From Ars Technica:
As for what interested Meta about the work done on Moltbook, there is a clue in the statement issued to press by a Meta spokesperson, who flagged the Moltbook founders’ “approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory,” saying it “is a novel step in a rapidly developing space.” They added, “We look forward to working together to bring innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone.”
What a time to be alive.
From Hannah Aubury at Mastodon:
For now, we want to run some onboarding experiments to test our ideas and learn what can work for us and for everyone on the network. Our first experiment is Default Server Recommendations. (If you were at FOSDEM or following along at home, you may have seen Andy Piper and I announce this or post about it!). Practically, we will replace the “join mastodon.social” button with a button that recommends a server from an opt-in pool that we will be hand selecting to start.
Good to see.
The email analogy (“choosing a server is like choosing an email provider”) has always been a solid go-to explanation, and it works reasonably well if you already understand why you might want your own email domain. That works great for a certain kind of person and lands with a thud for everyone else. Federation is genuinely a foreign concept for most new users, and no amount of clever copy fixes that. The real question is whether Mastodon can make the choice feel low-stakes enough that people stop worrying about it entirely and just … join somewhere.
This experiment feels like a step in that direction. Hope it fuels additional growth.
We’re never going to escape algorithms completely. But if we can recognize where they’re shaping our attention and make small choices to push back, we stand a better chance of keeping them from running our lives.
Continue reading →What I’ve realized is that I’ve been using Discord more and more — especially for sports talk — and it scratches the itch in a way the big networks don’t.
Continue reading →Time for my semi-annual social media pulse check. What am I using? What accounts should I really delete?
Continue reading →About a year ago, I wrote about the state of things at Twitter. It’s gone worse than I could have imagined, although I won’t cover that here. There are a zillion think pieces on that Musk has done to that company and what it means for Twitter, social media, and our overall discourse. I’ll leave […]
Continue reading →The Twitter dumpster fire has helped me realize how much I was addicted to Twitter/Mastodon and really don’t need it in my life.
Continue reading →Over the past few years I’ve tried to curtail my use of social media. I’ve unfollowed a ton of accounts on Instagram and Twitter, deleted my Facebook account, and mostly lurk in general. I’ve also deleted all of my old posts – I know that stuff is still searchable for Twitter if you are so […]
Continue reading →From The Guardian:
But the regulation could backfire, at least in terms of creating the internet Trump desires. By barring social media companies from using the nuanced forms of moderation they currently employ, the executive order could force them to resort to heavy-handed actions: deleting posts, or blocking users, rather than simply factchecking or reducing the reach of the worst material.
Similarly, removing section 230 protections entirely from a technology firm would be unlikely to force it to act as a politically neutral “mere conduit”, since any moderation at all – even simply deleting the vast quantities of automated spam that hit platforms such as Facebook and Twitter each day – would then open them up to lawsuits about the content they had left up.
I feel like this kind of sums up Trump’s presidency. He’s been flailing from one self-induced blunder to the next with no real strategy in mind. Rather than, you know, acting presidential and posting ideas that are truthful, he’s getting emotional yet again and will potentially create a situation that compels social media to disallow or fully censor the sort of hate, lies and misinformation he’s so well known for.
To be clear, I don’t think that a more tightly regulated social media landscape is an overall good thing. However the irony of the President issuing an order that makes it more likely to have his posts outright deleted does bring me some joy.
It’s been a long time since I wrote anywhere other than in my Day One journal (which I do nearly daily at this point – I love the type of things I notice and jot down when it’s mostly for an audience of one). I’ve mostly avoided social media over the past year or two […]
Continue reading →