Welcome to another episode of the roundup. There is lots of discourse currently happening on the fediverse feeds, about bluesky, moderation drama, centralization worries, issues that Black users face with regards to racism, and so much more. I’m doing a bigger writeup of this soon, as it feels like fediverse culture is changing as we spead.
For now, I’ve started giving more context and opinion to the newsitems, to help you better understand all the links and things that are happening. This means a large list, so let’s dive right in!
The links
Work is starting on a protocol bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol (the protocol that Bluesky uses). Here is a work in progress (and another demo) of using your Bluesky in Mastodon clients, and there is also a group network starting up that is dedicated to working on bridges. This is one of the key stories of the fediverse at the moment, with massive implications down the line. Bluesky has a lot of energy and interest behind it currently, and being able to interoperate with the rest of the fediverse would be of great benefit to all parties.
The website for Calckey got a new update. Visually it looks great, and really helps sell the appeal of Calckey.
The opt-in account database at fediverse.info that helps you find interesting accounts to follow is live with a new update. The visual update looks great, and it can be helpful to find people, especially with some more niche hashtags. The popular hashtags feature so many accounts that it can be hard to know which accounts to follow.
The fedidb.org dashboard that gives an overview of statistics about the fediverse is officially launched as a 2.0 update. As I talked about earlier, there are multiple competing dashboards and API that all measure statistics on the fediverse. As fedidb.org is maintained by @dansup, creator of PixelFed, fedidb.org has the potential become the new standard in a set of conflicting standards, as the methodology is clearer, there is an API, and it comes from a trusted source.
Jointhefediverse.net is a new website that helps new users get a better understanding of what the fediverse actually is, and how they can be onboarded. This is a great project to see, and the fediverse needs a lot more. Explaining federation and decentralization is hard, and this is a good approach.
Calckey has been getting a lot more attention recently. Community manager Panos Damelos is working on gathering this energy into more collaborative development work. Like Panos mentioned, Calckey started as a personal project, and the earlier choice to get a community manager on board early in the process is a great step to scale the project.
Mike Masnick wrote a new article ‘Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options’ that is worth reading. It is an indepth look at the different networks and protocols, and has a good explanation of Bluesky as well. Its good to see that the fediverse gets stressed more, by not only mentioning Mastodon, but also giving attention to Calckey.
Flipboard interviews ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou. One of the things Evan is asked about is best practices and rules of engagements for creators. The fediverse, especially Mastodon, is quite notorious for having specific cultural standards that are not written down. Being put in writing about what people deem acceptable and not is important.
The admin of the hachyderm.io server steps down after conflicts with other server admins. @maegul has an excellent writeup of the entire situation. It is a sad situation, Krís Nova was an excellent admin and great contribution to the fediverse. @maegul has an good take on the situation, questioning the use of defederation as a weapon. I agree with them, and I feel this situation could have been avoided by having the other admins be more accepting of a slower decision making process, instead of immediately going for defederation. The best summary: “Once tens of thousands of people are affected, decision speed ought to slow down.” That this was not taken into account by other folks is painful and damaging.
The server mastodon.online, which is hosted by the Mastodon organisation, is switching to a nightly build. This means that all the latest updates will always be immediately available on this server. Here is a showcase of some of the updates that will be coming to the rest of Mastodon soon.
The Vergecast, the flagship podcast by The Verge, interviews Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about ActivityPub. Great episode to listen to, both hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce have been explicit about the value of ActivityPub (and thus, the fediverse), and its great to see this theme being continued. Worth a listen.
Micro.blog will support the Twitter API until July 15th, but now also supports crossposting to Bluesky. Micro.blog is one of the fediverse projects that often flies under the radar. It is a great product, that features a unique combination of both full blogs and microblogs.
FediMoviesRock is a new fediverse project for movies. Alpha announcement here. It allows you to tag pretty much any movie in the format @{TileOfTheMoviePascalCase}_{YEAR}@alpha.fedimovies.rocks to your posts. You can follow accounts to get all the posts about the movie. The difference with using a simple hashtag is that this comes back to a managed page which is both more visually pleasing and easy to understand, such as in this example. There is a lot of potential in projects like this. For now it is a fun toy that is helpful, but there is a lot more that can be build on top of it.
Audon.space is a great audio tool, pretty much exactly like Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse. I’m impressed by how easy to use it is, and how well it incorporates your social graph. The developer quickly responding to extra requests from the blind community is great to see as well. Personally, I see a great potential for tools like this for the fediverse. So often the discussion is framed in context of microblogging (hello bluesky!), but this seems like such an interesting direction. A standalone tool that uses your fediverse social graph in order to increase the value of said tool. I foresee a future where lots more tools will start doing this.
The poll
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