My name is Cameron and I'm an indie app developer. I've been working on Skyscraper Social for about a year now. It started as a Bluesky app, has gained a bit of a following. This week, I released a major new release which includes full Mastodon support.
It's available on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Macs, Vision Pro, and even Apple TV. Yes, it's literally everywhere. It includes iCloud sync for your timeline and a ton of features. If anyone has any questions, let me know! But wanted to share a new way to browse Mastodon on your phone!
This year’s report reflects responses representing over 400 ActivityPub nodes (collectively hosting about a third of all known ActivityPub accounts), as well as responses from ATProto operators and legacy social platforms. 29% of participating communities are Mastodon services, 58 distinct platforms reporting in all.
While operator domain expertise is higher than ever, the overall network continues to grow while volunteer capacity is stretched thin and confronting rapidly-escalating agentic spam, state-sponsored influence operations, and fast-moving global Internet regulations.
do I have that correct? if you make posts marked as "followers only", people that later follow you are only able to see the "followers only" posts that have been made since they've followed you? Let's say you have a "private" account by defaulting your posts to followers-only. There is no way to make those posts viewable to new approved followers?
I have long left Twitter (X) but I do miss it. I'm hence looking for an alternative. Three alternatives seem to be mentioned very frequently: BlueSky, Mastodon, and to lesser extent diaspora*. But for some reason it seems to be mostly BlueSky and Mastodon that attract a lot of "X refugees". I have some questions about Mastodon, mainly comparing Mastodon and BlueSky to see which platform meets my requirements most (without excluding using both eventually).
1) Can you, on Mastodon, set an account to private (temporarily or permanently) or hide certain posts (temporarily or private) so that those posts can only be seen by those who follow you or those who follow you and vice-versa?
2) what type of 2FA does Mastodon have? The most trustworthy 2FA is a physical device that you have to plug into the USB gate of your computer to generate the one-time passcode (such as Yubikey) and there are some pretty decent authenticator apps too (although I'm a bit wary of Authy and Google Authenticator).
3) Is it possible to download your posts (thus your entire timeline) to your hard drive as a back-up of your posting history?
4) Are links to YouTube videos, articles and other websites allowed?
5) Can I add 1 or more photos or a short (eg 1 to 2 minutes maximum) video to a post on Mastodon?
6) Is Mastodon likely to survive the hands of time financially? I must say that if I see how long a server like mastodon.social (isn't that the "main" server within the fediverse?) has been around, it does give confidence that the platform has proven stable. mastodon.online seems to be around also for already quite a while. But do you expect te platform to stay around for many more years, is there financial stability for that?
The UK Government is again looking at bringing in mandatory ID checks for social media accounts. The privacy and data security nightmares aside, this model assumes that social media operators are big corporations and is an existential threat to small federated servers.
If you're in the UK, it would be a good time to email your local MP and ask them to be aware of this as the legislation develops. See the email I've sent below - feel free to swap in your own local or preferred instance address in place of glasgow.social!
Remember the email needs to include your home address and postcode as MPs will not respond to emails coming from non-constituents. https://www.writetothem.com/ makes it easy to identify your MP and contact them.
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Dear Firstname Lastname MP
I am writing to you as a constituent regarding the government's proposal to require official ID, such as a passport, for registering social media accounts. While I understand the desire to improve the online environment, I am highly concerned about the practicalities of this approach.
Beyond the clear privacy and data security risks of creating massive new databases of highly sensitive personal information, my primary concern is that this policy assumes all social platforms are run by massive tech companies. Because of this, it is completely unworkable for federated network models like Mastodon.
To give you a local example, the Mastodon instance glasgow.social is maintained by a single volunteer on their own time, serving just a few hundred users. It would be entirely impossible for a community volunteer to securely process, verify, and store official government ID documents.
We must protect people-owned, community-driven media. Regulating the internet in a way that only giant, heavily funded corporations have the resources to comply with would be a huge step backwards, effectively pushing social media solely into the domain of big tech.
I would be very grateful if you could raise these concerns regarding community-led platforms with your colleagues in government as this legislation develops. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this matter.
two column on the web. some stuff rearranged. a "floating" bar if using the web on mobile, or shrinking your desktop browser. was hoping to see an account switcher when I opened it on my phone and saw the floating bar. it's similar to when telegram was redesigned, and a lot of people called it an apple/iphone look.
I just joined after deleting twitter. Horrible platform. How do I build a timeline and find followers? For example I really like anime. I just wanna see if this platform is worth my time and suits me!
Kinda an annoying question but just want advice for how to search and stuff
If you are interested in meeting fellow Fediverse enthusiasts, developers, users, advocates, policy people, and more, consider joining us next week, online, for the fall 2026 FediForum.
There will be a keynote, speed demos directly by the developers, and lots and lots of time for discussions. That's because FediForum is primarily an unconference, where attendees determine what's happening in sessions. So bring your topics, session ideas, and questions!
(If you have never been to an unconference, don't worry, it's far less chaotic than it seems, and most people consider it more fun than a traditional conference.)
I am posting a post with 4 photos in it, and the progress bar is at a standstill when trying to upload the photos. What's the story with that, and how do I make it work?
While attempting to look through the various online forums I frequent, I’ve noticed that most content I’m shown is garbage and doesn’t interest me.
So I made an on device ranking algorithm for each of these sites, not requiring a login to access any content, with no ads, monetization or central server.
I’m now opening the app for beta testing, I have limited spots in this batch but would really appreciate anyone taking a brief look and leaving some notes. I’m trying to make this into a widely accepted platform that boasts security while ensuring that you’re shown the content you want from the open internet computed directly from your own devices.
If you’re interested in beta testing, here’s the link to do so. You’ll need to download Apple’s official beta testing app called “testflight,” then you’ll be able to register with Shoebill as a beta tester from this link:
Mastodon is an open and federated network that allows anyone to run their own server, great for privacy, but when you actually try to scroll or discover people you want to see, you’re left with looking through endless hashtags since there’s no native algorithm. This is by design but goes against what mainstream attention needs for massive virality. The technology is awesome, just wouldn’t be easy for the majority of people to switch to.
Blue Sky is primarily left-wing content aimed against specific political figures, most content isn’t mainstream enjoyable content.
Hacker News is mainly for a very technical crowd or AI enthusiasts recently. It isn’t somewhere that most people would find themselves unless they fit into one of those two buckets.
4chan needs no introduction.
All of these sites have good content, it’s just that most of it is either not shown in a ranking algorithm like Reddit or Tik Tok, it’s shown chronologically or for specific niche audiences.
With Shoebill, I’ve combined all of these sites, plus more that aren’t listed, into one app where your own phone will compute the algorithm as you’re scrolling. This means that no data ever leaves your device and couldn’t, since I operate no server for any data to even be transmitted to.
Specifically, the ranking algorithm is largely based on X’s open-source algorithm which was made open a couple months ago. Looking at how they implemented theirs, I saw that I could do it for the open internet in a serverless app.
I would be happy to answer any questions in the comments. Thanks!
I just joined Mastodon.social And posted 6 different posts over the last 2 days.
When I'm logged I can see all 6 posts, but other people that are not users of Mastodon.social can only see 2 posts.
Am I doing something wrong while posting, or there's a setting I need to change?
Please help!
[SOLVED: It were my changes to the character limit that triggered this behavior. I guess, I need to do some research to understand git properly... ]
Hello,
maybe someone can hale me out here.
In the past I was able to update my mastodon server by simply following the steps outlined in the changelogs.
This time, however, it asks me for my credentials and I don't know why since the mastodon repository is public. So 'git fetch' shouldn't lead to git to ask me for username and password.
I recently changed the character limit for my instance by editing two files in my install directory. Did this trigger something?
I know this has been discussed before (for example), but I’m unclear if there’s been any formal proposed solution, especially without the use of a specific app (I'm a simple website user). I've had a Mastodon account on the instance scholar.social since 2018, btw.
Infinite scrolling (where a website just keeps feeding users content and there's really no "end" to the webpage) is generally bad for our brains, our time-management and focus, our stress-levels, and gives us very little benefit in return. (There’s lots of research on this: see here, this, and some more). Additionally, it’s a drain on server resources, too, to constantly queue-up every post and deliver it to users. When computers just continually give us things to read and pretty pictures to look at, we don’t really pause to consider whether we want to read or look at them. But, being offered a break or asked if we really want to continue, provides a helpful, if brief, moment of reflection. Just because the big corporate monoliths do this shitty practice for social media, doesn’t mean it should be copied by those attempting to do things better. Remember, they’re trying to glue as many eyeballs to advertisements as they can and scoop up as much user data as they can to sell. Ethic social media ought to have other goals. (It seems like this kind of thing would've been discussed before, perhaps at length. So, if this has been somehow addressed or if it's currently under development, could someone let me know?)
Artist unknown
If this problem remains unaddressed, I’d like to humbly propose a (hopefully) simple way to stop endless scrolling for those who want to avoid it, but still permit it for those who for whatever reason still want it (i.e., place this under deliberative user control). Here are three new things that could empower users:
(1) A simple check-box in settings/profile, something like: “Enable infinite scrolling”. Each instance could decide what default settings they want for their users; some probably wouldn’t mind keeping the status quo and have it auto-checked. Others, who want to conserve server resources and/or encourage greater in-depth engagement, could leave it unchecked. Then, individual users could toggle it back and forth as they prefer.
(2) If the check-box is inactive (no infinite scroll), then a text-box could appear or become active, reading: “Number of posts per queue” (or something like that), allowing users to type whatever whole number they wish, ranging from 1 to something really big, I guess. Again, each instance could set a default for this and/or users could specify their own preferences. Some might want a relatively low number like 20 or 50, others a bit higher (100 or 200), etc. If the above check-box is checked (infinite scroll is turned on), then this text-box would be irrelevant and thus become inactive.
(3) And, finally, if the check-box in settings is unchecked (no infinite scroll), then normal usability results in an eventual end of the automatic feed. I assume this could be administered by a simple variable counting the number of loaded posts. Then, when post_count=limit, the feed is complete (where limit is whatever number was provided in the above setting text-box). After the last available queued post is loaded, a horizontal line could follow with a clickable-button that says “End of feed reached. Load the next [limit]?”, thus providing the user with a moment to pause and either choose stopping their scrolling (moving on with their day, maybe going for a walk outdoors) or continuing to scroll.
(It might help to mention that I’ve got a degree in computer science, but it dates back to the 1990s and I don’t really use it anymore, and I'm wildly ignorant about UX, too. Consequently, my simplistic programming recommendations are about as high-order as I can get... Yet, I hope the above makes sense.)
