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.
I just feel like you’ve really made it when your screensaver goes viral, you know? And it turns out there’s way more to Roku City than I realized. So kudos to Roku, and to designer Kyle Jones, for making the only screensaver I actually look at on purpose. It’s better than half the stuff on the Roku Channel.
[The New York Times]
Well, get comedy in general, which has a longer shelf live than any other kind of show. But especially Seinfeld. According to friend of The Verge Julia Alexander, decades after it ended, it’s still bringing in the subs:
When comparing... Grey’s Anatomy and Seinfeld, Parrot discovered that Seinfeld is more than twice as good at attracting new subscribers and 18 percent better at retaining subscribers who are at a high risk of churning.
