Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Fediverse

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.

05 Dec 2024

Technology

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

03 Dec 2024

Technology

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

03 Dec 2024

My OKRs for 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

01 Dec 2024

Technology

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

01 Dec 2024

Notable links

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

30 Nov 2024

Thanksgiving is about belonging

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’

28 Nov 2024

Indieweb

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

27 Nov 2024

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

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

27 Nov 2024

Technology

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:

26 Nov 2024

Notable links

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

26 Nov 2024

Media

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

25 Nov 2024
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community.

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Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.