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If you’re on Mastodon, you might notice new author bylines appearing alongside articles — including those from The Verge.

Click on the byline, and you’ll jump directly to the author’s fediverse account, allowing you to track their work wherever it’s posted.

You can see how author bylines appear beneath articles in this post, which links you to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko’s profile.

It can also lead to a person’s profile on Threads, Flipboard, WordPress with ActivityPub, PeerTube, and others.

Mastodon is working to open up the feature to more outlets, too, but it currently requires “manual review” to prevent “malicious sites framing users as their authors.” However, Mastodon plans on launching “a self-serve system” to manage the sites authors can appear from in the future.

Even though it’s not widely rolled out just yet, it does seem like a neat way to quickly find out who wrote an article and check out their other work across multiple platforms.

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Because — in Dorsey’s telling, at least — Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company.”

That’s the TLDR from an interview Dorsey conducted with journalist Mike Solana at his Pirate Wires site.

And then Dorsey decided what he really wanted to do was help Nostr, another Twitter alternative, which promises to actually be an open-source protocol, instead.

Dorsey, for instance, has some mostly kind words about Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022.

Though that mostly repeats his idea that Twitter’s original sin was becoming a venture-backed, for-profit company that went public with a business model based on advertising, positioned as a Facebook competitor.

But that story/argument isn’t a new one — you can find it in this four-episode podcast series I hosted last year, for instance.

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Bluesky had announced last month that it would use some portion of its funds to fuel efforts in the developer ecosystem via the AT Protocol Grant program.

Notes SkyBridge’s developer @videah.net on Bluesky, the project is currently undergoing a significant rewrite from Dart to Rust, which is why its GitHub repo hasn’t seen much activity lately.

“It’s already proving to be much more stable, hoping to show it off soon,” videah posted on Bluesky when sharing the news of the grant.

Instagram Threads (which is integrating with ActivityPub) now has more than 150 million monthly active users, Meta announced this week during earnings.

Another software developer, Ryan Barrett, was the recipient of some backlash on GitHub when building another bridge called Bridgy Fed, which would be opt-out by default — meaning Mastodon posts would show up on Bluesky even if the post’s author hadn’t opted into this.

He readjusted his plans to build a discoverable opt-in instead, which would allow users to request to follow accounts on the different networks.

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That’s a big shot of support for the fediverse — the network of open and interoperable social services that have all been gaining momentum over the past year.

This has long been the dream, and it seems like the platforms betting on it in various ways — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Flipboard, and others — are where all the energy is, while attempts to rebuild closed systems keep hitting the rocks.

Ghost itself is one of the bigger winners in the oops-Substack-has-Nazis newsletter migration, and letting authors on its platform more easily distribute their work is itself in stark contrast to Substack, which is reacting to its failing business model by making it harder to leave its own increasingly-social-network-like platform.

Ghost says it’s working with Mastodon and Buttondown, another newsletter platform, on ActivityPub support.

The company also says it will be working to improve its reading experience as it prepares to let people follow other fediverse authors on its platform.

Importantly, the project FAQ also says that paid content “should work fine” with ActivityPub as well — something no other platform has really tried yet, as far as I’m aware.

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Ghost, the open source alternative to Substack’s newsletter platform, is considering joining the fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others.

While the launch of a survey isn’t necessarily a commitment to federating Ghost, it is another signal pointing to the broader reshaping of the web that’s now underway.

Ghost has gained attention as a Substack rival in recent months for the same reason that some have fled X: People disagree about how platforms should be moderated.

Substack has taken to promoting free speech, as Musk does on X, but that’s also led to the platform being used by pro-Nazi publications, as detailed by The Atlantic late last year.

“I’m not aware of any major U.S. consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions,” Newton wrote at the time.

In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.

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In January this year, Turkey’s TCA said it would be issuing Meta with an additional $160,000 fine each day for non-compliance with the previous order.

For context, Facebook’s sibling company, Instagram, launched Threads last summer, in large part to capitalize on the exodus of Twitter users following Elon Musk’s controversial takeover.

Turkish regulators had announced the investigation on the way Meta linked Threads with Instagram in December, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer for.

This leads us to today’s announcement that Meta will pull Threads, temporarily at least, pending further discussions and legal resolutions with Turkey.

“We disagree with the interim order, we believe we are in compliance with all Turkish legal requirements, and we will appeal,” Meta wrote in a blog post today.

In the build up to April 29, everyone using Threads in Turkey will receive a notification about the impending closure, and they will be given a choice to either delete or deactivate their profile.

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Now you can add one more startup to that lineup: Lyrak, a new X rival that aims to differentiate itself by focusing on real-time news and monetization options for creators, as on X, but with fediverse integrations, similar to Instagram’s Threads.

With Lyrak, the plan is to take the best of what Twitter has to offer and combine it with ActiviyPub integration, allowing users to interact with a wider audience on other federated social networks, like Mastodon and others.

Founded by London-based web designer and marketer Rishi Siva, Lyrak is named for a lead character in the TV show “His Dark Materials,” Lyra.

At one point, Siva also created a Thumbtack-like app, but the COVID-19 pandemic impacted its ability to grow as many local tradespeople were unable to work at the time.

To attract them, Lyrak will allow Verified journalists to share content to users’ home feeds based on their interests and offer tools to send them notifications to people who regularly click their links.

The company plans to generate revenue through ads, like X, but also by taking a 10% cut from paid posts, subscriptions, tips, digital products and other AI features, in time.

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This follows last year’s introduction of a Mastodon integration in the app, replacing Twitter, and the introduction of support for ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the open source, decentralized social networks that include Mastodon and others.

In February, Flipboard announced it would begin to add its creators and their social magazines to the fediverse as well, meaning that the curated magazines of links and other social posts that its creators typically share within the Flipboard app could now find a broader audience.

By sharing creators’ posts and links with the wider fediverse, Flipboard’s publishing partners gained their own native ActivityPub feeds so they could be discovered by Mastodon users and those on other federated social apps.

“This is a major step toward fully federating our platform,” noted Flipboard CEO Mike McCue in an announcement.

“We’re not just making curated content on Flipboard viewable, but enabling two-way communication so users can see activity and engage with fediverse communities.

In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app.

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The official US president Threads account, currently helmed by President Joe Biden, has begun using Meta’s ActivityPub integration, making Biden the first sitting US president to post on the decentralized networking protocol.

The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse — and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts — as those features weren’t part of Threads’ integration when it opened up beta testing last month.

So far, only Biden’s official POTUS account appears to have toggled Threads’ fediverse integration on.

Neither Dr. Jill Biden’s nor Vice President Kamala Harris’ accounts showed up in a search.

And none of them appear to have joined Bluesky yet, a competing decentralized social network running on its own AT protocol that recently opened general signups.

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“For years, LGBTQ organizations have pleaded with Meta to improve safety for our communities, especially for transgender people,” Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

Alok Vaid-Menon, a nonbinary content creator, author and comedian in New York who is on GLAAD’s social media safety program advisory committee, said: “I have experienced an uptick of ant- trans harassment, slurs, dehumanizing tropes and violent threats.

Meta’s repeated failure to take the correct enforcement action, despite multiple signals about the post’s harmful content, leads the Board to conclude the company is not living up to the ideals it has articulated on LGBTQIA+ safety.”

And in June, GLAAD, the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, and more than 250 LGBTQ+ celebrities, public figures and allies signed an open letter calling on Meta to do a better job of protecting against anti-trans hate.

Celebrities including Elliot Page, Laverne Cox, Jamie Lee Curtis, Shawn Mendes, Janelle Monáe, Gabrielle Union, Judd Apatow and Ariana Grande signed the letter.

Right-wing media outlets and podcasters — including Matt Walsh, the account Gays Against Groomers, Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok and the Babylon Bee — contributed to anti-trans hate, according to the report.

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In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.

On Tuesday, a federal court in California released new documents discovered as part of the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the lawsuit.

When the network traffic is unencrypted, this type of attack allows the hackers to read the data inside, such as usernames, passwords, and other in-app activity.

This is why Facebook engineers proposed using Onavo, which when activated had the advantage of reading all of the device’s network traffic before it got encrypted and sent over the internet.

“We now have the capability to measure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program,” read another email.

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Jay and I also talked about the growth of the Bluesky app, which now has more than 5 million users, and how so many of the company’s early decisions around product design and moderation have shaped the type of organic culture that’s taken hold there.

And early on, we had this crazy ratio of 90 percent posters, and so it was extremely active and tons of people firing off shitposts essentially — really fast, funny takes on things and memes and a lot of stuff.

Do you think you’re going to end up in a place where you have what I will just call the Microsoft Excel problem, where so many people have asked for so many familiar features that it’s actually hard to bring them into a new paradigm, like composable moderation or adjustable filters?

I talked to the CEOs of other companies that are in these kinds of relationships with protocols or standards or open source, and at the end of the day, they often come back to “…but we also have to make money, and the best user experience is often the one that we control.

Yeah, and we’ve already begun talking to some standardization bodies — like starting the very early stages of that work, socializing the idea, taking on the pieces that are relatively more solid, as I mentioned earlier.

So, our goal is to let that whole ecosystem just iterate and experiment, and then we try to have some amount of leadership in terms of what we’re encouraging people to build, how we’re creating and surfacing the best stuff that gets built and bringing it to user’s attention and helping them install it.

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Threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum.

As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to “search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server.”

The beta currently doesn’t let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example.

Still, it’s promising to see Threads starting to get into the fediverse after first testing its ActivityPub integration last year.

You can turn on the feature by heading to your Threads account settings, selecting Fediverse sharing (Beta), and following the instructions.

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During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse.

As you can see in the video below, which FediForum shared with The Verge, Cottle can navigate to his Threads account settings and toggle on an option called “fediverse sharing.” Meta will then show a pop-up explaining what exactly the fediverse is, along with some disclaimers Meta will flag to users so they know what they’re getting into.

First, Meta notes that users will need to have a public profile to toggle on the feature, something Instagram head Adam Mosseri has already mentioned.

In other words, your post may still be visible on, say, a linked Mastodon server, even if you decide to delete it with Threads.

“I think this is a downside of the protocol that we use today, but I think it’s important to let people know that if you post something and another server grabs a copy, we can’t necessarily enforce it,” Cottle says.

The FediForum is an online event that gives developers the opportunity to show off what they’re working on in the fediverse.

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At the time, he noted that the aesthetics of physical spaces, like coffee shops and co-working offices, were being heavily influenced by Airbnb and Instagram, flattening global interior design into one singular and recognizable vibe.

Seven years later, Kyle’s argument is that AirSpace has turned into what he now calls Filterworld, a phrase he uses to describe how algorithmic recommendations have become one of the most dominating forces in culture, and as a result, have pushed society to converge on a kind of soulless sameness in its tastes.

You’ll hear us trace the origins of Filterworld back to the rise of modern social media in the 2010s and how this development has been accelerated by the deterioration of the open web, an erosion of trust in our institutions, and the frankly frightening speed and scale of platforms like TikTok.

What I find is that, in Filterworld, in this world of digital platforms and algorithmic feeds, one quirk goes viral instantly — a new adaptation, a new aesthetic flourish, can go from one person doing it to 100,000 people doing it in a day, whether it’s a TikTok sound or a dance or whatever, and so I think there are these artistic innovations that happen.

When we use the same platform for five or six years, we tend to start getting itchy and wanting something else, and I think it’s also been this gradual evolution of the internet from text to more professionalized images, to audio and video, to TikTok, which is this kind of full-featured television, essentially.

Digital platforms have absorbed different areas of culture that used to be more offline, whether it’s a television equivalent like TikTok or podcasts that used to be radio, over the past decade, more things have gotten more online, and I think that’s been a major shift.

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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.

The growing interest in federation stems from consumer demand to have more control over their personal data — something that gained more attention after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it to X and changed its focus to become an “everything app” with a focus on payments, creators, video shows, AI…and more lax moderation.

After a somewhat lengthy time in private beta, the company launched to the public earlier this month and now has over 5 million registered users, according to an official tracker.

It notes that Bluesky users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join, as aspects of how your experience differs from others is in your control thanks to other features, like custom feeds and composable moderation.

“There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem,” Bluesky’s blog post notes.

Once alternatives are established, Bluesky will recommend its service as the default to new users, but they’ll be able to change to another at any point, without losing their data.

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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.

What’s different this time is that the spammers targeted the smaller and even abandoned servers offering open registration, allowing the bad actors to quickly create accounts and generate spam.

Because Mastodon’s smaller servers are often hobbyist projects run by enthusiasts they were vulnerable to this sort of attack.

Many servers were simply shut off as their admins decided it would be easiest to wait out the attack or abandon Mastodon altogether.

“At the moment, there are no good built-in tools to handle this, as this is a complex issue — federated networks are not easy!

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Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.

Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.

In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.

As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.

The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.

“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.

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An open source project that let people view tweets without going to Twitter.com has shut down, as Elon Musk’s changes seem to have closed off all possible ways to access the Twitter network without a user account.

“Most Nitter servers were using a technique of generating loads of temporary tokens that were used for accessing the content, but that path is now blocked as well,” the NoLog update today said.

“I conclude that it is possible to easily acquire thousands of guest accounts within just a few minutes by using proxies, and they are all usable from a single IP address without getting rate limited,” the August 2023 post said.

I will also develop a service that fetches these continuously, and lets operators request guest accounts for their own instances without having to pay for proxies."

Pointing to a recent discussion on GitHub, today’s update from NoLog said there may be “a way to spin up a personal Nitter instance with your own account to keep the interface you are used to, but there is no guarantee this will work long-term.”

“Unfortunately regular accounts can only support a small group of users, so running a public instance this way is not feasible,” the update said.

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Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.

Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.

In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.

As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.

The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.

“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.

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