Nilay Patel

Founding partner Ben Horowitz says the firm will get involved in politics for the first time as “non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.”

You can now follow certain test Threads accounts on Mastodon as Meta begins enabling ActivityPub interoperability. It barely works right now — all you can do is follow so far, and posts don’t even show up yet - but Threads head Adam Mosseri’s account is storming up the charts and is now the third most followed account in the fediverse. The people want open and interoperable networks!

I’m getting a bunch of 500 errors, Down Detector reports have been spiking for about an hour, and there’s a Reddit thread of people noticing the same. It’s fine for other Verge staffers, though. How’s it looking for all of you?

Max Tani at Semafor:

Amicus briefs in the big First Amendment case against the bad Texas and Florida social media laws are getting filed, and Public Knowledge’s submission contains a citation to Welcome to hell, Elon as support for the idea that the real product of any social platform is content moderation. I truly hope Clarence Thomas reads this thing.

Duke University Libraries have decided to drop their use of Basecamp, after reconsidering various blog posts by co-founder David Heinemier Hansson in which he decries the push for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Duke’s post about it is clear-eyed and crisp, and worth reading:

53 seconds into this Cybertruck walkaround video, Mat from Carwow picks up the wiper. And…it’s so floppy! Looks like one blade but still inconclusive.