Albert Wenger tells how he first experienced the US. And when returning to Germany after a year. I totally relate to the reverse culture shock! https://continuations.com/happy-250th-anniversary-america

Looking back over 250 years, if you had to plot a score for the "health" of the United States since its founding, what would that graph look like? Which times were better than now? Which times were worse? I'm afraid I don't know enough US history to really have a firm opinion on many decades […]

Thanks @wearenew_public for the bag! I will take it for shopping in Silicon Valley where many work for the monopolizing tech giants! Being on the jury for the Open Social Awards was fun! Thanks for having me!

100% tax on all income beyond what’s in a blind trust for all presidents while in office. Who is with me? https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/01/us/trump-financial-disclosure-mar-a-lago-doral-income-invs

This is kind of terrifying. If you are a politician on social media, this is two desserts with one easy setup: save time, and be more appealing. What's not to like? If you are the public, ... you basically end up voting for a chatbot because that's all you ever heard from? […]

Oh right, as a side effect of a recent US supreme court ruling, the bilateral data agreements seem to be impossible going forward. And cannot be fixed because the ruling is on a constitutional level. What next? […]

To be able to post from my new account at @j12t.wsocial.eu, I need to go through W Social/W Identity verification. That apparently requires me to: * Agree that either my legal name, or my birth year and nationality are publicly displayed. * Provide them with photo of my passport and myself. 1/2

VMWare Fusion is leaking memory large scale. Before reboot: VM takes 144GB RAM Save snapshot, after restart: VM takes 27GB RAM. Wow.

Today’s additional job title: castle tower builder. Well, castle tower build machine overseer.

Apropos nothing, remember that: Nothing is as practical as a good theory.

What if this is the time to re-invent the internet? Get rid of dead ends (say surveillance advertising) and build in missing features (like digital identities that make us both more secure and have more privacy)?

This is a …large number! And going to grow, dare I say, exponentially! https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/11-06-2026-statement---europe-lost-200-000-people-to-heat-in-4-years-yet-nearly-all-of-them-were-preventable

In the old tradition of posting something online that is half-baked, tell me how I'm wrong? :-) Thesis: many activities that humanity does a lot of in the 21st century have no viable economic model, if negative externalities are accounted for. Eg Industrial farming. Fossil fuels. Social media. 1/3

W Social seems to have been quite successful in getting a big part of the EU establishment to sign up. Congratulations! One wonders though if the step from US social media companies to a EU social media company was big enough. Wouldn't a move to *your own instance* in the fediverse been better?

mkdir docs mv document1 document2 is not how to do it. Darn. It's been many years since I made a stupid mistake like this. Fortunately Time Machine saved my ...

RE: https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/116767676780591063 I wonder how that number compares, historically, with other innovations, both those that worked out well and those that worked out terribly. What did people think of horseless carriages? Electronic brains? Nuclear bombs?

“downplay text of the Iran agreement”. Conclusion 1: this agreement is real bad. And not a real agreement. Not even on the tiny fraction of issues they supposedly have agreed on. Conclusion 2: the Hormuz situation will remain unstable for the foreseeable future […]

Trying to log into Eventbrite, it says: "This user's password must change before logging in." And sends me back to the login dialog. It must change, all by itself. I see. What am I supposed to do here?

Meta says they now have half a billion monthly active users on #threads. This is about 100x that of #bluesky, and about 500x that of #mastodon, at only about 3 years old. How do *you* explain this? https://about.fb.com/news/2026/06/meta-launching-new-features-500-million-monthly-threads-users/

Mastodon is close to 1 million MAU according to FediDB, and don't you love to see it! Pixelfed remains 2nd with over 100k MAU. If Misskey published their MAU, I'm sure they would be in second, or maybe first. We did this together, without VC funding, enshittification or selling out users via […]

Ronna? Quetta? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes

This includes Mastodon and Bluesky and all of the rest. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back

RE: https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/116755228311993684 I've long thought #chatbots are the perfect #disinformation delivery vehicle. Tim Chambers and Will Robinson have the proof that this is so, based on a recent election. This may not even be intentional at this point, but it's bad […]

Create your own LLM for less than $100, end to end. Even if you don’t, a great description for how it is done. https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat

If you were in charge of social media industrial policy in the European Union, and you had complete freedom to decide, what would it be? Or what would your advice be to them? #eu #socialmedia #policy #fediforum #fediforumfriday

"Trump says attacks on Iran will resume". It's amateur hour. Actually, the amateurs would be embarrassed to be seen in this company. And those are the people who have power over life and death. Directly, kinetically, from the fallout: lack of fuels and fertilizer and sulfur and the list goes […]

Honoring the winners of last weekend's first Open Social Awards, which were announced at the Public Spaces conference in Amsterdam Friday night. We now have a dedicated page for them on FediForum Connect: https://connect.fediforum.org/awards/open-social-2026/ Check them out!

Another excellent support experience with Prusa, the 3D printer company. Chat: Them: how can I help you? Me: here is my problem. Them: here is the answer. And here are links for more background info. Me: thank you. Why can’t it be like that everywhere?

From today's Open Social Awards ceremony.

Congratulations to: Blacksky Algorithms for winning an Excellence Award as part of the Open Social Awards today.

Congratulations to: Sill.social for winning an Excellence Award as part of the Open Social Awards today.

Congratulations congratulations congratulations to: ** Newsmast Foundation ** for winning the very first Open Social Award.

Interesting analysis by @DePemig https://blog.gillesdutilh.com/2026/06/mutuals-are-not-friends-2/

Newsmast has a really good and intriguing post out today describing where they see the Open Social Web going in the next 12-18 months. "Connected community spaces" -- I so very much agree that's the right direction. IMHO the "global townsquare" was always somewhere between a bad idea and a […]

Few people appears to appreciate the depth of strategic disaster that a certain "stable genius" has gotten the US -- and the world -- in, with respect to the Iranian regime. I'm not a historian, and not a strategist, and perhaps there are historical examples for similar disasters, but I kind of […]

I hadn't realized until just now that Blacksky's Acorn project is named after the community in The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. That's kinda amazing actually. And a testament to how far we have come as a "civilization" if it feels appropriate to name our new tech projects after the […]

This is so "cool". Mailchimp keeps sending me marketing e-mails. Given what Mailchimp does, it seems they should be really good at it. When I click on the "unsubscribe" link in their e-mails, I get 404 Not Found. And have been for weeks.

This is, I think, the "melting pot" at its best. Somebody went out of their way to research and making voting as welcoming to immigrated citizens as they could. In the outrage that much of the US is committing all the time these days, this is heartening. I don't […] [Original post on j12t.social]

This is not nice. Updated my #mastodon install. Funny Javascript error in the browser. Went on a wild goose chase. Finally found it: My browser -- #vivaldi -- had a 404 HTML file in its cache that the Mastodon Javascript thought came live from the API as JSON. It probably got there when my open […]

Next week the very first Open Social award will be awarded to a deserving winner. And two deserving runners-up. How I know they are deserving? I'm on the jury but I'm not telling yet :-) To find out, consider going to the ceremony on June 5 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands […]

If you value this work and want to see our safety resources stay online, independent, and active, please consider joining our Power of One campaign. We are looking for 500 supporters to contribute just 1 (£, €, $) a month. Small change, big difference […] [Original post on mastodon.iftas.org]

As Mastodon celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2026, the open source platform’s new Executive Director, @mellifluousbox, is focused on what it’ll take to make the next 10 years even more impactful. He and @mike spoke for the Dot Social podcast about the power of building at the protocol level […]

Occasionally, there are actual open positions for open social web / federated social developers. (I don't know the org, but looks interesting) https://equalitie.org/careers/

I love codeberg as a concept. I don't love it so much that it keeps producing 5xx errors a bit too often IMHO.

The deadly opening scene from the book “Ministry for the Future” is coming ever closer. https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/india-heatwave-water-crisis-delhi-rajasthan-lucknow-maharashtra-scarcity-tanker-climate-change-2917248-2026-05-26

I don't think I need to be an epidemiologist to understand this graph. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qEyg!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F517d2544-d940-42bc-976c-4e487b3b1934_2340x1349.heic

I'm not sure that accountants would like this form of accounting, but it's cute anyways. https://isaiprofitable.com