Media
[Lucinda Jordaan at Global Investigative Journalism Network] I'd missed this story from back in July. Rappler is building its own end-to-end encrypted, decentralized communities on the Matrix protocol. "Built on the open source, secure, decentralized Matrix protocol, the app has the potential to become a global independent
Technology
[Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom at Rest of World] Mobile internet subscriber growth is significantly slowing globally: "From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to
Media
[Anil Dash] Anil Dash on Substack's attempt to brand "writing in a newsletter": "We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director
Culture
[Jillian D'Onfro at The San Francisco Standard] On one level, this piece about tech workers leaving the industry behind and doing something more culturally meaningful is quite nice: "Andrew Wasilewski, who managed to live “very frugally” on his layoff package while launching the Faight Collective, a music
Health
[Annie Waldman at ProPublica] UnitedHealth Group has been using an algorithm to determine whether patients have been receiving "too much" therapy and then cutting them off: "Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance
Technology
[Joanna Chiu and Viola Zhou at Rest of World] Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have, through their accelerators, supported startups that provide censorship and policing technologies in China. It's perhaps not a surprise that they've supported these endeavors - after all, startups look to find
Notable Links
[Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic] Elon Musk didn't just endorse Trump with his words - according to this pre-print research paper, he gave Republicans an algorithmic boost on X, too: "The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024, suggesting platform-level changes that influenced engagement metrics
This is a pretty great article about the decentralized social web, which quotes Christine Lemmer-Webber, Blaine Cook, and me. It’s in Polish, but if you don’t speak the language, the “translate” button on your browser works pretty well. Here are the full remarks I sent Michał “rysiek” Woźniak,
Technology
[Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke, at ProPublica] Security lapses in Microsoft's own products led to hacks that in turn pushed President Biden to ask for help from it and other tech companies to improve White House security. Microsoft saw it as an opportunity to lock the
Like many of you, I received a survey today with the title: “What is your dream for Mozilla?” I filled it in, but the potential for Mozilla is so expansive and critical to the future of the internet that I wanted to address my thoughts in greater depth here. Mozilla
Media
[Sara Fischer at Axios] "Beehiiv, a newsletter startup taking aim at Substack, says it's making a "multi-million dollar investment" to create a new "beehiiv Media Collective" of journalists on its platform." Beehiiv's new fund for independent journalists will give them
Fediverse
[Mathew Ingram at The Torment Nexus] Mathew wrestles with where Bluesky sits in the future of social media given its connections to venture capital and blockchain supporters: "I have no doubt that, as Cory says, Graber and the other founders of Bluesky are sincere in their desire to build
