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Fediverse client Phanpy is great, and one of the reasons I’ve given in a shoutout a few times already is that it combines the regular vertical feed with horizontal feeds, to make distinctions between types of content.
What Phanpy does, is to take all the boosted posts in your feed, and relegate them to a ‘carousel’. The carousel is a horizontally scrolling feed that intersperses the regularly scrolling horizontal feed. This creates a distinction between posts by the accounts I follow and posts that are boosted into my timeline. Posts by the accounts that I follow stand out more, and I read them all when I scroll through my timeline. Boosted posts are a bit less important to me, and I sometimes scroll past and skip the carousel if I have a little less time and only want to read the more important posts.
I think it is valuable to create distinction between different types of posts:
- Posts by my mutuals are the most important, and I don’t want to miss those.
- Posts by accounts I follow is something I try to keep up with.
- Boosted posts are interesting, I want to see most of them but I’m okay if I don’t see all of them.
- Followed hashtag posts are not a priority, and I don’t mind if I don’t check those for a few days.
By relegating boosts to a separate horizontal feed, it becomes easier for me to prioritise, and make sure that I see the posts by the accounts I follow. As a result I sometimes do not see all boosted posts, but thats fine with me. I would like have the same with posts that I only see because of the hashtag that I follow, those posts are not a priority either, and I think it would be nice if they are also placed in the carousel.
Some news from Bluesky: yesterday the network reached the milestone of 3 million accounts. This milestone comes 2 months after hitting the 2 million mark. While there are no official numbers for Monthly Active Users (MAU), Kuba Suder estimates around 500k MAU, based on the daily and weekly active users. For comparision, Mastodon has between 1 million and 1.5 million MAU, depending on the source.
Bluesky’s growth is far from over, as Bluesky said that that ‘Invite codes are going away soon’. This is different from opening up the network for federation, which is also planned for early 2024.
Bluesky is explicitly positioning itself as a place that is welcoming and suitable for news organisations. Bluesky team member Emily published an explainer how newsrooms can use Bluesky for the upcoming election season. Not everyone is convinced the network is ready yet though, as ændra explains some features that the network needs to be fit for purpose.
The Dutch broadcasting company KRO-NCRV has announced it is immediately ceasing the use of X. The news comes after a week of racism and hatred on the trending hashtag #Akwasi. Akwasi is a Dutch rapper who was a participant on the TV Show ‘The Smartest Person’. Other Dutch public broadcasters, notably including the main public broadcasting organisation NOS, is also considering leaving X over the amount of hatred and vitriol on the platform.
What strikes me about this announcement, and the consideration of other organisations like the NOS to do the same, is that it indicates my thinking of how platform migrations happen has been off. In the beginning of the Twitter migration wave I assumed that the process would happen as follows:
Someone sees that platform A is bad and becoming worse. They search for alternatives, and if they find alternative platform B, and deem it good enough of a replacement, they migrate to platform B. My thinking has mainly been focused on platform B: is B providing a good enough alternative to A?
Instead, the current situation with KRO-NRCV indicates that alternative platforms play a minor role in the consideration to leave. The decision is more straightforward: at some point a platform becomes bad enough that an organisation leaves. Instead of pointing to direct microblogging alternative platform where they will become active, they point towards their entire social media stack instead.
Both Threads and Tumblr have publicly stated that they are planning on joining the fediverse, and from both companies we received some more information this week.
Threads held a meeting, titled “Meta’s Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue” with various people who are active in the fediverse in some ways. Johannes Ernst shared extensive notes of the meeting, which are worth reading. Some of the items that stand out to me, based on these notes:
Meta’s decision to roll out federation in a step-by-step approach makes a lot of sense from a technical perspective, but does have a major cultural challenge. Many people already distrust Meta, and an implementation that starts with only partial federation of one or two features will likely increase, not decrease trust in Meta. Combating this will require significantly more open communication to the entire community; as Meta again risks increasing distrust in the community by only partially communicating to only some people within the fediverse community.
According to Johannes Ernst, Meta could not provide a clear answer to the main question as to why the fediverse integration is happening, and what has changed at Meta that the company is now touting openness as a strategy. A lot of the distrust around Meta revolves around a lack of clarity of the motives of the company, and it seems so far that it is difficult for the company to produce a clear and concise answer.
Tumblr is still working on it
Tumblr also confirmed that the fediverse is still being worked on. Over a year ago, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg made a statement that Tumblr would “soon” add ActivityPub support. During the year, not much news came about, and over the summer an engineer for Tumblr claimed that the project got cancelled quickly after the announcement. Now, Sarah Perez reports that Tumblr did move over someone to work on the project, but that Mullenweg also cautioned that they have not seen outsized user demand yet for federation.
I agree with Sarah’s take, that “reading between the lines, it seems the company isn’t ready to place a full bet on ActivityPub”.
Ryan Broderick, author of the excellent internet-trendwatching blog Garbage Day, has posted a new video, about why the internet feels different now, and feels bad for many people. There are some fascinating ideas in there that I think are worth highlighting:
First is the observation that how TikTok is operating is a good representation for the current state of the entire internet; in the sense that it has become impossible to form a coherent narrative on what is happening on the internet. We used to (pretend!) be able to form a coherent idea of what the internet was thinking, mainly by just taking some viral tweets and sticking them in a news article.
This period is now truly over, and helpfully demonstrated by this article by The Verge, ‘TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen’. It showcases that the internet has fragmented, and that even posts with half a billion views can stay within their own corner of the internet, barely making an impact outside of their own space.
Ryan also says that he is a big believer in the idea that once you have a name for something that is happening online, it is pretty much already over. Based on this, he assumes that whatever will be the new status quo has already arrived, and that the rut that we feel might already be over, with a small pocket of the web already having figured out the new way of using the internet.
Personally I agree with the idea, but I also think that it is just a bit too early to say so. From my observations it seems like the next status quo way of using the internet is on the cusp of arriving, without fully being there yet. As Jeremiah Lee says here, ‘the next big social network is just the Web’, and that is something I strongly agree with. More specifically though, I think that the next big social network will be build on top of all the current social networks. I think the winner will not be Mastodon, Bluesky or Threads, but instead the next generation of products that can seamlessly interact will all of them. From there it can expand to incorporate the entire Web. With more and more work being done both from the protocol level (bridges) as well as the client level, that vision is now starting to appear.