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WordPress parent company must stop blocking WP Engine, judge rules

[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.

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How Wall Street Billionaires Avoid Paying Medicare Taxes

[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.

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My most controversial opinion is that they should reboot Red Dwarf

3 min read

Okay, I know, but hear me out.

If you haven’t encountered it, Red Dwarf was an 80s / 90s science fiction comedy that has definitely aged interestingly, but still has a solid fanbase. Lister, a low-ranking engineer on the mining spaceship Red Dwarf is put into stasis as punishment for smuggling his pregnant cat aboard. In the meantime, a radiation leak kills everyone else on board, and the ship’s computer, Holly, keeps him in suspended animation until the radiation dies down. When Lister is eventually revived, he discovers that the computer is senile, the cat has led to a single, highly evolved but self-absorbed descendent, and everyone is dead. To his horror, his smarmy, overbearing, deeply insecure supervisor — who caused the leak to begin with — is resurrected as a hologram. Now lost in deep space, the rest of the series loosely revolves around finding their way back to Earth.

So, look. Some of the jokes are maybe a little out of date, and even the creators were a bit embarrassed by the first season. (It really comes into its own from Red Dwarf III onwards.) But the concept is really solid. It’s a different kind of story: if you squint a bit, it shares DNA with Alien, in the sense that it’s about the lowest-ranking member of a future crew (something that’s still really rare in commercial science fiction) whose life is subjected to the whims of corporate decision-making far above him. There are also parallels that indicate the need: at the time, Red Dwarf was an antidote to more earnest genre shows like Blake’s Seven and my beloved Doctor Who. A similar positioning has worked pretty well for Deadpool, which followed a long string of superhero movies. So, like, I guess what I’m saying is, an update could work.

Okay, so they’re actually still making the show, as well as a prequel. My controversial opinion is that the existing format needs to be radically updated, and just making more of the same show that they were making in the eighties isn’t quite right. Get some fresh creators in there, make the jokes more pointed and a bit less banter-down-the-pub, re-cast it while paying tribute to the existing characters, and I think there’s something really special there.

That’s all. Please carry on. More tech commentary etc to follow.

It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere

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The “Bird and Baby” grows up: inside the new Eagle & Child

[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.

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Reclaim the internet: Mozilla’s rebrand for the next era of tech

[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.

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The publisher is always right

[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.

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Australia's ban on social media for teens is a mistake

[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.

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The War on Poverty Is Over. Rich People Won.

[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.

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Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration

[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.

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FTC Bans Location Data Company That Powers the Surveillance Ecosystem

[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.

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These Tech Firms Won’t Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants

[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.

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My OKRs for 2025

2025

It’s December, somehow; the tail end of a stressful year, but also the precursor to another one that (and I’m sorry this isn’t the cheeriest prediction) somehow promises to be worse. Good times.

How do we propose to survive it?

Although I’m not a big resolutions guy, this year I think I need to set firm goals in order to get through it with intention. Sure, the primary goal (as always) is just to get through the year intact, but 2025 will also be foundational: a year where how we show up and manifest our presence sets the groundwork for everything that comes beyond. The world is changing, whether we like it or not: more Trump, more war, more division, more climate change. How we react to that, and how we choose to conduct our life, really matters.

Lists of New Year’s resolutions never really cut to the “why”: sure, you want to get fit, but where does that really get you? What’s your underlying purpose: the mission that will keep you on track? Why does any of it matter at all?

This is maybe the most LinkedIn idea ever, and maybe it’s because when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I’ve found myself thinking that, rather than resolutions, 2025 needs OKRs.

Objectives and Key Results are a management tool that was originally created by Andy Grove at Intel, but is now used in almost every tech company in almost every scenario. Here, you set a handful of top-level objectives, and then list some time-limited, measurable results for each one that will indicate that you’re on your path to achieving them. In an era where it’s going to be important to stick to our values and make progress on our goals as human beings in the face of increasing adverse pressure, I think figuring out what we need to do in order to make progress is going to be a helpful tool.

Remembering that OKRs have mostly been a tool for work, here’s an example objective with key results from Asana:

‌Objective: Become the market leader in cloud-based project management software.

Key results:

  1. Increase market share from 15% to 30% by the end of the fiscal year.
  2. Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 60+ by the end of Q3.
  3. Launch three new product features per quarter based on user feedback and usage data.
  4. Increase the free-to-paid conversion rate from 5% to 15% by the end of Q4.

In a corporate setting, this is pretty straightforward. Each objective should tie into a strategy that brings you closer to the vision for the world that your team is trying to create, which in turn is in service of a mission that defines why you exist in the world. So if you’re setting OKRs for a quarter, the hope is that each one will get you a little bit closer to creating the world you’ve set out to make, in service of that mission. If they don’t, they’re bad OKRs.

Clearly, I don’t want to set these sorts of corporate goals for my personal life; the real psycho move would be to send a Net Promoter Score survey to your friends and family. But I do think there’s value in thinking about, periodically, what your mission is (what is the purpose of your life?), your vision (what is the world that you seek to create?), your strategy and your objectives. And then figuring out what your measurable key results are that you actually want to achieve.

Is this approach a little bit over the line into management psychosis? Definitely. Could it still be useful? I think probably.

My mission is to work on and support things that make the world more equal and informed, while living a life rooted in creativity, inclusiveness, openness, and spontaneity, in opposition to competitiveness, aggression, tribalism, and conformity.

My vision is an aligned life where I and the people around me can truly be themselves, follow their passions, and do so in an environment of fairness and freedom, in an integrated community that is well-supported with transit, education, welfare, culture, and an internationalist outlook.

With those stated, without further ado, here are my OKRs for 2025:

Pivot from being a developer who writes to a writer who develops.

I’ve always identified as a developer who writes, but writing was my first love. In 2025, I want to realign my identity to reflect my actual priorities. Technology pays the bills, but writing feeds my soul — in 2025, I want to prioritize what genuinely drives me. Andy Weir and Ted Chiang, two writers who have made this leap, are inspirations to me.

This goal is about fostering a life rooted in creativity, and being true to my values and motivations.

Key results for 2025:

  1. Spend an hour a day writing fiction.
  2. Publish four short stories in publications where my work has never previously appeared.
  3. Finish the current novel.
  4. Finish a subsequent novel.
  5. Limit blogging to no more than twice a week to preserve time and energy for other writing.
  6. Read a minimum of two fiction novels a month.

Be an available father who intentionally expands our son’s horizons.

We have the world’s most incredible two year old. (If you also have a two year old, please don’t fight me on this. You know we all think our children are the most amazing.) I was very lucky to have parents who intentionally expanded my horizons in terms of breaking me out of a templated life: we lived in different countries, saw different ways of living, knew people from all over the world, and didn’t conform for conformity’s sake. Particularly in an era that seems to invite parochialism and a very narrow view of the world, I want to manifest the same thing for our son. I want his world to be expansive, inclusive, and far away from restrictive norms: a global outlook that values all people.

This goal is about openness and a global perspective, and prioritizing the life and prospects of our son.

Key results for 2025:

  1. Take him to at least one continent he has never previously visited and make a firm plan to take him to another.
  2. Take him to a museum or cultural event at least once per month.
  3. Do not spend time on devices (phone or laptop) around him.
  4. Read to him every night and intentionally pick stories from different cultures.

Strengthen my relationships with my friends and family.

I miss my friends. I miss my family. We are only as strong as our communities. Until the pandemic, I was pretty good about keeping up with people, but the onset of COVID-19 turned me into more of a recluse. (Moving across the country didn’t help.) I also had what I now think of as a breakdown in the year after my mother’s death — after a ten-year terminal illness which was the reason for my move to the US in the first place — and I made some decisions that I deeply regret.

This goal, at its heart, is about fostering a strong community.

Key results for 2025:

  1. Make real apologies to family members I hurt or disappointed during the year after my mother’s death.
  2. Reconnect with at least five friends I’ve lost touch with by scheduling regular check-ins (calls, video chats, or in-person meetups).
  3. Plan at least two reunions with friends or extended family during the year.
  4. Meet up with at least one friend in person per month.
  5. Have one 1:1 meal or coffee with my dad every week.
  6. Continue working in couples therapy to build a relationship founded on mutual understanding and emotional intimacy.

Live longer.

Somewhere around 2016, I let a combination of malaise and depression overtake me. I gained weight, I got sleepy, and I became less fit. I used to walk everywhere, and I stopped.

If this continues, I will die earlier than I want to. I don’t want to die. I want to live — particularly as an older parent of a toddler. More than anything, this goal is about being present for our son.

Key results for 2025:

  1. Do one vigorous workout exercise per day, every day, except when sick or traveling.
  2. Run at least one 5K per week starting mid-year.
  3. Walk to all destinations if walking is an option in the time available, regardless of the weather.
  4. Make a meaningful positive diet change, for example by becoming pescatarian and cutting out all processed food.
  5. Eat out no more than once per month, except when traveling.
  6. Don’t eat fast food, except when it’s genuinely the only option (for example, on a road trip).

Build in more freedom.

It’s easy to get caught up in a trap of your own making. The need to make more money often leads to less available time and a focus on things other than what you wanted the money to be able to do in the first place. It’s better to be free and unconstrained than to be wealthy and living a cookie-cutter life.

Similarly, it’s better to be true to yourself and your values than to bite your tongue — particularly in this upcoming era.

This goal is fundamentally about non-conformity and being true to your values: two things that are really important to me.

Key results for 2025:

  1. Lower monthly living costs by at least 25%.
  2. Increase available daily free time by 2 hours.
  3. Do not mince words with regards to anti-fascism, internationalism, fairness, or other core values.
  4. Travel for personal reasons (including just for fun!) at least once a quarter.

Do meaningful work with the potential to make the world more equal and informed.

I want to work on projects — whether by building or supporting them — that have the potential to make the world more equal and informed. I’ve found a home doing that in service of meaningful journalism that helps to strengthen democracy.

In order for this work to be meaningful to me, it has to have a strong, aligned mission, but I also need to do it with autonomy, trust, and the ability to set strategy and standards. I want to call the shots for my own work.

Key results for 2025:

  1. Ship a product with the potential to make the world more informed and equal, leveraging a technology strategy that reflects my mission, which I have defined and implemented.
  2. Advise and support two projects aligned with this mission, ensuring they make meaningful progress and ship to their intended audiences.
  3. Define and implement at least two core technology policies at my employer.
  4. Open source at least two core technology policies for any organization to use and build on.

These OKRs are my guide for 2025: a year where I want to live more intentionally, aligned with my values, and present for the things that truly matter. They’re not about perfection but about progress and purpose.

They’re also not set in stone: things happen. Life changes. They’re intended to be a North Star that guides me rather than a scaffold that constrains me. If I need to adjust them, I will. But I think it’s more useful to have these goals in mind than none at all.

These are mine. How about you? If you’re inclined to write your own OKRs for 2025, I’d love to read them.

 

Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

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Fourteen years

[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.

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The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price.

[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.

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Thanksgiving is about belonging

Fall pumpkins

I think Thanksgiving is mostly about belonging.

I was raised in a culture other than that of either of my parents or my nationality: what they call a Third Culture Kid. With that sort of profile, belonging is hard to come by. As a child, I sounded British but wasn’t; I didn’t get the overt cultural references and didn’t share the unspoken common understandings that mark someone out as being from the same tribe. I was indelibly other, and felt it, and knew it.

I’m thankful for my family for providing that sense of belonging: a space in my life that felt safe and was rich with those shared understandings. In the same way that some people are proud of the region they’re from or their religion or some other demarcation of sameness, I’m endlessly proud of my mother, my father, my sister, who each of them were and are as people, and who we all have been together. It’s not perfect or spotless — I’ve sometimes disappointed them in all sorts of ways, both small and catastrophic — but it’s ours. I’m lucky. Not everyone has that sense of belonging; that safety. A feeling of home, not from a place or things or nationality, but from people.

I used to throw Thanksgiving dinners when I lived in Edinburgh. I think people were grateful for the meal, if a bit nonplussed about why I was holding such a big dinner party on a Thursday. I found a sense of temporary community there, over homemade tortillas sprawled over the kitchen table of our top-floor tenement flat, but never quite belonging.

In my life, I’ve rarely been able to recreate that sense of belonging outside of our unit, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I’ve learned that I mostly find a shared sense of belonging with people who also share some degree of outsiderness, whose identities don’t quite fit into cookie-cutter homogeneity.

These days, of course, I have a new belonging: to a tiny child for whom I’m safety, who curls up into my arms and sleeps, who I put food on the table for, and who comes to me for kisses when he’s hurt or feeling sad. I see my new role as extending my family forward, and helping to give him all the warmth, safety, and, yes, non-conformity I got from mine.

Thanksgiving, then, for me, is about families, whether born or adoptive or found, and gratitude for the people who create safety and warmth. I’m thankful for mine: the one I’m linked to by blood, and the people who I’ve been lucky enough to call home, some of whom are overlapping.

This Thanksgiving I’m also thankful for the people who create that sense of belonging in the world: who seek to create bonds and build community, to try and forge belonging for everyone, rather than withdraw and isolate.

I’m thankful for the people who have to work so hard just to be themselves, to fight for their own identities, and for the people who see them as they are, not through the lens of outdated societal norms or inherited expectations. I’m thankful for people who want to include, and see inclusivity as a guiding value, not as a pejorative.

I’m thankful for the people who see suffering in places like Gaza and think, how can everyone belong and be safe, and not, these people had it coming, or this has nothing to do with me. I’m thankful for the people who see war and want it to end, not silently, but with their voices, on the streets.

I’m thankful for people who see the suffering of working people and choose to stand up for their rights and their well-being; for unions, for higher minimum wages, for protections, for laws and movements that give everybody a voice and a good life. I’m thankful for people who think, how can we improve and build a good life for everybody?

I’m thankful for the people who see every religion (and no religion) equally, and who push to ensure everybody has an equitable place.

I’m thankful for the people who see generational inequalities and want to right them, to halt cycles of harm so that future generations do not have to endure them.

I’m thankful for the people who see and act as if the world is one connected place, where every single person matters, regardless of where they are, what their background is, who they worship, or what their political leaders believe.

This Thanksgiving, I hold gratitude not only for my family and the belonging they’ve given me but also for those who strive to build a world where everyone can feel at home.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I hope you have belonging, and love, warmth, and safety.

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For Love of God, Make Your Own Website

[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.

[Link]

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Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web

Bluesky

Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, took a million Bluesky posts and turned them into a dataset expressly for training AI models:

“This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social media posting patterns, studying conversation structures and reply networks, research on social media content moderation, [and] natural language processing tasks using social media data,” the project page says. “Out of scope use” includes “building automated posting systems for Bluesky, creating fake or impersonated content, extracting personal information about users, [and] any purpose that violates Bluesky's Terms of Service.””

There was an outcry among users, who felt that they hadn’t consented to such an activity. The idea that a generative AI model could potentially be used to build new content based on users’ work without their participation, consent, or awareness was appalling.

Van Strien eventually saw that his act was a violation and subsequently removed the dataset, writing an apology in a Bluesky post:

I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo. While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake.

Which is true! Just because something can be done, that doesn’t mean it should be. It was a violation of community norms even if it wasn’t a legal violation.

Bluesky subsequently shared a statement with 404 Media and The Verge about its future intentions:

“Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself. Just as robots.txt files don't always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here. We'd like to find a way for Bluesky users to communicate to outside orgs/developers whether they consent to this and that outside orgs respect user consent, and we're actively discussing how to achieve this.”

It turns out a significant number of users moved away from X not because of the far-right rhetoric that’s become prevalent on the platform, but because they objected to their content being used to train AI models by the company. Many of them were aghast to discover that building a training dataset on Bluesky was even possible. This event has illustrated, in a very accessible way, the downside of an open, public, permissionless platform: the data is available to anyone.

There is a big difference in approaches here: on X, models are trained on platform data by the platform owner, for its own profit, whereas on Bluesky, the platform is trying to figure out how to surface user consent and does not, itself, participate in training a model. But the outcome on both may be similar, in that the end result is a generative model trained on user data, which someone other than the people who wrote the underlying posts may profit from.

The same is true on Mastodon, although gathering a central dataset of every Mastodon post is much harder because of the decentralized nature of the network. (There is one central Bluesky interface and API endpoint; Mastodon has thousands of interoperating community instances with no central access point or easy way to search the whole network.) And, of course, it’s true of the web itself. Despite being made of billions of independent websites, the web has been crawled for datasets many times, for example by Common Crawl, as well as the likes of Google and Microsoft, which have well-established crawler infrastructure for their search engines. Because website owners generally want their content to be found, they’ve generally allowed search engine bots to crawl their content; using those bots to gather information that could be used to build new content using generative models was a bait and switch that wiped away decades of built-up trust.

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data. Van Strien’s original act clearly showed the difference in culture between AI and open social web communities: on the former it’s commonplace to grab data if it can be read publicly (or even sometimes if it’s not), regardless of licensing or author consent, while on open social networks consent and authors’ rights are central community norms.

There are a few ways websites and web services can help prevent content they host from being swept up into training data for generative models. All of them require active participation from AI vendors: effectively they must opt in to doing the right thing.

  1. Block AI crawlers using robots.txt. A robots.txt file has long been used to direct web crawlers. It’s a handshake agreement at best: there’s no legal enforcement, and we know that AI developers and vendors have sometimes ignored it.
  2. Use Do Not Train. Spawning, a company led in part by Mat Dryhurst and the artist Holly Herndon, has established a Do Not Train registry that already contains 1.5B+ entries. The name was inspired by the Do Not Track standard to opt out of user tracking, which was established in 2009 but never widely adopted by advertisers (who had no incentive to do so). Despite those challenges, Do Not Train has been respected in several new models, including Stable Diffusion.
  3. Use ai.txt to dictate how data can be used. Spawning has also established ai.txt, an AI-specific version of robots.txt that dictates how content can be used in training data.
  4. Establish a new per-user standard for consent. All of the above work best on a per-site basis, but it’s hard for a platform to let a crawler know that some users consent to having their content being used as training data while others do not. Bluesky is likely evaluating how this might work on its platform; whatever is established there will almost certainly also work on other decentralized platforms like Mastodon. I imagine it might include on-page metadata and tags incorporated into the underlying AT Protocol data for each user and post.

I’m in favor of legislation to make these measures binding instead of opt-in. Without binding measures, vendors are free to prioritize profit over user rights, perpetuating a cycle of exploitation. The key here is user consent: I should be able to say whether my writing, photos, art, etc, can be used to train an AI model. If my content is valuable enough, I should have the right to sell a license to it for this (or any) purpose. Today, that is impossible, and vendors are arguing that broad collection of training data is acceptable under fair use rules.

This won’t stifle innovation, because plenty of content is available and many authors do consent to for their work to be used in training data. It doesn’t ban AI or prevent its underlying mechanisms from working. It simply gives authors a say in how their work is used.

By prioritizing user consent and accountability, we can create a web where innovation and respect for creators coexist, without stifling innovation or disallowing entire classes of technology. That’s the fundamental vision of an open social web: one where everyone has real authorial control over their content, but where new tools can be built without having to ask for permission or go through gatekeepers. We’re very close to realizing it, and these conversations are an important way to get there.

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Introducing Sill

[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.

[Link]

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Immigrants’ Resentment Over New Arrivals Helped Boost Trump’s Popularity With Latino Voters

[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.

[Link]

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Elon Musk floats buying MSNBC, but he’s not the only billionaire who may be interested

[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.

[Link]

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Bluesky is breaking the rules in the EU

[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?

[Link]

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With Trump alliance, Elon Musk became exactly what he vowed to expose

[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.

[Link]

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How decentralized is Bluesky really?

[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.

[Link]

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An Interview with Boots Riley

[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.

[Link]

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ProPublica is a big part of the future of news

In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin discusses my workplace, the journalism it undertakes, and why it's important (gift link). I lead technology, and while I sit on the business side of the operation, it's an absolute privilege to support these journalists.

This is on point:

“The impact is unmistakable. This year, ProPublica has averaged 11.8 million page views per month on- and off-platform (views on propublica.org and on aggregators such as Apple News and MSN). That represented a jump of 22 percent since 2022. It also just passed 200,000 followers on Instagram and has nearly 130,000 followers on YouTube.

It has partially filled the demand for local reporting that has resulted from the brutal realities of the newspaper industry’s consolidation. But it has also found relevance by being serious and focused, instead of giving way to many legacy media outlets’ impulse to lure back readers with games and frivolous lifestyle columns.

[…] I can only hope, for the sake of our democracy, that ProPublica will spawn imitators and provide competition to spur for-profits to be a better version of themselves.”

You can go read ProPublica here — its articles are all free to read and made available to republish under a Creative Commons license. If you have the means, you might also consider a donation.

ProPublica can also be followed on Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads.

Here’s the full Washington Post article.

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