Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky is adding to its ranks by scooping up a member of its developer community.
London-based software engineer Samuel Newman, who built the well-received third-party Bluesky client, Graysky, is joining the startup, where he will now help develop Bluesky’s official app along with the rest of the frontend team.
Given his change in position, the future of the Graysky app is uncertain.
Late last year, Graysky also added Trending Topics and a Pro subscription to help the app monetize.
With Newman now joining Bluesky, the hope is that the official client will also gain support for more features.
Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth.
The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol.
Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage, and more.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol.
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships.
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.)
The company has been spotted testing a cross-posting feature that would allow Facebook users to post to both platforms at the same time, using the same feature that was originally available for cross-posting from Facebook to Instagram.
The feature will allow users to share both text and link posts from Facebook to Threads, a rep for Meta said.
Even if only a sliver of those on Facebook used the cross-posting feature for Threads, it could still dramatically increase the number of posts available on the app.
With last summer’s launch of its Twitter/X competitor, Threads, the company leveraged its other, larger social networks to rapidly grow the new service’s user base.
The test of the Facebook cross-posting feature was recently spotted in the wild on Facebook’s iOS app, as in this example here shared by Threads user @whimchic (Ljiljana Grujicic).
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.
Some of the most important channels for news traffic — Google Search, social platforms like Facebook — changed how they focus on and surface news links, and that’s had an overall hit on traffic and ad sales.
And consumer tastes have changed, too, and it appears that the app is also struggling to attract and retain users.
Given the decline in downloads, Apptopia said a figure of 10 million active users today would now be “a stretch.”Another firm, Sensor Tower, added more insight, noting that SmartNews had, on average, roughly 1.7 million worldwide daily active users between Q1 2023 and Q3 2023.
Sensor Tower’s estimates indicate the SmartNews app has roughly 5 million worldwide monthly active users from Q1–Q3 2023, down an average of 30% year-over-year, per quarter, it said.
Sensor Tower also suggested that lapsed product iterations and feature launches likely contributed to falling consumer interest and interaction with the SmartNews app.
