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I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!

Bem vendos aos fediverses!

Jon

• 19 min read
The Bluesky logo, a stylized butterfly; and the fediverse logo, a multicolored pentacle and pentagram

Last updated September 12. See the Update Log at the bottom for details.

Join the discussion on Bluesky and infosec.exchange!
A Mastodon post from Marco Rogers (@polotek@social.polotek.net): I still maintain that the at protocol means that bluesky should be included in the definition of "the fediverse". I know it will take people some time to come around on that. And certainly bsky still has some promises to deliver on. But the actual fediverse will be so much messier than what people have in their heads right now. The lines will all be blurry and gray. By design.
Note the original versionof this pst was much longer, and I wound up moving a chunk of it to the next post in the series, Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse?. Sorry for the confusion!

The first time I saw the suggestion that Bluesky should be included as part of "the fediverse" was in a pair of Mastodon threads from Marco Rogers early this year. I hadn't ever looked at it that way before. After all, Bluesky has repeatedly highlighted the differences between its Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol and the ActivityPub (AP) protocol used by almost all of the 25,000+ instances in today's fediverse.1

But Rudy Fraser's outstanding The Moderation article had come out just a week before, giving me a much clearer understanding of the possibilities of the AT architecture, and Marco's points resonated with me. The more I thought about it, the more I came around to the idea.

Then again, opinions differ. Some people feel very strongly that Bluesky shouldn't be considered as part of "the fediverse". As Marco says, the lines are blurry and gray. The way I look at it is that there are many fediverses. Some include Bluesky, some don't. And different people mean different things by "the fediverse" (or "the Fediverse", as it's often written), so it's not surprising that there isn't agreement.

Over the last few months, though, more and more people are indeed coming around to Marco's way of thinking. TechCrunch's Welcome to the fediverse: Your guide to Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and more, Bluesky board member Mike Masnick's podcast The Fediverse And The Future Of Social Media: What Policymakers Need To Know, Saskia's Answering ARMY’s Question: What is the Fediverse & How Do We Get Involved?, the Fediverse Report's Fediverse for Publishers ...

Hey wait a second, I'm noticing a pattern here.

And the technology's advanced as well over the last few months. Bridgy Fed and long-time fediverse platform Friendica2 provide two-way connections between Bluesky and fediverse instances (servers) that only understand the ActivityPub protocol, allow accounts on Bluesky and other fediverse platforms to follow and interact with each other. It's not perfect, of course – connections between different Fediverse software are often incomplete and janky – but it sure feels like being part of the Fediverse.

Meanwhile, Bluesky itself has improved significantly, to the point where it's now a much better Twitter alternative than any Mastodon instance. Of course, there's a lot more to the fediverses than Twitter alternatives ... still, that's what a lot of people are looking for, so it's useful to have a good one in the fediverses. And the ATmosphere – a fediverse of AT-based applications including WhiteWind, Smoke Signals, and FrontPage – is starting to be broader than just Bluesky.

So let's make it official.

I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!

And what better way to do that than with a long post about it?

There are many fediverses

Of course, not everybody in the fediverses has such a welcoming view of Bluesky and the ATmosphere. One of the big reasons for that (although certainly not the only one!) is the different meanings people have for "the Fediverse".3

So before we get to the positive things Bluesky and the ATmosphere can potentially bring (and potential downsides of their newly-prominent position), important differences between AT and ActivityPub, the implications of BTS Army and millions of Brazilians joining Bluesky and the ATmosphere, the complex definitional struggles about what (if anything) "the Fediverse means going forward, let's start with the much more exciting topic of ...

Terminology!

  • a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentralized social network of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them, that communicate through one or more protocols, bridges, and hubs.4 Participants in a fediverse can be social networks (either centralized or decentralized) in their own right; participants can also be part of multiple fediverses.
  • "the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, and over time and means different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances, a specific kind of server
  • "today's Fediverse" is the Fediverse as it is now, as opposed to how it was in 2016 (before Mastodon existed), late 2023 (before Threads, Flipboard, and Bridgy Fed started two-way federation), or whatever comes next.
  • "fedi culture" is a set of cultural attributes that came to the Fediverse with the 2017 Mastodon/Glitch wave (although others use it more generally as "the culture of the fediverse"). Of course if you ask different people you'll get a different list of attributes – although many long-timers include things like pro-LGBTQIA2S+, defederation, #FediBlock, dislike for algorithmic feeds, and anti-Blackness in their list. 5
  • "the fediverse" can be a synonym for "the Fediverse", "today's Fediverse", "the fediverses," and occasionally even "fedi culture"
  • "fedi" can be a synonym for "the fediverse", "the Fediverse", "the fediverses", "fedi culture", or the community aspects of the fediverse(s)

Others use terminology differently (and sometimes so do I, when I'm quoting or responding to other what people have said). For example:

  • Lady of glitch.cat.family draws on the definition of the Web and emphasizes the overall interconnectedness by defining "The Fediverse" as "the set of servers and resources on the Internet which encode social interactions and relationships in a linked, machine-readable, open(-protocol, not necessarily public), and interoperable fashion"
  • in The Whiteness of Mastodon, Dr. Johnathan Flowers uses Mastodon "as a metoynym for the Fediverse," and notes that this is "in line with the documentation provided by Mastodon, which itself acknowledges the conflation of Mastodon with the Fediverse."
  • "Instances" have many names; Erin Kissane's and Darius Kazemi's Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers and many other sources refer to instances as "servers", and other terms include "service providers", or "sites" – and some software platforms have different names for their specific implementations of instances: "pods" in Diaspora, "hubs" in Hubzilla).
  • "federated" has different meanings to different people and in different disciplines. I'm using it in the general computer science sense of "servers connecting over protocols." Others (such as Lady's definition above) limit it to to specific kinds of interconnections or federated structure,. Often, there are analogies or references to political meanings of "federated", "federation", or "confederation." L. Rhodes in Federated and mediated networks and Robert W. Gehl's in Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse? are two good examples of this.

If you're thinking that this is kind of messy and confusing ... welcome to the fediverses!

Are Bluesky and the ATmosphere fediverses?

Bluesky is a decentralized social network, and the ATmosphere is a decentralized network of networks). But is it federated?

The Protocol Overview on atproto.com sure things so:

The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a federated protocol for large-scale distributed social applications.

Bluesky's also federated in the general computer science sense of the word (servers interconnecting over protocols),

Other opinions might differ, if they define "fediverse" or "federated" differently. And it's complex! Is BlackSky a semi-autonomous participant in Bluesky, an autonomous participant in the ATmosphere (currently relying on Bluesky's firehose for now but not necessarily inthe future), or both? The lines are gray and blurry, and it's all messy and confusing....

Hey wait a second, I'm noticing a pattern here. Welcome to the fediverses.

Is Bluesky an instance in today's Fediverse?

It depends on how you define "the Fediverse"... a topic I discuss in much more detail in Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse?

Does the answer even matter? To me, the key is to think of it in terms of many fediverses and getting away from privileging any One True Fediverse. Still, I also sometimes find it useful to consider about how meanings for Fediverse have evolved over time, for example the role of fascist fediverse instances like Gab and corporate fediverse instances like Threads. And understanding different positions on the definition of the Fediverse and in particular whether it includes Bluesky can help also highlight power dynamics and key difference of opinion that shape current and future fediverses.

Anyhow, the Fediverse means different things to different people, the boundaries are gray and blurry, its meaning constantly evolves. To me, it seems like Bluesky is indeed an instance in today's Fediverse. So to anybody on Bluesky reading this, I for one welcome you to the Fediverse as well – if you want to be part of it.

Then again if you don't want to be part of today's Fediverse, I totally respect that. My observation in Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks is just as true today as when I first wrote it in 2017:

"the existing “fediverse” is a two-edged sword"

From the Fediverse to fediverses, communities, and Social Archipelagos

"“The Fediverse” needs to end, and I don’t think anything should replace it. Speak instead about communities, and prioritize the strength of those communities. Speak about the way those communities interact, and don’t; the way they form strands and islands and gulfs. I’ve taken to calling this the Social Archipelago."

– Leonora Tindall, The Fediverse is Already Dead, March 2023

Terminology aside, the BTS Army and millions of Brazilians are most definitely joining Bluesky, and through it the ATmosphere. No matter the boundaries of today's Fediverse, this new surge highlights how different the situation in the fediverses is from November 2022, when millions of people dismayed by Apartheid Clyde's acquisition of Twitter flocked to Mastodon.

And a good thing too!

For one thing, that Fediverse needed to end. The emergence of multiple fediverses, and the role of bridges like Bridgy Fed in connecting them, is very aligned with Tindall's perspectives on communities and their interactions. Strands and islands in the Social Archipelagos can participate in multiple fediverses. Bridges can make connections over gulfs between (and potentially within) fediveres. Some of the strands and islands might even be fediverses in their own right.

And as BlackSky highlights, Bluesky and that ATmosphere are developing new organizations for strong communities and how they interact, complementing the Fediverse's instance-oriented structure. These aren't (yet) as place-oriented as Fediverse instances but it's still useful to think of them as part of the Social Archipelagos ... and noew topologies may well emerge.

"Some of what’s on my mind is about Mastodon/fedi, which has lost tempo on a lot of the parts of the Twitter migration that I’ve cared most about—Black Twitter, literary Twitter, radical journalist Twitter, while its someday-maybe-rival Bluesky has imported at least some of those communities despite obvious problems."

– Erin Kissane, The affordance loop, July 2023

Another reason Bluesky's emergence is a good thing for the fediverses is that most people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn't have good experiences ... so didn't stay in the Fediverse. Kissane's series of posts (also including Blue skies over Mastodon,  Notes from a Mastodon migration,and Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn't) talk about some of the reasons why. The Whiteness of Mastodon is also vital reading here. Frustratingly, many of the problems were similar to the ones faced by newcomers in the 2016-7 surge, most of whom also didn't stay.6

Bluesky addresses many (although certainly not all) of the issues newcomers to the Mastodon faced in 2022, and has paid a lot of attention to onboarding and usability. So today's Bluesky is a much better Twitter alternative for most people than Mastodon of 2022 – or today's Mastodon.

And having a much better Twitter alternative in the fediverses (and, depending on how you look at it, in the Fediverse) is a very good thing! Especially since Bluesky's arrival isn't the only big change in the Fediverse since November 2022.

Bluesky is a useful counterweight to Threads

"As always, it's exciting times in the Fediverse."

– me, in Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ!.

Meta's Threads entered the fediverse in April of this year, after some heated discussion of plans to embrace, extend, and exploit ActivityPub. Hundreds of instances have signed on to the Anti-Meta FediPact, many others are defederating (blocking) threads.net, but Mastodon's founder, CEO, and Benevolent Dictator for Life Eugen Rochko declared it a "clear victory for our cause." Kissane's Untangling Threads is a brilliantly-written overview of some of the pespectives about the situation, and polls (which are unreliable but still interesting) are roughly split. Guess what: it's messy and the lines are gray and blurry.

Flipboard's arrival in the Fediverse has sparked a lot less resistance than Threads but they two are a big ad-funded corporate social network. The top 19 entries on Mastodon Most Followed are on threads.net and flipboard.com. Most of the press the Fediverse gets these days focuses on Threads and Flipboard. No matter what you think of them, Threads and Flipboard have significantly changed the dynamics of the Fediverse.

And no matter what you think of them, Bluesky has also changed the dynamics. Bluesky now has ten times as many users as mastodon.social and is much larger (and growing) than Mastodon as a whole.

  • If you do see Bluesky as part of the Fediverse, they're (at least for now) by far the largest instance and largest platform, and further reinforce the current corporatizing trend.
  • If you don't see Bluesky as part of the Fediverse, it's (at least for now) the end of the Fediverse's era as the largest fediverse and the destination of choice for people looking for Twitter alternatives6

Either way, I see it as a good thing. For one thing, if the BTS Army and millions of Brazilians had joined Mastodon instead of Bluesky, most of them wouldn't have had a good experience – so would have joined Threads instead.7 Yes, Bluesky's venture funded, their all-public architecture is surveillance-capitalism friendly, they may well wind up with an exploitative business model, etc etc etc. All that being said, Bluesky's nowhere near close to Meta's track record of privacy invation, lying, expoiting their users base, law-breaking, assisting authoritarians and insurrectionists, and contributing to genocide!

So especially since Bluesky (unlike the Fediverse as a whole) is directly competing with Threads, they're a useful counterweight. And Bluesky also seems a lot more savvy about how Silicon Valley-based big tech companies operate than many fediverse influencers, so they're less likely to be tricked into believing Threads has anybody's best interests at heart other than Mark Zuckerberg's

It's the end of the Fediverse as we know it – and I feel fine

"I was excited by Bluesky's version of "big world social networking" because it meant I could host an instance of Bluesky tailored to Black users, curate custom feeds tailored to Black users, and moderate content that would be harmful to Black users without any of those users missing out on the content and context of the broader Bluesky ecosystem. This detail alone makes Bluesky radically different than other social networks."

– Rudy Fraser, Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space (Part 2)
"[T]houghtfully governed, medium-sized Fediverse servers are especially well positioned to offer a model of high-context, culturally sensitive online community that outperforms most interactions with centralized platform governance;

*The Fediverse’s combined emphasis on the sovereignty of local norms and a federated form of network diplomacy can offer a real and optimistic challenge to the dead end of centralized content moderation at scale"

-- Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers, Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi

Importantly, Bluesky's focus on the big world system complements something the rest of today's Fediverse is (at it's best) quite good at. Today's Fediverse's networked communities model combines these small- and medium-size communities with a decent "big world" view – not as big a world as the flat space of Bluesky, and with all kinds of quirks related to federation and defederation, but still (at it's best) pretty good. Bridgy Fed is a route to a better "big world" view for people in the Fediverse who want Bluesky as part of their big microblogging world (just as Threads and Flipboard provide routes to a better big world view for people in the Fediverse who want them as part of their microblogging world).

And microblogging is only one aspect of today's Fediverse. PeerTube is a viable YouTube alternative; check out DAIR Institute's Peertube page, with videos of their Data Workers Inquiry and Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 for an example of what you can find there. Pixelfed (images) and Mobilizon (events) continue to improve. So does the "Threadiverse" (federated forums, blogs, link aggregators, and other threaded discussion). The list goes on ...

Unfortunately, most people in today's Fediverse don't experience it at its best. But that's fixable! And while Bluesky's also developing its own community mechanism, it's an all-public space. Today's Fediverse's scoped visibility, while imperfect, is something that doesn't exist yet in Bluesky or the ATmosphere.

As Michael Foster says in Brazil, Bluesky & the Fediverse, Bluesky's emergence "means we can move on to something bigger and better." Citing Molly White's We can have a different web, Foster also suggests that "Fediverse 2.0" needs to get beyond "people vs protocols" to also focus on politics. Commenting on Foster's post in Fediverso 2.0: o fenômeno político que desponta no Brasil, José Murilo writes

"It reinforces the vision we have (at the Brazilian Institute of Museums) about the importance of the Fediverse as an ideal environment for digital public policies, as well as for activism and progressive media. Not to mention the huge wave of innovation in open source technology that is emerging from the possibility of customizing the open web through specific applications of the Fediverse in protocols such as ActivityPub."

AT's big-world approach, and Bluesky's attention to onboarding, usability, and stronger controls for people to protect themselves, are a welcome breath of fresh air in the fediverses – and hopefully to the Fediverse in particular as well. And the ATmosphere is already starting to develop non-microblogging platforms that may well similarly complement other Fediverse software.

So I for one am very glad to see Bluesky and the ATmosphere – and the BTS Army and millions of Brazilians – joining the fediverses.

Bem vendos aos fediverses!

Stay tuned for more!

There's a lot more to explore here on all of these topics. The next post in the series, Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse?, goes into more detail on some of the definitional struggles about how to define "the Fediverse" that leads people to different conclusions – and ways in which Bluesky's culture does and doesn't align with "fedi culture".

After that, I'll also discuss in more why Bluesky's a better Twitter alternative for most people, the AT protocol's advantages over today's ActivityPub for building scalable big world public networks, synergies between Bluesky and today's Fediverse, power dynamics in the fediverses, anti-Blackness, and more....

To be continued!

A note to researchers

There's a rich tradition of excellent academic and independent research in the fediverses – and a lot more interesting research to do, so I welcome you on that front as well! Hopefully the references in this article and the followup are a good starting point. These are only the tip of the iceberg, of course, and there's a lot of other valuable stuff out there. For topics related to moderation and Trust & Safety, the IFTAS Connect Library is a valuable resource in general, and includes links to various moderation-related research.

That said, not all of the research interactions with the Fediverse have been positive – see for example An Open Letter from the Mastodon community (2020) after one especially unfortunate incident. So even if your IRB says it's okay, please don't be like that or I for one will unwelcome you – and so will many others.

Roel Roscam Abbing and Robert W. Gehl's Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? Here’s what you need to know (2024) explains key differences between the Fediverse and X, and ends with several recommendations: consider studying instances, not individuals; work with instance admins, moderators, and the community at large to discover mutual research interests; and use the principle of parsimony. Gehl's Researching the Fediverse: Instances and Individuals (2024) is a good companion piece. So is "The Fediverse as an Ongoing Critique of Openness", in Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of F/LOSS (2020), coauthored by Aymeric Mansoux and Abbing.

As KatLH said in Research Ethics in the Fediverse (2020), "there is a general expectation that the minimum bar to clear should be opt in via informed consent." Consent matters, even for public posts (2024) makes a similar point, focusing on developers. Unfortunately, there is no general consent mechanism; Abbing's what does toot:indexable mean for academic research on the fediverse? (2023) looks at the best-known consent mechanism, introduced by Mastodon in release 4.2 and also adopted by several other platforms.

Bluesky, by contrast, has made it clear that (with minor exceptions other than DMs and mute lists) it's an all-public network with no expectation of privacy built around access to a firehose. Of course, as privacy scholars Daniel Solove and Woodrow Harzog note in their recent The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy, "the public availability of scraped data shouldn’t give scrapers a free pass." Norms on Bluesky may wind up following the expectation on Twitter that it's just fine for researchers to scrape and otherwise use data (as long as your IRB approves, of course) but then again more and more people are comming around to the idea that consent matters, even for public posts.

What about posts from other Fediverse instances that are available in the Bluesky firehose thanks to Bridgy Fed and other connectors? Bridgy Fed is opt-in (and only federates public posts), so one way of looking at it is that people have affirmatively consented to Bluesky norms. Other future connectors may take a different approach so this too may well get murky ethically. We'll see how thigs evolve, but today the lines are gray and blurry. Welcome to the fediverses!

Notes

1 There are around 70 active Diaspora instances according to fediverse.party; and a handful of Gnu Social instances listed on FediDB that presumably still use OStatus. In addition, Fediverse software including Friendica, Hubzilla, micro.blog, Wordpress (which also supports Indieweb via plugins) and BridgyFed supports multiple protocols. Still, almost all of the 25,000+ instances in today's Fediverse only support ActivityPub.

2 Friendica (originally Mistpark) launched in 2010, and with its support of the DFRN, OStatus, and Diaspora protocol was the first multi-protocol fediverse server; according to FediDB, there are currently around 300 Friendica instances with 1400 active users.

As Elena Rossini's recent The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 3: Friendica) discusses, Friendica's functionality remains much richer than better-known fediverse software like Mastodon. Friendica founder Mike Macgirvin went on to create Hubzilla, (streams), and now Forte; his Nomad and Zot protocols have long supported nomadic fediverse identity, and (streams) recently added nomadic identity over ActivityPub.

3 For that matter, my own usage of the terms has changed over time, so please keep that in mind if you read my other writing!

4 This part of the definition is originally based on Wikipedia's Fediverse page. I genericized it ("a fediverse" instead of "the fediverse"), and added "people and organizations" and "bridges and hubs."

A broader definition in terms of social media, as opposed to just social networking, would also include chat systems IRC, XMPP, and Matrix as well as email. Of course, the lines are blurry: a with my definition, a Matrix-based decentralizsed social network would be considered a fediverse.

Others might broaden the definition to include multi-protocol apps. Fediverse Report's Laurens Hof, for example, talks about "federation in the client"; Flipboard CEO's Mike McCue's perception of fediverse that I quote later in this article includes being connected to ActivityPub via apps. I don't have strong feelings either way here.

5 "fedi culture" for me includes

Your mileage may vary.

6 Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks (May 2017) was my attempt to sum up what I had in the April 2017 wave. A few of the highlights that applied equally well to 2022:

  • Even with a stated anti-harassment focus it can still be challenging for a network to respond well when people are actually harassed.
  • Even with an explicit anti-harassment, anti-fascism, and anti-racism focus, people of color are likely to be marginalized if the most influential people are white. Other patterns that are likely to occur as well (as elsewhere online):
    — cis men are likely to prioritize anti-harassment functionality lower than women and gender-diverse people.
    — harassment is more likely to be directed at women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.
    — impacts are likely to fall most heavily on women of color, and in particular queer women of color.
  • Instance-level federation choices are an important tool for sites that want to create a safer environment (although need to be complemented by user-level control and other functionality)

7

Mastodon forks like Glitch and Hometown and other platforms like Akkoma, Misskey, and GoToSocial are signifcantly better in various ways than Mastodon, but ActivityPub's design and the current structure of the Fediverse means that they're still not great Twitter alternatives – and that's what a lot of people leaving X because of Apartheid Clyde are looking for.

Update Log

Ongoing: typo and wording fixes, additional links, minor cleanups

September 5: initial "draft preview" version, titled "I for one welcome Bluesky and the ATmosphere to the fediverses!"

September 8: first published non-draft version, originally also including ost of what turned into the next post in the series

September 9: added A note to researchers , moved detailed discussion of whether Bluesky's a Fediverse instance to a separate post

September 10-11: revised definitions and section on whether Bluesky is an instance based on feedback in fediverse discussions.

September 12: continued revising definitional sections, revised closing section to include Threads (and reordered)