Last Week in Fediverse – ep 90
The Fediverse Schema Observatory helps to improve interoperability, the botsin.space server will shut down, and more.
The News
The Fediverse Schema Observatory is a new project by Darius Kazemi, who runs the Hometown fork of Mastodon as well as co-wrote to Fediverse Governance paper this year with Erin Kissane. The Observatory collects data structures from the fediverse; it looks how different fediverse softwares use and implement ActivityPub. It explicitly does not gather any personal data or posts; instead it looks at how the data is formatted in ActivityPub. ActivityPub and the fediverse has a long-standing problem in that the selling point is interoperability between different software, but every software has their own, slightly different implementation of ActivityPub, making good interoperability difficult to pull off. Kazemi has posted about the Observatory as a Request for Comments. The Observatory is explicitly not a scraper, but considering how sensitive the subject can be in the fediverse community, Kazemi has taken a careful approach of informing the community in detail beforehand about the proposed project, and how it deals with data. The easiest way to see and understand how the Observatory is works is with this demo video.
The botsin.space Mastodon server for bots will shut down in December. The botsin.space server is a server dedicated to running bots, with a few thousand active bots running. The server is a valued part of the community, with the wild variety of bots running on the server contributing to the Mastodon in both useful and silly ways. The admin states that over time running the servers has become too expensive over time, and that is was not feasible to keep the project going. The shutdown of botsin.space showcases an ongoing struggle in the fediverse, running a server is expensive and time-consuming, and every time a server shuts down the fediverse loses a block of its history.
Sub.club is a way to add monetization options to fediverse posts. Sub.club started with being able to add paywalls to Mastodon posts, recently expanded to long-form writing with support for Write.as, and now has added support for WordPress blogs as well. Sub.club has posted a tutorial on how to add the plugin to WordPress, making it an easy system to set up.
Bridgy Fed, the bridge between ActivityPub and ATproto has gotten some updates, with the main new feature is that you can now set custom domain handles on Bluesky for fediverse accounts that get bridged into Bluesky. This brings the interoperability between the networks closer to native accounts, and makes having a bridged account more attractive.
Upcoming fediverse platform for short-form video, Loops, got some press by The Verge and TechCrunch. Creator Daniel Supernault said that there are now 5k people on the waiting list, and that a TestFlight link will go out soon for the first 100 people. An Android APK will be made available at some point as well.
GoToSocial is working on the ability to for servers to subscribe to allowlists and denylists. This makes it easier to create clusters of servers with a shared allowlist, such as the Website League. As I recently wrote about Website League, it is a cluster of federating servers that uses ActivityPub but exists separately from the rest of the fediverse, and it is started by people who build a new shared space after Cohost shut down. Website League servers predominantly use GoToSocial or Akkoma, and have been actively working on tuning the software to meet their needs.
The Links
- Flipboard is now federating accounts of publishers in Brazil, Canada, Germany and the UK.
- A long read on Content Warnings, that extensively touches on the culture on using Content Warnings in Mastodon and the Website League as well.
- Diving Into the World of Lemmy.
- One year after X: Embracing open science on Mastodon – a reflection by the University of Groningen Library.
- Mastodon, two years later – a continuation of the article ‘Mastodon – a partial history‘, by The Nexus of Privacy.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- The Event Federation project has drafted a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for a common way to use the ‘event’ type in the fediverse.
- Setting up my federated fleamarket with flohmarkt.
- IFTAS October update.
- Ghost’s weekly update on their project to implement ActivityPub, mentioning that they have bridged their ActivityPub-based Ghost account to Bluesky as well.
- The Fediverse has empowered me to take back control from Big Tech. Now I want to help others do the same. – Elena Rossini.
- How the ‘Fediverse’ Works (and Why It Might Be the Future of Social Media) – Lifehacker.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!