Last weekend FOSDEM took place in Brussels, Belgium. However it was O₄FFDEM that provided the space for about 20 people to meet and discuss the future of events in the Fediverse for the whole Saturday. Among them developers like @lesion (developer of Gancio), setop (upcoming coordinator of Mobilizon), @dreirik (foss.events), @laurin (contributor to ActivityPods) and community members, (h)activists and event organizers like @becha or @eest9, just to name a few, and myself. Eventually, there were people from half of Europe: Montpellier, Strasbourg, Graz, Amsterdam, Italy, Vienna, Ljubljana, and Rotterdam.
Expectations
It was impressive how, despite the number of people present, it was possible for the group to de facto moderate itself, in particular through the experienced careful intervention of a few at the right moments. We began with a short round of introductions, in which expectations for the day were also clarified. We first decided to talk about values, to clarify what needs and concerns are generally present. We were all united by the desire to become independent of Big Tech, although there were several completely different concepts of how this would be achieved from a single point of view in the mix.
Dilemmas
It has become evident that in the case of events, from of a software developer’s point of view, one cannot simply speak of users, but must distinguish between organizers and participants, although the distinction can also be blurred in the case of a small community. Following dilemmas were identified:
regional vs global calendars
topical vs mixed calendars
aggregation vs autonomy
moderation vs censorship
Advantages of a physical meeting
The discussion about these aspects was extensive and, admittedly, did not always seem to me to be very target-oriented. However, it was necessary to balance our different backgrounds and bring us up to the same level of knowledge and it became more concrete after the lunch break when we decided to compare and work out the intentions and use cases of the existing applications and developments in more detail. I could recap this in detail here, but I think it is best to write a stand-alone follow-up article. Each project has its own approach: some focus on local communities, some focus on private events an another wants to provide a way to organize larger political movements with as few social features as possible. On top of that, people have come up with use cases that no developer ever seemed to think of before.
One activist’s question, “What’s the difference between federation and interoperability?“, which had been floating around the room all day, was finally addressed in a satisfying way with examples. Even if all applications can successfully aggregate and display events of others, it does not mean that they respect all mechanisms that control how the event is listed, whether the event is joinable via ActivityPub, whether these joins have to be manually approved, whether some event details visibility have a certain scope, etc.
Calendiverse
Perhaps one of the most important points was to enable the creation of event calendars, which are also aimed at people who do not want to have an account anywhere, but are simply looking for events. From the point of view of people looking for events, regional or topic-specific calendars are particularly important. Which events are aggregated and shown on an individual platform would be in the hands of the platform operators, which would then automatically play a major role in moderation.
Why use ActivityPub?
ActivityPub covers most of the features iCal offers for creating calendars by aggregating multiple sources, but adds a few more:
Follow relationships become tangible
Social media like features:
Boosting
Liking
Replies
Push, not pull based
Joining (Participants management)
Use moderation and governance tools from the Fediverse
Getting to a Common Ground
Mobilizon has already introduced a huge set of custom properties and ways to manage event objects in the ActivityPub world. We decided on a process to re-evaluate their choices and draft a Fediverse Extension Proposal (FEP) for the least common set of them. What makes an event:
Private locations which may be disclosed on participant’s acceptance
From Whom
To Whom: Public, Private, Unlisted
Why if not want to get listed just not “send” the event: e.g., Mobilizon -> federated groups -> federated private events
Let the sender of an event set the discoverability : the recipient might mistreat that
We decided to deal with advanced mechanisms such as sub-events, recurring events, irregularly rescheduled events in the future.
Summary
All in all, it was simply nice to get to know each other and exchange ideas with other people who pursue common or similar goals. Especially the exchange between developers and non-developers, who were in the majority, was of great importance from my point of view. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to capture all the aspects in such a short recap. If you are missing something important, please have a comment. Many thanks to all of you, especially the organizers and those who were taking the meeting minutes.
So… NOW I’m wondering about housing my own peertube. I think I’ve caught the Web3 bug or something.
There’s an opportunity for a Fediverse hosting service that lets you bundle things, share resources and (save money) for your independent online presence.
In this edition: Mastodon shares some plans for future updates, social network Pebble shuts down and starts a Mastodon experiment, and more information about Mozilla’s fediverse project.
Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput has posted a small thread with a near-term roadmap for update 4.3 for Mastodon. It is tentatively scheduled to be released before Christmas. One item specifically stands out:
“Notify users when relationships (follows, followers) are severed, due to a server block, display the list of impacted relationships, and have a button to restore them if the remote server is unblocked.”
Server blocks can be impactful on users, where they suddenly lose relationships with other accounts due to the connection between their servers being blocked. Currently people are not notified when this happens, even though the impact can be severe. The ability to restore connections after an unblock will also help with harm mitigations.
Other proposed improvements include grouped notifications, improved account recommendations, and more.
Mastodon quote posting timeline
Renaud Chaput gave a short update on Mastodon’s work on implementing quote posting. He stated that Mastodon is working on adding quote posts, and also on making sure that it is properly implemented in ActivityPub. The protocol currently has no formal specification for quote posts, and other platforms such as Misskey, Pleroma and Streams have all implemented quote posting in their own manner. Mastodon is looking to add a formal definition to the ActivityPub specification first, where it is also possible to get notified if you are quoted, and to control who can quote your post.
Expanding the protocol is currently mainly done via Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP), which allows everyone to submit a documents on how the ActivityPub protocol can be improved. An FEP is not mandatory, and fediverse platforms do not have to implement an FEP.
Kbin dev logs
Mbin recently appeared as a community-focused fork of Kbin. This week Mbin had their first release, with a large variety of small fixes by a group of contributors. The fork Mbin was created as a response perceived issues with governance at Kbin; contributors struggled with lack of engagement and interaction by Kbin creator Ernest, with contributions not being added or even reversed. Mbin is set up as a community project, where any of the (around 8) owners can add a feature by a contributor. Ernest has set up a new dev blog series, called the Road to Release, where he documents his progress on getting Kbin to release. The first update is the ability for admins to delete magazines, a often-requested feature.
In other news
This week marks the 1-year anniversary since the start of the Twittermigration, which lead to a massive inflow of people that left Twitter and joined the fediverse. Quite some people are writing up their reflections as part of their ‘fediversary’. It is fun to browse the #fediversity hashtag and see people’s posts. Personally I have enjoyed readingthesefourreflections.
Techcrunch has an extensive article and interview about Mozilla’s upcoming fediverse server mozilla.social. The server is currently still in closed beta. The entire article is worth reading, and provides some good insight in how Mozilla is thinking about their project. Techcrunch says that the “timeline to a public launch isn’t yet determined”, and it seems like it might take a while.
I haven't been following it very closely but looks like Mastodon's monthly active user count climbed back up to 2.1M over the last couple of weeks. Not far off from our last peak!
But your question is valid, as the Global South is totally underrepresented.
Mastodon is still strongly dominated by white North America and Europe. Japan has some very large instances, but there is limited interaction. Latin/South America is also growing.
With every new wave, some new regions join, I saw in the last wave entering many Turkish accounts, for example.
The network effect is a thing. We need to be welcoming to people from these places and invest some time to make the early adopters feel comfortable (e.g. by boosting them to facilitate them to find their peers).
For a more diverse Fediverse! :fediverso: :black_sparkling_heart: