Last Week in the Fediverse, ep 6

Mastodon and the fediverse keep 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 growing pains are visible again this week. In this episode I'll talk about:

DecentSocial, a conference on decentralized social networks

Dutch higher education launches massive #mastodon pilot

Discourse will add support for the fediverse

How news outlets are approaching Mastodon

Mastodon.social opens for signups

And much more news

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DecentSocial

Last Saturday was the first ever DecentSocial conference, an unconference that is entirely about decentralized social networks. It saw a big turnout, even with people divided over three major timezones. The setup was quite freeform: meet at the beginning, announce sessions you want to host, and then just join whatever conversation you find valuable. Turns out there was significant demand for people that wanted to talk, and share their mind. While quite a few people have been working on federated networks for quite a while, this was the first major conference that everyone could just get together and talk.

This Polis poll asked 40 questions of people, to get some understanding of the different viewpoints of the people that are participating on decent social web. The results divide people up in different groups, based on their answer. It's worth it to play around with this, and ask yourself what your opinions actually are.

People have been taking all sorts of notes and remarks during the different sessions. The organisers are still in the process of organizing all the notes, but if you are interested in the raw data you can find them here. The conference had a pay-what-you-want model, and people where very willing to contribute. The left-over money "will be earmarked for inclusion scholarships to make sure that the next event represents even more of the diverse communities trying to fix the social web." This inclusion and representation was also the subject from one of the more sessions that was hosted; "Decolonising tech and Feminist Internet". Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the co-creators of the ActivityPub protocol also hosted and recorded multiple sessions. You can find the video's on her PeerTube channel.

It seems like this type of conference fills a need; there was already talk about a organising a second edition of DecentSocial. Another, unaffiliated group of people is also hosting an online unconference about decentralized social media, FediForum, on 29 and 30 March. Visit Decentsocial.net for more information about this conference, and find the notes on all the sessions. If you are interest another unconference, you can https://fediforum.org/ visit as well.

Dutch higher education system starts Mastodon pilot

One of the bigger news stories of the week is the launch of a Mastodon pilot that greatly expands easy access to Mastodon for Dutch students and researchers. To appreciate the news, it needs a bit of context: SURF is IT cooperation organisation that of both higher education institutes and universities, as well as research organisations. They manage a Trust and Identity system that allows students and researchers to 1-click login to all cloud services of their institute.

SURF has created a Mastodon server, and integrated it with their 1-click login system. This allows students and researchers to skip the confusing registration process, and simply log in with their current credentials on the Mastodon server, all while staying anonymous. All organisations have to actively participate, with 15 organisations already having done so in the first week of launch.

I interviewed the program manager for this project. That interview will come out next week, and will feature a lot more in-depth information on the project. For now, it’s cool to see how quickly buy-in for the fediverse is moving beyond just tech circles.

Website with more information is here, in Dutch. The interview will be in English, and feature more explanations on how it all works. It's too much to cover here in this newsletter. For now it's enough to know that a major pilot program is actually happening; already tens of thousands of students have access to one-click register and login on Mastodon, and there is lots of room to grow.

Discourse is joining the fediverse

Discourse is popular open-source software for modern forums, and have seen a massive surge in popularity in recent years. They have announced they will join the fediverse by supporting ActivityPub. In practice this means for example that you can follow a category on Discourse from your Mastodon client, and every new post that is made will appear in your feed. Discourse is taking the integration slow and careful, following comments, users, or showing posts made on Mastodon in Discourse are intentionally not included. (If you're unfamiliar with Discourse, the announcement post is made on forum that uses it.)

In itself this is already relevant news: popular software getting fediverse support indicates that adoption is indeed spreading. However, I find it interesting in another way as well: in the minds of most people, the fediverse is closely related to Mastodon, and often equated with microblogging. The Discourse integration is actually way more similar to Lemmy. Lemmy is also an open-source federated platform, but also for forums, and best summarized as Reddit-but-on-the-fediverse. For a variety of reasons Lemmy has not gained major traction, and even people who use Mastodon are often not familiar what it is and that it exists. This unfamiliarity helps keep the idea that the fediverse is just microblogging, 'Twitter-but-slightly-different'. This extention of the fediverse that is not an extension of microblogging, but of forums instead, will help the fediverse grow in new and exciting directions.

The fediverse in tech media

Mastodon and the fediverse got some attention in large tech media, in a few different ways that are worth noting:

Mozilla chair Mitchell Baker was interviewed on the Decoder podcast by The Verge’s Nilay Patel. Towards the end, the conversation turns towards Mastodon. It’s worth listening or reading the transcript for the full answer, but the biggest takeaways:

• “Mozilla is going to shortly stand up our own instance of it so that we can learn more, understand more, contribute to the community, and really begin to explore hands-on how far might this protocol go”

• “The first step is to actually be an active participant in that world and do some learning, and not roll in as the gorilla or some giant thing that’s like, “Sure, we know everything, and we’re going to tell you how it is.” That’s not what we want to do.”

Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, posted a thread with some assorted thoughts on Mastodon and the fediverse that is interesting. One thing specifically stood out: “Anyone who likes Techmeme or Mediagazer linking to their tweets should probably start posting here ASAP. (Due to Twitter's unfortunate API changes and other factors.)”.

If Techmeme would indeed start only linking to fediverse posts and not Twitter posts, that would probably be quite impactful, from a cultural perspective, adding extra relevance and status to the fediverse for tech journalism.

The Verge’s Nilay Patel said on the Vergecast that Mastodon is ‘where all the action is’, with regard to developers. Last week’s interview with Botwiki.org’s maker @stefan was just a small example of that.

Initiatives on discoverability of news

There are a few news outlets that have fully embraced the fediverse, by not only linking their content here, but also by fully engaging with their audience on the platform. Interestingly enough, some of the most notable examples of this are local news outlets, such as the Texas Observer and GBHnews, which covers the Boston area, and Heise Online, a German tech news outlet. Others are more general internet-centric outlets such as The Markup. These news outlets got together, and decided to start a new initiative of #newstodon, where they actively encourage newsrooms to tag their best work of the week every Friday with the hashtag #newstodon. The first thread can be found here, or just search for the #newstodon.

One of the things I appreciate about the fediverse is the emergence of initiatives by users that are trying to fix a need that they have. People are simply experimenting with ways that might work best for them, and trying new things. Another recent example is how Chris Trottier is actively promoting the use of tagging posts about fediverse news with the tag @fediversenews@venera.social. This is somewhat similar to using hashtags, but with the difference that the post is now visible in a Friendica Group.

Mastodon.social open for signups

Mastodon.social has reopened again for signups. It is by far the largest instance. For people who are not familiar with decentralized social networks, it can feel as the 'main' or official instance, since it is hosted by the Mastodon organization and it is so big. This coincides with a structural increase in signups, over the last week or so, as well as a restructuring of the joinmastodon.org website. There are two sides to this. The fediverse promotes decentralization, and aggregating most users in a single instance is antithesis to the core ideology. On the other hand, for people who have only been exposed to centralized internet services over the last decade, the concept of decentralized instances is hard to grasp. A lot of people do not manage to follow the entire signup flow, often getting stuck on the part where the need to pick an instance. There is something to be said about getting people to sign up first in a large 'entry' server, and letting them transfer later to other servers. The question of the matter is if that second step actually happens in enough cases to counter balance the centralizing forces to a significant extend.

This increase in signups on the network has coincided with reports of admins of smaller servers actually reportign getting less signups recently. This intuitively makes sense; an easier signup flow can easily result in people taking the easy step and picking one of the big general servers. Finding a small server that is themed around a particular issue, and might have an approval process, takes more effort. Giving smaller servers less possibility to grow also reinforces the centralization process.

Overall this is a subject worth revisiting in the near future, once more data points start to come in, and trends can become clearer. For now, it looks like the structural increase in Mastodon signups is a good thing that comes with a real cost.

Admin server issues, continued

On Wednesday, the admin of the mastodon.au, a server with 6,5k active users in Australia, decided to shut down the server. The admin emailed the Mastodon organisation for a support question, but the response for this took more than a week. The admin then decided to shut down the server, publicly stating “We were in this for the long haul, the shutdown wasn’t based on anything more than an email that went unanswered”. This went viral in the feeds, as people were scrambling to have to move servers. Luckily a partial solution was found, in that the admin rights were transferred to a new person. The server will be closed for new signups, and from the looks of it, will only be in maintainance mode.

The primary analysis of this all is that shutting down an instance, inconveniencing thousands of people over a single unanswered email is just really dumb, not much more to say about that.

There are some things that are worth noting though:

• Instances that only have a single admin, without a further support team, are vulnerably to disruption. People should strive towards bigger admin and mod teams to prevent disruption after a single admin goes rogue. This was visible last week with the drama around mastodon.lol; one of the reasons it could escalate as much as it did, is that all power of moderation decisions was put on one person. So when disagreements about admin decisions arise, things can escalate quickly to a personal level. There is also little space of other people to come in and moderate between the disagreeing groups.
• On December 21, 2022, Mastodon gGmbH added a trademark policy to the joinmastodon.org website. This policy states: “Do not use or register, in whole or in part, the Mastodon marks as part of your own or any other trademark, service mark, domain name, company name, trade name, product name, or service name.”. It is clear that the Mastodon organization wants to avoid issues with servers that use their name. It seems likely that the organisation had exactly these sorts of issues that played out with mastodon.lol and mastodon.au in mind, that they wanted to avoid happen to servers that include the Mastodon name.
• As best as I can retrace from this story the original question centered around a classification for the server, from Regional to General. This has impact on where the server shows up on the joinmastodon.org website. It seems like the admin assumed that moving the classification to General would lead to more sign-ups. Eugen Rochko called this a ‘a break of trust’ for the original users. While both the intent and execution in the case of mastodon.au is not great for sure, it does indicate the power and relevancy of where your server gets placed on the joinmastodon.org website. A proper placement can significantly impact the amount of signups that your server gets.

New forms of governance

The recent issues with server admins have demonstrated the need for proper governance structures for servers. Current servers are experimenting with this in different ways, with the last week showing some interesting concepts:

• The server Hachyderm.io is actively working on a democratic governance model for their parent organisation Nivenly. A rough summary of the governance model is that members of the server can pay a small monthly fee, that covers the cost of the organisation and server maintainance, and will get you a vote in the organisation. Admin Kris Nóva gave a talk to FOSDEM 23 about the process of running the Hachyderm server, which can be watched here. The part at the timestamp covers the governance part of the server. The entire process and model is something that is worth watching for other admins as well, to get inspiration and lessons learned. Once the model is fully launched I´ll cover it in more detail. For now, something to keep your eyes on.
• Evan Prodromou, one of the co-creators of the ActivityPub protocol, is starting a new Mastodon instance for Canadians as a co-operative, at cosocial.info. Recent issues have demonstrated the need for new forms of governance for instances. It will be interesting to see how the co-operative mode of governance will be put into practice.
• Universeodon is a medium sized server (17k active users) that is currently run by a single admin, @supernovae. He posted about building up a community board. This is a good way to increase transparancy, but does not fully address the issue yet of one admin being a single point of failure.

Search

Search, build to opt-in: Toothfinder is an opt-in search tool that works by adding a keyword to your profile, and then authentificating to be indexed via their website. Another generic keyword, 'searchable' is now added to the tool. This allows other opt-in search tools to make use of the same singular keyword, which can help spread adoption.

Search, build to hurt: A known harrasser and troll decided to build a search tool that indexes all public posts on all servers. This was done with the explicit goal of upsetting and harrassing people, as the creator is very aware of the culture of only opt-in search tools. He specifically focused his harrasment at a group that is building a safe space here on the fediverse. More information and documentation on this is available on request.

The tool works by reading the 'federated' timeline on a few large servers, providing very little ways of blocking of preventing this. It is worth to have a conversation of what benefit the federated timeline still provides for servers. It is a firehose of posts that is unusable for all servers that federate with other larger servers, which is pretty much all servers. At the same time, it provides an easy access point to scrape the entire fediverse that cannot be easily blocked.

A variety of other news

Mastodon's lead developer Eugen Rochko shows interest in adding support for Passkeys to Mastodon. Passkeys are a new system that allows you to securely log in without a password.

@kona has set up a fediverse platform for transit alerts, via an open-source method that can easily expand to add more agencies. This January, a short news cycle happened when a transit agency was randomly banned from Twitter for a while. This underlined the need for a way for transit agencies to be able to broadcast relevant information on a platform that is not beholden to other commercial internet. Interesting to see this now being picked up and build out on the fediverse.

The latest update for iOS adds support to iMessage for rich previews on Mastodon posts. 9to5Mac has more details and screenshots of what this looks like.

News outlet Tidbits writes how they wish Mastodon clients could do so much more. What's your wish for unique, strange or interesting features?

Ebou is a new Mastodon client for macOS that explores a different kind of Mastodon experience. It groups posts by author, in a way that is much more similar to messaging apps. More information here.

A very important service announcement:

This is now canon. (link)

That is all for now. Thank you for reading. You can subscribe to my newsletter, right here at fediversereport.com, and follow me on Mastodon. If you sign up for my newsletter, you get Last Week in the Fediverse, directly in your inbox for free! Every week, a clear overview of all the news that happened.