Fediverse Report – #129
The News
SocialHub is a Discourse forum that has served as the main ActivityPub discussion forum for a long time. The platform might shut down on September 10th, as the current platform operators have stated that unless they can find a community that is willing to take over the infrastructure, they will shut down the platform. SocialHub has been run since 2019 by the small organisation called Petites Singularités, although in effect the administration of the platform came largely down to a single administrator. The current administrator Hellekin is also explicit in looking for a team of multiple people to take over, not a single individual, and other requirements for the new team are implied as well. There have been offers from individuals to take over the technical aspect, but there is less interested in the community management type of work.
A number of fediverse developers also question the value that SocialHub still can bring, who see that most fediverse developers have already left SocialHub, or were never even a part of it in the first place. It is easy to hypothesise a ActivityPub developer platform that contains reference material, documentations and lively discussions. But as Arnold Schrijver points out, it is “much harder it is to get people to collab and connect their otherwise independent initiatives, and still harder it is to find people doing the chores to maintain that.” Other efforts such as fedidevs.org have largely petered out, and it is unclear if there is enough interest from developers to collaborate on maintaining such a place.
Reading the conversations about SocialHub makes it clear that people can point to the various issues with how SocialHub functioned and what potential improvements could look like. But any changes to SocialHub beyond “a forum used by a sub-section of the community where people occasionally ask questions” requires community building, which takes significant time and effort by skilled people to do so. While there are people willing to contribute technical admin skills as well as financial support, it is the community management part that is more challenging to find.
The challenge remains that SocialHub, even though most ActivityPub developers do not participate in that forum, is the primary forum for discussing ActivityPub, by virtue of no other prominent other forum existing as a place for developer conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub. It leads to a challenging situation:
- Most conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub do not take place on SocialHub.
- There is value in having a place for conversations about the fediverse and ActivityPub that is focused on longer conversations and not dependent on one’s social graph.
- For a number of reasons a significant number of fediverse developers see SocialHub as not a great place for such conversations.
- There is no consensus on what a different place would look like, what its purpose is, and who should run such a place.
- Even if someone where to start a new place, or take over SocialHub, it is unclear if developers would actually participate in such an effort.
- The current administrator of SocialHub is looking for a group of multiple people with a coherent idea of how to create SocialHub into a community platform, but with most developers acting as individuals all with slightly different ideas, it is unclear if such a group can be found.
As of right now it is unsure if a solution can be reached, either by rebooting SocialHub or by creating a new place for conversations about the fediverse. Last week I wrote that FediCon shows that there is value in having fediverse developers meet together. While it’s good to see this happening offline, having spaces for conversations online is important as well.
A list published by Drop News Site contains over 100k websites that Meta allegedly has scraped for their data to train their AI, and the list also contains a number of fediverse servers. A communications representative for Meta says that the list is ‘bogus’. While it is difficult to verify the correctness of this specific news story, that Meta is scraping fediverse data for AI training is certainly plausible: the data is publicly accessible and Meta so far has shown an insatiable hunger to ingest as much data as possible for AI training purposes. Meta has shown a willingness to acquire data via methods that seem legally questionable in the most optimistic reading possible. While collecting fediverse data for AI training may potentially fall within legal boundaries, it goes against the clear wishes of the fediverse community.
The story points to how difficult it has been to evolve the fediverse to a network where people can actually publish their consent on how their data can be handled by others. The privacy policy of a significant number of fediverse servers, including some servers on the published list above, explicitly state: “Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network.” However, public response to this news makes it clear that for a significant number of people, they do not want Meta to be handling their public social networking data to be used for AI training.
There has been some effort by the Mastodon organisation to update the their Terms of Service (ToS) to prohibit the use of that server’s data for AI training purposes, but Mastodon had to retract that new ToS due to various criticisms. It is unclear however if such a ToS would be binding to third parties who have not signed the ToS. What’s more notable for me is that there is still no easy way for fediverse users to indicate their consent how their data can be handled on a per-post level that is also distributed via ActivityPub and is machine-readable. A significant group of fediverse users do not want their data to be used for AI training, but so far their options are mainly limited to being on a server who prohibits this via regulation, and there are no easy ways to set consent on a per-user level.
Mastodon shared in their monthly engineering update, Trunks and Tidbits, that the organisation is working on adding Starter Packs. Starter Packs were first launched by Bluesky, and found great popularity late last year. It allows people to create lists of accounts, and other users can follow all these accounts with a single click of a button. The feature allowed new Bluesky users to rapidly on-board the platform and get a timeline full of content. However, the feature also had some major drawbacks, such as being used for spammy engagement-bait accounts to build large following networks. People also could not opt-out of being included on other people’s Starter Packs, which caused some people to get a large number of followers that they did not want or ask for, leading to clashes and context collapse. Mastodon has the advantage of being a second-mover, and being able to iterate on Bluesky’s implementation. The organisation already has said that they will let users control if they want to be included in a Starter Pack.
A new research paper on the lemmygrad.ml Lemmy instance, called “Exploring Left-Wing Extremism on the Decentralized Web: An Analysis of Lemmygrad.ml“. Within Lemmy there exists a subculture of various instances, most notably Hexbear and Lemmygrad, that self-describes as Marxist and/or leftist, and partially intersects with the developers of Lemmy. There is interesting research to be done on how that sub-community impacts the wider culture of the Threadiverse. This published paper limits itself to data from 2019 to 2022, which misses out on how these communities and cultures have developed over the more recent years. For example, the Hexbear instance was not federating with the rest of the network for a while, only to turn federation back on over a year ago, and it would be interesting to explore how that has impacted other Lemmy servers.
The Links
- IFTAS has opened their yearly Needs Assesment, where they “input from moderators, administrators, and community managers across the decentralised social web” to find the needs of the people who are building communities on the social web.
- All of the video’s of the recent FediCon conference have now been published on PeerTube.
- Openvibe, a client that combines Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads into a single timeline, now also supports RSS, to be both a news and social app at the same time.
- Ghost CEO John O’Nolan writes some reflections about Ghost’s recently launched ActivityPub integration, and how people have perceived it.
- The WordPress ActivityPub team explains how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky via Bridgy Fed.
- The ‘delightful fediverse experience’ list tracks a large amount of fediverse-related projects, and has been expanded with some new categories around tools and extensions.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-129/
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Academics sometimes can be very… funny. Does that make their paper useless? One would have to read it.