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!

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou asks. 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 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 with practical guides for fediverse software.

A tool to discover new Lemmy communities.

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.

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.

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no hexbear yet :<

also this

https://lemmyverse.net/

Fungi have crossed the CleanTechnica radar as a potential biofuel resource, a packaging and insulation material, and a plant-based alternative to animal-derived leather. The idea of making sustainable concrete-type blocks from fungi has also been percolating for several years.

In January, for example, NASA published a proposal from the University of Nebraska that describes how sustainable buildings could be grown on Mars by, combining the masonry skills of fungi and cyanobacteria.

“This research proposes that, rather than shipping prefabricated outfitting elements to Mars, habitat outfitting can be realized by insitu construction using cyanobacteria and fungi as building agents,” explains Congrui Grace Jin, an assistant professor at the school’s College of Engineering, with in situ meaning that the blocks would be fabricated at the construction site.

The self-repairing bio-material would incorporate native soil, aka regolith, from the planet’s surface to grow homemade building blocks.

“Synthetic biology toolkits will be employed to create a synthetic lichen system, composed of diazotrophic cyanobacteria and filamentous fungi, to produce abundant biominerals (calcium carbonate) and biopolymers, which will glue Martian regolith into consolidated building blocks,” Jin added.