This edition of Last Week is a combination of the weekly fediverse newsletter, as well as the monthly Bluesky update. The next two weeks there will not be a newsletter, as I’ll be busy touching grass rocks in the Alps. I’ll be back again in August. Feel free to tag me in posts/news items that you think I should know about, as I will not be reading any feeds for these two weeks.
The News
The Dutch Government’s Mastodon pilot celebrates their one-year anniversary this week, and as part of the 1-year mark they’ve posted some reflections and a major announcement. They announced that the plan is to start offering Mastodon to all governments organisations at all layers of the government (national, provincial and local) as a shared service of the government, stating that this project will contribute to a reduction in dependency on commercial social media platforms and strengthens the government’s digital autonomy. In a reflection on the first year of the pilot, organisations that participated particularly mention the community as a positive aspect, although one of the main points of improvement is a current lack of reach, as well as integration of Mastodon in current tools that organisation uses.
Fediverse platform Streams has added nomadic identity to their platform, based on ActivityPub. Nomadic Identity makes your identity independent from a server. For the protocol-people: Streams is using FEP-ef61. For the non-protocol-people, this means that the implementation that Streams is using has been discussed in the community for a while, and gives space for other platforms to implement the same feature as well.
OpenVibe is a social media client for multiple networks, that combines ActivityPub, Nostr and Bluesky into a single app and a single feed. This week, OpenVibe added support for Bluesky for their multi-protocol app. TechCrunch has more details on the app. I’ve mentioned previously a few times the idea that ‘federation happens in the client’, and OpenVibe is the clearest example yet. What protocol and platform people use matters less for federation than what client people use, since clients can combine multiple protocols into a single feed.
BTS ARMY, the fanbase for the massively popular boy band BTS, is starting to join Bluesky. While it is only a small portion of the fandom, it immediately has a noticeable effect on the culture of Bluesky, as they started showing up in the Discover feed. FORBetter, a new blog about a better social internet by Newsmast’s Saskia, has been covering the migration of ARMY, and answering their questions about what the fediverse is.
In the June update for Bluesky I wrote about how near-term use-case of labelers will likely be more for specific services than broad content moderation decisions. Two recent new labelers illustrate this further, by using labelers to allow people to self-apply information about themselves that they want to showcase via a label: One labeler allows you to set a country flag on your profile, and the other labeler allows you to set your own preferred pronouns on your profile.
While Ghost is adding ActivityPub, Npub.pro has taken the concept of Ghost and applied it to Nostr. Npub.pro is a personal website based on your Nostr content, that uses Ghost themes. It takes your current Nostr posts (you can use either your shortform microblogs, longform articles, or both), and displays them as a website. Because it is based on Nostr, you do not need an extra CMS, any client that you use to publish Nostr content works. I think this is an interesting evolution in the thinking of the space of decentralised social networks, and what it means to view content separately from the platform that it is published on.
Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold decided to run an extra Relay for atproto, to help alleviate concerns that doing so would be prohibitively expensive. In the current setup he runs an extra Relay of the entire network for 150 USD/month, and has written up notes on the setup. The more expansive part is running an AppView, and Newbold estimates that running your own AppView will ‘a bit more expensive, but not much more’.
The Links
- Mastodon is hiring a part-time Finance/Ops Associate.
- Mastodon’s monthly update, Trunk & Tidbits, for their engineering and development work of the last month.
- Buffer, a popular social media scheduling tool, now has posting to Bluesky in beta.
- The PeerTube Livechat plugin got some major updates, including live polling during streams.
- The Open Science Initiative is currently in development, and updates will now be shared from their own Bonfire instance.
- Some statistics on the usage of the bridge between ActivityPub and Bluesky, courtesy of Kuba Suder.
- Two articles about Threads: the Threads Creator Paradox, and Mike Masnick questions how open Threads’ fediverse intergration actually is.
- WeDistribute takes a closer look at the ActivityPods example app to help developers.
- The newsletter ‘The Future is Federated’ writes about the power of owning your data.
- Newmast writes about how the UK government’s new digital policy could affect the fediverse.
- An Admin’s Guide to Fixing PeerTube.
- fedv.link is a way to share fediverse links that open on your preferred server.
- The latest update for the Bluesky app will now add suggested follows in the Discover feed.
- The software updates in the fediverse for the last week.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-and-bluesky-ep-77/
