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Other federated protocols
Other federated protocols are having a moment in the spotlight. A bridge between Nostr and the fediverse is created, and Jack Dorsey launches Bluesky, another decentralized network.
Laurens Hof
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SURF Program Manager Talks about Their Mastodon Pilot for Dutch Higher Education
In interview with @SURF, the Dutch IT cooperative for education and research, which has launched a Mastodon pilot. This means that tens of thousands of Dutch students and researchers can use Mastodon with just a one-click login via their institute, without having to register and pick out a server. I
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Flipboard joins the fediverse
Flipboard has announced it is joining the fediverse in a major way, by allowing you to interact with Mastodon through their app, as well as setting up their own instance. Reading the language in the blog posts, it is clear that Flipboard sees this not just as a side experiment, but that they are all
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Mammoth, a new iOS app for Mastodon, launches
Mammoth is a new app for iOS that launched this week, that stands out in a crowded field in multiple ways: Mammoth focuses on helping new users with a tailored onboarding flow. The company behind Mammoth is an investor-backed startup, raising questions about how it will make money.
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Cloudflare´s Wildebeest has a bug
All software always contains bugs. But some bugs are worth noting, if only already for public response to it. Cloudflare's Wildebeest has a bug with private messages, and the community's response to it is a good indication that Wildebeest is far from popular in the community.
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Nature publishes correspondence about value of moving to the fediverse
Nature has published correspondence that calls for every scholarly institute to set up their own Mastodon instance. It talks about how global communications platforms such as Twitter and the fediverse are common goods, that should be in public hands, not private property.
Last week
Last Week in the Fediverse, ep 6
Mastodon and the fediverse keeping growing in mainstream acceptance. Major tech news outlets are seriously discussing and talking about it. In the Netherlands, a pilot has started that allows higher education students and researchers easy access to the fediverse. Growth of a network is hard, and gro
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Governance struggles on the fediverse
Part of building out a decentralized social network is that figuring out governance structures that work for your server is hard. Recently this was visible in the drama around the shutdown of the mastodon.lol server, reported on here. This week this continues with a narrowly avoided shutdown of the
Sunday readings
Sunday Readings: some historical context
Last time I placed the rise of the fediverse in a larger context, with some reflections on the state of the internet at large. This time, I want to zoom in a bit more on the context of how the technical side, the ActivityPub protocol, came to be.
Last week
Last Week in the Fediverse, ep 5
Drama over the new Harry Potter game leads to the shutdown of the mastodon.lol server. The continued bot transition towards Mastodon. A public conversation on how to interpret Mastodon’s user numbers. Wildebeast, controversial new server software from Cloudflare is released.
Last week
Last Week in the Fediverse, ep 4
The major theme of this week is news around technical infrastructure. Mastodon.social experiences a DDoS attack, Twitter shuts down free access to the API, Stanford is called on by the community to start their own Mastodon server, and new tools get released with some interesting implications on the
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Small tech
Two posts resonated with me recently, about the power of small software. Small software is simple technology, nothing shiny, build to meet the need of a specific group of people