Werd I/O

[Emma Roth at The Verge]

I think this was almost inevitable:

"On Tuesday, a California District Court judge ordered Automattic to stop blocking WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org resources and interfering with its plugins."

Automattic is going to file a counterclaim, pointing out that the ruling was made without the benefit of discovery and without what it believes are the full set of facts. It believes it can still win in a full trial.

I still think there's more to this story than meets the eye. Either Matt Mullenweg was responding to some kind of outside pressure (for example, from his investors and board), or he basically went nuts. It could be a little from column A and a little from column B. It's even possible that there's some bombshell revelation forthcoming about WP Engine (although I have to say it's quite an outside chance). But I wish we could scratch the surface and go deeper. Maybe one day we'll learn more.

#Technology

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[Paul Kiel at ProPublica]

If we're going to improve on Medicare, we have to fund it - and it turns out that even today's Medicare taxes are being skipped out on by some of the wealthiest citizens in America, thanks to a legal loophole that the IRS has not adequately addressed.

"The trove of tax records behind ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series contains plenty of examples of billionaire financiers who avoided Medicare tax despite earning huge amounts from their companies. In 2016, Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, paid $0. So did Stephen Schwarzman, head of the investment behemoth Blackstone. Bill Ackman, the headline-grabbing hedge fund manager, was able to shield almost all his income from the tax."

Tax advisers have found a way to funnel income - including at very high levels - in such a way that it avoids Medicare taxes, allowing these high net worth individuals to profit while ensuring that some of our most vulnerable people's healthcare is underfunded.

Will this loophole be closed in the next administration? I'll leave that thought exercise up to the reader.

#Democracy

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[The Oxford Clarion]

I grew up in Oxford, and the Eagle and Child is one of my favorite pubs from back home. I'm also a longtime critic of certain big companies, Larry Ellison's Oracle among them. So imagine my dismay when I heard this:

"The masterplan is “a place for brilliant people to come together”. The Eagle & Child is to be the in-house bar for Ellison’s new Oxford outpost, the Ellison Institute of Technology. EIT has been set up to “accelerate innovation” in four areas: health and medical science, food security and sustainable agriculture, climate change and clean energy, and government in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Its £1bn campus is under construction at the Oxford Science Park. This week it announced a £130m investment in the University of Oxford as part of a “long-term strategic alliance”."

I mean, to be fair, it might be good. And it seems to have CAMRA's seal of approval. And there's something to be said for upgrading the city center's food possibilities (the pub grub situation has not been inspiring), as long as it remains both physically and financially accessible to all.

This is the bit that's most eye-rolling to me:

"Why is a Californian billionaire funding an Oxford pub, even one where Tolkien and Lewis once conversed? The answer lies on the Eagle & Child’s upper floors.

Ellison Scholars will be graduates and undergraduates “passionate about solving humanity’s most serious problems”. At least 20 will be appointed each year, working at EIT’s £1bn campus with the Faculty Fellows on solving the world’s problems through technology."

We'll have to wait and see, but forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical.

#Culture

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[Lindsey Lionheart O'Brien at Mozilla Distilled]

This is a rebrand and reorientation for Mozilla:

"Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible. For over 25 years, we’ve championed the idea that the web should be for everyone, no matter who you are or where you’re from. Now, with a brand refresh, we’re looking ahead to the next 25 years (and beyond), building on our work and developing new tools to give more people the control to shape their online experiences."

As I've argued in the past, Mozilla is best placed to support other peoples' work. I wrote last month:

"I believe Mozilla is best placed to achieve this goal by explicitly fostering an ecosystem of open, accessible software that promotes user independence, privacy, and safety. It should be a facilitator, supporter, and convener through which projects that promote these values thrive."

This seems to be a part of this refocused mission (and a continuation of a statement of intention that dates from 2023). As Lindsey Lionheart O'Brien writes in this update:

"We back people and projects that move technology, the internet and AI in the right direction. In a time of privacy breaches, AI challenges and misinformation, this transformation is all about rallying people to take back control of their time, individual expression, privacy, community and sense of wonder."

Who can argue with that? We need help, and if Mozilla is serious about this mission, I'm all for it. We just need to hold them to it.

#Technology

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[Gabe Schneider in Nieman Lab's Predictions for Journalism, 2025]

This is important:

"It’s not so much a prediction as a necessity: We must abandon publications and platforms that fail to center our values in favor of newsrooms that actually care for us, our families, our neighbors, and our future.

We are living in a system where our information needs are increasingly being sidelined due to shrinking newsrooms. What we’re left with now is a false choice: Many of the newspapers and platforms that remain are run at the behest of people with a minimal understanding of and interest in the success of our day to day lives."

Because the news industry has experienced (a word that is carrying a lot of water here) failed business model after failed business model, it's come down to rich people sweeping in to save it because they either believe in its importance or want to be seen as good. That's as true in non-profit journalism as it is for publications like the Washington Post.

This call to action for a course correction away from information controlled by the ultra-wealthy is spot on, but it has a prerequisite of the money coming from somewhere else. Many foundations are also effectively the ultra-wealthy funneling money into publications.

So how can newsrooms be genuinely independent? It comes down to not putting your eggs in one basket, increasing individual support as much as possible, making revenue-generating partnerships where they make sense, and becoming profitable by any means necessary. The Guardian has done a pretty good job of this, and as much as The New York Times is ridiculed for it, its games strategy probably does actually make a ton of sense.

"Whether the future is stronger union-run newsrooms or news cooperatives or nonprofits or even significantly more government investment in news, I won’t prescribe."

The form of the organization matters, yes (I think unions, co-operatives, and nonprofits are all great, for the record), but this is in some ways a parallel conversation to who is actually going to pay for it all.

#Media

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[Mathew Ingram]

As Mathew Ingram points out, Australia's new social media law is a well-intentioned error.

He quotes an Australian human rights commission dissent which points out that:

"For children in marginalised, remote, or vulnerable situations, social media offers a lifeline. It connects children with disability to peers, resources, and communities they may not otherwise access. It helps LGBTQIA+ youth find acceptance and solidarity. It can improve access to healthcare, particularly for children seeking mental health support."

This and: the harms may be overstated. Is social media leading teens to harm, or is it giving vulnerable teens a voice? The answer may be more complicated than some of the advocates who led to the ban might believe.

Other experts agree that the risks may outweigh the benefits, isolating lonely kids from help and community that they might otherwise receive. While well-intentioned, that seems like a bad thing to do.

#Technology

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[Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic]

This older interview with Matthew Desmond is doing the rounds again, and I discovered it for the first time. If you haven't read his books Evicted, and Poverty, by America, you owe it to yourself to do that. They're revealing, important works that shed light on the lived experience of many, many Americans.

On why American poverty is different, Desmond says:

"It’s different because it’s so unnecessary. We have so many resources. Our tolerance for poverty is very high, much higher than it is in other parts of the developed world. I don’t know if it’s a belief, a cliché, or a myth. You see a homeless person in Los Angeles; an American says, What did that person do? You see a homeless person in France; a French person says, What did the state do? How did the state fail them?"

It's only half-baffling to me why America has such bad social infrastructure. As Desmond points out here, social programs do work, but in America they address the symptoms and not the root cause. That's because the root cause is endemic to the entire American economic system.

"Half of us are invested in the stock market. Many times, we see our savings going up and up and up when someone’s pay is going down and down and down. Those two things are related. Or think about the housing crisis: Many times, it’s not just corporate landowners who are benefiting from high rents. It’s homeowners whose housing values are propped up and kept high by a scarcity of housing that they contribute to."

To solve poverty - which is something we absolutely must do - we have to change more than many people are comfortable with. You often hear complaints about "socialism" that are nothing of the sort - they're just the same kinds of social programs that every other developed nation has. But here they're weaponized as some kind of anti-democratic force rather than a democratic force that enhances the lives of huge swathes of the population.

The whole interview, as with Desmond's books, is worth reading: he's unflinchingly direct about what we need to do. I've personally given up hope that America will do these things. And that, quite frankly, cements other countries as far better places for most people to live.

#Society

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[Wes Davis at The Verge]

Threads added a little more fediverse support:

"While fediverse posts won’t show in feeds, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says their profile and posts do appear on Threads, and you have the option to get notifications when they publish. That’s something, at least."

This is pretty cool, but there's still a long way to go before Threads has full fediverse integration. When I tested it, I could mention my Mastodon profile in a post (when I published it using the web interface), and then subsequently could follow the generated link in the post to follow my Mastodon account in Threads.

What it won't do is show you fediverse content in the main feed. Apparently it will notify you when the fediverse profiles you subscribe to post new content, which I haven't had an opportunity to test yet; I can imagine that getting annoying if someone I subscribe to posts frequently.

A test post from my Mastodon account that referenced my Threads account, but wasn't in response to a Threads post, didn't generate a notification on Threads. I imagine there's a lot to think through with these kinds of interactions.

Clearly it's very early days - as you can see in the linked post, embedded Threads posts don't render fediverse handles properly, for example - but it's still exciting to see this kind of progress on genuine interoperability. It's the kind of thing internet services should have been doing at scale decades ago - but the second best time is now.

#Fediverse

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[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

This is good to see:

"The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced sweeping action against some of the most important companies in the location data industry on Tuesday, including those that power surveillance tools used by a wide spread of U.S. law enforcement agencies and demanding they delete data related to certain sensitive areas like health clinics and places of worship."

Gravy and its subsidiary Venntel are two of the largest companies used to sell location information to law enforcement. The FTC is not banning the practice outright - but it's requiring that information relating to sensitive locations is removed. That includes "medical facilities, religious organizations, correctional facilities, labor union offices, schools and childcare facilities, domestic abuse and homeless support centers, shelters for refugee or immigrant populations, and military installations."

Of course, many other locations not covered by this ban are also sensitive, depending on context, and it would be far better to not sell this information at all. It's also highly likely that other service providers are selling this information under the radar.

Still, it's a start.

#Technology

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[Sam Biddle at The Intercept]

In the face of Trump's promise to conduct mass deportations, The Intercept set out to find out who in tech would be collaborators:

"To see whether corporate America will support Trump’s promised anti-immigrant operation, The Intercept reached out to data and technology companies that hold immense quantities of personal information or sell analytic software useful to an agency like ICE. The list includes obscure data brokers that glean intimate personal details from advertising streams, mainstream cellular phone providers, household-name social networks, predictive policing firms, and more."

Only four companies responded. Of those, two said they would; one said they would not; and the other (Thomson Reuters Clear) hedged with a dodgy answer that suggests the door is open.

#Technology

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[Joel Gascoigne]

I always appreciate Joel's updates.

"Early on, my dream was just to create a tool that made it easy to Tweet consistently, build it for myself and others, and make enough money to cover my living expenses and go full-time on it. The number for me to be able to work on it full-time was £1,200 per month, and that felt almost out of reach in the beginning. Today, Buffer generates $1.65 million per month, serves 59,000 customers, and enables fulfilling work for 72 people."

It's a tool I personally pay for and use every day (although it runs behind the scenes for me, as part of automations I've set up for myself). But even before then, Joel's build in public approach felt meaningful - it resonated as a way I wanted to work and do business, too.

Although there are inevitably sensitive topics that I'm sure Joel hasn't been able to talk about, I've been impressed with this transparency, which has held through good times and bad. It's a model to learn from, and one that also leads to longevity:

"When I really stop to take a step back, I feel very lucky that I've been able to do this for fourteen years. It's a long time in any sense. In tech and social media it feels like almost a lifetime already."

It is. And I love it. Kudos.

#Technology

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[Ricardo Mendes]

Ricardo argues that Twitter's sale to Elon Musk was one major factor that led to the rise of extremism worldwide, and that it should never have been allowed:

The sale of Twitter to Musk should never have been allowed to proceed without serious scrutiny, oversight, or regulation. It handed control of a vital part of the global information ecosystem to a tech mogul whose priorities are clearly out of step with the principles of democracy. The risks were evident from the outset: toxicity, polarization, disinformation, and the undermining of democratic institutions. This is yet another example of how democracies are left vulnerable to the whims of billionaires whose agendas often run counter to the public good."

I have questions about how media ownership rules (for broadcast, newspapers, etc) could be adapted for our monopoly-first internet world. Musk didn't own any other media properties, so he couldn't have been restricted on those grounds, but there's something about the way he intentionally turned the dial to favor conservative speech that feels like it should have been illegal on a platform over a certain size.

Probably, as Ricardo notes, this comes down to anti-trust: no platform with a single owner should be allowed to be this big and this influential to begin with. I'd love to see a world where we keep networks (and services) small and manageable in order to dilute the influence any one person can have over our discourse and our elections. This seems to be a lesson we need to learn again and again - and, of course, there are plenty of forces that are against exactly this from happening, because they're trying to achieve exactly this level of power, influence, and financial value.

I don't know what the solution is, but I'm excited about the growth of Mastodon and Bluesky for this reason. Enough is enough, please.

#Democracy

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[Gita Jackson at Aftermath]

I love a good treatise in favor of the indie web:

"Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites."

Almost every single advance in my career, and many of the good things that have happened in my personal life, have come from writing on my own website over the years. It's both liberating and empowering to have your own platform - and anyone can build one.

And this is also true:

"“We were already long overdue for a return to websites we control, rather than feeds manipulated by tech oligarchs,” Molly White from Web3 Is Going Great! told me. “Now that they’ve made it clear how eager they are to help usher in authoritarianism, I think it will only become more painfully clear how important sovereign websites are to protecting information and free expression.”"

Want to start blogging? I made you a guide. Want to put up a website of any kind but don't know where to start? Show up at a Homebrew Website Club and say hello. There are so many ways to start, and so many ways to be online. Go get started.

#Indieweb

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[Tyler Fisher]

Tyler Fisher has built a Nuzzel-like service for Bluesky:

"Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most popular links in your network. (Yes, a little like Nuzzel.)"

It's a personal project for now but there's more to come:

"I built Sill as a passion project, but I'd also like to keep it sustainable, which means making plans for revenue. While I am committed to always keeping the basic Sill web client free, once we exit the public beta period (likely early next year), I plan to launch some paid plans for Sill with additional features."

I've been using it for a while and have found it to be quite useful. If you're a Bluesky user, you can sign up at Sill.social.

#Technology

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[Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg at ProPublica]

Important resentments coming to the surface here:

"Her anger is largely directed at President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for failing to produce meaningful reforms to the immigration system that could benefit people like her. In our reporting on the new effects of immigration, ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter."

The issue is not so much with asylum seekers as such - it's that asylum makers could make progress while immigration reforms that could help people who were already here stalled. These resentments mirror other complaints about the struggles of working class people who saw other groups receive what they perceived as preferential treatment.

What's particularly sad is the idea that Trump will help immigrants (or working people) in any meaningful way. He's been very clear that he wants to conduct unprecedented mass deportations - not just for criminals, but potentially for tens of millions of people.

"But the Democrats “promised and they never delivered,” Garza Castillo said. “They didn’t normalize the status of the people who were already here, but instead they let in many migrants who didn’t come in the correct way.” He believes asylum-seekers should have to wait outside the country like he did."

And of course, the challenge is that these reforms were blocked by Republicans - it's not that Democrats didn't want them (although it must be said that Democrats have not done a stellar job of backing the kinds of grassroots reforms that are really needed). There's a whole base of people out there who simply don't like immigrants. I find that point of view repellant - but it's prevalent, and it doesn't seem to be going away soon. Certainly not over the next four years.

#Democracy

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[Brian Stelter at CNN]

CNN's Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter reports that multiple very wealthy individuals, including Elon Musk, have enquired about buying MSNBC:

"I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire with liberal bonafides has already reached out to acquaintances at MSNBC to express interest in buying the cable channel. The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors."

The channel is not, as far as anyone knows, up for sale. Instead, it's being spun out of Comcast into a new media entity, SpinCo, whose name has a double meaning that is probably unintentional.

I don't think a media landscape where each outlet is owned by a different billionaire with their own individual interests is healthy for anyone. Hopefully we can divest from this kind of media ownership structure. I'd rather see a more fragmented landscape with lots of smaller outlets and a greater presence of non-profit organizations.

I'm not a cable news viewer myself - it all just feels like it's screaming at me - but I can't imagine much worse than Musk or someone aligned with him gaining ownership of a station alongside Twitter / X. It's not like the government is going to stop such a move over the next four years, so let's just hope it doesn't come to pass.

#Media

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[Wes Davis at The Verge]

Interesting announcement from the European Commission:

"The European Union says Twitter alternative Bluesky violates the EU Digital Services Act rules around information disclosure, reports Reuters. But since Bluesky isn’t yet big enough to be considered a “very large online platform” under the DSA, the regulator says it can’t regulate Bluesky the way it does X or Threads."

All platforms doing business in the EU need to have a dedicated page on their website that enumerates how many users they have in the EU. Bluesky isn't big enough for the DSA to actually be enforceable yet, but this raises interesting questions about how they would do this - or how any decentralized system would go about this. Will Bluesky need to start tracking location, or even KYC information? That doesn't seem desirable.

Whereas Bluesky's architecture lends itself to a few big players, led by the Bluesky Social corporation, Mastodon is made up of many, much smaller communities. These individually will never be big enough to be regulated under the DSA. If that model becomes predominant, will it in turn trigger DSA changes that take the fediverse into account? Or I wonder if there can be another path forward where a platform just has to demonstrate that it meets EU data standards for all users, and then doesn't need to track them?

#Technology

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[Mike Masnick at MSNBC]

As Mike Masnick points out here, the hypocrisy from Elon Musk about collusion between tech and government is staggering:

"Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and ... crickets. The silence is deafening."

There never was an anti-conservative bias on social media - but now there's active collusion between the owner of X and the Trump administration, to the extent that he's actually got a formal role in it. X is a clear threat to democratic values; further to that, it's an obvious warning against any centralized social media site of its magnitude. No one person should have control over how so many people learn from the world and communicate with each other. And yet, here we are.

#Democracy

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[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

Christine Lemmer-Webber has written a superb post that sets out to ask how decentralized Bluesky is but goes far deeper into the different models at play in decentralized social networking. It's required reading for anyone who cares about the space.

"What many users fleeing X-Twitter right now care about is a replacement for Twitter. For that matter, if you're coming from Twitter, whether or not Bluesky is truly decentralized, it certainly seems more decentralized than Twitter, the same way that Twitter may seem more decentralized than cable news. Things are sometimes more decentralized in degrees, and I certainly think the fediverse could be more decentralized than it is. (More, again, on this later.) But in all ways related to the distribution of power, Bluesky's technology is notably much less distributed than existing and prominent decentralized technology in deployment today."

There are few people more qualified to go into the nuts and bolts than Christine, and I really appreciate this perspective. The incremental nature of the improvements here doesn't mean that they're bad - and, indeed, Bluesky has done so well at curating a thriving community that the relative lack of decentralization compared to Mastodon doesn't matter to most users. Social networking is not about the technology; it's about the people. If it wasn't, we'd call the space subscription protocols or some other term that prioritizes the technology interactions. (And what a boring space that would be.)

Additionally: "the organization is a future adversary" is a wonderful rallying cry for anyone trying to build a platform that is free from lock-in and seeks to be a net positive for society. If you assume that some future state version of you or your organization will go bad, you're far more likely to put measures into place that help the work you're doing exist without you. I think that's both noble and wise.

As is, for the record, Bluesky's attempts to give itself enough runway to operate with. I fear that we may see challenges with Mastodon over the next year that relate to its low budget - unless it can pull something together to put it on more stable ground.

Anyway, this piece is fantastic, and I recommend everyone who cares about the state of decentralized social networking read it and its references.

#Fediverse

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[Annalee Newitz at The Believer]

Boots Riley is a national treasure. I loved this interview with him in The Believer:

"BLVR: Do you think that all expression is propaganda?

BR: The word propaganda got popularized in different ways at different times. But our generation knows it as a derogatory word for what other countries do. However, in the 1980s, if you were to call Red Dawn—which was my favorite movie at the time—propaganda, people would have been like, Oh, you’re crazy. That’s just freethinking.

[...] BR: Yeah. We think anything could happen because it’s in this other reality. You need some connections to what is happening on our world for people to question it as they’re watching. When it’s in space, you have the possibility of saying, OK, cool, a rebellion seems natural. I want to make movies where people don’t just theoretically agree to rebel if the moment is right. I want them to look at where they are right now and ask themselves whether they agree."

The full interview is worth your time.

#Culture

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