fediversereport

fediversereport, 10 months ago to random

The Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server, State Secretary of Digitalisation @avhuffelen announced today! The server lives on the official domain of the Dutch government, at social.overheid.nl.

The Secretary mentions in her announcement a letter to the government explaining her support for 'value-driven alternative social networks', such as Mastodon. For more information on that, check out
https://fediversereport.com/dutch-government-officially-launches-mastodon-server/

fediversereport, 11 months ago to random

Last Week in the Fediverse - ep 26

All the news of last week in the fediverse, split out by topic: Threads, Microblogging, Lemmy/Kbin and other protocols.

Stand outs:

• Adam Mosseri says Threads is not interest in hard news and politics
• Dutch government about to launch a Mastodon server
• A new search engine for Lemmy
• Bluesky plans to make money by letting you buy custom domains names you can use as handle

Read more at: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-26/

stefan, 11 months ago to threads

Is there any indication at all when #Threads should be getting #ActivityPub support?

liaizon, 11 months ago to memmy

Memmy app is looking to hire an Icon Designer if you know anyone, tag them here!

https://lemmy.ml/post/1707849 @memmy

fediversereport, 11 months ago to threads

Bloomberg also reports that #Threads will not launch in the EU.

Yesterday, the Irish Data Protection Commission said that Threads will not be rolled out in the EU "at this point".

Now, Bloomberg also reports the same, stating that Meta is waiting on more regulatory guidance on the DMA. The EU is expected to give more guidance in September.

Irish DPC: https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-threads-app-in-the-eu-irish-dpc-says-metas-new-twitter-rival-wont-be-launched-here/a1927220337.html
Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-05/meta-won-t-offer-threads-app-in-the-eu-on-regulatory-concerns?sref=xuVirdpv?utm_medium%3Dsocial
Bloomberg (archive): https://archive.ph/fQyFT#selection-4203.1-4203.61

fediversereport, 11 months ago to threads

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted a message on #Threads explaining why Meta is committed to adding #ActivityPub support. The reason he lists is the ability to take your social graph to another server.

https://www.threads.net/t/CuRtcYTNY3J/

fediversereport, 11 months ago to kbin

#Kbin is growing fast, and its new community is coming together to crowdsource their own unofficial mascot. Animal themed mascots are common in the #fediverse, so it is no surprise that Kbin has continued this tradition, with a parrot.

The community has settled on this mascot after multiple iterations and polls. Now the final question is: what will the mascot be named?

The final options are between Kibby, Bink or Kebin. You can vote here: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/137236/FINAL-NAME-POLL-Kibby-vs-Kebin-vs-Bink

fediversereport, 11 months ago to fediversenews

Last Week in the Fediverse - ep 25

Some standouts of this weeks news:

Lemmy and Kbin (the 'threadiverse') have experienced rapid growth over the last two weeks, before yesterday's shutdown of third party apps for Reddit.

Meta's Twitter competitor is named Threads, new screenshots available.

Kolektiva.social's data got seized by the FBI in an (unrelated) raid, after the admin erroneously had left an unencrypted backup on a local drive.

@fediversenews
Read it at: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-25/

symfonystation, 11 months ago to kbin

Via the Fediverse Report: Lemmy and kbin. https://fediversereport.com/lemmy-and-kbin/ #kbin #lemmy

fediversereport, 11 months ago to fediverse

The developer of Sync, a popular Reddit app for Android, has confirmed that they're building 'Sync for Lemmy'.

The developer confirmed it on Reddit here: https://old.reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy/comments/14ee1ul/sync_for_lemmy_is_happening/

You can track it in the new Lemmy community here: https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy

@fediversenews @fediverse ]

fediversereport, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to RedditMigration

Last Week in the Fediverse - ep 23 - An overview of what happened in the fediverse last week

• Background readings on the #redditMigration
• News on the threadiverse; new apps in development, custom styles, and more
• Launch of the spreadmastodon.org website
• Flickr is “definitely still considering” adding ActivityPub support

@fediverse] Lemmy group]

Read it all at: https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-23/

fediversereport, 11 months ago to fediverse

A group of over 40 European organisations have recently released a statement calling for the EU to set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund.

They call for this fund to support Digital Public Spaces, that are, among other things, based in FOSS, and ensure privacy by design. The statement gives three examples: #Mastodon, #PeerTube and #ActivityPub, stating that they would benefit from such a fund to further flourish.

Entire statement: https://shared-digital.eu/statement/

fediversereport, 1 year ago to fediverse

The admin for misskey.io has put out a call for people to apps for Misskey that work with both iOS and Android. They offer a bounty of 800k Yen (~€ 5350) per person for building these apps.

The Japanese #fediverse community is growing rapidly, mainly using Misskey. Misskey.io is now by far the busiest server on the fediverse, publishing twice the amount of posts/month that mastodon.social does (while m.s. has 6x more users!)

https://misskey.io/notes/9fgufm6o18

dansup, 1 year ago to random

I plan on adjusting the way https://fedidb.org calculates metrics for total users, popular instances and a few others to improve accuracy.

Also planning on adding an "Audit Log" that lists any changes I make to metric calculation, and which instances have been hidden or not included (and why). #fediDB

fediversereport, 1 year ago to fediverse

Last week's fediverse news roundup, episode 19 is out! Some highlights:

📋Defederation of Meta's potential entrance to the #fediverse remains a hotly discussed topic, with the user base fairly split over the approach
📸#pixelfed is rapidly shipping updates, such as spam detection, account verification, edits and more
🎥@thelinuxEXP has an excellent video about @Framasoft , the organisation behind #peertube and #mobilizon (https://tilvids.com/w/8DpY23X8tMoUK8vXMuVqtt)

@fediversenews

Read at https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-20/

ada, 1 year ago to fediverse

Hi Fediverse! I've been neglecting you the last couple of days, though the best possible reasons :)

Did I miss anything exciting in fedinews whilst I was otherwise distracted?

#fedimeta #fediverse

fediversereport, 1 year ago to fediverse

Last week's fediverse news roundup, episode 19 is out! Some highlights:

🎉Happy 15-year anniversary to the fediverse!
📸More details emerge about Instagram's new text app, that connects to the #fediverse.
🌉Skybridge is a new way to view your #bluesky feed in a #mastodon app such as @ivory
🦌Quote posting is added to a fork of #Elk
🌐Verify your #Wikipedia user account on Mastodon

@fediversenews
Read it all at https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-19/

maegul, 1 year ago to fediversenews

Am I the only one seeing some new reply threading on mastodon.social?

@fediversenews

supakaity, 1 year ago to random

Preface: This is a long, technical post so I apologise in advance. Please avert your eyes if such things offend you.

Hi everybeings!

Overview

@ada and I have discussed many areas where we see problems in the way the Fediverse currently works and where would like to see improvements made to improve safety of the fediverse.

Safety on the fediverse is one of the topics we hold most dear.

One of these areas (and one that has recently garnered a lot of attention) has been in the area of full-text search, and despite the option for account-wide no-crawl options in many pieces of fediverse softwares, this option is not-federated, non-specific, non-granular and not-for-purpose with regards to fediverse searching. It's specifically designed and worded for crawler bots at a html scraping level, and while we could repurpose it for fedi-searching, it just doesn't feel right or quite fit.

There's been a lot of talk on a lot of different levels out there, but nobody's come to a concensus. A lot of people are talking about how we should do it and what standards we should use, and generally making the whole concept a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

In this post, I want to share with you some of the ideas that I've gathered through my research, and implemented in a way that is simple enough (KISS), not overly complicated (YAGNI) yet still fit for the purpose I need as both a software engineer and an instance admin, and that anyone accessing the content will need.

The idea in sharing this is not to convince me that it shouldn't be done, or to create the absolutely most perfect solution possible that's going to take 20 years to build and will be outdated by the time we get there.

This will be getting built and going out in weeks, not months, not next year. It's needed now. This is my current plan how to implement something we needed months ago, now. This is your chance to change my mind and help refine this plan before I start really coding it up.

Technical/implementation details

A lot of these options will be settable as a default value in your settings as well as at an individual post / file level during composition or afterwards at editing stage.

In terms of inbound federated AP objects which do not support these new fields, we will try to infer the intent based off existing AP fields and other metadata when present.

Specifically, we will be using the Mastodon Account Lookup API (GET /api/v1/accounts/lookup?acct=) to get and store the noindex flag during actor creation/refresh. This will also allow us to put the noindex meta tag on any HTML pages containing that actor's posts.

Searchability

So you don't want people to be able to search for you. But is that everybody? Maybe you want your followers to be able to find your posts? Maybe the people you mention should be able to find your post? What about actual users on your local instance? Maybe a particular post you never want to appear in searches? Maybe a particular post you write contains stuff you want everyone to see?

We will be adding a global default and per-post override federated in AP as hk:searchableBy which will be settable to public, private or a combination of followers, mentions or local. This is different to the currentvisibility in that you can have a public visibility post that is searchable by followers and mentions for example.

{
    ...
    "searchableBy": ["followers", "mentions"]
}

Interactivity

The other problem is that at the moment you can't control who can reply, boost, vote and/or react to your posts.

To this end, we will be adding per-post overrides federated in AP as hk:canReply and hk:canInteract which will allow you to specify like on searches a combination of public, private, followers, mentions and local for replying to, and boost, voting or reacting to your posts respectively.

{
    ...
    "canReply": ["mentions"],
    "canInteract": ["public"]
}

Licensing

Licensing and attribution can get pretty tricky. On the fediverse, we're assuming that if you're making a post, then you have the rights and willingness to let the content be federated. If you didn't you wouldn't post.

However posting content sometimes requires you to provide the license and attribution that you're using along with the content. At the moment there's no reasonable or standardised way to provide this information on an image or in a post, thus you're in breach if you post a CC-BY licensed image.

So to alleviate this, we will be providing 2 federated AP fields hk:licensing and hk:attribution. The licensing field will contain the URL of the license under which the content is being shared and the attribution will contain any links to the source content/s and/or creator/s.

{
    ...
    "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa-nc/4.0/",
    "attribution": [
        "https://github.com/supakaity/icons"
    ]
}

Crawlability

So crawlability is about indexing of the content by external parties whether they be search engines or fedicrawlers. It will provide a per-object level flag under the AP field hk:crawlable that lists whether the item may be processed by a bot. The possible values are true or false.

{
    ...
    "crawlable": false
}

Quotability

Now this is a controvertial one. Sometimes people out there don't mind their posts being boosted, but don't want them to be quoted. You know what we say? If you don't want your posts quoted, we should respect that and not allow people to quote you. So we'll be supplying an AP field hk:canQuote that lists who can quote your posts using the same combination of actor types as above.

{
    ...
    "canQuote": ["followers"]
}

fediversereport, 1 year ago to fediverse

New: The Roundup episode 18

This week's #fediverse news gathered into an easy reading. Some highlights:

🌱The monthly update for #Mastodon org shows how they are expanding
🕺Fedi loooves #eurovision
calculatorCalckey keeps seeing rapid changes (adding CW to a boost!)
📖A variety of news articles (definitely recommend this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/social-media-centralism-fediverse/674041/)

Sign up at fediversereport.com to get this in your inbox a day early!

@fediversenews

Read it all here: https://fediversereport.com/the-roundup-episode-18/

weirdwriter, 1 year ago to fediverse

deleted_by_author

liaizon, 1 year ago to random

shoutout to @fediversereport for continuing this much needed resources of fediverse ecosystem news!

shoutout to @kainoa for seeing the shining gem that @syuilo created in Misskey and deciding to work full time forking it into what is now Calckey!

shoutout to @smallcircles for their work highlighting https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks in conversation after conversation to help bring together more decision making for the fediverse as a whole.