Notices by Fediverse Report (fediversereport@mastodon.social)

Dutch government announces that they'll make Mastodon available to all layers of the entire Dutch government, as a shared service of the government, starting in 2025!

The Mastodon pilot of the government celebrates their 1-year anniversary today, and as part of the evaluation they stated the Mastodon pilot "strengthens digital autonomy and [creates] a safe and reliable information supply".

Announcement (in Dutch): https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/nieuws/1-jarig-mastodon-overheid-blikt-terug-en-vooruit/

With the excellent news that all accounts on WordPress.com can now connect with the fediverse, it seems like a good moment to mention that Fediverse Report has had this feature enabled for a while as well.

You can follow me directly at @LaurensHof to see all the blog posts directly in your fediverse feeds.

Announcement blog for WordPress.com: https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/10/11/activitypub/

Announcement post: https://mastodon.social/@pfefferle/111217236362579201

Last Month in Bluesky - September 23

Bluesky is undergoing a period of significant growth: mid September saw the network hitting 1 million accounts, and another 400k in the four weeks since.

Bluesky announced that the architecture for federation is now ready, and said they will start (internal) federation in the next few weeks. They will start federation with new servers (PDS) that are run by the Bluesky team, with open federation coming later.

Read at: https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-september-2023/

Zuckerberg says that he has always believed in decentralized social media protocols, but that it's too complicated to implement it in Facebook. He says that the opportunity cost of transitioning an existing platform is too big. Threads is different, because they are starting from scratch.

Mark Zuckerberg: "the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be"

The Verge just released an interview with Mark Zuckerberg about a wide variety of topics, including Threads and ActivityPub.

You can read the entire interview here, with some of the most relevant parts for the fediverse down below:

https://www.theverge.com/23889057/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-elon-musk-threads-quest-interview-decoder

The Swiss Government has officially launched their Mastodon server at https://social.admin.ch/

In their official press release the Government confirms it is a trial for one year. They state that "Mastodon has several characteristics that make it fundamentally attractive for government communications", such as being beyond the control of others, as well as it being privacy friendly.

Official press release: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmitteilungen.msg-id-97696.html

Speaker of the Swiss Government: @gov

The multiple meanings of #fediverse

In this piece I take a look at how you can approach the term fediverse from different perspective, and how they all have different ideas on what the fediverse actually is.

Is the fediverse a group of communities with a specific culture? All software that uses #activitypub? Or decentralised social networks that interoperate with each other?

read at: https://fediversereport.com/the-multiple-meanings-of-fediverse/

The developer of Sync, a popular Reddit app for Android, has confirmed that they're building 'Sync for Lemmy'.

The developer confirmed it on Reddit here: https://old.reddit.com/r/SyncforLemmy/comments/14ee1ul/sync_for_lemmy_is_happening/

You can track it in the new Lemmy community here: https://lemmy.world/c/syncforlemmy

[Posting to: @fediversenews @fediverse ]

A group of over 40 European organisations have recently released a statement calling for the EU to set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure Fund.

They call for this fund to support Digital Public Spaces, that are, among other things, based in FOSS, and ensure privacy by design. The statement gives three examples: #Mastodon, #PeerTube and #ActivityPub, stating that they would benefit from such a fund to further flourish.

Entire statement: https://shared-digital.eu/statement/

Calling all fediverse Developers! This Monday will be a first meeting of fediverse developers to organise and discuss practical implementations of fediverse software. It focuses on practical tips and best practices for real-world interoperability.

Please boost so we can get a good representation of all the different fediverse software projects present!

Driving force behind this first meetup is Owncast's @gabek

For more information: https://events.nixnet.services/events/92296854-651d-417f-a732-ea51ea94ac12

Automattic, the company behind WordPress is now the official author of the ActivityPub plugin. This is pretty big news, since it allows every WordPress website to be a potential fediverse server.

In this piece I take a look at the potential impact on #fediverse culture, zooming in on how tagging your WordPress posts makes them show up when you search for a specific hashtag here on the fediverse.

How do you think this will change the fediverse?

@fediversenews
Read at: https://fediversereport.com/wordpress-on-the-fediverse/

The developer of #owncast (@gabek) is starting a project to document how all software in the #fediverse actually federates with each other. Check it out at https://fedidocs.org/about/

This should make it easier to understand how every software project actually interoperates!

@fediversenews

https://social.gabekangas.com/notice/ATWTqMHBpRQm8yF1e4

This blog post by @signalapp is excellent. It talks about how there is "no such thing as global communication norms". Some features, such as stickers or voice memos are massively more popular in some regions than others.

This is something to take into account of what's going to happen if/when the fediverse starts to scale.

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-for-everyone/

@atomicpoet @mmayo @jo @mammoth One of the investors in #mammoth is also Marc Benioff, so people's assumption of VC equalling Big Tech billionaires was somewhat correct. Also a VC company (Long Journey Ventures) that has invested in things like Uber and SpaceX.

Im all about more transparency for funding and monetization, but I'm not really sure telling the fediverse community that your app is funded in part by Marc Benioff is really going to improve public perception, to say the least.

Nature has just put out correspondence that calls for scholarly institutes to join the #fediverse, and start their own #mastodon instances.

Together with that, the writers put out a longer article, 'Mastodon over Mammon', that explains the argument in greater detail, and is worth reading.

Great work by @brembs et al, which points to the core issue: the private ownership of public commons.

Full version:
https://zenodo.org/record/7652771
Nature Correspondence:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00486-3

Threadstodon.io is a simple and clean toll to unroll #mastodon threads into an easy-to read format, created by @ericbrookfield

Works exactly like you expect: give the thread URL, and you get an clean and easy-to-read formatted page of the thread back, that you can also easily share as well.

Use it at https://threadstodon.io/

StreetPass is a cool new browser extension that uses Mastodon's verification system in a clever way.

Mastodon users verify themselves by adding a custom link to their personal site. StreetPass lets you know when you've found one of these links, and adds them to your list. As you browse the web, StreetPass will build a list of Mastodon users that belong to the websites you visit.

I spoke with the creater @tvler about the project, 🧵 below.

Visit https://streetpass.social/ to try it yourself!