Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X and subsequent changes to that platform, computational social science researchers may be considering shifting their research programs to Mastodon and the fediverse. This article sounds several notes of caution about such a shift. We explain key differences between the fediverse and X, ultimately arguing that research must be with the fediverse, not on it.

In our first episode, we talk about the relationship between publishers and audiences, and the search for alternatives in the wake of controversy.

A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.

It's just a "proposal," but it's also being prototyped inside Chrome right now.

For many years now, I’ve talked about why so many of the problems that face the current internet could be understood by looking at how we moved from an internet dominated by open protocols to…

Mastodon is now available on Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Read about some of the design decisions we made for these apps!

(Note: This post was first published, in a different form, at Opensource.com and appears here via a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.) When you thin...

Creator of SerenityOS

Customization, content discovery, empowering through more control... Here is an overview of the new version of our software solution to create alternative platforms to YouTube and federate them together. « Frama is not just... » Each week of Fall 2021, we want to present you the diversity of what Framasoft does. As these actions are...

Independent experts from NYU, UMass Amherst, Columbia, Marquette, and the ACLU are partnering with Gizmodo to responsibly publish this historic leak.

Attached: 1 image I flatter myself that I am pretty secure online. I've written a series of global bestsellers about information security, I've worked for EFF for nearly 20 years, I've given keynotes at some of the world's largest infosec conferences. And yet, I have been hacked. It wasn't even very sophisticated! 1/

From media reports and individual findings that various people have presented to us, it seems that the new social media platform owned by the former president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, so-called Truth Social, is using Mastodon’s source code with various visual adjustments. The platform has not formally launched yet, but it was made accessible ahead of time. Users were quick to note that the terms of service included a worrying passage, claiming that the site is proprietary property and all source code and software are owned or controlled by them or licensed to them:

It's another crossposted episode this week! Mike recently joined the Tech Policy Press podcast alongside Block Party founder Tracy Chou for a conversation about using middleware and interoperability to craft a new, less centralized online...

What if everyone's wrong?

The Internet Archive has grand ambitions for preserving the internet. But in order to do that, Big Tech has to stay out of the way.

A new browser extension from The Markup

I have never been more encouraged and thankful to Free and Open Source communities. Three months ago I posted a request for help with OCR’ing and processing 19th Century Newspapers and we got soooo many offers to help. Thank you, that was heart warming and concretely helpful– already based on these suggestions we are changing […]

Novel categorizations and “staining” techniques uncovered how much space on the search results page Google dedicates to itself

Open Source Evolutions: Software for the Masses Even from its beginnings, open source software has been all about free accessibility, ease of use, constant improvement, and evolution over time. Want to know more about how

A ‘Magna Carta for the web’ will protect people’s rights online from threats such as fake news, prejudice and hate, says founder of the world wide web

Update: A few months after this piece was published, I was invited by Harvard’s Berkman Center to speak about this topic in more detail. Though the final talk is an hour long, it offers much more insight into the topic, and I hope you’ll give it a look.