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A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub
fediversereport.com A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub

If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?

A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub
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Last Week in Fediverse - ep 90
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90

The Fediverse Schema Observatory helps to improve interoperability, the botsin.space server will shut down, and more.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90

This week's news

  • The Fediverse Schema Observatory is a new tool to help interoperability
  • the botsin.space server will shut down
  • Add monetisation to federated WordPress blogs with sub.club
  • You can now set custom handles on fediverse accounts that are bridged to Bluesky
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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86

Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86

This week's news:

  • Threads degrades their activitypub integration, delaying posts by 15 minutes before they appear in the rest of the fediverse
  • Website League is a new ActivityPub-based Island network, outside of the rest of the fediverse
  • Ghost discusses their beta plans and pricing.
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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86

Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 86

This week's news:

  • Threads degrades their activitypub integration, delaying posts by 15 minutes before they appear in the rest of the fediverse
  • Website League is a new ActivityPub-based Island network, outside of the rest of the fediverse
  • Ghost discusses their beta plans and pricing.
0
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 81
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 81

A major report on governance on the fediverse, conversations about public or private votes on the content-aggregator side of the fediverse, ⁂ as a symbol for the fediverse and more.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 81

This week's news:

  • A massive new report on governance on the fediverse by @kissane and @darius
  • Conversations on public votes on Lemmy and Mbin, and @piefedadmin users can now make their votes private
  • @FediverseSymbol proposes ⁂ as a symbol for the fediverse
  • Better #Activitypub debugging with browser.pub
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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 79
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 79

Mike Masnick joins the Bluesky Board, new ideas on microblogging focused on specific topics, and more.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 79

This week's news:

  • @mmasnick joins Bluesky's Board of Directors
  • @bonfire shows some more information on Mosaic, another project of Bonfire, and puts out bounties for developers to help get to a 1.0 release
  • A platform for football fans with CollabFC
  • 3d printing platform @manyfold has added early #activitypub support
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Last Week in Fediverse and Bluesky – ep 77
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse and Bluesky – ep 77

Dutch government's Mastodon pilot extended and expanded, a first implementation in the fediverse that decouples identity from your server, and a cross-protocol client with OpenVibe.

Last Week in Fediverse and Bluesky – ep 77

The news this week:

  • Dutch government plans to expand their #Mastodon project
  • Nomadic Identity (decoupling user identity from servers) over #activitypub comes to the fediverse
  • OpenVibe combines Mastodon, #nostr and now Bluesky into a single app and a single feed.
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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 76
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 76

Shining some light on review platform NeoDB, Mastodon launches some features to better support journalism, a first version of Ghost joins the fediverse, and more.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 76
  • A fully-featured review platform for the fediverse with NeoDB
  • Mastodon better supports journalism with author bylines on links, and seeing what people are talking about on trending news links
  • The first Ghost instance joins the fediverse
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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 74
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 74

More news about Ghosts' work on ActivityPub, statistics of Mastodon show the massive diversity in software ecosystem that happens when you have a fully open API, and much more.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 74

This weeks' news:

  • More updates by Ghost on their work on implementing #ActivityPub
  • Statistics shared by Mastodon show the power of an open API, and the incredible diverse ecosystem that it enables
  • NLnet supports fediverse event planning software Gancio with a new grant
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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 73 (and 72)
fediversereport.com Last Week in Fediverse – ep 73 (and 72)

New papers, plugins for fediverse software and scraping drama.

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 73 (and 72)

This week's news:

  • Scraper drama as AI-powered network Maven works on implementing #ActivityPub
  • Ghost will use fediverse server framework Fedify for their ActivityPub implementation
  • @Castopod releases version 2.0 with plugins
  • an on-device 'For You' algorithmic feed for Lemmy with 3rd party client Quiblr
  • Lemmy releases local-only communities
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What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD?
fediversereport.com What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD?

Farcaster, a crypto-based decentralised social networking protocol hit the news this week, by raising an eye watering 150 million USD, with a valuation of 1 billion USD, all the while sporting around 80K daily active users. For context, Bluesky has around 300k daily active users. The news raises a f...

What is Farcaster, and why did it raise 150M USD?

I take a deep dive into crypto-based social network Farcaster, aka Torment-Nexus-on-the-blockchain.

I think that crypto/web3 is mostly really dumb and bad, but I also do think that what happens on other decentralised social networks is relevant to understand the fediverse. The different protocols influence each other and I dont think they should be understood in isolation. That is why I wanted to have a better understanding of what Farcaster is, and why a16z wanted to spend so much money on it.

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Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’
  • Small detail that I think is actually quite meaningful:

    The article is written by editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. Nilay does not usually write a whole lot of articles, as he's the boss, and the articles he writes are often more commentary (like the famous 'welcome to hell' article for Elon, or his running joke on Brother printers). Within The Verge its usually more David Pierce as a true fediverse believer than Nilay.

    Futhermore, earlier this week Nilay posted on Threads a response to Ghost's survey about federation: "Curious how you approach federation for paid newsletters! (Because we want to figure that out too)" https://www.threads.net/@reckless1280/post/C51n5gmvvCJ

  • Last Week in Fediverse – ep 65
  • Thanks! And yeah, last few weeks have gotten wayy busier with news, its quite noticeable to me. I'm especially excited that there is lots of news outside of the microblogging sphere as well, that part is the most interesting part of the fediverse to me

    (mentions to my indieweb account are still broken for some reason, no idea why haha)

  • Last Week in Fediverse – ep 65
  • The value is in the granular way that you can connect communities. You're totally right that there are a lot of cases where there are good reasons not to connect communities. That goes across instance borders (like you said, Beehaw and Hexbear would preferably not connect communities), but even for instances that are similar, not all communities need to be connected. In the current example of the Social Hub forum and the NodeBB development forum, only 2 communities (categories) are connected, and the rest is not.

  • You Can Now Follow President Biden on the Fediverse
  • yeah its a big deal because of the spillover effort on how much easier this makes conversations with other gov officials about setting up a fedi server. I'm somewhat involved in this process at this point, and now being able to say that 'biden is on the fediverse' really impacts lobbying for the fediverse more broadly

  • FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer Network - The New Stack
    thenewstack.io FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer Network

    At FediForum, new fediverse apps were demo'ed to an active community of open source advocates. Also discussed, the Fediverse Developer Network.

    FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer Network
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    Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024
    fediversereport.com Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024

    Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere, hashtags and mutewords, people can host their own PDS, and much more.

    Last Month in Bluesky – Februari 2024

    An overview of all the news that happened in the ATmosphere last month.

    0
    Whenever the AT protocol of BlueSky is set for others to deploy, won't it have similar problems as ActivityPub instances?
  • Oh thats an interesting question! I'm assuming you are talking about the UX/UI of instance selection?

    And thats not something I have written about (neither does another article pop into my mind either sadly), but interesting idea for an article for sure to write about

  • Whenever the AT protocol of BlueSky is set for others to deploy, won't it have similar problems as ActivityPub instances?
  • Heya! Good answers earlier by you!

    Yeah I think I'll have to get into that, but I'm starting to run into the limit of not being a programmer myself, and information is pretty scarce on ATproto. The article differs from their own federation architecture description from earlier in the year, simply because its outdated and noone has formally written down the new info, so that was a bit of a struggle haha https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture

    At any rate, the PDS's are amenable for sure. Robin Berjon is the furthest along with thinking here, with his AP over AT piece: https://berjon.com/ap-at/ Responses I've seen havent suggested its technically impossible, but probably difficult for reasons that I tuned out of reading because I didnt understand :D

    Beyond that, people keep talking about the lexicon and how that at is core is also versatile; similar to how fedi has Mastodon's type=Note that everyone uses, even though you can create any 'type' you want. I'm pretty sure that nobody has done that yet tho.

  • Whenever the AT protocol of BlueSky is set for others to deploy, won't it have similar problems as ActivityPub instances?
  • I actually set out to answer this question in a blog post, but it turns out that the answer is quite complicated, so I have to write an entire series about it. First part I published this week, which explains all the different components that make up the Bluesky network:

    https://fediversereport.com/how-bluesky-works-the-network-components/

    I don't think that they'll run into the exact same problems that AP-fedi has, as the design decisions are often made specifically to avoid some of these. However, their design decisions create new sets of problems for the network, which I'll get into later

  • It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore
  • Strongly agreed.

    Some other loose thoughts related to this:

    • a very similar phenomenon is visible in Bluesky, but in that case it skews heavily towards older millenials who are trying to recreate a culture that used to exist on Twitter, and is now dead. Bluesky is fundamentally even more backward looking than AP-fedi, as ATProto really cannot do much else than microblogging
    • its been striking for me for a while that the fediverse developer community isnt able to become an actual community, and instead has been trying to reinvent community initiatives outside of fedi for a while, and they all bleed out. Think there are lots of reasons for that, but if the people building a social network cannot manage to use their own tools to use that social network to become a social community, than that usually does not bode well
    • there is a very loosely defined 'community' of people who are interested in talking about fedi on a meta (not Meta) level. youve been involved, so you know most of the names. Again, its striking to me that this group (me included) hasnt really transformed into an actual community, and instead its fleeting ephemeral posts on a feed that only some of the regulars see and comment on.
  • Establishing a new Fediquette
  • I'm very curious as to what people's view on etiquette is regarding submitting your own content. I write a weekly newsletter about the fediverse which is pretty relevant to this community for example. But I'm also quite aware of reddiquette thats pretty hesitant on submitting your own stuff, as it can get spammy really fast. Would love to hear.

  • Dutch government starts own Mastodon instance as reaction to the instability of Twitter
  • haha well think it mostly worked :D

    and thanks for the shoutout! I do need to update my bio and get proper accounts. For now just testing out the water a little bit, havent really fully decided on which server I want to pick. reason Im replying with 2 accounts is that federation between kbin.social and lemmy.ml specifically is still broken, couldnt even see your reply. Not sure how to approach that yet

  • Dutch government starts own Mastodon instance as reaction to the instability of Twitter
  • Yeah, I think theres quite a few reasons to be hopeful. Also why I personally am not very interested in comparisons to XMPP and EEE. To me, that refers to a different time on the internet, where corporations where way more interested in fighting an opensource threat. But times have changed, and for Big Tech, it seems to me they are way more worried about regulations than about opensource competitors.

    Not to say that this automatically means that the fediverse will be a success, not at all, this shit is hard. But to properly judge what challenges await the fediverse, I think its more fruitful to look at what Big Tech is concerned by, and what governments are thinking about. And I see very little talk about EEE from those actors. Instead, its mainly focused on regulations, privacy, and sovereign power.

  • Dutch government starts own Mastodon instance as reaction to the instability of Twitter
  • ha yeah I remember that, that was fun.

    To riff on this a little bit further: its also visible in how little attention in the gazillion conversations about Threads is paid to the fact that the entirety of the EU cannot even access it yet due to the new DMA and DSA.

    Or one of the articles I wrote that got relatively low traction, that was specificially about how all of the Nordic countries got an official recommendation to use ActivityPub for their governmental communications. I dont mind that some articles get less traction than others, but it does stand out when you consider how impactful such things are for the long term structure of the fediverse. Lots of EU governments are now talking about needing sovereign public digital spaces, and are actively looking how ActivityPub can help with that. And that matters way more than whatever Elons latest shenanigans are.

  • Last Week in the Fediverse - ep 23 - An overview of what happened in the fediverse last week
  • yay thanks!

    well the fun part is figuring out how this all works, and what the etiquette is, i simply have no idea either. reddits always been a bit iffy with submitting your own content, which i understand. But its not iffy to make a masto post to promote your own content, and tagging a lemmy group is temptingly easy to do...

    (also commenting with lemmy account because i cant get my calckey account to do it lol)

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