Angry Robot

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what’s next for Tumblr

WordPress maker Automattic bought Tumblr from Verizon for pocket change and I don’t usually get excited about corporate deals because they are usually either boring or depressing but this one I am very happy about. I don’t know if Tumblr will ever be an alternative to Facebook et al but Automattic is the best possible company to give it a shot.

Online Publisher Dependent Upon Facebook Shuts Down, Blaming Algorithm Change

How Facebook Is Killing Comedy

Dean Allen, R.I.P. – Om Malik

What a terrible loss. This site ran on Textpattern for quite some time and I found its grace almost as inspiring as the writing he posted to Textism.

One of the problems with climate change is getting people to realise it was anthropogenic – created by people. It’s the same problem with social networks – they are manmade. If they are not serving humanity, they can and should be changed.

Pretty sure this is the greatest video ever made

The Rowdy World of Rap’s New Underground

“SoundCloud rap” 😟

SoundCloud sinks as leaks say layoffs buy little time

Well that sucks.

What I Learned at Personal Branding School

I know it’s pointless to pine for a pre-Zuck world: That golden age when, if you wanted to feel inadequate and self-conscious and also thoroughly disgusted with yourself and with humankind generally, you had to get in your car and go to some party.

17776

Pretty amazing

Forgotify | Discover a previously unheard Spotify track

Pinboard Acquires Delicious

No way! One bookmarking service To Rule Them All. Nice work, Maciej!

How Congress dismantled federal Internet privacy rules

After lobbying from nice organizations like the major telecoms, advertisers, Facebook and Google, while everyone else was distracted by the Trump shitshow, Republicans gutted Obama-era laws preventing ISPs from selling your browsing history. Because clearly what the world needs is more creepy microtargeted psychometric manipulation

Micro.blog

Just to warn you that I’m gonna be experimenting with this micro.blog thing. The logic is articulated here. Basically, on the major social media platforms you don’t own your content, increasingly the platforms themselves act as gatekeepers, and they are selling your information to advertisers. It’s more in keeping with the traditions of the web to treat small social media posts like tweets as micro blog posts (hence the name of this effort), and ideally such content should live on one’s own blog.

That’s where it gets complicated.

So I’d rather keep these micro blog posts on this blog rather than starting a new one. I can have a different “post format” called “aside” that will look more like my current quick links than my normal posts. So far, so good. But it would make sense to cross-post these posts to twitter, right? And not duplicate efforts across two networks? Sure. But I have two twitter accounts, my personal one and the one for this blog, which parrots anything posted here. If I auto post from micro.blog to my personal twitter, which makes most sense to me, the net result will be people who follow both accounts will see things twice. I will try to figure some way around this, but bear with me.

TL,DR: I may break things here soon, sorry!

A question few are asking is whether the tools of mass surveillance and social control we spent the last decade building could have had anything to do with the debacle of the 2017 election, or whether destroying local journalism and making national journalism so dependent on [the tech industry’s] platforms was, in retrospect, a good idea.

Is It Time to Break Up Google?

Are tech giants like Google and Facebook monopolies?

Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?

Because your friends aren’t there. Same problem with almost every attempt to out-twitter twitter

Mastodon.social is an open-source Twitter competitor

Come, warm your hands by the burning carcass of app.net. (Sorry, was that cynical? I do hope it works but I think it’s not quite ready for its Verge article)