Reading List

As Twitter was crumbling under Elon Musk’s new leadership in 2023, various online circles found themselves flocking to alternative platforms. While some may have kept using Twitter (now known as… X), a non-negligible number of communities migrated over to Mastodon and other smaller platforms. Meanwhile, Meta shipped its own textual social media platform, Threads. The

The EU pilot for the fediverse comes to an end, but the European Commission will stay on the fediverse; Ghost announces that they will support ActivityPub and build a fediverse news reading client, and Mastodon creates a U.S.-based non-profit.

Proprietary social media networks need to be transformed into local and global digital commons.

“No one chasing money in media ever chased Twitter. But anyone chasing power found themselves irresistibly drawn to the platform.”

To find out who did, look all the way back to the start of the story.

Musk wants X to replace YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and even your bank.

My view on the state of social media in late 2023

Three stories that all relate to governance, in their own different ways. Mbin is a new fork of Kbin, due to governance issues at Kbin. A research paper on that gives some structure to how different Mastodon servers organise their rules. And Owncast runs into issues with how Apple governs access to the App Store.

The 2022 Annual Report is now available for download! As a non-profit organization supported exclusively by donations, we like to keep our community updated on our yearly progress, and 2022 was an interesting year to say the least.

A year after the world's richest man acquired the social media platform, a game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue.

All social media sites interconnected — heaven or hell for creators?

A clever new app called Slingshot is combining the serendipity of BeReal snaps with the friends-only photo sharing popularized by apps like Snapchat. But

Sometimes, there are words where everyone thinks they know what it means, and also, that everyone else also has the same idea of what it means. But then it turns out that terms like ‘fediverse’ can have surprisingly vague edges. If someone talks about the fediverse to you, it’s easy to imagine a cluster of […]

Popular messaging app Telegram recently announced that it’s been working on a new Stories feature that works pretty much the...

Copying Snapchat and BeReal all in one move.

There are a few fundamentally broken things about how Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability. Maybe they are fixable, I don't know. To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon. I have been enjoying my time there much more than I ever enjoyed Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. And I am 100% in the "I won't touch anything Jack Dorsey has ...

The Fediverse, a decentralized social network with interconnected spaces that are each independently managed with unique rules and cultural norms, has seen a surge in popularity. Decentralization h...

An in-depth report reveals an ugly truth about isolated, unmoderated parts of the Fediverse. It's a solvable problem, with challenges.

Trialling ActivityPub and the federated model for social media and it's possibilities for the BBC.

The BBC sets up their own Mastodon server. A W3C meeting about CSAM and Mastodon. Mastodon on your watch?

In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-ce…

Love Reddit but tired of what's happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast.

Over the past year the Fediverse has experienced significant growth, and this comes at a very real cost: Mental Health.

Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (

An online forum is a great place to ask questions and generally seek advice on what you want to do with technology. I spend a bit of time each day catching up on the latest discussions across maybe a half dozen or so technical fora. On some of them I am a heavy contributor, and on others I generally lurk, just gleaning insights and keeping up with the latest conversations. Having been involved with technical forums for the past thirty years or so I’ve seen plenty of good and bad practices, and in this post I am going to share five tips on what I think are valuable and practical considerations for posting queries to technical forums.