AutoTL;DR

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 661 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 552 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 880 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 220 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 23%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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!

The original article contains 1,023 words, the summary contains 143 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 729 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

The original article contains 1,176 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.

You know how everyone online is like, “Give me your email, it’s the only stable thing on the web, and so it’s the most important tool for building a lasting audience” now?

And the places where you connect with your friends, or make a living as a creator, couldn’t be irrevocably destroyed by a billionaire with a sink and a bunch of weird ideas about financial products?

The ActivityPub protocol I mentioned a minute ago is a little like email: it has specifications for senders and receivers and supports lots of different kinds of content.

You can always have different accounts for different things, but I think many people will end up having one main identity — your Threads username, or your Mastodon handle, or even a domain you hook up to all of these services individually — that ports across all of these systems.

A lot of folks I’ve talked to say that, basically, if we’d built social media like this 20 years ago, the world would be better and smarter and we’d all be richer and better-looking.

The original article contains 2,713 words, the summary contains 204 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Threads’ roadmap for integrations with the fediverse, aka the network of decentralized apps that includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, has been revealed.

A new blog post by Tom Coates, the co-founder of an older decentralized app called Planetary, details the events of a December meeting at Meta’s offices where the Threads team had reached out to members of the fediverse community to get feedback about the Instagram-led project to take on X with a decentralized app that will eventually interoperate with others in the fediverse by way of the ActivityPub protocol.

Meta did, in fact, start testing ActivityPub integration in December, allowing Threads posts to appear on Mastodon.

In addition, this rule would potentially come into play when a user banned from Meta’s platform moved their content to another Mastodon server.

Coates suggested various reasons why Meta may be pursuing this — perhaps to thwart coming regulation or to take over Twitter/X’s place in the zeitgeist as new owner Elon Musk turns it into an everyday app, potentially diluting its value as a fast-breaking news network and home to conversations.

Explained Flipboard CEO Mike McCue in a conversation with TechCrunch last month, what excited him about Mastodon and ActivityPub was that it wasn’t just about where social media was heading, it was where the web itself was going.

The original article contains 709 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If we do this correctly — if the next phase of how we congregate and communicate online is built for humans and not advertisers — there won’t be a new titanic company to rival Meta or a platform with eye-poppingly huge numbers like Facebook.

The infrastructure underlying all of this is typically ActivityPub, a decade-old protocol overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium (also known as the group more or less in charge of how the internet works).

(We really don’t need to get into the whole story of what happened to Twitter since then, except to say that the speed with which that platform changed made a lot of people acutely aware that we need a social ecosystem that can resist the whims of a single company or CEO.)

The simplicity is the point: since ActivityPub is not a product but a data format like PDF or JPG, what you do with those messages, those URLs, those inboxes and outboxes, is entirely up to you.

The most consistent argument against the long-term viability of platforms like Mastodon is that most people don’t give a hoot about the underlying protocols and infrastructure of their apps and just want things to be easy, reliable, and useful.

Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat and pries it apart into its component pieces, each one ripe for innovation and new ideas.

The original article contains 1,920 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In its initial phase, select Flipboard accounts will be discoverable and can be followed by the millions of users of decentralized social apps, including Mastodon.

This allowed Flipboard to get a feel for the world of decentralized social media, and learn how its users would respond.

That changed this year, when Flipboard shifted its Twitter integration over to Mastodon and another alternative social app, Bluesky.

Initially, Flipboard is testing the integration with select accounts, including publishers like Semafor, Pitchfork, Fast Company, Medium, LGBTQ Nation, Refinery 29, Digiday, Polygon, SPIN, Kotaku, Frommer’s, The Verge, Smithsonian Magazine, Refinery 29, The Root, ScienceAlert, AFAR Media, and others.

In addition to X rival Instagram Threads, which began testing ActivityPub last week, other tech companies are moving in this direction, as well.

For Flipboard, after integrating its backend with the fediverse, the company may reconsider what its front end should look like, too, for this new age of social media.

The original article contains 1,061 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

On Friday, two days after Threads finally started publicly testing ActivityPub integration, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Threads detailing the company’s plans for its continued integration with the fediverse.

Right now, it’s possible to follow a few Threads accounts (including Mosseri’s) from other platforms, but Meta has much bigger plans for Threads interoperability that Mosseri says will take “the better part of a year” to realize.

Mosseri says the updates will roll out “in stages,” and he recognizes that the “better part of a year” timeline is a long one.

“That’s a lot longer than I, or anybody on the team, wants, but it’s the reality given all the other work we need to be balance,” he says.

I’ve watched a Threads video from Mosseri on Mastodon, that rules!

Update December 15th, 5:57PM ET: Added screenshots of Mosseri’s thread.

The original article contains 171 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 17%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko lauds Threads’ entry into the decentralized social media space, saying the move will make Mastodon — the open source Twitter/X rival — “a far more attractive option.” Mastodon’s app, which is powered by the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub, has gained more attention in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, a network that’s been since renamed X to reflect Musk’s ambitions to turn the microblogging platform into an everything app encompassing creators, payments, video, live audio, and shopping.

Those unhappy with Twitter’s changes have been scoping out other platforms, including Mastodon, an open source alternative, as well as challengers from other startups like Spill, Spoutible, Post, Bluesky, and others.

Rochko has been largely positive about having the tech giant embrace ActivityPub and decentralized social media, having earlier said, “The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers.”

As the integration goes live, Rochko touted the move as “exciting,” and “huge for Mastodon,” saying in a post on the platform that it’s a “step towards the interoperable social web that we’ve been advocating for.”

In addition, he points out that having access to all Threads users from a Mastodon account makes the app more attractive, considering its other perks.

That same argument is being made by the Mastodon third-party client, Mammoth, backed by Mozilla, which believes that its app will offer a competitive user interface that will be more approachable for newcomers to decentralized social media, and a viable alternative to Threads, including for those users who don’t want to create an account with Meta.

The original article contains 686 words, the summary contains 285 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Joining the fediverse — the decentralized world of social media that includes Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other services that all interoperate through ActivityPub — has been on the Threads team’s to-do list since the very beginning.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri told The Verge in July that he believed decentralizing the platform was key to making it relevant to a new generation of creators.

Skeptics have long held that Threads would never actually federate, even as Zuckerberg, Mosseri, and others at Meta kept promising they would.

For the largest and most centralized social service on the web, suddenly throwing open the gates to other platforms seemed like an unlikely pivot.

This test appears to only cover one small part of a truly federated social network — it doesn’t sound like you’ll be able to post from Mastodon to Threads, for instance, and you can’t move your account between services.

But the test at least reaffirms Meta’s commitment to ActivityPub and to being part of the broader open social web.

The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 52%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The official Mastodon app is fine, but there’s also Ivory, Mona, Fedilab, Ice Cubes, Elk, Mastoot, and many others.

This openness is part of the whole appeal of the ActivityPub-powered social networking ecosystem, and it has already led to some solid new ideas.

Now, with the launch of Mammoth 2 for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, the app is going even deeper into curation and personalization: it’s launching a series of “Smart Lists” filled with good posts, a set of suggested people and accounts to follow, and more.

Most lists are filled with websites and well-known posters, so they’re more like a starting point than a long-term solution.

The default process has improved over time, but it’s still a lot of work to pick a server, sign up, find people, and get your timeline tuned just the way you like.

In general, he says he sees the app as a way to explore the entire fediverse, whether it’s on Mastodon or Pixelfed or anywhere else.

The original article contains 615 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Tags — basically hashtags with a twist — are now rolling out globally on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday.

Tags work a little differently than hashtags do on platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).

When composing a Threads post, you start a tag by tapping the # symbol and then typing out your topic.

“If you share on Threads, [tags are] a great way to help connect with people who are interested in the topics you’re talking about,” Mosseri says.

I like Meta’s implementation here, even the single-tag limit, as it seems like a smart way to prevent annoying hashtag spam.

That said, we’ll have to wait and see if users actually adopt the tags so that they can become a useful way to find conversations about a topic.

The original article contains 222 words, the summary contains 133 words. Saved 40%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.

In the last year or so, though, particularly after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition alerted users to how quickly their platforms can change or die, POSSE has gotten some traction again alongside ActivityPub and other more open ideas.

POSSE’s problems start at the very beginning: it requires owning your own website, which means buying a domain and worrying about DNS records and figuring out web hosts, and by now, you’ve already lost the vast majority of people who would rather just type a username and password into some free Meta platform.

Reece says he’s interested in building tools to aggregate and make sense of replies, likes, comments, and the rest, but it’s a much harder prospect.

Reece mentions a tool called Bridgy, which both allows cross-posting and aggregates social media reactions and attaches them to posts on your site.

Modern social networks are not a single product but a giant bundle of features, and the next generation of tools might be all about unbundling.

The original article contains 1,805 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Earlier this year, WordPress.com owner Automattic acquired a plugin that allowed WordPress blogs to be followed in the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others.

As a result, it launched version 1.0.0 of the plugin, allowing WordPress blogs to be followed on Mastodon and other fediverse apps.

That means anyone using the hosted version of the open-source WordPress software now has the ability to tie into the fediverse, connecting their blog to federated platforms like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, and others.

By using the plugin, the blog itself can also become the user’s profile in the fediverse, instead of having to set up an account directly on a federated app, like Mastodon.

To implement the plugin on Free, Personal, and Premium WordPress.com hosted sites, you simply head into the Discussion section with Settings from the blog’s dashboard and enable the toggle titled “Enter the fediverse.” From there, you’ll make note of your default fediverse name, which references the blog’s domain (e.g. “openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com@openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com.”) That profile can then be shared with others so they can follow it on Mastodon or other platforms.

That could expand the fediverse’s numbers, as well, given that Automattic’s own statistics indicate that over 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month on WordPress.com websites.

The original article contains 474 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 55%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!