Last Week in Fediverse - ep 43

The monthly update for Bluesky, Dutch broadcaster NPO joins the fediverse, and German news organisation Heise Online reflects on a year of being on Mastodon.

Bluesky October update

https://fediversereport.com/last-month-in-bluesky-october-23/

Dutch Public Broadcaster NPO joins the fediverse

"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?

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.

In other news

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.

Tumblr and interoperability, revised

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

Algorithmic feeds in clients

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

That's all for this week, thanks for reading. If you want to receive this update every Sunday in your mailbox, subscribe below!