Last Week in Fediverse - episode 34

New software and a new government on the fediverse! Lets take a look.

Social bookmarking on the fediverse with Postmarks

An interesting new fediverse server project has just launched, Postmarks. It is a single-user social bookmarking service, that you can easily self-host on Glitch. The basis is a straight-forward bookmarking service; you add a link, you optionally add some tags, and you have a nice visual overview of all your bookmarks that is public and easily shareable. An example of that can be seen here. The added value is in making it adding ActivityPub support. This way, you can follow the account on other platforms such as Mastodon. If you do this, you get a post in your feed every time a new bookmark is added, which looks like this. Furthermore, you can even comment on the bookmarks as well, also from other fediverse sites.

There are a few reasons why this project stands out. First of all is the focus on single-user self hosting only. While virtually all projects in the fediverse can be self-hosted, most people experience it on a server hosted by someone else. By using Glitch, the self-hosting can be experienced by everyone for free. For a better experience and a server that is always running, it is recommended to pay for it however.

The integration of Glitch for self-hosting also allows for more and easier customisation. Customising the site is as easy as editing a style.css file in the project. And because it is just your own single-user project, there is less barrier to experiment as well. If you host any fediverse server with other people as well on it, you have a responsibility towards your users that makes experimentation more risky and costly. The lower stakes of a single-user project can make experimentation more rewarding. How the community approaches this is definitely something to keep an any on, with multiple people already expressing interest in doing so.

For more information on Postmarks:

• The default Postmarks site that you can easily remix.
• A Techcrunch article on Postmarks.
• The code base.
• Getting started.
• Ethos of Postmarks.

Swiss government close to launching a Mastodon server

The Swiss government is in the process of setting up their own Mastodon server. It is visible at social.admin.ch. Admin.ch is the official website of the Swiss government. There are no accounts yet, and the admin account indicates that it is still in the process of being set up. This would mark the third national government Mastodon server, after the German government at social.bund.de and the Dutch government at social.overheid.nl. The other large governmental institute is the EU, which has their server at social.network.europa.eu.

Not much is known yet about how this server will be used, and what sort of governmental organisations will take part in it. One trend that does start to appear however, is the syntax of social.[governmentwebsite].[tld]. I'm personally curious to see that, if more governments join, this will become the defacto standard domain syntax, making it as intuitive as possible for people to know that this account is an official account by a government.

The EDPS, the European agency that is responsible for the European Mastodon server, held a talk recently at the Freedom not Fear conference, about the fediverse and public administration, titled 'Why we try and why we fail?'. He explains the challenges of convincing other agencies, especially regarding that the reach is often significantly lower compared to the other platforms. You can watch the keynote here on their PeerTube server.

In other news

Evan Prodromou, one of the co-authors of the ActivityPub protocol, has announced that he'll be writing a book about ActivityPub for O'Reilly Media. The book will be a developer guide that helps "programmers connect existing software to the social web, as well as making brand new social applications." O'Reilly Media is one of the biggest names in programming books. The book is scheduled to be released sometime after summer 2024.

A short update on search in Mastodon, with two different approaches by other software. Firefish used to have full-text search included. The latest version of Firefish now has a similar setting as Mastodon, allowing you to opt-in and opt-out of being indexed. The default value for Firefish seems to be opt-out. It is unclear if this is deliberate, or if this is because it is still in beta. Meanwhile, on a proposal to formalise the settings that Mastodon uses via a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal), Lemmy developer @nutomic points out the different default assumptions for Lemmy versus Mastodon. In Lemmy, the default value is that all content is assumed to be public and indexable, in contrast with the cultural expectations that exist within Mastodon.

• The Unofficial guide to Kbin has gotten a major makeover, and is certainly worth checking out for people using Kbin.
• A new automoderation tool for Lemmy.
• Mashable asks: What is the fediverse?
• The latest update on the work on building a bridge between all decentralised social networking protocols.
• The Global Weather & EAS Society has worked with the Iowa Environmental Mesonet to bring all their weather bots to Mastodon.
• Pixelfed has recently launched Stories. Now the fediverse platform Streams has also added support to view the Pixelfed stories, with Friendica and Firefish also looking at supporting them.
• SofaPub is a minimally functional ActivityPub server that can help developers with testing their own other ActivityPub software.
• German newsletter heise.de now reports more traffic from Mastodon than from Twitter/X. Editor Martin Holland has been tracking this for most of the year now with regular updates, and indicates that the Mastodon trendline is stable, with Twitter/X traffic decreasing.
• The W3C has an event in Sevilla this week, and there will be three sessions on ActivityPub.

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