The Fediverse Report

Welcome to the first edition of Last Week in the Fediverse, a free weekly newsletter that gives you an update on the most relevant news what has happened last week.

You can subscribe directly on Mastodon, Pleroma, or any other ActivityPub client you use for microblogging, by searching for @fediverse-report@write.as. If you want to follow my Mastodon account, you can also get it there directly, along with other interesting news and happenings.

🚀 Medium goes to Mastodon

The biggest news of the week is that blogging platform Medium has launched a Mastodon instance at me.dm. The blog post by CEO Tony Stubblebine is worth reading in full. A few things stand out:

• Article lenght is important, and Medium posts are too long to be directly integrated with Mastodon’s 500 character limit. Thus no direct integration of Medium, but a seperate new Mastodon instance instead.
• Slow scaling, the blog posts mainly talks about how they are dealing with the learning curve, and are slowly signing up people. There is no mention yet if or how, the Medium platform at large will do anything with federation or ActivityPub.

Medium is not the first large platform that is exploring the fediverse, Automattic has committed itself to Activitypub as well, which we reported on earlier here. Automattic’s Tumblr it is still at the commitment phase, while Medium has a growing Mastodon instance to show for. It will be interesting to see how this trend develops further into the future.

📈 A drop in Mastodon user activity?

On January 7th, The Guardian published an article detailing a significant drop in active users in the month of December, showing the following graph:

This has gotten quite a bit of attention, and framed the move to Mastodon as a counterculture move away from Twitter, that has gotten over its hype.

A few days later, data analysis by Dr. Jorge Caballero painted a different picture. He focused on users large and/or notable Mastodon accounts, which showed that the vast majority of them stayed very active.

Furthermore, he points out that the drop that The Guardian shows coincides with the yearly average drop in internet traffic during the winter holiday season.

🔎 Controversy around searching the Fediverse

On January 9th, an API for the entire Fediverse was released, the Fediverse Almanac. Only a day later, after significant pushback from the community, the developer took down the API and website again. In a now-deleted reddit thread the developer explains his reason for deletion:

A few days later, a different search tool was released, Searchtodon. Searchtodon only searches your own private timeline, avoiding both of the criticisms that got leveled at the Fediverse Almanac.

The data that the API of the Fediverse Almanac indexed is openly available data. While the developer listened to community pushback and deleted the project, it seems very likely that the controversy is not over. The convention about not scraping ban data is just that, a convention, creating a serious possibility of other people ignoring it.

🌐 Webclients, old and new

This week saw both the retirement and release of two webclients. Pinafore.social is retired, explains the creator in a blog post. While it is still usable, it will not see any further development.

Meanwhile, this week saw the public alpha release of a new webclient, elk.zone

Personally I have been trying out elk.zone, and I can recommend people give it a shot. Its design does feel inspired by Twitter in a lot of ways, which can be up both a good thing or a bad thing, depending on personal preference.

🔮 The near future

Cloudflare has been building Wildebeast, a hosted service for Activitypub and Mastodon. The project is openly available on Github, but there has not been an official announcement yet. We are definitely keeping our eyes on the project to see what Cloudflare is doing with this project, and bring you more information about it in a future newsletter.

That is all for now, thank you for reading, and see you next week! If you enjoyed this newsletter, do not forget to subscribe, either directly to this blog via @fediverse-report@write.as or by following my Mastodon account.