
An essay on user preferences, and how the fediverse's interconnected network of communities can play into that, as well as some other news.

Fediverse Report - On User Preferences and the power of communities
An essay on user preferences, and how the fediverse's interconnected network of communities can play into that, as well as some other news.
This week's fediverse news comes with an essay on what the fediverse can take from Bluesky's proposal to add User Intents. The fediverse can do better than Bluesky by focusing on what makes the network unique: many different communities, each with their own values and culture.
ah thanks for the feedback! Deep Research is a new mode of ChatGPT, so when I say ChatGPT here I meant ChatGPT's Deep Research mode, and specifically the output as made used by Casey Newton's article.
I was unsure on whether I should keep calling it Deep Research or just call it ChatGPT, but good to know I should have indicated this more clearly.
That's why I looked at the ratio of people discussing Superb Owls versus people discussing the halftime show. People who are posting pictures of owls on the superbowl hashtag clearly do care about it, just in a different form
This week I'm zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they'll run out of funding soon, indicating the challenges with funding Trust & Safety in the network.
This week I wrote about fediverse as a countercultural place for pop culture, and how that affects goals to bring the fediverse into the mainstream
As well as the news:
Pixelfed sees massive growth, NodeBB officially launches ActivityPub support, and Threads will not commit to a timeline on account portability.
This week's news:
Mastodon's 2023 Annual Report with more insights into the organisation, Surf is a new browser for the social web, and some considerations about the federation between Mastodon and Misskey
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?
Last Week in Fediverse - ep 90
The Fediverse Schema Observatory helps to improve interoperability, the botsin.space server will shut down, and more.
This week's news
Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.
This week's news:
Threads degrades their fediverse integration, a separate ActivityPub-based Island Network launches, and more news about Ghost and ActivityPub.
This week's news:
Waveform Podcast: Protocol Wars - The Fediverse Explained
Click to view this content.
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.
This week's news:
Mike Masnick joins the Bluesky Board, new ideas on microblogging focused on specific topics, and more.
This week's news:
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.
The news this week:
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.
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.
This weeks' news:
New papers, plugins for fediverse software and scraping drama.
This week's news:
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...
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.
Thank you for sharing the article! Please note that this is last's weeks episode, the newest episode went out yesterday: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-70/
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
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)
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.
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
Biden’s Threads posts can show up in Mastodon clients.
FediForum Showcases New Fediverse Apps and Developer Network - The New Stack
At FediForum, new fediverse apps were demo'ed to an active community of open source advocates. Also discussed, the Fediverse Developer Network.
Bluesky opens up the ATmosphere, hashtags and mutewords, people can host their own PDS, and much more.
An overview of all the news that happened in the ATmosphere last month.
do you mean something like vocata? https://codeberg.org/Vocata/vocata
think that would be super valuable to have for sure, but my non-dev vibes say that its probably above a one-man project, so might be hard to pull off?
i dunno, never used really used friendica much. reply didnt get send back to friendica tho
huh, i wouldnt have expected that actually, but at least its nice that something works
yeah that makes sense. thanks a lot of testing with me tho, much appreciated!
oh, final check out of interest: did this comment made from lemmy show up in your hachyderm notifications at least?
now this thing is just fucking with me lmao. how??? im so confused. i tried it on another account on mastodon.nl as well, plus I can find lemmy.ml posts if i search for them from indieweb.social, so it does not seem like the instances are defederated
wuut, how does it work for you
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
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.
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
they're working on a new project that will supersede audon, apparently https://firefish.social/notes/9j5dw744p5qnqwxp
Strongly agreed.
Some other loose thoughts related to this:
check out https://fediview.com/, it sorts your personal mastodon home timeline via an algorithm that you can pick.
yeah its great to have more managed hosting options. The UX is also really well done, which is great and something I dont see to often in these places. Need to get some time next few days to start up a new lemmy project with this