There are a few disparate trends that are currently happening in the fediverse, that are all influencing each other, but are not forming into one single clear narrative. Meta’s new project, named probably Threads (earlier codenames P92 and Barcelona) is on the verge of joining the fediverse in some capacity. How to approach Meta continues to be subject of debate. The growth of Lemmy and Kbin (nicknamed the ‘threadiverse’) is signalling a clear shift in the fediverse as well. Beyond the inflow of people itself, it also signals the power of federation and interoperability to people. People on the fediverse have largely internalised the concept that you can talk to other people that are also microblogging on different servers. But experiencing is something else, as this post described it:
“Until recently, I understood the theoretical practicality of an interoperable protocol such as ActivityPub. But being able to experience it in practice is truly something else.”
If you are looking for a writeup for the situation with Reddit, The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good overview here. It ends with a section on the move towards the fediverse, placing the move towards the threadiverse as a flight away from Reddit.
Lemmy developers @dessalines and @nutomicposted an update about Lemmy, detailing their experience over the last few weeks. Beyond mentioning the sudden growth, they also note that the way their financials are structured, this sudden large growth is detrimental to their finances. The developers work full time on Lemmy, and can do this via a grant from NLNet, that pays out if the developers deliver certain milestones. But this extra work due to the large inflow of people inhibits working on the milestones that pay money, which is an interesting side effect of how NLNet grants work. They also mention the critiques of being called fascists, and their alleged support of genocide. They deny these allegations, and call them slender, linking to two other posts explaining the history of Lemmy. These posts list (among other things) grievances with the politics of Reddit, but it is unclear how these posts refute the allegations that are made.
This article called ‘ talks about the issues at Reddit, and zooms in on the financial aspect. It is an important aspect that I feel is not discussed enough. Looking past the surface of all the drama that is currently happening, and you find that Reddit has raised 1.3 billion USD from investors who want a return on that money. As Reddit is currently not profitable, it is safe to assume that Reddit will feel like it has to implement other measures to improve their cashflow. It also seems likely that some of these measures might not be popular with users. In short, the financial side of the equation makes it likely that new drama with Reddit will surface, and with it, new waves of migration to Lemmy and Kbin.
The spreadmastodon website has officially launched. This unaffiliated project is aimed at reducing friction for people entering the fediverse. It allows for easy and direct signup to Mastodon. This currently leads to mastodon.social. They also launched a proposal on how to spread people towards other servers as well.
Ebou is now open source. It is a cross-platform desktop client for Mastodon. Instead of organising posts in a feed, it organises posts by user, like a messaging app would.
The Mastodon server home.social has shut down. Multiple admins of other servers had offered to take over the server hosting, but these offers had not been taken up upon.
The fediverse hosted their own #fedivision party this week, where people could vote on the most popular songs created by fediverse users.
On other networks
A few links with news about other decentralized networks that might be of relevance:
A vision for decentralized content moderation for Nostr. The core design thinking for Nostr is based around censorship resistance, an idea which is often in an uneasy balance with content moderation and safety. This proposal by nos.social provides a vision on how to deal with this.
One of the developers for Bluesky, Paul Frazee, explains some of his current thinking on how Bluesky can implement hashtags. Direct link, and image screenshot here. Some ideas, such as placing hashtags in a separate field, might be of interest to fediverse software as well. Calckey already has a separate field, but no real away of making them less visually prominent. The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress allows you to add completely invisible hashtags to federated articles.
A deep dive into the proposed federation architecture for Bluesky.
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