Last week in the #fediverse, ep 2
Welcome to Last Week in the Fediverse, a free weekly newsletter that gives you an update on the most relevant news what has happened last week.
In this weeks episode:
🔎The story about search, privacy and consent continues.
🔒Twitter shuts down the API access for 3rd-party apps, leading the developers to focus their efforts on Mastodon apps.
📅Apps that allow you to schedule posts for social networking such as Dlvr.it and Buffer add support for Mastodon
📰Bonus: video’s new jobs, and more!
You can subscribe directly on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any other ActivityPub client you use for microblogging, by searching for @fediverse-report@write.as. If you want to follow my Mastodon account, you can also get it there directly, along with other interesting news and happenings.
🔎Search, privacy and consent
As discussed last week, the community wide discussion and conversation on how to approach search, privacy and consent continues.
The tool Searchtodon shuts down again after community feedback. Creator Jan Lehnardt was explicit from the beginning that he would listen to feedback regarding how to approach privacy and consent. After significant pushback he shut the tool down again. A few days later he posted an extensive introspective, which is worth reading.
Meanwhile, ActivityPub co-developer Evan Prodromou held an informal poll to understand community attitude towards search, with some valueable discussion happening in the comments of the poll. We’ve discussed this in more detail in this post.
Anil Dash wrote an extensive article s a response to the conversations, called “How you could build a search that the fediverse would welcome”. He views consent as the building block that all search should be build around, and lists the advantages and disadvantages of search on the fediverse. His main idea is as follows:
“So: What about a truly opt-in, consent-based approach to search? We need a search bot that we can follow.
Whereas today's consumer web is shaped by Google sending its bots across the internet as rapaciously as possible, on the fediverse it should be entirely possible to create a search engine that is exposed to users as a bot that you can follow — and unfollow — whenever you want. When you're following the searchbot, and you make a public post, it'll automatically be indexed and included in search. When you unfollow, or post something that the bot doesn't have permission to see, that content is automatically excluded from the search index.”
[The article can be found here, ](How you could build a search that the fediverse would welcome)and is worth reading.
Ben Tasker took a different approach, and wrote an extensive blog post on how to autodetect and announce Mastodon scraper bot activity. While the consent-forward approach is preferred, one should be prepared that not all actors will honor the requests for privacy and consent. The tool that he promotes can help alert against bad behaviour.
🔒Twitter shuts down the API access for 3rd-party apps, leading the developers to focus their efforts on Mastodon apps.
While this newsletter is not aimed at reporting on Twitter, sometimes the actions of Twitter have direct consequences of the Fediverse. Last week, Twitter restricted API access for popular 3rd party apps. After the apps had been down for multiple days, Twitter formally banned 3rd party clients on January 19th.
These 3rd party clients are build and maintained by small independent companies, and three of those have been explicit and forward about how they will move forward with building apps for Mastodon.
Tabbots, the company behind Tweetbot, used their service disruption announcement to advertise their upcoming app Ivory, a Mastodon client for iOS:
Craig Hockenberry, creator of the first twitter client Twitterific, expressed his frustration in a blog post, as well as his excitement about the direction of the fediverse.
It also gave a significant boost to the new app IceCubes, another iOS app, with the interesting feature to easily follow local timelines from other instances.
📅Social network post scheduling tools add Mastodon support
This week showed a movement towards the fediverse, this time in the form of tools that help you schedule your posts across social networking platforms.
Both Buffer and Dlvr.it added support for Mastodon. With TweetMaps adding support late last year, it seems like we can speak about a movement:
(h/t @atomicpoet)
📰Grab bag
TILvids has created a nice introduction video, Mastodon in 180 seconds. You can watch it here to also have it serve as an introduction to using PeerTube.
Mastodon recently announced they are hiring for a DevOps Engineer and a Product Manager. Yesterday a Software Engineer was also added to the list.
FediMod is a proposal for better coordination between Mastodon admins on blocking and administration. Read our reporting here, or the entire actual proposal here.
🔮Next up
We’re already excited for the next articles, where we will be delving deeper into the promised Mastodon feature ‘groups’. It got announced on the public roadmap, but did not have much context to go with.
Next episode of ‘Tech for the fediverse’ also promises to be a good one; updates to PixelFed, Elk, the new IceCubes app, new versions of quote posting being trialed, and more!
That is all for now, thank you for reading, and see you next week! If you enjoyed this newsletter, do not forget to subscribe, either directly to this blog via @fediverse-report@write.as or by following my Mastodon account.
