Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85It’s been an eventful week

Fediversity Fediverse Report
1

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85

It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!

Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down

The Swiss Government will shut down their Mastodon server at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a pilot that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.

The Social Web Foundation has launched

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large grant, and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.

The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:

  • adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a grant for.
  • Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.
  • A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.
  • Working on long-form text in the fediverse.

The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they state that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.

Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.

As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?

Software updates

There are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:

GoToSocial’s v0.17 release brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”

Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.

  • Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
  • The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
  • Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.

In Other News

IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum.

The Links

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

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-85/

1 Like
2

What does this mean? Long-form text is already supported in ActivityPub, no? It’s only the microblogging implementations that have trouble with this format (of their own volition, I assume; I mean it’s right there in the micro-blogging name).

1 Like
3

Maybe they mean providing funding for microblog applications to implement support for rendering long-form text? Given the Ghost and WordPress AP teams are founding members of the Foundation, I’m guessing they would like other servers to support this feature.

If they add support for it in Mastodon, I hope it’s opt-in.

4

Maybe I’m being incredibly naive about how Mastodon and Co. works, but would this not just be removing whatever check currently filters long-form text and then perhaps using a “show more” button in the client to ensure such posts don’t take up too much space before the user wants to read it? Or would a more specialised solution be necessary?

5

I use the Mastodon “advanced UI”, which would not render long form content well using that technique (the screen is very information dense already). Even long microblog posts (> 500 chars) are difficult to read. The other issue (I’m guessing) is that they want more formatting control over long form content. If so, I think Mastodon should just continue providing the link and let people view it on the original site with the intended format.

6

That makes sense I guess.

A more “native” solution would be to “open” the post in a separate view that then displays it in a format more suitable for long-form reading. A bit like how Lemmy shows titles for posts in the feed view and then you click on a post to get the details and see comments. This view could be enabled for posts that meet some threshold length.

Now, if that is what they want to fund… I mean, honestly I don’t think Mastodon needs any further support. Mastodon is by far the most popular ActivityPub implementation right? I personally think the Social Web Foundation should rather support smaller implementations to foster a more diverse ecosystem. But maybe they aren’t talking about Mastodon? It’s quite vague.

7

I’ve seen Fedi discussions indicating the plan is to provide funding to Mastodon, but what will be funded wasn’t mentioned. That’s probably how they were convinced to join the consortium.

In general, the Foundation doesn’t appear to have diversity as a primary objective. It seems to me that making ActivityPub more attractive to commercial use is more their focus.

1 Like
8

… who wants that? I mean Meta using ActivityPub already led to massive opposition. Do we want ActivityPub to end up like email where in theory you can set up your own email or use an independent server but in practice 99% (disclaimer: don’t actually know if it is that bad) of emails are gmails, outlooks, yahoo mails or other such “big tech” providers? Or maybe the fear is that the fediverse will never take off unless we get big tech in on the idea? I’m personally not convinced that that is the case.

9

From the Foundation mission statement:

“Whether that’s advertising supported, or funded by charities and non-profits, or based on paid-for services, or affiliate revenue, we are working to find ways that companies can do well in the [ActivityPub] Fediverse.”

There are other posts about funding Mastodon, but I can’t find them in the large number of posts over the last few days.

Also related to my feelings of the Foundation focus on companies and commercial adoption:

For instance, SWF will initially focus on guiding media organizations on how to participate in the fediverse and why, offering case studies from others who led the way, like ProPublica, NPR, and the BBC.

Following this effort, SWF will launch similar materials for other institutions like universities, startups, and large enterprises.

With regard to startups, SWF is open to connecting with various accelerators and programs…

(emphasis mine). Reference: TechCrunch article about the Foundation

Also from that article, the following is related to long-form content… this supports my earlier speculation about which Foundation members are pushing for this feature.

In addition, SWF aims to better support services joining the fediverse, like Ghost, which allows for long-form text, as opposed to something short, more equivalent to a tweet. While the protocol currently allows for long-form text without a character count limit, other considerations come into play, Prodromou says.

“Things like, what’s a good number of attachments to include with long-form text? Or, how do you embed images? Should you have multiple sizes or not?” he says. “Those are the kinds of things that aren’t specific, formally, to the protocol, but they help build out the real usage.”

Some of my perspective is extrapolation on my part. If one primary goal is a “bigger fediverse” (i.e., more MAU and involvement from companies and large enterprises), one would logically focus on improving the UX of the biggest existing platforms rather than encouraging the development of a lot of small experimental or exploratory platforms with varying degrees of UX quality.

2 Likes