Friday links: December 26, 2025

Every Friday, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

This is a sort of holiday edition: looking forward and looking back. Whatever you celebrate, whoever you're with, I hope you've had a lovely week, and I hope the next year brings good things.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

Alternative Christmas message

Every year in Britain, the ruling monarch broadcasts a Christmas message. For the last few years, that's been King Charles III, who used his to advocate for diversity; for most of my life it was Queen Elizabeth II.

But Britain is not exactly deferential to the Crown – irreverence is one of its defining characteristics, and one that I treasure dearly – so for the last 32 yeras, Channel 4 has maintained a tradition of counter-broadcasting an alternative message. Previous editions have included Edward Snowden, a deepfake of the Queen, and the father of Alan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian refugee who tragically drowned during a boat crossing from Turkey to Greece.

This year's is Jimmy Kimmel. The jokes didn't hold up for me (although I appreciate the inclusion of Jammy Dodgers in the set dressing), but the message does: this has been a good year for fascism, and freedom of expression is under threat.

Lies we tell ourselves

What struck me about Damon Kiesow’s summary of the myths journalism tells itself is how similar it is to the myths open source software projects tell themselves.

“Yes, our own claims are rhetorical (not technological) determinism. But the logic is the same: we know what is best for our communities, and “best” reliably aligns with our existing professional practices, interests, and profit motives. By doing so, we try to reframe long-term economic and cultural changes as questions of individual behavior. "Things would be better if only readers would act correctly.””

Things would be better if only readers would act correctly. Substitute users for readers and that would sound like so many open social web projects.

“What we really need is to teach high school students to be more discerning consumers of information.”

”We just need to educate users.”

No, we don’t. We need to educate ourselves about the people we hope to help: what do their lives look like, what are their needs, and what is actually important to them? If we’re in the business of being of service, we need to adjust ourselves to them, not the other way around.

But of course, that means getting to know them, and worse than that, putting our own assumptions to the test. When we have lofty ideals, learning that they don’t match what’s actually needed doesn’t feel good. It hurts our egos. But if we care about service, that’s what we need to do.

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Airbus wants to move its data outside US jurisdiction:

“I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective,” Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, told The Register. “We want to ensure this information remains under European control.”

The contract is worth upwards of €50 million, but the company doesn’t necessarily think it’ll actually find a provider. US cloud providers are susceptible to the US CLOUD Act that allows authorities to obtain data held on their infrastructure even if it’s physically located in the EU. EU-only providers, meanwhile, haven’t necessarily hit the scale or sophistication that a customer like Airbus demands.

That creates a really interesting opportunity: Airbus is doubtless not the only large European company with similar needs. There’s a proposal to bankroll the creation of this kind of infrastructure in the EU, with an estimated price of €300 billion. It probably won’t be ready in time for Airbus, but they’ve at least proven that the need is real rather than ideological. Who’s going to pick up the baton?

2026 open social web predictions

Dewey Digital founder Tim Chambers has spent a lot of time studying and digging into the open social web, including by creating the Twitter Migration Report. So his predictions are well-informed and worth paying attention to.

He’s split them up into safe, plausible, and risky bets. Each category checks out and makes sense. We’ll be able to follow along: Tim creates a scorecard at the end of the year (he just published the one for his 2025 predictions). But I think a lot of these are pretty bankable.

For example, I strongly agree with this:

“Fedify will power the federation layer for at least one mid-sized social platform (500K+ users) that adds ActivityPub support in 2026. The “build vs. buy” calculation for federation shifts decisively toward “just use Fedify.””

And while this one is in the “risky” category, I still have high hopes that it will happen. (I previously would have put it in the safe category, but now agree with the placement; things change.)

“A well-known digital-native media publication (10M+ monthly visitors) will federate via ActivityPub in 2026 and publicly share positive results. Whether through Ghost, WordPress, or custom implementation, this outlet will report that federated followers drove meaningful engagement — making the business case for federation legible to other publishers for the first time. By year end, at least two additional publications will announce federation plans, citing this pioneer as proof of concept.”

I appreciate the scrutiny and detail: if nothing else, this is a pretty great map of where to look for emerging development on the open social web. I’m excited to see where the movement goes over the next year.