I would have called you out, just as I am doing right now, even if your blocklist were private. Why? Because I, along with a few people on your site and elsewhere, keep watching the number of people we can interact with shrink as your blocklist grows.
You see my comment as a problem; I see it as an intervention for an admin on a power trip. Three years ago, back in 2023, some random user upset you, and now, three years later in 2026, an entire website and all of its users — who had absolutely nothing to do with it — are damned.
You really see nothing wrong with that?
As I said, you're a prime example of why people on the Fedi have more than one account
🔴 #Urgent | Shelling is approaching the tents in central Gaza. We are living in constant fear and terror, with explosions happening close to where we are sheltering. There is no safe place left for us, and we are desperately trying to protect our children. Please stand with us. Any support or share could help my family move to a safer place during these terrifying days. 🙏💔🇵🇸 gofund.me/d0cc0587 #Gaza #Palestine #Donate #HelpGaza #GazaVerified #Mastodon @RFancio
#Loops updated their API docs. The way it is built is really a help for app devs. Currently, #Fedilab supports the #Mastodon, #PeerTube and #Misskey APIs. I personally think that adding Loops with their dedicated API would be a nice and good fit with Fedilab's purpose, and the poll results seem to go that way :)
A new episode in my series of tutorials on how to use #Mastodon! This time, going over every profile customization feature, from the basics, to custom fields, to verification, and more. Have you learned something you didn't know before from this video? Then please let me know!
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.
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.
This version not only includes an important security update, but also a patch to prevent a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
⚠️ Regarding the DoS exploit:
A malicious actor may not fully commit to a complete DoS attack, but instead slowly drain resources from your site, increasing your server costs over time. 💸 💰 😈
If you're not running 4.5.11 (or newer), you're at risk. ⚠️
💔 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!
Do you want to copy your followed hashtags from one Mastodon account to another Mastodon account? This was previously impossible to do automatically, but there is now an unofficial tool that lets you do this:
Do you want to learn the power of search on #Mastodon? With my fourth video in my series of Mastodon tutorials, you can! Did you already know all of this, or did you learn something new? Please let me know!
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.
I dunno, *can* we build #European alternatives to #Facebook and co? The #EU community managers are at it again with promoting the EU instance on #Mastodon!
PS: the community management team (that's my team) are up for an award. Any chance you'd give us a vote? Project 32 on this link: enonet.eu/survey/index.php/227…
Collections are coming to #Mastodon 4.6.0 I will implement support for them ASAP in #Fedilab.
"A Collection is a set of accounts that a user recommends others to follow. Users can create and share Collections and control whether they want to be featured in other user’s Collections."
Please give them a warm welcome to Mastodon and to the fediverse, follow their account, and donate to their fundraiser if you can (and please share this so others can do the same).
Also, remember that you can find all our families who have fundraisers listed at the following page, ordered by those who have received the least in donations over the last week (on a rolling basis):
We’re particularly delighted to see the @EUCommission include a call to “strengthen the open source social media space by supporting open and decentralised social media solutions and platforms. The Commission currently runs a #Mastodon instance, which hosts the Commission’s presence and plans to extend the users basis to EU institutions.”
This post is a bit longer than usual. Therefore, I start with a TLDR summary.
I show that network roles like “follower”, “friend”, and “mutual follower” are defined by the options for exclusivity of content that apply to these roles.
X and Instagram implement only “followers” and allow restricting content to followers on an account level.
Facebook and Instagram additionally implement mutual connections: “friends”/“connections”. Content may be restricted to friends only on the post level. Following on these platforms means subscribing to someone’s public posts.
Mutuals may seem equal to friends, but I argue that in the diversity of the Fediverse, where humans understand roles differently across platforms, mutuals cannot serve as friend connections.
Many people like the model of exclusivity used by Facebook and LinkedIn, where connecting and following are different things. Therefore, I believe that this model should be available in
... 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. ↩︎
zojuist laatste keer de server betaald. 1 juli 2026 is de laatste dag van mastodon.education.
Today made last payment for the server mastodon.education juli the first is the last day.
#instance ending
#Meta's #AI feature let attackers hijack Instagram accounts for days with nothing but a username. It was being A/B tested on a slice of users, and if you were in the test, you couldn't turn it off. Among the casualties: the official Obama White House account.
Meta has since patched it. There was no public acknowledgment.
Second in my series of tutorials on how to use #Mastodon is now up. I go over the home feed, how to fill it up with interesting things using the trending feed and hashtags, and how to declutter it with lists. Let me know if you learn something you weren't aware of from this video 🙂
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
There is a "hacker" group (script kiddies) targeting Mastodon sites that are not yet running Mastodon 4.5.10.
Version 4.5.10 fixes several security vulnerabilities that are relatively easy to exploit and were discovered in earlier versions of Mastodon.
If you're not running 4.5.10 (or newer), you are at risk. ⚠️
If you're using a nightly build of Mastodon, make sure you're running one that was released after the release date of 4.5.10. And yes, I said release date, not version number — earlier 4.6 nightly builds do not include the security patch. ⚠️
If you're delaying the update because you're running a modified version of Mastodon, consider whether maintaining those modifications is worth the security risk. ⚠️
After doing a couple of private workshops on how to use #Mastodon, I've decided I could just record a series of tutorials and have everyone benefit from it. Mastodon has a lot of features, and sometimes even long time users aren't aware of all of them! The first episode is about making posts on Mastodon--going over every aspect.
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
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.
We've implemented and enabled Turnstile on registration to prevent unwanted sign-up spam (it's a daily issue at this point).
Cloudflare Turnstile confirms web visitors are real and blocks unwanted bots without slowing down web experiences for real users. It's a simple snippet of free code that eliminates CAPTCHAs. With Turnstile, you can deliver better experiences and strengthen privacy for all users. More info: cloudflare.com/products/turnst…
Bekijk je favoriete video's, luister naar de muziek die je leuk vindt, upload originele content en deel alles met vrienden, familie en anderen op YouTube.
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.
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.
