Laurens Hof

Fediverse Report’s deep research on Deep Research’s fediverse report

ChatGPT recently released a new feature, called Deep Research, that allows ChatGPT to “use reasoning”, and process large amount of online information. In his newsletter Platformer, Casey Newton reported on the new ChatGPT’s new feature. To judge the quality and functionality of Deep Research, Newton prompted ChatGPT to output a report of 5k words using Deep Research, and compare this to a similar report made by Google’s Gemini. Notably for this blog, Newton asks ChatGPT for a report about how the fediverse could benefit publishers. A Fediverse Report, you could call it. Newton does not spend a lot of time analysing the results, saying that the output hits on the requirements of the prompt, and says that compared to Gemini, deep research “blows it out of the water”. Not all tech writers are as impressed with Deep Research, AI doomer king Ed Zitron wrote another long article, ‘The Generative AI Con’, in which Zitron pushes back against AI hype. He takes a Deep Research by reading through the same report that about the fediverse that Newton has published in Platformer. Zitron is not impressed by OpenAI’s new feature, saying that “the citations in this “deep research” are flimsy at best“, and that “this thing isn’t well-researched at all.“

A report on the fediverse is quite up the alley for a blog named Fediverse Report. So let’s do some deep research on Deep Research’s fediverse report. I’ll go over ChatGPT’s output in detail, analysing what information ChatGPT gives, and which information is missing.

ChatGPT’s output gets quite a lot of information correct, and more importantly, it structures the information well. It pulls in relevant examples, and also manages to find relevant obscure information. Deep Research’s ability to show what information the output is based on gives insight in how an LLM’s output gets constructed. It also allows the sources to be analysed, and it turns out there is a lot of interesting information you can learn by looking at the sources that Deep Research uses for the output. The report is also pretty well structured, and hits on most of the relevant points that publisher who is curious about the fediverse needs to know.

A common critique of LLMs is that they will give factually incorrect information, often simply called hallucinations. This problem is also visible in Deep Research’s output, it contains factual mistakes. The problem of factual (in)correctness of LLMs is well-known, and not a debate I want to rehash here. What I am interested in is the analysis and research part of Deep Research: which sources does the output use? Are those sources any good? And just as importantly: which relevant sources should have been part of the report, but aren’t? Judging if the output of an LLM is correct or incorrect is reasonably straightforward. But judging if the output of the LLM does not include information that reasonably should have been included is much harder. This goes doubly so for emerging fields like the fediverse, where there is no authoritative base of knowledge to rely upon.

In ChatGPT’s output that Newton uses to get a sense of the performance of Deep Research, I find that there are three types of issues relating to data and analysis. There are issues with the quality of the sources that ChatGPT cites, and there are sources missing that I expect to have been cited. But the most intriguing part for me is when ChatGPT cites a source correctly, but the resulting output is still lacking, because the needed information to get to a good understanding is not actually available on the internet.

Source quality

One issue that Deep Research struggle with is with the quality of the data sources it cites. The clearest example is this specific Reddit post, which ChatGPT cites six different times as a source in the section on monetization in the fediverse. The post is titled ‘monetization’ and posted on /r/fediverse. This specific Reddit post is the second search result on Google, as well as Kagi and DuckDuckGo for the search query ‘fediverse monetization’.

ChatGPT heavily focuses on WebMonetization by Interledger in this section, and how it integrates with Castopod. Interledger is a (non-crypto) payment network that allows people to send microtransactions to creators. There is indeed an WebMonetization integration with Castopod, but ChatGPT’s output gives no indication of how unrepresentative this is for the fediverse. With respect to Castopod and Interledger and what they are building, WebMonetization is in no way any meaningful part of the fediverse. In fact, both organisations presented their integration in 2025 during FOSDEM. The room consisted of the most in-the-know in-crowd of fediverse developers, and as far as I can tell this potential fediverse integration with WebMonetization was new information for most if not all of them. ChatGPT provides a reasonable summary of the position of Interledger regarding monetization in their output, but the complete lack of context of how early in the adoption stage WebMonetization makes that the output does not represent the state of the fediverse, as it is currently used by most people, at all.

An article by TwipeMobile is the prime source that ChatGPT uses throughout the article. TwipeMobile is software development company that builds apps for newspapers. The company also publishes research papers about related topic, and one is called “What is the Fediverse? A guide for publishers and the uninitiated.” With a title like that it is no surprise that ChatGPT likes the article. The quality of the article is mediocre however, and it lives in the twilight zone where it is impossible to tell for sure whether the article is generated by an LLM or written by a human.

The TwipeMobile article has some major issues with factuality, and as a result, ChatGPT’s output suffers as well. This is especially noticeable in ChatGPT’s comparison between ActivityPub and ATProto. The TwipeMobile article describes ActivityPub as ‘widely adopted’ and having an ‘established user base’, and ATProto as early in its growth. The article was published on 6 December 2024, and at that date the fediverse had 1.1 million monthly active users, while Bluesky had around 11 million monthly active users. That ATProto is 10x the size in terms of active users compared to ActivityPub does not seem particularly clear from the language used in the TwipeMobile article, which seems to imply that ActivityPub is more active than ATProto. As ChatGPT’s output relies so heavily on TwipeMobile’s article, this misconception is reflected in ChatGPT’s advice as well, which describes ActivityPub as having an ‘established audience’ and ATProto as being in an ‘early growth stage’.

Missing sources

ChatGPT does miss a few relevant sources, that would help publishers get a good understanding of the state of the fediverse and whether the network is relevant for them. One source that is missing from ChatGPT’s output is regarding monetisation and sub.club. Sub.club was a platform that let fediverse creators offer paid subscriptions and premium content, using existing fediverse infrastructure. It allowed people to set up a fediverse account, to share content with the rest of the fediverse. Creators could then set a paywall on posts if they so wanted, and sub.club provided the payment infrastructure. Sub.club shut down in December 2024, only a few months after launched, and they managed to onboard only 150 people. For publishers that are interested in monetisation on the fediverse Sub.club’s struggle to gain traction is a relevant data point. Sub.club got a fair amount of media attention (1, 2) from well-known outlets, so there was not a lack of sources for ChatGPT to cite from.

Another example of sources that are not included in ChatGPT’s output is not only a matter of not linking to articles, the lines between ‘relevant information that is missing from ChatGPT’s output’ and ‘relevant information that is not covered in well-known news publications’ are thin. Some of the most relevant information that is missing in the output is also missing in articles that rank high in search engines. A notable example is the statistics that Heise editor Martin Holland regularly publishes, which compares traffic to their site from Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and X over a longer time period. The original prompt by Newton asks for report on how the fediverse could benefit publishers, and traffic data time series is one of the best ways of showing the concrete benefits for publishers.

As best I can tell this data series is not published in news media, which explains why it does not show up. ChatGPT seems to prefer to use English-speaking sources. For example, there is no information on how ZDF, one of Germany’s largest public broadcasters, has had their own Mastodon server for years. Heise being a German news outlet also likely contributes to the data series is being not being reported on in English-speaking media, and not being found by ChatGPT.

On data availability

One limitation that ChatGPT’s output has is that it is dependent on available information. But what if the information is not available online, nor a clear indication there is missing data at all? Let’s take a look at how ChatGPT describes Medium as an example for how publishers can use a Mastodon instance to amplify author’s reach. The output cites Medium’s announcement blog post and summarises the point of why Medium started their Mastodon server this correctly. On a surface level ChatGPT’s output is good: it found relevant information and summarised the important points.

What’s missing here is the follow-up: Medium launched their Mastodon more than 2 years ago. So did their plans actually work out? That seems pretty relevant information for a potential publisher to know. In 2024, Medium barely posted about their Mastodon server on their blog. CEO Tony Stubblebine mentions Medium’s Mastodon server once in his ‘State of Medium‘ post, also saying that he finds Threads to be a better place for self-promotion. Those two additional data points suggest that Medium’s experience with launching a Mastodon server is mixed: the me.dm server has 1.7k MAU, so it clearly provides some benefit to the Medium user base. But neither are there signals that it is an overwhelming success.

The issue here is that Medium (or anyone else) has not published an analysis or statement with a follow-up on Medium’s Mastodon server, to ask the question: “are the benefits of running a Mastodon server by a publishing platform good enough that it is recommended for other publishers to do so as well?” Newton’s original prompt asks for “high-level strategic analysis for a digital-native publisher”, and this is the type of analysis that is needed for a publisher to actually make a decision. For a publisher it is only knowing about the existence of a project is not the point, a publisher needs to know if that project is successful and if they should consider it as well. This type of analysis is hard for ChatGPT to properly execute: LLMs are fundamentally about processing data, and it cannot process data that doesn’t exist.

Some more notes

ChatGPT’s output on recommendation I find to be quite good. The first three points of advice – Establish an Authentic Presence, Integrate Your Website with ActivityPub, Engage with the Community- are quite good at a high level, and advice that I would give to publishers as well. The advice to “Stay Adaptive with Protocols” is also good advice, but the description is wrong on some pretty important parts. Then again, this is also because the quoted source (TwipeMobile again) is wrong on this, so at least ChatGPT cited a bad source correctly.

ChatGPT spends another section on discoverability and engagement, writing a comparison between ActivityPub and ATProto. It correctly notes that discoverability on the fediverse happens to community sharing and hashtags, and that ATProto has space for algorithmic discovery. ChatGPT’s tendency to equate both sides is in full play here: it does correctly say the difference between the networks, but refrains from making a material conclusion about it, describing them both as equal but different. Again, the biggest fault ChatGPT here is not in what it writes, but what it does not write. There is no information on that search is opt-in on the fediverse, that around 5% of accounts have opted into being discovered, and that as a result search and discovery works significantly less well on the fediverse than it does on Bluesky.

Finally, ChatGPT offers the advice to use “third-party analytics services to gauge engagement.” There are indeed tools available for analytics, but not all of them are easy to find, or to know which one to use. ChatGPT does not tell you which tools you can potentially use, instead offering very basic advice on tracking engagement. ChatGPT’s output would have been better here with some more ‘deep research’.

Another general note on ChatGPT’s output: Zitron does not like Deep Research’ tone of writing, and I agree with what he writes here: “I don’t like reading it! I don’t know how else to say this — there is something deeply unpleasant about how Deep Research reads! It’s uncanny valley, if the denizens of said valley were a bit dense and lazy. It’s quintessential LLM copy — soulless and almost, but not quite, right.”

Over the last years how you feel about LLMs and generative AI has quickly become an identity marker for many people, with opinions ranging from LLMs being the new way to build machine god to a torment nexus that is designed to strip workers of their power. For this article I am not aiming to argue for a specific position in the debate about the values and impacts of LLMs, and instead I’m aiming for a smaller goal. OpenAI released a new mode that says it can do deep research, and a prominent tech writer used a singular prompt to get a sense of how good this new mode this. This prompt happened to be on a subject field I do know something about. I wanted to know how much ‘deep research’ was in ChatGPT’s output, so to that end, I simply did some deep research of my own.

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-reports-deep-research-on-deep-researchs-fediverse-report/

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Fediverse Report #105

While the news in the world is louder and intenser than ever, the fediverse has had one of it’s most quiet news weeks in a long time. But as compensation I’ll have another article out tomorrow, that I did not manage to finish for today.

The News

Some updates for GoToSocial: GoToSocial published the documentation that would also allow other fediverse platforms to implement their Interaction Policies. And Slurp is a new CLI tool to import your posts from other fediverse servers into GoToSocial. A guide to import your Pixelfed posts into GoToSocial with Slurp is available here.

Last week I wrote extensively about Mastodon’s plan to implement quote post. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed in a follow-up that Mastodon will not display quote posts if they are made using another implementation than Mastodon proposes. This means in practice that even when Mastodon has added support for quote posts, it will not display quote posts made by Misskey, unless Misskey also implements Mastodon’s new proposed system for quote posts.

Elgg is an old-school open source social network that started in 2004. It added a plugin for ActivityPub this week.

John Oliver discussed content moderation on Last Week Tonight, quickly promoting Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bluesky and Signal as alternatives.

The Identity Graph Explorer is a simple tool to find out how “identifiers on the Fediverse / Social Web are connected to one another”.

The Hexbear Lemmy community recently lost control of their domain, leading to a bidding war for the domain name for thousands of dollars. The admins now report that they have gotten back control of their domain.

The Links

• IFTAS is In a Funding Crisis – WeDistribute
• GoToSocial empowers you to have your own home on the Fediverse – with unique controls – Elena Rossini
• How to Launch Your Own Fediverse Community Server – WeDistribute
• Website League update for February
• Managing Mastodon Storage – FediHost
• Lemmy biweekly development update.
• 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:

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#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-105/

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Fediverse Report – #104

Mastodon has announced it will add quote posts to the platform, and some more news.

The News

Mastodon has announced it is adding quote posts to the platform, a long-awaited feature. Mastodon got a grant by NLnet in 2024 to add quote posts, and they are now sharing an update on their work. Mastodon is adding a variety of features to quote posts, such as giving people the ability to opt out of being quote posted. They will publish the technical work to support quote posts as Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, and Mastodon is currently in the process of writing these proposals. The organisation does not say when quote posts will be added, only noting that it ‘will still take more time to develop.’

For a long time, Mastodon had not implemented quote posts because CEO Eugen Rochko saw them as bad. His main concern is that quote posts lead to ‘dunking’ and toxic behaviour. Dunking refers to the behaviour where people use quote posts to ‘dunk’ on other people’s post, often with the intent that this mocking will lead to their followers to also mock and harass the original poster. Dunking was a visible part of Twitter’s culture, and in popular belief dunking and toxicity became linked together. Research showed a more complicated picture. Hilda Bastian analysed over 30 studies on quote tweeting, and concludes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs [quote Tweets] increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.“

In 2023 Mastodon changed their opinion, and first started saying that the organisation was open to implementing quote posts. Still, toxic behaviour via dunking continued to be a main concern. This is visible in the accompanying design research that Mastodon has done in their work on quote posts. Mastodon’s view seems to be that quote posts are toxic at it’s core, saying that “the team started out with a shared view that Quote Posts can be misused.”

Mastodon takes a technical approach to dealing to the purported problem of toxicity of quote posts, and the blog posts lists three features to mitigate it: people can choose if their posts are able to be quoted, people get notified if they are quoted, and there will be the ability to withdraw your post from the quoted context. Bluesky also has these features for quote posts, and they’re generally received well. What I find missing here is a take by Mastodon on the effect of these features on Bluesky. Mastodon sees quote posts as being dangerous, and that is why they will implement some features to mitigate the risk. But do they think that quote posts are being used well on Bluesky? Is Bluesky’s behaviour and culture around quote posts something that Mastodon is striving towards? I’m not clear to me what Mastodon’s answer is here.

Mastodon’s design research also says that they will display quotes in a different way to ‘steer away from dunk culture”‘, a feature not mentioned in Mastodon’s announcement blog post. Mastodon is planning to display a quote post by first showing the quote, and showing the reply below it. This is similar to how Tumblr does quote posts. But it differs from how all other platforms that interoperate with Mastodon display quote posts: fediverse native platforms like Misskey, Akkoma and Streams, as well as connected networks like Bluesky and Threads, all display quote posts by showing the reply at the top, and the quoted post below.

Mastodon’s position is that quote posts are a risky feature invite misuse, and thus need a variety of safety features. But Mastodon is not an isolated platform, it is connected to various other platforms that all have their own ideas about quote posts. If displaying quote posts Tumblr-style (quote above, comment below) is preferred over displaying them Twitter-style (comment above, quote below), what is the expectation on how other platforms should interact with Mastodon quotes? Is Misskey expected to display Mastodon’s quote post differently? Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning to display quotes that originate from Misskey not in the way that Misskey does (Twitter-style), but in their own manner (Tumblr-style), saying that it has “very little impact on the semantics”.

I find these statements hard to square: on the one hand, Mastodon says it how quote posts are displayed has little impact on the semantics of a post, but at the same time it is assumed to have enough of an impact in that it can reduce “dunking culture”. But if the manner a quote post is displayed can impact people’s behaviour, it automatically follows that the manner a quote post is displayed impacts its semantics, as otherwise there would be no impact on people’s behaviour either. But if the semantics of a post are altered by using a different display method for quote posts, than it means that Mastodon is taking an active decision to alter the semantics of posts made on other networks like Misskey and Bluesky.

Mastodon’s choice to use a different way of displaying quote posts than the other platforms in their network opens up a new interesting avenue for federated diplomacy. We’ve seen both ways of displaying quote posts be successful, the way posts are quoted is a significant part of how conversations flow on Tumblr. But what is new here is Mastodon is part of a federated network, and that means that their decisions impact other players, and their decisions have impact on Mastodon as well. This interaction between different display types of quote posts is something we have not really seen before, leading to some interesting new types of negotiations: how Mastodon expect Misskey to display Mastodon quote posts on Misskey? How does Threads feel about having their quote posts being displayed differently on Mastodon? What is the expected behaviour of Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects Bluesky with Mastodon? All those questions are still open, and I’m curious what the answer will turn out to be.

Tumblr is still planning to join the fediverse. I reported this recently, and now TechCrunch got a followup and a confirmation from Automattic, saying that ‘Automattic declined to share a time frame as to when the migration would be complete, given its scale, but a rep for the company called the progress so far “exciting.”’

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has announced they are now a formal member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C tends to favour institutional membership, but the W3C Social Community Group that concerns itself with ActivityPub is open to everyone. The SWF is working on various improvements to ActivityPub, such as adding end-to-end encryption and supporting data portability.

Event Federation is a WordPress plugin that extends the ActivityPub support plugin for WordPress by adding support for WordPress events. The plugin is now officially released as a 1.0 version.

Hexbear is a controversial Lemmy server that let domain expire. The Hexbear domain is now for sale, and an avid bidding war has driven up the price for the domain to over 2300 dollar at time of writing.

ForgeFed is an ActivityPub extension that adds federation support to software forges such as Forgejo. It has gotten a new NLnet grant, with the project now focusing on user research and documentation.

A few weeks ago, Fedidb removed fediverse platfrom GoToSocial from the database after refusing to honor robots.txt, and the GoToSocial developer spoofed data as retaliation. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault later decided to properly add support for robots.txt, but stopped crawling for the entire fediverse in the meantime while it was implemented. Supernault now confirms that Fedidb honors robots.txt and has added GoToSocial back to the data set.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has set up their own Mastodon server for all community members, including students.

The Links

• An experiment with social media handles – Doctor Popular
• Micro Social is a new third-party app for Micro.Blog
• A podcast by The Conversation about how decentralised social media platforms work, interviewing Robert Gehl
• Five Confusing Fediverse Things – FediHost Podcast
• ActivityPods shared their presentation from FOSDEM, about how the project compares to ATProto and their work with NextGraph.
• Another FOSDEM presentation that was uploaded recently was by Davide Eynard, about ‘Building your own Timeline Algorithm’.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform – Alex Kirk

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-104/

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Last Week in Fediverse #103

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.

On bridging and fediverse culture

Erin Kissane wrote an excellent article this week, about ‘bridging’ (connecting separate networks), fediverse culture, and why this regularly leads to drama and blowups. Kissane gives three explanations as to why this type of drama keeps happening, of which I want to highlight one: ‘Conflicting models of what the fediverse “really” is’. Kissane focuses on two different cultures on the fediverse regarding how connections between different places on the fediverse should be made, and how they should deal with consent.

I agree with Kissane’s observation, both that these competing models exist, as well as that a lack of acceptance that there are different models leads to conflict. Just last week I wrote about two separate cases of drama between various people about fediverse software that deals with these conflicting models on what the fediverse really is. In general I think that it is highly important to have a good understanding of what the fediverse truly is, and not only what people want the fediverse to be.

This Sunday was the NFL Superbowl, with the halftime show by Kendrick Lamar. Lamar made some powerful visual statements in his show, such as a flag of America that consists entirely of Black men. Browsing both the fediverse and Bluesky this Monday morning served as a good indication of how different the cultures of these two networks are.

On Bluesky, 20 of the most liked 25 posts of the entire network 1 discussed the Superbowl, and of those 20, 12 were specifically about Lamar’s halftime show. Shortly after the end of the show, network traffic spiked to almost double the traffic for a short period as people logged in to talk about the show.

On the fediverse, I had a hard time finding any posts discussing the Superbowl. I saw one post on the trending page of mastodon.social. Browsing through all posts made with the hashtag #superbowl gave me more than five times as much superb pictures of owls as it gave me posts about the halftime show.2 There is a long tradition of posting pictures of owls with the tag SuperbOwl, that far predates the fediverse.

It shows two social networks with very different cultures: one as a place to discuss mainstream cultural events, and one as a place for counterculture and the subversion of mainstream culture. I do not think this difference is an anomaly either, in general I see significantly less conversations about pop culture on the fediverse. This specific example with the Superbowl halftime show is just a clear example of a larger trend

To be clear here: this is not a criticism of the fediverse, nor is it a call for the fediverse to change and suddenly start posting about Lamar. The reason I’m highlighting these difference is to show what the fediverse actually is. There is a significant group of people that have an interest in the fediverse for the potential that it can be. This group frames the fediverse as an alternative to platforms like X, as a way to build social media platforms that are welcoming for everybody. This is a laudable goal to strive for. The ongoing coup in the US illustrates the urgent need for social platforms that are not owned by the oligarchy. But I also think that working towards such goals requires a good understanding what the fediverse currently actually is.

That is why I’m placing this observation in the context of Kissane’s post, who notes that people having ‘conflicting model of what the fediverse “really” is’ leads to conflict, and hampers potential for change in the fediverse. To me, how the fediverse responded to the Superbowl is a good illustration of the current culture of the network. What the fediverse currently is, is a countercultural network with little interest in mainstream pop culture. This is an absolutely fine identity to have! But for the people who are working to bringing the fediverse into the mainstream, it is important to realise that this countercultural identity clashes with with bringing a mainstream cultural identity to the fediverse.

The News

IFTAS has announced that they are running out of funding, and that barring new funding sources that will come through this month, the organisation will have to scale down their activities significantly. IFTAS says that they are currently focused on getting funding for their Content Classification Service (CCS). CCS is an opt-in system which helps fediverse server admins with CSAM detection and reporting. Running a social networking server comes with a fair amount of requirements regarding reporting CSAM, which are difficult to do for fediverse admins. CCS is intended to help with that, but IFTAS describes it as an “a ridiculously expensive undertaking, far beyond what the community can support with individual donations”. If IFTAS cannot secure funding by the end of the month, they will have to suspend the operation of CCS and its CSAM detection service. Other work that IFTAS will have to halt if no funding comes through is giving policy guidance, like their recent work for server admins on how to navigate the new UK Online Safety Act.

Funding Trust & Safety has been a major challenge for the fediverse. Recently, Mastodon tried a fundraiser for a new Trust & Safety lead, where Mastodon only managed to raise 13k of the aimed 75k. It is a concerning situation for the fediverse. One of the selling points of the network is that it can be a safer place for vulnerable people. But it turns out that actually funding the work that can make the fediverse a safer place is a lot harder than it should be.

Tapestry is a new iOS app by Iconfactory, who once made the popular Twitter client Twitterific. Tapestry is a combination of a news reader and a social media site. It allows you to combine many feeds into a single timeline. Tapestry supports social feeds like Mastodon, Bluesky and Tumblr, as well as RSS, YouTube, and more. The app was funded via Kickstarter last year. In a review, David Pierce from The Verge describes Tapestry as a ‘timeline app’, in a similar category as apps like feeeed and Surf. In his review, Pierce describes how timeline apps are about consuming information and new in a different way, and help manage the information overload that social media feeds present us with. I think that is also why I find these types of apps interesting, as they also frame the fediverse in a different way. Most popular fediverse software like Mastodon and Pixelfed are wired around social interaction. However, they follow the same patterns as the Twitters and Instagrams that came before, and over the last 15 years society has reshaped itself so that platforms like Twitter became not only used for talking, but also as a way to distribute news. So far, the fediverse is repeating this structure; Mastodon is used both for organisations that just want to send out a link to their news article as well as for people to chat with their friends. Timeline apps like Tapestry help split out these use cases, and allow people to take one part of the interaction pattern of Mastodon (following news and updates) without the other pattern (chatting with friends).

The Links

Some more videos of fediverse presentations that happened at FOSDEM last week were published online:

• Fediscovery – Improving Search and Discovery on the Fediverse – David Roetzel (Mastodon)
• Castopod & Web Monetization on the Social Web – Benjamin Bellamy (Castopod) & Jeremiah Lee (Web Monetization)
• Presenting ActivityBot at FOSDEM – Terence Eden
• Fediverse Fighters – The Role of Public Institutions – Melanie Bartos

The Brazilian Institute for Museums, a Brazilian government agency, is hiring two people to expand their integration with ActivityPub.

Flipboard has published more information and a schedule for Fediverse House, a conference about the social web. It will be held in Austin, Texas, on Sunday March 9th and Monday March 10th.

And some more links:

• Trunk & Tidbits, January 2025, Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update.
• A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship – Robert W. Gehl
• Pixelfed Crowdfunds More Open Source Social Alternatives for the Fediverse – David Cassel/The New Stack
• Release candidate 0.18 for GoToSocial with a wide variety of new features.
• Lemmy is working towards a 1.0 release with breaking changes in their API.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

1. I checked at 6am PST, and looked at the past 12 hours. ↩︎
2. Also checked on 6am PST, and checked all posts made with that hashtag as visible from the mastodon.social server. I saw 61 pictures of owls, and less than 10 pictures by non-automated accounts of the show by Lamar. I’m saying less then 10 here because there were some automated bot accounts in there who mirror posts from news websites. Due to the size difference in userbase between Bluesky and Mastodon I’m less interested in the absolute numbers as in the relative difference between them. ↩︎

#fediverse #superbowl

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-103/

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Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.a

Bluesky’s public launch was one year ago today, and here you can see how the network has grown and changed over this first year. In that year, Bluesky has managed to find a serious role in the larger media ecosystem. The media ecosystem itself has shifted rapidly as well: outlets like Wired and 404 Media, and independent reporters like Marisa Kabas and Nathan Tankus at the forefront of reporting what is happening in the US. I do not think it is an accident that they are all active on Bluesky

Note: I’ve been sick for the past few days, so this edition is a bit shorter and a day late, apologies. Next week’s edition will be focused again on the more technical side of AT Protocol (ATProto).

Credible exit

One of the core concepts why Bluesky is build on the open ATProto is to give users ‘credible exit’. The Bluesky company (Bluesky PBC) is mindful of how companies turn bad over time, and CTO Paul Frazee explicitly talks about how he sees his own company as a ‘future adversary‘. The idea is that in a future where Bluesky has become an adversary to its users, people can have a ‘credible exit’ away from Bluesky towards another microblogging app. People can take their digital identity (the DID, in ATProto terms), social graph and posts with them, and seamlessly continue microblogging on ATProto using another app. Such another competitor microblogging app on ATProto currently does not exist, and an important factor in that is the incentives to build such an app currently are not there. Bluesky is currently not an adversary, has a well-designed app and some significant funding, and it is hard to compete with that. Still, the assumption made by Bluesky PBC is that over the years, Bluesky PBC will gradually turn ‘bad’ in some way, and at some point the incentives are such that another company will build a microblogging competitor on ATProto, and people will have the option to have a credible exit.

The ongoing coup in America changes the dynamic however. Autocratic regimes are not particularly compatible with platforms that allow for free speech by people that oppose the regime. This creates a possibility that either the Musk or the US government will force Bluesky to censor speech or ban accounts that they don’t like, or that either party will come after Bluesky directly. Musk has called Bluesky ‘pedosky’ multiple times, indicating his feelings of contempt for the network that rivals his X platform. Such actions would likely be wildly illegal and should be fought in court, but in a world where an unelected private citizen can decide to shut down entire US government departments, it is prudent to account for the possibility that other illegal stuff might happen as well.

This new political environment changes the understanding of Bluesky having a credible exit as well. So far, Bluesky PBC frames credible exit as a way for people to move to a different app on the same network when the company becomes an ‘adversary’. But in the current political climate, it might just be that the US government becomes an adversary which prompts a need for a credible exit.

Bluesky clients

Bluescreen is the latest video app for Bluesky, made by the creator of the popular Bluesky client Skeets. It is similar to apps like Skylight and Videos for Bluesky, all three apps provide a TikTok-like interface to watch videos that are posted on Bluesky. Over at TechCrunch, Sarah Perez wrote an overview of all the video apps for ATProto that are currently being developed.

Now that I’ve gotten to play around with all three video apps for Bluesky, I am not convinced that Bluesky video clients are the way forward to build a ‘TikTok for Bluesky’. Bluesky’s recent update for video feeds have turned the official Bluesky app into a suitable video client as well, and I find that the video watching experience on the official Bluesky app is better than on any of these three apps. Part of it is that the competitor client apps are all still early in development, and this may change over time. But more importantly, videos on Bluesky get posted in an environment where there are lots of non-video content as well. If I watch a video on Bluesky and I want to see that account’s profile, I’m want to be able to see all of their posts, not just their videos. I can do this with the official Bluesky app, but not with any of the Bluesky video-focused clients.

There are now multiple image-focused Bluesky clients as well. Pinksky was recently released with an interface that is heavily inspired by Instagram. Bluescreen also now has a Bluesky client specifically for photo-sharing, Flashes, that entered open beta this week. Atlas is a Bluesky client for images that has collections similar to Pinboard. These image-focused Bluesky clients all bring something to the table that the official Bluesky client does not have, by restructuring the interface around images. But just with video, I’m wondering if it is enough to build a steady user base.

The Links

• Two RSS readers added Bluesky support this week: Feedly and Inoreader.
• handles.net allows for large-scale managing of Bluesky handles, similar to other services like Aviary.
• Another way to add bookmarks to Bluesky, this time with a separate app.
• Automating a dynamic avatar for Bluesky.
• Bluesky is now also using labelers for more casual use-cases, advertising a labeler for people to support their team during the Super Bowl.

In the media:

• Bluesky’s science takeover: 70% of Nature poll respondents use platform – Celeste Biever/Nature
• Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch
• Seizing social media for the people – Kate Lindsay/Embedded
• Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness – Mike Masnick/Techdirt
• Selling followers where the skies are blue – Conspirador Norteno/Conspirator0
• Bluesky’s AT Protocol is the real “everything app” – Scott Polhemus

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

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Fediverse Report – #102

FOSDEM and the fediverse match well together, some issues regarding data privacy and consent, and multi-network client Openvibe gets 800k in funding.

The News

FOSDEM, the free event for open source software was this weekend in Brussels, with a large presence for the fediverse and the social web. There were three events, presentations by various fediverse software developers in the SocialWeb Devroom, an extra smaller event on Sunday for more presentations, and a more casual event on Sunday evening at Brussels Hackerspace. All the events were fully packed, showing the large amount of interest from the community for the fediverse and the social web. The Social Web Foundation has been the main initiator of these events.

Some thoughts and observations:

• Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP) are documents with the goal to improve applications on the fediverse. People can write proposals, and developers can decide to support and implement proposals as they see fit. There are some great technical FEPs, but one of the challenges of such a grassroots system is getting buy-in from developers to support specific FEPs. NodeBB developer Julian Lam held a presentation ‘The Fediverse is Quiet — Let’s Fix That!’ as an advocacy for a specific FEP. The proposal Lam talks about is about fixing the problem of missing replies, where people do not see all replies on a post. What I think is noteworthy about Lam’s presentation is that it frames a FEP not only as a technical document, but as a process that needs community buy-in for other developers to support and implement a FEP. Hopefully, more of such advocacy might help see more FEPs implemented as well.
• Mastodon presented the progress on their Fediverse Discovery Provider project. The project builds an opt-in decentralised service for better discovery and search. In the presentation (and on the website), Mastodon stressed that the project is not only a Mastodon project, but is intended to be used by the entire fediverse. Mastodon developer David Roetzel said that he hoped that the goal is that many servers will run a “Fediverse Auxillary Service Provider”. Personally I think that it is instructive to look at Bluesky here. While the AT Protocol is decentralised, in practice everyone uses infrastructure owned by the Bluesky company. I’m not convinced yet that the Fediverse Discovery Provider project will not run into the same problem, as I’m unclear on what the incentives are for people to run competing Fediverse Discovery Provider projects.
• Some of the more interesting presentations I saw were about the integration of different types of protocols with ActivityPub. The ActivityPods project combines ActivityPub with Solid Pods, which shows quite some similarities with how the PDS system of ATProto works. All your data is stored on your Pod, multiple types of apps can connect to your Pod, and communicate via ActivityPub. It allows you to have a single account that is used for multiple platforms, similar with how your ATProto account can be used for multiple types of apps.
• One of the most valuable parts of a conference like FOSDEM is getting developers together in a room to meet and build relationships. Fediforum has provided such a place for people to gather digitally, but meeting people in real life remains one of the best ways to build trust and relationships. Some practical ways this was visible this FOSDEM was by getting the NodeBB, WordPress ActivityPub plugin, WriteFreely and Ghost developers together and recognising themselves as the ‘longform’ people. This group of developers getting together this way helps with the various projects becoming more interoperable, and better support for longform content in the fediverse.

Two issues regarding consent and data processing this week. The first is with GoToSocial and fediverse statistics sites like fedidb.org and fediverse.observer. Some GoToSocial servers have blocked statistics sites from indexing their platforms via robots.txt, but the crawlers of fedidb.org and fediverse.observer ignore those. In response, the main GoToSocial server decided to serve up randomised numbers, messing up the statistics of these sites. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault removed GoToSocial altogether from the statistics site, but does not seem to be willing to respect the opting out of crawling via robots.txt. The second is regarding the shutdown of FediOnFire, that displayed public posts from a relay in a format similar to one of Bluesky’s firehose visualisation tools.

• How the fediverse treats consent for public posts is unusual, and make it stand out from other networks. For a significant group of people, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-out bases if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a full 2-way interacting fediverse server. In contrast, consent for processing other people’s ‘Public’ ActivityPub posts is done on an opt-in basis if the service doing the processing is vaguely shaped like a crawler. The line between these two situations is hard to draw, even more so in an internally coherent way. Still, this line clearly exists, and ignoring it leads to high-profile blowups such as with Searchtodon and Bridgy Fed. Defining the permissions clearly for posts would help here, and it is frustrated to see that the situation has not meaningfully improved in years. Furthermore, that fediverse stats sites have ignored the opt-out on a server level via robots.txt indicates that servers setting permissions is not a panacea either.

The Pixelfed Kickstarter has seen some updates this week. First was the update that setting up a Pixelfed Foundation is now moved to the stretch goal of $200k CAD, and that for $300k CAD the stretch goal is to expand the team to hire additional developers. A few days later, developer Daniel Supernault said that the $300k CAD stretch goal is now to build a Tumblr alternative. That brings the goal of the Pixelfed Kickstarter to build four platforms: Pixelfed, Loops, Sup (an encrypted messaging platform) and an unnamed Tumblr alternative, as well as building a foundation and a developer testing kit with Pubkit. Moving the foundation to a stretch goal that has not been met yet does not feel great to me, as good governance of such large platforms is highly important. Adding a Tumblr alternative to another later stretch goal also makes me concerned that Supernault is taking on too much here, as that is a lot of products to build and maintain.

Openvibe, a client that combines your Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads account into a single feed, has raised 800k USD in outside investment, with Automattic among the investors. Openvibe is an early mover in the space, and it’s a name I regularly see pop up when people recommend clients. However, open networks and open APIs means that it is hard to build a competitive moat. Still, most apps are hobby projects, and I’m curious how far Openvibe can push their app with the new funding.

The Links

• ActivityPub server framework Fedify is now on Open Collective.
• Hosting a fedi instance on a .arpa domain.
• Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time – Elena Rossini.
• Flipboard and Surf are planning an event, Fediverse House, in Austin, Texas, on March 9 and 10, with more information available soon.
• Remembering Radio Free Fedi – WeDistribute.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-102/

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Fediverse Report #101

Its another massive week for Pixelfed, growing by another 100k active users and doubling their Kickstarter goal, raising over 100k CAD.

The News

Pixelfed continues to grow rapidly, adding almost 100k monthly active users in a week, and has now almost 300k monthly active users. Just over a month ago, Pixelfed had around 20k monthly active users. Developer Daniel Supernault launched a Kickstarter this week for Pixelfed,Loops and Sup. The Kickstarter proved popular, raising 100k CAD, double its 50k CAD goal. The Kickstarter is mainly for to fund the continuous development of the platforms, with the primary goals listed as ‘acceleration development’ for Pixelfed and Loops, and starting the development of messaging platform Sup. Sup is a planned encrypted messaging app that is supposed to compete with WhatsApp and Snapchat. Supernault has mentioned working on the project in the past, but it is unclear how far along the project is.

Supernault says that the operational costs for running all of his projects is now over 4000 USD per month. The large majority of people joining the flagship servers pixelfed.social and loops.video, which are both run by Supernault. Still, it seems like Supernault is not particularly interested in sharing out the load of users to other servers, saying that people unfamiliar with the fediverse want to join a a flagship instance. He also says that “using random servers to register on is very dangerous, because not all of them are as dedicated to this as I am, some of them don’t update frequently or handle mod reports as fast as we do.” Supernault is currently the only moderator for both the pixelfed.social server as well as the pixelfed.art server. He also says that Pixelfed.social needs to establish a mod team. One barrier to adding extra moderators is that Pixelfed does not have a specific ‘moderator’ role in the software, there is only the possibility to give someone full admin rights. Supernault says that he is working on adding such a feature.

The Pixelfed Kickstarter also lists a Pixelfed Foundation as its stretch goal. It is not particularly clear what such a Foundation would entail: the Kickstarter describes it as both a foundation and a corporation, as says that it “hopefully” would be a not-for-profit. Some of the potential work of the Pixelfed foundation would be to grow the Pixelfed and Loops social networks, and also support other developers in the wider fediverse ecosystem.

Tumblr has reconfirmed that it is working on connecting to the fediverse. In late 2022, Automatic CEO Matt Mullenweg said that the site was going to add ActivityPub support ‘soon’. Plans changed for Tumblr, including staff layoffs, and for a long time it was unclear if this plan was actually going to happen. In summer 2024, Tumblr announced that they would be working on moving the backend of Tumblr to WordPress. In an AMA this week, the company said that this migration of Tumblr to WordPress means that Tumblr can also use the plugins of WordPress, including the ActivityPub plugin. This means that people will be able to add ActivityPub to their Tumblr blogs. Not much is known about how this would work in practice.

The Analysis

Editor’s note: I wrote the section below before Supernault published his latest update on Kickstarter a few hours ago. In the latest update the Pixelfed Foundation is now moved towards a new stretch goal of 200k CAD. This changes my analysis, but I currently do not have the time to properly analyse and write about it before this newsletter will go out. I’ll write more about this next week.

Some more thoughts on Pixelfed:

• I worry about the moderation side for Pixelfed, and specificially the flagship pixelfed.social. Pixelfed.social is now a server with over 200.000 monthly active users, and Supernault is the only moderator for the server. 1 moderator for over 200k active accounts is not a whole lot, to put it mildly. One of the main goals of the Kickstarter is to “expand the moderation, security, privacy and safety platforms”, and my hope is that the financial success of the Kickstarter can help get a bigger moderation team for the servers as quickly as possible.
• One of the consistently most difficult aspects of fediverse platforms is the governance of the software. Mastodon has gotten a lot of pushback for its ‘Benevolent-Dictator-For-Life‘, and correspondingly, a lot of praise when Mastodon recently moved away from this model. For Pixelfed and Loops the power concentration into a single person is even more pronounced, with a single developer running two different platforms, two flagship servers as well as various other prominent fediverse projects such as fedidb. It shows the incredible amount of work that Supernault has contributed to the fediverse, but it also indicates the centralisation of power that has resulted from this. The Kickstarter promises a Pixelfed Foundation, but it does not say anything about how the Foundation will deal with governance. The short description of the Foundation mainly seems to be focused on financial sustainability and growth of fediverse projects. The section on the Pixelfed Foundation ends with a quote from Mastodon’s blog post: “The people should own the town square”, but it does not explain in any way how “the people” will get to “own the town square”.
• Over on Bluesky, the short-lived TikTok ban in the US has put video front-and-center. As a response, people are starting to take Bluesky posts that contain video, and build a TikTok-like UI around it. Bluesky launched video feeds in their app last week, and SkyLight is a high-profile project to build a video-only UI for Bluesky posts. I’m curious if Pixelfed’s renewed prominence will lead to more interest in similar image-viewing fediverse clients that less bound to server platforms, whether that is Pixelfed, Mastodon or other fediverse platforms.
• The dominance of Mastodon and microblogging over the wider fediverse has led to a situation where Mastodon and the fediverse get equated as mostly the same in coverage of larger news outlets. The growth of Pixelfed, and the mainstream attention that it brings now changes this dynamic. This Forbes article about Pixelfed is a good example, where the fediverse gets introduced from the perspective of Pixelfed instead of from a perspective of Mastodon.
• The Kickstarter states an “Commitment to open source and open principles”, and says that “all of the source code for Pixelfed is licensed under the AGPL license and is publicly available on GitHub”. I am not clear why Loops is not mentioned here for a commitment to open source. Loops is not currently neither open source nor federating, according to the official Pixelfed account. While Supernault also says that he is “working on that”, I find it strange that Loops is not mentioned under the commitment to open source.
• Building an encrypted messaging app is difficult, to put things mildly. Building an encrypted messaging as a solo developer, while also building an Instagram competitor as well as a TikTok competitor is just wildly optimistic. I fear that Supernault is spreading himself too thin here, committed to too many different products. Supernault’s shifting attention makes it difficult for him to ship features he has promised. Notable example of this is the Groups feature for Pixelfed, which Supernault has promised as coming “very soon” since summer 2023. His latest estimation for groups is now for Q2 2025.

Tumblr saying that they are working on their fediverse integration is great news for the fediverse. For a quite a while it seemed that Tumblr would not actually follow through on early announcements by CEO Mullenweg. The answer by Tumblr that ActivityPub support will depend on a plugin makes it plausible to me that Tumblr blogs will likely have to opt-in to connecting themselves to the fediverse by adding the plugin. So based on the limited information available it seems likely to me it will not be a situation where the fediverse instantly grows by millions of active users.

The Links

In the media:

• Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy – Jason Koebler/404Media
• Meta and X are going rogue. Here is what Europe should do now. – EDRi/EDRi
• The Challenge of Upward Momentum – Sean Tilley/WeDistribute
• Forum software NodeBB joins the fediverse – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch
• Teaching Mastodon Through Practical Interactions – Lety Does Stuff

Tech links:

• A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website) – Part 8 – Maho Pacheco
• Hosting a new ActivityPub Relay for the Fediverse including Mastodon and snac – gyptazy
• Lemmy bi-weekly development update.
• Running GoToSocial on your car.
• Upcoming fediverse music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information on how discovery will work on the platform.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.

#fediverse

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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 100

Welcome to the 100th edition of Fediverse Report! It’s been a wonderful and strange 2 years to report on all the developers in the fediverse and the wider open social web. The current state of the open social web is nothing like I expected it to be when I started writing. When I first started I expected the fediverse to slowly gain wider adoption over the years. Instead, adoption has dropped compared with 2 years ago. At the same time, the current state of the internet and social platforms make it loud and clear that there is a huge need for better social platforms. I do not know what role the fediverse and the open social web will play in all of it, but I do strongly belief in the importance of helping people understand what is going on in the space. Thank you all for reading and the support over the years!

The News

Pixelfed has seen massive growth over the last week. The photo sharing platform grew from some 20k monthly active users in December to almost 200k MAU right now. The inflow of new people is driven by a combination of three things: people are actively looking for an alternative to Instagram, as well as renewed media attention to Pixelfed as a result of the official app release. Pixelfed’s launch of the official apps has gotten significant media attention (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). The reviews of the Pixelfed apps show that there are two reasons for people to look for an Instagram alternative: not only are people looking to ditch Meta products due to their alignment with Trump, people are also looking for another photo sharing app that has not gotten as bloated as Instagram has. The title of the Lifehacker review makes that point clear, describing Pixelfed as a “Return to Instagram’s Glory Days”.

Pixelfed developer Daniel Supernault says he has gotten multiple offers from VCs to chat about Pixelfed, but that he has rejected them all. Instead he will launch a Kickstarter on January 22nd. Not much is clear yet about the Kickstarter, but in the introduction Supernault makes it clear he has big plans, saying: “We aim to be the first Fediverse app with a billion people by taking on the worlds biggest players using open source standards.” Loops got critiqued for it’s “predatory” Terms of Service, which Supernault responded to a few days later by changing the ToS of Loops to be the same as those of Pixelfed.

Forum software NodeBB has officially launched their 4.0 version, which includes ActivityPub support. NodeBB has been working on adding ActivityPub for almost a year, and been testing it for a while as well. The community.nodebb.org forum has been connected to the fediverse for a while now, showing what a connection between forums and microblogging looks like in practice. Developer Julian Lam says that existing NodeBB forums will have to opt-in to the fediverse connection, while it will be enabled by default for new forums going forward. Lam also says that the work on ActivityPub also helped connect NodeBB with competitor Discourse, saying “NodeBB and Discourse have been vying for the exact same market share (forums, community-building, self-started or enterprise) for over 10 years, and it was only after ActivityPub came around that the dev teams even started talking to one another.” By both working on ActivityPub, these competitors are now also collaborators, and both their forums can connect with each other.

BotKit by Fedify is a new framework for building bots on ActivityPub. It is powered by Fedify, a TypeScript library for building with ActivityPub. Using BotKit allows people to easily build bots for ActivityPub, instead of building bots on Mastodon or Misskey.

The WordPress ActivityPub plugin now gives you the ability to show fediverse engagement on the page itself. I’ve enabled it below as well, go check it out!

The Analysis

Some stray thoughts on Pixelfed’s growth:

• It has been a long time since the fediverse has seen a notable increase in users and new signups: the last major event was in July 2023 with people looking for Reddit alternatives. Over time, Bluesky became the default destination for people looking to migrate away from X. The ATmosphere does not have a dedicated place for sharing photos, giving all the more opportunity for Pixelfed to be the new home of people looking for an Instagram alternative.
• One of the advantages of the fediverse is in the interoperability between different platforms, even when two platforms are focused on a different modality of communications. Mastodon and Pixelfed can interoperate with each other, but the much more question is: will this be feature that will be actively used, or more of a niche nice-to-have? Mastodon does have an active traditions for the sharing of photos with hashtags such as #silentsunday, and I’m curious if/how these traditions will evolve with a more active photo sharing platform.
• Supernault is now responsible for the development of two different types of platforms: Pixelfed and Loops, and is also responsible for running the flagship servers for both platforms: pixelfed.social and loops.video. The amount of work that Supernault puts into the fediverse is incredibly impressive. At the same time, it does give me cause for concerns for governance of the platforms. It is an incredibly amount of load and responsibility that is all placed on a single person. Supernault would do well to delegate a significant amount of responsibility here. However, previous cases where other developers have tried to work together have not gone well, for various reasons. I’m concerned that the fediverse is replicating the same problems that Mastodon has had with governance here.
• Pixelfed looks to replicate the same power dynamic that Mastodon has with the mastodon.social server. The large majority of new signups are going to the main pixelfed.social server. The power dynamics of Pixelfed are even more skewed than they are with Mastodon: 75% of Pixelfed’s current monthly active users are on the pixelfed.social server.

One of the fundamental challenges of building a decentralised social network with ActivityPub is in the tension between local and global. The fediverse is a super-network of connected social networks: you can see mastodon.social as its own social network, that has joined the larger fediverse. This theoretically allows for benefits such as local digital communities with local norms and moderation. In practice, most fediverse software is not interested in the local communities part, and actively discourages using the software as such: Mastodon explicitly prohibits posting only to your local server, for example. As such, the fediverse as it currently is, is mainly a singular global network, and less a network made of a plurality of spaces. This current dynamic in the fediverse is what makes forums like NodeBB adding ActivityPub to their platforms so interesting. Forums like NodeBB are understood to be local communities. When you go to a forum, you expect to see only people and posts from that specific forum. Forums are often tied around a specific topic or community, making much easier to define what the local forum community is all about. Now these forums that understand the value of having a clear local community have an additional connection to a wider network. It is effectively the reverse sales-pitch of most current fediverse servers. Mastodon says: join the larger fediverse, and you might have some additional benefits if you join the fediverse via a specific community/server. NodeBB says: join our specific forum community, and you might have some additional benefits by being connected to a larger fediverse network.

TechCrunch checked in with Threads on their plans to add account portability to their fediverse integration, writing: “A Meta spokesperson couldn’t confirm that the topic was even on the Threads roadmap, let alone when it was due to be addressed.” I recently published that I do not have a satisfying answer as to “Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?”. Last week I also reported that the Threads-fediverse connection is seeing incredibly low uptake from the side of Threads; in total at best only a few thousand people on Threads follow someone from the fediverse. As Meta is quickly aligning itself politically with Trump, and applying censorship accordingly, the question becomes louder and louder: why is the fediverse still bothering with Threads? In practice nobody on Threads is interested in connecting with the fediverse, it does not allow for people to migrate their account from Threads to the fediverse, and it is bad optics for the fediverse to boot.

The Links

• Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update, Trunk & Tidbits, for December 2024
• PieFed roadmap for 2025.
• Mastodon’s CEO Eugen Rochko gave an interview with on the TechCrunch Equity Podcast.
• My year of Fediverse explorations – Elena Rossini
• ActivityPods published a roadmap for 2025.
• Ghost’s weekly update on their ActivityPub integration.
• Firefox had an interview with developer Takiyoshi Hoshida, who is behind the multi-protocol app Sora.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.
• Owncast January 2025 newsletter.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can follow me on the fediverse and subscribe to my weekly email newsletter below.

#fediverse #silentsunday

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-100/

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Last Week in Bluesky and the ATmosphere -2025jan.b

A busy news for Bluesky, and the wider AT Protocol (ATProto) network, with a new governance initiative, Mark Cuban calling for a TikTok alternative on ATProto, and much more. This week also features a deep dive on ATProto, explaining what Lexicons are and why they matter.

The News

Free Our Feeds is a newly launched campaign to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The goal of the project is to raise 30M USD over 3 years to set up an independent public benefit Foundation for ATProto. The funds will go to setting up the foundation, building out independent infrastructure and fund independent developers. The Foundation will be led by 9 “custodians”, including Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation and more. The announcement has drawn some major media attention. In an article on Project Syndicate, Robin Berjon, one of the initiators behind Free Our Feeds, describes more the thinking of the project, saying: “Infrastructure may be privately provided, but it can be properly governed only by its stakeholders – openly and democratically. For this reason, we must all set our minds on building institutions that can govern a new, truly social digital infrastructure.” The initiative got some high-profile names on board, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, artists such as Mark Ruffalo, Alex Winter and Brian Eno.

Billionaire Mark Cuban has become a more and more active cheerleader for Bluesky, and it is clear that he sees the possibilities that the protocol allows. Cuban posted a TikTok this week where he said he would be “open to investing and supporting in anybody or somebody who creates a TikTok replacement build on the AT Protocol”.

The developer behind third-party Bluesky iOS/iPad client Skeets announced that they are working on another client for Bluesky called Flashes. The app focuses on images, and describes itself as a ‘photo viewing client for Bluesky‘. The news got broadly picked up by news after a TechCrunch article headline made it sound like it was an official app by the Bluesky team, and tapped into broad sentiment for people looking for an Instagram alternative.

A Russian bot network is now active on Bluesky, which seems to be related or part of the Doppelgänger disinformation campaign. The bots target the general public with messages aimed to reduce support for the Ukraine. There are other issues with spam as well, such spammers now creating ‘no-more-bots’ block lists which weaponise lists to hide some accounts of people posting about disinformation and spam in the block list. Tools for community moderation are still limited, as demonstrated by this feedback by some community labelers.

The Bluesky team wrote a reflection for 2024 about the developments on ATProto, to chalk up how work has progressed. The big picture is that Bluesky states that “most of the public data aspects of the protocol have now been designed and implemented”, and that “the last missing pieces are nearing completion”. Regarding the implementation of OAuth, it is still in its first phase, and the team hopes to share more information soon on adding Auth Scopes. Auth Scopes allow for “more granular and flexible Authorization grants”. For future work, Bluesky says that private content on ATProto is a priority for the team to add. They are also thinking about improvements to the plc.directory system, which currently functions well but is a centralised part of the network. For plc.directory the team is working on both technical as well as governance improvements.

The Analysis

In the email newsletter introduction (subscribe below if you also want to get all updates weekly in your inbox, with added commentary!) last week I wrote that I was unhappy with the state of governance for the open social web. Things have already rapidly changed this week, with Mastodon making major changes and the Free Our Feed initiative focusing on governance for ATProto. Some thoughts on the Free Our Feed (FOF) initiative:

• Probably the largest impact of FOF is in the validation towards other organisations and people that ATProto does not have to be exclusively a network that is run by a VC-backed company. Bluesky’s ties with (crypto) VC money has been a major hesitation for some public-benefit organisations that work on a better internet to promote Bluesky, and have been mainly focused on Mastodon and the fediverse so far. The existence of another public organisation with no VC funding that works on ATProto can help alleviate these concerns.
• The site only mentions a GoFundMe, which has raised 57k USD so far. A healthy sum of money, but significantly short of the 4M USD they are seeing to set up the foundation. It is unclear to me if FOF is also pursuing other ways for raising funds.
• One of the main goals of FOF is to “fund developers to create a vibrant ecosystem”. The common response that I’ve seen and gotten by the existing ATProto developer community however is a confusion about the existence of FOF and disconnect with the people behind it. The ATProto developer community largely runs on volunteer labor, and it has been difficult to find even tiny amounts of funding for crucial projects. From the perspective of some of the developers, it is unclear what FOF adds as an intermediary for getting funding.
• The main purpose of the FOF is to provide independent governance for ATProto. It is understandable that people are uncomfortable with protocol governance by a for-profit VC-backed company. But providing an alternative is that much harder. Unilaterally declaring nine people to be ‘custodians’ for protocol governance is not a form of governance that feels particularly democratic to me. Why these nine people exactly? FOF has not given any reason as to why it should be these nine persons that are responsible for “major governance decisions”. What makes them qualified to be responsible for the major governance decisions for ATProto? It is clear that there are some skilled people that are part of FOF, but the lack of justification and unilateral declaration as ‘custodian’ does not feel great to me. I strongly agree with Berjon that internet infrastructure governance should be done “openly and democratically“, and that part is exactly where Free Our Feeds, with nine predetermined and unelected custodians making the major decisions, falls flat for me.

It has been almost a year since Bluesky opened up to the public, and so far, the network is highly centralised around Bluesky. While there has been a significant amount of experimentation by developers, no other larger company or organisation has built another AppView on ATProto yet. I think part of the problem here is a chicken-and-egg situation: the perception is that ATProto is a network that is owned by Bluesky, making other organisations hesitant to build their own platform on the protocol. But as nobody else is building on the protocol, the perception that ATProto is only for Bluesky gets reinforced. In that light I find Mark Cuban’s announcement that he is encouraging people to build on ATProto, and willing to invest in a TikTok alternative on the protocol to be noteworthy. Cuban has a high reputation build up with Shark Tank about knowing when and where to invest. If he signals to the community that ATProto is a good place to build upon and invest in, it makes it all the more likely that people will listen and start exploring building on the protocol. I personally think it is likely that the impact of Cuban signalling that ATProto is a good protocol to build upon might just have a bigger impact than a potential investment by Cuban in a TikTok alternative.

The bigger story about the announcement of 3rd-party Bluesky client Flashes is not in the app itself, but in the media attention and enthusiasm around it. The headline by TechCrunch ‘Bluesky is getting its own photo-sharing app, Flashes’ is not incorrect, but seems to have given a lot of people a wrong impression of what Flashes was planning to be. Part of the problem is that the difference between a third party client app, and a complete AppView is a new type of language that people are not accustomed to. It seems like that will take some time for people and the media to catch up to. On the other hand, it shows that there is significant interest by people for an Instagram alternative. People have been posting the suggestion to build an Instagram on ATProto literally every day for quite a while on Bluesky, but nobody has pulled the trigger to actually build such a thing. Seeing the interest by the media in such a project might just convince some people to actually start building a real Instagram competitor on ATProto.

The Deep Dive – Lexicons

This tech deep dive is a pretty wonky (we’re gonna talk about data formats, whoohoo!), but I think it matters. Lexicons play part of quite a bit of the news that lots of people on Bluesky have an opinion about, but can be difficult to understand. Lexicons explain why it is hard to build another microblogging app on ATProto that has a 500 character limit, for example. It also explain the difference between an Instagram-like ATProto app that is another Bluesky client such as the just-announced Flashes, versus a complete application that is truly separate from Bluesky.

Lexicons are about formatting data, but more importantly, they are about power: who gets to decide how public data is structured?

To explain what Lexicons are, a simplified explanation of ATProto. There are two core parts: A Personal Data Server (PDS) which contains all your data, and AppViews, which are apps/sites that take all public data and display it in a useful way.

A PDS can contain any sort of data. It can contain a microblogging post from bsky.app, and it also can contain a recipe from recipe.exchange. The dream of ATProto is that someone else can build their own microblogging platform on ATProto, and reuse the same data and social graph by using the data that is already on the PDS.

If someone were to build another microblogging app on ATProto, lets call it GreenField, they would look at the data in the PDS, and see that Bluesky already has formatted the data related to Bluesky in a specific way. You can see what that looks like in reality here by using PDSls. The GreenField app wants to display a post made by someone on Bluesky, so it would look at the data that is formatted under app.feed.bsky.post. This is a Lexicon, created by Bluesky PBC, and Bluesky PBC has determined that post made by with the Bluesky app all follow the format that is specified by app.feed.bsky.post.

So far so good, you open the GreenField app, log in with your ATProto (aka Bluesky) account, and you see the posts made by your friends. Now you want to make a post yourself using the GreenField app. This is where GreenField will have to make some interesting decisions. GreenField can store this post as a app.field.bsky.post in your PDS. People who are on the Bluesky app can now see the post you’ve made using the GreenField app, great. But what if the GreenField app wanted to do a few things differently from Bluesky? For example, what if GreenField decided they wanted to set a character limit of 500 characters on their posts? app.feed.bsky.post has a limit of 300 characters (defined here, line 16), so if the GreenField app would store a post with 500 characters under app.feed.bsky.post on your PDS, the post would not be visible to people in the Bluesky app. GreenField could also decide to make their own Lexicon, app.feed.greenfield.post, and define the character limit of the Lexicon to be 500 instead. But the Bluesky app only displays posts with the app.feed.bsky.post Lexicon, and not posts with app.feed.greenfield.post. So the post would also not be visible on Bluesky.

This example shows the power of Lexicons, and who gets to determine the specifications of a Lexicon. Anyone can create a Lexicon, which results in a system where the Lexicons that have the most users have the most power. Bluesky determined that their microblogging posts have a maximum of 300 characters. Anyone else can create their own Lexicon that sets a different character limit, but the soft power of 910 million posts that are already using the Lexicon that sets a 300 character limit is incredibly strong.

This is a long explanation of what seems like a technical detail, but worth knowing: decisions made via Lexicons can have powerful and long-lasting impact on the entire community, and I think it is important that decisions made here are not only left up to a few enthousiastic developers.

An example of the impact of Lexicons: There are now three different ATProto apps for sharing text snippets, effectively Pastebin clones: atpaste, plonk.li and Pastesphere. The three apps have similar features and purpose. But they all use different Lexicons. This makes these apps not interoperable with each other, and if one of the apps shuts down, it means you cannot access the text snippets that you’ve made with that app with any of the other apps.

It is the same with the review sites (reviews made with Skylights are not interoperable with Bookhive), the recipes sites (A recipe on recipe.exchange is not visible on recipes.blue). These apps could be interoperable if they agreed on either a common Lexicon, or supported each other’s Lexicon’s. But the apps were build at the same time when they were not aware yet often of each’s other’s existence, had different requirements, or just simply like doing their own thing.

Which brings us to Lexicon.community, an community-organised project by independent ATProto developers to come to a set of standardised Lexicons that developers can use. The project got set up in the last month, and the first community defined Lexicons are now getting formalised. The first major community Lexicon proposal is for Calendar and Location types, and provides generic Lexicons for things like events. Smoke Signal is an event planner app on ATProto, and developer Nick Gerakines is one of the driving forces behind the community project. He also has the intention to use the community Lexicons for the Smoke Signal app, to put community Lexicons first in use.

The benefit of using a generic community Lexicon for other app developers is that they automatically get interoperability, as well as a standardised Lexicon that is still extendable for customised additional features that are specific to that app.

The big challenge for any community project like this is governance, and how to get buy-in from the rest of the developer community. The project has a technical steering committee, consisting of some well-known developers in the ecosystem, such as Rudy Fraser who is behind Blacksky, Ryan Barrett the creator of Bridgy Fed and Tom Sherman who builds Frontpage.fyi. The real next step for the Lexicon.community is in getting other ATProto projects to actually start using the Lexicons. Lexicon.community also published a Lexicon for bookmarks. Asked for feedback from Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold said that “there are no hard blockers” for the team to use Lexicons that are not owned by Bluesky, and said that it is “part of the atproto vision to enable borrowing and cross-namespace use of Lexicons”.

The Links

• A first look at Altmetric insights from Bluesky – Mike Taylor/Altmetric
• Meet the Mayor of GreenSky – Henry Carnell/MotherJones
• An unofficial Bluesky roadmap based on all GitHub issues that have a roadmap-related label.
• Graze gives a few more notes and updates on their work on adding sponsored content to custom feeds.
• Setting up a PDS on RISC-V.
• A Typescript service for creating lists based on a Bluesky labeler’s labels.
• How to migrate your Bluesky account to self-hosted – Justin Garrison/YouTube.
• The Atrium-rs Rust package is looking for organisational support and maintainers.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2025jan-b/

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Last Week in Fediverse – ep 99

A major news for governance this week on the open social web, with Mastodon shaking up their organisational structure and more.

The News

Mastodon published plans for their new governance structure, with control of Mastodon moving to a new non-profit organisation, and moving ownership away from CEO Eugen Rochko. Mastodon will set up a new top-level non-profit organisation. This new organisation will become owner of various Mastodon related assets, including names and copyrights. These assets are currently still held by Eugen Rochko, and Mastodon says that this is not the intent of Mastodon. Rochko and the Mastodon organisation believe that “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

Rochko has been a major driving force in growing Mastodon into the platform and product that it is today. While his singular ownership in his name of Mastodon does not fit with the current state of the platform, it is indicative of the outsized influence and impact his work has had over the years. In a thread, Rochko also explains his own perspective, writing about how Mastodon has become tightly integrated with his own identity. He also says that the last two years have taken a toll on him, both mentally and physically. Stepping away from a leadership position that has become so tightly integrated with a sense of self is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and Rochko deserves recognition for both his work, and knowing when to take a step back. Rochko will focus on his original passion of product strategy for Mastodon.

Even for the Mastodon organisation, there are still multiple unknowns, and the organisation is still in the process of figuring it all out. The short summary of what the organisation of Mastodon will look like: There will be a new top-level organisation for Mastodon. This will be a non-profit organisation that is based in Europe. Mastodon does not know yet which European country. The organisation will be led by a new CEO. The new CEO has already been picked, but Mastodon is waiting for a few final practical details before they will be announced. Under this top-level organisation will be 2 other organisations, the US-based Mastodon non-profit and the current Mastodon GmbH organisation. For the US-based Mastodon non-profit nothing will change, this organisation is mainly for fundraising purposes. The current Mastodon GmbH organisation has become a for-profit organisation due to unclear German bureaucracy. This organisation will involve itself with the daily operations, both of running the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers as well as development of Mastodon software.

404 Media reported this week that Meta is blocking links to Pixelfed on their apps, after various fediverse users reported that links on Meta platforms to their Pixelfed account immediately got taken down as spam. Meta later admitted to Engadget that “removing the posts was a mistake and that they’d be reinstated.” Meta’s actions have been beneficial for Pixelfed, which has been at the centre of a news cycle. Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault said that the pixelfed.social was seeing “unprecedented levels of traffic“, and according to fedidb.org (also created by Supernault) monthly active users for Pixelfed jumped from 20k in December to 27k as of right now. Supernault also reports that pixelfed.social had 11k people joining in the last 24 hours, which also is validated by fedidb.org. I’m not clear on what the correct statistics are here, but a sudden jump in interest after all the media attention is clearly happening. Pixelfed also got the official apps finally out of testing and available in the Android Play Store and iOS App Store. The move has been announced and teased for a long time, and the app has been available in testing for a while.

Meta and Zuckerberg decided this week to go fully mask-off, making significant changes to their platforms and rules around hate speech. Most notably are the rules around hate speech, where Meta is now explicitly allowing hate speech against various minorities. The move sparked a wide backlash, and various Mastodon servers who previously federated with Threads decided to cut defederate from Threads. Notable examples include Hachyderm and mstdn.social. Other servers such as mastodon.social and indieweb.social condemned the move by Meta, but refrained from defederating from Threads.

The Analysis

In last week’s email introduction I wrote that I was unhappy with the state of governance of both the fediverse as well as the ATmosphere. This week’s news regarding Mastodon is a great step in the right direction. Mastodon has clear ambitions and values about decentralisation, and having a self-styled dictator-for-life who runs the software just does not fit at all with the stated values. The Mastodon Operations organisation now being a for-profit organisation is also interesting. While this happened outside of the control of Mastodon GmbH as a result of opaque Germany bureaucracy, I think it is potentially a good thing. Running a social media server with 250k monthly active users costs real money. Having servers be financially sustainable is an integral part of having fair and equitable social media platforms. So far, the fediverse has struggled making this happen on a donations model.

It is the next moves that are the real important ones: what form of governance will the non-profit holding organisation take? Will it allow for real community ownership, as implied by the title of the blog? Who will be the new CEO? What new sets of strategic priorities for Mastodon will be set? Many things are still up in the air, even for the people at Mastodon itself, and those aspects will be where we will see the most impactful changes. Still, this is a great step in the right direction.

I do find the contrast between the moves that Rochko has made and how Supernault approaches Pixelfed and Loops notable. Rochko has been aware of the downsides of his model of governance for Mastodon, and has made the necessary changes, while Supernault seems determined to go at it alone. Supernault has a wild number of projects on his plate: building the Pixelfed platform as well as mobile apps, as well as video platform Loops with it’s mobile apps, running the pixelfed.social and pixelfed.art server, running fedidb.org and more. It is incredibly impressive what Supernault has managed to build, all by himself in his spare time. Supernault has high ambitions, explicitly positioning his platforms as competitors to Instagram and TikTok. But as the looming TikTok ban in the US shows: one of the most important aspects of social media platforms these days is how they are governed, and by whom. Having a single developer governing the development of two different types of platforms, as well as their flagship servers, seems like a form of governance that is not particularly sustainable.

Rochko shared some more statistics about the connection between Threads and mastodon.social in a conversation on the Mastodon Discord, writing: “For some context, 81,745 people follow at least one Threads account from their mastodon.social account (and we are aware of 25,042 Threads account that federate), with some of the most followed accounts being MKBDH, Barack Obama, and Nilay Patel.” He also noted that only 811 Threads accounts follow at least one mastodon.social account. These statistics only represent mastodon.social, not the entire fediverse. But considering mastodon.social is by far the largest server and many other servers do not federate with Threads at all, it does provide a good indication of the actual usage of Threads. Hachyderm also shared some statistics on the connection between Threads and Hachyderm: “There were 2033 unique Hachyderm accounts following 919 unique Threads accounts and 26 unique Threads accounts following 22 unique Hachyderm accounts.”

Last month I wrote an article ‘Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?’, going through the various reasons for Meta to add federation to Threads. I did not have a clear single answer to that question. The data above provides at least an indication that users are also not clear on why Threads should have fediverse interoperability. It turns out that in practice, marginally few people are interested in the two-way connection between Threads and the rest of the fediverse.

In conversations last week regarding whether or not servers should defederate from Threads, one argument that got brought up repeatedly that connecting with Threads allows people to migrate away from Threads to Mastodon, while still keeping connections with people on Threads. Seeing the statistics on how few people actually use the Threads fediverse connections this argument rings hollow to me.

The Links

• The 5th edition of online unconference FediForum will take place on April 1st and 2nd this year.
• Threads is slowly making their fediverse integration available for a small number of EU users.
• Castopod has made a demo server available where people can test out the fediverse podcasting platform.
• PeerTube is slowly making more servers available in their official apps, being careful to comply with app store regulations.
• Hachyderm shares their monthly operations costs breakdown.
• Biweekly Lemmy development update.
• Ghost’s update on implementing ActivityPub and reflection on their work in 2024.
• Piefed held a community vote for their roadmap for 2025.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-99/

(Medien: 1)