barrett is brilliant: I really appreciate his ability to quietly add value by creating user-first technology solutions that speak for themselves.

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Why publishers are preparing to federate their sites

"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement."

The Verge and 404 Media will both support ActivityPub (a protocol, not a "plugin", as the article calls it) and plug into the fediverse.

This dovetails with what I've been talking about for some time: "Instead of spending time building a presence on other platforms for their benefit, a publisher can do that on their own sites — while giving readers the ability to see those posts on other federated platforms." And while the fediverse is still in an early, growing stage, it's worth taking a bet on.

As Flipboard's Mike McCue says further into the piece, "What The Verge is doing is definitely pioneering the future for media." I'm hopeful that more publishers follow suit - with this and other experiments that have the potential to help them build more direct first-party relationships with their audiences.

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Extinguishing the fediverse

The Mastodon homepage, displayed on a smartphone

I’m soliciting prompts for discussion. This piece is a part of that series.

 

Erlend Sogge Heggen asks:

There’s legitimate reason to be worried about Meta’s P92 project being part of a EEE play against the fediverse.

How might the fediverse community counteract this, perhaps with its own EEE strategy?

We know Meta will attempt an EEE play, but what if we play the reverse UNO card and EE(E) them instead?

Embrace: Carefully federate in a minimum-viable fashion that doesn’t overrun the existing .

Extend: Make a reality, so accounts can be moved effortlessly.

Extinguish: In case of misconduct, defederate and provide mass-migration assistance.

First, some quick definitions!

P92 is the codename for Meta / Facebook’s new app that will support the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon and its cousins. Users will be able to log in with their Instagram credentials, and one can potentially (but not definitely) imagine it being folded into the mainline Instagram app.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was a phrase coined internally inside Microsoft to describe its strategy with respect to the web. The idea was that the company would embrace open protocols, extend them with its own proprietary extensions, and then use its control over those extensions to extinguish competition. In particular, its plan was to do this with HTML in order to cement Internet Explorer as the web browser.

Finally, the fediverse, of course, is the community of small, independently-owned, largely non-profit social networks that interoperate using shared protocols, on which Mastodon is the largest platform.

There is legitimate concern that a company like Meta might attempt to control the fediverse. This is particularly true if they are allowed to create a uni-polar world: one where Meta is the only large company embracing these standards. In that world, Meta can throw hundreds of millions of users at the protocol, and it will instantly become its largest user.

I think it’s helpful to look at how Microsoft’s EEE strategy failed. There were arguably two main factors: antitrust risk and competition.

The Department of Justice sued Microsoft for monopolistic business practices, ultimately leading to a settlement where Microsoft capitulated to changing some of its approach in return for the DOJ dropping its desire to break up the company. It’s not clear to me that this kind of case would or could take place with respect to Meta extinguishing the fediverse; while I’m not a lawyer, I think the argument would probably be that many other social networks are available.

The other thing that hurt Microsoft’s dominance was Firefox. It was a good browser backed by a good community, but that wasn’t the deciding factor; Firefox gained market share because Google pushed it at every possible opportunity. Because Internet Explorer’s dominance was a business risk to Google, and because Firefox was built by a non-profit that was non-competitive with Google’s business, it made financial sense to try and break Microsoft’s stranglehold. Mozilla’s model was stronger than its predecessor Netscape’s had been: whereas Netscape needed to sell licenses, Mozilla’s deal with Google meant it made money every time someone used Firefox to search for something on the web. There was almost no friction to its growth strategy.

This activity led to a resurgence in a healthy ecosystem of standards-based web browsers for years — until Google decided to re-use the technique it had used on Firefox to push its own web browser. Even then, Chrome is a far better standards player than Internet Explorer ever was.

There won’t be hard evidence that Meta is adopting ActivityPub until we see its app in the wild. But if it is, that likely means that it sees the protocol as at least worth experimenting with, and maybe even as a potential threat. That’s a sign of great progress, and everyone involved in building the fediverse should feel good about it.

If Meta wants to own the fediverse, this isn’t a battle that will be primarily won with features or technology. Easy-to-use platforms, nomadic identity that easily lets you move your presence from one provider to another, and assistance will all be essential, but they’ll be table stakes. (If Meta is working on the platform today, it’s probably also too late for truly nomadic identity to make a difference.) To really stand a chance, the fediverse will need the kind of marketing and go-to-market support that Firefox enjoyed back in the day. Which may mean support from another large player that considers Meta’s ownership of the standard to be an existential risk.

It’s hard to see who that might be. Twitter is now the incompetence wing of the incompetence party. It’s highly unlikely that networks like Pinterest care. Microsoft’s platforms are tightly bound to its ecosystem, with access control at their core; I don’t see LinkedIn joining the fediverse any time soon. Google has fallen on its face every time it’s tried to build a social network, and runs YouTube as a separate entity that strongly benefits from closed ads. Salesforce might consider it a risk, as it provides social tools for businesses, which are easier to build and sell on an open social networking standard. Some of these entities might consider the fediverse to be worth exploring — but there’s no clear technology backer. Cloudflare actually did provide its own Mastodon-compatible platform that runs on its CDN, but it hasn’t seen anything like wide use. Medium has embraced Mastodon but has not deeply built support into its existing platform.

Perhaps media companies, who generally live and die on the size of their audiences, and have often been beholden to the large social networks, might find themselves interested in embracing a social networking federation where they have more say and control. The rise of the fediverse certainly is a de-risking of their business models. But I don’t think they see it yet; nor do I think they consider it their place to pick a winner. (Nor should it be, really, in practice.)

Perhaps there can be another kind of backer: an entity that sees the existential thread centralized control of social media poses to democracy itself. We’ve already seen how, left unchecked, centralized companies like Facebook incite genocides and throw elections. The fediverse can be an antidote to these trends — if we see it as a set of collaborating communities rather than simply the technology alone. The erosion of democracy, like monopolistic abuse of power, are human problems with human solutions rather than technological ones. Foundations and philanthropists may choose to provide this level of support, if they continue to see Meta as a threat to democracy.

Building features will not protect the fediverse from being extinguished, although they may provide a useful baseline. It’s going to take a whole different level of strategy, relationship-building, deal-making, and movement-building. I believe the fediverse is capable of doing this, as long as it doesn’t mistake building software for making true progress.

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