My top Bluesky feature requests for 2024 | ændra.::.blog
To fix social media, we need to introduce digital socialism
Proprietary social media networks need to be transformed into local and global digital commons.
How Twitter broke the news
“No one chasing money in media ever chased Twitter. But anyone chasing power found themselves irresistibly drawn to the platform.”
Elon Musk didn’t kill Twitter
To find out who did, look all the way back to the start of the story.
Elon Musk’s “everything app” plan for X
Musk wants X to replace YouTube, LinkedIn, FaceTime, dating apps, and even your bank.
Current thoughts on social media
My view on the state of social media in late 2023
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 40
Three stories that all relate to governance, in their own different ways. Mbin is a new fork of Kbin, due to governance issues at Kbin. A research paper on that gives some structure to how different Mastodon servers organise their rules. And Owncast runs into issues with how Apple governs access to the App Store.
Annual Report 2022
The 2022 Annual Report is now available for download! As a non-profit organization supported exclusively by donations, we like to keep our community updated on our yearly progress, and 2022 was an interesting year to say the least.
What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter? A fired Trump White House staffer offers a tantalizing clue
A year after the world's richest man acquired the social media platform, a game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue.
Snapchat is jumping on the AI selfie train with ‘Dreams’
They are meant to look “a little bit silly and a little bit weird.”
Integrating generative AI into the neighborhood network | Nextdoor
Nextdoor is testing new AI features leveraging ChatGPT API to enhance community conversations in the neighborhood. Learn more.
What is the fediverse — and how might it affect creators?
All social media sites interconnected — heaven or hell for creators?
Slingshot's playful new app lets you 'sling' quick photos to friends | TechCrunch
A clever new app called Slingshot is combining the serendipity of BeReal snaps with the friends-only photo sharing popularized by apps like Snapchat. But
The multiple meanings of fediverse
Sometimes, there are words where everyone thinks they know what it means, and also, that everyone else also has the same idea of what it means. But then it turns out that terms like ‘fediverse’ can have surprisingly vague edges. If someone talks about the fediverse to you, it’s easy to imagine a cluster of […]
Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 31 – The Fediverse Report
Telegram begins rolling out Stories, but only for Premium users
Popular messaging app Telegram recently announced that it’s been working on a new Stories feature that works pretty much the...
Telegram adds Stories for Premium subscribers
Copying Snapchat and BeReal all in one move.
Durov admitted there was some internal skepticism on whether Stories is a good idea — but shared that the team now “can no longer imagine Telegram without it.”
lol
Mastodon's Mastodon'ts
There are a few fundamentally broken things about how Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability. Maybe they are fixable, I don't know. To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon. I have been enjoying my time there much more than I ever enjoyed Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. And I am 100% in the "I won't touch anything Jack Dorsey has ...
Child Safety on Federated Social Media
The Fediverse, a decentralized social network with interconnected spaces that are each independently managed with unique rules and cultural norms, has seen a surge in popularity. Decentralization h...
Digesting the "Child Safety on Federated Social Media" Report
An in-depth report reveals an ugly truth about isolated, unmoderated parts of the Fediverse. It's a solvable problem, with challenges.
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
Trialling ActivityPub and the federated model for social media and it's possibilities for the BBC.
Last Week in the Fediverse – episode 29
The BBC sets up their own Mastodon server. A W3C meeting about CSAM and Mastodon. Mastodon on your watch?
Looks Like New: How did open social media platforms originate?
In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-ce…
Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
Love Reddit but tired of what's happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast.
The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem
Over the past year the Fediverse has experienced significant growth, and this comes at a very real cost: Mental Health.
Mastodon monoculture problem
Recent moves by Eugen Rochko (known as Gargron on fedi), the CEO of Mastodon-the-non-profit and lead developer of Mastodon-the-software, got some people worried about the outsized influence Mastodon (
Inside Meta's quick Threads launch to rival Twitter — and what's next - The Washington Post
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t - Erin Kissane's small internet website
my goal here isn’t to plonk down a big pristine block of research, but to offer a conversational glimpse into what real humans—who were motivated to try not one, but at least two alternatives to Twitter—actually report about their unsatisfactory experiences on Mastodon.
In my experience, building cultural norms into the tooling is much more effective and less alienating than chiding.
Constantly being told I was somewhat dim because I didn’t understand how to do things or what the unwritten rules were.
This, I particularly hate and hope desperately I did not contribute to.
A lot of people in the responding group found the process of picking an instance, signing up, and getting set up genuinely confusing.
The Own Your Experience school doesn’t really grapple with the genuinely terrifying dynamics of mass-scale complex systems.
5 Tips for Posting on a Technology Forum
An online forum is a great place to ask questions and generally seek advice on what you want to do with technology. I spend a bit of time each day catching up on the latest discussions across maybe a half dozen or so technical fora. On some of them I am a heavy contributor, and on others I generally lurk, just gleaning insights and keeping up with the latest conversations. Having been involved with technical forums for the past thirty years or so I’ve seen plenty of good and bad practices, and in this post I am going to share five tips on what I think are valuable and practical considerations for posting queries to technical forums.
Thread Heat with Casey Newton - What Future with Joshua Topolsky (podcast) | Listen Notes