"The benefits of decentralizing power are often outweighed by corresponding problems they create in the user experience. Bluesky’s AT Protocol set out to solve that in various ways. Unlike Mastodon, for example, you can search for usernames across the entire network..."
I'm pretty sure that's wrong. If I enter a complete username into the search in my fediverse app, doesn't it use DNS to find the server and then search it for that username?
"... the customization allows publishers to do a lot of useful, trust-building work that simply is not possible elsewhere. (To name another example, custom labels enable organizations to effectively verify their own employees’ accounts.)"
This is fair comment though. They've definitely tried out a very different approach to the pioneers of the fediverse and the folks who standardised and deployed ActivityPub.
But... why? They have absolutely no incentive to do that.
For a start, it would undermine the pitch that their customers are publishers and their readers, and the trust they've built with them. Most likely it would lose them a huge number of each, to other ad-free subscription platforms out there.
"Bonus prediction: Despite endless talk about wanting to eliminate it among politicians, TikTok skates unscathed through another presidential administration. After Montana’s effort to ban the app failed decisively on First Amendment grounds..."
Well that was entirely predictable, and also good news. Imagine the precedent if supposedly democratic governments could arbitrarily stop citizens using any online platform they don't like...
"Meanwhile, with a “jawboning” case pending before the US Supreme Court, the federal government has stopped sharing information with platforms for fear that putting any pressure on companies to remove content will be seen as a violation of the First Amendment."
... which it seems pretty obvious that it is. As are any attempts to weaken section 230 and make platforms liable to law suits for making independent moderation decisions.
I've been picking on #CaseyNewton a lot recently over his coverage of SubStack's recent freedom of expression controversy. So it's only fair to point out that Platformer is generally a good publication, to which I still subscribe. His article on the shuttering of iconic music magazine Pitchfork, for example, is timely and insightful;
#CaseyNewton also has some valid criticisms of the generative #AI trend;
"... its rise has led to a flood of AI-generated spam that researchers say now outperforms human-written stories in Google search results. The resulting decline in advertising revenue is a key reason that the journalism industry has been devastated by layoffs over the past year."
"[SubStack] began encouraging individual writers to recommend one another, funneling tens of thousands of subscribers to like-minded people. It started to send out an algorithmically ranked digest of potentially interesting posts to anyone with a Substack account, showcasing new voices from across the network. And in April of this year, the company launched Notes, a text-based social network resembling Twitter that surfaces posts in a ranked feed."
"Extremists on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for the most part had been posting for clout: those platforms made it difficult or even impossible for them to monetize their audiences."
"In three years on Substack, I’ve been recommended plenty of boring posts, but no openly Nazi ones. My experience of them has been unobjectionable.
... It was recommendations on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube that helped turn Alex Jones from a fringe conspiracy theorist into a juggernaut that could terrorize families out of their homes."
It would be obviously wrong to claim any hosted platform is "simple software". That was never their argument. Neither did they claim to be a "common carrier", although that's much closer. Surely even telecos have minimal TOS that forbid things like incitement to violence?
As Casey openly admitted in his first piece on the subject it was never really about "Nazis". Demanding #SubStack boot "Nazi" publications was always about establishing a precedent for the banning of any other speech accused of being "harm" by Casey and his fellow travellers.
"Some of our... customers are people who work in tech policy, content moderation, and trust and safety. They’ve spent years doing the work, making the hard calls, and cleaning up the internet for all of our mutual benefit. It’s only natural that they would resist spending money on a platform that spurns their profession in this way."
#CaseyNewton sniping once again at SubStack and others who defend free expression:
"... platforms that have rejected calls to actively moderate content have created a means for bad actors to organize, create harmful content, and distribute it at scale. In particular, researchers now have repeatedly observed a pipeline between the messaging app Telegram and X, where harmful campaigns are organized and created on the former and then distributed on the latter."
"In any case, with each passing day it becomes clear that Telegram, which has more than 700 million monthly users, deserves as much scrutiny as any other major social platform — and possibly more."
Make no mistake, this is a call to "actively moderate content" in private communications channels. If the Newtonites get their way, anyone using encryption to protect the privacy of their communications will be accused of having something to hide.
"Substack deserves credit for kicking off a revolution in independent publishing. But the world it helped to birth is now much bigger than its own platform. Next week we will move to a new home in that world. One where readers can feel confident their money is not going to accelerate the growth of hate movements."
This is dodging the question. It also reveals a disturbing lack of understanding of fascist recruitment, a key facet of which is nurturing a sense of victimhood in recruits. Which actual censorship of fascist speech helps them do.
I've only just got back in the studio for the new calendar year, and there's already yet another online mob forming against freedom of expression, this time targeting SubStack. I agree with #ElleGriffin;
I chose SubStack as a host precisely because they defend the universal human right to freedom of expression. In the face of increasingly entitled online censorship mobs from both the left and the right.
"To continue building, [OpenAI] would have to take money from private investors — which meant setting up a for-profit entity underneath the nonprofit, similar to the way the Mozilla Foundation owns the corporation that oversees revenue operations for the Firefox browser, or how the nonprofit Signal Foundation owns the LLC that operates the messaging app."
"...$120 million annually from the company’s subscription service, not including app store fees from Apple Inc. and Google... is hardly a replacement for the ad revenue that Twitter relied on in the pre-Musk era — about $4.5 billion in its last full year as a public company. Meanwhile, many of X’s top advertisers, such as Mondelez International, Coca-Cola, IBM and HBO, are spending less than they were before Musk took over..."
"Before the [Titter] takeover, Perez’s team was tasked with detecting efforts to manipulate elections around the world. Together, they added labels to posts containing election disinformation, and annotated content from state-affiliated media. Now, Perez says, much of that work has been abandoned."
"Over time, I have become more persuaded that social networks can be harmful to young people: in particular, certain groups of young people (those with existing mental health issues, victims of bullying) and in particular circumstances (those who are using social networks for more than three hours per day.)"
"But my views are also formed by my experiences growing up as a gay man online, where I used the then-nascent social web to find connections and community that I struggled to locate elsewhere. That history makes me skeptical of regulations that would make it harder for LGBT teens and other minority groups to find and speak to one another online, which is the express point of some (bipartisan!) legislation proposed this year."