Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Better failure for social media (19 Dec 2022)"
Lazar: Tevye! Tevye, I’m on my way.
Tevye: Where are you going?
Lazar: Chicago, in America.
Tevye: Chicago, America? We are going to New York, America.
Lazar: We’ll be neighbors. My wife, Fruma Sarah, may she rest in peace, has a brother there.
Tevye: That’s nice.
Lazar: I hate him, but a relative is a relative.
In the opening scenes of the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof, the narrator, Tevye, introduces us to his village of Anatevka, which is a pretty fraught place where people are unhappy and danger is on the horizon. Nearly three hours and (spoiler alert) innumerable indignities and terrors later, Tevye and his neighbors leave the village, all to go their separate ways.
Continue reading "How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2022 It was all downhill after the Cuecat"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 19 Sep 2022 How to ditch Facebook without ditching your friends"
The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is set to become law; it will require the biggest tech companies in the world (Apple, Google and Facebook, and maybe a few others) to open up their instant messaging services (iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and maybe a few others) so that smaller messaging services can plug into them. These smaller services might be run by startups, nonprofits, co-ops, or even individual tinkerers.
The logic behind this is sound. IM tools are the ultimate “network effects” products: once they have a critical mass of users, other users feel they have to join to talk to the people who are already there. The more users who sign up, the more users feel they must sign up.
Continue reading "End-To-End Encryption is Too Important to Be Proprietary"