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A programming note and context: Fediverse Report will now appear on Friday (instead of Tuesday), for some personal planning reasons as I fit this in with my other work. Fediverse Report will also shift in a slightly different direction, where for the foreseeable future I'll give more context and thoughts on the shifts in the state of social networks and the open social web. It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of the open social web is getting intertwined with how the Trump administration is (and will) interact with the open social web. The Trump administration is putting an increased focus on Bluesky to troll. Erin Kissane wrote an excellent overview of the situation this week that I highly recommend.
Kissane highlights the risk that the Trump administration will suppress Bluesky in some way, echoing my own writing on the subject. Furthermore, the arrival of the White House social media accounts on Bluesky places Bluesky moderation in a tough position, with no good options to take. For Kissane, that leads her to conclude: "On the individual level, people seeking private social networking may be better off, for now, finding a trustworthy Mastodon server and maintaining their connections with accounts on Bluesky via network bridges."
I agree with Kissane's assessment, and for me this also points to how intertwined the futures of the fediverse and the ATmosphere have become. Bluesky is currently top-of-mind for the Trump administration in a way that the fediverse is not, but any potential actions by the administration will impact not only Bluesky, but the fediverse and the wider open social web as well. It is impossible to predict if these second order effects are beneficial or harmful for the fediverse, since that depends strongly on both the details of any action of the administration against Bluesky, as well as how people on Bluesky will respond in practice.
For now, it means that I'm shifting my writing for Fediverse Report to include this larger political context of the open social web.
The News
During the recent FediForum, Ben Werdmuller gave the keynote speech about "why the open social web matters now", and the keynote and transcript are now available online. Werdmuller makes the point that we're seeing a shift into authoritarianism in multiple places, with the US being the most high-profile. He points out that the first step towards dealing with the threat is to have open information ecosystem, and that ecosystem is in decline both on social media (with all Big Tech companies capitulating) and in a decay of journalism. Werdmuller makes a distinction here between social media and social networks, where social media is for scale and broadcasting, and social networking are for trust and collaboration.
Werdmuller then describes how social communities can be build, which starts from a private community, that then connects with other peer communities. All these groups have their own secure (encrypted) spaces. This archipelago of connected places ( :) ) can then step into the public network (the fediverse) and share their messages with the broader world.
What stands out to me is how the process described by Werdmuller is pretty much opposite to how development on both the fediverse and the ATmosphere has happened so far. Development on both networks have started from the 'big world' social media approach, by creating public microblogging platforms. The assumption seems to be that over time, once there is an initial group of people who use these public network, private networks will emerge. In the case of ATProto this is fairly explicitly visible, the protocol does not support private data currently, and the developers are only now starting to work on this, once the public version of the protocol is deemed to be completed. For ActivityPub and the fediverse there is more possibilities for people to build such private communities, but there has been little interest in building it out. Mastodon does still not support the possibility for local-only posts for example, posts that are only visible to people on the same server, even though community forks of Mastodon (such as glitch-soc) do support local-only posting.
In the keynote, Werdmuller suggests a radically different approach, saying: "For the open social web to thrive, we need to go back to real communities with real-world use cases and solve their problems better than anything else. Not the needs of individuals within them, but of the interconnected communities themselves." It is important to be specific here, not by helping abstract groups like 'journalists' or 'organisers', but specific concrete individual communities. Werdmuller urges to be specific in the solutions as well: "Open source or federation are not solutions in themselves. They’re characteristics of a solution. We need to be concretely meeting needs. Not what you think their needs are or what they should be, but what you’ve learned they are from getting to know them deeply."
NLnet has completed their latest grant round, and with it, there are a number of ActivityPub-related projects that have received a grant. With the latest grant round, NLnet further cements their crucial role in the ecosystem, funding a large number projects and platforms (as well as this newsletter!).
NLnet funds five existing projects for further development:
- Everything-platform Hubzilla gets a grant to develop performance improvements.
- Microblogging platform GoToSocial gets a grant for performance as well as additional moderation features. GoToSocial also states here that the goal is to get to a 1.0 version at the end of 2026.
- Further improvements to the connector that addsActivityPub to CMS platform Drupal.
- GoActivityPub is a set of libraries for ActivityPub in Go.
- Flohmarkt is a marketplace platform on ActivityPub that people can self host.
NLnet also funds a new project, with Mirlo. Mirlo is an existing platform for artists to sell their music and merch. The grant from NLnet is to add ActivityPub support to Mirlo and to turn it into a federated, self-hostable platform. This makes the platform fairly similar to Bandwagon, which is also a place for artists to sell their music. Both platforms will likely gravitate towards one 'main' instance, with the possibility for artists to self-host their Bandwagon or Mirlo instance, that federates with the other platforms. The main part to watch here is if there will be interoperability between Bandwagon and Mirlo. While ActivityPub allows for the possibility of interoperability between different softwares, it does not guarantee it, and it requires active efforts from developers to make it happen. If and how this interoperability will evolve here, with both Bandwagon and Mirlo tapping into a new market of artist music sharing, is worth a keeping an eye on.
Some updates
The Links
That's all for this week, thanks for reading! Next week I'll dive deeper in to the developments regarding open science and the fediverse, with work by Bonfire and connecting ORCIDs with the fediverse.
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