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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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Decentralised social media ‘increases citizen empowerment’, says Oxford study

[Oxford Martin School]

The Oxford Martin School is a multidisciplinary research institution at the University of Oxford focused on tackling global challenges and shaping a sustainable future through innovation and collaboration. It ran a study on the societal implications of decentralized social media and found that "such platforms offer potential for increased citizen empowerment in this digital domain."

The lead author of the paper, Zhilin Zhang, noted that:

‘Decentralised social media platforms represent a shift towards user autonomy, where individuals can engage in a safer and more inclusive digital space without the constraints and biases imposed by traditional, centralised, algorithm-driven networks.

[...] Decentralised social media is more than just a technical shift; it's a step toward restoring autonomy and trust in our digital lives, empowering individuals and communities to connect without compromising their values or privacy.’

While the paper was undertaken under the auspices of the Martin School, its authors are affiliated with Oxford, University College London, and Stanford University: a true collaboration between centers of excellence with respect to the intersection of computing and society.

There's (I think) an obvious follow-on, which is that public interest funders should consider how they might support non-profit decentralized social media efforts, and continue to investigate their societal impacts. Which fund or foundation will step up first?

[Link]

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Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, says US justice department

[Dan Milmo at The Guardian]

The Department of Justice has filed its proposed remedies to Google's illegal monopoly over search services:

"The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market; a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work."

The court also wants everyone to have a way to block their content from being used as AI training data - and for the search index itself to be opened up.

The judge will decide next year. I have to assume there will be intense negotiations about which remedies actually get implemented - and I don't hold out much hope for strong enforcement under the Trump administration (particularly one where Elon Musk and JD Vance are participants). But it's a hint of what strong, capable antitrust enforcement could look like.

[Link]

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Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025

[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

Changes to financial aid at MIT:

"Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold."

If your family makes less than $100,000 a year, you also get housing, dining, and fees included, as well as an allowance for books.

I was a part of the final year of students to attend university tuition-free in the UK, and it made a huge difference to me. I would also have met this bar for having all costs covered - which will give the students who qualify an enormous head start. May more universities follow this lead.

[Link]

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The Right Triumphed Over Social Media and Helped Elect Trump

[Julia Angwin at The New York Times]

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Julia Angwin makes a strong argument for the open social web:

"If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.

We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (a.k.a. journalists) and by finding new ways to reach audiences beyond the grip of social media algorithms that are designed to promote outrageous content rather than sober facts. There is also a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms."

Julia goes on to describe the fediverse and how it's a key part of the solution. I particular, it's a way for all of us to seize control of our social media environment from platforms that are not acting in any of our interests.

[Link]

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How Rappler Is Building Its Own Communities to Counter AI and Big Tech

[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 news distribution outlet, and promises to pave the way for a “shared reality” — a call Ressa has been making to counter “the cascading failures of a corrupted public information ecosystem.”"

This is both incredibly cool and makes a ton of sense. It's the first time I've seen a newsroom build decentralized communities in the wild - and it's doubly cool that it's end-to-end encrypted. For CEO Maria Ressa, whose work has been beset by endless legal challenges in the Philippines, that last feature is particularly vital. But it all helps the newsroom evade censorship and avoid serving up its content for AI vendors to train on.

This quote from Ressa is something that every newsroom should learn from:

"We realized: there is no future for digital news unless we build our own tech, because there are only three ways a digital news site, or any digital site, gets traffic: direct, search, or social search.

[...] If you do not trust the tech, then you are always going to be at the mercy of surveillance for-profit tech companies that, frankly, don’t understand news or the value of journalism."

Exactly. I've banged this drum repeatedly, but it's a far more effective message from Ressa than me. This is the way. I truly hope that more will follow.

[Link]

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The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled

[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 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge."

Many services - Facebook included - were able to grow rapidly by hitching a ride on the growth of the internet itself. It looks like that rapid growth is coming to an end, which will have implications for consumer startups down the line.

It will also fundamentally change the way we relate to the internet. It used to be that the majority of internet users were new: correspondingly, there was a shine to just being connected that overshadowed shortcomings. But we're finding ourselves in an era where most of us have been able to sit with the internet for a while, sometimes for generations. That inevitably leads to a more nuanced relationship with it - and in turn, more detailed thoughts around regulation, policy, and the kinds of applications we want to be using in the long term. That cultural change will be interesting to watch, and likely societally positive - but it will come with some downsides for tech companies and platforms.

[Link]

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Don't call it a Substack.

[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 trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification."

Anil makes a point to highlight Substack's very problematic content policies: not only won't they ban someone who is using the platform to spout real hate, and have not removed most Nazis (not figurative Nazis, not right-wing voices, but literal flag-waving Nazis) from posting or earning money there.

They don't deserve to brand an open platform like email. And, in fact, nobody does. I appreciate Anil calling it out.

[Link]

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SF tech layoffs: Tales of post-pink-slip reinvention

[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 and art community in the Lower Haight, signed the lease for the space mere weeks after his last day of work in tech sales."

But then you find yourself asking: how does an artist community pay a lease on the Lower Haight? How do any of these folks live like this, even for a while, in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

And the answer is obvious, and a little sad, and perhaps not very empowering after all.

[Link]

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Inside UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage

[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 conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements."

The kicker here is the regulatory arbitrage: the practice has been ruled illegal in three states so far, but United simply undertakes its activities to a state where it's still legal. And because it doesn't answer to a single regulator, it's hard to impose stronger rules. In fact, more than 50 regulators each have jurisdiction over small slices of United's activities.

Effectively that makes it ungovernable:

"For United’s practices to be curbed, mental health advocates told ProPublica, every single jurisdiction in which it operates would have to successfully bring a case against it."

And:

"State regulators are supposed to be making sure private insurers that manage Medicaid plans are following the mental health parity laws. But this year, a federal audit found that they were failing to do so. “They are not well designed to essentially be watchdogs,” Lloyd said. “There’s very little accountability. Insurers can run roughshod over them.”"

In other words, the system needs to be radically overhauled if patients are going to receive adequate care. Will it be? Perhaps not soon.

[Link]

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Microsoft and Google incubated Chinese startups tied to police

[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 product/market fit in their regions - but it flies in the face of efforts they've made to appear to care about human rights.

I've been thinking about this a lot:

"Support for the companies through their startup incubator programs raises questions about the future of these initiatives, especially as Donald Trump prepares to take a second term as president."

We know that tech companies comply with authoritarian regimes when they try to do business there. There's a long history of that, from IBM colluding with the Nazis through Yahoo giving up the identities of bloggers to the Chinese authorities. What happens when their home turf becomes one? I don't think we can expect anything other than collaboration.

At this point, that's mostly speculation (beyond existing contracts with ICE, say) - but there's no doubt that surveillance and censorship have been used in China to squash dissent and commit human rights abuses. The tech companies who directly fund the infrastructure to do this are complicit, and should be publicly held as such.

[Link]

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Elon Musk algorithmically boosted Republican accounts on X from the moment he endorsed Trump

[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 for all accounts under examination. The date at which the structural break (spike) in engagement occurs coincides with Elon Musk’s formal endorsement of Donald Trump on 13th July 2024."

Despite big words about "free speech", Musk seems to be hell-bent on using the platform he acquired as a megaphone for his own interests, in the same way that Rupert Murdoch has used Fox News. To me, this points to the need for media regulation, and for anyone using the platform to approach it with caution. It's not an even playing field - not even close.

[Link]

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Escape from Twitter: The Future of Social Media Is Decentralized

2 min read

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, the author of the piece:

Social media is where people learn about the world: they discover the news, connect with each other, share the things they love and what's happening around them. We learn about art and love; about current events; and sometimes, about injustice and war — all at a global scale.

The owners of these spaces have the power to influence the global conversation to fit their business needs. Business model changes at every centralized social media company have made it harder to reach your community, but it goes beyond that. We recently saw the owner of X heavily weigh in on the US election. Previously, lapses at Facebook helped lead to genocide in Myanmar. These spaces are too important to be privately owned or to be subject to any single owner's needs or whims.

Decentralized social media divests ownership back to the people. Federated social networks are co-operatives of small communities, each with their own ownership and their own rules. Fully decentralized social networks allow users to make their own choices about how their content is moderated and presented to them. There is never a single owner who can unilaterally change the conversation; the platform is owned by everybody, just as the web itself is owned by everybody.

In answer to a question about my employer, ProPublica, its involvement in the Fediverse, and advice I might have for other publishers, I wrote:

ProPublica was already on the fediverse before I got there. That's down to Chris Morran, a member of the audience team. But, of course, I've been a strong advocate.

My main advice is: be everywhere your audience is. That does mean Mastodon and Bluesky - and we've had strong engagement on both. Use your own domain to validate your accounts and encourage your staff to join individually. By using cutting edge social media platforms and not being afraid to experiment early, ProPublica has so far bucked the downward trends that have been seen at other publications.

You can read the whole piece here.

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Biden Asked Microsoft to “Raise the Bar on Cybersecurity.” He May Have Helped Create an Illegal Monopoly.

[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 White House into its products.

Microsoft pledged to give $150M in technical services to the government to upgrade its security. But it wasn't altruistic:

"Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found. The proposal was, in fact, a calculated business maneuver designed to bring in billions of dollars in new revenue, box competitors out of lucrative government contracts and tighten the company’s grip on federal business."

The result may have created an illegal monopoly on government systems - and increased its susceptibility to future Microsoft flaws:

"Competition is not the only issue at stake. As Washington has deepened its relationship with Microsoft, congressional leaders have raised concerns about what they call a cybersecurity “monoculture” in the federal government. Some, like Wyden and Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, have blasted the Defense Department in particular for “doubling down on a failed strategy of increasing its dependence on Microsoft.”"

Monocultures are bad. It's hard to see how these kinds of toxic relationships don't get worse over the next four years.

[Link]

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What I want from Mozilla

Firefox on a phone

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 describes its mission as follows:

Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

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.

What should its next chapter look like in an internet increasingly dominated by corporate interests? Mozilla has the tools, the history, and the mission to reclaim its role as a pioneer of the open web. But doing so requires bold steps and a renewed focus on impact and innovation.

A mission focus on impact

Its success should be determined through impact. It should publish an impact report that shows how it has spread usable, private, open software worldwide, and solicit donations based on that activity. How has Mozilla prevented a monopoly of ad-driven surveillance technology in different markets? How has Mozilla helped people keep themselves safe online while seeking reproductive healthcare? How has Mozilla tech been used in authoritarian regions to support community well-being? It should clarify its roadmap for turning its mission into measurable outcomes, and then be unashamed about fundraising based on this directed mission. These focused impact reports would guide internal strategy, demonstrate accountability, and inspire public and donor trust.

Conversely, I believe Mozilla is not a media company. That means it should not attempt to be Consumer Reports; we don’t need it to navigate the world of AI for us or tell us what to buy for Christmas. Those are valuable pursuits, but Mozilla should leave them to existing technology media companies.

Impact-focused products that bring something new to the table

I believe this impact focus means that it should not seek to charge consumers for its products. If the mission is to make the internet open, accessible, private, and safe for individuals, as much friction towards achieving that goal should be removed as possible.

Many of Mozilla’s efforts already fall in line with this mission. The Firefox browser itself is an open, anti-surveillance alternative to corporate-driven browsers like Chrome, although it has fallen behind. This is in part because of anti-competitive activity from companies like Google, and in part because some of the most interesting innovations in the browser space have happened elsewhere: for example, Arc’s radical changes to browser user experience are really compelling, and should probably have been a Mozilla experiment.

Firefox Relay — which makes it easy to hide your email address when dealing with a third party — and Mozilla VPN are similarly in line at first glance. But because the VPN is little more than a wrapped Mullvad VPN, with revenue splitting between the two organizations, it isn’t really adding anything new. In a similar vein, Relay is very similar to DuckDuckGo’s email protection, among others. And why is one branded as Firefox and one as Mozilla? I’m sure the organization itself has an answer to this, but I couldn’t begin to tell you. (For what it’s worth, Mozilla seems to agree about the distraction and has scaled back support for these services.)

AI is a new, hot technology, but there’s nothing really new for Mozilla to do here, either. Many vendors are working on AI privacy, because that’s where a lot of the real revenue is: organizations with privacy needs that relate to sensitive information. There is no reason why Mozilla will be the best at creating these solutions, or differentiated in doing so.

Instead, to paraphrase Bill Clinton: it’s the web, stupid.

If Firefox is the biggest, most impactful software product in Mozilla’s arsenal today, how can it bring it back to prominence? One interesting route might be to use it as a way for third parties to explore the future of the browser. Mozilla can ship its own Firefox user experience, but what if it was incredibly simple for other people to also build wildly remixed browsers? Could Mozilla build unique features, like privacy layers tailored for vulnerable users, that competitors don’t offer?

Projects like Zen Browser already use core Firefox to build new experiences, but there’s a lot of coding involved, and they’re not discoverable from within Firefox itself. What if they were? One can imagine Firefox browsers optimized for everything from artists and activists to salespeople and investors, all available from a browser marketplace. The authors of those experiences would, by sharing their unique browser remixes, help spread the Firefox browser overall. While browsers like Chrome serve corporate goals around ads and analytics, the Mozilla mission gives Firefox a mandate to be a playground for innovation. It should be that. (And, yes, AI can play a supporting role here too.)

Note that while I think products should be made available to consumers free of charge, that doesn’t mean that Mozilla shouldn’t make money. For example, if there’s revenue in specific experiences for certain enterprise or partner use cases, why not explore that? Enterprise offerings could directly fund Mozilla’s open-source projects, reinforcing its mission.

Truly supporting a vibrant open web

While Mozilla’s products are key to advancing its mission, its influence can extend far beyond the browser. Mozilla has the potential to be a home base for similar projects that have the potential to create a more open, private, safe and self-directed web.

While that might mean support technically — developer resources, libraries, and guides — the most burning needs for user-centric open source projects are often unrelated to code. These include:

  • Experience design. Most open source projects lean towards coding as a core competency and aren’t able to provide the same polished user experiences as commercial software. Mozilla could bridge the gap by providing training and direct resources to elevate the design of user-centric open source projects, and to prepare these projects to work well with designers.
  • Legal help. Some projects need help with boilerplate documents like privacy policies, terms of service agreements, and contributor license agreements; others need assistance figuring out licensing; some will have more individual legal needs. It’s highly unlikely that most projects have the ability to produce this in-house, meaning they either leave themselves open to liabilities by not getting legal advice, or have to retain legal help at a high cost to themselves. Mozilla can help.
  • Policy assistance. Mozilla could help projects navigate complex regulatory environments, such as GDPR or CCPA compliance or lobbying for user-first policies globally.
  • Funding. Offering grants or investments for vetted open source projects could amplify Mozilla’s impact. It’s done this in the past a little bit through its defunct WebFWD accelerator and specific grants, and it’s doing a version of this today with its accelerator for advancing open source AI. There’s room for a wider scope here, and a little bit of a carrot-and-stick approach: for example, funding could be contingent on a project demonstrating its human-centered approach and being willing to work with designers.
  • Go-to-market strategy. Mozilla could provide guidance on launching and scaling projects, including identifying its first users, building community, and targeting messaging to them. Mozilla could host workshops on community engagement and messaging, enabling projects to scale effectively.
  • Regional impact. Different geographic communities have different needs. Regional accelerators could deliver it as a curriculum to local cohorts of open source teams. Regional accelerators could support open-source teams with tailored workshops and local mentorship, building capacity while addressing regional challenges.

A centralized Mozilla hub could provide templates, guides, and access to expert mentorship for projects to tackle legal, design, and policy hurdles. One-to-one help could be provided for the projects with the most potential to meaningfully fulfill Mozilla’s impact goals. And through it all, Mozilla can act as a connector: between the projects themselves, and to people and organizations in the tech industry who want to help mission-driven projects.

By creating a thriving ecosystem of user-centric open-source projects, Mozilla can ensure its mission outlasts individual products.

The dream of the nineties is alive in Mozilla

Mozilla has the tools, the history, and the mission to make the internet better for everyone. By fostering innovation and empowering communities, it can reclaim its role as a leader in the fight for an open web. Now is the time for bold action — and a strong focus on its mission.

That’s my dream for Mozilla. Now, what’s yours?

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