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Connected Places

Detail in the openairmuseum of Ootmarsum

Laurens Hof

Detail of modern building

Fediverse News – Summer 2026

Fediverse software updates, summer 2026 edition
Blue side of a truck

The Algorithm, Apparently Chronological

A German court has explicitly named Mastodon and Bluesky as positive examples of social networks that could retain hosting protection. It gets Bluesky’s feeds wrong, but its reasoning about user control might be more useful than it realises.
Blurbs of water

AI watermarking has a decentralisation problem

With AI watermarking inference providers mark their output as AI generated. But for the system to become useful, lots of independent providers need to collaborate together in a decentralised system without overarching governance.
Roof with red dutch roof tiles

The Algorithm, Singular

A new European ruling on algorithmic amplification determines if an operator controls how content spreads on a platform. But applying it to open social networks turns out to be a problem.
detail of a building in Brugge Belgium

The Permission Machine

When Elon Musk calls to imprison the government, it turns out not to matter very much. But when thousands of accounts repeat each other, it matters enormously.
Detail of the city Luik

Decrypting Matrix – Where Do Rooms Go?

Matrix has been running private rooms on open protocols for a decade, and they ended up inside European governments. This piece is about why happened, and why it does not have to be the result of the various projects for private data and rooms on the open social web too.
Broken red chain

Federation Has a European Legal Problem

What the Russmedia ruling means for ActivityPub and atproto.
Bill Reid's "The Raven and the First Men."

Reflections on AtmosphereConf

A reflection on AtmosphereConf, understanding this network as a subculture, joy, and what "We Can Just Do Things" actually means
Detail of a Belgian wall

The Purpose of Protocols

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?
Detail of the city Luik

Where Does Community Live?

ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.