The roundup - episode 18
The fediverse loves Eurovision, a chaos era for social networks, Calckey news, and more!
Mastodon has a reputation of being a platform that is for very serious conversations, with little space for sillyness and fun. This weekend's Eurovision songfestival was a great opportunity for Mastodon to shed some of that reputation, as it turns out that people on the fediverse love Eurovision. At least 24k posts where made using the hashtag #eurovision, where normally popular hashtags rarely get over 1k posts per 24h. It's popularity also inspired a new fedivision, a fediverse song contest that starts in June.
The links
An excellent article by Annaleen Newitz (@annaleen) in the Atlantic, about how social media has entered a chaos era. It goes into theoretical concepts around federation and decentralization. One thing that people have trouble with when they first join the fediverse, is making the mindshift from centralized siloes to a real decentralized network. This article is a great help for that, without being bogged down by the technical details, and instead helps people focus on decentralization itself.
The European University Association gives a good writeup about pilot project the Dutch higher education and research organisations are doing with their Mastodon server social.edu.nl. An in-depth interview with Programme Manager Mufty is available on Fediverse Report as well.
Robert W. Gehl (@rwg) is writing a book about Mastodon and the fediverse. As part of the project, he takes a deep dive into the history of ActivityPub and how it came to be. Here is part 2, where he goes into the details of the meetings that lead to the creation of the standards.
Vocata is a new ActivityPub server in current development. It takes a different approach from other current software, in that in separates the server and the client, and is agnostic about the content type. This first part of the readme.md is absolutely worth checking out, even for nonprogrammers, as it goes into more detail about what the fediverse actually is.
Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a familiar face on the fediverse, and the term enshiffitication has quickly caught on. This time he writes for the EFF, how in a time of decaying platforms, services on the internet can be designed to put users first.
Hannah Aubry (@haubles) writes for Fastly on specific tools devs can use to deal with one of the major issues of decentralization: content duplication.
Stefan Bohacek (@stefan) wrote an article about how the fediverse will 'win', due to the way it has figured out the money part. For good measure, he also released a tool to visualise your connections on the fediverse this week.
In PixelFed news: main developer @dansup proposed setting pixelfed.social as the recommended server for new users signing up, but reverted course after significant feedback. The hashtag #joinpixelfed was also temporarily blocked on Instagram, but the ban did not seem to last for very long.
Calckey news
Calckey is moving so rapidly it deserves it's own section at this point. The developers are offering paid bounties for adding Calckey support to new or existing apps. An engineering lead for Automattic created a thread on adding Calckey support to their Jetpack plugin, which quickly lead to expanding the current 'Share to Mastodon' button to 'Share to fediverse' button. @shoq is recruiting a developer to build an 'enterprise' version of Calckey. The current design of Calckey can be quite loud and noisy, so while @shoq does not expand on what an enterprise edition might look like, a cleaner and calmer version might make sense. @supakaity has added new functionality regarding Content Warnings, adding the option to add a CW to a post you want to boost but does not originally has a CW. Other recently added features are post editing and better accessibility tools.
