Laurens
@laurenshof.online
I care about an ethical internet. I write about Bluesky, the atmosphere and open social protocols at connectedplaces.online 🇳🇱
I care about an ethical internet. I write about Bluesky, the atmosphere and open social protocols at connectedplaces.online 🇳🇱
How to build a fediverse community when bots are indistinguishable from humans on applications to join?
When Elon Musk calls to imprison the government, it turns out not to matter very much. But when thousands of accounts repeat each other, it matters enormously.
Matrix has been running private rooms on open protocols for a decade, and they ended up inside European governments. This piece is about why happened, and why it does not have to be the result of the various projects for private data and rooms on the open social web too.
On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.
Many people in Europe see the open social web as a path to digital sovereignty. This week demonstrated a problem: the assumption that European governments actually want to be sovereign.
This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.
On the convergence towards private data on social networking protocols, and the connection to Matrix
The European Commission has decided not to extend the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules to social media, closing off a potential pathway for adoption for open social networks.
How the conferences FediForum and 2mr.social this week show how fediverse is trying to build connections with European politics, as well as with the atmosphere.
What the Russmedia ruling means for ActivityPub and atproto.
What makes a social network resilient?
Mastodon has received a 600k grant by the Sovereign Tech Agency, and Surf has launched.
On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience 'place' at the federation level.
Open social protocols are expanding beyond social media into the infrastructure developers use to build, distribute, and discover software. Three recent launches show what that looks like in practice.
On Mastodon's new Share button, and protocol ownership.
A big grab bag of news, that ties into the question of 'Where Does Community Live?'
Fediverse search engine Holos Discover shut down this week, showing structural issues how to distinguish between individual and community consent.
ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.