connectedplaces.online

When Elon Musk calls to imprison the government, it turns out not to matter very much. But when thousands of accounts repeat each other, it matters enormously.

On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.

So far, this matches up fairly well to a libertarian frame for decentralisation. But Leo XIV goes one step further, and refuses to let subsidiarity stand on its own, and pairs it with solidarity. “When subsidiarity is not linked to solidarity, it ends up becoming merely the protection of particular interests; when solidarity is not supported by subsidiarity, it degenerates into a form of welfare that does not foster responsibility.”

Lemmy has been around for a long time in the fediverse, and it is gearing up for an 1.0 launch. The new version is available in open beta, and comes with a bunch of major new features. There’s a new UI, new features such as post tags, grouping communities into a custom feed (similar to what PieFed has, and it’s one of my favorite features there), better filtering, and the ability to lock comments. The standout feature is Private Communities, where “Only approved followers can view the content (plus other community visibilities).” I recently already flagged this private community feature as an example of how the open social web is moving towards bounded spaces when I wrote about Matrix. People’s perception of fediverse and the atmosphere is largely dominated by microblogging, but Lemmy (and PieFed) has been going strong for years now, and the monthly active users have stayed consistent around 40k for multiple years. While this side of the network did not see the large spike of new people that Mastodon and Bluesky saw with people leaving Twitter, it also did not see the drop-off in activity either. Lemmy has found a stable group of users, and I’m very curious to see how new features such as private communities will change the community and culture.

On overview of all the news in the fediverse for the last month.

This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.

This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.

On the convergence towards private data on social networking protocols, and the connection to Matrix

The European Commission has decided not to extend the Digital Markets Act’s interoperability rules to social media, closing off a potential pathway for adoption for open social networks.

Sure, a Romanian marketplace did something bad, what do I care, you might think. But the problem here is two-fold: First, the ruling is written in a way that can be generalised beyond only Romanian online market places, and into pretty much all platforms that fall under GDPR and handle social data. Secondly, copying and publishing data on other websites is exactly what federation is. The function of open social networking protocols like ActivityPub and atproto at their core is to have social data be copied and published on other websites.

How the conferences FediForum and 2mr.social this week show how fediverse is trying to build connections with European politics, as well as with the atmosphere.

What the Russmedia ruling means for ActivityPub and atproto.

What makes a social network resilient?

Mastodon has received a 600k grant by the Sovereign Tech Agency, and Surf has launched.

On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience ‘place’ at the federation level.

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?

Open social protocols are expanding beyond social media into the infrastructure developers use to build, distribute, and discover software. Three recent launches show what that looks like in practice.

On Mastodon’s new Share button, and protocol ownership.

A big grab bag of news, that ties into the question of ‘Where Does Community Live?’

Fediverse search engine Holos Discover shut down this week, showing structural issues how to distinguish between individual and community consent.

ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

With Discord announcing age verification globally, people are searching for alternatives. But a Discord alternative on the open social web might just look structurally quite different.

On the tension in the DSA, that needs Big Tech platforms to exist so it can regulate them, while the fediverse does away with large platforms altogether.

The conditions that made ‘leaving Twitter’ a meaningful part of the open social web’s identity don’t exist for TikTok. What happens when people can’t see each other leave?

Bluesky has verified the account of ICE, which was a step too far for many in the fediverse, wanting to disconnect from the bridge between the networks

On the complexities of protocol governance.

ActivityPub is getting its first formal update path since 2018. I wrote about why this matters, how this leads to some strange and funny power dynamics, and about who actually participate

Fediverse Report #148: X is not a just platform problem anymore, it’s a power problem, and why you cannot compete as platforms with power.

Threads’ fediverse integration is on maintenance mode, signalling the end to a tumultuous story and period for the fediverse.

his week’s #fediverse news

The European Commission put a 120M EUR fine on X for DSA violations. But as the European politicians cannot get themselves to leave the platform, it shows the issues with how they understand how power works on social platforms.

Newsmast launches news app that combines local news with fediverse integration, and the first Brazilian fediverse conference with WebSocialBR

Fediverse Report 142 - this week’s #fediverse news

Fediverse community platform Bonfire launches, together with a crowdfunding campaign. Mastodon now officially quote posts, and a fediverse client for the Media Liberation Day campaign.

this week’s fediverse news:

this week’s fediverse news: - a closer look at the Tumblr-like platform Wafrn, which connects to both activitypub and atproto. Their latest update allows people to migrate their #bluesky account to wafrn, joining the fediverse while staying connected to their bluesky network - Loops is getting closer to joining the fediverse

this week’s fediverse news: - a closer look at the Tumblr-like platform Wafrn, which connects to both activitypub and atproto. Their latest update allows people to migrate their #bluesky account to wafrn, joining the fediverse while staying connected to their bluesky network - Loops is getting closer to joining the fediverse

Fediverse Report 137 - this week’s fediverse news

This week’s fediverse news:

on how the last weeks have shifted the threat model for open social networks: from fighting platform decay to the threat of authoritarianism

Publication croisé avec : https://piefed.social/post/1269689

Fediverse Report 134 - this week's #fediverse news

On Discourse and Decentralisation

this week's #fediverse news:

a deep dive into the messy substrate and coordination layers below decentralised networks, and how authoritarian thinkers like peter thiel view this substrate as a way to capture networks

This week's #fediverse news - Fediverse Report #131

An overview of the fediverse clients I'm paying the most attention to.

Communities on alternative social media platforms like the fediverse and Bluesky tend to create narratives about how their networks grow. For both networks the narrative is fairly similar: Big Tech platforms and their leaders behave badly, which in turn causes users to search for more ethical alternatives. This narrative is visible in the fediverse’s understanding of the 2022 Twitter Migration and Bluesky’s explosive growth in 2024. But what happens when these migration waves disappear, even though the conditions for them do not? Musk’s continuous egregious actions have not led to new growth for the fediverse and Bluesky, indicating that our narratives of growth need updating. Meanwhile, the continuous growth of Threads shows that cultural impact might just matter more than user counts.

This week's fediverse news: - Mastodon announces and retracts a new ToS for their instances - Threads moves their fediverse integration to a separate feed - Wanderer is a new fediverse platform for sharing your hiking and biking trails - PieFed launches 1.0 version of the platform