As usual, @mmasnick is spot on about why the recent bill to "sunset" Section 230 is one of the most harebrained things to come out of Congress recently.
just realized i've had the mollywhite.net domain for over 10 years(!!)
related sneak peek into an upcoming piece: i firmly believe that if you're going to spend money on one thing online it should be a domain, particularly as online identity gets more fragmented. as platforms come and go, you can always find me there.
@mwl@molly0xfff Yes! And, the beauty of it is that you still can use someone else's platform (MySpace back in the day, Substack or whatever today), but as long as you advertise a domain you own, you can just redirect it later.
Owning a domain is like the digital equivalent of a forwarding address that never expires. Nobody ever has to worry about which town you live in on any given month, because they'll always get to you no matter what.
“Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue”
“If Kevin Roose Was ChatGPT With A Spray-On Beard, Could Anyone Tell?
thank you to these new independent media companies like @404mediaco and Defector for giving us the headlines we deserve
@molly0xfff@404mediaco 404 is strong evidence that the problem with tech journalism for so many years was its reliance on catering to social media algorithms in exchange for views. Like, is it just me or does it seem like the quality of journalism is in an inverse relationship with the quality of Twitter? Once everyone was forced to stop pretending it was a town square, we started seeing much better media!
"it's all stored locally" is not a panacea for these alarming privacy-invading products!
what exactly is stored locally? what data is extracted from that local data and sent to the company's servers? is that local data being backed somewhere?
what additional risks are now being posed to people who share devices, whose devices might be accessed by others or compromised, or who might not realize these tools are running? what is the risk that the company might later change its decision on local storage?
I had such a great chat with @mike on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.
@molly0xfff@mike Watching/listening to this episode now. So far it is great. Molly, I had no idea about your reading lists! I'm so jealous I wish I had an archive like this on my site. Swoon.
@aburka@molly0xfff yeah. And most crucially, it'd provide a way for people to bring the blockchain back online once technological civilization is restored.
"In 2024, for the first time, it finally feels like we have a critical mass of people and platforms who are interested in rewilding the internet to bring back what we lost, and create something new. ... There's a palpable feeling that this just might be the year of the open web."
@molly0xfff In my case, it's not hope but defiance. I don't believe my website counts for much, or that independent operators alone can break the spell of network effects and liberate people who prefer their digital chains, but the power of Satan compels me to press on regardless; every day my website stays up is itself a small victory.
i'm sure it was a major and scary decision to branch out to their own platform, but the precarity of building on third-party platforms like twitch/youtube really can't be overstated
"[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you." – @ben
@shom@molly0xfff@ben@dangillmor Ever heard of low-background steel? Various instruments are made out of world war 2 and earlier battleship steel, some recovered from the bottom of the ocean, because all post-1945 steel is radioactive.
Pre-2023 Internet content is going to be a precious resource like low-background steel someday, the way things are going. Archives will be valuable, especially if one has the legal right to use them. (Although that will NOT deter people, they will obfuscate.)