Last Week in Fediverse – ep 76

People asking ‘Letterboxd but on ActivityPub’ has been a bit of a meme, but it turns out, a fully functional platform that does this and much more, already exists! Also two updates for Mastodon that pushes the platform in a direction of better supporting journalism, and a first version of Ghost is now active on the fediverse.

NeoDB

The main story this week needs some introduction, as it involves a platform that seems to be virtually unknown in the English-speaking side of the fediverse, even though it has been around for a while, and actively being used in the Chinese-speaking side of the fediverse. NeoDB is an platform that allows people to ‘manage and explore collections, reviews, and ratings for various cultural products, including books, movies, music, podcasts, games and boardgames’. It is a huge scope, and NeoDB has a large amount of integrations with other products.

NeoDB has had a full fediverse integration for a while, with reviews federating out, and comments/likes federating inwards to the platform, as well as the ability to sign up for NeoDB with an existing fediverse account. All of this is not news in itself, but worth mentioning, both for context as well as a suggestion for people to check it out.

What is news about NeoDB is that their English documentation site was published last month, which should help significantly with discoverability of the platform, which so far has mainly been used by a Chinese audience. The second part of the news is that this week, NeoDB shipped Bluesky and Threads integration, allowing you to log in with your Bluesky or Threads account. Furthermore, the developers are publicly pondering if they should be ‘dual-stack’, meaning that they fully integrate with both ActivityPub and atproto. The direction of the larger social web seems to be trending in the direction of platforms that span multiple protocols, with NeoDB being another example.

The News

Mastodon has made two updates this week that helps highlight journalism on the fediverse. The first update is that underneath some links that are shared on Mastodon, “the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account”. Mastodon says that this highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work”. The feature is rolling out slowly: only a few publications are included, and other publications can manually opt-in. It is currently also still only visible on mastodon.social, and currently requires admin approval. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says that wants to “avoid the risk of malicious sites framing users as their authors, but we intend to build out a self-serve system to manage which sites you can be featured from very soon.” While the feature is only visible on Mastodon so far, it works with other fediverse accounts: I linked my federated WordPress account to this blog, for example. Already apps are starting to implement this feature, such as Pachli.

The second feature update for Mastodon is that articles which appear in the trending News tab, allow you to see what people are writing about that article. This respects privacy settings, so not all posts will be visible. Both Phanpy and IceCubes already implemented the feature into their clients as well.

Ghost has taken two major steps in their work for implementing ActivityPub. They have made the repository for their work on ActivityPub available as open source, under the MIT license. Secondly, Ghost’s own newsletter about their fediverse integration has become the ‘first federated Ghost instance on the internet’, and you can follow @index via your own fediverse account.

Interoperability between different types of platforms on the fediverse can be quite unreliable, but the link-aggregator side of the fediverse is seeing some improvements recently: Mbin has added PeerTube support, after PieFed also did so a few weeks ago. Furthermore, Lemmy has made it easier to follow communities from the microblogging platforms in their recent 0.19.4 update: All posts (not comments) made on Lemmy get added a hashtag based on the community name. So if you want to follow the asklemmy community from your Mastodon account for example, you can simply follow the hashtag #asklemmy.

Pixelfed and Loops developer Dansup says that Loops, an platform for short-form videos that is currently in development, will first come to the Pixelfed app, and that only later it will become a separate app.

Casey Newton interviewed Adam Mosseri on Threads’ first anniversary, and posted his answer on Threads work on fediverse integration. Mosseri says that is not driving a lot of growth (by my own estimates it seems likely that like less than 10k people have turned on fediverse sharing), and that it “is proving very difficult just to do the basics, particularly from a compliance and a privacy perspective”.

Newsmast has released their ‘Amplifier‘ feature, which gives you more control over your timeline. With it, you can select to see if you want posts, reposts or comments in your timeline. It also allows you to shift your timeline to a different ‘timezone’, for example 12 hours back. You can see what that looks like with a short video here.

Shreyan Jain published an in-depth article about atproto and Nostr. It’s a long read, well-researched and places the protocols in a larger historical context. If you want to understand how these protocols work and how they compare to each other, I can definitely recommend the article. It seems to me we are far from the end of innovation and change in the space of decentralised social networking protocols, making it worthwhile to learn and build upon other protocol’s choices.

The Links

• Last Month in Bluesky – June 2024.
• Mastodon has expanded their core engineering team, and consists now of three people.
• Newsletter software Buttondown confirms that ActivityPub support is scheduled for their Q3 roadmap.
• Ghost recently funded Fedify, and Fedify developer Hong Minhee wrote some more details about the development process and funding.
• The first release candidate for PeerTube 6.2 adds automatic video transcription based on Whisper, auto-tags on video, as well as a comment moderation system page.
• A web app to search and explore your own Mastodon bookmarks.
• Newsmast’s Michael Foster writes about how to reach the potential of the fediverse with storytelling.
• ActivityPods published ‘a guide to create your first social app with ActivityPods 2.0′.
• A weekly overview of the fediverse software updates.
• Kookie is a new Misskey fork that focuses on the Brazilian community.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#activitypub #asklemmy #fediverse

fediversereport.com/last-week-…

NeoDB Open Source Software

2024-06-06 21:01:28

Hello, Fediverse!

We just shipped NeoDB 0.10 , with revamped i18n support and other features. A dedicated project site is also up: neodb.net

If you haven't heard about #NeoDB , it's basically Goodreads+ Letterboxd + RateYourMusic + Podchaser, all in one place, #opensource, powered up with #ActivityPub, plus microblogging, like #Mastodon and its apps.

Love to hear your thoughts, and if you find this project useful, or think someone else may think so, please help boost!

🧩 NeoDB

Mark the things you love.

^neodb.net

Charleston, South Carolina – A South Carolina Anarchist and Musician was recently subpoena’d to appear in front of a federal grand jury. She asked that others widely share this statement in order to bring awareness to her ordeal.

“My name is Cyprus Hartford. I’m a 20-year-old musician, trans woman, and anarchist. On June 5, 2024, I was stopped on the highway by federal agents and served a subpoena to testify before a Federal Grand Jury in Charleston, South Carolina on August 13, 2024. After consulting with friends, family, and attorneys, I’ve made the decision to challenge this subpoena, and if necessary, to refuse to give testimony before the grand jury. I will not allow the state to intimidate me. I will not put my community at risk by giving the state information that has nothing to do with harmful behavior, but discloses private information about our first amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.

Grand juries are an archaic and secretive process by which the state secures indictments. They have been abolished everywhere they were ever implemented, except for the USA and Liberia. As an anarchist, I don’t believe that any court should have the power to condemn human beings to imprisonment, but this is especially true for grand juries. Grand juries undermine witness’s rights to protect against self incrimination by forcing them to testify under threat of indefinite federal imprisonment via Civil contempt of court. This is what I will be facing for refusing to cooperate. Grand Juries nearly always vote to indict, with one exception. Grand juries almost never indict white police officers who shoot and kill Black people. This legal process is essentially a kangaroo court. It has no place in a supposedly free country. I refuse to participate in the process of rubber stamping an indictment. Unlike every other legal process in the U.S., federal grand juries happen behind closed doors. There is no defense attorney, no judge, and no press or public. Secret proceedings are inherently undemocratic, and susceptible to politically motivated abuse.

Although I don’t think this subpoena is justified, I wasn’t surprised to receive it because of similar repression happening in the Charleston area. In March, the same ATF agent who served me the subpoena left a card at the door to my family’s house. During the spring of this year, several others in the Charleston, South Carolina area were subpoenaed and did give testimony. State and federal repression is ramping up all around the country. After years of successive mass protest movements, the state is cracking down even further on dissent. We have the tools to be able to fight against this in court. When I was served this subpoena, I called movement attorneys associated with the National Lawyers Guild. They connected me with people who had been in the position I’m in. I was assured that I am not alone. People have been in my position before and made the decisions I am making. The state seeks to isolate and atomize us from each other, but we are stronger when we stand together.

At the present time, I’m currently attempting to find a lawyer to represent me in court. This is a somewhat expensive and difficult process. A gofundme link to support me with this, as well as living expenses in the meantime and potential funding in the event that I am incarcerated for my refusal to cooperate, can be found here: gofundme.com/f/support-cyprus-… . Any money left over after all this is done will go to others facing state repression.

With Love and Rage,
Cyprus Hartford

It/they/she”

Received by email.

abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/pos…

#anarchist #charleston #grandJury #northAmerica #repression

Maja’s extradition to Hungary – BASC statement

Yesterday afternoon, on 27.06.2024, the Berlin Court of Appeal ruled that our comrade Maja should be extradited to Hungary. Without the lawyer or Maja’s family being informed, Maja was taken out of the cell within a very short time after this decision on 28.06. at around 04:00 a.m. in a night and fog operation and brought to Austria, where she was handed over to the Austrian authorities for the purpose of further transport to Hungary. In doing so, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Saxony State Criminal Police Office and in particular the Soko LinX deliberately pursued the goal of circumventing Maja’s right to a constitutional complaint and thus the chance of preventing extradition. It was also intended to torpedo rapid reactions in solidarity.

On the morning of June 28 at 10:50 a.m., the Federal Constitutional Court issued a temporary injunction in response to an urgent application by Maja’s lawyers that the extradition must be stopped until the constitutional complaint to be filed by Maja’s lawyers has been examined. Maja was probably handed over to the Hungarian authorities at 10:00 a.m. So the order came about an hour too late and the Soko LinX had achieved its goal: to circumvent the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court and to create facts by kidnapping Maja.

All authorities (JVA Dresden, LKA Saxony, Berlin General Prosecutor’s Office) refused to provide the family with any information regarding Maja’s current whereabouts. Instead, they had to read in the press that Maja had already been brought to the Austrian-Hungarian border several hours ago.

As a non-binary person, Maja expects the unimaginable in the prison system of a queer-hostile country. The German authorities are well aware of this, but this does not stop them from behaving in accordance with the persecution zeal of authoritarian Hungary and their own.

The German security authorities like to boast about their supposed rule of law, but when it suits them, they bypass their own constitutional façade and the decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court to extradite anti-fascists to Hungary. Maja is now being exposed to conditions in Hungary that we can only guess at to a large extent. There is no presumption of innocence there, nor is there a trial based on the rule of law. There is a risk of up to 24 years in prison, which would be unthinkable in Germany in view of the accusations. It seems as if this was exactly the goal of the Soko LinX, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office.

It has been clear not only since yesterday that both the Hungarian prisons and the legal system do not meet any European standards. Hungary was already denied democratic status by the EU Parliament in 2022. Nevertheless, the extradition is simply implemented before it can be examined more closely by German courts. German authorities are responsible for the fact that Maja is now threatened with violence, isolation and a political show trial.

We are afraid for Maja in these circumstances and are stunned by the audacity with which legal standards have been undermined here. We are angry at how the authorities have trampled on Maja’s human rights and taken Maja to an unknown location and isolated her from the lawyers and family. We are angry at how contemptuously the authorities treat Maja’s family and deny them any information.

The information about Maja’s situation comes piecemeal and changes quickly. We therefore call on everyone to use the next few hours to continue to prevent Maja’s extradition and to show solidarity. Keep up to date and think about how you can react to the events.

Free Maja – Free all antifas

#NoExtradition

Budapest Antifascist Solidarity Committee

abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/pos…

#antifa #budapest #europe #germany #hungary #Maja #NoExtradition #PoliticalPrisoners

Just recently, Threads initiated phase two of their federation with the fediverse. Now, users on Threads can finally see posts from those replying to them from, say, a Mastodon account. For the longest time, you were simply sending your Threads posts to the Fediverse, and never seeing much info about who was interacting with you. Like firing a gun at a wall and hoping you hit your targets.

Post by @threads
View on Threads

Those who use Threads, who are actually interested in the fediverse, are still waiting to simply just see posts from the aforementioned on their Threads timeline. The problem? There may not be much to see once that time comes.

Why?

There are a lot of people across Mastodon and other pieces of fediverse connected software, that completely block out any and all federation with Threads, and within good reason. Meta runs Facebook, and Instagram, alongside Threads. They’re very much a mega corporation that absolutely sells your data, and absolutely have ulterior motives in regard to what content they want to have shared on their platforms. Which, honestly, isn’t much different than the motives of individual Mastodon instance admins. Save for the part where data is sold (that doesn’t happen on Mastodon, at least not to my knowledge).

As for the instance I’ve been running all year, I’ve chosen not to block Threads. Why?

Threads has decent people, funny people, people that are actually worth following. Sure, there is a lot of riff-raff, and garbage, but, back in the day when Twitter was actually okay, it was the same deal. And with Bluesky, it’s no different. With individual fediverse instances, topics and themes are usually much more concentrated, or extremely specific.

So, if a nazi launches an instance, there probably isn’t anyone worth following on there.

Maybe now you’re starting to see my reasoning. And maybe also why, I both run a Mastodon instance, and an active Threads account.

mkultra.monster/<a%20rel=
With how specific things on Mastodon can be, it’s really hard sometimes to find people I actually want to follow, topics I actually want to see, content I actually want to consume. But, on Threads? It’s right there. And that’s my major conundrum, to why I find it hard to decide whether I should just post on my Mastodon account, or not. And the second reason why I’m not really on-board with the “#fedipact” (check out this list where they color code anyone federating with Threads in red, which obviously means bad and evil and not good) and blocking out its influence entirely.

I feel like, if I don’t block Threads, and if other instances don’t block Threads, it’ll be easier to bring those people we actually want to see from Threads, to a better, healthier Mastodon instance.

If Facebook is anything to go by, I don’t know for sure that I trust Meta not to throw the steering wheel out the window and let the site run wild with whatever the loudest users dictate.

But, this whole thing, at least in my own eyes, and with my own experience, and situation, has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a content creator. A very unconventional content creator, but I am one, regardless! I’ve been writing since 2008. I’ve been making music since 2017, and I also make little videos, I run a store in Second Life, I try to be interesting on social media, and sometime in the near future, I’d like to find some kind of tech related remote job.

Blocking myself, or my entire instance from the mainstream internet would do me more harm than good. Part of that, is because it’s so hard to find, and sometimes even reach people on Mastodon.

I’ve been dabbling in the fediverse since 2017, and I’ve never had more than 200-some followers on Mastodon (maybe partially because I’ve had to switch accounts so much). But, on Threads, I’ve been there since day one, which is under a year, and I’ve nearly reached 1000 follows, and about half of my posts actually go viral. Sometimes, for no discernible reason.

This is something that’s really good for someone who is actively trying to reach people on social media. This is something that could lead me to having the career I’ve always wanted.

I’m not saying Mastodon is bad, and you shouldn’t use it, you should! But I’ve yet to crack the code on how there are people on Mastodon that have over 500, or over 1000 follows. How’d you do that? Why don’t my posting habits on Mastodon get me to the audience I’m trying to build, but the same habits do get me there, on Threads.

Some people go online to post, and forget. I go online to post, and try to build a future. And that’s the biggest reason I can’t block Threads, and it’s why it took me a considerable amount of time to finally swear off using Twitter (for the most part).

A lot of people on Mastodon aren’t really online trying to reach people with financial and career building goals. They’re just there to share and have friends (not that there’s anything wrong wit that, I would love to have a bunch of regular online friends again) so, to a lot of them, it’s really no big deal if they’re only reaching 1% of the potential social internet. But to me, it is kind of a big deal.

These are my thoughts, as of right now, though. They could change. Tomorrow I could let my Threads account go dormant and continue with my efforts to build only on Mastodon. Who knows! I don’t, at least not yet. What are your thoughts though? Do you think I’m making a bad decision? Should I swallow my worries as as content creator and just focus on Mastodon?

I would love to know what your opinions are!

cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/27/th…

#000000 #00000026 #999999 #federation #fedipact #fediverse #mastodon #socialMedia #thoughts #threads #twitter