Fediverse

When Threads launched this summer, one of the more intriguing aspects of the new service was Meta’s promise to support ActivityPub, the open-source protocol that powers Mastodon and other platforms. But there were still many unanswered questions about how such interoperability would work, and just how committed Meta was to the plan.Now, Meta is taking its first step toward making Threads compatible with the fediverse. A new test will make some Threads content available on Mastodon and other apps for the first time, Mark…

Is the grass greener on the other side? We’re not sure, but the sky is most certainly bluer. It’s been more than a year since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now X, leading people to set up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (which has already shuttered operations) and Spill have been presented as potential replacements, but few aside from Meta’s Threads have achieved the speed of growth Bluesky has reached. Bluesky remains invite-only in its beta, but as more people get on the site, the hype around…

It has been about 4 months since Threads launched as an alternative to the volatile and ever-so-changing landscape of X (formerly Twitter), and it has managed to provide a comfortable home to users owing to its fast deployment of new features, paying attention to user feedback and the fediverse support. For the unaware, fediverse, a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe", is a decentralized social media infrastructure. However, one area where users feel left out is DMs or direct messages. It has been one of the…

A new report suggests that the lax content moderation policies of Mastodon and other decentralized social media platforms have led to a proliferation of child sexual abuse material. Stanford’s Internet Observatory published new research Monday that shows that decentralized sites have serious shortcomings when it comes to “child safety infrastructure.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them all that different from a majority of platforms on the normal internet.Buy Now or Wait? How to Avoid Tech Buyer's RemorseWhen we talk…

Days after Meta launched its new app, Threads, this month, a software engineer at the company named Ben Savage introduced himself to a developer group at the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards body. The group, which maintains a protocol for connecting social networks called ActivityPub, had been preparing for this moment for months, ever since rumors first emerged that Meta planned to join the standard. Now, that moment had arrived. “I'm really interested to see how this interoperable future plays out!” he…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone,…

Illustration: Mastodon/Fediverse (CC-BY-2.0) // Stocktrek Images (AP)Six months ago, after the news broke that changes were coming to Twitter’s policies against disinformation and hate speech, I decided to give Mastodon a try. Unfortunately, I didn’t stick with the app long enough to develop a habit of using it. After returning to it once again this week, that’s something I’ve come to regret. In the few days since (mostly) ditchingTwitter, I’ve gained a new respect for the platform, which is decidedly less toxic and is…