I love it. There’s a poll ongoing about whether folks would ban a Meta (Instagram/Facebook) instance and people are like “well, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”
I really have no words.
Is it learned helplessness? Stockholm Syndrome? Masochism? Something else?
Whenever you see the words “ads”, “cryptocurrency”, “blockchain”, “web 3”, or “AI”, just replace them with “farts” and you’ll know whether you want them or not.
“Can the fediverse survive without farts?”
Yes, perfectly well.
“Will farts replace people?”
I hope not.
“The European Commission embraces farts.”
That’s unfortunate.
“This new startup wants to improve your life with farts.”
My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it's a #BigTech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the #audiobook comes from me - because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:
Co-founder of Twitter joins new Mastodon board of directors. Right, so federating with Threads wasn’t a mistake. This is just the direction Mastodon is going. Oh, well. Another Mozilla emerges.
THREAD: Meta's massive Ethiopian failures are the subject of a multi billion dollar lawsuit.
An intro for my new fediverse family, highlighting how hate speech and misinformation on Facebook incited bloodshed, worsened ethnic tensions amidst a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands in the country between 2020-2022.
You know that #BigTech looses millions of $ through their deployed #AI systems, right? You can expect a much higher price for using their #LLMs in the future - be it your privacy or your money.
So instead of learning proompt engineering, why not do something more useful and invest your time into learning a new #ProgrammingLanguage:
#Rust - a language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software
#Haskell - a purely functional language that changes the way you think
Anyone over the age of 30 who has spend any time in tech-adjacent spaces still cheering for #BigTech "joining" the #Fediverse is fucking deluding themselves. We've been through so many cycles of this shit over the past twenty years, how some people can still trust #facebook to do anything remotely ethical is beyond me.
They're not here to join, they're here to destroy. This is just the most cost-effective, PR-friendly way of doing it.
This week on my podcast, I read my recent @medium column, "Ideas Lying Around: Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this," which I describe a #TheoryOfChange for unrigging markets, addressing the climate emergency, building worker power and fixing the imbalance between news publishers and #BigTech:
“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”
Featured speaker this time was Euro Member of Parliament @kimvsparrentak who passionately spoke on the need for a more free Internet detached from #bigTech and more focussed on #Democracy and real #Social interaction.
When confronted with her presence on X and Insta, and the lack of active presence here on the #Fediverse we promised to help her.
Please help us get a decent follower-base here and follow her account right now, before she even gets a chance to get more active. A follower base of more than a 1000 people will surely help her convince her party members to spend time and money on a real presence here.