Last Week in Fediverse - ep 41

A bit quieter news week in the fediverse, which gives some space to explore some news that relates to the fediverse in relevant ways, without the news necessarily originating from the fediverse itself. The Verge gives some significant attention to posting on the internet, and new rules at Twitch provide an interesting opportunity for Owncast.

The Verge and the fediverse

Three separate but related news items from The Verge this week, that relate to the fediverse in some way:

• David Pierce published an article, ‘The poster’s guide to the internet of the future’. It is about providing an alternative to centralised internet platforms via POSSE (meaning Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). It explains how ActivityPub can power this decentralised version of the internet, and features many fediverse platforms. Manton Reece, creator of Micro.blog, talks about the pragmatism that underlines the micro.blog platform: “Instead of waiting for the perfect world, […], let’s just accept the reality, and focus on posting to your own site that you control — and then send it out to friends on other networks.” There is also a shoutout to the work that Ryan Barrett is doing with bridging between all the protocols.
  • The Vergecast had an accompanying podcast episode for this article, taking a deeper dive into what posting (and the distribution of your posts) on the internet will look like.
• In The Vergecast podcast from The Verge from this week, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel says: “my plan for our site is to federate our content, and to be more natively integrated with whatever new class of social networks that exists”. He shouts out theverge.space as a great 3rd party hack to see how a federated version of The Verge might look like.
• The Verge has started posting their content on the bot @verge@mastodon.social. The account has existed for a long time but has been dormant.

Together, these items provide a view of how The Verge thinks where the social web is headed, a view of many interconnected networks, and where the source of information matters more than the specific network or platform it is distributed on.

Twitch simulcasting rules update

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. This change in the Twitch Terms of Service, 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.

The links

• Popular iOS Mastodon app Ice Cubes is now also available for MacOS.
• The Alt Text Health Check image accessibility report provides on overview of how many images include alt text in the fediverse. The median value is that around 36% of images include alt text.
• Mastodon will soon change the 'favourite' to a 'like'.
• Pixelfed has implemented P2P for videos, similar how PeerTube does this.
• The website for Funkwhale has been updated.

That's all for this week, thank you for reading! You can subscribe below to receive this update directly in your mailbox. You can also subscribe on the fediverse, to find these posts directly in your feeds. You can find me there on @laurenshof@fediversereport.com