Last Week in Fediverse – ep 80
A British signup wave from X to Bluesky, Flipboard expands their fediverse integration, and more.
The News
Bluesky has seen a new signup wave away from X towards Bluesky, which consists predominantly of people from the UK. The move comes as Labour MPs begin quitting X, as The Guardian reports, as Musk feuds with the UK government over recent riots in the UK, per Reuters. Quite a few MPs have signed up for Bluesky, here is a starter pack with all MPs that are on Bluesky. In the UK press issues with X have become a subject of conversation again. It is clear that in the perspective of the UK press there are two alternatives to X, either Threads or Bluesky. Mastodon mostly does not get mentioned at all, and neither has Mastodon experienced any meaningful change in signup numbers during this period. The FORbetter newsletter takes a look at Google trends data which also shows that it is all Threads and Bluesky, with Mastodon missing the boat. What is also notable about this Bluesky signup wave is that it is spread out quite far in time, and less spiky. Previous waves (such as when an Indonesian community or the BTS ARMY joined Bluesky) tend to have a very big spike at the beginning which then quickly dies down: in this case, an increase started almost two weeks ago, which plateaued a week later with multiple days staying at the same level. This all indicates a more steady and consistent interest from the UK in Bluesky.
Flipboard has expanded their fediverse integration, and with the latest update you can follow people from the rest of the fediverse in the Flipboard app. Flipboard is now getting close to full two-way federation, as some accounts can also like and reply to other fediverse posts with their Flipboard account. Some more reporting by WeDistribute and The Verge on the feature. Flipboard is heavily leaning on federated Threads accounts for the new feature: 80% of the accounts that were recommended to me by Flipboard are Threads accounts. On the flip side, Flipboard does not seem to be particularly focused on Bluesky, with no (bridged) accounts recommended, and the account for Bluesky board member Mike Masnick is his Mastodon account, and not his more active Bluesky account.
An observation about Bluesky: one thing that interests me about Bluesky is how some of the experimental new features that are implemented find traction not in their original intended use case, but get repurposed by the community for another goal instead. Third party labeling is implemented by Bluesky as a way to do community labeling, but as good moderation is hard to do (and the most prominent labelers have called it quits). Instead, a different use case for labeling is emerging: self-labeling: setting your pronouns, country flags, or your fursona. Another emergent use case is for starter packs, which have gotten low usage during regular periods (with more use during migration sign-up waves), which seem to be more used as a Follow-Friday list.
The Links
- WeDistribute writes about ‘The Untapped Potential of Fediverse Publishing’.
- Mastodon’s monthly engineering update, Trunk & Tidbits. Andy Piper, Mastodons Developer Relations Lead, writes a personal blog post on the series as well.
- Fediverse Trust and Safety: The Founding and Future of IFTAS.
- Piefed’s monthly development update, with an indication that the software is almost ready for an official 1.0 release.
- Ghost’s weekly update says that they are still working on having the posts show up on Mastodon reliably.
- Dhaaga is a cross-platform app for both Mastodon and Misskey.
- Altmetric is a product to track academic research being discussed online, and they announced that they are working on adding Bluesky support.
- Bluesky engineer Brian Newbold wrote an update on the current state of atproto and how much progress is made regarding reaching the goals and values of atproto.
- A research paper that looks at the impact of Bluesky’s opening to the public on the community.
- The third episode of WordPress.com’s video series on the fediverse, on how the fediverse can make social media fun again, talking with Mammoth’s co-creator Bart Decrem.
- A new app directory dedicated to ActivityPub platforms, clients, and tools for easy browsing and discovery.
- A new blog series by the mod team of the hachyderm.io server to explain Mastodon moderation tooling.
- Hubzilla, Streams and Friendica creator Mike Mcgirvin continues his tradition of forking his own projects; with Forte being a new fork of his Streams project. Not much is known yet about what makes Forte different than Streams.
- ‘5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people’.
- Pipilo is a fediverse iOS app with a timeline that scrolls horizontal instead of vertical.
- A first federated instance of NodeBB that is not run by NodeBB themselves, and the difficulty of explaining the concept to people outside of the fediverse.
- A presentation by Robert W. Gehl on how ActivityPub became a standard.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-80/