More from The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
DomainInvesting spotted the Whois-listed change yesterday.
Last year, threads.com was just the website for a Slack-like app — you can imagine the traffic it got when Meta launched its Twitter alternative. Shopify bought Threads-the-company in June, though, perhaps clearing the way for Meta to scoop the domain for Threads-the-platform. And just in time for its Connect event, no less!
[DomainInvesting.com]
The company is ending its Mozilla.social Fediverse experiment in content moderation and will remove all content and accounts — but you still have time to move elsewhere:
At any point before Dec 17, 2024, you can migrate your account to another instance on Mastodon by following these instructions.
TechCrunch notes that Mozilla had about 270 active Mastodon users as of Tuesday. A tracker based on the Mastodon API reports about 8 million accounts and 1 million or so active users overall.
[support.mozilla.org]
After attracting 2 million users in its first year of operation, Bluesky has grown another 400 percent with some recent help from Brazil and Elon Musk. Are these monthly or daily users, or just account holders? Nobody knows! But it still has a way to go to match X’s estimated 250 million daily users and Threads’ 175 million monthly users.
In today’s issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that the lively Brazilian community of X users may find a home on Bluesky, but not so much on Threads, whose heavy-handed algorithmically sorted user interface doesn’t click with Brazilian internet culture.
A caveat from The Verge: we still don’t have official numbers on Brazilian sign-ups for Threads over the weekend.
[Garbage Day]
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
We already knew video was on the roadmap, but it seems like it’s the next big feature headed to the app. The app’s 1.90 update just added a bunch of useful-seeming “anti-toxicity” features.
Meta is now testing posts that will disappear after just 24 hours, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. (You may recall Twitter’s short-lived version of this, Fleets.)
When replying to one, you’ll see a timer next to the person’s name, along with a banner at the top that says the post will disappear, taking any replies with it, the outlet writes.
Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, wrote the “protocols, not platforms” paper that inspired Twitter to kick off the Bluesky project in 2019.
“It is, of course, exciting to see thoughts I’ve expressed for how to fix the Internet actually start to become tangible reality, which is why I’m excited to be involved with Bluesky to help it continue to move forward,” Masnick says.
Seems like a really useful way to help your friends and followers find stuff to check out on Bluesky. The starter packs have a link, a QP code, and a preview image to make them more shareable.
It’s trying out new “Show more like this” and “Show less like this” options within post menus that can help personalize your feed. The decentralized network is also rolling out performance improvements and alt text for GIFs.
Even without one Jack Dorsey, the social platform does have some new features on the roadmap, including:
DMs, video, improved Custom Feeds, better anti-harassment features, and a new login tool called “OAuth”
These are coming “over the next few months,” with a plan for off-protocol, one to one direct messages, and 90 second video clips.
[Bluesky]
CEO Eugen Rochko says the fediverse app has established a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the US in order to receive tax-deductible donations. Mastodon was previously based in Germany until the government there pulled its nonprofit status with “no advance warning or explanation,” according to Rochko. The board for the five-person US nonprofit includes Twitter cofounder Biz Stone.
[Mastodon Blog]
The decentralized social network has awarded an $800 grant to SkyBridge, an “in-progress proxy web server that translates Mastodon API calls into appropriate Bluesky ones,” which will let people use their favorite Mastodon apps on Bluesky.
The funds came from Bluesky’s rather modest ($10,000 in its initial allocation) grant fund for developers on the AT Protocol.
In the fediverse, that is. Petition e-4769, which so far only has 850 signatures, cites the “considerable controversy, harassment, misinformation, and strife” of corporate-run social media in asking the government to use open-source alternatives like ActivityPub, the social protocol used by Mastodon (and which US President Biden is now posting into... from Threads), for communication, instead.
The petition is sponsored by Parliament Member Gord Johns, and closes on April 21st.
[www.ourcommons.ca]