ElectroVagrant

This is a more focused revision of a post I made a few months ago, with an aim to help with discovery across the fediverse.

Searching and Following methods
This will vary across software, and may change as it changes, so take note of when this was written (end of March 2025).

By default, ActivityPub sites don't know of other, remote sites. Any remote site stuff you're seeing is because somehow the site your on was made aware of the other's stuff. Typically this may be that a user learns of a remote site's stuff in some way and decides to follow from their home site by looking it up via their site's search then subscribing/following.

All of the above format-specific links I've provided above are means of finding some remote sites' stuff to follow on one's home site. Below are some additional tools and methods to further help when using some of these different sites.

If you're aware of other resources, tools, or methods that I've not mentioned here, please mention them in the comments! There's undoubtedly more to add that I've not come across.

If you're reading this, you may be new or interested in seeing what's up.

What the Fed?
So putting it overly simply and from the start, the whole federation thing is basically like you following/subscribing to people/channels to make your timeline or for you page, but it's a whole community activity and some of the people/channels are from a variety of places rather than a single platform.

From there, you then curate what the community's found to suit your interests as you would in other places, following/subscribing and blocking, muting, or keyword filtering, depending on where you're participating from. For what your place and community's found, you'll look through either the "All" or "Other Servers" feeds. "Other Servers" just means only from other places and their communities, meanwhile the "All" feed is a blend of both original stuff from your place and from other places.

If you want to see only what your place's posting, sharing, and discussing, you'd look to either the "Local" or "This Server" feed. If you're from a small place, chances are this may be quieter than bigger places, like a village compared to a city. This may also extend to the aforementioned "All" feeds, but that depends on your place's community and whether they're avid lurkers following and subscribing to many without saying much, or the opposite, highly chatty with each other while not looking much beyond their little place.

Gettin' Messy
But what if your community hasn't found what you'd like to follow yet?

Here's where things get messy and either fun, or frustrating, depending on your mindset and time of day. You gotta roam the web, be curious. See the weird thing after someone's name? Like "DingoDazzle@doughnut.delish?" That "doughnut.delish" is another place with who knows what there. Take a chance and see what else may be found on "doughnut.delish", then copy a username or profile/channel/community link you find there with a different place name like, "MadSodaScientist@chemical.soup" into the search for your place and try to follow it.

Okay, so that's a whole thing, and it's more involved than corporate social media where it's often just a click, but that's how the raw discovery tends to work around here because it's connecting different places. It's clunky and manual, but once you've done it, you've helped your place out by making sure others don't have to do that. It's often a thankless task, but so is much of finding things for strangers.

Also it's worth mentioning, sometimes it won't work in your place, because technology is complicated and hard and everyone's using it a little differently. It's always a little wonder any of this works even a quarter as well as it does, all things considering.

Some Discovery Resources
However, there's more to finding other stuff than that, because the point of all this is community, and that means you're not alone. There's a number of resources to help.

For link aggregators using Lemmy or similar, there's Lemmyverse, for finding communities to subscribe to. Not to mention there's a few communities in these places for announcing and promoting new ones, such as !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !community_promo@lemmy.ca.

For microblogging sites using Mastodon or similar, there's Trunk, Fediverse.info, and Fedi.directory. Also for trying to connect to groups across said sites, there's A.Gup.pe.

It's also commonly recommended to follow hashtags related to your interests, e.g. #SillyTech, but also it doesn't hurt to keep an eye on #FollowFriday. There's also FediFollows that posts regular lists of people and accounts they think may be worth following.

For video sites using Peertube, there's SepiaSearch, and streaming sites using Owncast, there's Owncast Directory.

And if you want to zoom out further, there's Fediverse.observer, where you can see a range of different places using different software to host their communities. It's a great way to explore even further afield.

Think that's all I have for now. Be kindweird, go strange places, share with others, and embrace confusion.

Toss in whatever else you think may be helpful that I'm forgetting/unaware of, keepin' with the attempt to stay on the lighter, non-technical side.

Despite understandable misgivings with ATProto due to its corporate origins and its architecture lending itself to centralization, it's still open source. Moreover, it serves a different purpose compared to ActivityPub, in that it specifically aims to enable and support larger scale social networks.

In a way, ATProto could be complementary to ActivityPub, but for this to be the case, there needs to be more shared understanding between both communities. People working on both recognize the faults in existing social media, and aim to address them in different ways.

ATProto provides an opportunity to break down big social media enclosures with data portability and a similar vibe to big social media, but with more individual empowerment to adjust what they see. The latter point is a commonality with ActivityPub, but ActivityPub provides a different angle of breaking the big social media enclosures.

Where ATProto serves the interests of those into big social media vibes, ActivityPub serves the interests of those into small social media vibes. In other words, ATProto scales up, where ActivityPub scales down.

ActivityPub is arguably a better protocol for both individual and "small" group empowerment, as it can enable otherwise less active, small platforms to connect and ensure there's always some level of activity to encourage people to come back. Think of old forums that, on their own, gradually faded out as people stopped visiting and posting for more active online communities. ActivityPub can serve as a buffer against that, to some degree.

Together, both protocols could provide a better, open social web, and perhaps effectively topple big social media enclosures. After all, who wouldn't like to see the web without Meta/Facebook and Twitter/X?

TL;DR: ATProto/ActivityPub have a common foe in big social media enclosures like Meta/Facebook and Twitter/X and would be better served working together to erode their influence.

Trying to pitch the Fediverse on its technology backend to non-technical people is a bad approach, but so is trying to pitch it in terms of digital detox or "better" culture.

The backend is for the tech people, and the rest is your regular messy people. There are as many good pockets of the Fediverse as bad, because that's the internet.

In light of that, it's questionable to what extent the Fediverse should be pitched as a distinct thing in a similar vein as those platforms some Fediverse software emulates. Fediverse, open social web, whatever you want to call it is of main relevance more to those working on it and trying to promote it among developers.

To those of us using these platforms, it's probably better to simply invite those to our respective instances/sites as simply another site/app without all the jargon and background.

Forget Lemmy/Mastodon/Pixelfed/etc. except insofar as it's in the URL or needed to search apps. Ultimately they're backends, and many weren't going around inviting people to their sites or enthusiast forums talking up apache or phpbb or the like.

The Fediverse is an emerging subset of the open web with improved interconnectedness, and so what's more important than it is reinvigorating the spirit of the open web by reminding people there's more beyond the closed web by inviting and encouraging them to visit our open spaces alongside their own. It's closed web/walled garden thinking to discourage visiting a variety of sites and using a variety of apps.

The open web thrives, enduring, enveloping and eroding the enclosures despite their efforts to ward off its persistent being.

Article by Mike Masnick

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

Technically, anyone with the knowledge and interest can spin up a single-user ActivityPub server and go about their business, but generally these servers aren't being developed with that usage in mind. In other words, they can be overkill for individuals in terms of features or resource use.

That's where single-user software comes into play. Explicitly developed for individuals, or in some cases very small groups, to use, this software is lighter on resources and more focused in its features for individuals.

As to why you might want this: it enables you to benefit from many of the benefits of ActivityPub, connecting and engaging with others & building your own curated feeds, without some of the drawbacks of multi-user servers such as keeping up with federation/defederation decisions that may affect what you can interact with & follow.

So on to a couple lists, in no particular order:

"Microblogging" but with relaxed character limits:

1. GoToSocial
2. Hollo
3. Ktistec
4. Seppo - Note: more specialized/limited compared to above.
5. Takahe - More experimental compared to others above

Other

1. GoBlog - Simple blogging
2. Betula - Bookmark management & sharing.
3. Postmarks - Same idea as Betula, but some differences like ActivityPub commenting possible.

I'm sure there's way more, but these were a few that stuck out to me. Let me know any others you're into that I may have overlooked!

As RSS fans here may know, you can grab RSS feeds of communities and even your profile on Lemmy instances if you like. You can also do this with profiles on Mastodon, and I imagine other ActivityPub microblogging services.

However, you may not have known that public Bluesky profiles are much the same. By public, I mean their posts can be viewed without signing in to Bsky. I'm not sure but I'd think those limiting their visibility may not (or should not) permit pulling a RSS feed of their posts.

All you do is copy the account's Bsky handle, e.g. [username].bsky.social (or custom domains, should work the same I think) to your RSS reader of choice, and you should have a feed of their posts.

It's a nice way to get feeds for news sites that don't directly offer them and that have moved to Bsky but not Mastodon or other ActivityPub microblogging services. It's also great if you're simply not into microblogging in general and/or don't want to make another social media account and download another app.

Hope this helps!

I dunno how many here have given it a try yet, or simply don't ever intend to but are nevertheless a little curious, so I'm putting down some notes here.

Very basics:

1. It's very much a Twitter clone on the surface.
2. It may depend on your setup, but in my experience I did not have to provide a phone number to sign up.

Some miscellaneous quirks
Something not mentioned as much is that the custom feeds are, at least at the moment, not really user friendly to try to make yourself. These very much have a vibe of something more tech-oriented people may make for others to use, even with the Skyfeed app to ease their creation. If anything the fact something like Skyfeed exists is some evidence of this.

The trick is, the custom feeds are genuinely more flexible than lists of accounts or followed hashtags/terms on Misskey or Mastodon, but at the moment Bluesky's custom feeds seem kind of underutilized. Many of the custom feeds could simply be lists as found elsewhere.

Not sure how much of that is because the only existing platform using the AuthTransfer Protocol is Bluesky, technical challenge, or something else, but that's the state of many of them for now.

Oh, and presently there's no DMs, just as a stray detail to mention. Skimming convos I got the sense it may be to avoid giving people the sense of any private communications on there.

Also despite all these feeds and a more centralized model (dependent presently only on Bluesky's relay), there's still a sentiment from some there of the place being empty and lacking engagement. In the time I was poking about it, one of the "viral" posts in my discover feed was someone there, amusingly much like here and elsewhere on the fediverse, reminding people they have to engage/talk to others to get any engagement.

Some things really don't change where you go online.

My overall takeaway thus far is that it's pretty much par for the course with microblogging platforms, and not necessarily the best first showing of what the AuthTransfer protocol might really enable. Especially not with its lacking reach/privacy controls, not that any federated social media makes sense to promote as highly private, but still, some controls are better than none.

Today, we’re releasing an open labeling system on Bluesky. “Labeling” is a key part of moderation; it is a system for marking content that may need to be hidden, blurred, taken down, or annotated in applications. Labeling is how a lot of centralized moderation works under the hood, but nobody has ever opened it up for anyone to contribute. By building an open source labeling system, our goal is to empower developers, organizations, and users to actively participate in shaping the future of moderation.

In this post, we’ll dive into the details on how labeling and moderation works in the AT Protocol.

As Bluesky begins to open up more and more, it's felt more pertinent to try to wrap my head around it. To help in this, I decided to write out my rough understanding of it from its documentation, in the hopes that it may help others and myself with any corrections from misunderstandings.

As Bluesky themselves note, the architecture is laid out in Personal Data Servers, Relays, & App Views. The intent is that each of these may be deployed and/or developed independently of Bluesky, with some caveats to each.

First & foremost, which is somewhat glossed over, is the notion that ordinary people will have the knowledge or interest in deploying their own Personal Data Servers. This isn't really touched on from what I've seen in their documentation, despite it being touted as such a major benefit of the architecture.

Second, which is recognized in their documentation, is that due to the high volumes of data involved, there are likely to be fewer Relays deployed instead of many. See the following:

The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers. Small bespoke Relays could also service tightly or well-defined slices of the network, like a specific new application or a small community.

This inarguably undercuts much of the benefit of it as a distributed network given that Relays are what may enable much of the transfer of data across the network.

It is noted that this may be avoided via server-to-server networking, so we'll have to see how that shakes out given it's mentioned almost as an afterthought.

Third, data portability across a distributed network is absolutely an achievement, but it must be scrutinized. Their language concerning PDSs itself indicates they expect them to be as prone to ephemerality as existing fediverse instances, see:

We assume that a Personal Data Server may fail at any time, either by going offline in its entirety, or by ceasing service for specific users.

Data portability then is reliant on a few crucial details:
Clear communication of the need to safely store recovery keys and backups.

Retention of recovery keys in some way (people never lose recovery keys, right?).

Device safety/stability to ensure access to your Authenticated Transfer client's backed up data, and sufficient storage for said backup.

From that last section note the following about PDSs, "...or by ceasing service for specific users", and then see their documentation on PDS Entryways.

Bluesky runs many PDSs. Each PDS runs as a completely separate service in the network with its own identity. They federate with the rest of the network in the exact same manner that a non-Bluesky PDS would.
[...]
To enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface for interacting with bsky.social accounts.

What's noteworthy here is that in creating Bluesky Social, they've essentially created a model that I foresee others building on the AuthTransfer protocol emulating. Many everyday people won't be spinning up their own PDSs, in the same way that few people spin up their own fediverse instances. Essentially instead of PDS Entryways, what may emerge may be AuthTransfer Entryways/Gateways for whatever variety of apps may eventually be built on it.

Similar to different fediverse platforms, you may then eventually see AuthTransfer platforms that pair together Entryway services with an App View as Bluesky itself is presently doing. Arguably this may make the AuthTransfer network no more decentralized (they go back & forth on describing their approach as decentralized and distributed) than the ActivityPub network is.

Lastly, regarding custom feeds and composable moderation, there is something on a protocol level here that those using ActivityPub may look to and improve on (and may already be doing so).

In some cruder ways, however, these are already in play on the fediverse. Custom feeds exist here on Lemmy via different communities and instances. More topic-focused instances (on Lemmy as well as other fediverse platforms) in particular can collaboratively produce distinct local and federated/all feeds. To a limited degree similar may be said of "composable moderation" with community moderation and user/instance blocking.

Mastodon even permits the sharing of one's mute/block lists, albeit admittedly somewhat clunkily.

Altogether the AuthTransfer protocol definitely makes some interesting improvements, but not without some awkward tradeoffs that they seem to be trying to talk around instead of speaking more plainly about.

Addendum, as I wasn't sure if I was about to hit a character limit:
The idea of regular people spinning up a Personal Data Server is already pretty laughable, but it's accentuated by the idea that they might also go out of their way to pay for a domain name to sort of establish(?) their identity across the AuthTransfer network. Many will likely simply have names like around here as @name.atentryservice.tld.

Also there's a kind of weird disconnect throughout the documentation from the idea of people perhaps wanting to operate multiple handles/identities for different platforms, or different purposes on the same platforms. A lot of thought seems put into owning/maintaining a singular identity, but not as much to multiple identities.

Image description:
a crudely drawn face in top-left panel looking at a simple circle in the right panel says, "I prefer the real orb."

crudely drawn face with raised eyebrow in mid-left panel looking to their right at a now shaded circle with a shadow, "I said the real orb."

crudely drawn face with raised eyebrow and a smile in bottom-left panel looking to their right at the shaded circle, now larger and breaking through the bottom and middle panels closer to their face, "Perfection."

using meme-creation as a means to learn some aspects of inkscape 'cause why not

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission.
[...]
Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows.