Last Week in Fediverse - ep 40

Three stories that all relate to governance, in their own different ways. Mbin is a new fork of Kbin, due to governance issues at Kbin. A research paper on that gives some structure to how different Mastodon servers organise their rules. And Owncast runs into issues with how Apple governs access to the App Store.

Kbin and Mbin

Kbin has a new fork, called Mbin. It got created recently as a response to the struggles with governance at Kbin. Kbin has its creator Ernest in control of the project, who in an update this week let people know that there are multiple issues going on at the same time: the increased costs of the servers, which lead to delays in the delivery of development milestones (which are criteria for getting funding), as well as other major personal life events currently happening.

The control of the Kbin project is not very delegated, so when the main server kbin.social had problems this week, other Kbin core developers were not able to help with the problems. This was further illustrated this week, when the admin of the Infosec cluster of servers (they run a server of most fediverse software) announced that they will shut down their Kbin server, fedia.io. Admin Jerry Bell gives technical errors, as well as significantly higher requirements compared to Lemmy as the main reasons.

As a response to the situation, the fork Mbin has been recently created, the name a reference to Melroy van den Berg, one of the Kbin core developers who started this fork. A major goal of the fork is to create a better community-owned structure, where no single developer controls the project. Adding updates to the project requires consensus in a discussion on their Matrix channels, after which the changes can be made. The project proposes a from of Collective Code Construction Contract as governance, but the actual proposed method of getting consensus is not decided upon yet, with quite a bit of room of ambiguity ("issues/changes in the community first and have some consensus (WIP: we are still looking into some voting tool that might help here)")

For now, this fork has allowed the fedia.io server to continue their operation, as the fork solved the most pressing errors that were present while using Kbin. One thing to watch for is how this fork will impact other updates to Kbin that have been on the backburner: for example, Kbin's API is still not released as part of the core project, preventing Kbin apps such as Artemis to gain wider usage.

Mastodon server rules - research paper

Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances is a recently published research article that compares and characterises the rules of the most popular Mastodon servers. The researchers find that “Rules on Mastodon often pay particular attention to issues of harassment and hate — strongly reflecting the spirit of the Mastodon Covenant. We speculate that these rules may have emerged in response to problems of other platforms, and reflect a lack of support for instance maintainers.”

The report compares the rules on Mastodon servers to those on subreddits, and comes up with some interesting findings: “[R]ules about Hate Speech, Harassment, and Doxxing/Personal Info are far more common on Mastodon, while rules about Consequences/Moderation/Enforcement, Behavior/Content/Format Allowed, and Links & Outside Content are much less common. This contrast may suggest that these spaces have different values and purposes.” and “rules on Mastodon often explicitly engage with systemic oppression across many different intersectional identities beyond what is required by the Mastodon Covenant.”

And finally, this line in the report is a good indication of why I want to spend my time on the fediverse: “Mastodon instances seem to have more of an orientation towards justice”.

Owncast and the Apple App Store

Owncast creator Gabe Kangas announced that he has been working on an iOS and tvOS app for fediverse streaming platform Owncast. However, he stated that it is unlikely that this app will be released due to Apple’s App store policies. The app allowed you to browse the directory of streams on Owncast, add private server streams, and get notified when your favourite streamers were going live. Apple however refuses to approve the app into the App store, because of content rights. Apple’s position is that Owncast can only provide access to a catalog if they own the rights for the content in this catalog. As Owncast is only an intermediary portal for independently hosted servers, this is simply impossible to do. Gabe Kangas describes Owncast’s directory as similar to a podcast app. Podcasting apps can read out any podcast RSS feeds, without any permission or agreement by the podcast itself.

Gabe Kangas also states that he has been trying take a legal approach to this, but struggled finding representation that fully understands what Owncast is doing. It is an important story for the fediverse, as it is trying to expand beyond microblogging. It seems possible that someone building a PeerTube directory app might run into similar troubles.

The links

• ActivityPub, the non-standard standard. A blog post by Robert W. Gehl. about how the ActivityPub standard came to be, and what makes it stand out.
• Fedipage is a way to add ActivityPub to a static Hugo site.
• 404 Media writes why "Mastodon is the good one".
• The weekly development update for Lemmy.
• Common Abuses on Mastodon: A Primer by Stanford Internet Observatory.
• Mike Macgirvin, developer of Hubzilla and Streams, rightfully asks the question why other fediverse software platforms have not implemented comment controls yet, like Streams has.
• Steve Bate posted his massive collection (500+ links) of bookmarks related to the fediverse on Postmarks.
• Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky: Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation.
• An in-depth review of Firefish by WeDistribute. It provides an overview of all the cool features and ideas that Firefish has. Personally I really appreciate all the ways that Firefish pushes forward what fediverse software can be and do, but I have too many concerns about server stability to currently recommend people to use it.

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