Web

After days of explosive growth on the platform, the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours (versus 360,000 in all of 2023).

The team added that it’s working to bring on new members and asks users to help by reporting troll, spam, and scam accounts. Bluesky has also implemented email verification for new signups.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed during a live X session that Elon Musk will be “very involved” in helping thwart The Onion’s purchase of Infowars, according to Mother Jones.

Whether or not that’s true, it’s an excuse to remember that Musk once wanted to buy The Onion, didn’t, then funded Thud, a satirical media company, with Onion alums. (He backed out, reportedly because he worried about being targeted by the satire.)

US District Judge Christopher Lopez put The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars on pause and ordered a hearing to go over the results of the bankruptcy auction, according to Variety. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction,” Lopez said during an emergency status conference, Variety reports.

Our sister site Polygon has joined us in getting active on Bluesky, complete with a starter pack of reporters. If you prefer your decentralization ActivityPub-flavored, they’re still posting on Mastodon too.

The Verge’s Bluesky account is now actively posting stories from the site, and there’s a starter pack for following individual reporters, editors, and others. Come find us!

As spotted by @DuaneStorey on X, the “WP Engine Tracker” says more than 16,000 sites stopped using WP Engine since late September, which is when WordPress.com parent company Automattic started its public campaign against the third-party hosting service.

Meanwhile, Automattic’s response to WP Engine’s lawsuit claimed the company “failed to plausibly allege specific financial harm.”

The long-running instance hosts some of the fediverse’s great bots, like one that imagines the Google Searches of Star Trek: TNG’s Commander Riker. Another is posting 2001: A Space Odyssey, one frame at a time (which could take about five years).

Blaming ongoing expenses, botsin.space creator Colin Mitchell writes in a blog post that, starting not long after December 15th, it will go read-only until March 2025.

If you were a nerd online in the early ‘10s, you may recall Lore Sjöberg’s Dungeons & Dragons-inspired Speak with Monsters. The webcomic went dark years ago and it’s been only available in spotty online archives. But it’s getting republished (with an archival installment every Friday) in Sjöberg’s newsletter, starting with a strip based on the early D&D illustration below.

During the Web Creator summit, Google Search VP Pandu Nayak responded to concerns about smaller sites getting outranked on the search engine, as reported by Mountain Weekly News founder Mike Hardaker:

Our goal is to surface great content for users. I suspect there is a lot of great content you guys are creating that we are not surfacing to our users, but I can’t give you any guarantees unfortunately. We are focused on things for our users, that is not going to change.

On Google’s Q3 earnings call, Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski asked:

Why doesn’t it make sense to have two completely different search experiences? One, an agent-like answers engine and then, two, a links-based more traditional search engine? You could innovate on both and let the consumer decide.

Sundar replied: “I do think having two surfaces for us allows us to experiment more.”

But Google rep Chris Pappas tells us he’s referring to two different AI surfaces — AI Overviews and the Gemini App — not good ol’ link-based search.

Nothing beside remains:

In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk — in digital form — of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.

Screenshots shared on X show emails from WordPress.com parent company Automattic asking the owners of WordCamp Sydney — a community-organized WordPress conference — to remove posts related to WP Engine.

Meanwhile, a separate email from the company requests that event organizers share “all active social media accounts” login credentials with Automattic to ensure “safe storage for all future events.”

The attorneys for WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg make that very clear in a legal response to WP Engine’s lawsuit. The response also blames WP Engine for relying on WordPress.org, “a website owned and run by Defendant Matt Mullenweg individually:”

WP Engine, a private equity-backed company, made the unilateral decision, at its own risk, to build a multi-billion dollar business around Mr. Mullenweg’s website. In doing so, WP Engine gambled for the sake of profit that Mr. Mullenweg would continue to maintain open access to his website for free. That was their choice.

IA is slowly recovering from the cyberattack it faced earlier this month, and its latest update brings back a read-only version of archive.org — its digital library full of old games, magazines, videos, and more.

Cory Doctorow makes a strong case for replacing pretty much your entire internet feeds experience with an RSS reader, and spoiler alert he’s right and you should:

Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.