Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.

Basic synopsis on my feelings here:

• tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.

• I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.

• I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.

• The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.

• Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @[email protected], @[email protected] (an admin), @[email protected]. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.

I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.

I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards

I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou asks. It’s a good question, and I’m not sure of my personal answer. I enjoy my time here, but I also see lots of opportunities for how things could be better. There have been some interesting projects this week of people working on structural improvements within the fediverse, on safety, testing and search. Plus, we take a look at how the Japanese side of the fediverse is doing.

Search, and the lack thereof, on Mastodon has been a hotly contested issue for a long time. There are some technical challenges with implementing search in a federated contest, but the main limitation has always been social: how do you make sure that you have consent of the people who you are indexing? One option is to take the setting ‘Discoverable’, which indicates that your profile can be found by search engines and other discoverability services, and take all the posts by accounts that use the (opt-in) setting Discoverable, and return all public posts by that account. This is the approach taken by a custom patch created by @vyr, which as been used on the Universeodon server for a while.

Now, Eugen Rochko has proposed a similar change for Mastodon proper (without mentioning the previous work by @vyr), stating “It is my decision to unite all discovery features in one setting, because all of this stuff is an expected part of a social network and splitting it up into different settings that everyone has to opt-into one by one just to get the same behaviour they get by default on other social media seems like a bad user experience.”

The definiteness of the statement, and the lack of discussion (Eugen Rochko closed the comment section soon after) as well as the implementation itself lead to quite a bit of discussion from the community. These responses got taken up upon, and a new implementation got proposed a few days later. The current proposal for search is to have two separate opt-in options, one for the discoverability of your profile, and one for the discoverability of your posts.

This seems like a fairly optimal outcome, with full granular control and opt-in to get people’s consent. The process to get there though is more of a mixed bag. The way it is implemented also indicates that Mastodon struggles with its role as a community leader; a significant group of long-term Mastodon users also has feelings that are at best ambivalent about how the Mastodon organisation is run. By not crediting earlier work by others, and making unilateral executive decisions about controversial topics without community input runs the risk of eroding community trust and support in the project.

Official announcement of the Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP). The goal of the FSEP is “to reduce the administration burden for Mastodon admins, and increase safety for Mastodon users, by providing tools that will make it easy and convenient for admins and moderation teams to consistently discover harmful instances and protect their communities”. It is an interesting collaboration between multiple actors who are working on improving safety within the fediverse. Expect a more extensive report on this soon. For now, the proposal itself is worth reading.

The fediverse promotes interoperability between platforms and products and services via ActivityPub, but putting this in practice can be hard. For developers, there are scant little tools available to make sure that the product they are making is actually interoperable in practice. To help with this, the Social Web Incubator Community Group held a meeting about organising towards testing tools that developers can use to test is their platform is indeed interoperable with the other platforms. For non-developers who are interested in the fediverse, the most important takeaway is that for all its lofty ideals, getting full interoperability on the fediverse is really difficult. There is a lack of tools, documentation, but also knowledge of what tools actually are available is often lacking or hard to find. For developers, it’s worth checking the notes here, and the presentation by Johannes Ernst (@J12t)

The Misskey flagship server misskey.io reorganises themselves into a company, Nikkei Asia reports. Misskey continues to grow rapidly, especially in Japan. Misskey.io has recently restricted new signups to only people from Japan in order to be able to handle all the growth. I published a more extensive report on Misskey and the Japanese side of the fediverse this week, here.

The Lemmy developers held an AMA, and I wrote a report on the major themes in their answers, which you can read here. Much has been said about the political views of the developers, who explicitly identify themselves as Marxist-Leninist. What interested me was their views on software and the fediverse. And here they are surprisingly hands-off, something I did not expect beforehand. At some point they explicitly state that the fediverse “will grow whether we want it or not”, which surprised me, considering they developer the third most popular software on the fediverse. This gives them significant influence in whether and how the fediverse growth, but so far they seem reluctant to admit to this power.

Mastodon starts selling merchandise, with most of the items already being sold out again.

IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust And Safety, has written a blog post to introduce themselves, and launch another survey for a Needs Assessment.

Wired has posted an extensive description of how to migrate your posts from Instagram to Pixelfed.

Threads has added support for “rel=me” links, allowing you to verify your Threads account on Mastodon. The Verge has a simple guide on how to use this. What stands out is the comment by Threads developer Jessel, who says: “my hope is that folks take this as a sign that we’re embracing open standards seriously”.

Techmeme continues to add further support for the fediverse. They’ve linked to fediverse accounts as commentary for a while. Now it also links directly to their Mastodon post for you to comment, like or share, similar how it links to their post on X.

Lemmy held a Canvas event, similar to /r/Place on reddit, where people can place a pixel on a canvas every few minutes. Here is the final result.

Tweakers is one of the largest Dutch tech news website. They published an article on all Reddit alternatives, going in large detail on both Lemmy and Kbin.

An extensive wiki with practical guides for fediverse software.

A tool to discover new Lemmy communities.

Like, think about it.

edit: the have blocked the piracy comms, not the instance

Basically I made a post on blahaj and someone from kbin commented on it somehow even though we're not federated with them; I only happened to see the comment because I decided to look at how big the emojis looked to blahaj users so I went over to the same post on blahaj and there it was

Sometimes there's a real humdinger of a comment, like a real that I'd like to reply to, but I find that it only shows up on lemmy.ml and not here. Is that expected behaviour?

Trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong here.

so right now im having some pretty major annoyances with how federation is implemented by lemmy as a whole. defed makes it so you cant see whole threads, so looking at AMAs on lemmy.ml from hexbear are essentially useless unless you are viewing the main post, same with technical questions. which means lemmy cant replace reddit for a wide variety of uses. what i guess im asking is, can this be fixed, or is it innate to activitypub?

this is gonna be a huge problem as more and more instances are made. you could see someone make a question post but then you could create duplicate answers, wasting many people's time completely because you cant see each other. its also annoying as fuck that if i enjoy the community here, i have to keep making more and more accounts to access the fediverse as it inevitably becomes more fragmented. so in order to make sure that everyone sees everything youd have to keep creating accounts which is completely antithetical to the idea of the fediverse.

like i'd be ok with not being able to reply to certain instances, or choosing to block instances myself, but having that decision made for me is extremely lame. like if im in some instance talking about star trek or some shit, WHY does it fucking matter that im on a wrongthink instance so certain users cant see or reply to each others shit???

It's been over a day of federation. Does it take longer, or does someone have to manually add Hexbear?

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Welcome to another episode! The BBC joins the fediverse, and content moderation remains the most important conversation in the fediverse. My unscientific vibe-o-meeter also sees more discussions around content moderation and the

The BBC has launched their own Mastodon server this week, announcing their presence in an extensive blog post. It is a private server, only intended for accounts from the BBC, such as Radio 4 and 5 Live. The R&D department of the BBC established the server as an experimental project that will run for six months. After that, the BBC will evaluate whether and how to continue.

In the blog post, the BBC talks about the challenges they have run into while setting up a presence on the fediverse. They note that explaining the decentralised, federated model is hard when people are mostly familiar with centralised ownership models, as well as the resulting questions about hosting user content. Moderation is also a bit of an open question, as it relies on trust that other 3rd party servers will moderate their users properly. The BBC comes from a model where they are responsible for comments (on their own website for example), and have all the necessary tools to moderate comments properly that do not meet their guidelines. Here, they are dependent on other server’s moderation to take action when required.

The entrance of the BBC into the fediverse comes at a time when news organisations are actively exploring how move forward with social media. The situation in Canada is most notable for this, as a result of Online News Act, Google and Meta will have to pay Canadian news organisations for posts made on their platform that link to their sites. Meta has been threatening for a while that the passing of this bill will result in them banning news altogether, and this week actually banned all links to news (both Canadian and international) organisations for all Canadian users. News organisations setting up their own social media server on the fediverse seems to be a possible way out of this impasse, but for now, nothing has been said about this.

Meanwhile, over at Meta, employees at Thread seem to be acute aware of the BBC launching the Mastodon server. A Threads engineer states, in response to the BBC news: “we’ve been following this news internally with excitement. no updates on our side to share yet”. Threads have consistently stated their intent to add ActivityPub support to Threads. They have also stated multiple times not to be interested in hosting news and political content. News organisations posting their own content on their self-hosted fediverse servers thus fits right in with Meta’s thinking. This is something I wrote about earlier as well, and Threads employees being excited about this scenario playing out further points into this direction of why Meta is stating to add ActivityPub support.

Another direction that the conversation around the BBC joining the fediverse was transphobia and server blocking. Many trans people feel uncomfortable with the BBC platforming explicit transphobia. As such, some servers decided to block the BBC Mastodon server as a response. This prompted some interesting and constructive discussions about the extend to which server admins should block servers. On a base level, freedom of association is one of the core principles of a decentralised social network, so people being free to block whichever server they prefer is the system working as intended. However, asking critical questions about if doing so meaningfully contributes to providing safety to your users is also a valid way of holding people accountable for the actions they take on behalf of others. If this is something that interests you, I personally found these two exchanges to be valuable to read, where in both cases, I find the value in the comments where people voice their differences.

In last week’s update I wrote about the Stanford report on CSAM on Mastodon, with an overview of the situation and the promise to keep track of what is happening in the fediverse as a response. WeDistribute also published an extensive article about the findings that is worth reading. It zooms in on the recommendations, and also places it into a larger context on what is at stake with regards to internet regulation as well.

The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group held a special topic call this week, about the Social Web and CSAM, where the Stanford report was discussed in depth. David Thiel and Alex Stamos, of the Stanford Internet Observatory were also present. Meeting notes and audio recording are available here. Some of my notes and takeaways:

Alex Stamos makes a distinction between three different problems: (1) finding, taking down and reporting CSAM where the material is known in databases such as PhotoDNA. (2) the same, but for material that is new or computer generated. (3) situations where the social media accounts of the victims children are actively involved in the creation of material.

For the first problem, infrastructure exists that institutions can use to automate the scanning, reporting and deletion of CSAM. This however is aimed at large organisations and is not build to handle a federated structure. The second problem is something that centralised social networks struggle with as well. The third problem is something that’s not really a part of the fediverse currently, as it is largely adults who use the fediverse, and it is currently mainly happening on Instagram. If the fediverse grows and different audiences join, this might change however. For now, Alex Stamos recommends focusing on the first problem; how to implement a centralised scanning service into a federated architecture.

Another point came up regarding the effectiveness of adding a standard scanning tool is. Here Alex Stamos is clear, stating that scanning for perceptual hashes is an effective way in greatly reducing people’s ability to trade CSAM.

Regarding the reporting of CSAM two problems are noted: a lack of reporting to NCNEC. US fediverse servers are mandated by law to file a report to NCNEC every time they take down CSAM content. It is unclear if this legal procedure is being followed. At the least, there is a lack of awareness and education for server operations regarding this. Secondly there is a lack of moderation infrastructure, both in automated reporting, as well as in ways to safeguard moderators against both CSAM and violent content. An example of the latter would be making images black and white and blurring, when automated scanning suspect it is an extremely violent video.

The work of IFTAS remains highly interesting to me, in this case the work on providing a centralised intermediary service for the thousands of server operators to gain access to automated CSAM scanning tools.

In other news

Software and other technical news

Artemis, the first Kbin app for Android and iOS has launched in public beta.

Automadon is a new iOS app that allows you to create custom shortcuts for your Mastodon account on iOS.

Two new ways to bring the fediverse to your Apple Watch: Stomp allows you to see your Mastodon timeline (via TechCrunch) and Voyager reports having an app in Testflight to check your Lemmy account on your Apple Watch!

Reddit third party app Sync is back, but as a Lemmy app.

Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, reports that he has started work on an open source encrypted fediverse instant messenger, based on the Signal protocol.

SpaceHost is a new managed hosting service for the fediverse, which donates a portion of net revenue to the software developers. It is still in early access, and starts with providing Lemmy and Firefish managed hosting.

Cloudflare’s ActivityPub server Wildebeest is no longer being maintained, according to their GitHub.

Community

Nivenly, the cooperative behind Mastodon server hachyderm.io, is having a community discussion and vote on how to approach distributed generative AI system. The blog Nexus of Privacy has an extensive writeup on the discussion and arguments within the community. The follow-up comment by author Jon points to the reasons why I’m linking to this: Community governance efforts are hard, and it’s worth learning from others how they have approached community governance.

The Lemmy developers will host an Ask Me Anything on Monday August 7th, 15u CEST. The thread is already open to post questions in advance. The fediverse does not have a great mode of communication between developers and users, with communication either often happening on Github/Codeberg, or in random comment sections. Providing a more structured place for people to hear more from the developers is a good direction to go in.

What I’ve been reading:

Mastodon’s Mastodon’ts. An essay on “how Mastodon posts work are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability.” To me, the lack of ability to remove replies on a post you’ve made is a significant barrier for institutions to adopt the fediverse. Harmful and racist replies can stay up if the admin of another server will not act upon a report, while a block does not prevent other people from seeing the reply. With the renewed interest of news organisations and governments into setting up a presence of the fediverse, it seems likely that this issue will become more pressing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2920188

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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 [email protected], but old posts that are still tagged with [email protected] 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.

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. https://darnell.day/misskey-io-20-000-new-users-daily-discourages-europeans-from-signing-up-over

Mastodon client Mammoth has added an algorithmic For You page. TechCrunch has a review of it. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/twitter-rival-mammoth-adds-a-personalized-for-you-feed-to-make-its-mastodon-client-feel-familiar/

Mastopoet is a tool to share Mastodon posts as images, and specifically focuses on the design and visuals. https://mementomori.social/@rolle/110787810442832467

A blog posts by @renchap, one of the Mastodon developers, on a vision for the future of Trust & Safety for Mastodon. https://oisaur.com/@renchap/110742748852023343

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).” https://news.kgnu.org/2023/06/looks-like-new-how-did-open-social-media-platforms-originate/

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.” https://cybervillains.com/@alex/110771803391825598

PCMag has a review of Lemmy and Kbin. https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-kbin

The EFF writes about the FBI raid where the server of kolektiva.social got seized. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/fbi-seizure-mastodon-server-wakeup-call-fediverse-users-and-hosts-protect-their

"The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem”. https://medium.com/@thisismissem/the-fediverse-has-a-mental-health-problem-4cb4845dfee1

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. https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812

Lemmy.world still discussing if they want to defederate from an instance taken over by exploding-heads.

An instance that includes such gems as

Strange pattern emerging from lemmy.world with an admin advertising their business in the adhd community, allowing virulently Islamophobic atheistmemes community and now repeating the exploding-heads (we have to patiently discuss blocking the instance) course of action instead of a preemptive defederation, it is their last resort though.

The post on lemmy.world discussing it as well: https://lemmy.world/post/2680147

As of this post the blocked instances are here

spoiler

Hello fellow fediverse feds, I'm 100% sure this has definitely been thought of before, but I'm apparently bad at googling the idea, so what's up with this?

There's obvious problems with the federation model:

• It's a moderation nightmare and standards are effectively that of the worst website Federated with
• It's a bandwidth catastrophe, last I heard Lemmy broadcasts every single vote to every Federated server??? At serious scale this is a genuine waste of resources with real carbon cost. I've read mitigations to this that seem to basically be going down the same route of Usenet or cryptocurrencies, such as having trusted servers/shards/whatever bundle transactions, which is a whole new mess
• No cross-server identity management (not an inherent problem though). Super important ™️ clout chasers can try to squat their names on the big sites, but nobody's stopping anyone from doing a "REAL Elon Musk crypto give away" on a new server with the name not taken yet.

So what if users just had an rss-like experience of subscribing to individual communities on any server they pick? Their signed identity could carry meta data to facilitate cross-server connections (DMs go to XXX, also member of X, Y, Z, etc), and servers would only have to worry about serving and moderating their own content. What's lost? Discoverability? That seems lower stakes to centralize than moderation and corporate control.

Obviously the technology already exists: we have centralized OAuth providers and a more decentralized regime could be built off asymmetric encryption, but the attempt to apply it here is where?

Welcome! Don’t let the ironic detachment fool you, this is one of the kindest and most well moderated places on the internet.

Be open to having your opinions challenged because if you’re from the anglosphere I promise you the propaganda and indoctrination run much deeper than you expect. No one challenging your views is doing so out of some desire to personally attack you. Feel free to report if that’s what it feels like because our mods are A1 best in the fediverse and they will attend to that shit. Most of us are just trying not to feel hopeless and powerless, especially those of us in the west. Sometimes that can manifest as vitriolic rhetoric but our mods are pretty good and catching and stamping that shit out.

We all believe that growth happens through struggle and we’ve all had to struggle a lot with each other and ourselves to arrive at the positions we carry. And do not mistake this for a hive mind because there’s actually a pretty wide range of beliefs here and we’re all the better for it.

And we all recognize that we are all fallible and so it’s ok to be wrong about things. We get stuff wrong all the time here. But often times the difference between correct and incorrect is not so much whether “X thing happened like this” vs “actually X thing happened like this” but “X thing happened like this” vs “I do not have the firsthand knowledge or resources to say how X thing happened or whether it’s happening at all”. This is especially true when it comes to current events. (Uyghur “genocide” being a great example of this)

Just keep an open mind and remember that the atomic unit of propaganda is NOT falsehood, it’s EMPHASIS.

And if that comment about Xinjiang is too spicy for you then DM me so I can set you up w/ my homie Mehmet. He’s no Authoritarian tankie totalitarian apologist and he can get you an incredible deal on some Iraqi WMD’s!

Oh and don’t clean the owl, we like them that way!

As you probably know, lemmy.world's admin recently put out a post addressing their decision to defederate from Hexbear before Hexbear had even federated to another instance. Their reasoning can be found here, and I wanted to break down and critique their reasoning.

Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

None of lemmy.world's rules would be broken by Hexbear's federation, no rule states against ideological instances federating. If lemmy.world was a strictly non-political instance, this would make sense, but lemmy.world promises to "Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all members; regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic. Human comes first."

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below: “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.” “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.” “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The first paragraph, in shitposty-leftist terms says: Keep the shitposting to Hexbear itself, when interacting with lemmy.world users, be polite and informed. The second paragraph is explaining that Hexbear is anti-NATO (not against lemmy.world's rules), anti-IMF (not against the rules), and anti-World Bank (not against the rules). It is a core part of leftist ideology to oppose these things, and calling it "concerning" is ridiculous. The final paragraph is again, explaining Hexbear's stance on the three imperialist organizations and calling for the dismantling of the organizations. This could be interpreted as concerning, but nowhere does it say "the violent takeover of the world" or "genocide" or whatever the people in the comments are saying about us ("Hexbear is a cesspool for genocidal lunatics").

Here are some examples: “I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.” “All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.” https://lemmy.world/comment/121850 https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168 https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084 https://lemmy.world/comment/171595 https://hexbear.net/comment/3648500 Overall community comments: https://hexbear.net/comment/3526128 https://hexbear.net/comment/3526086 https://hexbear.net/comment/3652828 To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529

These are comments from people arguing on the internet. Nothing special. Go look at the comments.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected. We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate. Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate. Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate.

Defederation should only be considered as a LAST RESORT. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

Defederation should only be considered as a LAST RESORT. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

WHAT IS IT THEN, LWADMIN? IS IT A LAST RESORT, OR A PREEMPTIVE STRIKE?

Ok, thats just my little rant, if I'm wrong, be sure to dox me and send me death threats and all'at.

Edit: Formatting issues

Original title: Calckey codeberg repository has been taken over by malicious actors.

Calckey, a federated microblogging platform much like Mastodon, recently rebranded itself as Firefish. They set up their old organization/repository to redirect to their new one. Unfortunately, due to a quirk in the way Codeberg works, this allowed some rando to take over the original repository.

Hello and welcome to the ultimate Fediverse admin guide with all needed knowledge to run your very own Fediverse instance.

An update:

• fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
• As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
• We have backups, so don't worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)

Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.

https://lemmy.ml/post/2286939

Lemmy discussion

I'm waiting for the GDR instance personally.

The feverish news regarding the launch of Threads the previous week has died down somewhat. The Dutch government has officially launched their Mastodon server. Lemmy experiences a critical vulnerability. And some mixed messages regarding Tumblr adding ActivityPub support at some point in the future. Lets get into it! Microblogging

The major news of the week is that the Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server at social.overheid.nl. I wrote an article about the launch, and how it fits in a larger trend of the Dutch government thinking about open software, and Digital Common Goods, such as Mastodon.

Mastodon hits 2 million active users!
IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust and Safety, is working on providing guidance and service for servers to become compliant with the DSA.
@renchap, who works on Mastodon, confirms that currently nobody is working on major features at Mastodon due to a lack of personnel.
Mastodon had a critical security vulnerability, dubbed ‘tootroot’, that allowed attackers to hijack servers. A patch has since been released.
A collection of feature requests to help with moderation when Threads federates.
Tangerine UI is a new Mastodon web interface with just CSS.

Lemmy and Kbin

Lemmy and Kbin are fully settling into their own specific communities on the fediverse that is clearly distinct from the microblogging side.

Lemmy had a vulnerability that got actively exploited this week. The biggest instances such as lemmy.world got targeted and hacked. Here is the summary from the side of lemmy.world, and here the recap that focuses on the technical aspects of the vulnerability. Lemmy released an emergency patch the next day.
An update from the Kbin team regarding finances and future plans. The accompanying graph, that shows how the project jumped from 10k visits in May to 2.9m visits in June is spectacular.
One subject that has regularly come up with Lemmy is that of duplicated communities. For example, the lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and kbin.social servers all have a community called ‘fediverse’. In some cases, people deem this to be acceptable or even desirable. For the Android community on lemmy.world however, they preferred to merge with the community on the lemdro.id server.
If you’re interested in setting up your own Lemmy server, @reiver documented his experience step-by-step with the entire process.
Using Lemmy with your Mastodon account. A blog that explains in detail how you can use the federation of Mastodon and Lemmy to your advantage by using Lemmy with your Mastodon account. A showcase of both how powerful and cool this is, but also of how much clunky the process still can be.
New tools for Lemmy and Kbin keep appearing at a rapid speed:
    Kbin Enhancement Suite, a script manager for Kbin. Personal recommendation to check this one out, it has made my Kbin experience significantly better.
    Alexandrite is a new desktop-first Lemmy web app.
    Instance Assistant is a browser extension that replaces Lemmy links with links to your homeserver, making interacting easier.
    FediRedirect does something similar to Instance Assisant, and also handles Mastodon.

Fediverse

A new edition of FediForum will take place on September 20 and 21.
Communal Bonfires is a fascinating blog post about to design online community platforms. It ends with the announcement of Commune, a different way to structure Matrix chats, which will plug in to the fediverse as well. It is still slightly esoteric and meant for developers currently, but for people who are interested ways to think about the fediverse that goes beyond Twitter-like microblogging, this is highly recommended.
Discourse has implemented the first step of federation with their ActivityPub plugin, and is now working on the second phase.
ActivityPub federation of GitLab is underway.
A proposal for ActivityPub API service.
StreetPass is a browser extension that uses Mastodon’s verification system to show you the fediverse profile of someone when you visit their website. It is now available on Safari, after being released for Chrome and FireFox earlier.

Other networks

Things have settled down after a first intense week of the launch of Threads. Meta’s new platform skyrocketed to over a 100M users in a week. Now the first report of a pullback are starting to come in. This is a normal second half of what happens when people try out a new platform, not everyone sticks around, the fediverse has experienced this multiple times as well with the twittermigration and redditmigration. The Verge reports that ActivityPub integration for Threads is a ‘long while off’.

One question that is currently being debated on the feeds is whether Meta will pull through with adding federation to Threads. In that context, I wrote about this from the perspective of three new regulatory acts; the EU’s DMA and DSA, and Canada’s Online News Act. You can read that here. The conclusion is that from the perspective of compliance with the DMA, adding ActivityPub might make sense.

Bluesky experienced some major pushback from their community this week, after people found out that users could register the n-word as a user name. People on Bluesky have asking the Bluesky Team to implement a full Trust & Safety team for a while now, and Bluesky has struggled to provide safety for their Black community. The conversation and frustration from the community also focuses on the lack of apology, as well as a lack of communication from the team. The drama is indicative of a larger conflict of expectation: the Bluesky Team wants to build a protocol where online communities self-police, and the software should only provide tools to help with that. The current communities on Bluesky are significantly less interested in protocols, and want a place that resembles Twitter, but with better content moderation. This mismatch in expectations is not easy to overcome, even though Bluesky’s heart might be in the protocol, better communication and Trust and Safety would be helpful in reaching their goals, and providing safety to the community they have gathered.

An engineer from Meta has joined the ActivityPub working group in the W3C. TheNewStack provides a good summary of both the welcoming, unwelcoming and open reactions from people.
Trust Cafe is a new discussion platform by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Their FAQ mentions that they are open to federation with ActivityPub, and welcome volunteers who want to contribute with implementation.
A blog post about how blocking Threads might not be enough to protect your privacy, for people on Mastodon servers who do not want any of their posts to be accessible to Threads.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says that Tumblr is still working on ActivityPub integration, but that they have to do this with orders of magnitude less resources than Meta. Meanwhile, an unverified claim that the project to add ActivityPub got cancelled two days after starting last year. They say not to be working on Tumblr since May this year, and have no information on what currently is being worked on by Tumblr. One of the people at Tumblr working at projects states that the project is delayed, and that they are still considering it for their labs.

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no hexbear yet :<

also this

https://lemmyverse.net/

https://github.com/WardPearce/Purplix.io

Purplix.io is a open source end-to-end encrypted survey system & warrant canary manger / viewer.