Tag Archives: federation

Mastodon Founder Champions Thread Federation, Recommends X Rival as “a More Appealing Choice”

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Mastodon founder Eugen Roszko praised Threads’ entry into the decentralized social media space, saying: say the movement I plan to make mastodon — Open source Twitter/X rival — “It’s a much more attractive option.” Mastodon’s app, powered by decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub, has gained more attention in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Ta. The network has since been renamed X, reflecting Musk’s ambitions to turn the microblogging platform into an all-encompassing app for creators. , payments, video, live audio, shopping.

People dissatisfied with Twitter’s changes are seeking challengers from other platforms, including the open source alternative Mastodon, and other startups such as Spill, Spoutible, Post, and Bluesky. However, things have changed again with Instagram’s entry into the “Twitter clone” field. There are now Twitter alternatives backed by Meta’s vast resources, which helped him grow his monthly active users to nearly 100 million in just three months.Today’s Mastodon Only 1.5 million monthly activesfor comparison.

More importantly for Mastodon, Meta has promised to integrate Threads and ActivityPub. This means users can find and follow both Mastodon users and Threads users across both services. Many expected that the integration wouldn’t happen until early 2024, but Meta surprised everyone yesterday by announcing that he would begin testing the ActivityPub integration.

“Making threads interoperable gives people more choice in how they interact and allows content to reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: In a post on the thread.

Zuckerberg did not explain how the integration would work, but Roshko cleared up the confusion in a post on Mastodon, explaining that a federation (a thread connecting to a broader group of servers running decentralized social apps) “It’s one way at the moment,” he said. ” That means Mastodon users can follow a “selected few” threads on her profile. Like Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram — In Mastodon, however, the reverse is still not true.

Threaded users’ profiles on Mastodon were not backfilled with old posts before the integration began. Instead, your profile will display posts from this point on, but with the message “Old posts from other servers are not displayed.” Clicking on the “See more of the original profile” link will take the user to the thread instead.

Rochko is generally positive about getting tech giants to embrace ActivityPub and decentralized social media. said before“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub not only validates the movement towards decentralized social media, but also provides a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. There is also.”

The Mastodon founder also said that the entry of the meta “Status of “acceptance, extension, extinguishment” The ActivityPub protocol is a reference to how large companies can enter the market using an existing standard and extend that standard with unique features to beat the competition.

“…even if Threads ultimately abandons ActivityPub, where we end up is exactly where we are now,” Rochko pointed out. Blog posts this summer.

Image credits: Mastodon Eugen Roshko

As the merger gets underway, Rochko touted the move as “exciting” and “a huge deal for Mastodon.” Posts on the platform This is “a step towards the interoperable social web that we have been advocating for.”

In addition, he points out Having access to all thread users from your Mastodon account means the app becomes even more appealing when you consider other perks.

The same claim has been made by Mammoth, a third-party client of Mastodon that is backed by Mozilla. Mammoth believes its app offers a viable alternative to Threads with a competitive user interface that is more approachable for newcomers to decentralized social media. This includes users who do not want to create an account on Meta. While Threads distances itself from news, saying it doesn’t “amplify” news on its platform, Mammoth is open to news partnerships and curation, which could lead to people switching from Twitter/X to other apps. I hope that it will appeal to people.

With Threads integrated into the Mastodon ecosystem, users have more options for how they want to engage with Threads users and content, including accessing their accounts from their apps of choice.

Source: techcrunch.com

Bluesky, X’s competitor, reaches 2 million users; federation to launch in early next year

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Bluesky is a company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X. announced It now has 2 million users, an increase of another 1 million since September, despite still being an invite-only app. It also revealed deadlines for other important goals, saying it plans to have a public web interface up and running by the end of this month and start federation by early next year.

The latter is one of the most important differentiators between Bluesky and X, as it allows Bluesky to function as a more open social network. This means it works more like Mastodon, where users can choose which servers to join and move their accounts around freely. This is what Bluesky today claims is “billionaire-proof” and criticizes Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now known as X.

“Rather than being bound to the whims and black-box algorithms of private companies, you have the freedom to choose (and exit) at any time.” Explained in company blog post. “And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too,” it states.

Similar to Mastodon, a decentralized service, federation allows anyone to run their own service and connect to other services running the same protocol. For Bluesky, this is done like this: AT protocol The company is also developing consumer services and mobile apps in parallel. But his other major decentralized social network, Mastodon, uses an established protocol, his ActivityPub, which has grown significantly in the months since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. It is attracting attention.

Since then, other companies have adopted ActivityPub and Mastodon, including Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company). Unless Bluesky makes the AT protocol and ActivityPub interoperable in some way, there could be challenges regarding Bluesky’s ultimate reach. Bridging Maybe the two of you Technically It’s possible, but it’s more likely to be in the future, not in the near future.

Meanwhile, Bluesky is working to make its services more accessible, including launching a public web interface later this month. This will allow anyone to view his Bluesky posts, even if they don’t have an account. This could make the network more promising in terms of being a true competitor to X in breaking news and conversation, but it could expose Bluesky users’ posts to the outside world in ways they are not ready for. There is also. (This app currently does not have an option to set your profile to “private” like Twitter/X does. some users is not Happy about this. )

Despite its growth, Bluesky’s reluctance to drop its invite-only status and open its network to more users has allowed other competitors of X to gain a foothold. Last month, for example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Instagram Threads, an alternative to X, had just under 100 million monthly active users. He believes he can reach 1 billion users in the next few years. Threads also plans to interoperate with ActivityPub in the future.

Bluesky’s announcement follows Threads’ rapid release of features to make the app more competitive with X, including a chronological feed, support for displaying likes, search, and (free) Includes an edit button, web version, voting, GIF support, and more. , topic tags, and soon a developer API. Mastodon also took advantage of the opportunity presented by the Twitter acquisition and launched an easier-to-use version of its service in September of this year. However, Mastodon currently has 1.6 million monthly active usersHowever, it is much smaller than a thread.

In addition to today’s news, Mr. Bluesky also provides mobile push notifications, shareable user lists, email verification, advanced feed and thread settings for sorting and filtering posts, a media tab in user profiles, and a user profile for your own users. We also mentioned other recently released features, such as a Likes tab for profiles. , the suggestions below, and various accessibility improvements.

Bluesky started life as a Twitter project under Jack Dorsey, but the company was spun off from Twitter. $13 million How to start research and development. Mr. Dorsey sits on its board of directors. This year, the company raised an $8 million seed round led by Neo to further its development and transformed from a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corp.

Source: techcrunch.com