I dunno, *can* we build #European alternatives to #Facebook and co? The #EU community managers are at it again with promoting the EU instance on #Mastodon!
PS: the community management team (that's my team) are up for an award. Any chance you'd give us a vote? Project 32 on this link: enonet.eu/survey/index.php/227…
Collections are coming to #Mastodon 4.6.0 I will implement support for them ASAP in #Fedilab.
"A Collection is a set of accounts that a user recommends others to follow. Users can create and share Collections and control whether they want to be featured in other user’s Collections."
Please give them a warm welcome to Mastodon and to the fediverse, follow their account, and donate to their fundraiser if you can (and please share this so others can do the same).
Also, remember that you can find all our families who have fundraisers listed at the following page, ordered by those who have received the least in donations over the last week (on a rolling basis):
We’re particularly delighted to see the @EUCommission include a call to “strengthen the open source social media space by supporting open and decentralised social media solutions and platforms. The Commission currently runs a #Mastodon instance, which hosts the Commission’s presence and plans to extend the users basis to EU institutions.”
This post is a bit longer than usual. Therefore, I start with a TLDR summary.
I show that network roles like “follower”, “friend”, and “mutual follower” are defined by the options for exclusivity of content that apply to these roles.
X and Instagram implement only “followers” and allow restricting content to followers on an account level.
Facebook and Instagram additionally implement mutual connections: “friends”/“connections”. Content may be restricted to friends only on the post level. Following on these platforms means subscribing to someone’s public posts.
Mutuals may seem equal to friends, but I argue that in the diversity of the Fediverse, where humans understand roles differently across platforms, mutuals cannot serve as friend connections.
Many people like the model of exclusivity used by Facebook and LinkedIn, where connecting and following are different things. Therefore, I believe that this model should be available in
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This post is a bit longer than usual. Therefore, I start with a TLDR summary.
I show that network roles like “follower”, “friend”, and “mutual follower” are defined by the options for exclusivity of content that apply to these roles.
X and Instagram implement only “followers” and allow restricting content to followers on an account level.
Facebook and Instagram additionally implement mutual connections: “friends”/“connections”. Content may be restricted to friends only on the post level. Following on these platforms means subscribing to someone’s public posts.
Mutuals may seem equal to friends, but I argue that in the diversity of the Fediverse, where humans understand roles differently across platforms, mutuals cannot serve as friend connections.
Many people like the model of exclusivity used by Facebook and LinkedIn, where connecting and following are different things. Therefore, I believe that this model should be available in the Fediverse too.
In my previous post, I discussed the difference between friends and mutuals on a rather intuitive, human level. On this human level, an online friend is someone you share personal stuff with. Followers, in contrast, get to see only what you do out in the open. You may follow back someone who follows you – you are mutuals – but this only means that both of you see what the other does out in the open. Such a mutual follow does not necessarily define a more intimate relation.
In this post, I offer a more precise analysis of how the different roles “follower”, “mutual”, and “friend” are implemented on online social platforms. I explain how human understanding of network roles may differ between Fediverse platforms. From this observation, I argue that the Fediverse could grow strongly if the social connection types offered in Facebook and Linkedin would be available in the Fediverse too.
Roles and exclusivity
For this analysis, we need to realize that on a social platform, roles only get meaning by the restrictions one can place on content in terms of these roles. Less abstract: the concept of a friend only really matters when you can define that some of your content is available to friends only – or when only friends may interact in a certain way with you. Different platforms may have different constellations of such rules about exclusivity for network roles. Soccer players cover their mouth to communicate privately while being a public figure, viewed by many.
Constellations of rules about exclusivity
I illustrate these constellations of rules about exclusivity by looking at the four platforms that I made a little puzzle about in my previous post: Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. The table below shows which roles are implemented by each of these platforms. Implementation of roles, and the rules about exclusivity in relation to these roles for four social platforms. Words in quotes represent the precise vocabulary used on the platform. In the upper part of the table, the rows refer to various network roles, ranging roughly from broad (anyone in the world) to narrow (private group member).1 In each row, green cells indicate whether the role of that row is implemented by the platform of that column. The word in the green cell is the platform-specific wording used to describe that role on the platform. The lower part of the table shows how the four platforms implement exclusivity settings.
The table rather strikingly highlights two pairs of platforms: Facebook and LinkedIn on the one hand, and X and Instagram on the other:
Facebook and LinkedIn distinguish friends (“connections” on LinkedIn), followers, groups, and the rest of the world. You can define for each individual post whether if may be seen by friends only, a certain group only, or everyone. Followers have no special reading rights, but just subscribe to get your “for everyone” posts in their feed.
X and Instagram distinguish followers, approved followers, and the rest of the world. On a default “public” account, all posts may be seen by everyone end followers subscribe to get your post on their feed. You can set your account to “private” (“protected” on X), which requires follows to be approved, and only followers may view your posts.
Classic models of exclusivity
Since these constellations of exclusivity are so strikingly similar between the two pairs of platforms, I’ll call the model used by X and Instagram (including the private account option) the “classic follow model”, and the model used by Facebook and LinkedIn the “classic connection model”.
Approved mutuals don’t bring friends to the Fediverse
Mastodon implements the classic follow model, but adds the option of choosing “for followers only” on a post level. Thus, if two Mastodon accounts that require follower approval (“private accounts” in Instagram terms) follow each other, the situation between these two accounts is technically indistinguishable to a friend status on Facebook: Both people agree on the connection and they may share “friends-only” content with each other.
Does this mean that Mastodon – or the Fediverse in general – facilitates friend-connections? I believe they don’t.
An example of confusing roles
Say, Anne is a local politician. She uses her Mastodon account to advertise political ideas and engage with her community. She wants to have some control over the threads she starts, so she sets her account to “private”2, and posts mostly “for followers only”. Now, Anne’s good friend Bob only uses social media for connecting to friends. Bob is on Friendica and from there, he clicks on “follow/connect” next to Anne’s name (Friendica implements a friend connection as a mutual follow!3). Anne does not really understand why Bob wants to follow her political postings, but after accepting Bob’s follow request, the Mastodon interface offers Anne a “request follow” button, which Anne clicks to follow back Bob. Anne now has a “mutual follow” on her side, Bob finds Anne under “friends”.
Bob regrets this quickly, as his “friends” timeline is now filled with political posts of Anne. He searches for an option to subscribe only to Anne’s “for friends” posts, but has no success and mutes Anne.
Bob has another problem: he likes to follow some comic artists too, to populate his feed with some fun stuff every day. Now, one of these comic artists, Coco on Pixelfed, follows Bob back, thereby becoming Bob’s “friend” (without Bob getting notified about this). From now on, Coco will receive Bobs friends-only vacation images on their timeline. Keith and Mic just waiting for a friend.
Why roles are confusing in the Fediverse
The example above illustrates at two issues with connections in the Fediverse.
Your understanding of network roles depends on the platform you are using. (Anne doesn’t know that “friend” connections exist in the Fediverse)
Your understanding of network roles depends on what you aim to use the platform for. (Anne and Coco like to have many followers to broadcast to – Bob wants to make online connections)
One could argue that the second issue is not really an issue. If Bob wants to become online friends with Anne to share personal posts with her, he should ask her to create a separate personal account somewhere – maybe best on a Friendica server to signal the personal intend.
This is how people deal with this in the Big Tech social media world: People interested in sharing political opinions and comics share them on X and Instagram, respectively. People who want to connect with friends and professional colleagues do so on Facebook and Instagram, respectively.
What to do about this?
Standardize UX vocabulary
A part of the confusion described above is due to inconsistent UX across platforms. Diversity of platforms is a great virtue of the Fediverse, but it would help if platform softwares would follow a standard vocabulary about these roles that hold between platforms: Friendica users should be aware that their friends on Mastodon see them as just a mutual follow. Mastodon users should be aware that their mutual connections may be perceived as friendships.
Be (a bit) like Facebook
Still, if the wording in the UX’s were equalized, Bob would still need a separate account to follow Coco without risking becoming friends without noticing. Also, Anne would still need to create a private account for making actual connections. I’d argue that this wastes one of the great selling points of the Fediverse: you only need one account to connect to any other account.
I believe that the classic connection model is what Bob is looking for: He wants to connect to real friends, but he also wants to follow accounts that fill his feed with stuff he likes. Currently, this classic connection model is not available in the Fediverse, which is a shame. The model would offer people the possibility to follow and connect with the same account to the wide variety of Fediverse platforms, bringing closer the interoperational promise of the Fediverse.
I don’t have enough technical knowledge to know whether such model requires an adaptation of ActivityPub, or that it can, or should be implemented on a platform level. I do however believe that there is a reason why Facebook and LinkedIn offer this constellation of exclusivity rules: Many people, probably billions, are looking for the same thing as Bob. I therefore believe that this classic connection model offers huge potential for growth of the Fediverse.
I was tempted to refer to these roles as “circles”, but mutual follows and friendships cannot be sensibly visualized as circles. ↩︎
The setting would be called “require approval of follower requests” on Mastodon, but I use the Instagram vocabulary here for brevity. ↩︎
In my previous post, I incorrectly suggested that Freindica has an implementation for friends separate from mutuals. ↩︎
zojuist laatste keer de server betaald. 1 juli 2026 is de laatste dag van mastodon.education.
Today made last payment for the server mastodon.education juli the first is the last day.
#instance ending
#Meta's #AI feature let attackers hijack Instagram accounts for days with nothing but a username. It was being A/B tested on a slice of users, and if you were in the test, you couldn't turn it off. Among the casualties: the official Obama White House account.
Meta has since patched it. There was no public acknowledgment.
Second in my series of tutorials on how to use #Mastodon is now up. I go over the home feed, how to fill it up with interesting things using the trending feed and hashtags, and how to declutter it with lists. Let me know if you learn something you weren't aware of from this video 🙂
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
There is a "hacker" group (script kiddies) targeting Mastodon sites that are not yet running Mastodon 4.5.10.
Version 4.5.10 fixes several security vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to exploit and were discovered in earlier versions of Mastodon.
If you're not running 4.5.10 (or newer), you are at risk. ⚠️
If you're using a nightly build of Mastodon, make sure you're running one that was released after the release date of 4.5.10. And yes, I said release date, not version number — earlier 4.6 nightly builds do not include the security patch. ⚠️
If you're delaying the update because you're running a modified version of Mastodon, consider whether maintaining those modifications is worth the security risk. ⚠️
After doing a couple of private workshops on how to use #Mastodon, I've decided I could just record a series of tutorials and have everyone benefit from it. Mastodon has a lot of features, and sometimes even long time users aren't aware of all of them! The first episode is about making posts on Mastodon--going over every aspect.
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
We've implemented and enabled Turnstile on registration to prevent unwanted sign-up spam (it's a daily issue at this point).
Cloudflare Turnstile confirms web visitors are real and blocks unwanted bots without slowing down web experiences for real users. It's a simple snippet of free code that eliminates CAPTCHAs. With Turnstile, you can deliver better experiences and strengthen privacy for all users. More info: cloudflare.com/products/turnst…
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
Raphus Social is a Mastodon server that aims to be a safe and inclusive place for open minded people interested in technology, open source, games, and other general geekery.
This server has a post size of up to 1024 characters and up to 8 poll options.
Raphus Social 🦤 is a better bird site, a safe and inclusive place for bringing together open minded people interested in technology, open source, tabletop games, and other general geekery.
Please give them a warm welcome to Mastodon and to the fediverse, follow their accounts, and donate to their fundraisers if you can (and please share this so others can do the same).
Also, remember that you can find all our families who have fundraisers listed at the following page, ordered by those who have received the least in donations over the last week (on a rolling basis):
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan
Disappointingly, but all too predictably Jonathan Liew exercise a long critique of X (formally Twitter), but concludes that the 'utopian idea of the digital town square is dead for ever' without even mentioning Mastodon, which while not perfect (seem to me) to get quite a long way towards that ideal....
We've noted before how (wilfully?) blind to Mastodon mainstream journalists are, so we shouldn't be surprised, just disappointed (again).
Some argue that quitting the platform formerly known as Twitter cedes the space to malign actors. But it’s an open sewer, beyond redemption, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Liew
How (mostly) 'normal' people respond to the ideas of the Social Web
Marketing the Social Web is a headache. Only heightened by the clashing of heads as everyone offers an opinion.
Ikväll anordnar vi återigen vår kampanjmat — vi bjuder på gott mat och diskutera hur vi kan befria oss från digitalkapitalets bojor! Alla är välkomna, särskilt om du är ny på #Fediverse / #Mastodon eller än så länge bara nyfiken! Vi hjälper dig gärna att komma igång. Ikväll torsdag 28/5 kl 18-20 på Göteborgs LS. Maten är vegansk. Mer info finns här: organisera.org/events/6de30224…
Välkomna till god mat och goda råd! Det kan vara svårt att bryta sig loss ur teknikjättarnas strypgrepp, inte minst på fastande mage! Därför bjuder Sociala medier underifrån in till KAMPANJMAT - ett försök att med god, billig och vegansk mat under tr…
Musicians.today is a Mastodon server for musicians of all levels, instruments, regions, languages, and genres. You don’t have to be a professional musician to join, but you should at least play an instrument or sing as a hobby.
My wife just made her first contribution to our Mastodon fork. It's totally vibe-coded, but I'm still proud of her, because takes some understanding to give proper instructions for the issue, and it turned out to be an actual regression with a proper fix. @mustikkasoppa
Bug description The "Translate" button has disappeared from all posts in the feed after the mementomods-2026-05-24 update. Root cause Commit 076c8ec ("Refactor server reducer into TypeScript", May ...
"Any vegetational cover that you put in the city is going to have a positive effect, especially with heat. People have a place to gather or sit or meditate, or kids can go there and play."
https://www.npr.
We've successfully upgraded our Mastodon server to v4.6.0-alpha.8+mementomods-2026-05-24, along with Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.8.rc2.
This update includes today's latest daily build with 158 new commits from upstream since mementomods-2026-05-02.
What's new in Mastodon core - These are the changes Mastodon Team have introduced us in the latest nightly version we are running:
✨️ New features
- Collections keep maturing - add an account to a collection straight from its profile, choose how accounts are sorted in a collection, language added to the collection payload, partial accounts in the collections endpoint, plus batch actions and reporting for collections in the moderation tools - Profile redesign polish - account header banners refactored, better link colors in bio, display name overflow handling, improved number fields layout and spacing - Big accessibi
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We've successfully upgraded our Mastodon server to v4.6.0-alpha.8+mementomods-2026-05-24, along with Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.8.rc2.
This update includes today's latest daily build with 158 new commits from upstream since mementomods-2026-05-02.
What's new in Mastodon core - These are the changes Mastodon Team have introduced us in the latest nightly version we are running:
✨️ New features
- Collections keep maturing - add an account to a collection straight from its profile, choose how accounts are sorted in a collection, language added to the collection payload, partial accounts in the collections endpoint, plus batch actions and reporting for collections in the moderation tools - Profile redesign polish - account header banners refactored, better link colors in bio, display name overflow handling, improved number fields layout and spacing - Big accessibility pass - list semantics and landmark regions across the main navigation, footer, settings and login/sign-up pages, visible focus outlines on search and composer fields, and selected-state cues on the follows/followers filters - Admin: manage email subscriptions from the admin UI, search email blocks by domain - API: retrieve both resolved and unresolved reports, allow the HTML lang attribute on remote posts - Search results page keeps the search field and tabs sticky
🔧 Fixes & improvements
- Custom emoji selection and the emoji picker rendering when there are no custom emojis - Several collection bugs - crashes rendering remote posts with a collection card, notification URLs, item position updates, "New collection" link showing on other people's profiles - Profile fields not showing links, bio line spacing with and without paragraph tags, account header banner grayscale - Remote posts with large media descriptions no longer rejected - Text overflow in the list item component - Unblocking a domain now updates the blocked-domains list - Role management can require 2FA for all users - nan-tw added to supported locales
📦 Dependency updates
- Vite 8.0.13, TypeScript 6.0.3, Sidekiq 8.1.5, Devise 5.0.4 (security), axios 1.16.1, FFmpeg 8.1.1, aws-sdk bumps, and dozens of smaller updates
- Adapt profile styles to the new account_header module classes after upstream renamed (#38863) and removed (#38920) the old profile classes - avatar size and position, role badges, "Follows you" badge, tabs and buttons all restored - Restore the navigation menu order after upstream wrapped the items in list elements (#39145): Lists and Followed tags at the bottom, More as the last item - Hide the navigation separators that replaced the old hr elements - Restore even profile tab distribution at all widths - Fix familiar followers spacing when no role badges are present - Video previews behind a content warning use object-fit cover so portrait videos no longer letterbox
🔧 Ours: Mementomori.social Mastodon fork fixes
- Merged the latest upstream into our fork and resolved the conflicts, keeping all our customizations - Re-synced the vendored Mastodon Bird UI to 4.0.0-alpha.8.rc2
As always, if you notice anything unusual or buggy, please reach out to me or any of the admins. Enjoy your time here, and feel free to message me with any questions or thoughts.
It’s your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and Fediverse development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism.
Please give them a warm welcome to Mastodon and to the fediverse, follow their accounts, and donate to their fundraisers if you can (and please share this so others can do the same).
Also, remember that you can find all our families who have fundraisers listed at the following page, ordered by those who have received the least in donations over the last week (on a rolling basis):
More than thirteen years in, and I am still as excited about building this browser as I was on day one. Maybe more. That excitement comes from a genuine belief…
Upgrade overview
This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:
ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation
For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrad...
Upgrade overview
This release contains upgrade notes that deviate from the norm:
ℹ️ Requires assets recompilation
For more information, view the complete release notes and scroll down to the upgrad...
👋 Le 5 mars dernier, nous diffusions ici-même et pendant dix jours un sondage destiné à mieux connaître vos attentes quant aux institutions culturelles présentes sur Mastodon et le fediverse.
Vous aviez été très nombreux.se.s à le relayer, au total 1412 personnes y ont répondu ! 😱 Merci infiniment ! C'est au-delà de toutes nos attentes.
💫 Les résultats sont maintenant disponibles dans la Doc' de reseauCulture.fr!
Soccer players cover their mouth to communicate privately while being a public figure, viewed by many.
Implementation of roles, and the rules about exclusivity in relation to these roles for four social platforms. Words in quotes represent the precise vocabulary used on the platform.
Keith and Mic just waiting for a friend. 
I already forgot about this one.
