The European Commission has announced their new Mastodon account, and that they will stay on the fediverse. Over the last 2 years, the European Data Protection Supervisor had run a Mastodon and Peertube pilot for the EU, and that pilot has come to an end. The European Commission had by far the most successful and impactful presence on the fediverse out of the pilot, and they wanted to continue. The problem was that the EDPS struggled to find another EU organisation willing to take on the responsibility of hosting. As I wrote when the news came out, the perception and framing of the EDPS was wrong on how the fediverse should be approached by the EU: taking on responsibility for all EU-affiliated organisations social media presence is an unrealistic ask, and it is not a surprise that they could not find an organisation willing to do so. Instead, now the European Commission is taking responsibility and control of their own account; they are hosting their own Mastodon server. This is a much more sustainable and realistic approach for EU organisations moving forward.
The bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky has been used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messaging, with the spam originating from Nostr. The spam was created on Nostr, which bridges to the fediverse with the Momostr.pink bridge, which in turn can be bridged to Bluesky. While all the networks have many places of easy, open signups, spam tends to happen were signups can easily happen in bulk, and the protocol design of Nostr makes it especially easy to create new accounts.
(2024-05-21 Correction: the original article stated that the Mostr.pub bridge was used for the spam attack. This is incorrect, and the article has been updated to reflect that a different bridge, momostr.pink has been used.)
Micro.blog held their yearly micro.camp as an online live stream event, with a conversation about blogging with Christina Warren, as well as a demo of two new features of micro.blog: hiding replies on your blog and a new way for people to comment by verifying their Mastodon, Bluesky or micro.blog account.
Bluesky projects
This week I also wrote about three projects from Japanese developers who are building on top of ATProto, and build a video platform, audio spaces and a blogging platform, and I go into more detail on the challenges that building new products for the ATmosphere poses.
Ghost’s weekly update about building on ActivityPub, showing more progress. Ghost estimates that a release will take “more than a month, but less than a year, probably”.
Pixelfed has a Matrix channel again. Pixelfed developer lost admin control of the previous Matrix channel, and considered going exclusively to Discord. After many requests from the community now there is a new matrix channel again.
The ForgeFed project, which works on federated software forges, has gotten their NLnet grant extended, and showcased a demo of their reference implementation.
Hackaday.com looks at ‘your open-source client options in the non-Mastodon fediverse’
