Unlike #Twitter, this place isn’t set up as a race for RTs & likes & feels more like an ongoing conversation. Engagement is high & on the whole, there’s less outrage & more thoughtful content. I’ve been enjoying the chance to get to meet interesting new folks.
Tip: Start with an #introduction & share your interests. @feditips is a helpful follow to get oriented too.
For over a decade, @Flipboard's in-house editorial team has been curating the world’s best journalism around the clock. But to access this curation, you had to use the Flipboard app or visit flipboard.com.
Now we’ve decided to federate our Flipboard editorial profiles and their related Magazines in order to make our collections available to everyone on Mastodon and other Fediverse networks.
Here's what we're up to. Would love your feedback!
On that story about scientists leaving X and coming here. Please, please lean into the feature of hashtag following and tag your stuff. A lot of us would love to find you and hashtag discovery is the easiest way here.
I’m coming to love #Mastodon’s boost culture. Everybody’s all like, “Follow everyone! Boost it all!”
In the Blue Place, it felt like we were all competing for attention. Here, it’s more like we’re cooperating for attention.
At one level, that doesn’t make sense—everyone still has only so much attention to spend. But it feels better, and without The Algorithm enforcing power law, winner-take-all dynamics, the boost culture does seem to lift a lot of voices that were drowned out over there.
The #Fediverse needs to learn some serious conflict resolution...
If we ever aspire to become a serious alternative to corporate platforms we can't continue with this behavior. Let me explain.
Two days ago someone created a "The_Donald" community of a well-known #Lemmy instance. Immediately there were cries for defederation, blocking, and suspicion about the admin letting racists run rampant on his instance.
What ultimately happened was that when the admin logged in they removed that community. But before they even had time to realize what was happening they were already being accused of stuff and if any instance heeded the call to block, it would have caused damage to the users who would have their subscriptions / follows severed.
Some users who've just arrived from Reddit and bring a fresh perspective are already wary of the shit show this can become.
That instance resisted massive blocks because it was large enough. But what if it was smaller?
Twitter is like a top of the range Lamborghini but you’re trapped in the boot full of broken bottles and it’s being driven over a cliff by a madman.
Mastodon is like sitting in the back of a dilapidated VW camper van, with knackered suspension, no air conditioning, but lots of nice passengers having a sing-song and there’s a dog called Mr. Snuffles.
Bluesky’s having a bit of a moderation crisis, which got me thinking about the ways in which the major Twitter clones approach moderation:
#Bluesky has libertarian “free speech at all costs” moderation. #Threads has puritan neoliberal top-down moderation. #Twitter has Nazis-to-the-front anti-moderation. #Mastodon has a server covenant and vote-with-your-feet, accountable community moderation.
The first three are run by tech-bro billionaires. The latter is not. And it shows.
We at @Vivaldi continue to be the only browser company all in on Mastodon and the Fediverse.
We have made our own instance, Vivaldi Social. Any user that has a Vivaldi account for sync or other services, can easily enable a presence on Vivaldi Social.
We have integrated Mastodon as a Web panel into Vivaldi.
We include links to Vivaldi Social into Vivaldi.
We also work on integrating our blogs and forums into the Fediverse.
We hope others will follow. Mozilla has talked a lot and we hope they will join us fully soon.
"#Mastodon is failing" so hard that #Fediverse just crossed 4mln monthly active accounts (based on the-federation.info). :blobcatgiggle:
This is already slightly more than Nov and Dec #TwitterMigration waves' peaks. And it is still going up.
What I find particularly important is that it seems like a lot of this is not new accounts, but people returning to accounts created before and then left unused.
I expect this to be a more resilient kind of growth. Less of a drop after it peaks.
I'm so excited about federating #Flipboard to the #Fediverse! We are getting closer every day.
I just recently saw a demo from our engineering team of a Flipboard account being fully federated and followable from #Mastodon. Now we need to interpret all the engagement signals (commenting, favoriting, etc) properly. This includes designing what Flipboard users should see when they click on Mastodon users who reply to them and vice versa. A bunch more to do but we are making serious progress.
I’m more frequently seeing new accounts show up that are arguing for only one thing, repeatedly. Remember the large scale disinfo campaigns on Twitter made to look like real people from real places and with real lives? I think they’ve discovered #Mastodon.
So, a friendly reminder not to believe everything you read on here. Check out the person’s bio and timeline before buying their story - especially if you find yourself nodding in agreement. We can be better than Musk’s rat palace.
@Flipboard
“We have decided to suspend our activity on Twitter/X… we believe it’s vital to align our social presence with platforms that share our values for advancing trusted journalism, expert voices and quality information. This is one of the reasons we’re moving away from Twitter/X and investing our energy in #Mastodon and other open social platforms.”
If you ever used a tool known as "Mastochist" or "Mastodon Super Tools" and connected it to your Mastodon account, you need to remove the affected token.
Preferences > Account > Authorized Apps
It would be a good time to revoke access to other apps there that haven't been used in awhile, too.
Masto/Fedi: My dude we have like seventeen different ways to block people. Hell, block entire servers. Fuck it, block by default. Filter the letter "e" from your timeline and go full oulipo, we don't give a shit.
Can we please have a setting in the administrator panel to set the character limit for a Mastodon instance?
The current lack of such a setting does nothing apart from create a two-tier fediverse where folks who have the time to maintain their own Mastodon fork and folks who use other ActivityPub servers can write as much as they like whereas everyone else is limited to 500 characters. We’re not kids; make the option accessible and let instance owners decide for themselves.
Cooooool, the #Bundestag, Germany's parliament, has joined the German state's #Mastodon server, hosted by the Federal data protection officer! Welcome to the #Fediverse, dear @bundestag! 😎 🥳
New #Mastodon merch is now live just in time for Black Friday! A new, cozy, winter-themed mug, tote bags, and reprints of enamel pins, t-shirts and stickers—limited stock and 20% off!
In December, we started to federate the accounts of some Flipboard publishers and in February, we introduced Magazines to the fediverse. Now, we’re taking two important steps: federating the accounts of 400 creators and expert curators; and enabling two-way communication so that new followers and fediverse activity are visible and actionable in the Flipboard app.
To learn more about this, take a look at our blogpost:
Thanks so much to everyone who has given feedback on what we’ve done so far. We welcome your thoughts and comments as we continue on our journey to fully federate Flipboard.
Pixelfed is adding a Sign In with Mastodon option