Last Week in Fediverse – ep 83
Bluesky and Brazil continues to be a great match, and lots of other smaller news items.
Programming note: I’m switching the release day for this weekly newsletter to a Wednesday. Over the last year and a half I’ve spend my free Sundays writing this, and this is not sustainable in the long term. So look for the next edition to arrive on Wednesday the 18th.
Bluesky and Brazil
Bluesky remains highly popular among Brazilians as an alternative to X, that got banned in the country last week. Bluesky has added 3 million accounts since the ban went into effect just over a week ago. When I reported on it last week Bluesky had added 1 million accounts. Of these new accounts, around 85% are from Brazil. The popularity of Bluesky in Brazil also shows up in both politics and the media: President Lula, his party PT Brazil, the Supreme Court, and House of Representatives all have their accounts validated by using their domain as their handle. The media is also paying attention, one of the most popular news programs in Brazil, Jornal Nacional, showed their Bluesky handle during the show. Some of the biggest newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo and Correio Braziliense covered Bluesky as well.
What stands out to me about both articles is that they do not mention Threads. Threads have not made any data available regarding the impact of the Brazilian ban on X on the platform. While Threads is likely to still get a large number of signups simply due to its massive size, it is not part of the conversation in the way that Bluesky is for Brazil.
The inflow of new people also shows up for the Trust and Safety team. In an update Bluesky’s head of Trust and Safety, Aaron Rodericks, shares that the team normally receives about 20k reports per week, a number that skyrocketed to 270k reports, predominantly in Portugese.
The News
Firefish has died another death. This February, the original creator of Firefish Kainoa transferred ownership to the maintainer naskya, without naskya being informed beforehand. Naskya has been maintaining Firefish alone for the last 7 months, while noting that this them taking over the project as unwillingly. Naskya says that this is unsustainable, putting the project in maintanance mode. IceShrimp provides migration instructions for server admins who want to transfer from Firefish to IceShrimp. I’ve got fond memories of the time period during which Firefish worked well, which is sadly a while ago now. It enabled me to build a community in a way that I’ve found much more difficult to do on Mastodon, and the community that I’ve build during the Firefish period is still one that feels like my closest community on Mastodon.
Truefans is a podcasting app that is building ActivityPub integration. It gives you the possibility to create a fediverse account as well (truefans.social), and activities that you take in the Truefans app (listen/comment/follow) are broadcasted into the fediverse.
The IFTAS Moderator Survey for 2024 is live. Last year’s survey led to an extensive report on the actual needs that fediverse moderators have.
Forgejo’s monthly update: “Federation is getting useful. There is now more than preliminary background work, and the first exciting things could be tried out by users. The work is not near the goal yet.”
The SocialCG held their monthly meeting, and decided on two new Task Forces: a task force to update the website activitypub.rocks, and a Trust and Safety Task Force. The goal for the website task force is to make sure that the activitypub.rocks website is a better entry point, as it is badly out of date, with the last post from January 2021. The Trust and Safety team from Threads has already expressed interest in participating in the task force.
Trending topics are a feature that is highly sought after by the Brazilian community, and the community has build two versions themselves: as a browser extension and as a separate site.
EDIT: Another unaffiliated developer has brought to my attention that the browser extension might not be completely safe. I have not been able to verify this information yet, but for now I’d recommend against using the extension until more information is known.
Peertube continues to make inroads with livestreaming, especially via the livechat plugin, which got a significant upgrade again.
Bluesky continues the tradition of 3rd party clients implementing features before the official clients does: this time the Skeets app already supports displaying videos, even though the feature is not released yet and only the developers can post (otherwise invisible) videos.
The developer’s site atproto.com got a major overhaul, including a Quick Start guide that showcases how to build a complete and different type of application on atproto, an extensive article ‘ATProto for distributed systems engineers‘ and more.
A research paper – An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises – provides a critical analysis of the extend that the fediverse can deliver on the promises of decentralisation. Worth checking out, I also find the framing of ‘techno-romanticism’ as to explain the gap between what is promised and what is actually happening in the fediverse.
The Dutch coalition of public organisations PublicSpaces is starting PeerTube Spaces to promote the usage of Peertube as as suitable alternative for public organisations.
The (unofficial) atprotocol.dev community held a talk with the creator of event planner Smoke Signal, the video recording is available here. The recording from the previous talk, by the creator of frontpage.fyi is available as well. This Thursday is the next event, ‘From Feeds to Labelers with Ændra Rininsland’
The Links
- WeDistribute – A Brief History of the Fediverse Symbol
- Making a Mastodon bot with Google Sheets and Apps Scripts.
- Email platform Buttondown has added the option to automatically cross-post to Bluesky.
- Hachyderm’s Introduction to Mastodon Moderation: The Report Feature and Moderator Actions.
- Thoughts on the 📰 News Feed – by XBlock and News feed developer Ændra Rininsland.
- This week’s ActivityPub software updates.
- Fediverse for government organisations, a follow-up.
- Nostr somehow managed to get a billboard advertising Nostr close to where I live.
- A Bluesky client that makes Bluesky look like the old phpBB forums.
- Brazil, Bluesky & the Fediverse, by Newsmast’s Michael Foster.
- Brazilian Tech YouTuber Gabs Ferreira did a long interview with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-83/
