It has been more than a year since the #twittermigration started, with a massive inflow of new users towards Mastodon. Growth has plateaued, and the space is settling into a new dynamic. With the news that The White House and Joe Biden have joined Threads, changes in the space of social networks is far from over however.
Mastodon and reply guy culture
Mastodon has a reputation for a harboring a culture of ‘reply guys’. There is a culture of high engagement and reactions on people’s posts, which further alleviates the level and amount of replies that are annoying, irritating or demeaning. The account Mastodon Migration recently collected some posts by large accounts that all experience this issue, and how it turns them off using the fediverse.
Mastodon announced an update to their Android App, that aims to help alleviate these issues somewhat. In a blog post Mastodon announced that they recognise that Mastodon has issues with unwanted reactions, and that they are experimenting with different features to tackle the issue.
The first part is giving people a reminder for basic courtesy, the first time they are responding to someone they’re not following. It also shows a bit of information about the person they are responding to. Eugen Rochko believes that “by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field”.
The second part is to give people a reminder when they are about to respond to a post that is over 3 months old. Due to Mastodon’s heavy focus on reverse-chronological feeds, old posts can sometimes be boosted and go viral on the feeds again, months after they originally have been posted.
Both experiments do not prevent replying, and are simple notifications that can be dismissed, with a ‘Don’t remind me again’ option available as well. The update will arrive soon on the Android Mastodon app, with the update for iOS coming later. If the experiment goes well, it might come to the web interface as well.
Flipboard takes the next steps into the social web
Flipboard has already committed to decentralised social media a while ago, and is now taking the next steps in their commitment. The company announced yesterday that they will completely stop tweeting, and that they have launched a new podcast, Dot Social, about the ‘open social web movement’.
Flipboard will stop posting on Twitter, citing the rise in hate speech and disinformation as reasons. They state that open standards are the future of social media. They will post on most other social networks (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads). On Mastodon they have had active editorial desks accounts for a while (I enjoy their Culture Desk account personally), which will continue to be a focus.
Flipboard also announced a new podcast, Dot Social, hosted by the CEO Mike McCue, about the open social web. It is about how the internet is changing, and how open standards are contributing to a more open social web. Guests are people who are pioneering in the space, and include some people well known in the fediverse, such as Evan Prodromou. The first episode is with Mike Masnick, who wrote the seminal paper ‘Protocols not Platforms’, on decentralizing innovation, and is out now.
Nivenly organisation update
Nivenly is the member-run co-operative that is also behind the Mastodon server Hachyderm.io, and supports various open source projects. They gave an update on projects and project applications, some of which are of specific relevance to the fediverse.
Pachli is a Mastodon Android app, and a fork of the Tusky app. Pachli creator Nik Clayton left the Tusky project this fall over allegations of lapses in governance of the Tusky project (response by Tusky here). Pachli has applied to be a Nivenly project, to provide a governance model and a legal entity that can help with practical matters. Nivenly is currently soliciting feedback on the proposal.
FIRES, Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server, is a project by Emelia Smith, with the goal too provide the ability to subscribe to moderation advisories and recommendations that change over time. Emelia is currently working on a large technical proposal for FIRES, and it is undergoing private peer review at the moment. Her updates (here, here) have more information, and I’ll cover this in more detail once the proposal is made public.
The FSEP, Federation Safety Enhancement Project, was created a few months ago by Ro (author of The Bad Space), with the goal of providing other blocklist providers with a template for compatibility. The proposal got stuck in the first phase, as Ro got targeted with racism and other harassment over The Bad Space (the next update by @jdp23’s article series on fediverse and safety will cover this in more detail). For now the project is shelved. Meanwhile, Ro writes as a reflection on the incident that it has showcased the value of work of The Bad Space, and as a result he has set up think tank that can help develop consent-based tools for independent social networks.
In other news
Here is an overview of all the other news that has happened this week in the #fediverse.
ActivityPods is a project that aims to combine the ActivityPub protocol with the Solid protocol. The goal of the project is that you can have one account on the fediverse, which hosts your data and followers, using the Solid Protocol. Other ActivityPub applications can then connect to your data. ActivityPods posted an update on their road towards version 2.0, scheduled to be released early 2024. They will also be working on Mastopod; a Mastodon-compatible implementation of ActivityPods.
Tagginator is a small new bot for Lemmy, that does something simple but smart: it replies from a Mastodon account to new posts on Lemmy communities that it monitors, and comments with a hashtag that is relevant to that community. This way, people on Mastodon who follow that hashtag will now also start to see Lemmy posts in their feed. As Lemmy will not add hashtags in the near future, this is a workaround to improve the interoperability between the microblogging side of the fediverse and the threadiverse.
Heise Online’s editor Martin Holland has regularly given updates on data and traffic for their news account. In the latest update he provides some insight in the decentralisation of the fediverse. It also shows the extend of the peak of the twittermigration last year, and how traffic has slowed down since.
The University of Innsbruck put out a press release that they’ll be focusing more on Mastodon for science communication, and that their presence at X will be significantly reduced.
Mastodon will be present at FOSDEM 24.
Kbin dev gives an overview of the current work and plans for the near future.
All fediverse client and server updates for the week.
That’s all for the week, thanks for reading. You can subscribe to my blog on the fediverse by searching for @LaurensHof to receive updates during the week as well. Or subscribe to receive the weekly newsletter every Sunday below.
