Martin Holland
Martin Holland  ·  5 days ago
Exactly two years ago, we started to post links on #Mastodon via our account @heiseonline 👇

https://mastodon.social/@heiseonline/109314036284496776

It took longer, than I expected, but here we are: it seems like this account now brings continuously more #traffic to heise.de than #X (#Twitter) in its entirety, although it only has ¼ of the follower number (and many of them don't seem to be active anymore).
I'll prepare some graphs after the weekend.

#SocialMedia
#TwitterExodus
#MastodonMigration
#TwitterMigration
#Fediverse

Martin Holland
Martin Holland  ·  3 days ago
The week is over, here are some charts:
For two weeks in a row, #Mastodon brought more #traffic than #X / #Twitter to heise.de.
But I forgot, that's not just via @heiseonline, but also @heisec, @ct_Magazin, @heiseautos, @iX_Magazin etc. (but for Twitter its the same).

#Bluesky is way behind, #Threads even more. Only Twitter is clearly falling.

(🧵 1/3)

#SocialMedia
#TwitterExodus
#TwitterMigration
#MastodonMigration
#Fediverse

Martin Holland
Martin Holland  ·  3 days ago
If you add all the #TwitterAlternative s, they have been in the lead for a while now.

If you add @Flipboard and sum it up wit #Mastodon (because #Fediverse 😉), then #Facebook ist not far.

But, if you have a look on the numbers since the beginning of 2022, then it's clear, that this is mainly a story about the decline of #Twitter.

(🧵 2/3)

#SocialMedia
#TwitterExodus
#ElonMusk
#Bluesky
#Threads
#MastodonMigration

Laurens Hof
Laurens Hof  ·  last week
Last Week in the ATmosphere – 24.11.a

One of the main goals of writing this newsletter is not only to share links, but more importantly, to give context to help you make sense of what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks. Yesterday and today I thoroughly exhausted my ability to make sense of things, and as such this edition is more of a collection links to everything.

For an in-depth analysis, earlier this week I wrote about how to think about how ATProto works, how that relates to governance and power, and what decentralisation and federation mean in this new context.

https://fediversereport.com/a-conceptual-model-of-atproto-and-activitypub/

The News

In an update on Bridgy Fed, the software that allows bridging between different protocols, creator Ryan Barrett talks about possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Barrett says that Bridgy Fed is currently a side project for him, but people make requests for Bridgy Fed to become bigger, and become ‘core infrastructure of the social web’. Barrett is open to that possibility, but not while the project is his personal side project, and is open for conversations to house the project in a larger organisation, and with someone with experience to lead the project.

Atmosphere Stats and Blueview.app both allow you to show you statistics about your account. Blueview shows you your follower growth over time, and Atmosphere Stats assigns you an animal based on your posting style, as well as showing an overview of your posts by time of day.

The Links

Some updates on Bluesky:

  • Bluesky will added the ability to post threads in one go soon, and the feature is already available to test, and a preview of what it looks like here.
  • A short thread on how the Discover feed works, and some of the steps the Bluesky team is taking to improve the quality of it.
  • Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shares some aspects about what the Bluesky team currently is working on.
  • There is a renewed call for private data on ATProto: Bluesky Engineer Devin Ivy shares some ideas the team is considering, while Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold reiterates that the team understands the need for it, and says it is a ‘heavy lift’ to implement.

New additions to the wider ATProto ecosystem:

Further integrations of ATProto applications

  • Hagoromo is a third-party client for Bluesky, focusing on multi-column, and their latest update now also adds support for your Linkat.blue profile.
  • Third-party client Klearsky now supports showing all other ATProto-powered profiles on your Bluesky profile (as well as other updates).
  • Blogging platform WhiteWind has added support Frontpage; if a WhiteWind blog is posted on Frontpage, this now automatically shows up in the comment section of the WhiteWind blog as well.

Links for developers:

  • Supercell is a lightweight and configurable atproto feed generator.
  • Out-of-band tag support on third-party Bluesky client Ouranos.
  • Display your Bluesky posts on your Astro sites.
  • A (technical) reflection on a stalled attempted to build a Vine clone on ATProto.
  • PDSls allows you to paste in bsky.app urls for easier searching.
  • New tools to export your repo and blob, as well as viewing the PLC operations log.

Articles:

Podcasts:

  • Bluesky COO Rose talked with the Quiet Riot podcast about elections and platform values.
  • Bluesky board member Mike Masnick talks on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline about tech media and joining the Bluesky board.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-24-11-a/

Data Quine
Data Quine  ·  2 weeks ago
"Bluesky and enshittification: No one is the enshittifier of their own story."
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic putting into words maybe one of the fears I have for #RStats folk - they'll get locked in.

Easy to get in. But can you get out again. For me it's not really anything #Bluesky itself is/isn't doing...but what's gone before. People have poured their time and content for free into other platforms then been stung by policy/service changes. 1/2

Possibly a Dog
Possibly a Dog  ·  3 weeks ago
So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.

And so is Xwitter. And so is LinkedIn. And so is TikTok.

And so is BlueSky. 😲

BlueSky's big claim is that they're "decentralized" with "no algorithm". And yeah, technically, ironically, everything's an algorithm, but I'm not well-actuallying that word. Their current default feed algorithm is not The Algorithm; it lets you see all the posts from all your friends and that's great. It also lets you block at will, and won't shove spam on your feed, or shadow-ban your friends' political posts. It's not evil (yet). It's fine.

But. It's not decentralized. #BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky's 13 million captive users for auth and reach.

It (allegedly?) uses #ATProtocol to pass messages between its edge nodes. But all its central features are still centralized, and the protocol allows "reach" to be centrally managed separately from "speech" (to enable centralized blocking, and goosing and filtering in various feeds), and the protocol isn't even fully implemented as designed.

For example, ATP allows for "DID"s for identity portability, so if you later want to switch to a hypothetical GreenSky competitor, you won't lose your followers and blocklist and post history.

But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.

And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.

Their general partner Kinjal Shah -- whose cryptocurrency-fueled career has careened from Bitcoin to NFTs to DAOs to VC -- is now on the BlueSky board, and methinks the press release doth protest too much when it defensively claims, with just a pinky promise, "the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)."

Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It's better than Facebook. It's easier than Mastodon. It's sassier than TikTok. It's not motherfucking Xitter. But it's not decentralized.

links:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/bluesky-now-owned-by-crypto-grifters/

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc

Possibly a Dog
Possibly a Dog  ·  3 weeks ago
And, they just announced subscriptions. Here comes the rent!

https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l7bifd4rwd2g (direct link to the sub subskeet) has a bunch of cheerleaders replying “take my money”, as if that will forestall the inevitable degradation of service, and as if they weren’t secretly planning this business model shift all along

it’s #enshittification stage 2: charge rent for full functionality, then add ads to the free tier — first for self-promos, then to buy subs for others, then “partners” (advertisers) including crypto scams from their new co-owners, and influencer-hustling pickaxe salesmen

(referring to the real profiteers of the gold rush)

— then add ads to the paid tiers too

(that’s stage 3, right @pluralistic ? it’s hard to keep the stages straight since they’re all happening so quickly these days)

#bluesky