Werd I/O

[Allison Hantschel in DAME]

Hand-wringing over people leaving overtly unsafe spaces like X to find communities that are actually enjoyable to hang out in (like Mastodon and BlueSky) is absolute nonsense.

"With that user growth, mostly from liberals disgusted with Musk’s nonstop promotion of conservative disinformation, came criticism that people were merely seeking out an ideological “echo chamber” to reinforce their views.

They’re complaining that Americans are underexposed to fresh new ideas like “non-white races are inferior” and “trans people shouldn’t exist” and “we should hunt the poor for sport” and without algorithmic pressure will suffer without such content. They’re upset that they’re not allowed to promote their toxic work into the eyeballs of people who aren’t looking for it."

Let's put it like this. If you're at a party and it's full of assholes, it's quite reasonable to leave and go to another party. There's no law that says X is the social networking platform for everybody (at least, not yet). There's nothing that says you have to be on Facebook or Instagram. Everyone gets to use the law of two feet to find a community that's comfortable for them.

Hantschel puts it like this:

"There’s no obligation to stay where you find nothing useful or interesting, and there’s no homework assignment that requires you to allow people to ruin your experience. You’re not required to spend a certain number of hours a day engaging with hateful people, or even people you just dislike, in order to accumulate Intellectual Diversity Points."

What these commentators are really complaining about: they spent well over a decade building up followings on these platforms and now people are looking elsewhere, rendering their investment moot. That's just too bad.

#Technology

[Link]

[Matt Binder at disruptionist]

Just in case you thought he was still all about free speech:

"Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is currently banning links to “Signal.me,” a URL used by the encrypted messaging service Signal. The “Signal.me” domain is specifically used by the service so that users can send out a quick link to directly contact them through the messaging app."

Signal, of course, is the encrypted chat app that is used by anyone who wants to have conversations with freedom from surveillance - including activists, journalists, and, as it happens, public servants who have either been fired or are under threat of it. As the article points out:

"Signal has been an important tool for journalists over the years as really one of the few services that are truly private. All messages are end-to-end encrypted, everything is stored on device, and no content is kept on any Signal servers in the cloud. If a source wants to reach out to a reporter and be sure their communication would be as confidential as possible, Signal is usually one of the primary methods of choice."

This includes public servants blowing the whistle on DOGE. So it's weird that X is blocking it. But given Musk's activities in the current moment, maybe not surprising.

#Technology

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[Joe Wilkins in Futurism]

The job market in the tech industry has been brutal for a little while now, and doesn't show signs of getting easier.

"Of all the workers devastated by the carnage, former tech workers in Silicon Valley are having a particularly rough go of it.

The region's former software engineers and developers — whose jobs were previously thought to be ironclad — are now having to contend with a fiercely competitive job market in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world."

Silicon Valley - which, here as in a lot of places, is incorrectly used to mean the San Francisco Bay Area - is in a bit of a pickle. Mass layoffs have driven down salaries, so many tech companies are quietly firing swathes of workers and re-hiring those seats in order to lower their costs. That's before you get to the actual downsizing, which has sometimes been significant.

And at the same time, living costs are sky-high, and house prices are all but unobtainable. When so many peoples' wealth is tied to the equity in their home, there are two possible outcomes: a significant drop in wealth as prices decline (particularly as fired employees flee for more affordable climes), or a significant increase in inequality as prices continue to climb. Either way, that doesn't look good.

That's a societal problem, but it's also a problem for the tech industry. Who can afford to found a startup when base prices are so high? The demographics of founders are narrowing to the already well off, forcing other founders to look elsewhere.

The solution will have to involve more help (potentially including more startup funding for a wider set of founders) or better jobs in the area. Otherwise Silicon Valley will continue to lose talent to other parts of the country and the world. Tech companies are trying to get their employees to return to the office to counteract this effect, but it simply won't be enough; no RTO policy is compelling enough when you can't afford to buy a house and bring up a family.

That's an opportunity for other ecosystems, but it's one that they will need to intentionally pick up. To date, smart tech ecosystem strategies in other parts of the world have been few and far between - not least because they aim for a similar level of talent density as Silicon Valley rather than embracing a remote, distributed culture.

I openly miss living in the Bay Area and may return in the future, so I have skin in the game. I'm curious to see what happens here.

#Technology

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[Miriam Eric Suzanne]

Every single word of this piece resonated for me, from the underlying discomfort to the realization that AI as it currently manifests reflects a kind of fascist mindset in itself: an enclosure movement of culture and diversity that concentrates power into a handful of vendors.

This is true of me too:

"Based on every conference I’ve attended over the last year, I can absolutely say we’re a fringe minority. And it’s wearing me out. I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind?"

I think drawing the line between "tech" and "the web" is important, and this piece captures exactly how I've been feeling about it:

"“Tech” was always a vague and hand-waving field – a way to side-step regulations while starting an unlicensed taxi company or hotel chain. That was never my interest.

But I got curious about the web, a weird little project built for sharing research between scientists. And I still think this web could be pretty cool, actually, if it wasn’t trapped in the clutches of big tech. If we can focus on the bits that make it special – the bits that make it unwieldy for capitalism."

So this post made me (1) feel less alone (2) like I want to be friends with its author. This is a fringe feeling, unfortunately, but if enough of us stick together, maybe we can manifest an alternative.

#Technology

[Link]

[Alex Heath at The Verge]

And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America:

"In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’s status as a federal contractor and recent “court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic.” As The Wall Street Journal notes, Google also removed a line included in previous annual SEC reports saying that it’s “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do.”"

In other words, because DEI initiatives are now banned within the federal government, and because Google wants that sweet federal contractor money, it's ending the practice of overtly being inclusive as a company.

This is cowardice - and it's exactly what the Trump administration is going for. Its retrograde goals aren't simply for government; the idea is to remake the entire United States, and through changes to international relationships and the simple truth of America's global influence, the world.

#Technology

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[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub]

This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next:

“By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.”

If you take a step back, it’s remarkable that the weirdest guy from PayPal has evolved into the world’s richest and most dangerous man. This serves as a reminder of what happened.

#Technology

[Link]

[Matt Haughey]

I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains:

"A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for switching to Signal for messaging, and this does a great job of laying it all out. This friend doesn't currently have a blog, so they asked me to post it for them, and I obliged since I think it's a straightforward introduction to protecting yourself when communicating with others."

This doesn't just go into the what - it talks a little about the why for Signal, including some of the protections you'll get on Signal that you won't get anywhere else.

Take a look - and then start using it.

#Technology

[Link]

[Herman Martinus]

I recognize a lot of the sentiment here. Twenty years ago, I ran an open source social networking startup and tried to differentiate ourselves by saying many of these same things.

"Bear won't sell. I'm not building this to flip it to the highest bidder. No VC funding, no external pressures, no "exit strategy." Bear is independent and will stay that way."

In practice, I don't know how much that means to very many people. For a comparable example, take a look at Mastodon vs Bluesky (not, by the way, that this is a binary choice); the latter has taken on at least thirty million dollars in VC funding but is currently thriving.

Trust is something you earn over time through your actions and decisions, and isn't a direct outcome of your funding choices. There certainly are bootstrapped companies that have stood the test of time - Esri comes to mind, among others - but there are also VC-funded companies that have proven to have longevity and have done okay by their users. (This will alienate some of my readers, but I don't think VC is inherently bad; it only becomes so when it is considered to be the only funding option and non-VC businesses are shoehorned into that structure and strategy.)

Herman effectively comes to this conclusion in the piece too:

"I've recently chatted to a few bloggers and legal professionals on what a good structure looks like for a project like this. And the common theme was that the legal structure didn't matter nearly as much as the intentions of the people running things. We've seen our fair share of open-source projects become sour (see the recent Wordpress drama) or abandoned entirely. We've seen OpenAI become ClosedAI. There's a common thread here. Trust isn't just a legal structure, but a social contract."

Additionally, I think the conclusion that small, sometimes family-owned businesses last longer is not wrong, but context is important. For a local business? Absolutely. To what extent does this make sense on a global web where every service can be available to everyone? I really badly want this to be true here too, but it's not a given that it is.

Anyway. I really love what Herman is doing with Bear, and this piece isn't a criticism of him or his service in any way. It's fantastic that he's out there doing this. My feelings are more: this is a hard road, and the answers aren't yet clear. But it's a journey that I'm very glad people are on.

#Technology

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[Ross Douthat and Marc Andreessen in The New York Times]

This podcast conversation with Marc Andreessen is very revealing. It's particularly fascinating to me that what I experienced as "America finally having a much-needed moral awakening" presented to people like Andreessen as "radical Marxism". If nothing else, that shows he's never actually met a radical Marxist, and doesn't have a solid take on what that really means. Bernie Sanders ain't it; that guy just wants universal healthcare and well-enforced antitrust rules.

"It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”

And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”"

I think that's a little bit overblown - after all, the tech industry was still booming and still swimming with engineers, designers, product managers, and the like. But also, it represented a class of workers (not just young people, as Andreessen falsely asserts) who were coming to terms with the impact their industry was having in the world politically, environmentally, and socially. The internet is a core part of society now, unlike the hyper-growth years of a decade or two prior, so of course people have more nuanced opinions about it and are reckoning with its impacts. You can't turn back the clock on human perception.

Still, I find that understanding - a gap between my experience and theirs - to be very useful. That's something we can work with, and maybe, just maybe, we can find a bridge.

#Technology

[Link]

[Taylor Lorenz at UserMag]

This is like something from a cyberpunk novel:

"The phrase “cute winter boots” is not about footwear. It's a code phrase being used to discuss resistance to Trump and how to fight back against the draconian immigration policies his administration is enacting. Users talking about “cute winter boots” keeping people safe from "ice," are referencing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Cute winter boots" is just the latest example of algospeak, coded phrases and words aimed at subverting algorithmic filters."

The reason is a perceived idea - which may well have basis in fact - that actual discussion of how to combat ICE raids and so on will be demoted by the platform's content algorithm. It's also clearly a way of trying to avoid scrutiny from authorities. But it also reveals a strong knowledge of what the TikTok algorithm likes to promote:

"The videos discussing "cute winter boots" leverage the TikTok algorithm's preference for product-focused content to amplify their reach. "What the algorithm likes is products," said Diana, the admin of @/citiesbydiana, a TikTok account about urban planning. "It’s a way to talk about resisting the federal government in a way that will actually reach people.""

This is absolutely dystopian police state stuff, but at the same time, it shows a ton of initiative, and illustrates that people aren't going to take any of this lying down. Power to them.

#Technology

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[Mike Masnick at TechDirt]

On Zuckerberg's claims about why he's changing Meta's fact-changing policy:

"If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck in prison for the rest of his life, and just a couple months ago FCC Commissioner (soon to be FCC chair) Brendan Carr threatened Meta that if it kept on fact-checking stories in a way Carr didn’t like, he would try to remove Meta’s Section 230 protections in response.

Two months later — what do you know? — Zuckerberg ended all fact-checking on Meta."

His appearance on Joe Rogan's show served as a way to whitewash this argument. I don't doubt that the government placed pressure on him to enact certain kinds of community moderation policies, but the timing makes the underlying reasons clear.

This is a long piece that goes into Zuckerberg's claims and debunks them soundly. Here's what you really need to know: it's a PR move to placate the incoming administration, and that Zuckerberg capitulated so soundly and so quickly is a very bad sign.

#Technology

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[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

Not just obeying in advance but actively collaborating:

"Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.

“When we look at the history of mass atrocities against particular groups, we always see a period where the information landscape is shaped away from recognizing the humanity of the targeted group. By letting hate speech flourish online, you enable the pre-conditions for group violence offline,” [Rebecca Hamilton, law professor at American University] added."

We're in for a rough few years, and Meta and its big tech compatriots seem to be all in.

#Technology

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[Mark Lemley on LinkedIn]

Meta's lawyer in its AI case has fired them as a client, and is not beating around the bush as to why:

"I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness. While I have thought about quitting Facebook, I find great value in the connections and friends I have here, and it doesn't seem fair that I should lose that because Zuckerberg is having a mid-life crisis.

[...] I have deactivated my Threads account. Bluesky is an outstanding alternative to Twitter, and the last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe."

I wish I could read a response from Zuckerberg himself. I suspect none will be forthcoming.

#Technology

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[Andrew J. Hawkins at The Verge]

I think this is the wrong kind of protectionism:

"The Biden administration finalized a new rule that would effectively ban all Chinese vehicles from the US under the auspices of blocking the “sale or import” of connected vehicle software from “countries of concern.” The rule could have wide-ranging effects on big automakers, like Ford and GM, as well as smaller manufacturers like Polestar — and even companies that don’t produce cars, like Waymo."

I would much rather see a ban on vehicles that spy on you, regardless of who manufactures them. The rule as it stands provides very uneven protection, and allows domestic vehicle manufacturers to conduct significant surveillance over their customers. Legislators should just ban the practice outright, and conduct inspections to ensure that it's the case across the board.

#Technology

[Link]

[Mike Masnick in TechDirt]

Mark Zuckerberg is very obviously running scared from the incoming Trump administration:

"Since the election, Zuckerberg has done everything he can possibly think of to kiss the Trump ring. He even flew all the way from his compound in Hawaii to have dinner at Mar-A-Lago with Trump, before turning around and flying right back to Hawaii. In the last few days, he also had GOP-whisperer Joel Kaplan replace Nick Clegg as the company’s head of global policy. On Monday it was announced that Zuckerberg had also appointed Dana White to Meta’s board. White is the CEO of UFC, but also (perhaps more importantly) a close friend of Trump’s."

He then announced a new set of moderation changes.

As Mike Masnick notes here, Facebook's moderation was terrible and has always been terrible. It tried to use AI to improve its moderation at scale, with predictable results. It simply hasn't worked, and that's often harmed vulnerable communities and voices in the process. So it makes sense to take a different approach.

But Zuckerberg is trying to paint these changes as being pro free speech, and that doesn't ring true. For example, trying to paint fact-checking as censorship is beyond stupid:

"Of course, bad faith actors, particularly on the right, have long tried to paint fact-checking as “censorship.” But this talking point, which we’ve debunked before, is utter nonsense. Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is."

This is all of a piece with Zuckerberg's rolling back of much-needed DEI programs and his suggestion that most companies need more masculine energy. It's for show to please a permatanned audience of one and avoid existential threats to his business.

I would love to read the inside story in a few years. For now, we've just got to accept that everything being incredibly dumb is all part of living in 2025.

#Technology

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[Rae Morey at The Repository]

The bananas activity continues over at Automattic / Matt Mullenweg's house:

"Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week.

[...] The disbandment happened after team rep Thijs Buijs announced in Making WordPress Slack on Wednesday that he was stepping down from his role, citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025."

Meanwhile, a day earlier, Automattic announced that it will ramp down its own contributions to WordPress:

"To recalibrate and ensure our efforts are as impactful as possible, Automattic will reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project. This is not a step we take lightly. It is a moment to regroup, rethink, and strategically plan how Automatticians can continue contributing in ways that secure the future of WordPress for generations to come. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress."

This is a genuinely odd thing to do. Yes, it's true that Automattic is at a disadvantage in the sense that it contributes far more to the open source project than other private companies. Free riders have long been a problem for open source innovators. But it's also why the company exists. I have questions about the balance of open source vs proprietary code in Automattic's future offerings. That's important because WordPress is the core value of its products and the open source core guarantees freedom from lock-in.

Is there a proprietary CMS coming down the wire? Is this bizarre board activity behind the scenes? Is something else going on? This whole situation still feels to me like there's another shoe ready to drop - and the longer it goes on, the bigger that shoe seems to be. I hope they don't completely squander the trust and value they've been building for decades.

#Technology

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[Jason Kottke]

Jason nails what the supposed focus on free speech by Meta and others is really about:

"What Zuckerberg and Meta have realized is the value, demonstrated by Trump, Musk, and MAGA antagonists, of saying that you’re “protecting free speech” and using it as cover for almost anything you want to do. For Meta, that means increasing engagement, decreasing government oversight and interference, and lowering their labor costs (through cutting their workforce and strengthening their bargaining position vs labor) — all things that will make their stock price go up and increase the wealth of their shareholders."

It's a grift, pure and simple. One that happens to help them curry favor with the incoming President and his fan-base.

#Technology

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[Alex Weprin at The Hollywood Reporter]

I don't think this is a great thing at all:

"Meta will also move its trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, with content review to be based in Texas. “As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said."

Its lack of effective moderation previously led to aiding and abetting an actual genocide in Myanmar; there's a reason why trust and safety on large online platforms evolved in the way it did. The idea that Texas is somehow a politically-neutral place to run these teams from is also completely laughable.

A funny thing about cries about censorship on social platforms is that they all seem to relate to people wanting to be abusive to vulnerable people who are already systemically oppressed. I guess we're allowing more of that now. This really is a new era of prosperity!

Of course, this is a move to placate the incoming President, which is likely just one of many. It's, in many ways, pathetic to see. It's just business, they'll shrug and tell you. Well, just business and peoples' lives.

#Technology

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[Ryan Barrett]

Ryan Barrett takes Stewart Brand's Pace Layering and adapts it to model technology progress:

"I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand‘s Pace Layering for decades now. Really great framework for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. I’ve been thinking about a tech version of it for the better part of a year, and I finally took advantage of the holiday break to bang out a rough draft. Thoughts?"

My thoughts are that this is helpful. It's also a good way to think about where you want to be in the stack as a person: product is this kind of messy, unstable squiggle of a progress line, whereas the underlying CS, standards, and components provide relative stability. It's as much of a guide to where to orient your tech career as it is to how the whole system works.

#Technology

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[Thanos Pappas at CarScoops]

There are a few different levels to this story about the VW Group's terrible cybersecurity:

"According to a new report from Germany, the VW Group stored sensitive information for 800,000 electric vehicles from various brands on a poorly secured and misconfigured Amazon cloud storage system—essentially leaving the digital door wide open for anyone to waltz in. And not just briefly, but for months on end."

Much of this data was precise location information for hundreds of thousands of vehicles - all stored in a misconfigured S3 bucket.

So, obviously, it's incredibly damning that a company the size of VW left its sensitive data on an S3 bucket in this way. But it's not great - at all - that the company was storing this information at all.

One of the challenges of modern cars (this issue isn't limited to EVs) is that they're fully connected and phone home to their manufacturers. It isn't just VW that keeps track of the locations of the vehicles it makes; it's every car manufacturer. If there's a connectivity option for the car, the car is being tracked.

This data can be used in all kinds of ways: for example, it could be used as an additional revenue stream by selling it to data brokers, whose customers could use it for use cases that run the gamut from ad targeting to law enforcement.

The headline here is provocative, but the impact of these sorts of disclosures isn't limited to people who travel to brothels. Activists, politicians, and journalists are three more groups who are at risk from always-on tracking. And one can imagine this kind of data being used to demonstrate that someone drove to get reproductive healthcare, for example.

Nobody should be able to obtain this level of personal tracking about any private person. That it was accidentally released on an S3 bucket is almost incidental.

#Technology

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[OpenStreetMap]

Meta has contributed 178,710 Euros (an oddly specific number!) to OpenStreetMap.

On one level: hooray for people contributing to open source.

On another: Meta has a $1.5 Trillion market cap and uses OpenStreetMap in multiple applications. To be fair, it also provides direct non-monetary contributions, but regardless, when all is said and done, it's a bargain. Arguably, the open source project deserves much more. And it's really sad that a donation at this level from a major beneficiary of the project is so exciting that it merits a blog post.

#Technology

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[Ernie Smith at Tedium]

Is the ongoing Matt Mullenweg / Automattic / WP Engine drama really about private equity undermining the open source WordPress project? In his summary of the latest developments, Ernie doesn't think so:

"But I don’t think that’s really what’s been happening here. I think the concern, if we’re really being honest, reflects frustration that Mullenweg has struggled to make Automattic into the firm that WP Engine has become—the first choice for businesses and agencies looking to get a site online. His actions since September—which, mind you, included building a website promoting the number of WP Engine users that had left that platform—have only come to underline that. And despite his claims otherwise, his actions have clearly spoken in the other direction."

I still think there's another shoe here. I've published a few times about this saga, and each time I've heard from people who have been involved in WordPress for a long time who think this is very much in line with Mullenweg's long term behavior and personality. But I still have to wonder if it's not so much him worrying about Automattic's progress in this market as his board and investors. If they're suddenly putting pressure on him to improve results, that in turn would explain why he's being so erratic, and how this appeared to come out of the blue.

I don't know. I don't have any inside here. It's so weird, and so obviously counter-productive. The most recent injunction is the prelude to a full court case; let's see what happens there. I wouldn't like to make predictions.

#Technology

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[Erin Griffith at the New York Times]

I've been using Mozi for a little while and like it quite a bit:

"Mr. Williams views Mozi as an attempt to return to social media’s original intention, which was about interacting with people you already knew. Over the years, social media companies evolved into just plain media — a place for watching videos from influencers and professional entertainers, reading links to news stories, sharing memes or impulse shopping via highly targeted ads. Many of the apps are optimized to get users hooked on an endless scroll of new information."

Here I've got to offer a disclaimer: I used to work with Ev Williams at Medium, and have chatted with him a number of times since leaving that position. I'm also friends with a few people in that circle (who were either involved in early Twitter, early Medium, or both). I like him and think he has good instincts about what the web might be missing for regular people. I also know and like a founder of Dopplr, which apps like this all owe a debt of gratitude to.

For all my hyping of decentralized social media, the underlying tech isn't the thing: it's the use case and the way it builds relationships between people and communities. What I like about Mozi is that it doesn't attempt to horde your engagement or intermediate your relationships: it uses your device's existing (inherently-decentralized) messaging tools and address book to stay in touch but adds a kind of presence layer over the top.

Also, this:

"Consumer apps like Mozi are out of step with the tech zeitgeist, which has centered most recently on artificial intelligence."

Honestly, thank God. And I'm grateful that the team is talking about monetizing through premium features that provide extra value, rather than advertising or selling to data brokers.

In other words: hooray for a good old-fashioned app that tries to behave well and add value.

#Technology

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[Daniel Appelquist and Yves Lafon at the W3C]

These ethical web principles that guide the ongoing development of the platform are great. And this is spot on:

"The web is a fundamental part of our lives, shaping how we work, connect, and learn. We understand that with this profound impact comes the responsibility to ensure that the web serves as a platform that benefits people and delivers positive social outcomes. As we continue to advance the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work."

I feel like this is missing a statement on inclusivity (beyond "the web is for all people"), but I imagine that might have been difficult or contentious to include.

But in particular, enforcing the web as a platform that does not lead to societal harm, supports privacy and freedom of expression, and enhances individuals' control and power feels like an important statement. Particularly right now.

I guess my question is: how does this come into play in practice in the day-to-day work of the W3C? How does the W3C intend to seed these ideas outside of its walls? Those practical considerations feel important, too.

#Technology

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[Emma Roth at The Verge]

I think this was almost inevitable:

"On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins."

Automattic is going to file a counterclaim, pointing out that the ruling was made without the benefit of discovery and without what it believes are the full set of facts. It believes it can still win in a full trial.

I still think there's more to this story than meets the eye. Either Matt Mullenweg was responding to some kind of outside pressure (for example, from his investors and board), or he basically went nuts. It could be a little from column A and a little from column B. It's even possible that there's some bombshell revelation forthcoming about WP Engine (although I have to say it's quite an outside chance). But I wish we could scratch the surface and go deeper. Maybe one day we'll learn more.

#Technology

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