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Why Twitter Will Endure - NYT (2008):

“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”

Pluralistic: AI is a WMD (09 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

Fun fact: “The Tragedy Of the Commons” is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, “rescuing” it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to “rational self-interest”

I did not know this.

Meta employees speak out against bias, censoring, and reckless policy at their workplace.

Metamates For Ceasefire:

Most recently, questions about investigative reports indicating the possibility of governments, ISPs, and coordinated bad actors using Whatsapp data for military targeting have been met with dismissive and insufficient responses or outright deleted throughout internal forums. 

Any Fediverse leaders want to break their DNAs and stand up against Meta, or?

Threads is testing cross-posting from Instagram globally | TechCrunch:

Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is running a global test to let users cross-post images from Instagram to Threads.

Are they using #ActivityPub?

Why I’m Resigning From The Intercept - Ken Klippenstein:

The reason so much of the news media sucks is they aren’t writing for you. They’re writing for their sources in Washington, for the industries they cover, for rich people, and for fancy awards committees. Just take a look at the ads they run: for investment banks, defense contractors, oil companies. Unless you’re in the market for any of these products, they aren’t writing for you.

Did you know that we can win? - by Margaret Killjoy:

Because there is one thing I can promise every single person who reads this: one day, you too are going to die. You don’t win at life by living forever. Only the billionaires, who are spiritually lost, spend their time trying to “beat” death. You win at life by living lives of meaning.

Happy May Day.

Bluesky backs a project that would let Mastodon apps, like Ivory, work with its network | TechCrunch:

Social networks Bluesky and Mastodon may soon be accessible from within a single app — at least, that’s what Bluesky hopes. The new decentralized social network, originally incubated inside Jack Dorsey-run Twitter, is backing a project that would connect — or “bridge” — Mastodon requests into Bluesky requests so that consumer apps, like Ivory, would be compatible with Bluesky, too.

It’s starting to make a lot more

Sense why these niche third party apps were receiving VC funding.

Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device - MacRumors:

Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code.

My Dinner With Andreessen - The American Prospect

I had long kept in the back of my mind as an outstanding proof text that useful invention often flourishes best when government subsidizes it, socialism-style—given that Andreessen had created it while a student at a public institution, the University of Illinois.

How the TikTok ban could survive a court challenge:

“If the Chinese government wants data on Americans, they don’t need TikTok to get it,” wrote Alan Z. Rozenshtein, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota, in a piece for Lawfare on Monday. “They don’t even need to steal it. The United States is a notorious outlier among developed nations for its lack of a national data-privacy law. This means that the Chinese can just buy from data brokers and other third-party aggregators much of the same information that they would get from having access to TikTok user data.”

96% Of Hospitals Share Sensitive Visitor Data With Meta, Google, and Data Brokers | Techdirt:

Hospitals, it should be clear, aren’t legally required to publish website privacy policies that clearly detail how and with whom they share visitor data. Again, because we’re too corrupt as a country to require and enforce such requirements.

But, but, but, TikTok.

This Totally Sucks - by Dave Pell - NextDraft:

The internet has long operated according to an unwritten bargain. People make their content available to search engines and in exchange, search engines drive users back to the sites where that content resides. That agreement has been upended by AI programs like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. There’s a new bargain: Giant banks of computers inhale your content and use it to train their own systems to answer anything on their own sites. They suck up everything and you get played for a sucker. Soon, everything ever shared on the web will been sucked dry.

Why single vendor is the new proprietary - OpenSource.net

Single vendor isn’t a reasonable way to do Open Source and resist evil proprietary software. It’s just another way to do proprietary software. It’s just a relicensing time bomb.

Why single vendor is the new proprietary - OpenSource.net:

The second misconception is that single-vendor Open Source is, somehow, the reasonable and business-conscious way to do Open Source. You should be on board if you want Open Source to win against proprietary software. But those companies are still doing what is, essentially, proprietary software: like the proprietary software companies of the 80s, they very much consider the software being produced as their exclusive property. They still intend to capture all the value that derives from it. And thanks to copyright aggregation or permissive licensing, they still can change the license any time they want. So it’s still proprietary: they just choose, for now, to release their software under an Open Source license.

BlueSky and AT Protocol.

When Web and Chaos Theory Meet, The Future Could be Weird (1996:

EFF webmaster Tachibana takes it a step further. He boldly predicts that by 2020 we won’t even recognize ourselves. “I’m sort of pretty far on the wacko side of things. We’ll be in a post-biological phase, where cyborgs become reality. The Web is a very important step in that process.”

In a sense, we are pretty unrecognizable.

These protest signs against New Coca-Cola is taking me out.

No Tech For Genocide Day of Action - April 16:

Google workers do not want their labor to power Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. **That’s why on April 16, Google workers with No Tech For Apartheid are leading a coast-to-coast day of action to demand that Google stop doing business with Israel and providing tech to this genocide. 

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO (Jan 2024):

The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you.

Deeply unserious people.

Thought— The concepts of federation and decentralization can be complimentary, but are not interchangeable.

Federation speaks to the ability to move between nodes— data, content, identities.

Decentralization speaks to power and authority.

I made this little social media compass to illustration the two concepts.

Threads no longer available in Turkey following a decision by the Turkish Competition Authority:

Within the framework of the current findings; It was decided to apply temporary measures to prevent data merger behavior that may occur as a result of the data transfer mechanism between Instagram and Threads.

From Meta:

Threads will no longer be available in Turkiye due to a regulatory decision

Following a decision by the Turkish Competition Authority, Threads will no longer be available to people in Turkiye starting April 29, 2024. Your Threads profile will be deactivated, but you’ll be able to download your information and delete your profile at any time. We value the Threads community in Turkiye and hope to be back soon.

(Automattic Aquires) Beeper

This is a big bet. Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans! I’m really excited about the future of chat 📟

Facebook Knows You Better Than Anyone Else - The New York Times (2015):

Given enough data, the algorithm was better able to predict a person’s personality traits than any of the human participants. It needed access to just 10 likes to beat a work colleague, 70 to beat a roommate, 150 to beat a parent or sibling, and 300 to beat a spouse.

This story was published a full three years before the NYT broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Jay Graber: Building Bluesky and a Decentralized Social Media Protocol | Protocol Labs

If centralized platforms are governed like monarchies, federated networks are governed like little feudal societies. There isn’t just one king ruling over the whole network but there are smaller lords who still have absolute power over their domain.

What is Decentralization? · Field Notes

In it’s simplest definition, decentralization is the degree to which an entity within the system can resist coercion and still function as part of the system. Now be careful, coercion doesn’t mean force, it means negative incentives to align with an authority.

Report from the front: Tonight’s launch of Open Social (2007):

Freedom wins, and openness wins. You can hold it back for some period of time, but in the long run, freedom always wins because freedom and openness let people all over the world be fully creative and innovative in every way they want. And the creativity and innovation that freedom and openness enable will always swamp anyone’s attempt to wall off a proprietary world with tight controls and sharp limitations.

Even with Google’s adoption, OpenSocial never took off and eventually died.