How Musk Made Vivaldi Build A Mastodon Server... In A Fortnight (Official Mastodon / Fediverse Development Thread)
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ActivityPub support
Summary
The end goal of this proposal is to build interoperability features into GitLab so that it’s possible on one instance of GitLab to open a merge request to a project hosted on an other instance, merging all willing instances in a global network.To achieve that, we propose to use ActivityPub, the w3c standard used by the Fediverse. This will allow us to build upon a robust and battle-tested protocol, and it will open GitLab to a wider community.
Before starting implementing cross-instance merge requests, we want to start with smaller steps, helping us to build up domain knowledge about ActivityPub and creating the underlying architecture that will support the more advanced features. For that reason, we propose to start with implementing social features, allowing people on the Fediverse to subscribe to activities on GitLab, for example to be notified on their social network of choice when their favorite project hosted on GitLab makes a new release. As a bonus, this is an opportunity to make GitLab more social and grow its audience.
Description of the related tech and terms
Feel free to jump to Motivation if you already know what ActivityPub and the Fediverse are.Among the push for decentralization of the web, several projects tried different protocols with different ideals behind their reasoning. Some examples:
- Secure Scuttlebutt (or SSB for short)
- Dat
- IPFS,
- Solid
One gained traction recently: ActivityPub, better known for the colloquial Fediverse built on top of it, through applications like Mastodon (which could be described as some sort of decentralized Facebook) or Lemmy (which could be described as some sort of decentralized Reddit).
ActivityPub has several advantages that makes it attractive to implementers and could explain its current success:
- It’s built on top of HTTP. You don’t need to install new software or to tinker with TCP/UDP to implement ActivityPub, if you have a webserver or an application that provides an HTTP API (like a rails application), you already have everything you need.
- It’s built on top of JSON. All communications are basically JSON objects, which web developers are already used to, which simplifies adoption.
- It’s a W3C standard and already has multiple implementations. Being piloted by the W3C is a guarantee of stability and quality work. They have profusely demonstrated in the past through their work on HTML, CSS or other web standards that we can build on top of their work without the fear of it becoming deprecated or irrelevant after a few years.
The Fediverse
The core idea behind Mastodon and Lemmy is called the Fediverse. Rather than full decentralization, those applications rely on federation, in the sense that there still are servers and clients. It’s not P2P like SSB, Dat and IPFS, but instead a galaxy of servers chatting with each other instead of having central servers controlled by a single entity.The user signs up to one of those servers (called instances), and they can then interact with users either on this instance, or on other ones. From the perspective of the user, they access a global network, and not only their instance. They see the articles posted on other instances, they can comment on them, upvote them, etc.
What happens behind the scenes: their instance knows where the user they reply to is hosted. It contacts that other instance to let them know there is a message for them - somewhat similar to SMTP. Similarly, when a user subscribes to a feed, their instance informs the instance where the feed is hosted of this subscription. That target instance then posts back messages when new activities are created. This allows for a push model, rather than a constant poll model like RSS. Of course, what was just described is the happy path; there is moderation, validation and fault tolerance happening all the way.
ActivityPub
Behind the Fediverse is the ActivityPub protocol. It’s a HTTP API attempting to be as general a social network implementation as possible, while giving options to be extendable.The basic idea is that an
actor sends and receives activities. Activities are structured JSON messages with well-defined properties, but are extensible to cover any need. An actor is defined by four endpoints, which are contacted with the application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams" HTTP Accept header:GET /inbox: used by the actor to find new activities intended for them.
POST /inbox: used by instances to push new activities intended for the actor.
GET /outbox: used by anyone to read the activities created by the actor.
POST /outbox: used by the actor to publish new activities.
Among those, Mastodon and Lemmy only use
POST /inbox and GET /outbox, which are the minimum needed to implement federation:- Instances push new activities for the actor on the inbox.
- Reading the outbox allows reading the feed of an actor.
Additionally, Mastodon and Lemmy implement a
GET / endpoint (with the mentioned Accept header). This endpoint responds with general information about the actor, like name and URL of the inbox and outbox. While not required by the standard, it makes discovery easier.While a person is the main use case for an actor, an actor does not necessarily map to a person. Anything can be an actor: a topic, a subreddit, a group, an event. For GitLab, anything with activities (in the sense of what GitLab means by “activity”) can be an ActivityPub actor. This includes items like projects, groups, and releases. In those more abstract examples, an actor can be thought of as an actionable feed.
ActivityPub by itself does not cover everything that is needed to implement the Fediverse. Most notably, these are left for the implementers to figure out:
- Finding a way to deal with spam. Spam is handled by authorizing or blocking (“defederating”) other instances.
- Discovering new instances.
- Performing network-wide searches.
Motivation
Why would a social media protocol be useful for GitLab? People want a single, global GitLab network to interact between various projects, without having to register on each of their hosts.Several very popular discussions around this have already happened:
- Share events externally via ActivityPub
- Implement cross-server (federated) merge requests
- Distributed merge requests.
The ideal workflow would be:
- Alice registers to her favorite GitLab instance, like
gitlab.example.org.
- She looks for a project on a given topic, and sees Bob’s project, even though Bob is on
gitlab.com.
- Alice selects Fork, and the
gitlab.com/Bob/project.gitis forked togitlab.example.org/Alice/project.git.
- She makes her edits, and opens a merge request, which appears in Bob’s project on
gitlab.com.
- Alice and Bob discuss the merge request, each one from their own GitLab instance.
- Bob can send additional commits, which are picked up by Alice’s instance.
- When Bob accepts the merge request, his instance picks up the code from Alice’s instance.
In this process, ActivityPub would help in:
- Letting Bob know a fork happened.
- Sending the merge request to Bob.
- Enabling Alice and Bob to discuss the merge request.
- Letting Alice know the code was merged.
It does not help in these cases, which need specific implementations:
- Implementing a network-wide search.
- Implementing cross-instance forks. (Not needed, thanks to Git.)
Why use ActivityPub here rather than implementing cross-instance merge requests in a custom way? Two reasons:
- Building on top of a standard helps reach beyond GitLab. While the workflow presented above only mentions GitLab, building on top of a W3C standard means other forges can follow GitLab there, and build a massive Fediverse of code sharing.
- An opportunity to make GitLab more social. To prepare the architecture for the workflow above, smaller steps can be taken, allowing people to subscribe to activity feeds from their Fediverse social network. Anything that has a RSS feed could become an ActivityPub feed. People on Mastodon could follow their favorite developer, project, or topic from GitLab and see the news in their feed on Mastodon, hopefully raising engagement with GitLab.
Goals
- allowing to share interesting events on ActivityPub based social media
- allowing to open an issue and discuss it from one instance to an other
- allowing to fork a project from one instance to an other
- allowing to open a merge request, discuss it and merge it from one instance to an other
- allowing to perform a network wide search?
Non-Goals
- federation of private resources
- allowing to perform a network wide search?
Proposal
The idea of this implementation path is not to take the fastest route to the feature with the most value added (cross-instance merge requests), but to go on with the smallest useful step at each iteration, making sure each step brings something immediately useful.- Implement ActivityPub for social following. After this, the Fediverse can follow activities on GitLab instances.
- ActivityPub to subscribe to project releases.
- ActivityPub to subscribe to project creation in topics.
- ActivityPub to subscribe to project activities.
- ActivityPub to subscribe to group activities.
- ActivityPub to subscribe to user activities.
- ActivityPub to subscribe to project releases.
- Implement cross-instance forks to enable forking a project from an other instance.
- Implement ActivityPub for cross-instance discussions to enable discussing issues and merge requests from another instance:
- In issues.
- In merge requests.
- In issues.
- Implement ActivityPub to submit cross-instance merge requests to enable submitting merge requests to other instances.
- Implement cross-instance search to enable discovering projects on other instances.
It’s open to discussion if this last step should be included at all. Currently, in most Fediverse apps, when you want to display a resource from an instance that your instance does not know about (typically a user you want to follow), you paste the URL of the resource in the search box of your instance, and it fetches and displays the remote resource, now actionable from your instance. We plan to do that at first.
The question is : do we keep it at that? This UX has severe frictions, especially for users not used to Fediverse UX patterns (which is probably most GitLab users). On the other hand, distributed search is a subject complicated enough to deserve its own blueprint (although it’s not as complicated as it used to be, now that decentralization protocols and applications worked on it for a while).
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Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time
Threads’ fediverse plans are coming together.
www.theverge.com
Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time
During the FediForum conference, Meta demonstrated what it might look like to toggle on fediverse sharing and post across multiple platforms.
By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.Mar 19, 2024, 6:34 PM EDT
25 Comments
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24774110/STK156_Instagram_threads_1.jpg "An image showing the Threads logo")
Illustration: The Verge
Threads is coming to the fediverse — and we just got our first official look at how that might work from Meta itself. During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse. The integration will let users share their posts across different platforms through Threads, letting them reach multiple audiences at once. Meta is just one of the many platforms aiming to join the fediverse, a group of decentralized social networks aiming to become interoperable with one another.
As you can see in the video below, which FediForum shared with The Verge, Cottle can navigate to his Threads account settings and toggle on an option called “fediverse sharing.” Meta will then show a pop-up explaining what exactly the fediverse is, along with some disclaimers Meta will flag to users so they know what they’re getting into.
First, Meta notes that users will need to have a public profile to toggle on the feature, something Instagram head Adam Mosseri has already mentioned. Users in the current alpha test also can’t view replies to their posts and can only see the likes they get. Cottle says Meta is working “super hard” on changing that.
Additionally, Meta warns that Threads can’t “guarantee” that a post gets deleted on other linked platforms if a user decides to delete it on Threads. In other words, your post may still be visible on, say, a linked Mastodon server, even if you decide to delete it with Threads.
“I think this is a downside of the protocol that we use today, but I think it’s important to let people know that if you post something and another server grabs a copy, we can’t necessarily enforce it,” Cottle says.
Once fediverse sharing is enabled, users will be able to post to other services that interoperate through ActivityPub. Cottle says Threads will “wait five minutes” before sending posts out into the fediverse, during which users have a chance to edit or delete their post. If a Threads user has fediverse sharing enabled, their profiles will display a “pill” icon that other users can click into to copy their fediverse usernames.
Cottle demonstrated the process of using Threads to post to the fediverse, and you can already see how his post federated out to Mastodon.
“I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”
The FediForum is an online event that gives developers the opportunity to show off what they’re working on in the fediverse. “It’s good for them, and it’s good for the rest of us to see what they’re up to,” Johannes Ernst, one of FediForum’s co-founders, tells The Verge. “They’re being transparent about what they’re building and why.”
Threads started testing an ActivityPub integration last year, and Mosseri suggested last December that Threads’ plans for the fediverse could take “the better part of a year” to pan out. Earlier this month, Threads gave Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of the ActivityPub protocol, the ability to post on both Threads and Mastodon. Threads also plans on letting users follow non-Threads fediverse accounts and letting creators take their followers with them to another platform.
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Bluesky lifted its ban on heads of state signups
Bluesky really is open to all, now.
www.theverge.com
Bluesky lifted its ban on heads of state signups
Has anyone told Joe Biden?
By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.Apr 13, 2024, 1:17 PM EDT
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25332789/bluesky_media_kit_banner_1.png "An image showing the Bluesky logo on a gradient blue background")
Image: Bluesky
Bluesky is apparently ready for a bigger challenge. It says it’s allowing heads of state to sign up now, a little over two months after it opened for general signups. In May last year, the site asked its users not to give invitation codes to “recent/prominent heads of state,” stating that it was its policy not to accommodate them.
When Bluesky instituted its heads-of-state policy, the site was still in its showing-everyone’s-ass phase, and its moderation approach wasn’t in place, yet. So instead of the varying degrees of controlled chaos that social networks are, Bluesky was filled with, well, lots of unsettlingly sexy pictures of the cat-eating alien puppet star of the 1980s sitcom Alf, which The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto pointed out last year. It didn’t seem ready to manage world leaders along with the likes of infamous shytposters like Dril.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25392416/Screenshot_2024_04_13_at_11.45.37_AM.png "A screenshot of Bluesky post announcing that it has lifted its no heads of state policy.")
Come one, come all. Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
Things are different now, and the platform offers moderation, in its own unique way. Bluesky lets users handle moderation themselves by building out their own filters based on its open-sourced Ozone tool. It also does feeds differently than most social networks. Instead of foisting a one-size-fits-all algorithm on everyone like the default Threads For You feed, it offers people the ability to apply user-created options in addition to the Discover and Popular With Friends tabs.
The site also introduced other features this week, including hashtags in profile bios and the ability to long-press a link to share them.
Related
- Bluesky starts letting users host their own servers
- Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber
As Bluesky updates its policy, world leaders are already on other platforms, including, sort of, Mastodon. US President Joseph Robinette Biden’s account started using Threads’ limited fediverse integration earlier this month, for instance. At the moment, it doesn’t look like Biden has joined up, so there’s no Commander-in- Skeets quite yet.
Canadians are asking their government to federate.
In the fediverse, that is. Petition e-4769, which so far only has 850 signatures, cites the “considerable controversy, harassment, misinformation, and strife” of corporate-run social media in asking the government to use open-source alternatives like ActivityPub, the social protocol used by...
www.theverge.com
AT 9:00 AM EDT
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WES DAVIS
Canadians are asking their government to federate.
In the fediverse, that is. Petition e-4769, which so far only has 850 signatures, cites the “considerable controversy, harassment, misinformation, and strife” of corporate-run social media in asking the government to use open-source alternatives like ActivityPub, the social protocol used by Mastodon (and which US President Biden is now posting into... from Threads), for communication, instead.
The petition is sponsored by Parliament Member Gord Johns, and closes on April 21st.
Petition e-4769 - Petitions
[WWW.OURCOMMONS.CA]
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25368000/Screenshot_2024_04_02_at_4.06.37_PM.png)
President Biden is now posting into the fediverse
Biden’s Threads posts can show up in Mastodon clients.
www.theverge.com
President Biden is now posting into the fediverse
POTUS puts the ‘fed’ in ‘fediverse.’
By Wes Davis, a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.Apr 2, 2024, 5:13 PM EDT
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25368000/Screenshot_2024_04_02_at_4.06.37_PM.png "A screenshot of President Biden’s account, as viewed from a Mastodon instance on the web.")
The president’s account can now be found on platforms like Mastodon. Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
The official US president Threads account, currently helmed by President Joe Biden, has begun using Meta’s ActivityPub integration, making Biden the first sitting US president to post on the decentralized networking protocol. If you want to follow the President’s posts, but don’t want to leave Mastodon, you can follow @potus@threads.net.
The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan.
Here’s the account as viewed from the official Mastodon client:
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25367953/IMG_710C15A98018_1.jpeg "A screenshot of the POTUS Threads account from a Mastodon client.")
The Presidential Threads account, as viewed on Mastodon. Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge
Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse — and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts — as those features weren’t part of Threads’ integration when it opened up beta testing last month. But his posts are available, and he’ll see likes coming in from there. Or whoever is running the Presidential Threads account will, anyway.
So far, only Biden’s official POTUS account appears to have toggled Threads’ fediverse integration on. Neither Dr. Jill Biden’s nor Vice President Kamala Harris’ accounts showed up in a search. And none of them appear to have joined Bluesky yet, a competing decentralized social network running on its own AT protocol that recently opened general signups.
Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse
Replies from other platforms will show up in Threads.
www.theverge.com
Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse
You’ll now be able to like and see replies from other platforms right inside Threads.
By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.Jun 25, 2024, 12:03 PM EDT
Illustration: The Verge
Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.
Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25504689/Fediverse_2up.png "Screenshots showing Meta’s fediverse improvements to Threads.")
Screenshots showing Meta’s fediverse improvements to Threads. Image: Meta
Related
Thanks to this upgrade, you’ll probably do less of that, but in a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that Threads’ fediverse integration will be available starting today in more than 100 countries, a significant expansion from its initial availability in the US, Canada, and Japan.
Meta has been vocal about its plans to integrate with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub since launching Threads nearly a year ago, with first testing starting in December.
Dave Clark (@bedirthan@dice.camp)
Threads is getting more federated. It's still not fully ActivityPub like the promise, but it's closer. I still wish more instances decided to do the limited connection rather than an outright block. https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/25/24185226/meta-threads-fediverse-likes-replies
Mark Jardine :misc_mtb: (@mark@tapbots.social)
It's happening very slowly, but I'm glad they are still moving forward with Fediverse integration. I created an account on Threads (a few months ago) just to see what's going on over there and the algorithmic feed is a complete dumpster fire. I just want to be able to follow and interact with...
Richard MacManus (@ricmac@mastodon.social)
Looks like UK folks can now federate from Threads. I will have a play, but I will be keeping Mastodon as my main social account. In fact, I hope to federate *from* Mastodon to Threads, eventually. "Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is expanding their beta for sharing to the...
Threads users can now share to the open social web, aka the fediverse | TechCrunch
Instagram's Twitter/X rival Threads is furthering its expansion into the fediverse -- the interconnected social network that includes apps like Mastodon,
techcrunch.com
Threads users can now share to the open social web, aka the fediverse
Sarah Perez
10:00 AM PDT • June 25, 2024
Comment
Image Credits: Meta
Instagram’s Twitter/X rival Threads is furthering its expansion into the fediverse — the interconnected social network that includes apps like Mastodon, PeerTube and others running the ActivityPub protocol. On Tuesday, Meta announced that it’s now opening up its beta for sharing to the fediverse to Threads users who are 18 and up and who are using Threads with a public account in global markets.
The beta was first introduced in March but was limited to three countries to start, including the U.S., Canada and Japan. In a post on Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that the option is now available to more than 100 countries worldwide.
With the beta, Meta is also taking on one of the larger initiatives around making the fediverse more viable: user education. Today, many people don’t understand how the fediverse works or what it means to federate your account across the open social web. But within Threads, Meta is offering an explainer that describes the fediverse as a social network of interacted servers, informs users how sharing works and answers some basic questions. In doing so, Meta may encourage more people to explore the fediverse, including those who may have felt more intimidated by existing federated apps, like Mastodon.
Alongside the expansion, Meta is also now allowing authors of federated posts to like and see replies from the wider fediverse. However, the final step of being able to respond to those replies with replies of your own is not yet live.
As this is a beta experience, Meta says that once you opt-in to fediverse sharing, your Threads posts will be available on Mastodon, and likes and replies from Mastodon and the fediverse will be available directly on Threads, too. To ensure the beta is also a good experience for Mastodon users, Meta says your posts from Threads will be available in the fediverse, but it’s only going to federate top-level posts and self-replies for the time being. Other post types, like polls and posts with reply controls, are not yet supported.
To turn on fediverse sharing in Threads, you’ll tap on the option in your Account Settings. It will be labeled “Fediverse Sharing (Beta)” and offers instructions and a link to Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy.
“Our goal remains to grow the fediverse responsibly, prioritizing the success of a safe, diverse, content-rich, and interoperable community,” Instagram shared in an email with TechCrunch. “This is just the next step in our journey to make Threads interoperable with ActivityPub, and we will continue to collaborate with developers and policymakers to make progress so creators and users across services can experience the benefits the fediverse offers, including expanded content reach, further fostering their community, portability, and more.”
With Threads, Meta almost immediately became the largest app in the fediverse, as it topped 150 million monthly active users as of April. The wider fediverse has north of 11 million total users, with 800K+ who are active on Mastodon monthly.
What Is the Fediverse? | Meta
The fediverse is a global social network of interconnected servers that allows people to communicate across different platforms.
about.fb.com
What Is the Fediverse?
June 25, 2024
Takeaways
- The fediverse is a global social network of interconnected servers that allows people to communicate across different platforms.
- Threads is Meta’s first app built to be compatible with the fediverse to help people join public conversations and find their community, no matter what server they use.
- Our vision is that people using other fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities.
What is the fediverse?
The fediverse is a global, open network of interconnected, but still independent social media servers, each with its own users, content and rules. Servers share information with each other to enable people to connect and discover new things across the fediverse. So what does that mean? The fediverse allows you to communicate across different servers – imagine posting on Threads and having people see your post on Tumblr or Flipboard.A helpful analogy is e-mail. If you use Yahoo and your friend uses Gmail, you’re able to send emails to each other because both providers conform to the same protocol. Unlike email, your fediverse conversations and profile are public and can be shared across servers.
Right now, most social networks don’t work that way. People on Reddit can’t follow people on Pinterest, for example.
The fediverse changes that, enabling people to follow one another and communicate across different servers.
What is Meta’s role in the fediverse?
Meta doesn’t own the fediverse. Threads is just one of many servers that has joined it. Threads is Meta’s first app built to be compatible with the fediverse by integrating it with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol. Threads will be one of the social networks on the fediverse where content can flow between Threads and other servers.People 18 and over with public Threads profiles in 100+ countries can turn on sharing to the fediverse. If you turn on sharing to the fediverse, people on other fediverse servers will be able to search for and follow your Threads profile, see and interact with your content, and share your content with anyone on or off their server.
Sharing to the fediverse impacts your privacy and control over your information. To learn more, visit our Help Center, Fediverse Guide in our Privacy Center, and Threads Supplemental Privacy Policy.
We hope that by joining this fast-growing ecosystem of interoperable servers, Threads will help people find their community, no matter which server they use.
What are the benefits of open social networking?
Open social networking makes content more easily accessible across servers. For example, if you turn on sharing to the fediverse, this means your Threads profile and posts will be accessible from other servers as well, allowing you to reach new people with no added effort.With open social networking, people using fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities.
Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation. This will give people more choice when it comes to reaching new audiences, expanding their communities, and joining public discussions on topics they care about.
Newsletter service Ghost will support the fediverse protocol ActivityPub
Newsletter platform Ghost is the latest service to pledge support for ActivityPub, the open source protocol powering the fediverse.
www.engadget.com
Newsletter service Ghost will support the fediverse protocol ActivityPub
The move could bring "tens of millions" of people into the fediverse.
Karissa BellSenior Editor
Mon, Apr 22, 2024·1 min read
Ghost
Newsletter platform Ghost is the latest service to pledge support for ActivityPub, the open source protocol powering the fediverse. The company announced Monday it would add ActivityPub support later this year in a move that could bring tens of millions of people into the fediverse.
The fediverse is a growing collection of services, including Mastodon, Flipboard and Threads, that support the ActivityPub protocol. It’s part of a growing movement for decentralized social media services, which rely on open protocols rather than closed networks. Proponents often compare it to email, which allows people to communicate regardless of their preferred app or platform.
In a blog post laying out its vision, Ghost said it was joining the fediverse in an effort to “bring back” the open web. “On, Ghost publishers will be able to follow, like and interact with one another in the same way that you would normally do on a social network — but on your own website,” the company wrote. “The difference, of course, is that you’ll also be able to follow, like, and interact with users on Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Buttondown, WriteFreely, Tumblr, WordPress, PeerTube, Pixelfed... or any other platform that has adopted ActivityPub, too.”
While Ghost says ActivityPub integration will be optional for publishers, the company notes that its entry into the fediverse could bring "tens of millions" of new people into the space. A number of popular newsletters run on Ghost, including Platformer and She’s a Beast, as does the independent tech news site 404 Media.
Correction May 1, 2024, 6:50 PM ET: A previous version incorrectly stated that the Garbage Day newsletter runs on Ghost. We regret the error.
bluesky / bsky stats
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Bluesky managed to reach almost 6 million usersbluesky / bsky stats
Bluesky lets you curate accounts and feeds to follow with its Starter Pack feature | TechCrunch
Social network Bluesky has added a new feature for users to create a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow. This feature, called "Starter
techcrunch.com
Bluesky lets you curate accounts and feeds to follow with its Starter Pack feature
Ivan Mehta2:53 AM PDT • June 27, 2024
Comment
Social network Bluesky has added a new feature for users to create a curated list of people and custom feeds to follow. This feature, called “Starter Pack,” is intended to help users joining the social network to find interesting content right out of the gate.
Existing users can add accounts and custom feeds to create a starter pack and share the link or the QR code with someone who is not on Bluesky yet.
The link shows a “Join Bluesky” button, which will lead you to a sign-up page for the social network. Once you have signed up, your account will automatically follow all the suggested people and feeds. You can choose to sign up on Bluesky without following these suggestions as well.
At the moment, you can add 50 users and three custom feeds to the starter pack.
If you are already on Bluesky, this could be a good tool for you to find new people or feeds to follow as well. However, the company said that starter packs don’t show up in searches at the moment. To discover them, someone has to send you a link or write a post with the starter pack link.
When an existing Bluesky user clicks on the link on the desktop, they can see people, feeds and even posts posted by those accounts. However, if you tap the link on mobile, it will open in a browser with the sign-up page, so you can’t directly follow accounts from there.
A prompt to create starter packs will begin appearing on the desktop and within Bluesky’s mobile app on both iOS and Android (v1.87).
Along with this, the new app update also lets people retroactively restrict a conversation so that only specific people can reply to the thread. Options range from no one, only mentioned users or followed users. Plus, you can also find new feeds to follow in search and explore.
Image Credits:BlueskyLast month, Bluesky added direct messages and a way to personalize the main discover feed by providing feedback with “Show more like this” and “Show less like this” buttons.
Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new 'byline' feature | TechCrunch
The new bylines go beyond the typical @username references that often accompany link posts from news publications and those pointing to other written content, like a WordPress blog or Substack
techcrunch.com
Twitter/X alternative Mastodon appeals to journalists with new ‘byline’ feature
Sarah Perez11:14 AM PDT • July 2, 2024
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Mastodon, the open source, decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), is rolling out a new feature that’s meant to make the app more appealing for those who use it to keep up with news and information from writers and journalists. Starting Tuesday, the company is adding clickable author bylines on link posts that can direct Mastodon users to the author’s account on the fediverse, if active, in turn allowing journalists to gain more exposure and increase their following.
The new bylines go beyond the typical @Username references that often accompany link posts from news publications and those pointing to other written content, like a WordPress blog or Substack. Instead, the change will feature the news publication’s headline and image followed by another reference underneath that includes the author’s profile photo and name.
The feature is already rolling out to select news publishers, including The Verge, MacStories and MacRumors. (It’s in the queue here at TechCrunch as well, we’re told!)
To access these new bylines, you’ll need to be using the main Mastodon server (by way of users) at mastodon.social either on the web or in an official mobile app, for the time being. If using another Mastodon server, it will need to support the recent Mastodon nightly release, but the feature will only work for moderator-approved websites.
The company says the new bylines will also be supported by its API, which will make it possible for third-party apps to support the addition going forward.
On the back end, the innovation that drives the feature is a new kind of OpenGraph tag, Mastodon says. These are the same kind of tags you’d have on your website that help determine what sort of thumbnail image appears alongside the preview for the page when shared to other services, like Mastodon, iMessage, Discord and more.
This tag looks like this: ‘<meta name=”fediverse:creator” content=”@Gargron@mastodon.social” />’. And it can be added to a site with a simple line of code, making its implementation fairly straightforward.
The handle in the tag can also refer to any fediverse account, not just Mastodon. That means it can point to accounts on Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plug-in installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed and others. Plus, it will work without the leading at symbol (@) for the handle, Mastodon says.
One caveat, though, is that it doesn’t yet support multiple authors for co-byline situations; only the first author will show. But that may be addressed in a future release.
Mastodon says it will propose a specification draft for other ActivityPub platforms in the weeks ahead.
The addition of the tag could potentially encourage more journalists to increase their use of the federated social network, as it will help them gain exposure. The fediverse has 10+ million users, not counting Threads (which has 170 million monthly users but isn’t fully federated). Mastodon, specifically, has around 804,000 monthly actives.