The News
Newsmast, the UK organisation that helps news organisations create their own social media places on the fediverse, has taken a new direction. In a blog post founder Michael Foster describes how news organisations do not gel well with the original approach of either Mastodon servers or the channel.org communities. The finding of Newsmast is that this is too confusing and tech-centric for news organisations to really grasp. Instead, Newsmast is now going in the direction of apps, as “independent news publishers and campaigning organisations love the idea of having an app.” The product offering is that Newsmast creates a white-label of an app that uses their (fediverse-enabled) backend, which the news organisation can theme and customise to their needs. This gives news organisations an app, which is what they want and conceptually relate to, while also giving them a community that can connect to the wider open social web if they want to. Newsmast has already rolled out one of such apps, for the Media Revolution campaign. Foster says that they are about to start working with a UK-based Fediverse community for another such project, where the Newsmast white-label app will be used to create a customised app for the community.
A new paper by Christina Dunbar-Hester about her experiences dealing with targeted harrassment on Mastodon, describing what some of the moderation practices in a decentralised system actually looks like. She writes: “As currently configured, Mastodon values noncentralization, but it stops short of rewriting power relations to encodeheterogeneity (Suchman, 2002). FLOSS universalism and FLOSS relations of domination pervade both the user base and many (certainly not all) “power users” who assume control of and take responsibility for many of the parts of the network through moderationand administration roles.” The entire paper is worth reading, Dunbar-Hester concludes: “a possibility for a more accountable decentralized social media network might resemble Mastodon, but prioritize intentional, self-organized choices about equitable online sociality that foreground social power”.
ActivityPub Fuzzer is a new tool to help ActivityPub developers test their interoperability with other fediverse projects. Fuzzer is a program that runs locally, and emulates how other fediverse projects structure their messages. This allows a developer to test interoperability against a large array of fediverse platforms. The open nature of ActivityPub makes it so that interoperability between platforms is trickier than it might be assumed, with various platforms all having their slightly different interpretations of the protocol. Fuzzer is created by Darius Kazemi at the Applied Social Media Lab.
IFTAS, the Independent Federated Trust And Safety organisation has announced they are shutting down the IFTAS Connect community at the end of the month. The IFTAS Connected community was a place for fediverse moderators to come together and have conversations about moderation, share resources and more. IFTAS also runs their yearly moderator Needs Assessment survey, and one of the consistent findings is that fediverse moderators often struggle with guidance, toolings and burnout. Such a community was meant as a place for moderators to connect with each other and help towards those issues. However, IFTAS found that after 18 months of operating the place, usage remained low. It indicates one of the persistent challenges for fediverse moderation: moderation is largely done by each server independently, with little cooperation between communities which have a lot in common. There is a large potential in the fediverse for collaboration between communities, but making this collaboration happen has proven to be challenging.
WordPress is continuing towards becoming a full fediverse platform with their ActivityPub plugin. The latest update of the plugin now supports following a ‘reader timeline’, showing all the posts of accounts you follow from your WordPress account. There is now also support for Mastodon’s new quote posting feature, allowing you to quote post the WordPress post from Mastodon.
Matthias Pfefferle, developer of the WordPress ActivityPub integration, also talked on his podcast to Dave Weiner, creator of the RSS standard, about WordPress, textcasting and open web standards.
Bandwagon, the fediverse platform for music sharing, discovery and sales, shares their updates of the last few months, with various improvements to the platform across the board. Developer Ben Pate says that the next big priority is to add account migration. Elsewhere in fediverse music, a blog post on how to revive indie music videos on the fediverse.
A selection of tools for Lemmy, which gives you the option to view trends, threadiverse statistics, a leaderboard of most active users, stats on individual users, and more.
Fediverse advocate Elena Rossini has published an extensive fediverse starter guide. The guide explains what the fediverse is (via her excellent video), the various types of software that are available, the values of the fediverse, and why it matters. It is these last two points I think are noteworthy: the fediverse is inherently a political project, and it is important to understand the values of the network as a context of why the network exists and why people care about it.
The Links
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- A blog post on how to map your bike rides using the fediverse wanderer.to platform.
- A blog post reflecting on the Labeling politics on Mastodon.
- The Fireside Fedi livestream had episodes talking about ActivityPub, the W3C and more with Ben Goering, and with Reiver about FediCon and CrowdBucks.
- Utrecht University (shout-out to my alma mater) wants their students to use Mastodon.
- Fediverse advocate Chris Trottier is in the process of setting up a PeerTube co-op.
