Simon Willison’s Weblog

Threads has entered the fediverse (via) Threads users with public profiles in certain countries can now turn on a setting which makes their posts available in the fediverse—so users of ActivityPub systems such as Mastodon can follow their accounts to subscribe to their posts.

It’s only a partial integration at the moment: Threads users can’t themselves follow accounts from other providers yet, and their notifications will show them likes but not boosts or replies: “For now, people who want to see replies on their posts on other fediverse servers will have to visit those servers directly.”

Depending on how you count, Mastodon has around 9m user accounts of which 1m are active. Threads claims more than 130m active monthly users. The Threads team are developing these features cautiously which is reassuring to see—a clumsy or thoughtless integration could cause all sorts of damage just from the sheer scale of their service. # 22nd March 2024, 8:15 pm

Phanpy. Phanpy is “a minimalistic opinionated Mastodon web client” by Chee Aun.

I think that description undersells it. It’s beautifully crafted and designed and has a ton of innovative ideas—they way it displays threads and replies, the “Catch-up” beta feature, it’s all a really thoughtful and fresh perspective on how Mastodon can work.

I love that all Mastodon servers (including my own dedicated instance) offer a CORS-enabled JSON API which directly supports building these kinds of alternative clients.

Building a full-featured client like this one is a huge amount of work, but building a much simpler client that just displays the user’s incoming timeline could be a pretty great educational project for people who are looking to deepen their front-end development skills. # 16th March 2024, 1:34 am

Where is all of the fediverse? (via) Neat piece of independent research by Ben Cox, who used the /api/v1/instance/peers Mastodon API endpoint to get a list of “peers” (instances his instance knows about), then used their DNS records to figure out which hosting provider they were running on.

Next Ben combined that with active users from the /nodeinfo/2.0 API on each instance to figure out the number of users on each of those major hosting providers.

Cloudflare and Fastly were heavily represented, but it turns out you can unveil the underlying IP for most instances by triggering an HTTP Signature exchange with them and logging the result.

Ben’s conclusion: Hertzner and OVH are responsible for hosting a sizable portion of the fediverse as it exists today. # 12th January 2024, 6:54 pm

Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday. Johannes Ernst reports from a recent meeting hosted by Meta aimed at bringing together staff from Meta’s Threads social media platform with representatives from the Fediverse.

Meta have previously announced an intention for Threads to join the Fediverse. It sounds like they’re being extremely thoughtful about how to go about this.

Two points that stood out for me:

“Rolling out a large node – like Threads will be – in a complex, distributed system that’s as decentralized and heterogeneous as the Fediverse is not something anybody really has done before.”

And:

“When we think of privacy risks when Meta connects to the Fediverse, we usually think of what happens to data that moves from today’s Fediverse into Meta. I didn’t realize the opposite is also quite a challenge (personal data posted to Threads, making its way into the Fediverse) for an organization as heavily monitored by regulators around the world as is Meta.” # 12th December 2023, 1:05 am

Guppe Groups. This is a really neat mechanism for helping build topic-oriented communities on Mastodon: follow @any-group-name@a.gup.pe to join (or create) a group, then that account will re-broadcast any messages from people in that group who mention the group in their message.

I found it via the histodons group. I was pondering how something like this might work this recently, so it’s great to see someone has built it already. # 26th January 2023, 7:45 pm

Jortage Communal Cloud. An interesting pattern that’s emerging in the Mastodon / Fediverse community: Jortage is “a communal project providing object storage and hosting”. Each Mastodon server needs to host copies of files—not just for their users, but files that have been imported into the instance because they were posted by other people followed by that instance’s users. Jortage lets multiple instances share the same objects, reducing costs and making things more efficient. I like the idea that multiple projects like this can co-exist, improving the efficiency of the overall network without introducing single centralized services. # 24th January 2023, 11:23 pm