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"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement." The Verge and 404 Media will both support ActivityPub (a protocol, not a "plugin", as the article calls it) and plug
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"It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business." This piece ends on the most important point: nobody is coming to save
If I was a nefarious software company, here’s how I might be thinking: AI functionality tends to require that data is sent to a centralized service for processing. This is often data that is not being shared online in any other way that is easily available for analysis: existential
I’m enamored with Matt Webb’s unoffice hours: a way to chat with him about anything, without needing to email him first, for 30 minutes. As Matt says: I loved those open conversations over coffee in the Before Times. There’s an ostensible reason to connect, so you talk
In saving news, culture is key.
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"It’s a good time to be ProPublica. And it’s a good thing that we have ProPublica." Hey, that's where I work! The article continues: "Spreading its journalistic wealth has long been core to its mission. The latest iteration of that is the 50
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"The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants." There's a chicken and egg problem
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"The free version of Apple News is one of the biggest news platforms in the world. It’s the most widely used news application in the United States, the U.K., Canada, and Australia, and boasted over 125 million monthly users in 2020." And publications are becoming dependent
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"I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable." This is what we were trying for with Known: something that felt social but was fully under the user&
I adore the way ShareOpenly has been added to Tedium: You can see it for yourself on all its posts, including this great one about the decline of the ball mouse. Its founder, Ernie Smith, told me: “figured I had to have fun with it”.
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A lovely blog post by Jon Hicks on his process for creating the ShareOpenly icon. Characteristically, lots of care and attention went into this. I'm really glad you get to see the open hand icons, which we eventually decided against, but feel really warm and human. Jon'
I’ve been following Ani DiFranco for decades. I’ve seen her play live around twenty times: she always brings a kind of joyful, progressive energy that leaves me motivated and buzzing. She has a new album out, and it feels like a return to visceral, honest form. It’s