Last Week in Fediverse – ep 85

It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!

Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down

The Swiss Government will shut down their Mastodon server at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a pilot that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.

The Social Web Foundation has launched

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large grant, and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.

The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:

• adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a grant for.
• Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.
• A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.
• Working on long-form text in the fediverse.

The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they state that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.

Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.

As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?

Software updates

There are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:

GoToSocial’s v0.17 release brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”

Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.

• Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
• The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
• Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.

In Other News

IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum.

The Links

• All the speed demo videos of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.
• Evan Prodromou’s book about ActivityPub, ‘ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web‘ has officially launched.Lemmy Development Update.
• PieFed’s Development update for September 2024.
• A tool to make sure you see all replies on a fediverse posts (and an explanation on how it differs from FediFetcher).
• A work-in-progress Rust library for ActivityPub.
• The German Data Protection Office updated their Data Protection Guidelines for running a Mastodon server.
• The Revolution Will Be Federated – WeDistribute.
• This week’s updates for fediverse software.

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

#fediverse

fediversereport.com/last-week-…

GoToSocial

2024-09-24 11:36:21

Hello everyone! We've just made the first release candidate for version 0.17.0 of GoToSocial Adventurous admins who want to try the new features and help us spotting bugs can get the release from below:

github.com/superseriousbusines…

⚠️ This release contains several database migrations which will run the first time you start up this new version. Be sure not to interrupt this migration process. This will take anywhere between a few seconds and an hour or even more (on slower hardware / big databases). Please be patient! Back up your database file before updating! We had to rejig the entire statuses table to introduce interaction policies (see below). ⚠️

Release highlights:

• Interaction policies: This release gives you the ability to set interaction policies on your statuses using the settings panel. Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped. This feature is still a work-in-progress as we will almost certainly have some kinks to work out in terms of implementation etc, but we wanted to get it into people's hands as quickly as possible.
  User docs here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/…
  Federation docs here: docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/…
• Much wider range of support for different media types: In this release we've embedded a webassembly build of ffmpeg into the GoToSocial binary, so that users can post many different types of media than previously, including mp3, flac, and other audio types, and many more video types. Admins: you don't need to have ffmpeg installed on your server for this to work.
• Audio player: to complement the new media types, we adapted our current video player to also play audio, so people visiting your profile can play MP3s and FLACs. Album art is supported when embedded in the audio file!
• Header/avatar alt text: You can now set alt-text for your avatar + header images, so that screenreader users visiting your profile can read a description of your beautiful face.
• Better threading model for statuses: On the web view of a thread, conversations are now indented at different levels, to make it easier to see who's replying to whom.
• Prefers-reduced-motion is now supported, so that folks with animations turned off in their operating system or browser aren't confronted with lots of animation when they open your profile.
• Conversations view: You can now view a list of your direct message conversations, making it much easier to keep track of who you're talking to.
• Import/export csv files: It's now possible to import Mastodon-compatible CSV files for accounts you follow and accounts you block, making it much easier to migrate across instances. Export of these files is supported too.
• Exclusive lists: You can now mark lists as "exclusive", which means that posts from accounts in an exclusive list will show up only in that list and not in your home timeline.
• Show/hide posts on your profile: Previously only Public posts were shown on your web profile. This is still the default, but you can now choose to show unlisted posts on your web profile too (the Mastodon default), or to show no posts at all.
• Lots of new themes: solarized, brutalist, ecks pee, and more.
• Store worker queue on restart: when you stop the instance, pending tasks are stored into the database, and loaded again when you start up the instance, so that no tasks get lost between restarts.

Thanks for reading!