The feverish news regarding the launch of Threads the previous week has died down somewhat. The Dutch government has officially launched their Mastodon server. Lemmy experiences a critical vulnerability. And some mixed messages regarding Tumblr adding ActivityPub support at some point in the future. Lets get into it!
Microblogging
The major news of the week is that the Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server at social.overheid.nl. I wrote an article about the launch, and how it fits in a larger trend of the Dutch government thinking about open software, and Digital Common Goods, such as Mastodon.
Mastodon hits 2 million active users!
IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust and Safety, is working on providing guidance and service for servers to become compliant with the DSA.
@renchap, who works on Mastodon, confirms that currently nobody is working on major features at Mastodon due to a lack of personnel.
Mastodon had a critical security vulnerability, dubbed ‘tootroot’, that allowed attackers to hijack servers. A patch has since been released.
A collection of feature requests to help with moderation when Threads federates.
Tangerine UI is a new Mastodon web interface with just CSS.
Lemmy and Kbin
Lemmy and Kbin are fully settling into their own specific communities on the fediverse that is clearly distinct from the microblogging side.
Lemmy had a vulnerability that got actively exploited this week. The biggest instances such as lemmy.world got targeted and hacked. Here is the summary from the side of lemmy.world, and here the recap that focuses on the technical aspects of the vulnerability. Lemmy released an emergency patch the next day.
An update from the Kbin team regarding finances and future plans. The accompanying graph, that shows how the project jumped from 10k visits in May to 2.9m visits in June is spectacular.
One subject that has regularly come up with Lemmy is that of duplicated communities. For example, the lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and kbin.social servers all have a community called ‘fediverse’. In some cases, people deem this to be acceptable or even desirable. For the Android community on lemmy.world however, they preferred to merge with the community on the lemdro.id server.
If you’re interested in setting up your own Lemmy server, @reiver documented his experience step-by-step with the entire process.
Using Lemmy with your Mastodon account. A blog that explains in detail how you can use the federation of Mastodon and Lemmy to your advantage by using Lemmy with your Mastodon account. A showcase of both how powerful and cool this is, but also of how much clunky the process still can be.
New tools for Lemmy and Kbin keep appearing at a rapid speed:
Kbin Enhancement Suite, a script manager for Kbin. Personal recommendation to check this one out, it has made my Kbin experience significantly better.
Alexandrite is a new desktop-first Lemmy web app.
Instance Assistant is a browser extension that replaces Lemmy links with links to your homeserver, making interacting easier.
FediRedirect does something similar to Instance Assisant, and also handles Mastodon.
Fediverse
A new edition of FediForum will take place on September 20 and 21.
Communal Bonfires is a fascinating blog post about to design online community platforms. It ends with the announcement of Commune, a different way to structure Matrix chats, which will plug in to the fediverse as well. It is still slightly esoteric and meant for developers currently, but for people who are interested ways to think about the fediverse that goes beyond Twitter-like microblogging, this is highly recommended.
Discourse has implemented the first step of federation with their ActivityPub plugin, and is now working on the second phase.
ActivityPub federation of GitLab is underway.
A proposal for ActivityPub API service.
StreetPass is a browser extension that uses Mastodon’s verification system to show you the fediverse profile of someone when you visit their website. It is now available on Safari, after being released for Chrome and FireFox earlier.
Other networks
Things have settled down after a first intense week of the launch of Threads. Meta’s new platform skyrocketed to over a 100M users in a week. Now the first report of a pullback are starting to come in. This is a normal second half of what happens when people try out a new platform, not everyone sticks around, the fediverse has experienced this multiple times as well with the twittermigration and redditmigration. The Verge reports that ActivityPub integration for Threads is a ‘long while off’.
One question that is currently being debated on the feeds is whether Meta will pull through with adding federation to Threads. In that context, I wrote about this from the perspective of three new regulatory acts; the EU’s DMA and DSA, and Canada’s Online News Act. You can read that here. The conclusion is that from the perspective of compliance with the DMA, adding ActivityPub might make sense.
Bluesky experienced some major pushback from their community this week, after people found out that users could register the n-word as a user name. People on Bluesky have asking the Bluesky Team to implement a full Trust & Safety team for a while now, and Bluesky has struggled to provide safety for their Black community. The conversation and frustration from the community also focuses on the lack of apology, as well as a lack of communication from the team. The drama is indicative of a larger conflict of expectation: the Bluesky Team wants to build a protocol where online communities self-police, and the software should only provide tools to help with that. The current communities on Bluesky are significantly less interested in protocols, and want a place that resembles Twitter, but with better content moderation. This mismatch in expectations is not easy to overcome, even though Bluesky’s heart might be in the protocol, better communication and Trust and Safety would be helpful in reaching their goals, and providing safety to the community they have gathered.
An engineer from Meta has joined the ActivityPub working group in the W3C. TheNewStack provides a good summary of both the welcoming, unwelcoming and open reactions from people.
Trust Cafe is a new discussion platform by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Their FAQ mentions that they are open to federation with ActivityPub, and welcome volunteers who want to contribute with implementation.
A blog post about how blocking Threads might not be enough to protect your privacy, for people on Mastodon servers who do not want any of their posts to be accessible to Threads.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says that Tumblr is still working on ActivityPub integration, but that they have to do this with orders of magnitude less resources than Meta. Meanwhile, an unverified claim that the project to add ActivityPub got cancelled two days after starting last year. They say not to be working on Tumblr since May this year, and have no information on what currently is being worked on by Tumblr. One of the people at Tumblr working at projects states that the project is delayed, and that they are still considering it for their labs.
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