Fediverse Report – #131

The News

IFTAS founder Jaz-Michael King wrote an excellent blog post titled ‘There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.’, that I think is worth reading. In it, King describes the fediverse as a large plurality of places, that can account for humanities wide-ranging diversity in cultures, languages and identities. King concludes: “I don’t want to grow “the fediverse”, because there is no single “the” fediverse. I want to help humanity step out of walled-in, private platforms and onto the open social web – a web where everyone can exercise their rights to free expression, free association, and just as importantly, the right to choose who they associate with.”

This dual mode of thinking, either the fediverse as a single place, or the fediverse as a large plurality of partially-connected places, popped up again this week related to Bluesky. Mississippi’s new Age Assurance Law puts stringent requirements on social media platforms to put in age verification checks. Bluesky has various concerns about this new law, decided they could not comply with it, and decided to block Mississippi IP addresses, effectively removing themselves from the state. This led to a whole set of discourse on the fediverse about the decentralised nature of Bluesky, considering they can just blacklist an entire state, in a way that impacts virtually all users on the network.

This supposed centralised nature of Bluesky is then put into contrast with the decentralised nature. However, the language of this conversation, and which fediverse is being discussed, matters here. Talking about Bluesky’s decision, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says: “And this is why real decentralization matters. There is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” This response makes sense from a perspective of the fediverse as a single place: there is no owner of this singular fediverse which can make such decisions. But this ‘singular’ fediverse is only a conceptual thing: instead there are “10.000+ fediverse operators across the world get to make that decision for themselves.” as Rochko also says.

What stands out to me about the conversations on the fediverse is how much focus is placed on the singular fediverse, and how its decentralised nature can be a powerful tool for dealing with government overreach. In contrast, very limited attention is given to the very real problem that this means that there are a large number of server operators who do have to make the challenging decision for themselves: do they comply with Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law, block access to Mississippi IP addresses, or ignore it altogether? In the big picture, the singular fediverse’s decentralised nature looks like a great way of dealing with age verification laws. But once you zoom in further and see a million fediverses, the picture becomes a whole lot more complicated: it means that thousands of (volunteer) server administrators are making difficult decisions. They’ll all have to decide for themselves if and how they want to comply with this new law. The stakes are big: failure t comply can be fined up to $10,000 per violation.

While this singular fediverse can be a powerful framing tool, I think it’s worth paying attention to how King describes the value of a million fediverses. Viewing the fediverses as a large number of independent places, shows both the value in diversity that it allows, as well as the very real challenges that individual server operates face when it comes to complying with global regulations.

None of the large fediverse servers have so far complied, neither with the UK’s Online Safety Act, nor with this new Mississippi regulation. I am very much not a laywer, but neither laws have clear exceptions that would apply to Mastodon servers as far as I can tell. In that context, I find Rochko’s comment of “Technically, you’re probably also breaking laws in Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and so on. The question is, do you care?” to be slightly concerning.

Bounce is a new tool that allows people to move their following graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind the bridging software Bridgy Fed, and it is now available in beta. In it’s current version, it allows people to port their Bluesky social graph to their Mastodon or Pixelfed account. I’ll have more writing on Bounce out in the next few days, but for more coverage you can read Sarah Perez’s TechCrunch article about Bounce.

CrowdBucks is a new fediverse-native payment platform, that allows for crowdfunding, tipping and more. It is created by Charles Iliya Krempeaux (aka @reiver), who also organised the recent FediCon conference in Vancouver. Reiver explains that the “long-term vision that CrowdBucks is a part of is to create a payments layer for the Fediverse”. What stands out about CrowdBucks is that it does not require people to create a new account, instead they can sign in to CrowdBucks with their existing Mastodon account. Other software platforms are also planned to be supported later.

When you are logged in to CrowdBucks, you can set up your profile donation tiers, or goals. When you visit a link to a CrowdBucks profile page, you can again log in with your existing fediverse account and donate. Donations go through Stripe, and the team also expects other payment methods to be implemented later.

The platform is still in its early stages, with some notable missing features the ability to share content with your subscribers, or lock content behind donation tiers. CrowdBucks is open-source, and the code is available here. Payment systems on the fediverse have proven to be challenging, as last year’s Sub.club experiment indicates. CrowdBucks does have the outline of what a fediverse-native donation platform can look like however, and it’s exciting to see it develop.

The Fedilabs client now has meaningfully different versions between FDroid and Google Play’s Android, due to Google requiring them to remove various features, such as donation links and the ability to register an account. Various PeerTube videos also had to be removed from the client to exclude videos that explain how to download YouTube videos. This is one of the small news items that I think has fairly large implications down the line: Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store are major gatekeeping systems that the decentralisation of the fediverse has a difficulty in bypassing. As such, I expect censorship issues and governments trying to wrestle control over decentralised systems to focus on clients, much more than on servers.

Oni is a new single-user ActivityPub server, and what stands out about Oni is that it uses ActivityPub client-to-server part of the protocol. This part of the ActivityPub protocol determines how clients should communicate with servers using ActivityPub. Very few fediverse platforms use this part of the official protocol specification, and almost all platforms use another implementation, with the Mastodon API being the most popular. This is incidentally also a major contributing factor to Mastodon’s influence over the entire fediverse, as it effectively owns half of the protocol that most of the network runs on. Using ActivityPub Client-to-Server part of the protocol is challenging, as it is a chicken-and-egg problem: virtually no servers support it, but no client supports it either. In the case of Oni, that means that using Oni requires using a specific client to post to the server, Box. Box is another project by the same developer, and a basic fediverse client that focuses on supporting ActivityPub Client-to-Server.

In their latest monthly update, Mastodon mentioned that they are working on adding starter packs. Another initiative for starter packs is by fedidevs.com, which features already a collection of starter packs, in ActivityPub format. Developer Julian Fietkau says that these will likely be compatible with Mastodon in the future. One difference so far is that Mastodon plans on giving people control over being included in a starter pack, a feature that starter pack on fedidevs.com currently do not have.

In Other News

• WeDistribute is launching a weekly newsletter, Relay, with a roundup of links to all the news around the open social web.
• Event planning software Mobilizon has gotten new funding from NLnet, and they are looking for community input on improvements to the software.
• Oeee Cafe is an Oekari drawing board that has added support for ActivityPub. Oekari drawing boards are sites where people can draw with basic tools in their browser and share the images.
• A sneak peek at upcoming tool ActivityPub Fuzzer, which lets ActivityPub developers test compatibility against other fediverse platforms with simulated messages.
• A preview of what Mastodon’s upcoming quote posting feature will look like.
• NeoDB-You is a new Android app for culture review platform NeoDB.
• Mona, a iOS Mastodon client, has a variety of new features including automatic alt-text creation and additional translation options.
• Pachli, a Mastodon client for Android, now supports on-device translation, without using Google.
• IFTAS is holding a survey under fediverse moderators. as part of their yearly Needs Assessments Report.

The Links

• The Fireside Fedi interview streams talks with Robert W. Gehl, who recently published the book “Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media”. I’ll do my own review of the book somewhere in the next few weeks as well.
• An overview of all the upcoming conferences for the open social web.
• WeDistribute’s Sean Tilley describes his experience with the recent FediCon conference, with some of his key takeaways from the event.
• Mastodon developer David Roetzel gave a talk at the FrOSCon conference, about what’s new with Mastodon and the wider fediverse, with a VOD available here. Mastodon head of communications Andy Piper gave a keynote at the conference, on the importance of open source for sovereinty.
• This week’s fediverse software updates (and the week before).

#nlnet

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-131/