Last Week in Fediverse – ep 81A busy news week, with a

Fediversity Fediverse Report
1

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 81

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

The News

Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi have been working on a massive research project about governance of fediverse servers, and they released their findings this week. The entire report is worth reading, as well as the two additional documents that they published:

Kissane and Kazemi explain that “whole swathes of knowledge about the aspects of server management that extends beyond the more purely technical concerns of hosting, provisioning, and technical upkeep exists only as insider knowledge.” This research paper is a great counter, and documents many of the cultural intricacies of the fediverse that have not been easily accessible before.

There are a great number of insights in the paper, and I want to comment with my own observations on one of them. Kissane and Kazemi write “we think the diverse and robust conversations and
viewpoints on Threads federation could serve as a useful jumping-off point for server teams to
even informally document their philosophies of federation and the policies that flow from those
philosophies” (p87). From my observations, when federation with Threads was a frequent topic of conversation in spring 2024, there was a potential within the fediverse for servers to talk about and publish their federation policies, as well forming diplomatic blocks for servers with similar federation policies. The conversation about federation was top of mind for everybody, and it was clear that there was a need for clear understanding of federation policies. This opportunity for better server governance simply did not happen, the conversation has moved on, and it feels like the moment has passed. I still think this is one of the larger missed opportunities and ‘what ifs’ that I keep thinking about regarding how the fediverse could have turned out better.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has been arrested in France, with Reuters reporting that ‘the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram’. For more information about Telegram and the situation with Durov I recommend any news source that is not this blog, but I do want to point out the responses on Nostr to the arrest. Nostr’s culture is strongly focused on censorship resistance and leans culturally rightwing and libertarian. There are two aspects to understanding a network that preaches censorship resistance: the types of posts that such a network actually facilitates, which is not surprisingly posts that many people prefer not to show up in their feeds (or exist at all really). But the other aspect is how people who use such network and value censorship resistance understand themselves and think about what is important in the world. And in that framework, the arrest of Durov is seen as a huge validation of the viewpoint that censorship resistance is important and people should be wary of authoritarian behaviour of government. To be clear, this is not a viewpoint I am endorsing. What I am observing is that Nostr sees itself this way ([1], [2], [3], [4]), and how Nostr frames the event as an indication of the importance of Nostr and Nostr’s values. With a significant part of the rightwing internet ecosystem speaking out against the arrest, it’s worth noting if Nostr can take this opportunity to grow.

The Lemmy developers have opened a conversation on whether votes should be displayed publicly, which turned into a major topic of discussion on Lemmy. To understand the situation, a short bit of context: there are three platforms on the content aggregator side of the fediverse: Lemmy, the biggest platform, Mbin, the successor of Kbin, and Piefed. How you voted is visible to Lemmy moderators, but not to regular Lemmy users. How people voted is visible to everyone on Mbin, including if that vote was made with a Lemmy account.

Responses on the threads indicates that a majority of Lemmy users prefers their votes to be private. This demand for privacy is understandable and should be encouraged, but runs into the practical limitations of the way the current fediverse works, with the limitations being both of governance as well as technical. Upvotes on Lemmy get translated to Stars on Mastodon, which are public. The most straightforward implementation of ActivityPub for vote/like/favourite support assumes that this information is public. As interoperability between the fediverse content aggregators is already a hilariously chaotic mess (shout-out to Elena Rossini who documents it all in painstaking detail in her latest newsletter), changes to more privacy are not likely to make the interoperability situation any better. Still, Piefed gave it a shot and did implement private votes this week in response, by creating shadow accounts in the background that do the voting on your behalf.

The situation also indications the limitations of governance as it currently is in the fediverse, especially between fediverse software developers. Lemmy developer Dessalines talks on Github about Lemmy is dependent on other implementations for votes to stay private. The problem is that none of the developers of any of the projects appear to be in any form of communication or conversation with each other about this, which makes good governance between the different implementations slightly difficult, to put it mildly.

⁂ is a new proposed symbol for the fediverse. In a manifesto, the authors explain the need for a unicode symbol that represents the fediverse. The fediverse already has two symbols: a coloured pentagram and an icon by Meta. The authors state that the coloured pentagram is a great logo, but that it not being available as a typographical unicode character limits it’s usage. Getting people to voluntarily adopt to a new logo is never easy, and even more so in a decentralised network. Personally, I think the proposal hits on an important theme: there is value in a unicode symbol that can be used to denote that something is federated. Meta already does this by putting their own fediverse logo next to Threads profiles that are federated. This is a good innovation by Meta, and I think there is value in adopting this idea without having to adopt Meta’s (centralising) logo for the fediverse. The comment made here by the authors gives an illustration of what this means. It also helps push the proposal for the ⁂ symbol as an addition to the current logo instead of a replacement.

Bluesky Feed Creator, an external tool for people to build their own custom feeds without having to code, has a major update with a new automod system. Moderation of custom feeds and groups is not a solved issue so far, neither on ActivityPub nor on Atproto, and this takes a step in the right direction.

BrowserPub is a browser for debugging ActivityPub. Creator John Spurlock explains that the goal is to make it “a bit easier to see how well the various players in the fediverse support the C2S side of the ActivityPub spec. You can punch in any ActivityPub discoverable web url or fediverse handle, and BrowserPub will discover and display the underlying AP.”

Newsmast showed a preview of Patchwork, their upcoming plugin system for Mastodon. As the research by Kissane and Kazemi indicates, there is a lot of potential for better moderation tooling for the fediverse. However, Mastodon is slow to update, with 11 months between it’s two latest updates. Enabling servers to get additional moderation and federation tools via a plugin can significantly improve the ecosystem.

Robert W. Gehl is writing a book about the fediverse, ‘Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Ethical Social Media‘, and make an overview of the draft available.

A practical demonstration of how Bluesky’s starter packs can significantly help with community migration: the small Spanish community on Bluesky grew by 20% due to one successful starter pack.

The Links

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-81/