games OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

[Filled] Seeking more for a weekly Masks game

Hello people, you may know me from my multiple posts for my weekly sunday cyberpunk game I've been running for hexbear users for a year now. Me and a few other awesome trans-femme hexbear users have come together to start up a game of Masks, a Powered by the Apocalypse game that centers on teenage superheroes. Inspired by Teen Titans or Young Justice, Masks explores how superpowers impact a teen's life, and their relationships. A very rules-lite system that empowers the players to create a story all of their own, we look to play once a week at or around 2:00 PM CST / 8:00 PM CET. At the moment we are playing on Saturdays but are open to some other days of the week (Not Monday/Wednesday/Sunday) You do not need to have any previous TTRPG experience or knowledge of comic books, or even LGBT, just interest in role-playing and collaborative story-telling with comrades. We use a private discord server for voice and roll20 for the virtual tabletop Please comment or send a direct message for any information/interest. Thanks! While there are no more spaces in the game please reach out if you are interested if something happens I'll be pleased to reach out.

ttrpg OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Weekly Shadowrun (Cyberpunk + Urban Fantasy roleplaying game) game looking for more!

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1672667 > Hello and thanks for the interest, I've been running a weekly cyberpunk roleplaying game for hexbear users for over a year now, and I'm looking for new people to join a heist/anti-corporate aktion/criminal syndicate intrigue campaign. > > The current system is Shadowrun 5e and I can provide all the information to play the game on Roll20 the web-based tabletop simulator we use to play and utilize discord for voice. We'll build a character together to join the existing group of: > > Mafia Orcish Gun-guy > Ex-corporate Human Medical Mage > Ex-corporate Elven Infiltration Mage > Shadowy Human Drone Operator > > We are looking for one to two people to join us on Sundays for three hours starting at 8:00PM CET / 2:00PM EST > > Please leave a comment or send a DM if interested or have any questions > >

games OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Weekly Shadowrun (Cyberpunk + Urban Fantasy roleplaying game) game looking for more!

Hello and thanks for the interest, I've been running a weekly cyberpunk roleplaying game for hexbear users for over a year now, and I'm looking for new people to join a heist/anti-corporate aktion/criminal syndicate intrigue campaign. The current system is Shadowrun 5e and I can provide all the information to play the game on Roll20 the web-based tabletop simulator we use to play and utilize discord for voice. We'll build a character together to join the existing group of: Mafia Orcish Gun-guy Ex-corporate Human Medical Mage Ex-corporate Elven Infiltration Mage Shadowy Human Drone Operator We are looking for one to two people to join us on Sundays for three hours starting at 8:00PM CET / 2:00PM EST Please leave a comment or send a DM if interested or have any questions

games OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Looking for a couple players to join a Sunday Cyberpunk TTRPG game night

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/339101 > We started off playing Cyberpunk Red and are just now playing Shadowrun 5E, a delightful mix of cybernetic technology, magic, and near-future corporate wrecking mischief! > > We play on sundays from 20:00 to 23:00 CET or 14:00 to 17:00 EST the majority of the players are from hexbear with the exception of a single person. We are skipping November 26 so the next date of play will be December 3rd. > > I can provide all the books and resources for developing the character, we play on Roll20 using maps, tends to be a pretty even mix between roleplay and combat. Even spread between goofy/fun play and more serious moral explorations in the context of a cyberpunk world. We have a couple femme of center and a couple masculine of center folks in the game. We use lines/veils and try to include some time before and after the game to socialize out of character. > > I am an experienced GM in many genres of ttrpgs but would say I specialize in cyberpunk/modern settings, and welcome anyone to join no matter their experience with TTRPGs (a couple players are very new to TTRPGS and others are quite experienced) or Shadowrun. I will ask that if you are very knowledgable about the Shadowrun world / timeline of events / big plot points to do your best to not meta-game or share that knowledge out of character. > > We use discord for voice, and while we do have a home-server we have been using a group message/call for playing. > > Any questions or interest please comment here or DM me. > > Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1063911 > cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/339101 > > > Hey there we have been playing now for a couple months and have a spot, currently 5 players (myself and 4 PCs) and like to do around 5-6 PCs so that we can always play even if a couple are unavailable. Currently we have a Mafia gunguy, a sword guy, a medical magician, and an infiltration oriented magician. > > > > We play on sundays from 20:00 to 23:00 CET or 14:00 to 17:00 EST the majority of the players are from lemmy with the exception of a single person. > > > > I can provide all the books and resources for developing the character, we play on Roll20 using maps, tends to be a pretty even mix between roleplay and combat. Even spread between goofy/fun play and more serious moral explorations in the context of a cyberpunk world. We have a couple femme of center and a couple masculine of center folks in the game. We use lines/veils and try to include some time before and after the game to socialize out of character. > > > > I am an experienced GM in many genres of ttrpgs but would say I specialize in cyberpunk/modern settings, and welcome anyone to join no matter their experience with TTRPGs (a couple players are very new to TTRPGS and others are quite experienced) or Shadowrun. I will ask that if you are very knowledgable about the Shadowrun world / timeline of events / big plot points to do your best to not meta-game or share that knowledge out of character. > > > > We use discord for voice, and have a simple server dedicated to this > > > > Any questions or interest please comment here or DM me. > > > > Thanks!

Forgot to make this post yesterday. Managed to do about 2,000 between the two days finished up a chapter and moving into the second. Feeling really good so far and think I'm pacing the novel well of course if I do finish it'll be an effort to actually edit it lmao.

RIP [@LiberalSocialist@hexbear.net](https://hexbear.net/u/LiberalSocialist) who did this last year. Helped inspire me to give it a go this year. Was able to put down 1,642 words in a fantasy/sci-fi novel I've gotten some help with here, while not starting a novel from scratch I hope to use this month challenge to finish it.

fediverse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Last Week in Fediverse – episode 33

fediversereport.com

Lemmy experienced a CSAM attack this week, with some significant ramifications for the entire network. It started early in the week, where new accounts created on lemmy.world posted Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on multiple communities. This prompted the lemmy.world admins on Monday to set the registration to application only, with no more open signup on the server. The next day the CSAM attack continued, this time from accounts made on other servers that posted to communities on lemmy.world. As a response the lemmy.world admins closed the lemmyshitpost community, as that seemed to be the main focus of the attack. This problem with CSAM on Lemmy differs from the problem that Mastodon has with CSAM, as reported on earlier this summer. When the Stanford Internet Observatory report found CSAM on Mastodon, it often existed below the surface, with the vast majority of users never encountering the material. The attack on Lemmy seems to have been executed with the purpose of getting people to see the material, as quite some people reported seeing the material. One of the major impacts of this attack relates to technical design choices that Lemmy has made. Images that are posted on server A get send over and stored on server B, when someone on server B follows a community on server A. Images that are posted on lemmy.world, the biggest Lemmy server, exists in the databases of most other Lemmy servers as well. This means that due to the attack on lemmy.world, many Lemmy admins do now have images of CSAM in their database. With it comes liability for the admins, as well as reporting requirements. IFTAS has a good overview of the resources for admins to navigate these requirements. Other aspects of Lemmy have confounded the issue of third party servers unwittingly hosting CSAM. It is currently not possible to federate with other Lemmy servers, and receive the text of a post, without also receiving and hosting the images of a post. Mastodon for example does allow servers to reject images while not rejecting text. Selective deletion of images in the database on Lemmy is also hard to do, and as a result, servers decided to delete all federated images in their database. One of the ways admins deal with this new threat is with a new AI scanning tool called Lemmy Safety, created by the admin of the dbzer0 lemmy server. It scans all images in the Lemmy database for potential CSAM, and automatically deletes the images, and can also be used to scan newly incoming images. While this can help in the short term with making sure there is no CSAM material, it might interfere with legal obligations that administrators have. In various jurisdictions, administrators are required to report to the relevant authorities when they become aware of CSAM. Again, this collection of resources by IFTAS is a good start with helpful information. It is clear that this is a complicated problem for volunteer admins to deal with. Multiple administrators concluded that the risks and complications of continuing to host Lemmy servers is not worth it. Other servers, such as lemm.ee have made extensive plans on how to deal with the situation, such as disabling image uploads, and applying a custom patch to prevent images from other servers to be saved on their server. They also float the idea of an invite-based registration system. On the Matrix chat channels for Lemmy admins, tension is rising, and people are frustrated with the lack of acknowledgement and communications from the developers @dessalines and @nutomic. The developers have not communicated anything about this on either their Matrix chat channels or on their Lemmy. On their GitHub, the dbzer0 admin proposed to expand his automated CSAM scanning to allow for saving and review potential hits, instead of outright deletion. Developer @dessalines stated that this “is not something we have time for rn.” For servers that are operated under US law however, administrators are mandated to save CSAM they encounter, report it to the authorities, make it not visible for users, and restrict access to the saved material as best as possible. The outright rejection by the main developer to build tools that can admins satisfy these legal requirements does not help the confidence of admins who are worried about their responsibilities. Meanwhile, new reports are starting to pop up of a new type of CSAM attack. Posts that are titled ‘Tiktok Cringe’, and first show a few seconds of a random tiktok video, and then switch to CSAM material. This makes it really easy for moderators to miss the content, unless they watch the entire video. At this point, it is unclear if this was an isolated incident, or part of a bigger attack. How this situation will develop in the near future is out in the open, but I’m sure we’ll come back to it soon. Social network Minds has been working on implementing ActivityPub, and are now mostly connected to the fediverse. Minds, which launched in 2015, has a strong focus on free speech and cryptocurrency. As such, multiple outlets report the far-right nature of its user base. Minds reported that they joined the fediverse in a not particularly clear post. So far it seems like posts made on Minds are visible on Mastodon, but comments made by Mastodon users on a post made by Minds, are not visible on the Minds’ platform itself. The culture and ethics of Minds seems to differ significantly from that of most fediverse servers, and if Minds becomes more prominently visible within the fediverse, this will likely lead to friction and conversations around defederation. On the other hand, it does give another indication that ActivityPub is becoming the standard protocol for other social networks to implement. A contributor to the Tusky project (an open source Android client for Mastodon) leaves the project, and writes a blog post alleging financial mismanagement. The other contributors write an extensive explanation of the situation, denying the allegations. While the situation itself is not particularly impactful for the fediverse, it is a good illustration of how difficult the organisational aspect of collectively building software on the fediverse is.

chapotraphouse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Remote Hiring Database

hiring.cafe

A few months back someone asked around looking for a remote work job database, I don't think this was it but could help someone so here it is.

fediverse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Very interesting series of comments on threadiverse

Credit to https://literature.cafe/u/Janvier Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear’s politics. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I’ve come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I’ve split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy’s 10k character post limit. # 1/5 – The Threadiverse is shrinking There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn’t enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It’s [visible in the active user data](https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse), as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There’s a couple of obvious culprits for this: Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience. Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences. This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in. # 2/5 – Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance I support your account of Hexbear’s predecessor. I don’t share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear’s current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience. Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of ‘enlightened’ centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press’ attention, perhaps they didn’t want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That’s how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances. With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They’ve developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you’re transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there’s not a better place on the web to be. While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation. # 3/5 – Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse’s killer feature Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success. So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That’s obviously up to the admin(s), but it can’t be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow. Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I’ve alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy’s codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them. Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.

fediverse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 31

fediversereport.com

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.

traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns OpheliaAzure • Now • 97%

we stan a NB ICON


traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns OpheliaAzure • Now • 98%

claiming sunsets in the name of traaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaans

 🏳️‍⚧️

traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

death to ...


traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

biscuit template

 

traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

oh fuck i need to do voice practice


ttrpg OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Looking for a couple players to join a Sunday Cyberpunk TTRPG game night

We started off playing Cyberpunk Red and are just now trying out Shadowrun 5E We play on sundays from 20:00 to 23:00 CET or 14:00 to 17:00 EST the majority of the players are from hexbear with the exception of a single person. I can provide all the books and resources for developing the character, we play on Roll20 using maps, tends to be a pretty even mix between roleplay and combat. Even spread between goofy/fun play and more serious moral explorations in the context of a cyberpunk world. We have a couple femme of center and a couple masculine of center folks in the game. We use lines/veils and try to include some time before and after the game to socialize out of character. I am an experienced GM in many genres of ttrpgs but would say I specialize in cyberpunk/modern settings, and welcome anyone to join no matter their experience with TTRPGs (a couple players are very new to TTRPGS and others are quite experienced) or Shadowrun. I will ask that if you are very knowledgable about the Shadowrun world / timeline of events / big plot points to do your best to not meta-game or share that knowledge out of character. We use discord for voice, and while we do have a home-server we have been using a group message/call for playing. Any questions or interest please comment here or DM me. Thanks!

fediverse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 30

fediversereport.com

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou [asks](https://cosocial.ca/@evan/110876724649979050). 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](https://toast.ooo/post/288913) 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 ](https://thefedi.wiki/)with practical guides for fediverse software. A [tool](https://stirante.github.io/lemmy-discover/) to discover new Lemmy communities.

fediverse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 29

fediversereport.com

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.

fediverse OpheliaAzure • Now • 100%

Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 27

fediversereport.com

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. Thank you for reading! If you want to receive this weekly newsletter right in your inbox every week, subscribe below!