It’s called Lemmy. Check it out. 🤪

💪😎✌️

»TikTok« aka vertical short video. Even Loops is growing! - But yes, also Threads, Reddit etc.

The brutal truth of social networks: people don’t stay for protocols, decentralization, or good intentions. They stay because everyone else is there. Building better infrastructure is impressive. Building a habit people refuse to leave is harder.

Ad skipping sounds wonderfully pro consumer until you remember somebody has to pay for the podcast: If listeners skip every ad, block tracking and still expect endless free shows, the economics eventually stop working. You can’t demand independent media while systematically deleting the mechanism that funds it.

The tech industry loves claiming it is building the future while apparently speedrunning past the footnotes of the past. If your worldview comes from TED talks, founder biographies and half read sci fi, maybe disrupting democracy isn’t visionary thinking: it’s just historical illiteracy with a Series C.

The harsh truth: most people don’t care about decentralisation, protocols or who owns the server. They care whether their friends, memes and creators are there. Don’t sell them the Fediverse as digital vegetables.

Find them a great app, help them follow 20 interesting accounts, and make it fun. Network effects beat ideology every time.

I’d start with Loops.video: TikTok already proved that vertical short videos are basically social media crack, so don’t ask your friends to suddenly become Mastodon power users reading federation essays.

Give them a familiar format without the TikTok ecosystem: Fediverse adoption probably needs to feel boringly familiar before anyone cares that it’s decentralised.

That reminds me that I really must finally mention this on: Fedizen.EU

Absolutely. And it’s reassuring that he didn’t ask for anyone’s contact details…

This is what the AI agent hype conveniently skips: autonomy means giving software permission to act first and ask questions never. If an assistant can hack a gym website while trying to complete a mundane task, maybe »agents will run everything« isn’t a productivity revolution. Maybe it’s just automated chaos with venture capital funding.

All of them! 🔥

We spent years worrying AI would become sentient and overthrow humanity. Turns out the more realistic scenario is humans inventing a religion around autocomplete. 🙈

The Usenet still exists? I mean: there are still people!?

Facebook spent years claiming it couldn’t control what its platform amplified: Apparently it gets much easier when it’s time to write the checks.

That might be the real breaking point: not when bots dominate traffic, but when advertisers stop believing the traffic represents humans with wallets.

Humans may end up seeing a translated audit layer while the actual machine conversation looks more like APIs than language.

Probably less nostalgia and more open protocols. Bring back personal websites, RSS, forums and interoperable social networks. Make switching services painless, kill algorithmic engagement as the default and stop treating every click as ad inventory.

Auto mode sounds less like security and more like outsourcing judgment to the same AI you’re supposedly trying to constrain. If users are bad at spotting malicious prompts, the answer shouldn’t be: great, let’s remove them from the loop entirely. That’s not safety. That’s automated permission laundering.

The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.

Nothing says »rebuilding trust with readers« quite like handing audience data to Palantir: Search traffic falls, so apparently the next logical step is turning journalism into a surveillance flavored CRM. Maybe the real monetisation strategy is discovering exactly how uncomfortable readers can get before they stop visiting entirely.

ByteDance building China’s largest model while running TikTok is fascinating: few companies have that combination of compute, money and an absurdly large stream of real world human behavior. The AI race isn’t just US labs versus China anymore: it’s ecosystems versus ecosystems.