An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” — the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others — has been achieved.
Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols.
That could shift in the future, however, to becoming opt-out for Bluesky users only.
So if my Bluesky account is @sarahp@bsky.social, then my bridged account is @sarahp.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy.
Anything from your Bluesky account that interacts with fediverse users will be bridged, including replies, @-mentions, likes, reports, and, if you have fediverse followers, your own Bluesky posts.
According to a post from Ghost founder John O’Nolan, the company — which is structured as a nonprofit — is considering federating Ghost over ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the fediverse.
It also asks how federation would personally benefit Ghost users.
With Ghost, however, the idea could be to federate the accounts of the writers who use Ghost to publish their content.
After seeing O’Nolan’s post, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput reached out to help with the ActivityPub integration, which O’Nolan accepted.
In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.
Lyrak to take on X by combining the best of Twitter with fediverse integrationThreads.
Once live, Lyrak users will be able to see posts from Mastodon users and vice versa.
Founded by London-based web designer and marketer Rishi Siva, Lyrak is named form a lead character in the TV show “His Dark Materials,” Lyra.
Lyrak says it will focus initially on getting journalists to join the network, to help it with becoming a real-time social app.
“The advantage of being a startup building a social app is that we have a fresh perspective on things.
On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its fediverse integrations to 400 more Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself.
In total, Flipboard says there are now over 11,000 curated Flipboard magazines available to federated social networking users.
In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app.
4.3.25), Flipboard users will be able to see their new followers from the fediverse in their Flipboard Following tab, while their Flipboard notifications will now include fediverse reactions and conversations.
The company had already begun curating content for fediverse users across a handful of “news desks” (dedicated fediverse accounts) that directed users to interesting articles and links across topics.
The account operated by Biden’s team published a message regarding the president’s support of reproductive freedom on Threads, Meta’s up-and-coming Twitter/X competitor.
Soon after, Threads users noticed that his post sported a Threads’ fediverse sharing logo — a circular shape that resembles planets orbiting a star, which gives a sense of the interconnected universe that makes up the fediverse.
When Meta introduced Threads, its text-focused Twitter/X competitor, the company said it planned to federate the app so users on Mastodon and other networks could see and respond to Threads’ users posts.
Late last year, Threads began testing that integration and, in March, it opened up fediverse sharing to Threads users in beta.
For example, at present, Threads users can’t see who replied or liked their posts from other servers and can’t share their posts with polls.
Decentralized social network Mastodon has updated its official app for Android to let users easily share their profiles with QR Codes.
To share the QR code, users can go to their profile tab and tap the QR icon next to their name to get a code related to the profile others can scan.
Mastodon has also updated prompts for blocking and muting to explain the effects of taking those actions on a profile.
Users trying out Mastodon have complained about the complicated nature of having different servers on the ActivityPub network.
The company will have to work on making it easier for users to understand and navigate the decentralized social world.
Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for the inspiration around Communities.
In addition, Newsmast offers a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server with a selection of communities they’ve curated.
Users could then connect to that server in place of the Newsmast server within the Newsmast app.
Later this week, Newsmast will also open up its API to developers, which means your preferred Mastodon app could integrate with Newsmast’s Communities, too, for a more seamless experience.
(In fact, some Mastodon users were confused why Newsmast’s accounts were following them and boosting their content, without understanding the larger purpose.)
Social network Bluesky, a competitor to X, Threads, Mastodon, and others, is opening up its doors with today’s news that the network is now opening up federation, following its public launch earlier this month.
The move will allow anyone to run their own server that connects to Bluesky’s network, so they can host their own data, their own account and make their own rules.
That sent some former Twitter users in search of alternatives that were more sustainable, like Mastodon and Bluesky.
While this model is similar to Mastodon, Bluesky uses a newer social networking protocol, the AT Protocol, while Mastodon and many other networks today use ActivityPub.
“After this initial phase, we’ll open up federation to people looking to run larger servers with many users,” it says.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.
According to reports on Mastodon, this fully-automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers.
A spam attack that impacted the open source X rival Mastodon, Misskey, and other apps highlights how the decentralized social web, also known as the Fediverse, is open to abuse.
Over the past several days, attackers have targeted smaller Mastodon servers, taking advantage of open registrations to automate the creation of spam accounts.
While this is not the first spam attack that has impacted the Fediverse, Rochko notes that only larger servers like Mastodon.social had been targeted previously.
The spam attack highlighted one of the weaknesses that comes with how the Fediverse is structured.
It makes me want to walk away and give up,” wrote one Mastodon server admin sam@urbanists.social.
