The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms

If you’re on Mastodon, you might notice new author bylines appearing alongside articles — including those from The Verge. Click on the byline, and you’ll jump directly to the author’s fediverse account, allowing you to track their work wherever it’s posted.

For now, you’ll only see this feature on mastodon.social and other instances that use a recent Mastodon nightly release. You can see how author bylines appear beneath articles in this post, which links you to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko’s profile.

Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Bluesky will now let you send a direct message to other users. For now, you can only send messages containing text, but Bluesky is working on adding support for images and videos.

To send a DM, select the chat icon at the bottom of your screen on mobile or hit the chat bubble in your sidebar on desktop. Once you create a new chat, search for the user you want to talk to, write your message, and hit send. Just keep in mind that DMs on Bluesky aren’t end-to-end encrypted just yet, but the platform plans on supporting it in the future.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is no longer on the board of Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform he helped start. In two posts today, Bluesky thanked Dorsey while confirming his departure and adding that it’s searching for a new board member “who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience.”

The posts come a day after an X user asked Dorsey if he was still on the company’s board, and Dorsey responded, without further elaboration, “no.” As TechCrunch points out, Dorsey was on a tear yesterday, unfollowing all but three accounts on X while referring to Elon Musk’s platform as “freedom technology.”

Open platforms keep gaining support out there — newsletter platform Ghost just published what amounts to a manifesto in support of the ActivityPub protocol with plans to ship ActivityPub integration “in 2024.”

That’s a big shot of support for the fediverse — the network of open and interoperable social services that have all been gaining momentum over the past year. Ghost founder John O’Nolan recently said that federation over ActivityPub was the platform’s “most requested feature over the past few years” — a comment he made on Meta’s Threads, which itself is slowing beginning to federate.

Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”

The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, but now it’s set to shutter “within the next few weeks.” It serves as a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others. All users have to do is pay a “few cents” per article instead of signing up for a subscription to each publication.

Bluesky is apparently ready for a bigger challenge. It says it’s allowing heads of state to sign up now, a little over two months after it opened for general signups. In May last year, the site asked its users not to give invitation codes to “recent/prominent heads of state,” stating that it was its policy not to accommodate them.

When Bluesky instituted its heads-of-state policy, the site was still in its showing-everyone’s-ass phase, and its moderation approach wasn’t in place, yet. So instead of the varying degrees of controlled chaos that social networks are, Bluesky was filled with, well, lots of unsettlingly sexy pictures of the cat-eating alien puppet star of the 1980s sitcom Alf, which The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto pointed out last year. It didn’t seem ready to manage world leaders along with the likes of infamous shitposters like Dril.

The official US president Threads account, currently helmed by President Joe Biden, has begun using Meta’s ActivityPub integration, making Biden the first sitting US president to post on the decentralized networking protocol. If you want to follow the President’s posts, but don’t want to leave Mastodon, you can follow @potus@threads.net.

The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Bluesky is taking a big leap toward federating. On Thursday, the social network announced that it is opening up early access for users and developers who want to self-host their data. While this isn’t true federation yet, the company plans to open up federation to larger servers with even more users in its next phase. When the dust settles, anyone can (in theory) create their own server with their own rules on Bluesky’s AT Protocol. 

The draw of self-hosting is that it offers users more control over their social media. Rather than store your data on Bluesky’s servers, you can keep it on your own, or move your existing posts, likes, and followers to another company’s platform. If Bluesky were to go bankrupt or change hands, users who self-host would have a degree of extra security.

At some point over the last year, you’ve probably come across the term “fediverse” a few times. Maybe you’ve read about it here at The Verge or seen some internet oldhead talking on their blog about how this is the internet they were hoping for back in 1993. Maybe someone sent you that “Protocols, Not Platforms” article so you’d think they were smart.

The fediverse is a little like HTTP or the nitrogen to oxygen ratio in the air: very important, all around you, but probably not something you need to think about in your day to day. But if the fediverse is actually going to change the internet — and I think it might — it’s worth understanding just a little better.

There was a moment last year when Bluesky — the weird, irreverent Twitter competitor with a decentralized twist — had captured lighting in a bottle.

The app quickly amassed over two million users while in closed beta and became a hot topic of conversation in newsrooms like The Verge’s. Now, the conversation about what comes after the platform-now-called-X has largely shifted to ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol powering Mastodon, a budding ecosystem of other services, and eventually, Meta’s Threads.

Security consultant and Have I Been Pwned creator Troy Hunt has detailed a vulnerability in the API of Spoutible, a social platform that emerged following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, that could allow hackers to take full control of users’ accounts.

After someone alerted Hunt to the vulnerability, he discovered that hackers could exploit Spoutible’s API to obtain a user’s name, username, and bio, along with their email, IP address, and phone number. Spoutible has since addressed the vulnerability, writing in a post on its site that it didn’t leak decrypted passwords or direct messages, while confirming the “information scraped included email addresses and some cell phone numbers.” It invited anyone who still wants to use the service back for a “special Pod session” at 1PM ET. Both Spoutible and Hunt recommend that users change their passwords and reset 2FA.