The Roundup - episode 14
11 million Mastodon accounts, the first Fediverse Developer Network meeting, lots of talk about news organisations that should join the fediverse, and much more!
Even though many people join the fediverse to avoid the chaos of Twitter, this week was one of those weeks that it was hard to avoid talking about Twitter. The news that NPR was leaving Twitter (and others after it as well) created a lot of chatter about how to get these organisations to join the fediverse instead. For now this is a story in active development, and we'll see how the situation plays out. Some smaller radio stations have joined, but NPR and PBS have not, even though some of their journalists have. It is also notable how big the support is for GBH News, a local news station from Boston, in this specific context.
The first Fediverse Developer Network meeting was last Monday, with a big turnout. Lots of developers are interested in connecting with each other, and helping each other build the fediverse. Some of the outcomes:
- There is a Matrix chat channel for developers.
- A write-up on how to support fediverse developer communities.
- Further work and merging of fedidocs.org with fedidevs.org.
- The potential for developers to cooperate with fediverse.info.
Meanwhile, the Social Hub of the ActivityPub Rocks community is also working on organization structures. It is exciting to see this interest in better organisation and working together coming from so many different directions.
Mastodon also celebrated 11 million accounts this week. I wrote about the reliability of data earlier. However, gaining 1 million accounts in 25 days is a clear sign of growth.
Some Wikipedians have started a community-run Wikipedia account. They are also in the process of adding support for fediverse verification for all Wikipedia accounts. It's worth watching how this renewed interest between the fediverse and Wikipedia develops.
The links
- FediDB is live in beta! It is a dashboard and API that shows statistics about the fediverse, created by Daniel Supernaut, who also makes Pixelfed.
- The Verge on hashtags and Mastodon.
- FediFriday is an easy website overview of all the accounts the creator (Dr. Jorge Caballero) recommends, and is currently being expanded to be more generally useful.
- Cory Doctorow on how to make the least-worst Mastodon threads. Personally I recommend using phanpy.social however.
- Substack came under major controversy this week after a disastrous interview by the CEO on content management. People have been looking for alternatives to Substack, such as Ghost. This week someone created a first version of an ActivityPub plugin for Ghost.
- An extensive look at how to migrate your lists if you migrate your account to a different server.
