FediForum September 2023

This week saw the second edition of FediForum, a two-day virtual unconference about the fediverse. It had more than 100 people attending, and provided an opportunity for the many people who are working on the fediverse to get together, showcase their work, and have conversations about the many topics of discussion.

Demos

Every day started with demos by fediverse projects, such as the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, a demo of Micro.blog, and how work on Bonfire is moving towards a release version. It also showed interesting tools such as FeedSeer and Fediseer, two very different projects with very similar names. FeedSeer allows you to get a clear overview of the links and news items that are being discussed in your personal feed. Fediseer is a chain-of-trust system of fediverse server admins to share which servers are they think are trustworthy, and which ones they think they don't. Fediseer is an interesting new take on the topic of content moderation and shared deny lists.

Another demo that stood out to me was that of Gath.io. Gath is an open source event planner that anyone can use, that originated outside of the fediverse. @Darius added ActivityPub support to it, so you can interact with it via the rest of the fediverse, such as subscribing to RSVP'ing to a specific event directly from your Mastodon account. It's a cool project for both the service it offers, as well as for showcasing that the fediverse can also be expanded by adding support to existing other applications. Fediseer and Gath.io are services that I'll revisit in the near future, as they deserve a closer look.

The sessions

Most of the conference is focused on the sessions, where anyone can call a session about a subject they prefer. Subjects were wildly varied, ranging from discussions about governance to content moderation, from project showcases to technical discussions about specific features. While there were way too many sessions to cover here, I want mention a few that stood out the me:

Ian Forrester held a Q&A about the BBC's experiences with their new Mastodon server. He noted that when convincing other people of the project, it's important to focus on the human values, and that numbers of followers don't really matter for success. He says that if the focus is on numbers, it'll not seem worthwhile. What also stands out is how organisations look at other organisations for what they are doing. Ian says that it was easier to convince others in the BBC when they could point to other governments and public broadcasters being active on the fediverse. In return, one of the feedback that the BBC gets now is that other organisations are saying "look, the BBC is doing this, why don't we do this". What is also encouraging to hear, is that unless something major happens, the BBC plans to run the server the 6-month experiment end date.

The presentations by IFTAS were noteworthy as well, with a preliminary presentation of the survey on fediverse content moderation (to be publicly released soon), as well as an explanation of how the organisation is currently working on improving Trust and Safety on the fediverse. The presentation on their current work can be viewed here. They are working on a deny list subscription service called FediCheck, where admins can subscribe to a deny list that should form a baseline of the minimum necessary servers to block. This is done by focusing on the communality of the deny lists of the largest servers on the fediverse. Admins of these servers can sign up to give their consent, here.

Moving forward

What does stand out however is the lack of representation of any of the big projects on the fediverse. FediForum had a large number of people present who want to push the fediverse forward. But in the end, changes need buy-in and implementation from the projects that people on the fediverse are using. Especially in the context of content moderation and trust and safety, where the fediverse still needs better tooling. There were presentations, ideas and concrete tools on how to improve the safety for both Mastodon and Lemmy. But as far as I could tell, there were no representations by Mastodon, Lemmy, or any of the other big fediverse projects. This stands out even more considering that Meta had multiple representatives that were part of the conversations on how to improve content moderation on the fediverse. For future editions of the FediForum, it is definitely worth watching this develops.

EDIT: FediForum indicates that the detailed notes of the sessions will be out very soon. When that happens I'll place a link here.

EDIT2: the notes are now live, here.