laurenshof

laurenshof, 4 months ago to bluesky

Bluesky has 3 million accounts, invites going away soon

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 Suber 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.

#bluesky

https://laurenshof.online/bluesky-has-3-million-accounts-invites-going-away-soon/

laurenshof, 4 months ago to random

Dutch public broadcaster quits X

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.

#Akwasi

https://laurenshof.online/dutch-public-broadcaster-quits-x/

laurenshof, 5 months ago to fediverse

Threads and Tumblr on fediverse connections

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”.

#fediverse #threads #tumblr

https://laurenshof.online/threads-and-tumblr-on-fediverse-connections/

laurenshof, 5 months ago to fediverse

Innovation in decentralised social networks

Flipboard’s Mike McCue recently released the first episode of the new podcast Dot Social with Mike Masnick, where they discuss protocols, platforms, and the decentralised internet, and it’s worth listening to.

Johannes Ernst gives a thread with a summary and responses here, which is worth reading. One thing I’d like to comment on is Mike Masnick’s comment that he expects innovation more to happen on Bluesky’s ATProto than on fediverse’s ActivityPub.

I agree that innovation in the decentralised network space is happening to a signficant extend outside of the fediverse sphere, but I disagree with the idea that this will happen on Bluesky and ATProto. Instead, I think that Nostr is a more likely candidate:

Innovation in a decentralised network is currently largely dependent on individual hobbyist developers that are experimenting. For an individual developer the accesibility and difficulty of working with the protocol is an important consideration. From my understanding talking to developers is Nostr the easiest to work with. ActivityPub differs a lot, but can certainly be difficult, especially regarding actual interoperability. I have been told that ATProto is the hardest of the three to develop for, plus that it is simply not even put into practice yet.

Culture of the network is even more important though in driving innovation. The fediverse has cultures and etiquette that say that some innovations in the network are unwelcome, especially regarding search and consent. One of the things that interest me about the fediverse is that the social impact of technology is taken into account. We’re building these networks for people. But making features off-limits in a network does limit innovation as well, there is a cost to it.

Bluesky is threading a difficult middle ground here with the culture. The developers seem to have more of a technologist mindset to protocol design, and concerns about how federation will interact with content moderation are not given much care. At the same time, a core group of Bluesky users is not particularly interested in federation, and wants a simple Twitter replacement. That puts the team in a pretty difficult spot with regards to future innovation. They made great strides with custom algorithms, but they do experience significant pushback from the community on features that they themselves want to work on, especially relating to opening the network.

Nostr has an explicit culture of adverse interoperability, and a libertarian community who seems to be quite inspired by crypto’s mantra of ‘if we can build it we should build it’. This is not really grounds for a network that is safe for many people. It does provide a fertile ground for rapid experimentation and innovation. The network is by far the smallest of the three, but it has also created quite some innovations that the other two network haven’t, in the recent months. Multiple long-form article publishing sites, a torrent archive, an integrated payment system for subscriptions with crypto, and more. There are good reasons to be have some issues with some of these innovations, but it is hard to deny that they are developing at a rapid speed.

Overall I think that innovation often happens at the fringes where there is reasons for experimentation. But also, cultural reasons that inhibit innovation speed can actually be pretty good from the human perspective.

#fediverse #nostr

https://laurenshof.online/innovation-in-decentralised-social-networks/

laurenshof, 5 months ago to random

Understanding Nostr

In the coming period I’ll be posting more regular about Nostr, as there are some interesting developments happening with implications for the fediverse. This blog is meant as a reference and explainer of what Nostr actually is, to provide more context of the news and developments that are happening.

Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Through Relays) is an open-source protocol, that enables a decentralised social network. It draws inspiration from crypto with its focus on keys instead of usernames and passwords, and has a significant crypto community as well.

There are four parts to the Nostr network to understand: Clients, Relays, Public keys and Private keys:

Your client is an application that you log into. This can be a website or a mobile app, and anyone can create clients for the network. The client is where you post and read messages. It does not store any of your data.

The first time you visit a Nostr client, you create a public key and a private key. Together these effectively form your account.

Your Public key is your username, and it is a long hexadecimal string of random letters and numbers. You find other people on the network by searching for their public key.

Your Private key is your password. There is no authority that controls this, meaning that if you loose your private key, or someone else accesses your private key, your account is permanently compromised.

Relays are the back-end of the Nostr network, and are effectively a group of servers that store all the data of the network. Your account is not hosted on a specific relay, nor is your data. Instead when you create a post, you select which relays (plural) you send your information to. Sending your post to multiple relays creates redundancy, and is the core part of the censorship-resistance that people on the protocol want. Similarly, when you open a client, you get the data from most relays, in order to make sure you get all the posts of the people you follow.

Finally, some personal thoughts regarding Nostr. A social network that prioritises censorship resistance with little to no content moderation tools available for users is simply not safe to use for a large intersectionality of different groups of people. I write and care about decentralised social networks because I value that everyone can have a place on the internet that is safe for them to use, especially marginalised people. As such, I don’t feel that Nostr’s ideology aligns with mine, nor do I think that they set themselves up to escape the ‘nostr bitcoin bubble’, as Jack Dorsey calls it.

https://laurenshof.online/understanding-nostr/

laurenshof, 5 months ago to random

Jack Dorsey on Nostr

Jack Dorsey wrote a post about Nostr the other day that I think is worth reading, and take stock how he thinks about social networks. Fediverse-accesible link here (side note: Nostr can connect to the fediverse via a bridge, so I follow Jack directly from my Mastodon account).

First to note is that Jack is fully focused on Nostr, not on Bluesky. He deleted his Bluesky account a while ago, even though he is still on the board of the Bluesky organisation. Reading this post makes it clear where his attention is though, and its not at Bluesky.

Reframing Twitter as an information network over a social network is interesting, and I can see why. It also indicates the impossible dilemma Mastodon is in: Eugen Rochko explicitly frames it as a Twitter competitor, but by making search opt-in, it can never come close to the information network that Twitter was.

Nostr is positioned as working towards a multi-app/use-case ecosystem. Nostr struggles with the same problem that the fediverse has here; both protocols allow for a large variety of different networks and products, but they are currently heavily dominated by microblogging. The challenge for both networks is how to grow beyond just microblogging, and providing other use-cases.

Jack also mentions the ‘completely open and wild API’ as a benefit for Nostr. It is here that the fediverse is ahead of both Bluesky and Nostr. An open API is great for a whole lot of purposes, but at the same time it violates people’s consent to actually use their data. Nostr positions itself as the wild west. This comes with advantages, such as development speed, but makes the community unsafer. In turn, this makes it all the harder for the Nostr community to expand beyond the bitcoin bubble.

Overall, the post illustrates what makes me excited about decentralised social networks, and that we finally have choices. I personally disagree with part of Jack’s vision how a social network should look like. I can contribute to the network that aligns with my values, while there is still space for people to have their own network with their own values.

#nostr

https://laurenshof.online/jack-dorsey-on-nostr/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to threads

Biden and the White House join Threads

The White House has joined Threads with a variety of new accounts. The government announced accounts for President Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, as well as accounts for the White House and a Spanish version, La Casa Blanca.

The move comes after a week in which Elon Musk continued his descent into white nationalism and antisemitism, as well as major advertisers fleeing the platform after having their ads placed next to nazi posts.

The White House has condemned Musks posts as “unacceptable”. The Hill reports that the move towards Threads has been in the work for several weeks. While the latest controversies might be a good confirmation for the White House, it does not seem like it might be the direct reason.

Overall this should boost Threads uptake significantly, with it being endorsed by the most powerful political figures. One thing to watch for his how politicians from both sides of the political spectrum will approach this move. For democratic politicians there is now a significant incentive to follow Biden to Threads. Republicans have been aligning themselves more closely with Elon Musk however, and might be less incentivised to join another platform.

#threads

https://laurenshof.online/biden-and-the-white-house-join-threads/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to mastodon

A Mammoth Task, a Zeit interview with Eugen Rochko

A Mammoth Task, is the headline of the interview by German newspaper Zeit with Eugen Rochko. It details the history and background of how Eugen Rochko came to build Mastodon, and his vision for social networks. It introduces him as a private person, who rarely gives interviews, does not go to conferences, and has not met most of Mastodon’s employees in person (a shame, as I very much enjoyed meeting Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput at Next Generation Internet conference last week)

The article does not shy away from pointing out some uncomfortable facts either, noting his title as a Benevolent Dictator For Life. They write: ‘“I feel quite comfortable in this role,” he [Eugen Rochko] says, “an individual with a vision always builds a better product than a group.” He almost sounds like the Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of this world. Is Rochko really interested in building a democratic network? Or does he just want to be at the top himself?’.

The entire interview is worth reading (non-paywalled here, auto translation works well enough), as it shows that some press is moving beyond an easy narrative of Mastodon as an replacement for Twitter, and is willing to look deeper into how decisions get made on this new generation of decentralised social networks.

#Mastodon

https://laurenshof.online/a-mammoth-task-a-zeit-interview-with-eugen-rochko/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to bluesky

Bluesky crosses the mark for 2 million accounts

Bluesky has now 2 million accounts, crossing the milestone 2 months after reaching the one million mark. It is a great eye-catching headline about a network in growth, doubling its user base in two months, and going from 500k to 800k daily posts. But underneath it all, the numbers are quite a bit more mixed.

Looking at the amount of posts that people make on the platform, there is little growth in the same time period at all. The following graph shows the amount of posts per day, in thousands.

graph showcasing the trend of posts per day over the last 2 months. it showcases a slightly upward trend for the first month, and a slight downward trend for the second monthThere are a few things of note here: September 20th was in inflection point of the network; this was the day that Elon Musk floated the idea of charging everyone to use X. This lead to a massive increase in signups, as well as a great boost in posts per day.

After that moment, total posts per day has not increased anymore, even though the network grew from 1.1m accounts to 2m accounts. If we look at posts per day per account:

graph showing posts per user per day. there is a clear downwards trend visible, from around 0.58/day mid sept to below 0.4 mid novThere is a clear downwards trend visible in the amount of posts per user per day. This indicates that people continue to sign up for the network, but that the network does not manage to retain the new users into actually contributing and posting.

#bluesky

https://laurenshof.online/bluesky-crosses-the-mark-for-2-million-accounts/

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laurenshof, 6 months ago to random

In other fediverse news, week 43

A preview of this week’s newsletter with all the other short news that has happened this week:

• Nathan Mattes, the freelance iOS developer for Mastodon, wrote a reflection on working on the project for the last year. There’s some interesting information in there, like development almost coming to a pause last August due to financing struggles. It also provides some good insight in the update this spring where mastodon.social got set as the default server select for signing up.

• Developing with ActivityPub can be surprisingly difficult for a variety of reasons, one of them being a lack of testing tools. @Helge got funding from NLnet and made this tool, Verify your Fediverse Actor, that helps developers and improves interoperability.

• The developer for Takahe is looking for new developers and maintainers to take over the project. Takahe is a fediverse project in development, with the goal to have multiple domains in one ActivityPub server.

• Pleroma announces plans to split the development of the front-end and the back-end. The project has struggled to synchronise the development. Now the front-end development of Pleroma will become more of a client instead.

• Kbin developer Ernest has been keeping a devlog every day for the past week on the road to release. Here’s his reflection on the week. One major new feature is that people can now request ownership of magazines that are abandoned, which should help improve the spam situation.

https://laurenshof.online/in-other-fediverse-news-week-43/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to random

A year on Mastodon, a reflection by Heise Online

German news organisation Heise Online has written up an extensive report (in German) on their first year on Mastodon. Some key takeaways:

“Mastodon alone generated around two thirds as many visits to the sitein the twelve months as X/Twitter overall. At the same time, this should not obscure the fact that the absolute numbers are comparatively low; Twitter was never really relevant as a traffic source for media like Heise Online.”

Their statistics also show that activity in the fediverse has noticeably slowed down: “access via Mastodon reached its peak around the turn of the year. Since then they have been slowly declining.” And: “of the 20 most popular posts on Mastodon, half come from the first three months [of the year]”.

On community interaction: “If there are direct questions or other requests to express yourself, no other social network is as busy online as Mastodon. But here too the numbers are now declining; Mastodon and the Fediverse have apparently no longer been able to really benefit from the recent waves of farewells at X/Twitter.”

But there is more to a network that engagement numbers, as Heise Online points to the both the high quality as well as quantity of comments on the fediverse. They also indicate the low cost (less than 100 EUR/month) and effort of participating in the fediverse. As other news organisations (BBC, the Dutch NPO) are joining the fediverse, they can learn from the experience that Heise Online already has here.

https://laurenshof.online/a-year-on-mastodon-a-reflection-by-heise-online/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Tumblr and interoperability, revised

Last week I wrote about Tumblr’s shelved plans to add interoperability to their network. There is a tension between the short term demands, of having your social network that is bleeding money survive, versus the longer term demands of participating in the shift in the digital landscape.

Yesterday, a memo by Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg was leaked that the team is significantly downsizing. Matt went on Tumblr and posted the rest of the memo as well, with some comments and answering questions.

On profitability: “Out of the 11.5M monthly active users of Tumblr, only about 27k have subscribed, or about 0.2%. If that were 10% or 20% we could run the site forever.”

On interoperability, Matt was supportive, but significantly more vague than earlier promises to add ActivityPub support, stating: “Every future for Tumblr that I’m involved in will include it being more open, supporting more standards, API’s, and open source.”

#ActivityPub #tumblr

https://laurenshof.online/tumblr-and-interoperability-revised/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to random

“It is our goal to have all government organisations be involved in the pilot”, the Dutch government wrote in September 2023. Since this summer, the Dutch government runs their own Mastodon server at social.overheid.nl. Gradually, more and more organisations have joined the server.

Today, the Dutch Public Broadcasting organisation (NPO) has set up their own Mastodon server as well, at social.npo.nl. Some of the new accounts are for broadcasting stations, such as NPO Radio 1, or for specific programs that are run by NPO, such as Pointer or Zembla. Zembla has been active here for a while incidentally, and now moved to the new server as well.

One of the public tasks of the NPO is to drive innovations in the media sector; finding new ways for broadcasting organisations to reach an audience in a post-Twitter landscape is an excellent way to fulfil this mandate. Will NOS, the other Dutch public broadcaster, follow?

https://laurenshof.online/dutch-broadcaster-npo-launches-mastodon-server/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to random

Markus Unterwaditzer wrote a blog that does into the practical problems that he encounters with Mastodon’s chronological timeline. He notes that the lack of algorithmic feed makes it hard to connect with followers in different timezones, or followers who do not post a lot. Mastodon proposes lists as a partial solution to help with organising and taking control of your feed. But as the blog notes, lists require a high amount of effort of people to use and maintain, significantly more than what the average person can be expected to be willing to put into.

Algorithmic feeds are not impossible in the fediverse. Most fediverse servers however have pushed the option to implement algorithmic feeds away from the server to the client. There are separate solutions that provide an algorithmic view on someones personal Mastodon timeline, such as fediview and FeedSeer. The way these systems work is that they ingest all the posts on your timeline, and then sort them via simple, easy-to-understand algorithms that the user can choose from. They effectively function quite similar to other 3rd party clients as Phanpy or Elk, with the exception that they only provide the algorithmically sorted timelines.

@Moof says here that he was hoping there to be more mobile clients that would have incorporated some sort of algorithmic view at this point. I personally also would have also expected more to be happening in this space. The most notable clients who provide some form of algorithmic feed are Mammoth and SoraSNS. One issue seems to be that placing the algorithm in the client instead of in the server introduces significant lag in the client. Both Fediview and Feedseer can take quite a while to load, Fediview took more than 20 seconds to load. This is also visible in SoraSNS, where I scroll quicker than the algorithm can calculate the next post, introducing frequent pauses where the timeline is still loading the next post. Although I would love to see more experimenting with algorithmic timelines in fediverse clients, I’m not sure if the barrier of long loading times will be easy to overcome if the client also has to do the algorithmic calculations.

https://laurenshof.online/algorithmic-feeds-in-clients/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to random

Over the summer I wrote about some claims by Tumblr employees, who said that the plans to connect to the fediverse were shelved. Now there is a good overview of the entire situation, which can be found here. It tells a story of a hasty announcement by the CEO, and the quick quiet shelving of the project only a few days later.

Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko responded to the situation, stating that “The point is not how interoperability affects the bottom line, the point is that it allows your platform to survive in an ever changing social media landscape and have a bottom line at all.”

The case of Tumblr showcases a clear conflict between ideals about decentralisation and federation, and the practical harsh reality of a platform that is losing 30 million dollar per year. Federating your content out towards a larger social network allows you to reach more people. It also allows your current network to access your content outside of your own app. Tumblr is currently primarily ad-supported, with another option to remove ads for $5/month. Federation thus allows people to use your network without seeing ads, and creates significantly less incentive for people to sign up for the paid ad-free option.

In the long term, interoperability might be the only way to survive. But in the short term, interoperability directly eats into the two sources of revenue that the network currently has.

https://laurenshof.online/tumblr-and-interoperability/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to random

Bluesky has published a roadmap for their current development plans for the AT Protocol that powers the network. It can be found here, and it is a fairly technical read, focused on developers. There are still quite some things of interest for regular users in it:

• Federation is coming, scheduled for early 2024
• DMs are coming, but quite a way off.

The main work that the Bluesky team is focused on is getting to federation. This will allow the network to properly scale, as the current infrastructure starts to hit its limits. Federation is currently available in a separate testing environment for developers. The developers are currently working on completing the final parts of the protocol that enables federation to happen. Most of the technical roadmap is dedicated to the individual work items that are happening, or need to happen. The infrastructure that is currently used on the live network now has most parts in place to allow federation to happen. Altogether the team estimates that the network will open up to everyone via federation in early 2024.

DMs are an often requested feature, and people regularly mention that the only reason they still use their X account is to access DMs. Implementing DMs requires significant additions to the protocol, as currently all information is public. Proper end-to-end encrypted messaging needs to be added for DMs to work. The team is currently planning on focusing on this after federation is complete. The amount of work that is needed, means that DMs are still quite some time away, and should not be expected any time soon.

Another important part of the roadmap is that governance of the protocol will be submitted to an independent standards body, which I’ll talk more about in a next update.

https://laurenshof.online/bluesky-technical-roadmap/

laurenshof, 6 months ago to fediverse

Twitch has officially announced that streamers on Twitch are now allowed to simultanously stream (simulcasting) to all other live platforms. They state that ‘We believe that you should have the freedom to decide which services you want to live stream on.’ The new policy comes with a few restrictions, such as making sure that the quality of the stream on Twitch is not lesser than on other platforms, and they are not allowed to advertise the other platforms on Twitch. Still, these changes will significantly increase options for streamers to experiment with other platforms such as YouTube.

Allowing simulcasting will likely also benefit open source fediverse streaming platform Owncast. Owncast allows you to completely self-host your streams, and connect them with the fediverse for easier social connections. The software itself is pretty great, but the platform does feature a lack of streamers actually using it. Most times when browsing the directory, the only streams listed are 24/7 music live streams. Allowing Twitch streamers to simulcast to Owncast is a first step, and it seems likely that a few more dedicated fediverse fans will use this opportunity. It is still a very long way away of mainstream appeal, but this new policy change does provide Owncast with an opportunity to get at least a few more streamers on board.

https://laurenshof.online/twitch-simulcasting-provides-opportunity-for-owncast/

#owncast

laurenshof, 7 months ago to random

Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances is a recently published research article that compares and characterises the rules of the most popular Mastodon servers. The researchers find that “Rules on Mastodon often pay particular attention to issues of harassment and hate — strongly reflecting the spirit of the Mastodon Covenant. We speculate that these rules may have emerged in response to problems of other platforms, and reflect a lack of support for instance maintainers.”

The report compares the rules on Mastodon servers to those on subreddits, and comes up with some interesting findings: “[R]ules about Hate Speech, Harassment, and Doxxing/Personal Info are far more common on Mastodon, while rules about Consequences/Moderation/Enforcement, Behavior/Content/Format Allowed, and Links & Outside Content are much less common. This contrast may suggest that these spaces have different values and purposes.” and “rules on Mastodon often explicitly engage with systemic oppression across many different intersectional identities beyond what is required by the Mastodon Covenant.”

And finally, this line in the report is a good indication of why I want to spend my time on the fediverse: “Mastodon instances seem to have more of an orientation towards justice”.

https://laurenshof.online/mastodon-server-rules-research-paper/

laurenshof, 7 months ago to fediverse

Owncast creator Gabe Kangas announced that he has been working on an iOS and tvOS app for fediverse streaming platform Owncast. However, he stated that it is unlikely that this app will be released due to Apple’s App store policies. The app allowed you to browse the directory of streams on Owncast, add private server streams, and get notified when your favourite streamers were going live. Apple however refuses to approve the app into the App store, because of content rights. Apple’s position is that Owncast can only provide access to a catalog if they own the rights for the content in this catalog. As Owncast is only an intermediary portal for independently hosted servers, this is simply impossible to do. Gabe Kangas describes Owncast’s directory as similar to a podcast app. Podcasting apps can read out any podcast RSS feeds, without any permission or agreement by the podcast itself.

Gabe Kangas also states that he has been trying take a legal approach to this, but struggled finding representation that fully understands what Owncast is doing. It is an important story for the fediverse, as it is trying to expand beyond microblogging. It seems possible that someone building a PeerTube directory app might run into similar troubles.

https://laurenshof.online/owncast-and-the-app-store/

#owncast

laurenshof, 7 months ago to TwitterMigration

Mid September, Elon Musk live streamed a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu on X. In it, Musk floated a plan to charge all users for X. Even by Musk’s exceedingly high standards, this plan was vague, unrealistic and half-baked. That the plan was not particularly well thought out was confirmed on this week’s Code Conference. X CEO Linda Yaccarino was asked about these plan by Elon Musk, and did not appear to know about these plans, and managed to make this clear in one of the most painfully cringe ways possible. However, it drove a significant news cycle, and spurred quite some people to make the jump from X to other platforms:

• Bluesky added some 60k users in the 24 hours after the news, roughly 4 times its average daily growth number.
• Mastodon added around 30k users in the 24 hours after the news, around 6 times its average daily new signups.

Note that these numbers happened only after a comment by Elon Musk, these plans were not actually implemented (yet?).

Yesterday, Elon Musk changed X again, removing all the headlines from links posted on X. This change has a significantly negative impact on X’s function of sharing news, as it is now virtually impossible to know what link you are clicking on (or even see that the image is indeed a link). What stands out to me however is that this did not drive a signup cycle to either Bluesky or Mastodon at all:

• Bluesky added some 15k users, which is in line with the average of the last week.
• Mastodon added some 6k users, which is also the same as the average of the last week.

This indicates that an actual change which negatively impacts the X platform right now does not necessarily drive a signup wave to other services, but perceived changes can.

https://laurenshof.online/what-drives-people-to-move-away-from-x/

#twittermigration