I love this explanation of group chat dynamics, even though I feel personally victimized by most of it. “Be the thumbs-up-and-move-on responder” is my new life goal.
It’s been a week, friends. Twitter is melting down before our eyes, Meta laid off 11,000 people, the crypto world is facing yet another scandal, and we couldn’t even record a whole podcast without a bunch of news breaking. Things are only getting wilder, too, so stick around.
What if you had access to everything the internet knows about you, and what if you could use it to make your life better? That’s what Mem is trying to figure out.
Yeah, yeah, election day was yesterday. But it’s still Politics Season, right? So we spent an hour talking about how we get political news, the state and future of free speech in America, and all the ways the CHIPS and Science Act will change tech.
WSJ columnist (and Verge alum) Joanna Stern has a great column this morning comparing Mastodon’s structure to email. It’s a good analog! But I like this one, from Simon Willison, even better:
You can post text and images to it. You can link to things. It’s a blog.
A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.
[simonwillison.net]
“Many thousands of employees” are set to be laid off, The Wall Street Journal reported, especially on the recruiting and business teams. Mark Zuckerberg is blaming overstaffing based on inflated growth plans, and has said he’s “accountable” for the mistakes. (Safe to assume he will not be getting laid off, though.)
Those who lose their job should be finding out tomorrow morning, and will reportedly get at least four months’ severance.
My overarching theory is that no email service can overcome a bad domain name. And there are a lot of bad domain names out there. (Protonmail is too long, OnMail is sort of boring, even hey.com doesn’t feel right.) But I think Zoom’s Zmail might have a chance... if only because it sounds exactly like Gmail!
Yesterday, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko said the service hit a new high of 1,028,362 monthly active users, almost double the number from two weeks ago. And an automatic tracker showed more than 6.2 million total accounts, up 450,000 in the last week. These obviously aren’t Twitter-sized numbers, or even close, but it’s a big jump nonetheless.
For $8 a month, Twitter will be... Twitter. Or it can be much worse for free! We debate whether the new Twitter Blue is worth the price, along with everything Elon Musk has done at the company, the official Matter launch, and much more.
