Laurens Hof @laurenshof@connectedplaces.online
Public

Fediverse Report – #145

The News

Holos, from the same developer as fediverse client Fedilab, is a project that enables running a full ActivityPub instance directly on a smartphone. It pushes the “own your data” ethos further than typical self-hosting, where your data lives entirely on your device rather than a server. Running a server on a smartphone comes with a challenge however, as mobile devices can’t host stable servers because their public address changes constantly. Holos solves this by running a relay server, which provide a stable identity and proxies requests to the phone’s changing address. This approach creates interesting tradeoffs, as users gain greater control over their data but they’re only reachable when actively online. And while Holos decentralises data storage for individuals, your social address (@username@server.social) depends on the relay, which creates a new dependency. The project is still in its early stage and is actively being developed, but it’s refreshing to see the boundaries of how ActivityPub can be used being pushed.

Last week I wrote about Threads usage numbers, and how I was trying to square Threads’ claim of 400M Monthly Active Users (MAU) with a new Pew Research study that found that 21M US adults ever have used Threads. I asked on Bluesky: “So where are the other 380M users located? Taiwan apparently has an active Threads community, but where else?” Quite a few people from multiple other Asian countries chimed in to point out that Threads has become one of the major social networks in their country, people from the Philippines, India, Indonesia and Kazakhstan pointed out. One comment specifically stood out to me, where someone pointed out that Threads’ algorithm is good at surfacing local content while keeping US-politics news out. This would explain both the appeal of Threads to Asian communities, especially in contrast with X, as well as why Threads seems to have relatively low cultural impact in Western countries. The selective filtering of Threads algorithm makes interactions between the Western communities and Asian communities less likely.

Another realisation was that the raw comparison of 21% “ever used” for X versus 8% for Threads is misleading because it ignores platform age: X has had 18 years to accumulate users while Threads has had about two and a half. I initially tried to reconcile these figures with the roughly equal DAU numbers by calculating what annual churn rate would produce this outcome, and landed on around 6%. But 6% annual churn is implausibly low for microblogging platforms, where people routinely create accounts, poke around, and leave, and real churn rates are substantially higher. This means that the numbers Pew Research found actually favour Threads here: achieving 8% “ever used” in such a short timeframe while maintaining competitive daily active users suggests Threads is acquiring and retaining users at a pace that outstrips what the surface-level comparison implies.

IFTAS has an extensive look at Australia’s eSafety Act that comes into force on December 10th, and the organisation has published a detailed guide for social networking site operators what the law expects from them. IFTAS writes that “It appears relatively likely that eSafety has little desire to actively enforce compliance on small Fediverse servers if they follow the guidelines below.” As for the guidelines, IFTAS suggests that servers publish a clear Terms of Service with a stated minimum age policy of 16+, set up moderation workflows (good ideas regardless), and have a “short policy statement on how under-16 users will be prevented or removed (if you are running a service that is inappropriate for children)”.

An interview with Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and now that Rochko has stepped down as CEO, it feels like there are some more open takes by him, and the interview is worth reading. On ActivityPub protocol, Rochko says: “ActivityPub is essentially a language. Or rather, it’s a vocabulary, and what developers and the federalists have been doing is defining grammar. […] But when you want to do something more advanced, like when you need some agreement, and you can use the same vocabulary, but you have different grammar, you can’t understand each other.” I think Rochko gets close to the core of the challenge of growing the fediverse here: using ActivityPub depends on agreement and collaboration between different platform developers, but the fediverse does lack the social infrastructure for structural communications and collaborations. While there is the system of Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, it is far from enough to be the substrate of a network that requires a shared language for collaboration between platforms. This is one of the main points of interest for me how the new Mastodon leadership will see their role in the network here: due to their size the Mastodon organisation holds significant influence in how the structure of collaboration between fediverse platform developers functions in practice.

Stegodon is an SSH-first microblogging server built with Go. Users connect via SSH, authenticate with their public key, and compose posts in a terminal interface that then federates to the fediverse via ActivityPub. It’s a deliberately minimal approach to fediverse participation, targeting users who prefer terminals over browsers. The project’s developer is now experimenting with replacing HTTP-based federation entirely with Git, using push and fetch operations to synchronise posts between instances. The developer presents this as an alternative for small-scale social networks, and using Git also comes with challenges: Git pull-based model means no real-time delivery, and it’s immutable history conflicts with deletion and moderation needs. It is an interesting experiment, but with rather fundamental limitations.

The Links

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