@berlinfediday merch doing its magic. Special thanks belongs to @elektropunk 👏 who took care of the #Fediday logo and our #fediverse merch. The bag is a very limited edition ✨
Listening to "Character Limit" by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac on a run. It's a solid account of how Twitter fell apart.
The book sharpens something I keep coming back to about Dorsey and Graber's idea of "decentralized" social media. Graber says she spent years studying existing protocols and decided none were good enough for users, so Bluesky built ATProto from scratch. I still don't buy that none of the existing solutions were worth improving.
There are two kinds of nerds: the Silicon Valley startup kind, and the open standards kind - Torvalds, Berners-Lee, people who build a commons and don't try to own it. Bluesky comes from the first camp. The framing is still commercial: a company, VC money, a product that happens to have an open layer. That's the part that doesn't sit right with me.
Decentralization as something you can market isn't the same as decentralization as something no one controls and any living room nerd could host and tweak on their own.
1 day ago from Unimatrix Zero :: Primary Cluster :: Node One — (52.5173885 13.3951309)
@Michael 🇺🇦 has implemented a nice new extension of following tags into Friendica. In the development branch (aimed to be released as 2026.08) it is now possible to automatically follow the tags from tags.pub by @Evan Prodromou 🥳
Admins of Friendica nodes can activate this in the settings of their nodes, down below in the Relay section. All the tags that are selected there plus user tags if that option is enabled, will then be automatically followed at tags.pub as relays (and unfollowed it one removes a tag from the list).
#Fedle reached over 5000 games played across the #Fediverse. Congrats to mathstodon.xyz, kolektiva.social and livellosegreto.it for leading the leaderboard this week.
Following the @EUCommission Tech Sovereignty and Open Source Strategy (and Mastodon’s direct mention within it!) announced this week…
Our team is proud to have signed and contributed to the drafting of the European Social Stack Open Declaration alongside our peers in the #SocialWeb and #Fediverse: @anewsocial, @eurosky.social, @newsmast, Save Social, and @swf.
We are a movement, and stronger together.
Read the declaration, add your signature, and share: european.social/
Looking at fedidb.com/stats, seems like things have been picking up around here again, nice!
Also, some interesting talks at today's Next Socials' PublicSpaces conference around communities, moderation, libraries and digital public spaces, and the sustainability of the open social web.
💔 Is There Still Hope? I am writing these words from southern Gaza while living through one of the hardest moments of my life. Your donations have become our only lifeline amid hunger, destruction, and the lack of even the most basic necessities. Today, I went to the hospital because of the severe pain in my leg, and there I received devastating news. The doctors discovered that one of the metal screws fixing my leg has broken, causing very serious complications. The pain has become unbearable, and I can no longer stand properly. The doctors told me that I urgently need surgery to save my leg from amputation. My injury is not minor. I suffered a fractured femur, extensive damage to tissues and nerves, and there are still shrapnel fragments inside my leg. I also have a metal plate extending from my hip to my left knee, and after one of the screws broke, my condition has become more dangerous than ever. I had previously postponed the surgery because I could not afford the $800 cost, and because I was struggling to provide for my family’s basic needs during the... show more
💔 Is There Still Hope? I am writing these words from southern Gaza while living through one of the hardest moments of my life. Your donations have become our only lifeline amid hunger, destruction, and the lack of even the most basic necessities. Today, I went to the hospital because of the severe pain in my leg, and there I received devastating news. The doctors discovered that one of the metal screws fixing my leg has broken, causing very serious complications. The pain has become unbearable, and I can no longer stand properly. The doctors told me that I urgently need surgery to save my leg from amputation. My injury is not minor. I suffered a fractured femur, extensive damage to tissues and nerves, and there are still shrapnel fragments inside my leg. I also have a metal plate extending from my hip to my left knee, and after one of the screws broke, my condition has become more dangerous than ever. I had previously postponed the surgery because I could not afford the $800 cost, and because I was struggling to provide for my family’s basic needs during these extremely difficult circumstances. Now, after my condition has worsened and one of the fixation screws has broken, the surgery has become more urgent than ever. The doctors warned me that any further delay could result in losing my leg permanently. 💔🙏 ⏳ I have only 5 days left to undergo this surgery. Every day that passes increases the risk of permanent amputation, and I am terrified that it will soon be too late. I urgently need $800 for the operation. Every contribution, no matter how small, brings me one step closer to saving my leg. 💔 I am facing this pain while also carrying the burden of my brother's imprisonment, my mother's illness, and the responsibility of being the sole provider for my family. I feel helpless and afraid of what the future may hold, but I still hold on to hope in God and in the kindness of compassionate people. 🙏 Please do not leave me alone in this hardship. Any donation, no matter how small, could help save my leg and support my family. If you are unable to donate, please share this post. It may reach someone who can help. 💔 My life and my family's future are in your hands. 🔗 Donation Link: chuffed.org/project/133500-sup… @aral #gaza #genocide #palestine #iran #israel #war #GazaVerified #Mastodon #fediverse #newMembers #verification
Hello everyone , My name is Diyaa , I am 28 years old, and I live in Gaza—or at least, I used to. I am the sole provider for my family of 9 people, including my wife.
This photo for #doorsday shows the main entrance to Meta's headquarters after the #fediverse 🫶 🌈🦄 took over. You don't know the Fediverse? If you are posting your beautiful photos 📸 on #pixelfed ❤️ you are already using one great service of the Fediverse. And there are much more: #loops #lemmy #mastodon #peertube and so on. Why? You don't want to give away your data and opinions to the big corporations that want to make money with it. Support them in any way you can!
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.
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):
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
... show more
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. ↩︎
Such a good thing to have a community created Instagram alternative under development.
Hoping they’ll be open to getting more help on the project as surely this is too much for a single dev to compete with a billion dollar company when it comes to speed of adding features.
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
Der #Microsoft Deal mit Bayern ist geplatzt und ich finde ihr solltest das wissen... falls ihr es nicht schon mitbekommen habt 👉 abendzeitung-muenchen.de/bayer…
Moin #Fediverse und euch einen gesunden Start in diesen Mittwoch. Alles wird gut!
Es ist offiziell: Der Freistaat will seine Verwaltung nicht länger dem US-Softwareriesen Microsoft ausliefern. Digitalminister Fabian Mehring genießt seinen Triumph – in aller Stille. Die Hintergründe.
@si_irini @andijah @SilviaMarton ...reason is simply: only the EU and Switzerland will do as regions and the #Fediverse will fall/disintegrate into irellevance, if Mastodon.social falls. I lost all my content once on X, and I hope it will not happen here again, but that (still) is my assessment.
Also if @ Ploum, a writing professional, can live with threads of 500k-pearls, so should I. And, as stated, it also hast its (visibility) advantages to have shorter posts (moreover, you...
#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.
Idea: Mastodon should allow adding rel=me links to Mastodon profiles to allow an account to verify other accounts.
(Or maybe a specific rel=trust?)
This can be used to create a web of trust.
e.g., For Gaza Verified, we have verified about ~250 accounts so far using video interviews. But that sort of verification doesn’t scale. And if we trust these accounts to be people from Gaza, we should trust them to verify people they know from Gaza. So Gaza Verified and the 200+ verified accounts become a trust root.
If they could then add rel=me links to their profiles to say “I verify this account is by a Palestinian from Gaza” (which is all we do), then we would start creating a decentralised web of trust.
Angehängt: 1 Bild
The #Fediverse/#OpenWeb keeps growing, so how far can a post go now? Let's try it out!
If you see it please share and/or like! I'll post stats.
#Mastodon #Sharkey #Friendica #Pixelfed #Lemmy #SocialMedia
@fediverse@piefed.
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.
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.
