More from The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
“Linkifying them is the logical next step,” CEO Jay Graber said while discussing the use of hashtags on the Twitter alternative platform on the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast,
Graber also said Bluesky, which recently opened, now has nearly 5 million users and will soon roll out moderation services, enabling “any third-party service that wants to build, you know, a labeler or an annotator some way of giving input to the network.”
The buzziest new thing in social networking is a big deal. It’s also very confusing. And it’s not actually new. Let’s talk about it.
That comes courtesy of Alessandro Paluzzi, who frequently reverse engineers and reveals Threads and Instagram features. The new option lets you turn fediverse sharing on and off at will and you can easily copy your username formatted for the decentralized Activity Pub social protocol.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said recently that Threads users will also be able to follow and interact with fediverse accounts from Threads, though their accounts will have to be public to do so.
Wired has an interview with Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, all about the state of Threads’ plans to decentralize and join the world of ActivityPub. The short version: it’s a process, but it’s happening! And Meta knows exactly how big Threads is, what it’ll do to the fediverse when it joins:
“We’re kind of like the big whale that’s coming into this conversation.”
Post launched in 2022 as a way to read ad-free news articles and paywalled content with a points-based system. But now, it’s rolling out a number of improvements, including native comments you can leave on feeds, repost, and tag people in.
There’s also an update to make navigating between posts and comment threads smoother, along with a new real-time notification system that will keep you “up to date with accurate comment counts, activity stream updates, and much more.” Post is also working on building achievements, status badges, and rewards for users.
[Post News]
That’s one of a few things I learned from the platform’s 2023 moderation report. Also, it plans to open source its frontend moderation review system (called “Ozone”) and says it is “in the process of pulling out the moderation back-end as a standalone service that other organizations can self-host.”
[blueskyweb.xyz]
Tom Coates was recently at a meeting with Meta’s Threads team talking about ActivityPub, the fediverse, and the future of social. He took a lot of interesting notes! And in those notes he has a near-future roadmap for Threads’ decentralization plans:
• Early 2024 (Part One) – the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users
• Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application
• Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them
[plasticbag.org]
If you’re joining or thinking about joining the fediverse via an iPhone, this Mastodon client from the makers of Tweetbot is an option many prefer. A post on DaringFireball points out that the most recent update for Ivory adds an Explore tab with better search plus “a new popular & trending section.”
However, the devs note, that the data populating that section will vary based on the data generated by your particular Mastodon server. We’re on Mastodon (and Threads and whatever else), are you?
Posts wishing people a happy New Year on Meta’s Threads might come with fun colors and effects to celebrate the holiday.
Alessandro Paluzzi, who frequently discovers new features (like the Threads edit button) before they’re out, by reverse engineering apps, posted a screenshot of the festive text in action.
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri posted a little more about the plan to integrate Threads with the fediverse.
While responding to some skepticism about pushing posts out to other ActivityPub instances, Mosseri said only public accounts will show in the wider fediverse outside of Threads, and — though he said this isn’t fully decided — only after users “explicitly opt in.”
Instagram boss Adam Mosseri’s small announcement is important to anyone who publishes content on the internet. Until now, traffic from Threads was indistinguishable from Instagram in the metrics used by sites like this one, But now that it has a separate link referrer, site owners can see for themselves how much traffic it’s sending in comparison to competitors.
On the other hand, Twitter / X allegedly just signed up 10 million new people in a week, if you can believe that.
Even as big advertisers exit, sports Twitter has continued going strong. But now the official Threads account announced that sports/NBA Twitter’s newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski “has landed” and is doing a Q&A Friday.
If “woj bombs” are on the move, it might be about more than hashtags — Wojnarowski works at ESPN, which is still owned by Disney. Musk singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger with his “go f yourself” comments last week, then followed up with more attacks and accusations today while misspelling Iger’s name and saying “He should be fired immediately.”
The decentralized social network announced in November that it would finally be adding a public web view, but as TechCrunch reports, some users asked for a way to make their posts private.
Note that this upcoming change does not mean Bluesky will have private accounts; Bluesky is only giving users a way to keep posts private from users that aren’t logged in.
“Remember, your posts, profile, and likes are all public data,” Bluesky wrote. “But sometimes, added friction matters.”
According to a thread from Bluesky’s safety account, it’s introducing “more advanced automated tooling” to flag content to its moderation team before users see it and letting users once again report their own posts for mislabeled content. And sometime “soon,” users will be able to set controls for who can reply to a post.
You still can’t view Bluesky posts unless you have an account (that feature is “realistically” arriving “mid month,” a Bluesky developer said Friday), so if you can’t see the posts yourself, TechCrunch has a good summary of what’s changing.
Pebble, a Twitter alternative formerly known as T2, will be shutting down as of November 1st, according to co-founder Gabor Cselle.
“We weren’t growing fast enough to convince investors of a breakout,” Cselle wrote. “With many alternatives in the space, the challenge was even greater. We needed more investment and time to fully realize Pebble.” The service topped out at 3,000 daily active users, TechCrunch reports.
Maybe Pebble is a cursed name?