This week's news:
- @mmasnick joins Bluesky's Board of Directors
- @bonfire shows some more information on Mosaic, another project of Bonfire, and puts out bounties for developers to help get to a 1.0 release
- A platform for football fans with CollabFC
- 3d printing platform @manyfold has added early #activitypub support
[share author='Laurens Hof' profile='https://fediversereport.com/author/laurenshof/' avatar='' link='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-79/' posted='2024-08-11 17:09:02' guid='08552256-1ddb98c771664f15-878de609' message_id='https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-79/']Last Week in Fediverse – ep 79

While we’re busy enjoying the summer (or the Olympics), here is this week’s fediverse news.

The News

Mike Masnick, author of the ‘Protocols, not Platforms‘ paper has joined Bluesky’s Board of Directors. There has been a seat available since Jack Dorsey suddenly left the board a few months ago. In his personal announcement post, Masnick says that ‘Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality‘. Masnick also explains that one of the key aspects that excites him about Bluesky is how ‘they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat.’

With the current implementation of Bluesky, two parts of the architecture (the Relay and the AppView) are theoretically decentralised, but with no incentive structure for other people to also run an alternative part of the infrastructure, nobody actually has done so. Furthermore, the Identity part of Bluesky is still fully centralised and under control of Bluesky, with no clear path to change this. This places Bluesky significantly behind other major fediverse software, who are all already fully resistant to future self-harm. As Masnick values this principle, it is worth seeing how his position on the board will influence the direction of the development of the AT Protocol.

Two new fediverse projects that stand out to me for a similar reason; they both shift away from ‘microblogging about anything you want’ to a community that is clearly defined by interests or topics. CollabFC is a football-based social network, that creates a specific network for football clubs. When you join a hub for a club, such as Liverpool for example, you have the possibility for a ‘local’ feed dedicated to Liverpool, as well as a feed for all other football instances. Gush is a platform that is in development for talking about video games. Part review site similar to BookWyrm and NeoDB, it focuses on posting about specific games. What is different about it is that each game ‘a first-class object that you can reference and share across the fediverse’. Both of these platforms are early in their lifecycle, but point in a direction of more focused discussion on fediverse platforms.

Bonfire shared some more information about their upcoming platform Mosaic. Full details will be available in September, but it looks like a front-end UI for displaying posts as a website instead of the regular feeds. Something similar is Servus, a CMS for Nostr, or Npub.pro, which are both experiments for Nostr to display posts not as a feed but a website as well. Meanwhile, the main aspect that is holding up the release of the ‘main’ version of Bonfire is a slow performance, and the Bonfire team put out two bounties for developers to help them fix this issue.

Threads held an AMA about the fediverse with Flipboard’s Mike McCue and Blockparty’s Tracy Chou. It seems relevant that Threads wants to promote their fediverse connection by hosting an AMA on their main account, but there were little answers that stood out or provided new information, with most answers talking more about a conceptual understanding of what the fediverse could be, more than what the actual rest of the fediverse outside of Threads actually looks like.

Manyfold is an open source self hosted platform for sharing your 3d printer files. They have been working on adding ActivityPub support, and the latest update added experimental early stage support for ActivityPub.

Link aggregator platform Kbin is getting closer and closer to being completely dead, with the main flagship instance kbin.social now also being offline. The lead developer could not keep up with work on the platform due to personal reasons for a while now. The project has been superseded by the hard fork Mbin, which has been around for a while now, and got another update this week.

The Links

• Newsmast’s Michael Foster writes about ‘how can we persuade organisations and creators that it makes sense to federate using tools they already have in place’.
• Bandwagon, the upcoming fediverse music sharing platform, is expanding their beta test.
• Buffer recently added support for Bluesky, and the Buffer CEO wrote a blog post about the significance of Bluesky and decentralised social networks.
• Elena Rossini’s newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ does an extensive deep dive into Friendica.
• WeDistribute takes a closer look at the successful ‘Mastodon for Harris’ campaign, which raised over half a million USD.
• Bluesky is summoning a community marketing manager.
• The new video series Fediverse Files by WordPress.com has a second episode in which they interview Evan Prodromou about ActivityPub.
• Font Awesome for the fediverse, with Decentralised Social Icons, by WeDistribute.
• A blog by Smoke Signal, an upcoming event platform build on top of atproto, about building communities with atproto.
• Mastodon posted an update about the first half of 2024 for their Patreon supporters.
• A closer look at the new features in Newsmast latest update.
• For the atproto devs: an atproto browser.
• Owncast Newsletter August 2024.
• TechLinked discusses the fediverse and how the web is different now in their podcast.
• IFTAS Connect July 2024 roundup. IFTAS is also looking for admin support while they are seeking funding to continue their work on building an opt-in content classifier to detect CSAM.
• A proof of concept for fediverse spam filtering.
• This week’s fediverse software updates.

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

#fediverse

fediversereport.com/last-week-…

Another update: startrek.website/post/13283869 I found a fix for my issue. I'm annoyed that I had it in the first place, but I overall still like my laptop.

Important update in this post: startrek.website/post/14075369
I still consider this a good laptop, but this is an important fix if you're using this on Debian 12. When 13 comes out next year, the out-of-box support of this laptop should be basically perfect.

Anyhow, back to the original post:
I recently got a brand new laptop, a Thinkpad 21JT001PUS, to consolidate/replace my array of various on-the-go-Linux devices, and I have to say, I'm impressed. I know Thinkpad and Linux aren't news, but for such a recent device, I am surprised how well it works. The price wasn't bad (which makes up for the fact that it's a Zen 3 chip with DDR4, in my opinion), it has good upgradability (I'll touch a bit on my experience later), and hardware support was really good.

I initially tested hardware support with Debian Testing Trixie XFCE (as that was the Live USB I happened to have on hand, since I often test devices and also keep it around as a backup for my desktop, which runs Testing). At first I couldn't get it to boot, but then I found the BIOS setting to enable non-Microsoft certificates. After that, I booted in and found everything worked out of the box (except the fingerprint sensor, of course, but that's extremely rare for any laptop anyway). However, after experience with my previous portable devices, I learned I prefer stable distributions on those, as during some parts of the year, I can go months without opening the laptop.

Thus, I retested with Bookworm. Almost everything worked still, except for the Wi-Fi (which seems to have been introduced in later kernel versions). Luckily, this thing has an ethernet port (From which it is HECK to remove cables - I've found I had to twist the end up a bit to get it out), so I was able to do an install and then add the Backports kernel to get Wi-Fi working.

One minor issue I had (a software fault rather than a hardware/kernel one) was Bluetooth headphones, but as it turned out, it was just that PulseAudio was installed instead of Pipewire, so after switching, it worked flawlessly with Blueman).

As for battery life, so far it seems okay (as I write this, it says 3:29 left at 51%), but I haven't rigorously tested it yet (though I threw on the usual tlp and stuff like that for good measure).

For performance, I once again haven't tested it too rigorously, but I did play some Civ VI, which it was keeping up with just fine.

The upgrabability of this laptop does have one caveat, though. The bottom is a bother to remove, and most Youtube crap conveniently glosses over them. For one, some of the screws would get loose but not come out all the way. I eventually found the trick was to throw some pry tool under the screw head to hold it up so I could get it the rest of the way out. After they were all out, the bottom cover STILL wouldn't budge. This too ended up being a matter of jamming a pick in one corner of the case and running another one to slowly pry up the bottom case on all sides. I lost a plastic tab or two in the process, but that doesn't show up on the outside, and I think 24 GB of RAM (and 2 TB of NVME 2280 storage + 256 GB, the Windows drive that I left in the 2242 bay) will be plenty for a long time.

Overall, I would say this is a great laptop for those who don't want to go the route of purchasing a used laptop for Linux. I'll say an 8.5 out of 10 due to the hard-to-remove bottom cover and weird ethernet port (Update: 8 out of 10 now due to the nasty Wi-Fi bug I had to fix with a few module options, see posts linked in top of page).

Here's the Linux Hardware probe: linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50…

Twitter hat sich verändert und das leider nicht zum Guten!

Hier ein paar Schlagzeilen:

• Elon Musk Is Turning Twitter Into a Haven for Nazis
• Elon Musk says he’s letting Donald Trump back on Twitter
• Twitter’s sacking of content moderators raises concerns
• Elon Musk won’t stop tweeting his way into trouble

Ich habe, um ehrlich zu sein, keine Ahnung, warum ich immer noch bei Twitter bin, und ich glaube, bei Facebook hat damals wesentlich weniger gereicht, um meinen Account zu löschen…

Klar, Twitter war über 17 Jahre lang das soziale Netzwerk meiner Wahl und hatte über lange Zeit hinweg wenig bis keine Konkurrenz! Ich habe viele spannende und inspirierende Menschen kennengelernt. Twitter hat mir geholfen, mich mit der deutschen Web2.0-Community zu vernetzen. Barcamps und Webmontage wurden über Twitter organisiert und diskutiert. Außerdem verdanke ich Twitter wohl auch meinen aktuellen Traum-Job bei Automattic!

Aber das alleine hat mich die letzten zwei Jahre nicht auf Twitter gehalten. Die Menschen, die mir wichtig sind (inklusive mir), sind weitergezogen und haben das Fediverse für sich entdeckt. Ein besseres Job-Angebot als das von Automattic ist aktuell eher unwahrscheinlich (😍) und wenn es hochkommt, schaue ich maximal alle zwei Wochen bei Twitter vorbei, und seit Monaten nutze ich schon keine Twitter-Apps mehr auf meinem Handy oder Computer.

Das was mich hält, kann also nur Nostalgie und die Romantisierung der „guten alten Zeit“ auf Twitter sein!?!

Ich widme jetzt fast 20 Jahre meiner Zeit der Open Web Idee (von Web2.0 über Social Web bis hin zum Fediverse) und predige auf meiner Seite, auf totem Holz, in Podcasts und auf Konferenzen, wie wichtig es ist sich unabhängig vom „corporate web“ zu machen und die volle Kontrolle über seine eigenen Daten zu haben.

Nur fair, wenn ich jetzt auch umsetze, was ich da so von mir gebe!

Ich glaube, vielen geht es ähnlich wie mir: Sie sind unzufrieden mit Twitter, haben ihren Account aber aus Sentimentalität noch nicht gelöscht. Doch so wird sich langfristig nichts ändern. Der einzige wirkungsvolle Protest ist das konsequente Löschen all dieser inaktiven Profile. Das Netzwerk verdient durch uns und mit uns Geld, und nur wenn die Nutzerzahlen sinken, wird genügend Druck erzeugt! Aber selbst wenn nicht… das ist dann nicht mehr mein Problem ☺️

Also…

…oder um es mit den Worten von Groucho Marx zu sagen:

Hello, I must be going, I cannot stay,
I came to say, I must be going.
I’m glad I came, but just the same,
I must be going.

Wir sehen uns im Fediverse 👋