Looking back at 2024

Mostly good stuff that happened this year.

2024 is nearly over, which means this will be the last time I post on my blog this year. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to look back.

This year has been pretty monumental, for many good and some bad reasons.

The bad ones are well... pretty obvious. The good, less so. So, I thought I'd put together a list of all the good things that (I can remember) this year - both personal and professional.

January

At the Newsmast Foundation, we started the year strong, launching Community Feeds, 62 topical timelines which anyone on the Fediverse can follow and interact with. We handed over our curated communities, removing the need to visit the Newmast app - a bold move!

It paid off. Even though many were hesitant at first and the tech still offers some limitations, Community Feeds have been hugely successful. Not only in their uptake, but in helping others understand what the Newsmast Foundation is about and what we want to bring to New Social.

February

I moved out of my parents and back to the city with my partner 🎉

It's worked well so far and we're still going strong (even if she has no idea what utensils you can use on a non-stick pan!).

March

The Newsmast Foundation team grew again as we invited Oriana and Mariana back to the team.

They helped us prepare and attend our first ever FediForum where we showed off Patchwork, the technology behind Channel.org! I still can't believe that was only this year.

For the first time since we launched Newsmast, our team also took the opportunity to get together in person. It was a great day, full to the brim of new ideas, which helped propel us through the year.

April

We launched our report into communities on the Fediverse - based on the Community Feeds we launched in January.

This piece of research confirmed what we already suspected, that micro-blogging on the Fediverse was driven by knowledge-sharing 👩‍🔬

This report has been cited a few times, throughout the year. Personally, I really hope we get time to do a comparison piece in the new year!

May

A lot of big changes came in May, including some major updates to the Newsmast app.

Not only did we improve a handful of features on Newmast, we also opened up to sharing with Threads and Bluesky (as well as beginning to build a presence on each respective platform to raise awareness for sharing).

We used a handful of pilot communities to experiment with featuring experts from Threads and Bluesky across the communities on the Newsmast app and our Community Feeds 🌐

Whilst some were hesitant about the connection to these platforms, I believe we made the right decision. Our Communities benefited from the experts these platforms host, but - perhaps more importantly - we really began to realise how powerful New Social can be when the walls of the silo are taken down and social media becomes social again.

May also meant that, Mariana and Oriana left the Newsmast Foundation for new adventures. I keep up with them both and I'm still so glad that this tiny little charity brought us three friends together. Sadly, there has been a lot less talk about Taylor Swift without them 😔

June

As we headed into summer, our Community Feeds celebrated 10,000 followers 🥳

If that wasn't enough cause for celebration, we also launched the Amplifier on the Newsmast app. A cool little feature that lets you quickly organise the posts you see on your timeline or in a Community by a variety of filters.

Amongst all the excitement, I took two weeks to recharge and relax as I explored Montenegro. Any stress I'd managed to shed came back pretty quickly after the flight home got cancelled - I promise, Montenegro airport is not a place you want to travel even with a flight that's running on time.

July

After the busy months earlier in the year, in July things calmed down a bit (even with a general election here in the UK) giving us chance to build our late summer campaign raising awareness for New Social and what it all means.

The drop in projects also meant I had time to pick up a new one, leading to FORbetter - which I am still blown away by the support for ❤️

August

In August, I finally got to sit down and talk to Anuj Ahooja and Tim Chambers. Two really great guys who've really helped build and raise awareness for this space on social media.

Newsmast also saw more major updates, as we launched Newsmast 3.1. The update brought post visibility settings, scheduled posts, and drafts (before some of the Big Tech platforms 👀).

August also meant that I got to spend a weekend down at Silverstone watching MotoGP - the best motorsport series on the planet 🏍️

September

As we attended our second FediForum, we showed off how far we'd developed the Patchwork technology for Channel.org.

Even though it was only our second FediForum, I felt like we'd really come a long way since the first in March. I hope I'm not too presumptive when I suggest that others thought the same. Many projects in this space sit stagnant, but as you can see from the year so far, we like to keep moving over here at the Newsmast Foundation.

Outside of FediForum, we built a new type of group on New Social for the Kamala Harris News Group as they searched for a decentralised tool which could meet their specific needs in the runup to the U.S. election. We were very proud to help them with this.

October

I started October by getting my dose of Zoom DJ-ing at MarketingLand. A crazy but genuinely insightful virtual event that I won't forget anytime soon.

We upped our commitment to helping the Kamala Harris News Group as the U.S. election began to loom.

Even though the Newsmast Foundation is a UK charity, we knew the danger a Trump presidency posed for marginalised groups and communities - the same communities we'd worked to grow on alternative social media.

We also faced some tough decisions, having to pause development of Patchwork for server admins to focus on Channel.org.

But it wasn't all bad, people, organisations, and nonprofits began leaving X by the bucketload as they saw the misinformation and hate allowed to run riot on the platform as Musk turned political.

October also saw one year since we launched the Newsmast app 🎈 - looking back, it's pretty crazy how much we could do in such a short time with such a small dev team.

November

After the results of the U.S. election, we refocused our efforts to help those trying to leave platforms like X.

For me, this is where I felt our charity mission really came into its own as we helped so many organisations and charities get set up on New Social platforms like Bluesky or Threads - not a perfect solution but a step closer to an open social network with the important voices we've been waiting for.

December

This month has been a bit of a whirlwind for our team! Especially me.

Remind me, don't come up with a whole social campaign to launch in the New Year in the run-up to Christmas next year! If you do, do not get sick.

But, it's all very exciting and - if I'm honest - I'm actually very proud of how far the Newsmast Foundation and I have come this year.

Next year, I head into a new role with the Newsmast Foundation so hopefully I'll get more time for the creative bits that help people understand the importance of New Social. Expect more campaigns, blog posts, and maybe I'll even get better at posting on LinkedIn.