Hi {name},

Some practical housekeeping: Connected Places will be on a summer schedule for the next month or so. This means a lower number of articles every week, as well as a slightly more irregular schedule. Im taking some time off, as well as taking the opportunity to experiment and build some new projects behind the scenes.

On another note: I'm excited to say that Connected Places has gotten a grant by NLnet, which covers the Fediverse Report articles for the next year, as well a longer form deep dive article on the fediverse every month for the next year. This grant gives me a lot more stability to keep working on Connected Places, so I'm very grateful to NLnet for this. So while there might be a bit less writing about the new social networks in the near future, at least you know that there is a lot more articles guaranteed to happen a while! I'll write a bigger announcement about this next week, but wanted to let you know beforehand. Thanks again for your support!

And for some commentary on this week's news:

The fediverse saw one of the more interesting versions of context collapse that I've seen in a long while. It lead to a whole drama cycle (because sure why not), but the technical problem of what happened is honestly quite funny. The full writeup of what happened is here, and the TLDR is that a someone made a Mastodon post contained two links: a tag to someone else's fediverse account, and a link to another Mastodon account. The post was critical of Elon Musk, but that needed context from the linked post. The other account was tagged as a question to provide translation advice. 

Mastodon rendered and displayed the link to the other post, providing the necessary context to understand the original post that it was critical of Musk. However, Bluesky made the tagged account as a link preview. This made it look like the original post was critical of the tagged user, not of Musk. In turn this blew up into a whole drama cycle.

Some thoughts:

- It is really high time and long overdue that Mastodon properly supports quote posts now. This how situation flowed out of how the fediverse has hacked an entire system of semi-quote-posts around Mastodon not supporting them.

- The fediverse is basically context-collapse-as-a-service. You're sending out your posts to potentially thousands of other social networks, each with their own culture and software, with no control over how other platforms display the content.

- Context collapse got originally framed in a purely social context: the problem when content that is intended for a specific audience gets placed in front of a different audience who does not share the same context, usually due to reposting the content or via algorithmic feeds. This example shows how the new social networks generate a new form of context collapse. As different platforms with different UI affordances can display the same content, the context can collapse due to a different platform displaying the post in a manner thats different than intended.

- That this blew up now has less to do with the technical part of the problem, and more that a significant part of the fediverse has a strong distrust of Bluesky as a corporate social network.

- One of the popular responses on the fediverse is that you should have informed consent to tag people in a post if your fediverse account is bridged to Bluesky. I have quite some feelings about this (including: this is getting really hard to explain to normal people what this is all about), but what I'll say is that there is an inherent tension between people wanting to be on a social network that by design sends out their account data to an unknown number of other data processors while at the same time wanting to feel in control over who gets to process their data.

- It feels like neither the fediverse nor Bluesky has really grappled yet with how being on a network where people can have strongly different UIs to experience the same content can lead to problems of misunderstanding. 

Thanks for reading, and until next week!