Last Week in Fediverse – ep 93
Even on the fediverse is Bluesky currently the main topic of conversation, and some other smaller news as well.
The News
Bluesky is having a major moment in the spotlight right now, which is also impacting the fediverse. It is a major source of conversation on the feeds, as it asks people to reflect on what exactly they want out of social media. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko shared that Mastodon also sees some impact of people looking to leave X, with a 27% increase in monthly signups. With a total of 90k new signups this month, that amounts to ~20k new users that might potentially be attributed to the changing environments at X. Statistics on fedidb indicate that monthly active users for Mastodon grew by around 50k in the last month. In Japan, Misskey seems to be a popular destination according to a survey, but it’s hard to know how this translates to numbers as Misskey statistics have been unreliable for a while now.
Bluesky’s Starter Packs, which allows you to easily follow many people around a certain theme, are especially a source of conversation, and there are multiple attempts at bringing various forms of Starter Packs to the fediverse as well. Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault is releasing ActivityPub Starter Kits ‘soon’, the documentation is available here.
Sub.club keeps expanding their offering, and with their latest update you can turn the RSS feed of your website into an ActivityPub feed with a paywall.
The latest update for the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress now gives you a ‘fediverse preview’ option, which shows you what your WordPress post will look like viewed from the fediverse.
The popularity of Bluesky has led Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault to ask the community whether Pixelfed should add support for Bluesky, but he decided against it after significant pushback from the community.
Threads has made another marginal update to their ActivityPub implementation, and it’s another one for the list of ‘how did they not do that already with the previous update?’.
Trouble in Paradise? Understanding Mastodon Admin’s Motivations, Experiences, and Challenges Running Decentralised Social Media – an academic paper that interviewed 16 instance admins and describes their experiences. Short write-up of the paper here.
A proposal for a Public Key Directory server as a first step towards E2EE encryption on ActivityPub. I’m not a cryptography expert at all, but I’m personally curious how this differs from ATProto’s PLC.Directory.
Sharkey is announcing some major security vulnerability patches that affects all *key software.
The Mastodon team will have a stand at the Social Web Devroom on FOSSDEM. You can still submit proposals until December 1st.
The Links
- First Look: Loops, by Pixelfed – WeDistribute.
- Fedi Moderation Tooling Research.
- Mastodon & OpenTelemetry.
- Trunks & Tidbits for October 2024, the monthly update from the Mastodon engineering series.
- Loops has added share links.
- Lemmy development update.
- A short update on the Hubzilla Association.
- This week’s fediverse software updates.
- My Thoughts on GoToSocial – James Ashford
- Vivaldi’s podcast ‘For a Better Web’ interviewed Evan Prodromou.
- The weekly update for Ghost on their ActivityPub implementation.
- Flipboard is promoting the fediverse on TikTok.
- Resources for choosing the right fediverse instance – and I’m not just talking about Mastodon (DRAFT) – The Nexus of Privacy.
- The ‘Do the Woo’ podcast has two episodes about WordPress and the fediverse.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!