Welcome to another busy news week. There are too many things happening nowadays, so I’ve decided to focus more on the larger stories that need more context, and spend some less time on simpeler news like links to new apps. There are some interesting new stories again this week, with the main story of Mark Zuckerberg comments on Threads enough for it’s own article. Let’s dive in!

Mark Zuckerberg on Threads and ActivityPub

The main focus of the week is on the comments that Mark Zuckerberg has made, as they provide some clear indications of his visions for Threads, and why he thinks Threads should interoperate with the rest of the fediverse. It’s a big enough topic for its own article, which you can read here:

Mark Zuckerberg on Threads and ActivityPub

Fediseer

Fediseer is project that has gained steam recently, and is another take on the concept of shared block lists. It is centered around the concept of a “chain of trust”. Every server admin can submit information, and validate other servers whether they are trustworthy or not. The project is centred around Lemmy, although it is not exclusively so, and other fediverse servers can also use the project.

Fediseer started in the summer of 2023 as a project by @db0. When he started a Lemmy server, he noticed that quite a few other servers were major sources of spam and bot accounts. In the blog post announcing the project, @db0 explains the process in detail, but the summary is as follows: server admins claim ownership of a server, and validate that other servers are not sources of spam. The thought behind this is, that during a spam wave attack (where bad actors can easily start new bot servers), an admin can move to a allow-list, where only servers can federate who are validated.

Over the last period, this project has started to expand, and is now used to share information about servers that should be avoided as well. It is also moving beyond Lemmy, with more and more other microblogging servers such as Mastodon showing up. This puts the functionality more into the direction of shared blocklists like The Bad Space or Oliphant’s block lists. A few features of Fediseer stand out from other projects:

• It creates three different negative classifications: Censures, which is a disapproval from server A to server B. This can be for any subjective reason, and is mostly used in a similar manner as blocklists are. The Censure list gives a good impression, as it is largely servers that on most blocklists for reasons like ‘hate speech’ and ‘pedopelia’. Hesitations are a a milder form of censures, and the list gives again a good impression of how people use this. Hesitations like ‘poor communication on reports’ or ‘repost-bot’ indicate that these are indeed milder than censures. Suspicious instances are algorithmically determined, and are mainly aimed at Lemmy instances that might be sources of spam.
• It allows admins to filter the lists based on which server contributed the hesitations and censures. This allows for significantly greater customisation, forcing every admin to consciously decide which other admins they trust to listen to their suggestions for hesitations and censures.
• There is significant community buy-in. Almost all large Lemmy servers are participating, as can be seen here. This makes it that proposed blocks/censures can better represent the Lemmy community at large.

Overall, Fediseer is an interesting take on the concept of sharing information about other servers to potentially block, especially with the large community buy-in from Lemmy. A project that is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Blogging resurgence

There has been quite a bit of activity again in the blogging software for the fediverse. WriteFreely is a free, open-source blogging project that has been around for a while. It is integrated with write.as, with provides a managed hosting server with paid extra features. Activity around the project had calmed down, with the previous update that had new features stemming from summer 2021. Now, WriteFreely has finally a new update out again this week, with features such as fediverse verification.

Meanwhile, PostFreely is a recently started fork of WriteFreely, by @reiver (who also runs fediverse hosting company SpaceHost) and @matthew. To get an impression of the direction they will be taking, their Lemmy post discussing the archetypes of people who might use PostFreely.

And in the background of it all is WordPress’ ActivityPub plugin. It recently went to the official 1.0 version. It has been available for people who run their own version of WordPress, with it coming soon to all blogs who run on WordPress.com, enabling millions of blogs to easily connect to the fediverse. I’ve been running it on both my sites, and it’s a great feature to have.

German state of Saxony starts a Mastodon server

The German state of Saxony has started their own Mastodon server at social.sachsen.de/. The server is intended for the departments and organisations that are part of the government of Saxony. It is run by the Saxon Data Protection Authority ( @sdtb ), who states: “I am pleased that I can provide public bodies with a data protection-compliant social network for their public relations work.”

I personally find it interesting to see that the agency originally started with their own account on the federal German government server ( social.bund.de/explore ), and have now decided to spin up their own server for the state of Saxony. It illustrates how the government servers can function as as example for others to follow and start their own social media servers.

Germany and social networks, continued

Staying with the theme of Germany for a bit, here are another four short unrelated news items about Germany and social networks:

• Cybersecurity expert Erik Uden appears on German public television at the ZDF, one of the countries largest independent broadcasters, wearing a Mastodon t-shirt, and receiving an internship at Mastodon as a prize at the end. My German is not good enough to fully understand what its about, but the YouTube broadcast got half a million views, so at least the Germans liked it.
• German Mastodon server Mastodon.de announces a large scale pro-Mastodon campaign, saying: “the aim of bringing selected people (including artists, actors, authors, politicians, …) as well as non-profit institutions to the Fediverse. This campaign starts in October 2023 and, in our opinion, is one of the most important steps to make the Fediverse more suitable for the masses.”
• Two weeks ago I noticed that Germans are heavily overrepresented compared to other Europeans on Bluesky. This effect seems even stronger now, with German posts regularly getting to the top most popular posts on the network during prime hours for the USA as well.
• Among the many crazy and evil things Elon Musk is saying, he is now also picking a fight with the German Federal Foreign Office, who isn’t having any of it. Ethical analysis of this here.

Together these separate strands of news all point towards a shift in German culture. There are many people who have pointed out the many misgivings and ethical concerns they have with Elon Musk’s X, but there are not many government agencies who have rebuked Elon Musk so explicitly as this German government agency did. At the same time, separate data points circumstantially indicate that Germans are at the forefront of movements towards other social networks, both Mastodon, and Bluesky.

In other news

The Activitypub.rocks community is undergoing a revitalisation project. The current website is still the official website for the ActivityPub protocol, and thus by extension, for the technical part of the fediverse. As the site has not been updated since January 2021, which is not particularly inviting for new developers. The reboot of the project is happening over at the Social Hub, and is a real grass-roots movements where everyone can participate and contribute.

@jerrytheadmin implemented Cloudflare’s CSAM scanning into both Mastodon and Firefish servers. CSAM scanning is an important tool for server admins, as both the Stanford Internet Observatory report and recent weaponisation of CSAM at Lemmy have shown. Cloudflare provides a CSAM scanning tool, but this requires an admin to register with NCMEC as an organisation. It also needs custom integration into the servers, as neither Mastodon nor Firefish provide standard functionality for this. I’ve reached out for further comment.

Thank you for reading! If you want to receive this update every Sunday directly in your mailbox: subscribe right here!

#activitypub #fediverse #mastodon #threads

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-37/

Laurens Hof

2023-10-01 16:05:50

Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview with The Verge this week, about a wide variety of topics. You can watch the interview here, or read the entire transcript here. One of the topics that was touched upon was Threads, and ActivityPub. Mark Zuckerberg made some interesting comments regarding his vision on interoperability of social networks, ActivityPub, and the goals of Threads. In this article I take a deeper look at some of his statements, and how they relate to the fediverse.

On Interoperability

The comment from Mark Zuckerberg that stands out most is regarding interoperability: “the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be.” It is strange to see him tout the advantages of interoperability and open platforms, when he is the owner of multiple of the world’s largest closed platforms. Even more so, under his watch these platforms used to decrease interoperability.

Still, one of the core values of the fediverse is in promoting interoperability between products and servers, and apparently Zuckerberg is now on board with this. He gives the following reasons of why he thinks interoperability is important:

“My view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I’m just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services, that I actually think that we’ll benefit and we’ll be able to build better quality products by making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it.“

The first sentence is in line with basic fediverse values, if we interoperate with each other, we both benefit. It’s the second sentence that is just as important however, as Mark Zuckerberg immediately frames this benefit in how Meta can benefit the most from this. His actual explanation in the second sentence however is focused only on how Meta can benefit from this, and become the best (biggest) service. Interoperability is thus framed in an extractive manner: interoperability is used to create value for Meta.

The second reason mimics the first argument. Mark Zuckerberg says here:

“There’s kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don’t think that people like feeling locked into a system. So, in a way, I actually think people will feel better about using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave.”

Here, interoperability is used as a way to rebuild walled gardens. Meta’s current platforms function as a walled garden by not allowing you to take your data and social graph to a different platform. To stay with the metaphor, a wall is to prevent people from flowing out of the garden. Mark Zuckerberg’s estimation here is that replacing the wall with a sign that says ‘you can leave if you really want’ will increase the flow of people into the garden more than the flow outside of the garden. In that sense, interoperability is simply more effective than a walled garden at keeping as many people as possible using the service, from the viewpoint of Meta.

For both of the arguments, the literal, surface level reading of the arguments presented by Mark Zuckerberg might fit in with the fediverse. After all, the reason why I’m writing about the fediverse is because I also believe that interoperability between services is of benefit for both the services that do so. I also prefer to use a service when I know I am not locked in. Its the second part of the argument, the why behind the argument, is that stands out as different. Mark Zuckerberg focuses exclusively on how Threads can benefit, and ultimately make money out of it. Even the ability to leave is transformed in a reason to stay.

A Second Phase

Another remark that drew my interest was how Mark Zuckerberg seems to distinguish between two phases in social media:

“Maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into, but I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don’t think that that’s going to be where it goes.”

He is talking about interoperability again here as the distinguishing factor for the difference between phase one of social networks and the next phase. He then draws parallels to the messaging ecosystem. Meta is working on providing full interoperability for WhatsApp. Something that is conveniently not mentioned is that this interoperability for messaging apps is a requirement of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, which will come into force in spring 2024.

The implication here from Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective seems that interoperability of social networks is here to stay, due to external forces, and Meta will have to adopt.

Another note here is that Mark Zuckerberg says, when talking about decentralised social media protocols, that he has “always believed in this stuff.” Pressed by Alex Heath, he points at the technical complications of implementing a decentralised protocol into Facebook. What is not mentioned is that he also holds the majority of voting power at Meta, and that under his leadership, Facebook has actively removed functionality that enabled interoperability. For example, fediverse platform Friendica used to have a Facebook/Friendica plugin that allowed full interoperability between both platforms, until Facebook made major changes to their API that depreciated this feature.

Culture of Threads

Mark Zuckerberg again:

“A lot of the conversation around social media is around information and the utility aspect, but I think an equally important part of designing any product is how it makes you feel, right? What’s the kind of emotional charge of it, and how do you come away from that feeling?”

and

“I think Twitter indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical. I think that that’s sort of the design. It’s not that the designers wanted to make people feel bad. I think they wanted to have a maximum kind of intense debate, right?”

and

“So I think how we set the culture for Threads early on in terms of being a more positive, friendly place for discussion will hopefully be one of the defining elements for the next decade as we scale it out.”

Together this provides a picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of social networks and Threads, and gives more context of why he values interoperability all of a sudden.

Content moderation at scale is extremely hard and expensive, and Meta’s historical track record is absolutely disastrous. Like, playing-a-determining-role-in-genocide-levels of disastrous.
Given that context, it’s no surprise that Meta has little interest in content that’s associated with negative emotions. It is in their interest to have content with negative emotions not to be posted on their platforms. Making declarations of intent is vastly easier than actually implementing them however. For example, the account libsoftiktok is allowed on Threads, and it is hard to square that with the intent of focusing on positive and friendly content.

Still, leaving aside the challenges that Meta has with implementing this vision (if it is even realistically attainable), Meta’s new preference for interoperability fits in with a preference for positive content over negative content. Twitter has been very successful with a focus on heavy news and content that is often more negatively emotionally charged, in Mark Zuckerberg’s view. This means that disincentivising negative content from Threads, also means losing out on content that made Twitter so successful. Interoperability can provide an opportunity here for Meta and Threads. Reading between the lines, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg hopes that people will post the positive content on Threads, and the more negative content on other ActivityPub networks. This way, people on Threads have access to all the content they want, while Threads gets to push the responsibility of content moderation for more difficult topics towards the owners of other interoperable networks.

What To Expect

The prospect of Threads joining the fediverse has been a hotly debated topic. People have expressed major concerns about the implications regarding content moderation, safety and privacy. Other people have expressed doubts whether Meta will actually move forward with their plans. This interview with Mark Zuckerberg seems to do little to alleviate concerns regarding safety, privacy and content moderation. It does provide however some clear indication that at this point in time, Meta is serious about adding ActivityPub support to Threads. Plans can always change however, and nothing is guaranteed until it actually happens.

#activitypub #facebook #fediverse #meta #threads

https://fediversereport.com/zuckerberg-on-threads-and-activitypub/

U.N. investigators cite Facebook role in Myanmar crisis

U.N. human rights experts investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said on Monday that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech there.

^{Tom Miles (Reuters)}

Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview with The Verge this week, about a wide variety of topics. You can watch the interview here, or read the entire transcript here. One of the topics that was touched upon was Threads, and ActivityPub. Mark Zuckerberg made some interesting comments regarding his vision on interoperability of social networks, ActivityPub, and the goals of Threads. In this article I take a deeper look at some of his statements, and how they relate to the fediverse.

On Interoperability

The comment from Mark Zuckerberg that stands out most is regarding interoperability: “the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be.” It is strange to see him tout the advantages of interoperability and open platforms, when he is the owner of multiple of the world’s largest closed platforms. Even more so, under his watch these platforms used to decrease interoperability.

Still, one of the core values of the fediverse is in promoting interoperability between products and servers, and apparently Zuckerberg is now on board with this. He gives the following reasons of why he thinks interoperability is important:

“My view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I’m just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services, that I actually think that we’ll benefit and we’ll be able to build better quality products by making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it.“

The first sentence is in line with basic fediverse values, if we interoperate with each other, we both benefit. It’s the second sentence that is just as important however, as Mark Zuckerberg immediately frames this benefit in how Meta can benefit the most from this. His actual explanation in the second sentence however is focused only on how Meta can benefit from this, and become the best (biggest) service. Interoperability is thus framed in an extractive manner: interoperability is used to create value for Meta.

The second reason mimics the first argument. Mark Zuckerberg says here:

“There’s kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don’t think that people like feeling locked into a system. So, in a way, I actually think people will feel better about using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave.”

Here, interoperability is used as a way to rebuild walled gardens. Meta’s current platforms function as a walled garden by not allowing you to take your data and social graph to a different platform. To stay with the metaphor, a wall is to prevent people from flowing out of the garden. Mark Zuckerberg’s estimation here is that replacing the wall with a sign that says ‘you can leave if you really want’ will increase the flow of people into the garden more than the flow outside of the garden. In that sense, interoperability is simply more effective than a walled garden at keeping as many people as possible using the service, from the viewpoint of Meta.

For both of the arguments, the literal, surface level reading of the arguments presented by Mark Zuckerberg might fit in with the fediverse. After all, the reason why I’m writing about the fediverse is because I also believe that interoperability between services is of benefit for both the services that do so. I also prefer to use a service when I know I am not locked in. Its the second part of the argument, the why behind the argument, is that stands out as different. Mark Zuckerberg focuses exclusively on how Threads can benefit, and ultimately make money out of it. Even the ability to leave is transformed in a reason to stay.

A Second Phase

Another remark that drew my interest was how Mark Zuckerberg seems to distinguish between two phases in social media:

“Maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into, but I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don’t think that that’s going to be where it goes.”

He is talking about interoperability again here as the distinguishing factor for the difference between phase one of social networks and the next phase. He then draws parallels to the messaging ecosystem. Meta is working on providing full interoperability for WhatsApp. Something that is conveniently not mentioned is that this interoperability for messaging apps is a requirement of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, which will come into force in spring 2024.

The implication here from Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective seems that interoperability of social networks is here to stay, due to external forces, and Meta will have to adopt.

Another note here is that Mark Zuckerberg says, when talking about decentralised social media protocols, that he has “always believed in this stuff.” Pressed by Alex Heath, he points at the technical complications of implementing a decentralised protocol into Facebook. What is not mentioned is that he also holds the majority of voting power at Meta, and that under his leadership, Facebook has actively removed functionality that enabled interoperability. For example, fediverse platform Friendica used to have a Facebook/Friendica plugin that allowed full interoperability between both platforms, until Facebook made major changes to their API that depreciated this feature.

Culture of Threads

Mark Zuckerberg again:

“A lot of the conversation around social media is around information and the utility aspect, but I think an equally important part of designing any product is how it makes you feel, right? What’s the kind of emotional charge of it, and how do you come away from that feeling?”

and

“I think Twitter indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical. I think that that’s sort of the design. It’s not that the designers wanted to make people feel bad. I think they wanted to have a maximum kind of intense debate, right?”

and

“So I think how we set the culture for Threads early on in terms of being a more positive, friendly place for discussion will hopefully be one of the defining elements for the next decade as we scale it out.”

Together this provides a picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of social networks and Threads, and gives more context of why he values interoperability all of a sudden.

Content moderation at scale is extremely hard and expensive, and Meta’s historical track record is absolutely disastrous. Like, playing-a-determining-role-in-genocide-levels of disastrous.
Given that context, it’s no surprise that Meta has little interest in content that’s associated with negative emotions. It is in their interest to have content with negative emotions not to be posted on their platforms. Making declarations of intent is vastly easier than actually implementing them however. For example, the account libsoftiktok is allowed on Threads, and it is hard to square that with the intent of focusing on positive and friendly content.

Still, leaving aside the challenges that Meta has with implementing this vision (if it is even realistically attainable), Meta’s new preference for interoperability fits in with a preference for positive content over negative content. Twitter has been very successful with a focus on heavy news and content that is often more negatively emotionally charged, in Mark Zuckerberg’s view. This means that disincentivising negative content from Threads, also means losing out on content that made Twitter so successful. Interoperability can provide an opportunity here for Meta and Threads. Reading between the lines, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg hopes that people will post the positive content on Threads, and the more negative content on other ActivityPub networks. This way, people on Threads have access to all the content they want, while Threads gets to push the responsibility of content moderation for more difficult topics towards the owners of other interoperable networks.

What To Expect

The prospect of Threads joining the fediverse has been a hotly debated topic. People have expressed major concerns about the implications regarding content moderation, safety and privacy. Other people have expressed doubts whether Meta will actually move forward with their plans. This interview with Mark Zuckerberg seems to do little to alleviate concerns regarding safety, privacy and content moderation. It does provide however some clear indication that at this point in time, Meta is serious about adding ActivityPub support to Threads. Plans can always change however, and nothing is guaranteed until it actually happens.

#activitypub #facebook #fediverse #meta #threads

https://fediversereport.com/zuckerberg-on-threads-and-activitypub/

Laurens Hof

2023-10-01 16:05:50

Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview with The Verge this week, about a wide variety of topics. You can watch the interview here, or read the entire transcript here. One of the topics that was touched upon was Threads, and ActivityPub. Mark Zuckerberg made some interesting comments regarding his vision on interoperability of social networks, ActivityPub, and the goals of Threads. In this article I take a deeper look at some of his statements, and how they relate to the fediverse.

On Interoperability

The comment from Mark Zuckerberg that stands out most is regarding interoperability: “the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be.” It is strange to see him tout the advantages of interoperability and open platforms, when he is the owner of multiple of the world’s largest closed platforms. Even more so, under his watch these platforms used to decrease interoperability.

Still, one of the core values of the fediverse is in promoting interoperability between products and servers, and apparently Zuckerberg is now on board with this. He gives the following reasons of why he thinks interoperability is important:

“My view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I’m just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services, that I actually think that we’ll benefit and we’ll be able to build better quality products by making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it.“

The first sentence is in line with basic fediverse values, if we interoperate with each other, we both benefit. It’s the second sentence that is just as important however, as Mark Zuckerberg immediately frames this benefit in how Meta can benefit the most from this. His actual explanation in the second sentence however is focused only on how Meta can benefit from this, and become the best (biggest) service. Interoperability is thus framed in an extractive manner: interoperability is used to create value for Meta.

The second reason mimics the first argument. Mark Zuckerberg says here:

“There’s kind of this funny counterintuitive thing where I just don’t think that people like feeling locked into a system. So, in a way, I actually think people will feel better about using our products if they know that they have the choice to leave.”

Here, interoperability is used as a way to rebuild walled gardens. Meta’s current platforms function as a walled garden by not allowing you to take your data and social graph to a different platform. To stay with the metaphor, a wall is to prevent people from flowing out of the garden. Mark Zuckerberg’s estimation here is that replacing the wall with a sign that says ‘you can leave if you really want’ will increase the flow of people into the garden more than the flow outside of the garden. In that sense, interoperability is simply more effective than a walled garden at keeping as many people as possible using the service, from the viewpoint of Meta.

For both of the arguments, the literal, surface level reading of the arguments presented by Mark Zuckerberg might fit in with the fediverse. After all, the reason why I’m writing about the fediverse is because I also believe that interoperability between services is of benefit for both the services that do so. I also prefer to use a service when I know I am not locked in. Its the second part of the argument, the why behind the argument, is that stands out as different. Mark Zuckerberg focuses exclusively on how Threads can benefit, and ultimately make money out of it. Even the ability to leave is transformed in a reason to stay.

A Second Phase

Another remark that drew my interest was how Mark Zuckerberg seems to distinguish between two phases in social media:

“Maybe for phase one of social networking, it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into, but I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don’t think that that’s going to be where it goes.”

He is talking about interoperability again here as the distinguishing factor for the difference between phase one of social networks and the next phase. He then draws parallels to the messaging ecosystem. Meta is working on providing full interoperability for WhatsApp. Something that is conveniently not mentioned is that this interoperability for messaging apps is a requirement of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, which will come into force in spring 2024.

The implication here from Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective seems that interoperability of social networks is here to stay, due to external forces, and Meta will have to adopt.

Another note here is that Mark Zuckerberg says, when talking about decentralised social media protocols, that he has “always believed in this stuff.” Pressed by Alex Heath, he points at the technical complications of implementing a decentralised protocol into Facebook. What is not mentioned is that he also holds the majority of voting power at Meta, and that under his leadership, Facebook has actively removed functionality that enabled interoperability. For example, fediverse platform Friendica used to have a Facebook/Friendica plugin that allowed full interoperability between both platforms, until Facebook made major changes to their API that depreciated this feature.

Culture of Threads

Mark Zuckerberg again:

“A lot of the conversation around social media is around information and the utility aspect, but I think an equally important part of designing any product is how it makes you feel, right? What’s the kind of emotional charge of it, and how do you come away from that feeling?”

and

“I think Twitter indexes very strongly on just being quite negative and critical. I think that that’s sort of the design. It’s not that the designers wanted to make people feel bad. I think they wanted to have a maximum kind of intense debate, right?”

and

“So I think how we set the culture for Threads early on in terms of being a more positive, friendly place for discussion will hopefully be one of the defining elements for the next decade as we scale it out.”

Together this provides a picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of social networks and Threads, and gives more context of why he values interoperability all of a sudden.

Content moderation at scale is extremely hard and expensive, and Meta’s historical track record is absolutely disastrous. Like, playing-a-determining-role-in-genocide-levels of disastrous.
Given that context, it’s no surprise that Meta has little interest in content that’s associated with negative emotions. It is in their interest to have content with negative emotions not to be posted on their platforms. Making declarations of intent is vastly easier than actually implementing them however. For example, the account libsoftiktok is allowed on Threads, and it is hard to square that with the intent of focusing on positive and friendly content.

Still, leaving aside the challenges that Meta has with implementing this vision (if it is even realistically attainable), Meta’s new preference for interoperability fits in with a preference for positive content over negative content. Twitter has been very successful with a focus on heavy news and content that is often more negatively emotionally charged, in Mark Zuckerberg’s view. This means that disincentivising negative content from Threads, also means losing out on content that made Twitter so successful. Interoperability can provide an opportunity here for Meta and Threads. Reading between the lines, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg hopes that people will post the positive content on Threads, and the more negative content on other ActivityPub networks. This way, people on Threads have access to all the content they want, while Threads gets to push the responsibility of content moderation for more difficult topics towards the owners of other interoperable networks.

What To Expect

The prospect of Threads joining the fediverse has been a hotly debated topic. People have expressed major concerns about the implications regarding content moderation, safety and privacy. Other people have expressed doubts whether Meta will actually move forward with their plans. This interview with Mark Zuckerberg seems to do little to alleviate concerns regarding safety, privacy and content moderation. It does provide however some clear indication that at this point in time, Meta is serious about adding ActivityPub support to Threads. Plans can always change however, and nothing is guaranteed until it actually happens.

#activitypub #facebook #fediverse #meta #threads

https://fediversereport.com/zuckerberg-on-threads-and-activitypub/

U.N. investigators cite Facebook role in Myanmar crisis

U.N. human rights experts investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said on Monday that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech there.

^{Tom Miles (Reuters)}

The Fediverse may become flooded with billions of new users over the next six months after the @EU_Commission declared that six major tech companies have less than a year to comply or face fines based on global revenues.

Image: from Pixabay, discovered on Fediverse Party.

The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers – […]

https://darnell.tv/2023/09/07/billions-fediverse-europe-dma/

darnelltv

2023-09-07 05:14:21

The Fediverse may become flooded with billions of new users over the next six months after the @[url=https://social.network.europa.eu/users/EU_Commission]European Commission[/url] declared that six major tech companies have less than a year to comply or face fines based on global revenues.

Image: from Pixabay, discovered on Fediverse Party.

The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers – […]

https://darnell.tv/2023/09/07/billions-fediverse-europe-dma/

There’s no need to run instances of #Threads because Threads will soon federate via #ActivityPub.

And by federating via ActivityPub, they get data from #Mastodon, #WordPress, #PeerTube, #Kbin, etc. – unless, of course, those ActivityPub-enabled servers choose not to federate.

(Sidenote: Meta can still get that data via RSS, but it’s probably better for them to receive via push request than pull request.)

Most social media companies don’t want to be publishers. They’d rather be platforms. And if you’re building a platform that merely integrates with an already existing social network (the Fediverse), you have all the more reason to say you’re not a publisher.

This way, when those politicians call Zuckerberg down to Washington, and ask him why he’s hampering their freedom of speech, he can just say, “No, we can’t hurt anyone’s freedom of speech – that congressman we kicked out of Threads a month ago can set up a Mastodon server if he wants…”

Of course, I can talk about the many other benefits of not being a publisher but that would take much too long.

If the Socialverse (social networks online) were the Star Trek universe, then the Fediverse would be The Federation: a union of multiple applications founded on the principles of liberty, equality, peace, justice & progress (ok, so maybe your’s truly borrowed some text from Star Trek).

Image Credit: From Star Trek, Deep Space Nine (image discovered via Memory […]

https://darnell.tv/2022/12/11/tumblr-dominion-fediverse-automattic/

darnelltv

2022-12-11 05:16:49

If the Socialverse (social networks online) were the Star Trek universe, then the Fediverse would be The Federation: a union of multiple applications founded on the principles of liberty, equality, peace, justice & progress (ok, so maybe your’s truly borrowed some text from Star Trek).

Image Credit: From Star Trek, Deep Space Nine (image discovered via Memory […]

https://darnell.tv/2022/12/11/tumblr-dominion-fediverse-automattic/

So #Meta wants to build the greatest #ActivityPub platform in the #Fediverse.

👉🏾 Meta: The Greatest Fediverse App Will Be Built By Us (Threads) https://darnell.day/meta-the-greatest-fediverse-app-will-be-built-by-us-threads 🔛 @darnell@darnell.day

Too Long; Did Not Read:

👉🏾 #Threads focusing on being “positive”
👉🏾 #Facebook & #Instagram will not embrace Fediverse due to current architecture
👉🏾 Meta to challenge #Minds, #Mastodon & #Misskey for Fediverse crown.

📹 Zuck interview: https://youtu.be/9aCg7jH4S1w

👉🏾 The Verge article: https://www.theverge.com/23889057/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-elon-musk-threads-quest-interview-decoder

Darnell (Seize The Day)

2023-09-27 23:59:53

Meta: The Greatest Fediverse App Will Be Built By Us (Threads)

Image Credit: @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org on Pepper & Carrot

So the Verge has an excellent interview of @zuck@threads.net by @alexheath@threads.net & the first 17 minutes of the interview are worth watching (after that it deviates into other topics).

You can read the transcript on the Verge or watch the video below, but there were a few interesting highlights.

//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2F9aCg7jH4S1w%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D9aCg7jH4S1w&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2F9aCg7jH4S1w%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=d932fa08bf1f47efbbe54cb3d746839f&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Cultural Foundation For Threads

Meta wants to build out a foundation for Threads based on positivity according to Mark Zuckerberg.

So that's been a big part of how we've tried to emphasize and develop Threads. And, you know, over time, if you want it to be ubiquitous, you obviously want to be welcome to everyone. But I think how you seed the networks and the culture that you create there, I think, ends up being pretty important for how they scale over time.

Where with Facebook, we started with this real name culture, and it was grounded to your college email address. You know, it obviously hasn't been grounded to your college email address for a very long time, but I think the kind of real authentic identity aspect of Facebook has continued and continues to be an important part of it.

So I think how we set the culture for Threads early on in terms of being a more positive, friendly place for discussion will hopefully be one of the defining elements for the next decade as we scale it out. We obviously have a lot of work to do, but I'd say it's off to quite a good start. Obviously, there's the huge spike, and then, you know, not everyone who tried it out originally is going to stick around immediately. But I mean, the monthly active's and weekly's, I don't think we're sharing stats on it yet.

Zuckerberg declined to release official stats for Threads (so rumors of Threads stagnating might be premature), but he seems content with its size thus far as the site is only three months old.

Facebook (& Maybe Instagram) Will Never Fully Embrace The Fediverse

It looks as if my theory that Facebook (& by extension Instagram) would eventually embrace the Fediverse will probably never happen for technical reasons.

I've had our team at various times do the thought experiment of like, “Alright, what would it take to move all of Facebook onto some kind of decentralized protocol?” And it's like, “That's just not going to happen.” There's so much functionality that is on Facebook that it's way too complicated, and you can't even support all the different things, and it would just take so long, and you'd not be innovating during that time.

I think that there's value in being on one of these protocols, but it's not the only way to deliver value, so the opportunity cost of doing this massive transition is kind of this massive thing. But when you're starting from scratch, you can just design it so it can work with that. And we want to do that with this because I thought that that was one of the interesting things that's evolving around this kind of Twitter competitive space, and there's a real ecosystem around that, and I think it's interesting.

Ironically Threads messaging will be powered by Instagram, but Instagram itself will probably not fully embrace ActivityPub. This probably means platforms like Pixelfed will face no direct competition within the Fediverse from Meta.

Build The Best ActivityPub App (Threads By Meta)

Meta does intend to build the best ActivityPub on Earth & challenge platforms like Minds, Mastodon, & Misskey (the “3 M’s”) for the Fediverse crown.

Well, I guess my view is that the more that there's interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be. And I guess I'm just confident enough that we can build the best one of the services, that I actually think that we'll benefit and we'll be able to build better quality products by making sure that we can have access to all of the different content from wherever anyone is creating it.

Threads has the resources to build the best ActivityPub app, but the question is whether they can convince the masses to use their platform over rival services (most of whom are open source).

My prediction: Threads will help bring the Fediverse to the mainstream, but most governments, companies, geeks, celebrities, etcetera, will eventually choose to host their own content on domains or servers that they control.

I do believe Threads will probably reach 100 million active users over the years, but my money is on Automattic will end up dominating the Fediverse in the future via WordPress & Tumblr (fun fact: Tumblr is larger than Threads right now).

👨🏾‍💻 by Darnell Clayton 🔛 @darnell@darnell.day

🕺🏾 Follow my adventures upon: 👉🏾 @darnell@one.darnell.one 🐘 (Mastodon) 👉🏾 @darnell@darnell.moe 🦁 (Misskey) 👉🏾 @darnell@threads.net 🧵 (Threads)

🦹🏾‍♂️ Other digital havens: 👉🏾 @darnell@darnell.app 📸 (Pixelfed) 👉🏾 @darnelltv@darnell.tv 👨🏾‍💻 (WordPress) 👉🏾 @darnell@counter.social 🥷🏾 (Counter Social)

👨🏾‍💻 by Darnell Clayton 🔛 @darnell@darnell.day

🕺🏾 Follow my adventures upon: 👉🏾 @darnell@one.darnell.one 🐘 (Mastodon) 👉🏾 @darnell@darnell.moe 🦁 (Misskey) 👉🏾 @darnell@threads.net 🧵 (Threads)

🦹🏾‍♂️ Other digital havens: 👉🏾 @darnell@darnell.app 📸 (Pixelfed) 👉🏾 @darnelltv@darnell.tv 👨🏾‍💻 (WordPress) 👉🏾 @darnell@counter.social 🥷🏾 (Counter Social)

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg on Threads, the future of AI, and Quest 3

Meta CEO Mark Zuckeberg sits down with Decoder guest host Alex Heath for a rare interview on the future of AI, his feud with Elon Musk, and all the Quest 3 news out of Meta Connect.

^{Alex Heath (The Verge)}

Good morning Fediverse. The mornings are becoming chilly where I live. The birds also seem to feel it and are chirping less enthusiastically at the blue sky.

Anyway, there's a lot of Fediverse news, and I'm slowly posting links to them. Today, let's talk about ActivityPub Minimal Core (AP Core). First, I think this is important. I might have stated it already, but one problem with ActivityPub is that it talks about too much, or said differently ActivityPub is not properly scoped.

For example, a good scope for "ActivityPub: the Federation Protocol" would be, everything that happens between enqueuing a message to be send on the Sending Server to what happens up to enqueuing a message to be processed on the Receiving Server. There is some stuff that sensibly belongs into a Federation Procotol like follower management.

On another note, a less complicated implemented of ActivityPub that actually federates with the Fediverse is given by pixels, whose source code can be found here. It's 205 LOC, and I didn't spend energy trying to decrease them. I could probably reduce by about half spending energy.

Welcome to another busy week, with the FediForum conference, Mastodon 4.2 update, new safety tools, and more. Let’s dive right in:

FediForum

The update on FediForum got big enough to be it’s own post, which you can read here:

FediForum September 2023

Mastodon 4.2

Mastodon has officially launched the 4.2 update. With this update come a variety of highly anticipated features, such as opt-in search and a better onboarding experience. Here is the official blog post by Mastodon announcing the update. It has gotten a fair bit of media attention as well, with articles by The Verge and TechCrunch. Both focus on how Mastodon has gotten easier to use with this new update, via the onboarding process, but also via better interaction if you open a Mastodon post on a server that is not your own home server.

Mastodon has been focused on getting consent from people for being included into search. This is inherent in a decentralised platform; you cannot make any assumptions about other people who run their own server, as they are completely free to have their own preferences. This is not without drawbacks however, as searching tools become more valuable when they cover a larger percentage of the network. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko indicated that 14k people have opted into search so far, after that the search patch has been available for over two weeks on the biggest server, mastodon.social. This makes it less than 5% of active users that have opted into search after two weeks. Other fediverse software projects are following the design of Mastodon when it comes to opt-in search: Firefish recently moved to the same opt-in structure, and now Pixelfed has annouced to do so as well.

The 4.2 update comes with other great features as well. A personal favourite of mine in this update is the new option of exclusive lists. You can now set an account to be ‘exclusive’, and posts by accounts on this list do not show up in your home feed anymore, and you only see them while you’re looking at this list. I use this to add bots such as the mastodonusercount bot and the Alt Text Health bot to an exclusive lists. They are interesting bots with information that I want to know, but do not need to clutter up my home feed. Now, I can keep track of the information the bots send out, and only see it when I want to.

Fedi-safety

Recently, Lemmy has experienced multiple attacks where people weaponised Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), as I’ve written about here. By uploading CSAM to Lemmy communities, they expose the admins of Lemmy servers to significant liability, as well as hurting both the actual victims as well as the people who see the images.

One of the practical problems that admins face here is that automated scanning of images is possible, but locked behind large providers such as Cloudflare. For a small server admin it is not feasible to meet all the regulatory requirements to be able to partake in such automated scanning. Beyond that, people are hesitant to use Cloudflare in the first place, as it does mean that all your content gets scanned by a large tech company. One part of the things these scanning tools do is compare images that get uploaded Lemmy for example against a dataset of known CSAM. As such, access to these tools is often highly restrictive

@db0, who also created the AI Horde, used the knowledge he build up there to create a tool called Fedi-safety. This tool allows admins to scan their database for CSAM. Instead of comparing against an actual dataset of CSAM, it instead uses the abilities provided by generative AI tools to determine if an image contains both sexual content as well as depictions of children. @db0 has a more detailed explanation here. In the description of the Fediverse Safety tool, he explains that “this tool will have a lot false positives”. False positives means in this case the tool will classify an image as CSAM when it is not. Considering the costs that come with having false negatives (an CSAM image does not get classified as CSAM), this might be a worthwhile tradeoff for admins.

Now, @db0 created the another update, which is integration of the fedi-safety tool directly into Lemmy. Once it is installed, the scanning of images now happen when a user tries to upload an image. When the scanner thinks the image is unsafe, the image cannot be uploaded and spread around the network at all. As with the fedi-safety tool, it comes with the price of false positives. One thing that does stand out about it is that the scanning of images can be completely self-hosted on your own GPU. People can be hesitant about sending images to third party scanners. With this tool, the scanning can be done by the same server admin who you are already entrusting your image to. Another aspect that people worry about is if their content is used to train an AI. The fedi-safety tool does not do that, as it is completely locally run, and immediately deletes images after scanning.

FediGov

FediGov is an campaign that is started by the Free Software Foundation Europe, with the goal of convincing public authorities to rethink their use of social media. The initiative hopes to convince more governments to use the fediverse, suggesting that they use Mastodon, PeerTube and Pixelfed instead. They list four main reasons why governments should do so: sovereignty, privacy, the use of public funds, and legal certainty. These arguments are noticeably similar to the arguments that the Dutch and Swiss governments recently gave when they introduced their own Mastodon servers this summer. Especially the arguments around sovereignty and privacy were explicitly mentioned as core reasons for the Dutch and Swiss governments to start their Mastodon pilots, indicating that this is indeed strong arguments for the FSFE to focus on.

The links

• IFTAS is offering funding for personal digital safety services to fediverse moderators.
• An excellent guide by WeDistribute on how to connect your WordPress blog to the fediverse.
• Kbin has restricted federation to only other Kbin and Lemmy servers. Admin Ernest cites “recent spam campaigns, untested features, and the lack possibility of quick fixes on the new infrastructure” as the reasons.
• Talking about Kbin, @reiver documents his experiences as a new Kbin admin here.
• Flipboard is working on full federation. This is fairly exciting news, and something I’m sure that will be revisited soon.
• Renaud Chaput is now officially the CTO of Mastodon.
• MissKey, not to be outdone by Mastodon’s major 4.2 update, has a major update as well. The patch notes are only available in Japanese, here, further reinforcing the concept that MissKey is primarily for the Japanese side of the fediverse.
• Lemmy is starting with a bi-weekly development update. The first version is here.
• Evan Prodromou posted some comments about the SWICG rechartering process. This week saw another meeting of the SWICG as well about this. I could not make it, and have not gotten around diving into this. Expect an update on this next week.

Final note

On a final note: last week I promised an update on the situation with The Bad Space. After spending quite some time on it, and realising I still had not a full overview of the entire situation, I don’t think I am in a situation where I can give a fair and balanced overview of the situation. The situation cannot be seen independent of both a historical context, as well as a larger analysis of block lists in general. This is not something I can provide at this time. Thank you for your understanding.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want to receive this update every Sunday directly in your mailbox, subscribe below!

#activitypub #fediverse #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-36/

Laurens Hof

2023-09-24 18:56:04

This week saw the second edition of FediForum, a two-day virtual unconference about the fediverse. It had more than 100 people attending, and provided an opportunity for the many people who are working on the fediverse to get together, showcase their work, and have conversations about the many topics of discussion.

Demos

Every day started with demos by fediverse projects, such as the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, a demo of Micro.blog, and how work on Bonfire is moving towards a release version. It also showed interesting tools such as FeedSeer and Fediseer, two very different projects with very similar names. FeedSeer allows you to get a clear overview of the links and news items that are being discussed in your personal feed. Fediseer is a chain-of-trust system of fediverse server admins to share which servers are they think are trustworthy, and which ones they think they don’t. Fediseer is an interesting new take on the topic of content moderation and shared deny lists.

Another demo that stood out to me was that of Gath.io. Gath is an open source event planner that anyone can use, that originated outside of the fediverse. @Darius added ActivityPub support to it, so you can interact with it via the rest of the fediverse, such as subscribing to RSVP’ing to a specific event directly from your Mastodon account. It’s a cool project for both the service it offers, as well as for showcasing that the fediverse can also be expanded by adding support to existing other applications. Fediseer and Gath.io are services that I’ll revisit in the near future, as they deserve a closer look.

The sessions

Most of the conference is focused on the sessions, where anyone can call a session about a subject they prefer. Subjects were wildly varied, ranging from discussions about governance to content moderation, from project showcases to technical discussions about specific features. While there were way too many sessions to cover here, I want mention a few that stood out the me:

Ian Forrester held a Q&A about the BBC’s experiences with their new Mastodon server. He noted that when convincing other people of the project, it’s important to focus on the human values, and that numbers of followers don’t really matter for success. He says that if the focus is on numbers, it’ll not seem worthwhile. What also stands out is how organisations look at other organisations for what they are doing. Ian says that it was easier to convince others in the BBC when they could point to other governments and public broadcasters being active on the fediverse. In return, one of the feedback that the BBC gets now is that other organisations are saying “look, the BBC is doing this, why don’t we do this”. What is also encouraging to hear, is that unless something major happens, the BBC plans to run the server the 6-month experiment end date.

The presentations by IFTAS were noteworthy as well, with a preliminary presentation of the survey on fediverse content moderation (to be publicly released soon), as well as an explanation of how the organisation is currently working on improving Trust and Safety on the fediverse. The presentation on their current work can be viewed here. They are working on a deny list subscription service called FediCheck, where admins can subscribe to a deny list that should form a baseline of the minimum necessary servers to block. This is done by focusing on the communality of the deny lists of the largest servers on the fediverse. Admins of these servers can sign up to give their consent, here.

Moving forward

What does stand out however is the lack of representation of any of the big projects on the fediverse. FediForum had a large number of people present who want to push the fediverse forward. But in the end, changes need buy-in and implementation from the projects that people on the fediverse are using. Especially in the context of content moderation and trust and safety, where the fediverse still needs better tooling. There were presentations, ideas and concrete tools on how to improve the safety for both Mastodon and Lemmy. But as far as I could tell, there were no representations by Mastodon, Lemmy, or any of the other big fediverse projects. This stands out even more considering that Meta had multiple representatives that were part of the conversations on how to improve content moderation on the fediverse. For future editions of the FediForum, it is definitely worth watching this develops.

EDIT: FediForum indicates that the detailed notes of the sessions will be out very soon. When that happens I’ll place a link here.

#activitypub #fediverse #fediversenews #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/fediforum-september-2023/

FeedSeer News

FeedSeer News shows you the most popular links and news articles being discussed in your Mastodon feed.

^{news.feedseer.com}

Welcome! It’s been an eventful week, especially on Lemmy. Let’s dive right in!

Lemmy and CSAM attacks

Lemmy experienced a CSAM attack this week, with some significant ramifications for the entire network. It started early in the week, where new accounts created on lemmy.world posted Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on multiple communities. This prompted the lemmy.world admins on Monday to set the registration to application only, with no more open signup on the server. The next day the CSAM attack continued, this time from accounts made on other servers that posted to communities on lemmy.world. As a response the lemmy.world admins closed the lemmyshitpost community, as that seemed to be the main focus of the attack.

This problem with CSAM on Lemmy differs from the problem that Mastodon has with CSAM, as reported on earlier this summer. When the Stanford Internet Observatory report found CSAM on Mastodon, it often existed below the surface, with the vast majority of users never encountering the material. The attack on Lemmy seems to have been executed with the purpose of getting people to see the material, as quite some people reported seeing the material.

One of the major impacts of this attack relates to technical design choices that Lemmy has made. Images that are posted on server A get send over and stored on server B, when someone on server B follows a community on server A. Images that are posted on lemmy.world, the biggest Lemmy server, exists in the databases of most other Lemmy servers as well. This means that due to the attack on lemmy.world, many Lemmy admins do now have images of CSAM in their database. With it comes liability for the admins, as well as reporting requirements. IFTAS has a good overview of the resources for admins to navigate these requirements.

Other aspects of Lemmy have confounded the issue of third party servers unwittingly hosting CSAM. It is currently not possible to federate with other Lemmy servers, and receive the text of a post, without also receiving and hosting the images of a post. Mastodon for example does allow servers to reject images while not rejecting text. Selective deletion of images in the database on Lemmy is also hard to do, and as a result, servers decided to delete all federated images in their database.

One of the ways admins deal with this new threat is with a new AI scanning tool called Lemmy Safety, created by the admin of the dbzer0 lemmy server. It scans all images in the Lemmy database for potential CSAM, and automatically deletes the images, and can also be used to scan newly incoming images. While this can help in the short term with making sure there is no CSAM material, it might interfere with legal obligations that administrators have. In various jurisdictions, administrators are required to report to the relevant authorities when they become aware of CSAM. Again, this collection of resources by IFTAS is a good start with helpful information.

It is clear that this is a complicated problem for volunteer admins to deal with. Multiple administrators concluded that the risks and complications of continuing to host Lemmy servers is not worth it. Other servers, such as lemm.ee have made extensive plans on how to deal with the situation, such as disabling image uploads, and applying a custom patch to prevent images from other servers to be saved on their server. They also float the idea of an invite-based registration system.

On the Matrix chat channels for Lemmy admins, tension is rising, and people are frustrated with the lack of acknowledgement and communications from the developers @dessalines and @nutomic. The developers have not communicated anything about this on either their Matrix chat channels or on their Lemmy. On their GitHub, the dbzer0 admin proposed to expand his automated CSAM scanning to allow for saving and review potential hits, instead of outright deletion. Developer @dessalines stated that this “is not something we have time for rn.” For servers that are operated under US law however, administrators are mandated to save CSAM they encounter, report it to the authorities, make it not visible for users, and restrict access to the saved material as best as possible. The outright rejection by the main developer to build tools that can admins satisfy these legal requirements does not help the confidence of admins who are worried about their responsibilities.

Meanwhile, new reports are starting to pop up of a new type of CSAM attack. Posts that are titled ‘Tiktok Cringe’, and first show a few seconds of a random tiktok video, and then switch to CSAM material. This makes it really easy for moderators to miss the content, unless they watch the entire video. At this point, it is unclear if this was an isolated incident, or part of a bigger attack. How this situation will develop in the near future is out in the open, but I’m sure we’ll come back to it soon.

In other news

Social network Minds has been working on implementing ActivityPub, and are now mostly connected to the fediverse. Minds, which launched in 2015, has a strong focus on free speech and cryptocurrency. As such, multiple outlets report the far-right nature of its user base. Minds reported that they joined the fediverse in a not particularly clear post. So far it seems like posts made on Minds are visible on Mastodon, but comments made by Mastodon users on a post made by Minds, are not visible on the Minds’ platform itself. The culture and ethics of Minds seems to differ significantly from that of most fediverse servers, and if Minds becomes more prominently visible within the fediverse, this will likely lead to friction and conversations around defederation. On the other hand, it does give another indication that ActivityPub is becoming the standard protocol for other social networks to implement.

A contributor to the Tusky project (an open source Android client for Mastodon) leaves the project, and writes a blog post alleging financial mismanagement. The other contributors write an extensive explanation of the situation, denying the allegations. While the situation itself is not particularly impactful for the fediverse, it is a good illustration of how difficult the organisational aspect of collectively building software on the fediverse is.

The links

• Misskey is raising funds for an official iOS app.
• Technology website The Verge has moved their backend to WordPress. Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel calls this a bet for The Verge on Threads, and by extension ActivityPub.
• Pixelfed has many features in the works. Developer @dansup has announced groups, channels, and a solo server project, and is working on other fediverse projects as well. One of these features, Stories, is finally shipping for mobile.
• The Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, has joined the fediverse on the social.bund.de server.
• Interoperability between software on the fediverse is often more complicated than the ideals of the fediverse might suggest. Here is an overview of the conversations around a testing suite for ActivityPub, which can help make sure that different software works properly with the rest of the fediverse.
  
  • If you are a developer of fediverse software, it’s recommended to check out this first version of a test suite by Steve Bate.

  
  

• Search on Mastodon is complex, Terence Eden writes, for a variety of both social and technical reasons. The vmst.io server has made extensive documentation for Mastodon search, visible here.

Thank you for reading! If you want to receive this update right in your mailbox every Sunday, subscribe below!

#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-episode-33/

Laurens Hof

2023-07-30 19:15:17

Welcome back to another episode! I was still on holiday this week as well, but enough has happened that I wanted to give you a shorter overview of the most important news. It’s been interesting to experience the fediverse as a regular user that doesn’t try to keep up with all the news however. That’s why this episode is still short, focusing on a few highlights that stood out for me. Next week this update will be fully back, including some upgrades!

Mastodon and CSAM

The most important news is the release of a report by Stanford about the proliferation of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on Mastodon. The report looked at the public timelines of the top 25 Mastodon servers and found 112 pieces of actual CSAM, as well as over 1200 text posts mainly used to coordinate offsite trading of CSAM, all which is absolutely horrifying. The researchers also share detailed directions for future improvements that are worth reading.

The Washington Post is reported in detail on this as well. In the article it is not super clear that some servers such as Pawoo, a known bad actor, are commonly blocked. The Stanford report understandably is super limited in providing information on where exactly the information is found, but servers like Pawoo and some of the large Japanese Mastodon servers are the most common suspects. This lead to people voicing their frustrations that they felt like they were getting lumped in for a description of fediverse that does not match their view of fediverse (since they’ve blocked the server).

There are multiple frames of analysis here: the direct response by the community, the secondary response by the community by working on better safety features relating to this, and how this impacts the larger public’s understanding of Mastodon. I have not been available enough the last week to give a proper analysis of the direct response of the community, I’m regret to say. Responses seem to have varied wildly, from ‘the Washington Post article is a hit piece’ to large concerns about the findings. Personally I feel uncomfortable with some more negative responses that focus on mistakes and framing in reporting by news outlets, when in the end, there is a goddamn CSAM material on Mastodon and limited moderation tools to deal with it. I’ll be writing more how different community initiatives are being worked on to improve Trust and Safety and moderation tools, as well as how this report impacts the public’s perspective on Mastodon.

What turned people off Mastodon

Erin Kissane has done excellent research by asking people on Bluesky what turned them off Mastodon. Its an extensive look at 350 people who tell in their own words what turned them off Mastodon. Erin’s work is deliberately structured in a way that resists easy summarisation, so I’ll refrain from that with the urge to simply read it all, it’s worth it.

A few things stood out to me: Eugen Rochko’s responds to the line in the article ‘If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress.’ with ‘Not that far off the truth!’. The Mastodon post for this article got a massive amount of attention, virtually all of it positive. Considering the amount of critiques of Mastodon culture that are in the post, it is nice to see how open people are to the feedback. Thats not to say that everyone is open in all context, and the scolding behaviour that Mastodon is known for is certainly real. However, it shows there are ways to format structural feedback and criticism that are acceptable to the community.

Calckey rebrands to FireFish, with new forks.

Two weeks ago, Calckey rebranded itself as Firefish. An impressive part of this rebrand is how the main server calckey.social got transferred to a new domain, firefish.social, without impact on the users. For example, my new username is now laurenshof@firefish.social, but old posts that are still tagged with laurenshof@calckey.social properly refer to my account. Firefish has put in significant effort in individual account transfers as well. WeDistribute has a writeup on how to transfer from Mastodon to Firefish, which includes a full transfer of your posts, lists, blocks and mutes.

Arguments between the main developer and other contributors of Firefish lead to the creation of the hardfork Iceshrimp. Hajkey, which is run by the admins of blahaj.zone server, was originally a soft fork of Calckey, with several safety features merged back into Calckey. Lead Hajkey developer @supakaity announced that they will not rebrand, and go downstream from Iceshrimp instead. In the announcement post she mentioned that she recently got overruled when trying to implement a feature which was intended to improve the safety of a minority group. As such, she felt that Hajkey aligns better with Iceshrimp, and as such will position Hajkey instead as downstream from that project.

Other links

• The flagship server for Misskey, misskey.io, is experiencing rapid growth, adding 90k users in the last 2 weeks. Uncertainty around GDPR compliance has led them to discourage signups from European users, @darnells writes.
• Mastodon client Mammoth has added an algorithmic For You page. TechCrunch has a review of it.
• Mastopoet is a tool to share Mastodon posts as images, and specifically focuses on the design and visuals.
• A blog posts by @renchap, one of the Mastodon developers, on a vision for the future of Trust & Safety for Mastodon.
• The podcast Looks Like New talks about some of “Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms: Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub), Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos), and Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky).”
• The Podcast Moderated Content has a new episode with an extensive discussion on “safety issues with the Fediverse, how Meta might deal with them, and some potential solutions to get ready for the challenges without Meta effectively calling the cops on a huge number of instances.”
• PCMag has a review of Lemmy and Kbin.
• The EFF writes about the FBI raid where the server of kolektiva.social got seized.
• “The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem”.
• Lemmy has had a massive inflow of bot registrations in the last months. @kersploosh has a writeup of their work on getting admins to delete these suspicious inactive accounts, leading to a drop of 900k registered users for Lemmy.

If you want to receive this weekly update directly in your mailbox, subscribe here! Thank you for reading!

#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-28/

The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem | Medium

Over the past year the Fediverse has experienced significant growth, but it's also come at a cost: Mental Health. We must address this with urgency.

^{Emelia Smith (Medium)}

Welcome back to another episode! I was still on holiday this week as well, but enough has happened that I wanted to give you a shorter overview of the most important news. It’s been interesting to experience the fediverse as a regular user that doesn’t try to keep up with all the news however. That’s why this episode is still short, focusing on a few highlights that stood out for me. Next week this update will be fully back, including some upgrades!

Mastodon and CSAM

The most important news is the release of a report by Stanford about the proliferation of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on Mastodon. The report looked at the public timelines of the top 25 Mastodon servers and found 112 pieces of actual CSAM, as well as over 1200 text posts mainly used to coordinate offsite trading of CSAM, all which is absolutely horrifying. The researchers also share detailed directions for future improvements that are worth reading.

The Washington Post is reported in detail on this as well. In the article it is not super clear that some servers such as Pawoo, a known bad actor, are commonly blocked. The Stanford report understandably is super limited in providing information on where exactly the information is found, but servers like Pawoo and some of the large Japanese Mastodon servers are the most common suspects. This lead to people voicing their frustrations that they felt like they were getting lumped in for a description of fediverse that does not match their view of fediverse (since they’ve blocked the server).

There are multiple frames of analysis here: the direct response by the community, the secondary response by the community by working on better safety features relating to this, and how this impacts the larger public’s understanding of Mastodon. I have not been available enough the last week to give a proper analysis of the direct response of the community, I’m regret to say. Responses seem to have varied wildly, from ‘the Washington Post article is a hit piece’ to large concerns about the findings. Personally I feel uncomfortable with some more negative responses that focus on mistakes and framing in reporting by news outlets, when in the end, there is a goddamn CSAM material on Mastodon and limited moderation tools to deal with it. I’ll be writing more how different community initiatives are being worked on to improve Trust and Safety and moderation tools, as well as how this report impacts the public’s perspective on Mastodon.

What turned people off Mastodon

Erin Kissane has done excellent research by asking people on Bluesky what turned them off Mastodon. Its an extensive look at 350 people who tell in their own words what turned them off Mastodon. Erin’s work is deliberately structured in a way that resists easy summarisation, so I’ll refrain from that with the urge to simply read it all, it’s worth it.

A few things stood out to me: Eugen Rochko’s responds to the line in the article ‘If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress.’ with ‘Not that far off the truth!’. The Mastodon post for this article got a massive amount of attention, virtually all of it positive. Considering the amount of critiques of Mastodon culture that are in the post, it is nice to see how open people are to the feedback. Thats not to say that everyone is open in all context, and the scolding behaviour that Mastodon is known for is certainly real. However, it shows there are ways to format structural feedback and criticism that are acceptable to the community.

Calckey rebrands to FireFish, with new forks.

Two weeks ago, Calckey rebranded itself as Firefish. An impressive part of this rebrand is how the main server calckey.social got transferred to a new domain, firefish.social, without impact on the users. For example, my new username is now laurenshof@firefish.social, but old posts that are still tagged with laurenshof@calckey.social properly refer to my account. Firefish has put in significant effort in individual account transfers as well. WeDistribute has a writeup on how to transfer from Mastodon to Firefish, which includes a full transfer of your posts, lists, blocks and mutes.

Arguments between the main developer and other contributors of Firefish lead to the creation of the hardfork Iceshrimp. Hajkey, which is run by the admins of blahaj.zone server, was originally a soft fork of Calckey, with several safety features merged back into Calckey. Lead Hajkey developer @supakaity announced that they will not rebrand, and go downstream from Iceshrimp instead. In the announcement post she mentioned that she recently got overruled when trying to implement a feature which was intended to improve the safety of a minority group. As such, she felt that Hajkey aligns better with Iceshrimp, and as such will position Hajkey instead as downstream from that project.

Other links

• The flagship server for Misskey, misskey.io, is experiencing rapid growth, adding 90k users in the last 2 weeks. Uncertainty around GDPR compliance has led them to discourage signups from European users, @darnells writes.
• Mastodon client Mammoth has added an algorithmic For You page. TechCrunch has a review of it.
• Mastopoet is a tool to share Mastodon posts as images, and specifically focuses on the design and visuals.
• A blog posts by @renchap, one of the Mastodon developers, on a vision for the future of Trust & Safety for Mastodon.
• The podcast Looks Like New talks about some of “Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms: Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub), Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos), and Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky).”
• The Podcast Moderated Content has a new episode with an extensive discussion on “safety issues with the Fediverse, how Meta might deal with them, and some potential solutions to get ready for the challenges without Meta effectively calling the cops on a huge number of instances.”
• PCMag has a review of Lemmy and Kbin.
• The EFF writes about the FBI raid where the server of kolektiva.social got seized.
• “The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem”.
• Lemmy has had a massive inflow of bot registrations in the last months. @kersploosh has a writeup of their work on getting admins to delete these suspicious inactive accounts, leading to a drop of 900k registered users for Lemmy.

If you want to receive this weekly update directly in your mailbox, subscribe here! Thank you for reading!

#activitypub #fediverse #lemmy #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-fediverse-episode-28/

Eugen Rochko

2023-07-28 22:32:18

"If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress." Not that far off the truth! I resonate with a lot of the points in the post. Frustrating that even as we improve the UX people throw around so many (sometimes outdated) tips that it makes newcomers feel overwhelmed anyway.

This week saw the second edition of FediForum, a two-day virtual unconference about the fediverse. It had more than 100 people attending, and provided an opportunity for the many people who are working on the fediverse to get together, showcase their work, and have conversations about the many topics of discussion.

Demos

Every day started with demos by fediverse projects, such as the WordPress ActivityPub plugin, a demo of Micro.blog, and how work on Bonfire is moving towards a release version. It also showed interesting tools such as FeedSeer and Fediseer, two very different projects with very similar names. FeedSeer allows you to get a clear overview of the links and news items that are being discussed in your personal feed. Fediseer is a chain-of-trust system of fediverse server admins to share which servers are they think are trustworthy, and which ones they think they don’t. Fediseer is an interesting new take on the topic of content moderation and shared deny lists.

Another demo that stood out to me was that of Gath.io. Gath is an open source event planner that anyone can use, that originated outside of the fediverse. @Darius added ActivityPub support to it, so you can interact with it via the rest of the fediverse, such as subscribing to RSVP’ing to a specific event directly from your Mastodon account. It’s a cool project for both the service it offers, as well as for showcasing that the fediverse can also be expanded by adding support to existing other applications. Fediseer and Gath.io are services that I’ll revisit in the near future, as they deserve a closer look.

The sessions

Most of the conference is focused on the sessions, where anyone can call a session about a subject they prefer. Subjects were wildly varied, ranging from discussions about governance to content moderation, from project showcases to technical discussions about specific features. While there were way too many sessions to cover here, I want mention a few that stood out the me:

Ian Forrester held a Q&A about the BBC’s experiences with their new Mastodon server. He noted that when convincing other people of the project, it’s important to focus on the human values, and that numbers of followers don’t really matter for success. He says that if the focus is on numbers, it’ll not seem worthwhile. What also stands out is how organisations look at other organisations for what they are doing. Ian says that it was easier to convince others in the BBC when they could point to other governments and public broadcasters being active on the fediverse. In return, one of the feedback that the BBC gets now is that other organisations are saying “look, the BBC is doing this, why don’t we do this”. What is also encouraging to hear, is that unless something major happens, the BBC plans to run the server the 6-month experiment end date.

The presentations by IFTAS were noteworthy as well, with a preliminary presentation of the survey on fediverse content moderation (to be publicly released soon), as well as an explanation of how the organisation is currently working on improving Trust and Safety on the fediverse. The presentation on their current work can be viewed here. They are working on a deny list subscription service called FediCheck, where admins can subscribe to a deny list that should form a baseline of the minimum necessary servers to block. This is done by focusing on the communality of the deny lists of the largest servers on the fediverse. Admins of these servers can sign up to give their consent, here.

Moving forward

What does stand out however is the lack of representation of any of the big projects on the fediverse. FediForum had a large number of people present who want to push the fediverse forward. But in the end, changes need buy-in and implementation from the projects that people on the fediverse are using. Especially in the context of content moderation and trust and safety, where the fediverse still needs better tooling. There were presentations, ideas and concrete tools on how to improve the safety for both Mastodon and Lemmy. But as far as I could tell, there were no representations by Mastodon, Lemmy, or any of the other big fediverse projects. This stands out even more considering that Meta had multiple representatives that were part of the conversations on how to improve content moderation on the fediverse. For future editions of the FediForum, it is definitely worth watching this develops.

EDIT: FediForum indicates that the detailed notes of the sessions will be out very soon. When that happens I’ll place a link here.

#activitypub #fediverse #fediversenews #mastodon

https://fediversereport.com/fediforum-september-2023/

FediForum

2023-09-24 19:03:21

Thank you @fediversereport ! We'll have session notes out probably tomorrow. Many of them are very detailed, which should also help people with understanding what happened at #FediForum.