The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms

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.

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.

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.

Unlike every other app and service chasing the bouncing ball of vertical video (off the top of my head, we have YouTube, Instagram, NBA, Amazon, Reddit, Twitch, Netflix, Spotify... you get the picture), Bluesky’s April Fools’ contribution is... actual shorts.

At least, assuming they get enough orders on Custom Ink to put the shipment through, but I’m not sure why Bluesky CEO Jay Graber didn’t mention this when she was on Decoder?

While Threads continues to test the waters of federation, the team is working on other features too. Continuing a push that started with “NBA Threads” outreach events around summer league and All-Star Weekend, and snagging posts from newsbreakers like Woj and Shams, it’s now testing live scores of NBA games and plans to add other sports.

Of course, it’s March, so why not start with the Women’s and Men’s NCAA basketball tournaments and bring in the NBA during the playoffs?

Yes, Windows users can get the Threads app Mark Zuckerberg is showing here from the Microsoft Store

But once it’s installed, you’ll get the same desktop web app experience (loaded in Microsoft’s Edge web browser) that we’ve had access to since August.

One of the creators of the ActivityPub protocol, Evan Prodromou, is now beta testing the ability to cross-post from Threads to Mastodon. He’s the first non-Meta employee I’m aware of with this feature enabled, which suggests that we’re getting closer to a wider rollout.

In other Threads news: Everyone now has the ability to save drafts and access the phone camera directly in the app.

“Linkifying them is the logical next step,” CEO Jay Graber said while discussing the use of hashtags on the Twitter alternative platform on the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast,

Graber also said Bluesky, which recently opened, now has nearly 5 million users and will soon roll out moderation services, enabling “any third-party service that wants to build, you know, a labeler or an annotator some way of giving input to the network.”

That comes courtesy of Alessandro Paluzzi, who frequently reverse engineers and reveals Threads and Instagram features. The new option lets you turn fediverse sharing on and off at will and you can easily copy your username formatted for the decentralized Activity Pub social protocol.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said recently that Threads users will also be able to follow and interact with fediverse accounts from Threads, though their accounts will have to be public to do so.

Wired has an interview with Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, all about the state of Threads’ plans to decentralize and join the world of ActivityPub. The short version: it’s a process, but it’s happening! And Meta knows exactly how big Threads is, what it’ll do to the fediverse when it joins:

“We’re kind of like the big whale that’s coming into this conversation.”

Post launched in 2022 as a way to read ad-free news articles and paywalled content with a points-based system. But now, it’s rolling out a number of improvements, including native comments you can leave on feeds, repost, and tag people in.

There’s also an update to make navigating between posts and comment threads smoother, along with a new real-time notification system that will keep you “up to date with accurate comment counts, activity stream updates, and much more.” Post is also working on building achievements, status badges, and rewards for users.

That’s one of a few things I learned from the platform’s 2023 moderation report. Also, it plans to open source its frontend moderation review system (called “Ozone”) and says it is “in the process of pulling out the moderation back-end as a standalone service that other organizations can self-host.”

Tom Coates was recently at a meeting with Meta’s Threads team talking about ActivityPub, the fediverse, and the future of social. He took a lot of interesting notes! And in those notes he has a near-future roadmap for Threads’ decentralization plans:

• Early 2024 (Part One) – the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users

• Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application

• Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them

If you’re joining or thinking about joining the fediverse via an iPhone, this Mastodon client from the makers of Tweetbot is an option many prefer. A post on DaringFireball points out that the most recent update for Ivory adds an Explore tab with better search plus “a new popular & trending section.”

However, the devs note, that the data populating that section will vary based on the data generated by your particular Mastodon server. We’re on Mastodon (and Threads and whatever else), are you?