Author: tio

Developers of the WordPress ActivityPub talks about how they plan to make WordPress websites a full member of the fediverse, videos of FediForum available, and bridging to Bluesky op a per-server basis.

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The News

Fediforum has published the videos of the keynotes and the software demos. For a list of all the demos, you can check out the website. Some thoughts on some of the demoes that stood out to me. For some of the other cool demos (such as Bounce and Bandwagon), check out last week’s news.

• The keynote by Christine Lemmer-Webber talks about how the social media style of the 2010s is no longer good enough. With this, she refers to both the fediverse as well as Bluesky. Lemmer-Webber makes the case we live in an age of surveillance, and both Bluesky and the fediverse do not meet the need for safety and privacy that comes with that. She says that shame is not an effective way to get people to use better platforms, and that we need to bring joy to the new platforms. Lemmer-Webber is now working on different protocols with the Spritely Institute, that use Object Capabilities. I’ll go into more detail on that once Spritely gets closer to public usage, but to hugely oversimplify: with Object Capabilities, you can enforce who has access to your data that you send out. Seeing one of the co-authors of ActivityPub actively advocating for further development of new open protocols indicates to what extend the space of the open social web is still in active development.
• BadgeFed is a platform for issues badges using the Open Badges standard and ActivityPub protocol, where the badges can later be verified cryptographically. There are some interesting parallels with how people are developing badges on ATProto, and it seems to me that both networks are now in the stage that there are solid proofs that you can build systems for credentials on decentralised protocols. The next stage is seeing how people will start using these new systems.
• For developers: ActivityFuzz is an upcoming project from Darius Kazemi, and builds upon the Fediverse Schema Observatory. These tools give a much greater insight into how all the different fediverse projects have implemented ActivityPub in practice, and shows all the differences. This makes building fediverse platforms that are compatible with other platforms more accessible.
• Gobo is a client that allows people to post to multiple different platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky. One of the challenges with cross-posting tools is that these platforms have different character limits, which Gobo has some nice ways of setting the cutoff-point for a longer text thats different for each platform.
• Encyclia is a recently-announced project to make ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) records connected to the fediverse, with the demo providing a first view of what this looks like in practice.
• The Build Your Own Timeline Algorithm takes your Mastodon timeline and uses various customisable algorithms to create custom clusterings for the post, allowing you to sort your timeline into various different topics.

The team implementing the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress has posted a blog with a roadmap what they are working on. The team has plans to majorly expand the plugin, and make WordPress a full member of the fediverse. So far, the interaction has mainly focused on publishing to the fediverse, which will now be expanded to also be able to follow, read and interact with the rest of the fediverse directly via a WordPress account. The main feature will be a reader experience, which is effectively a timeline feed within WordPress. It places WordPress into even more direct competition with Ghost, who also offers a timeline reader as part of their ActivityPub integration.

The Social Web Foundation released a draft of their work to implement end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging over ActivityPub. Their plan uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS), a protocol for encrypting messages, that is designed to be used in combination with other protocols for sending the encrypted messages. One of the parts that is missing for ActivityPub is the ability to send real private messages to each other, and an integration with MLS can help with that. It might take a while before it gets there, this first version of the draft is now ready for proof-of-concept implementations and interoperability testing.

Bridgy Fed, the bridging software that connects ActivityPub with ATProto, has gotten an update where server admins can opt-in to the bridge for their entire server. For some context: Bridgy Fed was originally designed to be opt-out, meaning that every fediverse account could automatically be bridged to the Bluesky network and visa versa. After massive pushback from the fediverse community, this was changed to opt-in, where people have to actively take action to have their account be connected to the other network. The debate laid bare to what extend the fediverse struggled with being a decentralised network, where decentralised means that there are different communities with values that at times are incompatible with each other. Instead the debate got largely framed in terms of what the value (opt-in or opt-out) should be for the entire network. However, with this latest update individual communities can now be independently decide for themselves if they want to be connected to other protocols by default.

The Links

• Bonfire has added the ability to create a separate ‘Events’ feed for Mobilizon and Gancio events.
• Canvas is a yearly fediverse event where people can paint on a shared canvas, one pixel at a time, for 48 hours. This year’s Canvas event will start on July 12th.
• Mastodon has made some tweaks to smaller screen layouts on web.
• Fediverse Support Line #2 – Migrating – FediHost Podcast.
• Ghost talks about how they are making all replies show up.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:

We have just reached €55,000 in contributions for the PeerTube app crowdfunding!
We were not certain to reach it but you followed us until now… that means a lot to us, thank you very much! 🥰

Thanks to this completed goal, we will be able to work with peace of mind on every improvements we wanted to make to the application this year! 🎉

📹 Broadcast live streams using PeerTube app

Whether you want to cover an event happening in your street or to share your road trip with your community, you will soon be able to do so directly from the mobile app!

In addition to making broadcasting easier (no more need for computer or OBS), this enhancement will let you be more spontaneous: you will soon be able to start your live streams on the fly, in just a few seconds…! 🥳

For those of you who have been following the PeerTube project for a long time, maybe you remember we have already funded an app dedicated to PeerTube live streams, soberly called PeerTube Live.
At the time, we called on an external developer to work on this app: we never thought that one day we would maintain our own mobile app!
Today, we can’t imagine not integrating this major feature for videomakers into our app. Fortunately, we will be able to draw on the previous work to implement it, even if that will still be a lot of work!

🫶 Next goal: Support Framasoft

We can imagine many of you have questions about this goal.

If you didn’t know, PeerTube is developed by a small french non-profit called Framasoft (yeah, this is us!).
Our mission is to raise awareness about digital issues and cultural commons: to help people all around the world (even if we mostly work in France) to have a critical look on our digital society by sharing keys to understanding.

However, we define ourselves as being an organization “that does”. We like to think but above all we seek to build solutions that enable everyone to take ownership on these issues and become emancipated.

That is why we built PeerTube: to allow everyone to get back control on their videos.

That is also why we have been running the “De-google-ify” campaign for the past 11 years, providing alternative services to those offered by Big Tech. These services, which are free and accessible to all, are among the largest non-commercial services in the world!

Finally, we opened Framaspace for the same reason: to provide a free collaborative space (based on Nextcloud) for small non-profits and collectives.

We seek to equip those who wish to build a fairer and more equitable world.

Of course, even though all of our services are free, they still have a cost. We have to pay each month for our 10 employees and the whole infrastructure we maintain.
To do so, our business model is based on solidarity: that’s donations from thousands of people (mostly based in France) that fund us! That’s thanks to all these people that PeerTube was born, that 2,000 collectives can enjoy Framaspace today or that more than 2,000,000 of people can freely use our services each month!

By supporting Framasoft, you support both PeerTube and all our other projects.
By doing so, you allow us to help to (digitally) empower those working for a better world.

To support Framasoft and help us to continue to act, you can:

• Follow our social media and share our posts: Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit & Lemmy
• Subscribe to our newsletter and share the latest PeerTube news!
• Share the crowdfunding campaign with your friends and family or on your social medias
• And indeed, if you can so, support us by making a donation!
  Thank you very much! 💖

Support PeerTube

WordPress plugins on ATProto, managing digital badges and attestations, and more.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!

The News

The Linux Foundation has announced FAIR, a package manager project for WordPress. It is “a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” To achieve this independent and federated repository of tools for the WordPress ecosystem, FAIR uses ATProto underneath. FAIR has build their own protocol, the FAIR protocol, on top of ATProto. It uses DID PLC as an identifier for the packages, and ATProto for indexing and discoverability. As the project has just launched and some of the final parts are still being ironed out there are no packages yet that use the FAIR system. As such I cannot give yet a good context for what discoverability of WordPress packages over ATProto actually looks like. The chaos of the last year around the management of WordPress shows a need for decentralised repository of packages and plugins, and FAIR does already show that ATProto can be much more than only a microblogging network.

Gnosco is a new tool for digital badges and attestations on ATProto. It acts as a secure middleman between the application that issues the badge and your PDS. This allows applications to create a signed record to award a badge of attestation for a user. This badge is then not yet placed into the user’s PDS, but instead held in escrow by Gnosco. Users can then log into Gnosco with their ATProto account and review the badges. If they approve, the signed badge then added to their own PDS.

Gnosco took me a while to wrap my head around what the tool is and what it does, but it tackles the following problem. Badges and awards and other attestations need to be accepted and signed by both the issuer and the receiver. But not for all attestations that are issued it is known in advance if the user actually wants to receive this attestation and store it on their PDS. So there needs to be a way for the user to accept or reject a badge or attestation that is issued. Gnosco provides this interface that is platform-neutral, where users can accept and reject any attestation or badge.

Photo-sharing platform Grain now has their own moderation system on their own infrastructure. Grain is building a social photo-sharing network on ATProto that is separate from Bluesky, using their own lexicon. One reason why image-sharing platforms so far tend to have been alternate Bluesky clients is that means that the client does not have to be responsible for moderation. For Grain, the goal is to build their own independent social network, and thus their own moderation system is mandatory as well. The Grain developer also released a stand-alone app to embed Grain galleries on your own website.

Blacksky is proposing to make a soft-fork of the Bluesky client for the Blacksky community. With their own forked app, Blacksky can set some default values that benefit their community, such as setting the default feed to the Blacksky Trending feed, and setting the Blacksky moderation as default moderation. The organisation is looking for 2500 USD in recurring monthly donations, and they are close to reaching that goal.

ATProto chatroom app Roomy has released the another alpha version. Besides offering public chatrooms, Roomy continues to experiment with features for collecting and aggregating chat messages into longer-lived places for text. In this update they included ‘boards’, where people can create simple markdown pages as well as collect ‘threads’ that are pulled out of the chat log. Roomy is on the bleeding edge of technology when it comes to using ATProto, by combining it with Conflict-free Replicated Data Type (CRDT). The Roomy blogs go into more detail on why they are building the architecture this way, but the current practical problem is that CRDTs are new enough that what Roomy needs is still in development.

Tech updates and news

• ATStudio is a new developer-focused tool that allows people to interact with ATProto. It allows you to “experiment with the protocol and debug code paths by making direct XRPC requests and executing @ATProtocol SDK methods using the integrated dashboard.”
• Boost Blue is a new Bluesky client for Android and iOS, that has a few in-demand features that the main Bluesky client is missing, such as repost muting by user, drafts and bookmarks.
• Bluesky’s latest update adds a ‘share’ button on every post, and an announced update to get notification on likes on reposts is pushed back to the next update which contains more notification filters.
• An update by Skylight on how they are building their algorithm.
• Work on the Deer client is paused for the summer.
• Graze announced they are backing Party Starter with a 1k USD grant, a “toolkit for creating short-lived, location-aware events”. Not much else is known yet about Party Starter.
• A “minor change to the PLC Directory service, with the aim of expanding compatibility with non-atproto apps and services”.
• A tool to run raffles on Bluesky posts.
• A new PDS browser with a retro interface.

The Links

• How to use Bluesky to grow your brand – a comprehensive guide for organisations on how they can use Bluesky.
• Feel the ATmosphere: it’s 1995 all over again – a writeup of last month’s Ahoy! conference
• Alumni Ventures is one of the companies who invested in Bluesky’s series A last October. They’ll be hosting a webinar next week on why they invested in Bluesky.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!

FediForum and related announcements

The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week.

Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months.

Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session.

Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story.

Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.

Shutdown of Lemm.ee and opportunity for PieFed

Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server.

The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.

Platform updates

Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’.

Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May.

PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app.

Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.

The Links

• I Posted to Mastodon 1 Mile Away from an Internet Connection – Tom Casavant
• Backfilling Conversations: Two Major Approaches – Julian Lam
• The Power of a Niche – FediHost
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below: