Welcome! It’s been a somewhat slower news week, over on the microblogging side of the fediverse, but that makes it up for a busy week of community drama on the threadiverse. Being a young platform that has recently had a massive inflow of new people means figuring out as a group of communities on how to interact together. Lemmy is now seeing this process play out, with multiple ongoing conversations and issues around defederation. Let’s dive right in!

Defederation drama on Lemmy

Over the last few weeks, multiple Lemmy servers have either defederated from each other, or held discussions about defederation. These decisions and conversations have been for quite different reasons, but there is some underlying common threads in the conversations around it. Decisions by individual servers to defederate is usually something I prefer not to report on, but in this case its worth noting the community’s response to it.

A quick rundown of the different events: A Lemmy server decided to defederate from Lemmynsfw.com, a Lemmy server that is dedicated to porn. The NSFW community made a thread (here, but might be down) to complain about the defederation decision. Lemmy’s largest server, Lemmy.world has defederated from a large server that is dedicated to piracy, citing regulatory reasons. The decision was originally published in their discord, leading to pushback from their own community over both the decision itself as well as their communication methods. Finally, multiple servers have held open discussions about whether to defederate from Hexbear, with the end result that Hexbear in turn decided to defederate from one the involved servers. Hexbear is an active Lemmy server that has existed for multiple years seperated from the rest of the fediverse, and only in the last few weeks have turned on federation. The community is strong leftist, and formed after the ChapTrapHouse community got banned from Reddit.

What stands out in these separate events is the wider community involvements and opinion regarding the defederation decisions. On the microblogging side of the fediverse, drama between servers that leads to defederation is usually treated more as a something that only really affects the people on both servers, and people on servers that are not part of the drama either staying out of it, or offering commentary from the sideline.

In the threads on Lemmy dedicated to these decisions, lots of people from who are not directly impacted by the decisions chimed in. Part of this is the affordances of the software, which accentuates the idea that everyone can centrally respond to a specific topic. Another part of it is that defederation on Lemmy has a different and broader impact on the entire community than it has on, let’s say Mastodon. This is most visible in the case of Lemmy.world defederating from the large piracy community dbzer0. For the Lemmy community at large, the piracy community is more valuable the more people are contributing to it. So when the largest Lemmy community cannot contribute anymore, this decision meaningfully impacts the people who are not part of neither the lemmy.world or dbzer0 community.

Community culture on Lemmy also differs from the culture that is more dominant on other parts of the fediverse. On microblogging platforms, defederation and blocking is framed in terms of safety and protection. On Lemmy and Kbin safety also plays a role, especially in the case of defederation between Hexbear and Blahaj.zone. However, defederation tend to also be framed in the context of censorship. The Lemm.ee server, a proposal to defederate from Hexbear was viewed much more critical, with comments focusing more on individual responsibility. In the other cases regarding piracy or NSFW content, people’s hesitation towards defederation gets framed even more in terms of censorship. Overall it feels like the broader Lemmy community is still searching for a shared communal attitude towards when defederation is a proper tool to be used, if such consensus can even be found.

In other news

The Nivenly foundation announced that Kris Nóva has passed away. She was the driving force behind the hachyderm.io server as an admin. She stepped back from that role and became the president of the Nivenly foundation, the ‘nonprofit on a mission to bring sustainable governance and autonomy to open source projects’. Her contributions and work with Hachyderm and Nivenly have made a significant positive contribution on the fediverse.

Bean, a Lemmy app for iOS has officially launched. One of it’s standout features is the ability to group communities into a single feed, although this is locked behind the paid version. The Lemmy developers relegated the decision on how to approach duplicate communities to well, the community, and this grouping in the client is one potential way of dealing with the duplication. In a short conversation with the developer, he said he expects to add Kbin support as well, once the Kbin API officially releasesand that other Lemmy apps will do so too. This might hopefully avoid the microblogging problems of the fediverse, where the vast majority of apps only support Mastodon and rarely the other microblogging platforms.

Red Planet Lab, a VC-backed startup, has released a demo of a Mastodon clone with a completely rewritten backend, in order to have it handle Twitter-sized audience (500M+ users). Their demo is done to showcase their product Rama, their new programming platform. Red Planet Lab promises to open source release their ActivityPub server next week. Backend architecture is not the only necessary requirement to have a success product however, as the recent shuttering of Cloudflare’s Wildebeest project indicates. It also has sparked a renewed conversation on the fediverse regarding server sizes: ‘what is a good size for fediverse servers, and can servers be too large?’

other

A Threads engineer posts about ActivityPub, specifically about putting in effort to learn about the protocol. From the thread, it seems there is a team of at least four engineers at Meta who are working on what they call ‘fediverse workstream from threads’. They express an interest in joining the Fediverse Developer Network as well.

Mozilla.social, the Mastodon server of Mozilla that is currently in closed beta testing, seems to be using a front end client based on Elk as a user interface.

A new cross poster that allows you to automatically post your fediverse posts to Bluesky as well. An update by Robert W. Gehl on his upcoming book “Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media”.

Firefish continues its professionalisation steps with a new paid developer, sponsored by Spacehost. Spacehost is a new hosting service for fediverse software, with Chris Trottier being involved in both Spacehost and Firefish. The Verifiedjournalist.org project is looking for someone to take over the project.

The University of Innsbruck has set up their own Mastodon server. (h/t for the tip @gunchleoc)

WeDistribute has a great article on IFTAS, the organisation for Independent Federated Trust and Safety.

An extensive article on hashtags by Chris Messina, creator of the hashtag. The article goes into detail on Mastodon’s proposed changes to hashtags.