The Roundup - episode 17

Welcome to a new edition of the roundup. For the next few editions I´m experimenting with adding some more context to most news, to help you give a better understanding of why all the links are there. Lets get to it!

Crypto spam

Mastodon.social experienced a crypto spam wave attack. The attack took roughly an hour, and was one of the largest spam wave attack lately. This event brought multiple discussions to light again: the fear that mastodon.social is getting too big, leading to a re-centralization of the fediverse. This discussion has become significantly more pronounced since Mastodon decided to suggest mastodon.social as the server for people who register via the official Mastodon apps.

While this fear is understandable, the spam attack hightlights the conflicting forces in the debates about (de)centralization of servers. During the spam wave, an admin of another server publicly stated that they wished to be able to block mastodon.social during the attack, but couldn't because of how large the server is. Other server admins opted to mute mastodon.social instead.

The difference between muting and blocking is highly relevant in this case: muting allows messages to pass between people who already follow each other. Blocking permanently separates the servers, meaning all follow and followers between accounts on the servers are lost permanently. This got some servers in trouble when they realized they did actually block mastodon.social instead of mute, and lost all their follow-connections from mastodon.social.

In other news

Bluesky continues to be a large subject of discussion, both on culture and about interoperability. The biggest change of this week is update to the Ikuradon app (Android and iOS). This Japanese app is a client for Mastodon, and the latest beta adds Bluesky support, allowing you to read messages from your Bluesky account all in the same app.

The Universeodon server has updated their signup process, helping people with the onboarding process and getting them to follow some accounts. Any process that helps new users with onboarding is always great to see. It also is an indication of a slowly building trend of servers trying to individually distinguish themselves with the technical services they offer.

The discover.fedified tool is rapidly getting upgrades, and now all Mastodon users can sign up for the directory. These discovery tools have historically been overwhelmingly focused on Mastodon, so it'll be interesting to see if they can make the switch towards server-agnostic fediverse discovery tools. In an early encouraging sign is the fediverse.info directory, which is now advertizing that it supports Calckey too. The VerifiedX project (such as verifiedjournalist.org)is now expanding to third party applications as well, with the verified.thecanadian.social directory.

Mozilla is opening up the beta for their mozilla.social mastodon server. The announcement post is worth reading, and so is the coverage from The Verge. They position themselves clearly on the issue of content moderation. They are not trying to build a neutral platform, but instead are making opiniated choices about content moderation, with the goal of providing a nicer place to be on the internet. They do also mention the possibility of giving their server some UI love. What is not mentioned is their signup flow, as you log in directly with your Firefox account. This will make signing up to the fediverse significantly easier once the server gets out of beta.

Mastodon makes changes to the signup flow, setting mastodon.social as the default server if you sign up during the apps. This choice went live a few weeks ago, and has continued to be majorly controversial for a variety of reasons. In the end the argument is best summarized as a choice of decentralization versus ease of signup: the new design increases both centralization as well as user inflow, and it is a matter of personal preference to what extend they feel it's worth making this tradeoff.

The blogpost also announces quote posts, search and groups, three features that are also sources of major discussion. It'll be interesting to see in what format they will be shipped, and in what timeframe. One of the more interesting responses is by GoToSocial who sees it as a cutoff point regarding them supporting the Mastodon API.

The links

• IFTAS (International Federation of Trust and Safety) has put out an open call for 12 active moderators to join their moderation panel.
• Mona, a Mastodon app for MacOS and iOS has officially released, with a glowing review of macstories.net.
• @supakaity, a contributor to Calckey who also runs her own fork, is experimenting with adding Content Warnings to boosted and quoted posts. Calckey is under rapid development, and new features that help with user safety are great to see.
• @dansup posits a question on which servers should be included as being part of the fediverse, when servers host illegal content.
• The Fleeting Utopia: Navigating the Euphoria of New Digital Communities by @rabble is an excellent video essay about on the early fleeting utopian feeling of new social networks, and how to use Ostrom's work on Commons to build better digital spaces.
• Masto-collab is a way to collaboratively post to Mastodon using wikis as a collaboration platform.
• Kbin is a new link aggregator on the fediverse that is in alpha, that just released their roadmap.
• Some large new accounts joined the fediverse, such as Ars Technica, X.org and Matt Ferrell.
• Mike Macgirvin, creator of Hubzilla and Friendica, is building a Fediverse Identity Manager.
• ActivityPub server software Takahe is back from a development break, with an update of their new direction.

To read

@erlend has put out two blog posts this week that are both worth reading. Juicy clients is about how clients can become real clients for the fediverse and not just Mastodon. Sense-making in federated discourse is about how to organise information in an overload of posts that are hard to organise.

Erin Kissane's (@kissane) essay 'Blue Skies over Mastodon' has generated quite a lot of discourse on the feeds. It is an excellent critique on Mastodon's issues with user focused product design, and what can be learned from Bluesky.

The poll

Annalee Newitz posted two polls with peoples biggest fears regarding the fediverse. The responses where quite varied with no excessive winners, which indicates that people see and fear quite a few potential struggles that can hurt the future of the fediverse. The result that stood out most is that of monetization, which got by far the lowest amount of the votes. People are clearly more worried about culture, such as volunteer moderator burnout than about building businesses on top of the fediverse.