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Fediverse News – Summer 2026
Fediverse software updates, summer 2026 edition
The Algorithm, Apparently Chronological
A German court has explicitly named Mastodon and Bluesky as positive examples of social networks that could retain hosting protection. It gets Bluesky’s feeds wrong, but its reasoning about user control might be more useful than it realises.
AI watermarking has a decentralisation problem
With AI watermarking inference providers mark their output as AI generated. But for the system to become useful, lots of independent providers need to collaborate together in a decentralised system without overarching governance.
FR#168 - LLMs Join The Fediverse
How to build a fediverse community when bots are indistinguishable from humans on applications to join?
The Permission Machine
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.
Decrypting Matrix - Where Do Rooms Go?
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.
FR#167 - Change
On coordination in a decentralised network, and the European Social Stack declaration.
FR#166 – No Change
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.
FR#164 – The Pope on Defederation
This week, the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.
FR#163 – Decrypting Matrix
On the convergence towards private data on social networking protocols, and the connection to Matrix
FR#162 – EU Regulation Won’t Save Open Social Networks
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.
FR#161 – Conference Edition
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.
FR#160 – Everyone Wants Servers And Nobody Wants Servers
What makes a social network resilient?
FR#159 – Sovereign Tech Agency funds Mastodon
Mastodon has received a 600k grant by the Sovereign Tech Agency, and Surf has launched.
On verification and coordination authority
Who verifies the atproto developer community, and why can't it be the community itself?
FR#158 – What is Mastodon for?
On AI and place, and how Mastodon gives tools to create communities at the instance level, but people experience 'place' at the federation level.