I'm officially writing a book! "Rewild the Internet: How to Resist Big Tech" will be published by Simon & Schuster in NY and Bloomsbury in London. It's uses ecology to show why we've got such a toxic technology monoculture through almost the whole tech […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Congratulations to @Mastodon for launching its new service offerings. It’s win-win: we all need a strong Mastodon organization, and organizations looking to onboard need expert help from people who know. This only benefits the ecosystem and I’m excited to see it.

🇪🇺YES: Germany is not supporting the EU's #chatcontrol bill as proposed! The blocking minority needed to stop this illegal mass surveillance plan seems secured (for now). ✅ Opposition now also from LU🇱🇺 & SK🇸🇰! #keepupthefight https://fightchatcontrol.eu

Looks like the issue with @libreoffice which destroyed all my work is a Known Issue with Mac installations that should be shared with all Mac users ON INSTALLATION. Libre Office stopped responding when I replied with more info. As @argv_minus_one says "A cursory web search shows there are a […]

So I started using LibreOffice. Did an OS update on my macbook today. Come to find out today, that LibreOffice was not saving properly on my mac, nor was it backing up uncorrupted to my proton drive. I've lost EVERYTHING from my hardest and most significant day's work, impossible to reconstruct […]

So I started using LibreOffice. Did an OS update on my macbook today. Come to find out today, that LibreOffice was not saving properly on my mac, nor was it backing up uncorrupted to my proton drive. I've lost EVERYTHING from my hardest and most significant day's work, impossible to reconstruct […]

Want to fight for Palestinian #digitalrights? There is a super interesting job vacancy for #policy #advocacy folks at @7amleh : https://7amleh.org/post/vacancy:-advocacy-department-manager #palestine #HumanRights #fedijobs #jobs #mastojobs #ngojobs

I did a podcast recently with my incredibly dear and respected old friend, @gushosein at Privacy International. I talked about: 'Rewilding the internet isn't just a metaphor. It's a system that gives access to hope as a muscle and something we do. It defamiliarizes the internet and tech right […]

Last week in a Kerry car park I watched an SUV driver plough through a couple of traffic cones because he simply didn't see them - too low to be visible from his driving position. Now most kids who can walk are taller than traffic cones, but still, it was pretty harrowing to imagine him quite […]

One thing that the current exorbitant investments in "AI" show is that the investor class and big tech corporations do not pay enough taxes: If you have billions to set on fire for spicy autocomplete we should take some or all of those to do something useful with.

Just been watching @cwebber 's brilliantly informative and inspirational Fediforum keynote about open social media protocols (some more open than others... but getting there!), and <why> we need secure, often private and fundamentally joyous spaces to organise in and life in. Just brilliant […]

“It is time we demand that the tech sector comply with the same laws as everyone else. Only when technology businesses compete on a level legal playing field will we see how inevitable their innovations really are.” https://on.ft.com/4oiBsBD

Lots of talk about Ghost today, and rightly so, but don’t forget that a little open source framework @fedify made the ActivityPub plugin possible. Support open source! https://ghost.org/changelog/6/ #activitypub #fedidev

Behind every draconian decision, there's secret evidence ("detailed security assessments") we're not allowed to see. We should just suck it up and believe them. Sorry, Yvette Cooper, that's not how democracy should work. When you make a decision of such consequence, we need to see the basis for it.

"Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities." […]

Example passengers!

BTW, I referenced joy here and had not yet watched @cwebber's FediForum talk which also uses this word joy. Yes! More joy! https://social.coop/@cwebber/114688242964109365

Happy to say that I've gotten funding from NLnet to write about the fediverse for the next year! Connected Places will keep going for another year, and I'm excited to keep you all informed about everything thats happening on the new social web connectedplaces.online/funding-upda...

The article points out that the rise on borrowing and visiting libraries in Denmark is an anomaly in Europe*, which is a pity. It also rightly identified that the number of events, reading groups and a good selection of books are key to get people into libraries. IMHO, the other important factor […]

Motherfucking wind farms…

@jim The suggestion that #vpns should be banned is absolutely appalling. I hope @thegreenparty will join the #libdems in opposing this, & other aspects of the #osa which threaten #privacy, particularly of young #lgbti people seeking #information about #sex & #relationships, which is by no means […]

#libdems opposition to the #onlinesafetyact is beginning to snowball Quite rightly, they are asking for suspension and a rethink. Where is the opposition within Labour, Jeremy Corbyn's new grouping and the UK Green Parties? I hope they can also speak out against this car crash […]

Remember when “social media” was “social networking”? What changed? That second word: media. It’s all about capturing your attention and selling you stuff. Humans are social and want to connect with one another. That’s what makes the #fediverse special to me - authentic connection. We haven’t […]

@mariafarrell @pluralistic Just learned that there is a federated alternative to Komoot and it looks pretty nice: https://wanderer.to/

When We Get Komooted https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/

hey @pluralistic did you see this? the ultimate enshittification yarn of the German bikepacking/routing company (a knowledge commons to its users and employees) that sold out to VC and ended up spreading BS AI-generated 'route maps'. and how the extractivised community is starting all over […]

Pleased to announce that my book, Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media, is now available online, and will be out in print in a couple weeks! https://moveslowlybuildbridges.com That site has more stuff, too -- links to related […]

“The UK government’s continued complicity in Israel’s atrocities is unconscionable, and I do not want to spend another day operating on children who have been shot and starved by a military our government supports. History will judge not just those who committed these crimes, but those who stood […]

1. Researching this week’s column, I felt that I understood at last just why, on so many issues – benefits, Gaza, environmental and planning laws, anti-protest laws, bank deregulation, fiscal rules etc - Labour is out-Torying the Tories. Why it has become so cruel, so destructive and so spineless. 🧵

I want to use Jitsi for interviewing people in my book research, but there seems to be no way to schedule meetings in advance and send out invitations to people. Does anyone know of third party clients that can do this and don't require a CS degree to use..? Really really don't want to have to […]

The excellent @openrightsgroup 20th birthday conversation between @pluralistic and @mariafarrell started with the #opentech panel discussion which led to ORG's founding. An #org friend has dug out the video! I've uploaded it to #PeerTube here: https://p.lu/w/fE5rfqD2YVjjTCczEAaPjy

I just wrote 'Issue 25:1 A Cage Went in Search of a Bird'. It's about the loss of our beloved dog, Molly. https://buttondown.com/MariaFarrell/archive/issue-251-a-cage-went-in-search-of-a-bird/

Breathe more deeply #obliquestrategies

Interesting article as always from Paul. I was also a little taken aback by the amount of centralization in the web, if we’re to believe these guesstimates: “…you can infer that roughly 50% of the web’s traffic is sent to the top 17 sites. The 75% percentile accounts for 451 sites, 90th […]

My village only posts important information on Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account. Many US government offices and departments, esp on the local level, only post official messages on proprietary social media platforms like Twitter X and esp, Facebook. That is the only place they post, not […]

#bakeapple, male flower blooming in the shade of leather leaf and willow. #botany #Photography #NewfoundlandLabrador

Just out; my podcast with Alun Davies of @ripencc on where @robin.berjon.com and my Internet Rewilding idea came from what internet 'food webs' are and what they mean for browser sustainability what the technical community needs to do (hint: think like ecologists to protect and regenerate the […]

Today I will spend hours in the @EUCommission's #dma workshop with #apple so you don't have to. It'll be painful, it'll be funny, it'll be hot! 😆 The workshop starts with Apple lawyers speaking time in which they are supposed to explain how they comply with the #digitalmarketsact. Instead, they […]

The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street […]

Before I take seriously any dreams you may have about terraforming Mars, buy a few acres of the worst farmland in your area, and build a no input farm on it that feeds your family year-round. If you can't even do that, no mention of living on Mars please.