Laurens Hof

protocols as aesthetics

this is genuinely the most bewildering drama about fedi and consent that ive ever seen

the cyberpunk present is weird as fuck: the latest Shai Hulud malware wave contains an LLM prompt to create biological weapons and nuclear weapons, with the purpose to trip LLM safety refusals so that LLM-based code scanning wont see the malware

https://socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hulud-miasma-and-hades-worms-target-bioinformatics-and-mcp-developers-via-malicious

the problem with writing about 'the purpose of a system is what it does' is that it makes you realise that the purpose of open protocols is to have protocol wars, people fucking love to argue about their protocol as a teamsport

absolutely wild that the news that dutch gas prices rose by 30% in a single day did not even manage to crack the top 5 most read stories

like, how? how did we fuck up our information ecosystem this badly?

sure this is all very bad for activitypub but this is truly amazing content

jack dorsey discourse hitting the timeline

RE: https://toot.fedilab.app/@apps/116048181884367592

the meta-problem, that a well-meaning actor does not feel comfortable in the knowledge the 'indexable' flag can actually be treated the way it says on the label actually a massive problem for fedi

is one of the coolest activitypub projects, and shows that the network has an incredible amount of growth potential still by exploring new primitives

https://holos.social/how-it-works

mastodon has dropped the ball so hard on supporting local-only posting that atproto is inventing this concept now from first principles

https://chipnick.com/a-model-for-addressing-privacy-on-atproto/

mastodon should keep mastodon.social as the default on joinmastodon.org and their apps, as it is an amazing strategy to maximise engagement on the fediverse

JGAO is such a crazy good channel about current chinese culture

lmao, Meta is considering a change to charge for sharing links on Facebook. Under the change, page and professional mode profiles can only share 2 links per month, and you can share more links if you pay for Meta Verified

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-considering-charging-business-pages-to-post-links/808099/

slop

I was interviewed about how media can use new social platforms

Happy that they explicitly mention why I do this work: sure, big tech bad, but the main point is that social media are collective sense making tools, and thats what makes them so extraordinarily valuable

https://www.svdj.nl/nieuws/stapje-voor-stapje-de-controle-terugpakken-hoe-media-hun-publiek-kunnen-heroveren-op-big-tech/

is there an opensignup bonfire server thats updated to 1.0? would like to check it out but dont see any server for it

turns out that federating forums by ingesting microblogs with hashtags is an absolutely disastrous idea

even worse, while forum<>forum federation might work, as soon as one forum ingests microblogs it ruins the ecosystem for the other forums who are connected to it

that the main way people use groups for microblogging is suddenly defunct because one person forgot to renew their domain might be a good indication that decentralisation and network resilience includes more than counting the number of servers

GPT 5 everybody! Screenshots from the livestream

i dont even recall people on fedi talking about this as if this would ever even happen lol

https://www.theverge.com/news/695124/tumblr-wordpress-automattic-fediverse-integration-on-hold-decoder

listening in on #igf2025 on the session Privacy Preserving Interoperability and the Fediverse and its absolutely maddening. the speakers are literally hallucinating worse than an LLM on what the interoperability for threads actually looks like

https://igf2025.sched.com/event/246Ho/ws-

lol just checked your peertube video, and im immediately connected to 21 peers for it🥹

these are the top posts I see on Threads' new fediverse feeds

10/10 no notes

You can catch me live on stream on the

in a few hours!

https://social.firesidefedi.live/@firesidefedi/statuses/01JTJWFV78QDBCS9AE4ZQQBCCW

federation challenge: how does this work?

i made a post (note) on my wordpress account. its enabled with activitypub, and thus gets send out to the fediverse. My wordpress account gets followed by a Discourse forum. Someone on the Discourse forum replies with a note. I open the wordpress article with my main mastodon account. I see the discourse reply. I want to react, but with my personal mastodon account.

(cont)

Considering this post is going viral here and boosted by Mastodon's ceo:

What is mastodon.social's policy if it had received the same takedown request? Meaning if an account on mastodon.social was ordered to be taken down by a Turkish judge 'under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, citing “national security and public order.”'

More context on the request: https://bianet.org/haber/x-users-in-turkey-migrate-to-bluesky-amid-censorship-306189

cc

https://mas.to/@osma/114346166890552471

i think the eu should invite Canada to be part of Eurovision

participation is already famously apolitical anyway so having our friends from across the pond join would be a nice bonus

the unaccountable leadership of the big tech platforms is bad! Please join our network with unaccountable leadership instead!

anyone have any idea what happened here?

5.6k servers shutting down in a month is a lot, but it is not reflected in other stats. im not convinced yet that there were 5k servers out there being actively used by real people that could all shut down without people noticing it in other ways

A quick comparison between how people like Paul and Hailey can Post, versus how Eugen or the Lemmy devs post, as well as the active user numbers between these platforms make me just ever so slightly doubtful of this claim

https://social.coop/@cwebber/113602196673345224

This is why I included a section on Mastodon in my article on how Bluesky is not distributed in a social sense. Its much easier to deal with on Bluesky because of the explicit nature of the centralisation points.

The fediverse is absolutely failing at decentralisation here: we are clearly centralised on one of the aspects that actually matter, and handed power over to a dictator-for-life who refuses accountability

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-decentralisation-and-the-distribution-of-power/

https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113524158302790957

I think the core question for the fediverse is now how the community will regroup and reorient itself now that its becoming clear that it will not be the new destination for people looking for an alternative to X

The fediverse does not have to be a public-global townsquare twitter-like, instead we can built new types of networked communities

People saying things like 'this large account is our Algorithm' or 'this big account is our Starter Pack' does not exactly bode confidence in the whole decentralisation thing tbh

No shade to these accounts, they do impressive and hard work and have massively contributed to the community.

Its just that promoting single accounts for a specific purpose of either content or account discovery is hugely centralising around them?

i think over time 'fediverse' will come to include bluesky:

simple reason, it makes everyone mad:

• from the activitypub side for recognising a different protocol
• from the atproto side because they want to push 'ATmosphere' instead
• from the branding and marketing side because its a bad name

so everyone agrees that its bad, but any alternative cannot find consensus since it'll end up in a fight about power and definitions. so it'll end up defaulting to fediverse including bluesky

fucking brutal lol

like i said, that fedi was not paying attention matters

https://indieweb.social/@laurenshof/113045668161154399