Last Week in the Fediverse - episode 32

Search is really, actually, finally coming to Mastodon. By far one of its most discussed and requested features, there is now finally an implementation that fully accounts for people's consent to opt-in to being indexed. How Lemmy's community is evolving, and grappling with conversations about defederation and blocking continues to be a major focus for me. Beyond that, how software forges like now GitLab are working on becoming part of the fediverse is something to look out for, how this will impact the idea about what the fediverse actually is. Speaking about 'fediverse', I wrote an article about its multiple meanings this week, check it out! But first, let's dive into this week's news.

Lemmy follow-up

Last week I wrote about defederation and Lemmy, and the conversation is far from over. Some updates that are worth mentioning:

In last week's update I mentioned that lemmy.world had defederated from the dbzer0 server. This is not correct, as lemmy.world only blocked the piracy community on the dbzer0 server. As this is by far the largest community on the server, the point that defederation decisions between two servers can meaningfully impact people on unrelated servers still stands. However, it does provide an insight in how these more granular controls for server administrators help curate and moderate their own server better. Lemmy.world admins are concerned about the legal liabilities of having content about piracy on their server, and they could solve it this way without impacting the other communities on the dbzer0 server. Thanks to @erlend and @Leraje on the feedback.

In another conversation about the server literature.cafe potentially defederating from the Hexbear server, I found this comment chain by @Janvier to be a worthwhile read. He makes the case for smaller servers to defederate from many large servers, and not only Hexbear, as a way for smaller communities to grow organically. It is an interesting and different vision of Lemmy; many smaller 'islands' that are only marginally connected, instead of one big platform that is tightly connected between the different servers.

In other Lemmy news:

• On the technical side of blocking and defederation: the ability for people to block an entire server is in currently in the works.
• New tools like defed.xyz and Defederation Investigator help give people insight into the current interaction between servers, and which servers have blocked each other.
• Lemmy Handshake is a new tool that makes it easier to manage multiple Lemmy accounts and migrate across instances.
• Two conversations about community duplication on Lemmy. Here is a discussion on how to approach the 'fediverse' communities that exist on multiple servers, and here a post on the duplicate Rust communities.

In other news

Opt-in search is really coming to Mastodon, and is now available in public beta testing, and already available on servers like mastodon.social. It is fully opt-in, and people have to manually enable a new setting 'include public posts in search results' under their privacy settings. Search has always been a contentious issue in Mastodon, even though other fediverse platforms have had it for a long while, often with full opt-in consent. The full opt-in nature of the implementation does satisfy people's requirements for getting consent to be included in search results. It does come with the cost of increasing complexity for Mastodon; people will have to be told about the option, make a decision for themselves whether they want it, and then find the button that is 3 clicks deep in the personal preferences page. The new implementation does allow for advanced operators to be used, you can find them here on Mastodon's Github. The uptake of people actually opting into being included in search results is definitely something to keep your eyes on.

Gitlab plans to add ActivityPub support. This is a project that has been years in the planning, but last week an extensive design document was posted. The project is split into five phases. The final goal is that you can use ActivityPub to submit merge requests across different instances. In order to get there, the first step is to implement ActivityPub for following activities. This means that you can see activity on Gitlab on your Mastodon account, for example. As @J12t notes, the project is tagged with 'CEO interest', and if a CEO of a 7 billion dollar public company wants to be in the loop, it is usually a good indication that this is a meaningful project for the company.

Due to a cascade of technical errors, three fediverse servers are permanently offline, affecting around 4 thousand people. The admin of the server has given a detailed explanation of what happened here, and why the situation is not salvageable. It is a painful reminder that there is a real tradeoff in entrusting your social media presence to volunteers. Even if these volunteers are highly skilled and motivated, there is a risk of things going wrong, which can result in the complete and permanent loss of your social media account without any recourse.

The links

• Pixelfed promises to add groups features next week, a feature that has been developed but never released since 2021. It will initially ship without federation, which will be added later.
• The parliament of the German federal state of RheinlandPfalz stops posting to X and will use Mastodon instead.
• Pixels is an interesting demo application of what you can do with ActivityPub, a social canvas to draw pixel art together.
• @jdp23 points out the stark differences between instances for Mastodon's growth numbers in the last three months: almost all growth has gone to mastodon.social, with other large instances gaining drastically fewer signups, and decreasing MAU, versus increasing MAU on mastodon.social.
• A deep dive into Firefish Groups, which are effectively group chats, and how this compares to features on other platforms such as Mastodon.

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