Carl Heath @carl@mastodon.se

I really loved this long interview with Matt Mullenweg about the Tumblr acquisition. Nilay Patel covers a lot of ground about content moderation, staffing challenges, and how to responsibly acquire a social network: finding a path to sustainability without alienating its community and killing what makes it special. https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Smart piece on my colleague @drewharwell and other journalists who remain shut out of Twitter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/23/musk-twitter-journalists-suspended-elonjet/

Also! #FollowFriday #FF more tech reporters!
@rcourt
@craigsilverman @harrymccracken
@robpegoraro
@oneunderscore__
@laurahazardowen @thedextriarchy
@lorakolodny
@zoeschiffer
@kimberstreams
@strngwys @nateingraham
@kevinctofel
@edbott
@jetjocko
So many more!

Glad it's finally public: @mozilla will be standing up its own Mastodon instance.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launch-fediverse-instance-social-media-alternative/

It's an experiment: mistakes will be made, it might be a complete failure, and it definitely won't solve all problems. But this is right in Mozilla's wheelhouse, and the people driving this are going about it thoughtfully, so I'm optimistic that Mozilla will be able to contribute to healthier social media. I'm looking forward to it!

I get the feeling this BBC journalist waited their whole life just for this moment....

Sign of the times, today was the first time I saw a Mastodon post shared on Facebook!

I think Mastodon is going to have a profound impact upon society. Federated, decentralized networks (at the social as well as technical level) may very well become the platform upon which a new kind of business model emerges, one where you don't work for a company so much as for your localized graph of interconnections. You're seeing this model emerge from many different directions - federated privacy, file sharing, community building ... why not work?
#TheFutureOfWork

It's common advice to tell students to write an empirical paper "backwards" -- start with the main message (often figs) and work outward from results until you END with intro. Well, someone actually wrote up this advice on writing things up! Now a formal article (in a perhaps surprising venue).

"Finding your scientific story by writing backwards"
by Montagnes et al. (2022, Marine Life Sciences and Technology)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42995-021-00120-z

Who misses Facebook Groups -- and wishes something similar existed on the Fediverse?

Well, it does!

In fact, I just created a Facebook-like group on Friendica.

Here's a demo of one:

https://venera.social/profile/fediversenews

That @drewharwell is cool as hell: "Hell, no. I’m not deleting a tweet that contained factual information and didn’t violate anyone’s rules,” he said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/23/musk-twitter-journalists-suspended-elonjet/

Washington Post reported on the fact that the journalists banned from Twitter still don’t have access to our accounts unless we delete tweets Musk doesn’t like https://web.archive.org/web/20221223175244/https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/23/musk-twitter-journalists-suspended-elonjet/ (Internet Archive link to bypass the paywall)

Too much focus is on whether Mastodon will replace Twitter. It doesn't matter. I like the return to this old-style internet where no one owns it. Creativity and new possibilities are much more enjoyable.

FTP, Gopher, IRC, and Newsgroups weren't mainstream, yet they were so much fun and led to newer things. I say let this place NOT replace Twitter. Let it be something more. #mastodon #Twitter #twitterexodus #Fediverse

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/twitter/mastodon-reminds-me-of-the-early-days-of-the-internet-heres-why-thats-a-good-thing

LastPass Leak Update: Encrypted Vaults Leaked, AND **URLs are not encrypted in LastPass**, so all URLs in your vault should be considered public information now, linked to your name and information. Goodbye LastPass, that's crazy bad by design.

Looking forward to Steve and @leo take on this in SN.

https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/

“Nearly a week after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk said that the accounts of suspended journalists would be reinstated, at least six remain blocked.” https://www.voanews.com/a/whistleblower-organization-files-complaint-to-congress-over-twitter-suspending-journalists/6888490.html

For me at least, getting onto @Mastodon and appreciating the structure of the platform and the tone of conversation has made these other pop-up social networks (Twitter replacements) totally unattractive. No, I don’t want to move up on a wait list by “referring 5 friends”; no, I don’t want to be part of another Jack Dorsey project; no, I don’t want to be part of something with weird completely top-down control. Mastodon broke me for other platforms.

#MastodonNews Dec 22, 2022

This is a pretty awesome story.

The New Stack: Why a Twitter Founding Engineer Is Now All-in on Mastodon >>> https://thenewstack.io/why-a-twitter-founding-engineer-is-now-all-in-on-mastodon

Blaine Cook @blaine was one of the founding engineers of Twitter in 2006... I asked Cook if he thinks it’s likely that the fediverse can [become] the default platform for public conversation... “Yeah, I think it’s inevitable. We’ve seen a similar story before — the phone networks used to be monopolies.”

#twittermigration #fediverse

If you use LastPass this is extremely important news. Attackers have access to all your website URLs and encrypted passwords.

This was effectively their only job and they failed.

This feels somewhat inevitable given how big a prize the LastPass vault is but scary to see happen.

https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/

TikTok spied on journalists. https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/22/tiktok-tracks-forbes-journalists-bytedance/

The bedrock of the free press is publicly-available government information. @internetarchive's Democracy's Library protects journalism and democracy by securing the posterity of the world's government documents.

I wrote about it at the Columbia Journalism Review:
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/archiving-official-documents-as-an-act-of-radical-journalism.php

Here's @brewsterkahle's new essay on Democracy's Library:
http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/30/what-is-the-democracys-library/

So I wrote this yesterday, and lots of people like it, but I'm kinda of frustrated at all the cynicism of people who IMMEDIATELY insist "no it'll get ruined" or "normal people won't do it" or "most people don't care" or whatever else.

Stop being so cynical. YOU have a chance to help make it a better future. Instead of whining about how it won't work why not try to help make it work? https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/