This, 100%. @montclairlocalnews.bsky.social

At this point, I can't really imagine joining a completely new social network that's not on an open protocol - what's the point? It would be like walking freely into a cage…

Indianapolis Star, November 22, 1918

Despite the ongoing efforts of dedicated individuals & safety teams, and the soothing words of their PR teams, I remain convinced that we will look back on today's Internet safety problems with the same chagrin as the pollution of the Hudson River in the decades before the advent of the EPA. 1/5

We all know Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" Well we have corollary:

😦

Late to this but gotta share

ATPROTO GAMES ITS HAPPENING

there is more than interest, there are like, very aggressive plans. ;) just a complicated thing to do when you have a 15 year archive and lots of dependencies. if we were starting over today i think we'd start a bsky server instead of a website

It's happening! Original Star Wars, official and on the big screen!

I finally rewatched Rogue One after finishing Andor, and good lord, it all hits so much harder.

GreenGale is a WhiteWind-compatible markdown blog platform on AT protocol. Supports per-post theme presets and inline KaTeX. Choose between WhiteWind and GreenGale lexicons in the composer. Closed beta starting soon.

Platformocracy reader mailbag no. two covers three cool Fediverse tools for Exit that I missed last time. Thanks to @wake.st for pointing them out. Plus, my first reader poll -- tell me what you want to read about between now and winter break! 1/5

A few neat things about selfhosted.social - Supports 2FA via email codes like Bluesky's PDS - No invite codes needed, protected by a captcha - Backups every 4 hours, and if you migrate with PDS MOOver can create a rotation key to recover your account if we're never not here

We are officially open to the public! selfhosted.social is an independent ATProto PDS managed by @baileytownsend.dev No invite codes required. Everyone is welcome. We just ask that you read over and agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. selfhosted.social/legal

I'm happy to announce that my PDS, selfhosted.social, is officially open to the public now!

"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” —FDR, 1944

"Never spread the lie in the headline" should be a hard rule of 21st century journalism. Research shows that repeating lies helps to spread them, and people read headlines more than they read stories.

He is risen

I really wish we'd stop calling them climate "skeptics" or "vaccine skeptics", if you jump off a cliff we don't call you a "gravity skeptic"

Are we not even making our own disinformation? What happened to American manufacturing?

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

Sill's bookmarks have a new update! By using the community lexicon for bookmarks, you can publish Sill bookmarks to your PDS and interoperate with other bookmarking apps across the ATmosphere!

Twitter accounts are based in Russia. BlueSky accounts are based in homes with, frankly, too many books, plants, obsolete cables, and pieces of rustic pottery, that could do with a bit of a tidying up, to be honest.

Good to know your options while you’re still in control. Being able to take your data & identity across platforms really matters now. But @bellack.com’s piece also hits the real question - who’s watching the watcher? #Decentralization #DigitalRights #OpenSocialWeb #ActivityPub #ATProto #SocialMedia

@andytseng.bsky.social @bellack.com >Fediverse doesn’t use DIDs >There is a proposal out there for a Fediverse-specific DID, but I am not aware of it being implemented anywhere yet. There is another proposal that has 3 implementations: https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/ef61/

Great piece by my friend @scottstein.bsky.social about how everyone wants screaming these days but it's OK, and even important, to push back and want to not be screaming. Definitely captures something hard about existing these days. Read this.

I see a lot of Paidchecks on X didn’t realize that a whole lot of people on social media lie about their location to grift off the naïveté of the rage-addled American right. Turns out this problem is real and it’s a thing those of us who worked on “disinformation” pointed out.

anyone who can help with this

I've talked a lot about the need for Exit from big social platforms. The good news is Exit and interoperability exist today, if you know where to look! In this week's Platformocracy, I go on a whirlwind tour of technologies and projects that make this possible. Here are a few to know. 1/6

🤯

These are good changes. The commitment to transparency with the user and more gradations of enforcement action are really positive steps. Thanks @safety.bsky.app !

Magnificent.

The GUARD Act may look like a child-safety bill, but in practice it’s an age-gating mandate that could impose a mass censorship and surveillance regime on nearly every public-facing AI chatbot. Tell Congress to oppose the GUARD Act today. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Sigh. I want to like these folks but I wish they would stop stepping on rakes. *taps sign, again*

It's a home and away series today! @robleathern.bsky.social and I have traded newsletters to continue our reaction to @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social article about Meta's shockingly high fraud rates. 1/3

one to be aware of, browsers allow any website to go full screen, so now ClickFix are faking Windows update reboot prompts to get remote access for ransomware groups. cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog...

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Justice Louis Brandeis, born on this day in 1856

This is why doing moderation in secret is bad. You can’t learn and correct for context if you won’t let anyone know what you’re doing.

In a closed ecosystem the system’s creator has to come up with the killer use case. In an open ecosystem anyone can come up with the killer use case.

The thing to understand about this is that this catastrophe in the UK has redounded to the political benefit of the very same people and political movement that pushed for it! Extremely perverse.

Sigh. Secret courts are bad, actually. In the real world, the right to a public trial is guaranteed in the US 6th Amendment and the European Convention on Human Rights. [To be clear, the big platforms are also wreaking secret justice constantly. I just think Bluesky is a chance to do better.]

am i doing this right

To be fair, a courtroom-set divorce movie starring Tracy Morgan as the Monster and Kim Kardashian as the Bride would have made for one of the funniest episodes of 30 Rock ever.

* Bullshit #1: We graded our own homework, in secret, and passed! * Bullshit #2: We deserve an “A” for effort, regardless of the results. * Bullshit #3: We made a number go down, who cares if it’s relevant? * Bullshit #4: Look at our giant numerator! Don’t ask about the denominator.

Hopefully you've seen the @jeffhorwitz.bsky.social article revealing that Meta makes 10% of their revenue from scams and fraud. Their bullshit PR response adds insult to injury. I chew it into tiny pieces point by point in this week's Platformocracy. 1/3 #meta #trustandsafety #adtech #fraud

One of my underlying working models for non-profit news is that nobody is in competition with each other. We should all be co-operative. We should be open sourcing code, sharing wins and losses, and doing as much as possible to lift each other up - out in the open so newcomers can benefit too.

The origin of the phrase "pulling himself up by his own bootstraps" was meant ironically -- it's impossible. It was meant to convey that we are all dependent on each other for success, since no one could "pull himself up by his own bootstraps." Seems like some folks may have missed the point.