Slices

This Sunday marked a major milestone for Mastodon as it reached 10 million registered accounts. Milestones like this are important to acknowledge and celebrate, highlighting the growth of both Mastodon and the fediverse. But how reliable is this number actually?
Two new initiatives around journalism on the fediverse popped up this week. The journalism-focused server Newsie.social launched the verifiedjournalist.org project. It aims to provide an extra level of verification and credibility for journalism. Federated.press, another journalism-themed server, launched a new pilot project to fact check specific posts.
WordPress makes it easier to allow your website to join the fediverse via a plugin. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is now an official author of the plugin. I take a look at the potential future impact of this.
Meta is planning on joining the fediverse. There are early plans on making a decentralized network with ActivityPub, so that it connects to the fediverse. This lead to a lot of different reactions within the community. This article documents some of the different types of responses.
Publishing platform Medium has opened up their me.dm Mastodon server to all current Medium subscribers, the company announced this week. I take a look at what this paid server actually offers.
Other federated protocols are having a moment in the spotlight. A bridge between Nostr and the fediverse is created, and Jack Dorsey launches Bluesky, another decentralized network.
In interview with @SURF, the Dutch IT cooperative for education and research, which has launched a Mastodon pilot. This means that tens of thousands of Dutch students and researchers can use Mastodon with just a one-click login via their institute, without having to register and pick out a server. In this interview with the Program Manager, I dive deep into how it all works, and what other organisations can learn from it.
Flipboard has announced it is joining the fediverse in a major way, by allowing you to interact with Mastodon through their app, as well as setting up their own instance. Reading the language in the blog posts, it is clear that Flipboard sees this not just as a side experiment, but that they are all in on the fediverse. The title of the announcement post by CEO Mike McCue (@mmccue) leaves little to the imagination: "The Future of Flipboard Is Federated".
Mammoth is a new app for iOS that launched this week, that stands out in a crowded field in multiple ways: Mammoth focuses on helping new users with a tailored onboarding flow. The company behind Mammoth is an investor-backed startup, raising questions about how it will make money.
All software always contains bugs. But some bugs are worth noting, if only already for public response to it. Cloudflare's Wildebeest has a bug with private messages, and the community's response to it is a good indication that Wildebeest is far from popular in the community.