In the discussion, the dev who originally responded just pointed to the #NLnet pro-AI-but-mark-it-and-we-don’t-pay-for-it policy, while another F-Droid developer started with insults then pulled the “just a tool” card only to compare using #AI with using Windows as development platform, completely losing the plot of slop propagation.
Sad to see another supposedly-FOSS thing die with #fdroid embracing the fashtech. (Not as in using it themselves, but very well as actively welcoming äpps that use it and knocking down any criticism.)
#Wayland and #input methods?
Yeah, I think I paid back for what I messed up.
I wrote a description of every feature I could remember – implemented or not yet implemented – on my #blog .
With this, I'm moving on and shuffling away from the stage.
https://dorotac.eu/posts/im-finished
@deepjoy
Yes, I participated in two projects funded by #NLnet
First, #CAcert (I was on the board from 2012 to 2016, most recently as Vice President). Then, from 2016 until its unfortunate discontinuation in 2022, I worked on the #WPIA project, again as Vice President and also as Managing Director.
I have to say that the email server actually requires the least work of all.
I use the #MailCow Suite @doncow , and a lot of it is already automated, and the individual components work together seamlessly.
My mail server "serves" almost the entire family network, as well as 4 small businesses and a handful of clubs. So, about 10 or 12 "main domains", and around 20 or 25 alias domains.
IP reputation hasn't worried me much either; I've only had one blacklisting issue in the last five years, but the hosting provider resolved it within a few hours. And of course, you have to ensure that #DKIM, #DMARC, #SPF etc. work together correctly. Then it becomes quite easy.
So I'd say things have gotten easier since I started #selfhosting e-Mail years ago. (#mDaemon was my first hosting suite for e-Mail).
Edit: I should also mention that I run an email setup with a primary mail server and a backup mail server.
@deepjoy
You're right, funding from #NLnet is a very good sign. I've had the real pleasure of working on two NLnet-funded projects in the past.
I agree with you that the barriers to entry for #selfhosting many services are unfortunately very high—far too high for many. But that's precisely where tools like #YunoHost steps in.
I've been playing around with it a bit over the last few days and I have to say it's really easy to use. The fact that devices like #RaspberryPi are explicitly supported makes the barrier to entry much lower in my opinion.
My situation is a bit different. I already self-host a lot of things: #DNS, #webserver, #email, #cloud, #Matrix, #Mastodon, #Pixelfed. And everything runs on Raspberry Pis. Some of it is at my home, much of it in #hosting locations distributed across Europe.
@yunohost @nlnet
Unfortunately, #Vernissage was not selected for NLnet funding. It is disappointing, but I understand how competitive these calls are. As a fully independent project sustained entirely through community support, #Vernissage relies on patron support to cover its ongoing infrastructure and resource costs. That support now matters more than ever for the project’s future. ❤️
#NLnetFoundation #NLnet #Founding #Support #foss #photography #fediverse #ActivityPub
A note to #FOSS funders
I’ve been working at the heart of this space for more than 30 years, funded and unfunded. In that time I’ve seen hundreds of alternative tech projects start with energy and good intentions. Most of them wither on the vine, a very small number flower. After watching this cycle repeat for decades, one thing has become clear: the projects that survive and grow almost always follow a simple pattern. I call this the #4opens. Other people describe similar ideas as open source development, open […]
I cannot develop myself #fediprofile and #badgefed to the extent and in the pace that I want to take them, and also, I am not a designer/accessibility/front-end expert.
I have decided to apply for funding in #nlnet, if someone has some recommendations or tips lmk.
FR#155 – Where Does Community Live – updates
Last week I wrote an analysis article about how communities get built on open protocols, and how the architecture of both ActivityPub and atproto steer into different directions with what types of communities are possible, while at the same time giving people a significant amount of flexibility in what they are building. It is easy to let the major players determine the narrative for what the networks are for: when Mastodon saying their goal is to build a network of sovereign communities, to understand the entire fediverse and ActivityPub that way. Or when Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee says that the purpose of open protocols is “to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities”, to take this rights-based vision to understand the atmosphere more broadly.
But my interest is not only in describing general structures (“the fediverse is for networked communities, the atmosphere is a social infrastructure”), but also finding how specific news items fit in framework as much as it complicates it. So this week’s Fediverse Report is a collection of news items that relate to this framework.
Fediverse News
Twt Cymru, Wales’ longest-running independent fediverse node, announced a mobile app launching on St David’s Day, built in partnership with the Newsmast Foundation as part of their “Apps for Change” programme. The app wraps the toot.wales Mastodon server into a branded experience with its own onboarding flow, bilingual Welsh/English interface, and curated community feeds, designed to feel like a Welsh social app rather than a generic Mastodon client. Twt’s founder Jaz-Michael King describes it as “a digital lifeboat for Wales and the Welsh, a space that cannot be bought, sold, or broken by the whims of a single billionaire.” Twt Cymru is one of the clearest examples networked communities: a culturally specific community (Welsh language users), running their own infrastructure (a Mastodon server since 2017), now with their own branded app, federating into a much wider open social network. The Newsmast Foundation is pushing into this direction more broadly, with their partnership with the Bristol Cable as another example of how they’re building social apps that are predominantly for their own community, and the integration with the wider fediverse network as a secondary feature.
In Montreal, the first FediMTL conference was held, featuring keynotes from Cory Doctorow and two creators of the ActivityPub protocol, Christine Lemmer-Webber and Evan Prodromou. The conference had two intertwined motivations, that of sovereignty and of community. For sovereignty, with themes such as Canadian digital autonomy, escaping dependence on American platforms, and Doctorow arguing that Canadian technologists should “hack emergency exits” into existing platforms. The other is community, with Qlub, a Quebec-based ActivityPub platform with over 3,500 users, building a social space rooted in Quebec identity. These overlap but they are not quite the same thing: sovereignty asks who controls the infrastructure, and community asks what people build inside it. Both need bounded and self-governed digital spaces, but for different reasons.
The Netherlands swore in the new Jetten cabinet this week, and several ministers have begun posting on social.overheid.nl, the Dutch government’s Mastodon server running since 2023. A small item on its own, but maybe the clearest example of the sovereignty side: a government treating fediverse infrastructure as sovereign communications infrastructure.
The Forkiverse, the Mastodon server launched in January by podcast hosts PJ Vogt (Search Engine), Kevin Roose, and Casey Newton (Hard Fork), has now been running for nearly two months and grown to around 10,000 registered accounts with roughly 3,600 monthly active users. It remains one of the largest new fediverse servers since the 2023 post-Twitter migration wave. That the biggest new fediverse server in years grew out of an existing audience and not from scratch tracks with what the architecture implies: the networked community model works best when the community already exists before the server does. Moderation challenges arrived almost immediately: sexual harassment from federated users, encounters with the Portal Combat propaganda network, and the general discovery that running a server means running a community with real governance responsibilities. As the Hard Fork hosts found out, and as Mastodon’s Executive Director Felix Hlatky described in his recent interview about Mastodon operators, most people who start servers underestimate what moderation actually requires.
A fediverse take on the “link in bio” is being built, designed as a decentralized, privacy-respecting alternative to Linktree. Each profile is itself an ActivityPub actor: it can be followed, it boosts posts from all your other fediverse accounts, and it has its own inbox. The problem of the networked communities model is that this results in having a large number of different fediverse accounts: I had 26 different fediverse accounts last time I counted. The linktree approach turns that fragmentation into a feature by giving you one followable persona that aggregates all your fediverse activity. The challenge is that if your identity is tied to specific communities, each with their own server, you need some way to be visible as a single person across all (or at least some) of them. Atproto solved this by making identity portable and separate from any particular service. The fediverse has not solved this yet, but this is an interesting take on it.
A technical deep dive into Wafrn’s dual-protocol architecture, examining how the Tumblr-like platform implements both ActivityPub and atproto natively in a single codebase. From the perspective of networked communities a server can participate in both networks simultaneously is highly relevant. Wafrn is one of the more technically ambitious projects in the ecosystem, but that can be hard to see behind the deliberately unserious facade of the project (Wafrn stands for We Allow Female Representing Nipples, a reference to the Tumblr ban of adult content).
Atmosphere News
If the fediverse side is building networked communities, the atmosphere side is building the infrastructure those communities could run on. This week, that infrastructure got a lot busier.”
Multiple PDS providers are now explicitly positioning themselves as community infrastructure. Eurosky, the European atproto project, launched its PDS and crossed 1,000 users, releasing EU-HAUL, a migration tool available in 26 European languages. Northsky, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community PDS, published a Phase 2 roadmap covering their own app, moderation labeler, independent appview, and private data infrastructure. They have sent out over 1k invites with a 26% migration rate and 6k more people on their waitlist. The roadmap shows what it takes to turn a PDS into a community home on atproto: PDS hosting is only the first step, and everything else has to be built deliberately. Smaller PDS providers are also growing: npmx.social, run by developers behind a new npm registry browser that integrates with atproto, now hosts hundreds of people and is offering European PDS hosting as a side project alongside their main registry work. Blogging platform pckt also announced their own PDS.
The main development this week are three separate approaches to permissioned data on atproto, with Blacksky, Bluesky and Northsky all working on it.
Blacksky is close to launching private posts and community-scoped visibility. Rudy Fraser announced that their appview goes live next week, with the explicit note that this lets members interact with each other even if Bluesky has banned them, followed by the launch of Blacksky-only posts. Two proposals for community moderation approaches, peer-based communal moderation versus machine-learning image classification, will go to a community vote. Northsky is developing Stratos, their own private data solution that targets what they call “true data privacy rather than hiding in plain sight by using a different lexicon”. They plan to build Stratos for the broader atproto ecosystem, allowing anyone to run their own Stratos service. And Daniel Holmgren, Bluesky’s engineering lead, published the second entry in his permissioned data design diary, introducing “buckets” as a potential new protocol primitive.
Holmgren’s post is worth attention because it shows the protocol-level design problem in full. He works through two approaches that fail. App-controlled access (which he calls “realms”) solves the authorization problem but centralizes power in applications, because users in the same group using different apps cannot see each other’s content without individually authorizing every app. Granular per-record access control gives flexibility but creates a coordination problem: every time someone joins a group, every member’s access control list on every record needs updating. His solution, buckets, is a shared container with a single authoritative access control list that all content within it inherits. A bucket is, in protocol terms, a bounded space with governance: “permissioned data needs a shared context with a perimeter.” How buckets interact with the community-built solutions from Blacksky and Northsky, and whether these converge into shared infrastructure or remain parallel approaches, is worth watching.
Beyond microblogging, the application layer on atproto continues to thicken. A selection of what launched or updated recently:
Finally, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee published “Practical Decentralization,” a blog post that articulates what he sees as the purpose of open protocols: “to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet.” A deeper analysis will follow in a separate article. It is valuable to see protocol leadership put a specific thesis on paper, and I hope others will do the same.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr155-where-does-community-live-updates/
mirabilos
dorotaC
Juergen M. Bruckner
Vernissage
Christian Zierleyn
PositivDenken 🤯
#OMN (Open Media Network)
Maho 🦝🍻
Laurens Hof