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This is the best summary I could come up with:
That’s a big shot of support for the fediverse — the network of open and interoperable social services that have all been gaining momentum over the past year.
This has long been the dream, and it seems like the platforms betting on it in various ways — Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Flipboard, and others — are where all the energy is, while attempts to rebuild closed systems keep hitting the rocks.
Ghost itself is one of the bigger winners in the oops-Substack-has-Nazis newsletter migration, and letting authors on its platform more easily distribute their work is itself in stark contrast to Substack, which is reacting to its failing business model by making it harder to leave its own increasingly-social-network-like platform.
Ghost says it’s working with Mastodon and Buttondown, another newsletter platform, on ActivityPub support.
The company also says it will be working to improve its reading experience as it prepares to let people follow other fediverse authors on its platform.
Importantly, the project FAQ also says that paid content “should work fine” with ActivityPub as well — something no other platform has really tried yet, as far as I’m aware.
The original article contains 377 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 50%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Ghost, the open source alternative to Substack’s newsletter platform, is considering joining the fediverse, the social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others.
While the launch of a survey isn’t necessarily a commitment to federating Ghost, it is another signal pointing to the broader reshaping of the web that’s now underway.
Ghost has gained attention as a Substack rival in recent months for the same reason that some have fled X: People disagree about how platforms should be moderated.
Substack has taken to promoting free speech, as Musk does on X, but that’s also led to the platform being used by pro-Nazi publications, as detailed by The Atlantic late last year.
“I’m not aware of any major U.S. consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions,” Newton wrote at the time.
In addition to Newton, other notable Ghost users include 404 Media, Buffer, Kickstarter, David Sirota’s The Lever and Tangle, to name a few.
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This follows last year’s introduction of a Mastodon integration in the app, replacing Twitter, and the introduction of support for ActivityPub, the social networking protocol that powers the open source, decentralized social networks that include Mastodon and others.
In February, Flipboard announced it would begin to add its creators and their social magazines to the fediverse as well, meaning that the curated magazines of links and other social posts that its creators typically share within the Flipboard app could now find a broader audience.
By sharing creators’ posts and links with the wider fediverse, Flipboard’s publishing partners gained their own native ActivityPub feeds so they could be discovered by Mastodon users and those on other federated social apps.
“This is a major step toward fully federating our platform,” noted Flipboard CEO Mike McCue in an announcement.
“We’re not just making curated content on Flipboard viewable, but enabling two-way communication so users can see activity and engage with fediverse communities.
In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app.
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“For years, LGBTQ organizations have pleaded with Meta to improve safety for our communities, especially for transgender people,” Sarah Kate Ellis, GLAAD’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
Alok Vaid-Menon, a nonbinary content creator, author and comedian in New York who is on GLAAD’s social media safety program advisory committee, said: “I have experienced an uptick of ant- trans harassment, slurs, dehumanizing tropes and violent threats.
Meta’s repeated failure to take the correct enforcement action, despite multiple signals about the post’s harmful content, leads the Board to conclude the company is not living up to the ideals it has articulated on LGBTQIA+ safety.”
And in June, GLAAD, the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, and more than 250 LGBTQ+ celebrities, public figures and allies signed an open letter calling on Meta to do a better job of protecting against anti-trans hate.
Celebrities including Elliot Page, Laverne Cox, Jamie Lee Curtis, Shawn Mendes, Janelle Monáe, Gabrielle Union, Judd Apatow and Ariana Grande signed the letter.
Right-wing media outlets and podcasters — including Matt Walsh, the account Gays Against Groomers, Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok and the Babylon Bee — contributed to anti-trans hate, according to the report.
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In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
On Tuesday, a federal court in California released new documents discovered as part of the class action lawsuit between consumers and Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
“Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an email dated June 9, 2016, which was published as part of the lawsuit.
When the network traffic is unencrypted, this type of attack allows the hackers to read the data inside, such as usernames, passwords, and other in-app activity.
This is why Facebook engineers proposed using Onavo, which when activated had the advantage of reading all of the device’s network traffic before it got encrypted and sent over the internet.
“We now have the capability to measure detailed in-app activity” from “parsing snapchat [sic] analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo’s research program,” read another email.
The original article contains 671 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Jay and I also talked about the growth of the Bluesky app, which now has more than 5 million users, and how so many of the company’s early decisions around product design and moderation have shaped the type of organic culture that’s taken hold there.
And early on, we had this crazy ratio of 90 percent posters, and so it was extremely active and tons of people firing off shitposts essentially — really fast, funny takes on things and memes and a lot of stuff.
Do you think you’re going to end up in a place where you have what I will just call the Microsoft Excel problem, where so many people have asked for so many familiar features that it’s actually hard to bring them into a new paradigm, like composable moderation or adjustable filters?
I talked to the CEOs of other companies that are in these kinds of relationships with protocols or standards or open source, and at the end of the day, they often come back to “…but we also have to make money, and the best user experience is often the one that we control.
Yeah, and we’ve already begun talking to some standardization bodies — like starting the very early stages of that work, socializing the idea, taking on the pieces that are relatively more solid, as I mentioned earlier.
So, our goal is to let that whole ecosystem just iterate and experiment, and then we try to have some amount of leadership in terms of what we’re encouraging people to build, how we’re creating and surfacing the best stuff that gets built and bringing it to user’s attention and helping them install it.
The original article contains 13,352 words, the summary contains 279 words. Saved 98%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the US, Canada, and Japan.
Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum.
As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to “search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server.”
The beta currently doesn’t let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example.
Still, it’s promising to see Threads starting to get into the fediverse after first testing its ActivityPub integration last year.
You can turn on the feature by heading to your Threads account settings, selecting Fediverse sharing (Beta), and following the instructions.
The original article contains 196 words, the summary contains 135 words. Saved 31%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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In recent weeks, Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s have filed legal papers that advance novel arguments aimed at hobbling and perhaps shutting down the NLRB – the federal agency that enforces labor rights and oversees unionization efforts.
Kate Andrias, a Columbia University law professor, said workers would be hurt if the courts issue a sweeping decision that declares both the NLRB and the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional.
Some worker advocates have voiced surprise that these companies are seeking to hobble the NLRB when, in their view, the labor board is already too weak, its penalties toothless.
SpaceX, Starbucks, Amazon and Trader Joe’s have put forward three main arguments for holding the NLRB unconstitutional: it penalizes companies without a jury trial, exercises executive powers without the president being free to remove board officials, and violates the separation of powers by exercising executive, legislative and judicial functions.
William B Gould IV, who was chair of the NLRB under President Clinton, said anti-union “tech billionaires” like Musk and Jeff Bezos “have fueled these efforts”.
If the labor board is ruled unconstitutional, workers who feel they were illegally fired or otherwise disciplined for backing a union might file a flood of lawsuits in federal courts.
The original article contains 1,194 words, the summary contains 208 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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At the time, he noted that the aesthetics of physical spaces, like coffee shops and co-working offices, were being heavily influenced by Airbnb and Instagram, flattening global interior design into one singular and recognizable vibe.
Seven years later, Kyle’s argument is that AirSpace has turned into what he now calls Filterworld, a phrase he uses to describe how algorithmic recommendations have become one of the most dominating forces in culture, and as a result, have pushed society to converge on a kind of soulless sameness in its tastes.
You’ll hear us trace the origins of Filterworld back to the rise of modern social media in the 2010s and how this development has been accelerated by the deterioration of the open web, an erosion of trust in our institutions, and the frankly frightening speed and scale of platforms like TikTok.
What I find is that, in Filterworld, in this world of digital platforms and algorithmic feeds, one quirk goes viral instantly — a new adaptation, a new aesthetic flourish, can go from one person doing it to 100,000 people doing it in a day, whether it’s a TikTok sound or a dance or whatever, and so I think there are these artistic innovations that happen.
When we use the same platform for five or six years, we tend to start getting itchy and wanting something else, and I think it’s also been this gradual evolution of the internet from text to more professionalized images, to audio and video, to TikTok, which is this kind of full-featured television, essentially.
Digital platforms have absorbed different areas of culture that used to be more offline, whether it’s a television equivalent like TikTok or podcasts that used to be radio, over the past decade, more things have gotten more online, and I think that’s been a major shift.
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The move will allow anyone to run their own server that connects to Bluesky’s network, so they can host their own data, their own account and make their own rules.
The growing interest in federation stems from consumer demand to have more control over their personal data — something that gained more attention after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it to X and changed its focus to become an “everything app” with a focus on payments, creators, video shows, AI…and more lax moderation.
After a somewhat lengthy time in private beta, the company launched to the public earlier this month and now has over 5 million registered users, according to an official tracker.
It notes that Bluesky users will be able to participate in the global conversation, instead of the one dictated by the community they join, as aspects of how your experience differs from others is in your control thanks to other features, like custom feeds and composable moderation.
“There are some guardrails in place to ensure we can keep the network running smoothly for everyone in the ecosystem,” Bluesky’s blog post notes.
Once alternatives are established, Bluesky will recommend its service as the default to new users, but they’ll be able to change to another at any point, without losing their data.
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The accumulated evidence flatly contradicts what Portland’s police chief told the public and city council staff in the days after the attack: that the gunman, 43-year-old Ben Smith, had opened fire only after he had been confronted by “armed protesters”.
That false characterization of the unarmed victims as aggressors, which was repeated in dozens of local and national news reports, remains uncorrected on the website of the Portland police bureau (PPB) even today, as the survivors mark the second anniversary of Smith murdering their friend, June Knightly.
The attack took place on 19 February 2022 before a march in north-east Portland to demand justice for two young Black men killed by police officers in Minneapolis, Daunte Wright and Amir Locke.
Footage from a helmet camera worn by another volunteer, Dajah Beck, shows that Smith appeared intent on drawing the women into a physical confrontation, daring them to “make” him leave.
As Smith spun around, shouting: “Fuck you!” Knightly, who was tall but walked with a cane and had lost her long hair to a round of chemotherapy, stepped between him and Deg and demanded that he leave.
It would later emerge that Smith had railed against antifascists in rightwing Telegram chats and that he had posted a comment on the YouTube channel of the anti-antifascist blogger Andy Ngo a month before the attack.
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Software developer Ryan Barrett found this out the hard way when he set out to connect the AT Protocol and ActivityPub with a bridge called Bridgy Fed.
Barrett planned to make the bridge opt-out by default, meaning that public Mastodon posts could show up on Bluesky without the author knowing, and vice versa.
In what one Bluesky user called “the funniest github issue page i have ever seen,” there was a heated debate over the opt-out default, which — like any good internet argument — included unfounded legal threats and devolved into bizarre personal attacks.
As a nonprofit, Mastodon’s appeal is that, unlike Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, it’s not controlled by a big corporation that needs to make its investors happy.
The ideological issues around Bridgy Fed are likely to continue stoking tension across these federated social networks as they increase their connection points.
“I am thinking and feeling deeply that however content moderation works on either side of the bridge, it needs to be at least as good as it is for native fediverse users, and vice versa,” Barrett said.
The original article contains 1,176 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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When an amateur restorer discovered slides showing street scenes from early 20th century Middleton – located near Manchester in the UK- he was keen to find out where exactly they were taken.
This historical photo holds the first clue, a street sign with the name ‘Manchester Old Road’ can be seen on the left-hand side of the image.
We then searched Google for (“Manchester Old Road” Middleton 1900 maps) and found a relevant page on StreetList.co.uk, a tool for navigating and exploring geographical information in the UK.
We found the National Library of Scotland provides many high-quality historical maps that you can view and explore without payment or subscription.
Here’s another example of an historical photo we geolocated further down the road, by examining the ordnance survey, other postcards of the area and Street View.
With thanks to Roger Liptrot for sharing information about the historical photos he found of Middleton, UK and for digitising the images from the original glass slides.
The original article contains 641 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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It’s an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your content, data, and follower graph between networks.
You know how everyone online is like, “Give me your email, it’s the only stable thing on the web, and so it’s the most important tool for building a lasting audience” now?
And the places where you connect with your friends, or make a living as a creator, couldn’t be irrevocably destroyed by a billionaire with a sink and a bunch of weird ideas about financial products?
The ActivityPub protocol I mentioned a minute ago is a little like email: it has specifications for senders and receivers and supports lots of different kinds of content.
You can always have different accounts for different things, but I think many people will end up having one main identity — your Threads username, or your Mastodon handle, or even a domain you hook up to all of these services individually — that ports across all of these systems.
A lot of folks I’ve talked to say that, basically, if we’d built social media like this 20 years ago, the world would be better and smarter and we’d all be richer and better-looking.
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Although headcount at Microsoft might currently be down – by two percent compared to the previous year – recruitment persists at the Windows giant.
The Substrate does the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Microsoft’s cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust quite a statement of intent.
Microsoft said: “We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond.”
Considering the growing enthusiasm for memory-safe programming, something Rust delivers with far less effort than the likes of C++, Microsoft’s move is unsurprising.
Memorably, a Microsoft engineer had to rapidly backpedal issue a clarification after proudly proclaiming that Office 365 was being ported to JavaScript.
In this instance, while Microsoft remains committed to C#, at least in public, its actions over the last few years and the job posting are indications that the company is keeping its options open.
The original article contains 357 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Although headcount at Microsoft might currently be down – by two percent compared to the previous year – recruitment persists at the Windows giant.
The Substrate does the heavy lifting behind the scenes for Microsoft’s cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust quite a statement of intent.
Microsoft said: “We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond.”
Considering the growing enthusiasm for memory-safe programming, something Rust delivers with far less effort than the likes of C++, Microsoft’s move is unsurprising.
Memorably, a Microsoft engineer had to rapidly backpedal issue a clarification after proudly proclaiming that Office 365 was being ported to JavaScript.
In this instance, while Microsoft remains committed to C#, at least in public, its actions over the last few years and the job posting are indications that the company is keeping its options open.
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Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.
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In the last year or so, though, particularly after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition alerted users to how quickly their platforms can change or die, POSSE has gotten some traction again alongside ActivityPub and other more open ideas.
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POSSE’s problems start at the very beginning: it requires owning your own website, which means buying a domain and worrying about DNS records and figuring out web hosts, and by now, you’ve already lost the vast majority of people who would rather just type a username and password into some free Meta platform.
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Reece says he’s interested in building tools to aggregate and make sense of replies, likes, comments, and the rest, but it’s a much harder prospect.
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Reece mentions a tool called Bridgy, which both allows cross-posting and aggregates social media reactions and attaches them to posts on your site.
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Modern social networks are not a single product but a giant bundle of features, and the next generation of tools might be all about unbundling.
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The original article contains 1,805 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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In March, WordPress.com owner Automattic made a commitment to the fediverse — the decentralized social networks that include the Twitter rival Mastodon and others — with the acquisition of an ActivityPub plug-in that allows WordPress blogs to reach readers on other federated platforms.
Since the acquisition, the company has improved on the original software in a number of ways, including by now allowing the ability to add blog-wide catchall accounts instead of only per-author.
At the time of its acquisition, the ActivityPub plug-in supported federated platforms including Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, HubZilla, Pixelfed, SocialHome, and Misskey.
Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg has been bullish on the promises of the fediverse — especially given the open-source nature of its decentralized, interconnected server software.
Late last year, for example, the CEO wrote that Tumblr would add support for ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized social apps.
WordPress’s support for ActivityPub follows a number of moves by other publishers to embrace the fediverse.
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Since Mr. Musk bought the platform, he has repeatedly declared that he wants to defeat the “woke mind virus” — which he has struggled to define but largely seems to mean Democratic and progressive policies.
The result, as Charlie Warzel said in The Atlantic, is that the platform is now a “far-right social network” that “advances the interests, prejudices and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.”
“We believe that users should have a say in how their attention is directed, and developers should be free to experiment with new ways of presenting information,” Bluesky’s chief executive, Jay Graber, told me in an email message.
When the Stanford political science professor Francis Fukuyama led a working group that in 2020 proposed outside entities offer algorithmic choice, critics chimed in with many concerns.
Robert Faris and Joan Donovan, then of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, wrote that they were worried that Fukuyama’s proposal could let platforms off the hook for their failures to remove harmful content.
Nathalie Maréchal, Ramesh Srinivasan and Dipayan Ghosh argued that his approach would do nothing to change some tech platforms’ underlying business model that incentivizes the creation of toxic and manipulative content.
The original article contains 1,182 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Because — in Dorsey’s telling, at least — Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company.”
That’s the TLDR from an interview Dorsey conducted with journalist Mike Solana at his Pirate Wires site.
And then Dorsey decided what he really wanted to do was help Nostr, another Twitter alternative, which promises to actually be an open-source protocol, instead.
Dorsey, for instance, has some mostly kind words about Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022.
Though that mostly repeats his idea that Twitter’s original sin was becoming a venture-backed, for-profit company that went public with a business model based on advertising, positioned as a Facebook competitor.
But that story/argument isn’t a new one — you can find it in this four-episode podcast series I hosted last year, for instance.
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