Threads

Threads is launching without federation. The Verge reports that Meta estimates that Threads will join the fediverse after 3 months. Instagram head Adam Mosseri talks extensively about decentralization and ActivityPub in interviews with the NY Times (@tchambers pulled the relevant quotes) and The Verge.

Threads will not be focused on hard news and politics, because they aren’t ‘worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks.’ This ties in with the ruling that Meta will have to pay publishers in Canada, and Meta deciding they’ll ban Canadian news from being posted. Allowing news articles to be published in Mastodon, which then federate to Threads, allows Meta to sidestep the payments to the Canadian publishers.

One of the subjects that has been discussed at the meetings between Meta and Mastodon admins is ‘an initiative that is focused on account portability for data migrations’, reports Byron Miller, admin for universeodon.com.

A question that has come up a few times is, what are Tumblr’s plans? They mentioned considering ActivityPub early in the year, but no news about this ever since. Now, Meta’s press release about Threads explicitly mentions Tumblr’s plans as well.

Mastodon published a blog post about what to know about Threads.
‘Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy’ is an extensive study into specific actions people can take on the fediverse to protect their data from Threads.

Microblogging

The reshuffling of the social media landscape in the last weeks has been good for Mastodon. It went from 1.2M active users to 1.8M active users in the span of a week.
The Dutch government is working on a Mastodon server. It is mentioned in this blog post (in Dutch) how governmental organisations can set their own rules for social media on the fediverse. The server is already visible at social.overheid.nl, but it is currently still in the process of being set up, with no actual content and launch yet.

A fairly large poll (35k) responses that show the people on the fediverse skew fairly old. This is especially notable in how the uptake of new social networks is often attributed to younger people starting with it first, and older people following later. This dynamic seems to be reversed on the fediverse.

Misskey has seen an enormous inflow of new users in the last week, growing with more than 100k users (more than 33%) within a week. As the userbase is largely Japanese, this is often missed
A new feature thats coming soon to Mastodon: hide people on lists from your home timeline. This can make specialised lists significantly more useful. Personally I’ll use this to put Lisa Melton on a separate list and enjoy what effectively amounts to a curated timeline.

Calckey will show their rebranding on July 19th. The project will also show a full server migration to a new domain.
Adding Mastodon comments to a static website.

@icymi_law is a bot that distills all post #lawfedi posts into a singular algorithmic feed.
mastodon.xyz went down for a day after a report of CSAM on the timeline. Here is an extensive write-up on what happened.

FediForum is an unconference that is planning a new session this September. Here is a write-up from the previous session in April.
A short reflection by Christine Webbers, one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec, on the process of standardising the protocol. Big Tech refused to pay attention a few years ago, and now, here we are.
A sneak peak at Memory, a new social platform thats in development, build on top of ActivityPub. I got a preview, and it looks really exciting. It’s also an indication that the landscape of how we’re thinking about microblogging on the fediverse is going to be changing in the future, with projects like Bonfire as well.

9to5mac reviews four major Mastodon apps for iOS.
A blog that goes into details of the privacy issues that are present in the structure of the fediverse itself.
A call to action for universities to join the fediverse.

Lemmy and Kbin

Kbin’s quick growth, that started from effectively zero, means that a community identity needs to be formed. This is visible in a discussion like this, about what name to call Kbin users (Kbinaut seems the most likely outcome for now), and this community effort to design and name a mascot.

The end result is a white parrot named Kibby. The next question is if the community can continue this into a formal mascot, with proper licensing and support. Ofcourse, the first use-case of the mascot is to signal a rivalry with Lemmy.

Lemmy-search.com is a new search engine for Lemmy. The goal is “to be a replacement for using site:reddit.com in Google, but just for the fediverse.” The difference in reception to search by Lemmy users versus how Mastodon users perceive search is worthwhile to notice.

Lemmy is continuing to grow rapidly. They crossed 1 million posts total. The biggest server, lemmy.world grew by 66% in the week after the Reddit API shutdown.
Turning the Lemmy UI into the look of old.reddit.com.

Jack Dorsey is showing an interest in Lemmy over at Nostr.
Lemmy Universal Link Switcher automatically switches Lemmy links on a website to links of your Lemmy home server.
The federation-lag-o-meter measures the speed of different Lemmy servers, how quickly content federates towards that server.

Other networks

Bluesky announces an 8M seed round, and a new way to make money: charge for custom domain names that people can use as their handle.

Tumblr releases StreamBuilder as open source, their framework for building and displaying timelines of content. This might prove to be of value of fediverse developers.