Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Fediverse
[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch] "Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesday announced it would be ending
Media
[Simon Willison] "Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos, this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read." It really is fascinating. It's also really badly written, which says a lot about the priorities MrBeast instills
Fediverse
[Media Economies Design Lab at University of Colorado Boulder] "The Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is launching a 5-month process of mentorship and peer-to-peer learning, empowering veteran community builders to adopt emerging open social networks." This seems like a wonderful initiative for the
Technology
[Matt Burgess at Wired] "Today, a group of six computer scientists are revealing a new attack against Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset where exposed eye-tracking data allowed them to decipher what people entered on the device’s virtual keyboard. The attack, dubbed GAZEploit and shared exclusively with
Culture
[David Allen Green at The Law and Policy Blog] "In essence: this endorsement is a masterpiece of practical written advocacy, and many law schools would do well to put it before their students." This is a fascinating breakdown of Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris: not
Media
[Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos at NiemanLab] "To survive, journalism must continue to embrace technology. But doing so should never cost newsrooms their independence. News organizations should prioritise building direct relationships with their audience to reduce reliance on third-party platforms. They should also stay informed about evolving regulations, and
Technology
[Lucas da Costa at Briefer] "Some people call our strategy "open-core" and that's technically right. Still, I'd rather say that we have two pieces of software: one that is open-source and another that is not. I think that's more honest because
Business
[Hunter Walk] "I asked some investor friends to share, as the title suggests, one thing they wished people better understood about venture capital. There were no ground rules other than to specify that ‘people’ could be founders, politicians, LPs, etc and that it would be default attributed but anonymous
Technology
[iA] "In a text editor, chapters are files. Organizing your files is work, but in a large text body it’s essential work. Your book or thesis will grow from it and get stronger as you clarify the structure. With iA Writer 7.2, structuring large writing projects has
Media
[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post] I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone. "What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a
Startups
[Paul Graham] "In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the
Fediverse
[Ghost] "It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond." This is a big