“Given the severity of the threats social media companies pose to democracy and fundamental rights, policy responses cannot merely tinker around the edges,” writes Christine Galvagna. The EU must act now—fund decentralized, public service social media to protect democracy and digital rights.

Always nice to get stopped by people you've never seen who proceed to tell you they watched a previous presentation of mine, and hope I will say more about this... 1/2

Vote!

I used to focus on left versus right. Now I’m much more worried about the money at the top. But while it might seem strange to say it, I think this is a hopeful way of looking at the world that opens the door to coalitions that seemed impossible before. My first for the @newrepublic.com:

Food for thought. Sounds right to me.

“Under the business-as-usual scenario, the construction carbon footprint alone will exceed the per-annum carbon budget for the 1.5 °C and 2 °C goals in the next two decades.” How many f”s in eff’d of this magnitude?

The Next Terrorist Attack.

And now there is a #NoKings alliance. www.nokings.org/alli...#NoKings Great idea!

Thesis: a social media platform that does not make you addicted will always have fewer daily active users than one that does make you addicted. Question: How many fewer? 10%? 90%?

Wanted to talk about the fact that the ONLY form of communication/transparency the MAGA world seems to believe in is "trolling the libs." And why they're doing that. And why it's so stupid.

This is fine, nothing to see on that video. Nothing at all. Just very stable genius stuff. newrepublic.com/post/202339/... #trump #japan

Beautifully written, funny and true imho: “AI MAY NOT simply be “a bubble,” or even an enormous bubble. It may be the ultimate bubble. What you might cook up in a lab if your aim was to engineer the Platonic ideal of a tech bubble.”

One thing I love about elections in California is how many options there are to cast your ballot. I chose to vote in person more than a week ahead of voting day. A certain sign of how much a party or governments supports democracy is whether they make it easier or harder to vote.

If convicted, people who showed up to a protest could face “decades of prison time,” the National Lawyers Guild says.

+1. The speaker won’t call it to session, and won’t swear in a vote determining member. We’re just doing House of Representatives theater now, and it’s been intermission for a while.

Seems like Trump having to blatantly lie about Reagan’s policies is a pretty good sign it’s the Republican Party that has shifted drastically to the extreme.

It’s not a ballroom he wants. He just calls it that. He wants a throne room. Where the subjects and vassals can prostrate themselves in front of him. At least that makes a lot more sense to me.

@laurenshof.online observes that "the process [for how to build online social communities] described by Werdmuller is pretty much opposite to how development on both the fediverse and the ATmosphere has happened so far". I agree! And I think @werd.io is right!

The amount is meaningless — less than one day of salary. But the principle is important: once the armed services are paid by the oligarchs, they become a private militia, and we no longer have a country. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/10...

OpenAI’s new Atlas browser is the best surveillance device yet invented. Congratulations!

Wake up, babe, the least subtle visual metaphor in history just dropped

The president of the United States has a revenge committee. America has become an authoritarian state.

“CO2 growth rates accelerated significantly from an average of 0.8 ppm per year in the 1960s to 2.4 ppm per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020… From 2023 to 2024, CO2 in the global surface atmosphere increased by 3.5 ppm; this was the largest one-year increase in the 1/2

Ben's keynote from #FediForum has made it to the front page of Hacker News. news.ycombinator.com...#FediForum

Hi, I'm the ProPublica reporter who's been tracking an unusual stat: U.S. citizens grabbed by immigration agents. I did it because the government isn’t. This is what I found.

Here’s my writeup of #FediForum (the openings at least). Loved the message of @ben’s keynote — everything big starts small — and I was impressed by the fedi products showcased: @altstore ( @rileytestut), Bounce ( @quillmatiq, @snarfed.org), Frequency ( @jesseplusplus), CrowdBucks ( @reiver#fediforum & […]

The keynote and demo recordings, as well as session notes, from FediForum October 2025 are now online. Checkout our website https://fediforum.org, which also has links to our PeerTube and YouTube channels.

"Bouncing from ActivityPub to ATProto". Did you know you could pack up your Mastodon account and move to Bluesky, reconnecting with your followers? And vice versa? Here are the demos from #FediForum to show how to: spectra.video/w/nUaL... (one way) spectra.video/w/pMRU...#FediForum(the other way)

Social media does not have to be on a public town square, or manipulate you. Here's @jesseplusplus.bsky.social's demo at #FediForum showing off Frequency Social, a federated, privacy-first social networking app.

Not a peep from Musk about this government spending. Was the chainsaw from him worth it, Elon?

"Blocked by 22,723". (So far.) Welcome, indeed.

Trump has pardoned pedophiles, cop-beaters, woman-beaters and George Santos. That doesn’t include the pardons he sold. But tell me more about how we need the military to stop crime.

Trump and his cronies have spread desperate lies about No Kings Day — calling peaceful participants "terrorists" and "criminals." You know why? Because they want us to shut up and go away. That's how kings and dictators win. But we won't let them. See you tomorrow. NO KINGS.

What a thug trash administration.

#NoKings protest this Saturday. Want to keep your constitutional republic? You simply must come out and be counted. There are events literally everywhere in the US, and in many places outside of the US as well. Counting on you.

An impressive list of data / privacy related laws enacted in California recently.

I’m old enough to remember when we had a system of checks & balances that involved Congress, when Congress controlled the purse and legislated, and the president respected the Constitution & rule of law. I’m old enough to remember when a U.S. president wouldn’t want to be King George or a dictator.

"The Stakes Are Real: Why the Open Social Web Matters Now." Amazing keynote from @werd.io at last week's #FediForum, reminding us all that what we are building here is critical for the world at this moment in time, and also some good advice on how to solve right problems.

Last week I was delighted to give a keynote talk to open #FediForum, the conference about building the open social web. It's about the real threats we're facing, why open alternatives matter so much right now - and the questions we can ask ourselves to make our work really matter.

Hey. Hi. Tom Homan is on camera taking a $50k bribe and no one knows where the money went. If this was any other administration, this would be non-stop on the news. Why are we normalizing this stuff?

EXCLUSIVE: Thousands of leaked messages show leaders of Young Republican groups joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape in a private Telegram chat. Inside rising GOP leaders’ racist chats — obtained by POLITICO and spanning more than 7 months👇

"Digital public product organizations". Interesting idea.

Just under 1 week till #nokings protest. Here’s the plan: 1. Share / boost this post to grow account - help us grow to largest social reach by 18th ✅ 2. Amp and boost all Nokings posts leading up to 18th. We will, too. ✅ 3. On protest day take pics and share […] [Original post on channel.org]

This is so important and organizing on the open social web may be the most vital, free, and billionaire-proof places left to do digital organizing. #nokings

I found the war on Christianity

OH: ASCII Imperialism. Not wrong. Still funny.

We have vast reserves of strategic mockery. Test us at your peril.