I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.

Speed demos made at FediForum September 2024, the online unconference that brings together the people who move the open social web and the Fediverse forward.

Also available on YouTube

It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!

TL;DR:

Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.

Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.

User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.

Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

Article translated in English :

Confederation closes its Mastodon instance

Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.

As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.

In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.

Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.

Too few active users

On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.

On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.

The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

https://fedidb.org/

Some folks have gotten themselves together as something they’re calling the Social Web Foundation, and I’ll cut to the chase: this is an attempt by ActivityPub partisans to rebrand the confusing “fediverse” terminology, and in the process, regardless of intent, shit on everything else that’s been the social web going back twenty-five years.

Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet, the OStatus protocol, and co-author of ActivityPub, is launching a dedicated nonprofit for the purpose of advocating for and supporting the Fediverse.

!announcements@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20509588

Here is an update that explains what we have been working on recently (apologies for not having these for a few months, summer vacations and all that). This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

@privacyguard added Single-Sign-On (SSO) support to lemmy (this still needs some UI work and testing, but the bulk of the work is done). Special thanks to Privacy Portal for working on this!

@carlos-cabello added a way to filter posts by title only (and not body) when searching.

@Freakazoid182 added custom emoji and tagline views.

@nothing4u made our scheduled cleanup job delete denied users.

@sunaurus made a few image proxy fixes.

@sleepless has been working hard on lemmy-ui-leptos, which may eventually replace lemmy-ui. He made improvements to how posts are displayed; made SI formatting consistent with how the current UI handles it; added translations; added post content actions, creator, and community listings; and made some plugins for markdown-it.

@nutomic cleaned up the issue tracker by closing invalid issues and adding tags like good first issue. He also made some simple improvements, like adding a category to RSS feeds, fixing an issue with activitypub ids, and removing the enable_nsfw setting in favor of content_warning.

@dessalines integrated a new rust clearurls library into lemmy that will remove tracking params for any post or comment text (Much thanks to @jendrikw for creating this library), increased the bio max length from 300 to 1000, removes lemmy's reliance on openssl, made the list logins response more uniform, added the ability to restore content on an unban, added a default comment sort type for both the local site, and your user.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

In a guest article co-written by Heidi Li Feldman and Tim Chambers, the case is made in favor of political organizing in the Fediverse, rather than through corporate social media.

Both authors bring up case studies in their experience in grassroots fundraising and advocacy for the Harris-Walz presidential campaign through Mastodon and Bluesky.

I'm planing hosting an instance, and I think that in the end I'll have to let the users pay for subscription. But just when I was imagining how I should design the subscription, I found there's a dilemma arose from the nature of fediverse:

(assume that people really like my instance for some reason)

1. If I charge my users, they may simply register on another instance and keep interacting with my instance to avoid paying the fees.
2. I can limit activities of the users who don't register on my instance to force them to subscribe my instance, but such action is obviously destructive to the fediverse.

I think this is not only my own problem. I think every instances with some scale faces the issue of costs, and relying on donation forever may not be a long term solution. So here's the question: how to let the owners of the instances get paid without violating the values of fediverse, i.e. decentralization and federation? Moreover, the solution should let the instances with higher popularity earn more money, so that'll encourage people to host high-quality instances. And I just figured out a (possibly very rough) solution by integrating blockchain to fediverse.

First, there will be a blockchain. There will be these cryptocurrencies:

1. the universal currency, let's say "fedicoin". Fedicoin can be traded on trading platforms like normal cryptocurrencies.
2. the currency of every single instance, e.g. InstanceA coin for InstanceA, InstanceB coin for InstanceB. The instance-specific coins are only used for federation between instances.

and the blockchain holds these data:

1. how many fedicoins and instance-specific coins each instances owns.
2. how many fedicoins each non-instance users owns, if any. I guess it would be better that only the instances can own instance-specific coins.

For operating the blockchain, there should be nodes to hold the data and process the transactions. The nodes can be either served by the instances or the non-instance machines. The nodes earn fedicoins.

When instances are federating with each other, every "demand" requires paying some instance-specific coins. The price of each type of demand will be predefined in the federation APIs. For example, if a user on InstanceB want to post on InstanceA, then InstanceB have to pay 10 lemmy.world coin to lemmy.world, and vise versa.

To earn instance-specific coins to pay for the demands, all the instances will "trade" automatically with other instances, and the "exchange rate" will be determined by some algorithm, possibly based on the amount of demands between each two instances. For example, if on average the demand from InstanceB to lemmy.world is 5 times more than the demand from lemmy.world to InstanceB, than in a trade, InstanceB may get 1000 lemmy.world coin, while lemmy.world may get 5000 InstanceB coin.

There will be an upper limit for every instance to own other instances' coins. For example, when lemmy.world owns 100,500 InstanceB coins, which exceeds the limit 100,000, then lemmy.world will refuse to trade with InstanceB by InstanceB coins. Under such condition, InstanceB have to trade with lemmy.world by the fedicoin. The owners of InstanceB will have to purchase fedicoin to let InstanceB trade with lemmy.world to maintain the fedaration.

Currently I think that the exchange rate between fedicoin and an instance-specific coin should be controlled by the owners of each instance, because each instance may have different costs for machines and moderation.

Finally, (hopefully) we'll have a fediverse like this:

1. The highly-demanded instances earn fedicoins, which can be exchanged to real-world currencies. Such mechanism also encourages hosting high-quality instances and more open federation.
2. The instances can simply charging their users normally by real-world currencies, so the users don't have to bother about cryptocurrencies.

Other side notes: Defining the prices of the demands may be tricky? For example, if my understanding is correct, there's no actual action like "read" when instances are communicating with APIs.

For the automatic trades between instances, of course there should be some controllable configuration, e.g. "don't buy coins over some price from some instances".

I'm just interested in the fediverse, and I hope my ideas can be helpful for its development. Any comments or crossposting are welcome and thank you for your reading.

Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, I’ve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into it’s own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.

About radio free fedi

Our friend Gabe from @owncast@fosstodon.org wanted a 24/7 feed of fedi artists, video, audio, anything. Given various attempts by Gabe and myself at both video and podcast formats with sustainability of content and buy-in issues, RFF was an invitation to a community driven pivot.

radio free fedi is consent, agency and artist celebrating community radio from the fediverse. We actively and openly present contributing artists' information with the hopes that you will drop-in, discover, and then LEAVE? That's right, RFF has no interest to be an end-point for hyper focused consumption. We also do not have the resource to provide infinite custom streams and we love the community to not do soulless algorithms. We want to foster organic discovery and discourse. We want to generate support for independent artists on the platforms and methods of their choice, no judgement. Support independent and fedi artists!

Things we do a little different:

No payola, no automated submissions, every submission is checked best we can to be from a decent fedizen and not likely to harm or harass our fedi friends of all walks
Every submission is carefully checked for good data and imagery best as possible. We have less time as we've grown to fix these so good submissions help heaps!
We add an artist support link affiliated to every track so you know where to go to help each other.
We add consented public fedi link affiliated to every track so you can interact with, promote and share the artists you find.
We add artists' license and permission for every track to celebrate agency and consent and again to foster good communication for support and collaboration.
Provide discovery options for independent artists who, like many of us, find promotion a bit challenging or uncomfortable. The classic fedi LOVES indie artists and promotion in this light is never a dirty word.

Artist data is made available on this website for now playing tracks and there is further track history in various formats including a bot for the main channel in case you missed track data while you were washing the dog. If you require alternative formats for ingestion for other means to help the wider world discover and support fedi artists please reach out.

Stop gaps like Bandcamp playlists on third party tracking sites, various hyper open methods with poor discovery and walled garden corporate streaming platforms alike seldom strike a good balance to retain attribution and actually promote, celebrate, interact and ENCOURAGE direct support of artists without costing everyone involved some painful percentage of coin, privacy and agency. We are continually impressed and heartened at the community that has rallied to support each other around a more transparent and organic discovery layer.

I hope my post doesn't break the rules ; I'd like to invite as many people as possible to participate to Sunnyvision, the summer edition of the Lemmyvision song contest.

It's a fun way to celebrate summer, and discover new music, more info on the original post, quoted below !

TL;DR

• In ~~this thread~~ the thread on !lemmyvision@jlai.lu, in the comments, post a song that was released in summer of any year.
• Next week, you'll be able to vote for your favourite song from the songs posted here.

Remember that time I wanted to set up a smaller scale Lemmyvision for summer? Yeah me neither.

But here it is, it's still summer for a week, so..

Welcome to Lemmyvision's summer edition, Sunnyvision!🌞

If you don't know what Lemmyvision is, check out the sidebar!

The aim is to promote different languages and cultures from around the world, to share more between our online communities across Lemmy, and discover songs from lesser known artists.

The first edition concluded on April (https://jlai.lu/post/6041838) with 9 instances/countries/communities participating! The Northern Boys - Sexy Train (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VXKhJfRQ7k), the feddit.uk submission, won!

For this 'lighter' edition, the goal is to celebrate the last week of summer, with some summer related tunes. You do not need to bring your instance/community, everyone can share a song, no matter what instance they're on, as long as they can federate here!

Rules

• Just post a song that was released in summer, from any year you want
• At the end of the week I'll gather all the songs posted in this thread
• You'll then be able to listen to a playlist with all those songs, and vote for your favourite!

Spread the word if you can, and I hope you have fun, and that everyone can discover new music! 🎶

If you ban a Mastodon user on a Lemmy community, does the ban transfer if they migrate instances?

The fediverse is now something that you can evangelize about. Its turning into a buzzword ...

This should inspire Prismic and the upcoming revival of OpenBlox

Galeras, eu consigo criar conta e autenticar numa conta #pixelfed usando uma do #mastodon??

@fediverse@lemmy.world @fediverse@bolha.forum

For Fediverse musicians looking for a new Bandcamp alternative, Bandwagon feels extremely promising. It's built on top of the Emissary platform, and offers a robust amount of features for playing, promoting, and discovering music.

sub.club is an emergent new platform for paid subscriptions in the #Fediverse. It's simple, smooth, and easy to use.

Because let's say you're Tom Hanks. And you get TomHanks@Lemmy.World

Well, what's stopping someone else from adopting TomHanks@Lemm.ee?

And some platforms minimize the text size of platform, or hide it entirely. So you just might see TomHanks, and think it's him. But it's actually a 7 year old Chinese boy with a broken leg in Arizona.

Because anyone can grab the same name, on a different platform.

Lemmy mentioned＼( °□° )／

Over the past 5-6 months, I've been noticing a lot of new accounts spinning up that look like this format:

• https://instance.xyz/u/gmbpjtmt
• https://instance.xyz/u/tjrwwiif
• https://instance.xyz/u/xzowaikv

What are they doing?

They're boosting and/or downvoting mostly, if not exclusively, US news and politics posts/comments to fit their agenda.

Edit: Could also be manipulating other regional news/politics, but my instance is regional and doesn't subscribe to those which limits my visibility into the overall manipulation patterns.

What do these have in common?

1. Most are on instances that have signups without applications (I'm guessing the few that are on instances with applications may be from before those were enabled since those are several months old, but just a guess; they could have easily just applied and been approved.)
2. Most are random 8-character usernames (occasionally 7 or 9 characters)
3. Most have a common set of users they're upvoting and/or downvoting consistently
4. No posts/comments
5. No avatar or bio (that's pretty common in general, but combine it with the other common attributes)
6. Update: Have had several anonymous reports (thanks!) that these users are registering with an @sharklasers.com email address which is a throwaway email service.

What can you, as an instance admin, do?

Keep an eye on new registrations to your instance. If you see any that fit this pattern, pick a few (and a few off this list) and see if they're voting along the same lines. You can also look in the login_token table to see if there is IP address overlap with other users on your instance and/or any other of these kinds of accounts.

You can also check the local_user table to see if the email addresses are from the same provider (not a guaranteed way to match them, but it can be a clue) or if they're they same email address using plus-addressing (e.g. user+whatever@email.xyz, user+whatever2@emai.xyz, etc).

Why are they doing this?

Your guess is as good as mine, but US elections are in a few months, and I highly suspect some kind of interference campaign based on the volume of these that are being spun up and the content that's being manipulated. That, or someone, possibly even a ghost or an alien life form, really wants the impression of public opinion being on their side. Just because I don't know exactly why doesn't mean that something fishy isn't happening that other admins should be aware of.

Who are the known culprits?

These are ones fitting that pattern which have been identified. There are certainly more, but these have been positively identified. Some were omitted since they were more garden-variety "to win an argument" style manipulation.

These all seem to be part of a campaign. This list is by no means comprehensive, and if there are any false positives, I do apologize. I've tried to separate out the "garden variety" type from the ones suspected of being part of a campaign, but may have missed some.

[New: 9/18/2024]: https://thelemmy.club/u/fxgwxqdr
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://discuss.online/u/nyubznrw
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://thelemmy.club/u/ththygij
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://ttrpg.network/u/umwagkpn
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://lemdro.id/u/dybyzgnn
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://lemmy.cafe/u/evtmowdq
https://leminal.space/u/mpiaaqzq
https://lemy.lol/u/ihuklfle
https://lemy.lol/u/iltxlmlr
https://lemy.lol/u/szxabejt
https://lemy.lol/u/woyjtear
https://lemy.lol/u/jikuwwrq
https://lemy.lol/u/matkalla
https://lemmy.ca/u/vlnligvx
https://ttrpg.network/u/kmjsxpie
https://lemmings.world/u/ueosqnhy
https://lemmings.world/u/mx_myxlplyx
https://startrek.website/u/girlbpzj
https://startrek.website/u/iorxkrdu
https://lemy.lol/u/tjrwwiif
https://lemy.lol/u/gmbpjtmt
https://thelemmy.club/u/avlnfqko
https://lemmy.today/u/blmpaxlm
https://lemy.lol/u/xhivhquf
https://sh.itjust.works/u/ntiytakd
https://jlai.lu/u/rpxhldtm
https://sh.itjust.works/u/ynvzpcbn
https://lazysoci.al/u/sksgvypn
https://lemy.lol/u/xzowaikv
https://lemy.lol/u/yecwilqu
https://lemy.lol/u/hwbjkxly
https://lemy.lol/u/kafbmgsy
https://discuss.online/u/tcjqmgzd
https://thelemmy.club/u/vcnzovqk
https://lemy.lol/u/gqvnyvvz
https://lazysoci.al/u/shcimfi
https://lemy.lol/u/u0hc7r
https://startrek.website/u/uoisqaru
https://jlai.lu/u/dtxiuwdx
https://discuss.online/u/oxwquohe
https://thelemmy.club/u/iicnhcqx
https://lemmings.world/u/uzinumke
https://startrek.website/u/evuorban
https://thelemmy.club/u/dswaxohe
https://lemdro.id/u/efkntptt
https://lemy.lol/u/ozgaolvw
https://lemy.lol/u/knylgpdv
https://discuss.online/u/omnajmxc
https://lemmy.cafe/u/iankglbrdurvstw
https://lemmy.ca/u/awuochoj
https://leminal.space/u/tjrwwiif
https://lemy.lol/u/basjcgsz
https://lemy.lol/u/smkkzswd
https://lazysoci.al/u/qokpsqnw
https://lemy.lol/u/ncvahblj
https://ttrpg.network/u/hputoioz
https://lazysoci.al/u/lghikcpj
https://lemmy.ca/u/xnjaqbzs
https://lemy.lol/u/yonkz

Edit: If you see anyone from your instance on here, please please please verify before taking any action. I'm only able to cross-check these against the content my instance is aware of.