How Musk Made Vivaldi Build A Mastodon Server... In A Fortnight (Official Mastodon / Fediverse Development Thread)

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Bridgy

brid.gy

Bridgy connects your web site to social media.

Likes, reposts, mentions, cross-posting, and more...

Looking for Bridgy Fed instead? (What's the difference?)

Connect your accounts:

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Using one of these? Click to add webmentions:

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Already signed up? Find your user page here.

Help | News | Bug? | Stats | Open source | IndieWeb | Bridgy Fed

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Bridgy Fed

fed.brid.gy

Bridgy Fed


Docs News Code Issues Feedback

Bridging the new social internet

Bridgy Fed connects web sites, the fediverse, and Bluesky. You can use it to make your profile on one visible in another, follow people, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Interactions work in both directions as much as possible. See the docs for more info.

Got a web site? Enter it here to use it on the fediverse and Bluesky:

Got a fediverse account? Bridge it to Bluesky by following @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy

Or, follow a web site like example.com by searching for @example.com@web.brid.gy

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GitHub - snarfed/bridgy: 📣 Connects your web site to social media. Likes, retweets, mentions, cross-posting, and more...

📣 Connects your web site to social media. Likes, retweets, mentions, cross-posting, and more... - snarfed/bridgy

github.com

 

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Bluesky adds ‘anti-toxicity’ options to limit dogpiling and hostile quote posts

Users can also now hide replies and block list creators.

www.theverge.com

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Bluesky adds ‘anti-toxicity’ options to limit dogpiling and hostile quote posts​

​

The app’s 1.90 update introduces new features to help users avoid online harassment.​

By Jess Weatherbed, a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
Aug 29, 2024, 12:43 PM EDT

If a post is being shared as part of a dogpiling effort, Bluesky users can now limit people from linking to them directly. Image: Bluesky

Bluesky has introduced a bunch of new “anti-toxicity” features that aim to help users protect themselves against harassment and dogpiling. Announced via a recent blog post, version 1.90 of the decentralized social media platform adds tools that can limit exposure to unwelcome interactions with other users, such as an option to detach your post from somebody else’s quote of it.

The update allows users to view all the posts that quote a post they’ve made, then detach their original post so it can no longer be seen beneath the other user’s commentary — preventing readers from seeing it and clicking through to engage. You can already cut off engagement by blocking a quote poster, but detachment offers a less drastic option.

The downside, as Bluesky notes, is that this update lets users who spread dis- or misinformation detach their posts from quote posts that correct it. “To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future,” the company said in the blog. For now, it’s a tradeoff that could mitigate one of the more unpleasant aspects of posting your opinions online.

Version 1.90 of the Bluesky app also allows users to hide replies to their posts and move them behind a dedicated “Hidden Replies” screen, where they can be revisited with less visibility. (Reply hiding has been available on X, formerly Twitter, for years.) Bluesky is also stepping back from promoting every single reply to the “Following” feed; it will now only show conversations that include replies between at least two followers.

Someone chatting some nasty nonsense? Boom — post replies can now be hidden. Image: Bluesky

Thanks to Bluesky’s design, quote post removals and hidden replies are public data, akin to blocking other users. Bluesky says its app won’t list all the quote detachments on the original post, but that data will still be accessible via the Bluesky API.

Additional changes include a new priority filter that lets users only receive notification updates from people they follow, as well as the ability to limit being featured in lists. When a user blocks someone who has created a starter pack or curational user list, they’ll also be filtered out of any of these lists, except for moderation lists that govern muting and blocking.

There’s a good selection of tools here to nope out of mobbing on the platform, but Bluesky says it isn’t done yet — additional changes are being made “to combat ban evasion, botnets, and other forms of toxicity.” The company is planning to share more details about those efforts next week.

 

[Gizmo_Duck]

Bluesky adds ‘anti-toxicity’ options to limit dogpiling and hostile quote posts

Users can also now hide replies and block list creators.

www.theverge.com

​

Bluesky adds ‘anti-toxicity’ options to limit dogpiling and hostile quote posts​

​

The app’s 1.90 update introduces new features to help users avoid online harassment.​

By Jess Weatherbed, a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
Aug 29, 2024, 12:43 PM EDT

If a post is being shared as part of a dogpiling effort, Bluesky users can now limit people from linking to them directly. Image: Bluesky

Bluesky has introduced a bunch of new “anti-toxicity” features that aim to help users protect themselves against harassment and dogpiling. Announced via a recent blog post, version 1.90 of the decentralized social media platform adds tools that can limit exposure to unwelcome interactions with other users, such as an option to detach your post from somebody else’s quote of it.

The update allows users to view all the posts that quote a post they’ve made, then detach their original post so it can no longer be seen beneath the other user’s commentary — preventing readers from seeing it and clicking through to engage. You can already cut off engagement by blocking a quote poster, but detachment offers a less drastic option.

The downside, as Bluesky notes, is that this update lets users who spread dis- or misinformation detach their posts from quote posts that correct it. “To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future,” the company said in the blog. For now, it’s a tradeoff that could mitigate one of the more unpleasant aspects of posting your opinions online.

Version 1.90 of the Bluesky app also allows users to hide replies to their posts and move them behind a dedicated “Hidden Replies” screen, where they can be revisited with less visibility. (Reply hiding has been available on X, formerly Twitter, for years.) Bluesky is also stepping back from promoting every single reply to the “Following” feed; it will now only show conversations that include replies between at least two followers.

Someone chatting some nasty nonsense? Boom — post replies can now be hidden. Image: Bluesky

Thanks to Bluesky’s design, quote post removals and hidden replies are public data, akin to blocking other users. Bluesky says its app won’t list all the quote detachments on the original post, but that data will still be accessible via the Bluesky API.

Additional changes include a new priority filter that lets users only receive notification updates from people they follow, as well as the ability to limit being featured in lists. When a user blocks someone who has created a starter pack or curational user list, they’ll also be filtered out of any of these lists, except for moderation lists that govern muting and blocking.

There’s a good selection of tools here to nope out of mobbing on the platform, but Bluesky says it isn’t done yet — additional changes are being made “to combat ban evasion, botnets, and other forms of toxicity.” The company is planning to share more details about those efforts next week.

The social media equivalent to “p*ssy dried up”

 

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Bluesky is finally adding video

Slowly but surely.

mashable.com

Bluesky is finally adding video​

Slowly but surely.

ByShannon Connellan on August 30, 2024

Credit: Bluesky logo / Mashable edit

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Bluesky is finally about to add video.

The decentralised social media platform flagged the coming update on Friday in a post. Bluesky first announced it would be adding video in May, along with DMs.

Bluesky (@bsky.app)

Now might be a good time to announce that our next major app update will have video. 👀 More details soon!

bsky.app

Bluesky didn't specify exactly when the video feature will roll out or what it will look like, promising "more details soon," but in May, the company said "it’s looking like the v1 of video integration on Bluesky will be 90-second clips that you can share on your posts."

Bluesky also announced some "anti-toxicity" features this week, including the ability to detach quote posts, hide replies, and the ability to filter your notifications to only receive updates from people you follow.

Earlier this year, Bluesky added a "stackable approach" for content moderation, which lets users essentially run their own independent moderation services.

In its most recent report, Bluesky says it's sitting at 5.8 million users, offering an alternative for users on competitor X (formerly Twitter). The platform, which was invite-only for its launch, already had 3 million sign-ups before opening up to everyone in February. Meta-owned competitor Threads said at the beginning of August it crossed the 200 million user mark.

TopicsApps & SoftwareSocial Media

 

[AStrangeName]

Bluesky is finally adding video

Slowly but surely.

mashable.com

​

Bluesky is finally adding video​

Slowly but surely.

ByShannon Connellan on August 30, 2024

Credit: Bluesky logo / Mashable edit

---

Bluesky is finally about to add video.

The decentralised social media platform flagged the coming update on Friday in a post. Bluesky first announced it would be adding video in May, along with DMs.

Bluesky (@bsky.app)

Now might be a good time to announce that our next major app update will have video. 👀 More details soon!

bsky.app

Bluesky didn't specify exactly when the video feature will roll out or what it will look like, promising "more details soon," but in May, the company said "it’s looking like the v1 of video integration on Bluesky will be 90-second clips that you can share on your posts."

Bluesky also announced some "anti-toxicity" features this week, including the ability to detach quote posts, hide replies, and the ability to filter your notifications to only receive updates from people you follow.

Earlier this year, Bluesky added a "stackable approach" for content moderation, which lets users essentially run their own independent moderation services.

In its most recent report, Bluesky says it's sitting at 5.8 million users, offering an alternative for users on competitor X (formerly Twitter). The platform, which was invite-only for its launch, already had 3 million sign-ups before opening up to everyone in February. Meta-owned competitor Threads said at the beginning of August it crossed the 200 million user mark.

TopicsApps & SoftwareSocial Media

Timing has been in Bluesky's favor as of late

 

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Lemmy - Beginner's Guide for Redditors​

You’ve recently seen a post, comment or message telling you to "try out Lemmy". It sounds interesting but you have no idea where to find it. Googling "Lemmy" gives 50 different sites that all look the same. You go back to the post and find replies mentioning "federation" and "instances". This is the moment you give up due to confusion.

And I agree: discussion around Lemmy IS confusing. However, Lemmy is the best alternative to Reddit if you can get past the onboarding.

This guide aims to bridge the gap between Reddit and Lemmy. It is intentionally written in an order that does not dump everything onto you at once, but instead goes further in depth the further you get. For now, let’s begin with the basics: the registration process.

GitHub - amirzaidi/lemmy: Lemmy - Beginner's Guide for Redditors

Lemmy - Beginner's Guide for Redditors. Contribute to amirzaidi/lemmy development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

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Mastodon 4.3

Grouped notifications, notification filtering, better onboarding and a refreshed look await in this new release of our decentralized open-source social media software.

blog.joinmastodon.org

Mastodon 4.3​

New safety and discovery tools and a refreshed look​

Eugen Rochko

CEO / Founder

Mastodon 4.3 just landed! If you’re a mastodon.social user, you might have already seen some of this in action as we’ve been gradually rolling out these updates over the course of the last 11 months in nightly releases, but we’re finally making a new stable release available to the community. If you use a different server, you will get access to these improvements once your server operator upgrades.

Notifications​

On Mastodon, your experience depends a lot on the moderation style of the server that hosts your account, but your unique ability to choose a server that suits your needs the best is useless if you don’t have much insight into how moderation decisions impact you. If a moderator decision results in you losing followers, or no longer being able to follow people from another server, you will now be notified and have the ability to export a list of the affected profiles.

Also, if a moderator decision targets your account specifically, you will now receive an in-app notification so you can’t miss it.

We’re also bringing two new major features to help people deal with unwanted attention. Notification grouping has arrived in Mastodon, allowing you to make sense of your notifications even if your posts are going viral. Instead of inundating your screen with hundreds of individual notifications for the same post, you’ll see a summary of how many people boosted or favourited it.

We’re also introducing a brand new system for filtering unwanted notifications. You get to decide what happens to notifications from people you don’t follow, who aren’t following you, recently created accounts, or unsolicited private mentions. You can either send them to the void immediately, never to be seen again, or put them into a special inbox you can peruse when you want.

Design​

One of the ongoing efforts is to make Mastodon easy and delightful to use. We’ve invested a significant amount of money and time into working with professional designers and performing user testing over the last few years, but we really ramped up our efforts in 2023. Mastodon is quite a large application, and our resources remain very constrained compared to our corporate competitors, but we’ve made significant progress on improving the look and feel of Mastodon across the board.

We have redesigned the new post composer to be much more intuitive to use, to make sure you get your post right the first time. Not only does it look better, but you can now re-arrange media you’ve uploaded as you see fit, and see exactly what layout it will be displayed in. We’ve also made content warnings and word filters easier to notice and expand.

Across the web app, our iconography and color palette got a refresh, link previews look even better, and you can now hover over anyone’s name to peek at their profile and quickly follow or unfollow them. We also redesigned all of the “utility” emails (password resets, follow notifications, etc.) as well as the first welcome email to help you identify what’s most important.

Among various redesigned dialogs, new confirmation dialogs for muting and blocking describe exactly what effects muting and blocking will have. If you are about to block another server, we’ll show you exactly how many followers you would lose to help avoid potential mistakes. In the spirit of surfacing product education in more areas, clicking the domain on someone’s profile now brings up information about Mastodon’s decentralized nature.

Onboarding and discovery​

Helping new users get started on Mastodon has been a key focus for us over the past few years. We found that people would skip follow recommendations during onboarding and end up with a boring feed that doesn’t offer anything new for hours or days.

We value the user’s agency over what is shown in the home feed, and pride ourselves on being a reliable platform to keep up with the people you care about without opaque algorithms randomizing which things you see in which order. This presents a challenge when other platforms have created an expectation that the user only has to passively consume what is generated for them instead of actively curating what they want to see.

On Mastodon, you need to follow people or hashtags to see them in your home feed. To bridge the gap for people who fly past the onboarding, we’ve introduced a little carousel with follow recommendations that will appear above the first post older than four hours on the first page of your home feed.

We’ve also significantly improved the system of follow recommendations as a whole, mixing generalized results like profiles popular in your language with personalized ones like profiles that a lot of the people you follow, follow. For added transparency, the reason for the recommendation is displayed along with it.

Helping writers and journalists​

In this version we’re introducing a new way to highlight writers and journalists on the fediverse. By adding a single line to their HTML, publishers can feature the fediverse profile of the page author in the link previews on Mastodon. That way, when lots of different people are sharing the link, or the link is trending in the News tab, you can easily navigate to the author’s fediverse profile and follow them right from within Mastodon to receive future updates. Publications like The Verge and TechCrunch are already using this.

We’ve also put a fresh coat of paint on our website embeds. You’ve always been able to embed a Mastodon post on your own website, but we’ve made them look a lot better and gave them a more graceful fallback when the source is slow to load or no longer available. Of course, the dialog for embedding a post now looks a lot better as well, offering a simple click to copy button. Keep in mind that you can only embed posts that are public!

What’s next?​

Now that 4.3 is done, our focus for the next release will be on implementing the highly requested features of quote posts, as well as the ability for server operators to subscribe to managed blocklists, which along with our new initiative of pluggable fediverse discovery providers should make running small and medium-sized fediverse servers much more viable; and with Ghost entering the fediverse, further improving how long-form content from other fediverse platforms is displayed within Mastodon.

We are extremely grateful to everyone who supports Mastodon through Patreon, our 501(c)3 in the US, and other means. Unlike our competitors, we don’t take venture capital, don’t sell ads and don’t sell your data. While other social media platforms have teams of hundreds of engineers working on them, we operate on less than 500K USD annually with a team of only 4 full-time employees, and a number of contractors. If you’d like to see the pace of development increase, please consider chipping in so we can hire more people!