The Roundup - episode 21

Welcome to another edition of The Roundup! I've mentioned this blog post by Signal a few times before, and will do so again. One of the reasons why I think it is so relevant, is that it shows how the same communication platform is used it wildly different ways in different geographical regions, with people often not even realising that this happens. This already happens when everyone uses the same app, Signal. I've pointed out before that this effect must therefore be even stronger on the fediverse, where people are not even using the same app.

This differentiation in the fediverse is starting to play out in more and more pronounced ways. For most fediverse users in the Western world, the fediverse is tightly linked with Mastodon. But the Japanese fediverse community is growing extremely rapidly, mainly using Misskey. It has grown in less than half a year from 75k accounts to 325k accounts. Not only that, people on misskey.io love to post. Compared to Mastodon's biggest server, mastodon.social, people on misskey.io post 12 times as much!

The language barrier between English and Japanese contributes that these groups do not overlap much, with people often not really knowing what happens at the other side. Still, if you want to understand the fediverse, its getting harder and harder to ignore Misskey. We used to have a moment where people referred to Misskey and Calckey as *key, but with Calckey getting a rebranding and name change soon, the field of fediverse microblogging clients keep expanding.

Discussion platforms

Beyond the expanding scene of microblogging services is the field of forums and link aggregators. Reddit's changes to their API pricing, effectively killing 3rd party apps, has a lot of people upset, and some are looking for new places to go.

Lemmy is one of the main recipients of the new inflow of people. As an illustration, Beehaw.org is a small Lemmy community that is focusing on being a safe and diverse place. They have had to restrict signups after their user base doubled in the last few days. Lemmy has an Android client, and an iOS client that entered TestFlight beta a few weeks ago. Another project to work on a read-only client for Lemmy is underway as well. Lemmy is not without controversy though; the large account FediTips voiced their concern about the politics of the developers, regarding the denial of human rights abuses. As one of the largest Lemmy server explicitly states that they like Stalin, and some developers of Lemmy associate with this server, it is understandable that people are hesitant to recommend Lemmy. For a more in-depth article regarding this, as well as the context where this happens regarding Reddit's changes, as well as the potential for Kbin in this, I recommend this article by @jayeless.

Forum software Discourse has been working on a plugin to enable federation, and the first version of this is available. As of now, it only publishes a note to the rest of the fediverse when a new topic is created, and does not allow for the federation of comments yet. The ActivityPub Social Hub is one of the first forums to make use of this functionality, so you can now easily see on your fediverse account when new topics are created.

The links

• Mastodon is featured on the Apple App Store. It describes Mastodon in fairly good detail, and links to popular client apps such as Ivory and Mona.
• Mozilla.social is the Mastodon server by Mozilla that is currently in closed beta. Mozilla is focusing on content moderation, and trying to make it a nice and friendly place on the internet. They are hiring a senior director of product to lead mozilla.social.
• Trunks is a Mastodon app for iOS, Android and web client, and after 5 months in beta has now officially been released.
• An excellent article that goes into the details of making an app for the fediverse, and the practical complications with interoperability. While in theory all apps should talk with each other via ActivityPub, getting the details correct for the implementation turns out to be quite a bit more complicated.
• Web browser Vivaldi has been running their own Mastodon server for a while now. In a new interview, the CEO talks more about federation and running their own server.
• An overview of the top 30 most popular servers that relate to the fediverse in some way. This list takes the widest possible interpretation of fediverse. Quite a few people will disagree with including Truth Social on the list for example, as it does not federate. I personally see this list as a good overview of what is out there, even though I hold a narrower definition of fediverse.
• Bonfire is a microblogging client that is still in alpha testing, that focuses on circles and boundaries. A new blog post explains their thinking in more detail.
• Calckey has the feature to add plugins. This is barely used, as their is little documentation on how to make plugins. Jeff Sikes has been building plugins, and documenting the process on how to make them.
• Owncast celebrates its 3 year anniversary with a major update.
• Fedified's Elk fork continues to go into its own direction, now adding trending posts from feditrends.com.
• PixelFed has updated their onboarding process for new users. One notable thing is that they use the word 'communities' to describe servers/instances. Personally I think that is a great term that makes it easier for new users to understand what is going on with federation.
• John Gruber might have some mixed feelings on Mastodon (stating last month that Mastodon is doomed to relative obscurity, compared to Bluesky), but still implemented federation for his blog Daring Fireball.

Beyond the fediverse

Quite a lot of news this week that is not directly about the fediverse, but still relates to it in some way.

• On Bluesky: This article by The Intercept answers some basic questions about Bluesky in an detailed manner, such as who exactly owns Bluesky. It also reiterates Bluesky's goal to federate with other servers that run ATproto. If/when that happens, bridging to the ActivityPub fediverse is all but guaranteed. This will complicate the question about what the fediverse entails even further.
• Bluesky, continued: Bluesky has a roadmap update. They give a shout out to an extension Skylink, that shows you if a domain that you visit while browsing is used as a domain on Bluesky. This is pretty much the exact thing as the StreetPass extension for Mastodon.
• One of the servers in the far-right server cluster that include places like Kiwifarms suffered a databreach, which includes leaked DMs. The Daily Dot reports that the DMs show that Alex Gleason is working closely with Trump's Truth Social as well. This in itself is not surprising news, as both platforms use the Soapbox front-end, of which Alex Gleason is the creator. Gleason claims that this information was public all along. The story by Daily Dot did bring this connection into the spotlight, with outlets like Yahoo also reporting on it.
• WordPress.com has launched paid newsletters in a challenge to Substack. This is not fediverse news, for now, but the impact might be visible in the fediverse later on. WordPress is actively working on further integration into the fediverse with their ActivityPub plugin. Substack has so far not focused on interoperability with other platforms. Their new microblogging platform, Notes, does not interoperate, for example. How this will play out is uncertain, but worth watching.