Social Media

The platform has doubled the maximum file size to 2MB, and the resolution limit has been upped to 4000x4000. There are photo carousels now, too.

When you’re in a Threads Community’s live chat, you can talk with real time with other users about what’s going on. For the NBA playoffs, the NBA Threads Community will be hosting some live chats to follow games. Live chats will come to other Community feeds in the coming months, Meta says.

As a result, users have been experiencing “intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads and search,” Bluesky says. The company first got a report of “intermittent app outages” at around 2:40AM ET this morning.

A new “Messages” tab appears in this preview of its redesigned web layout that head of Threads, Connor Hayes, posted on Thursday, as Engadget reports.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the open-source, cross-platform European Age Verification Solution it has been testing will be available publicly soon, reports Bloomberg. She said it is “completely anonymous,” using a passport or ID card to verify age for access to online services, with accuracy that complies with EU child-protection regulations.

Digital privacy non-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced it’s leaving X, citing a sharp decline in views for its posts. With EFF off the platform, some commenters agree with the organization’s thinking.

Now that a jury has ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark trial, the sharks are circling, and what better place to find potential clients than on those social media platforms? The only problem is that Axios reports Meta pulled “more than a dozen” such ads from firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law on Thursday.

Outage reports have gone up and down on Downdetector today, and my feed occasionally hasn’t loaded. Bluesky says the issue, which it blamed on an upstream service provider, “appears” to have been fixed, but users have taken the problems as a chance to poke fun at unpopular comments from the Bluesky team about vibe coding.

One way to reduce screen time? The Scrōll Stoppr by Yahoo. Who knows if it actually ships, but these are listed in the TikTok Shop at a price of $4.99 with free shipping for anyone who’s tried every other way to put their phone down.

The musician’s account disappeared after posting pictures from his no-phones-allowed concert to r/PaulMcCartney, spurring media reports that mods had banned him. However, as 404Media points out, the subreddit’s mods say it wasn’t them, and a site admin commented with an attempt at an explanation:

Baseball is back this week and we’ve already got the afterglow of a great World Baseball Classic, an upcoming Heated Rivalry-themed game night, and Netflix completely missing the first-ever robot ump challenge because they cut away to a mid-game interview. It’s a long season — can MLB keep the momentum going?

A New Social’s Bridgy Fed tech has been linking microblog posts and accounts across services like Mastodon and Bluesky for a while, but now that ability applies to more macro content as well:

A beta feature in development for WhatsApp would display users’ status updates at the top of the Chats tab, similar to how stories are displayed in Messenger and Instagram, WABetaInfo reports. Status updates, which disappear after 24 hours like stories, are currently displayed in a separate tab in the app.

As drone strikes hit the city, social media videos shared by influencers follow a script: nonchalance at the danger, followed by flattering videos and photos of UAE leaders. “I know who protects us,” the videos go.

Instead of relying on hashtags to disclose a promotion, creators can now use a toggle to have “Paid partnership” text appear at the bottom of their post, as shown by X head of product Nikita Bier.

It’s a posthumous one because, as Buzzfeed reported in 2019, someone on 4chan of all places confirmed Epstein’s death more than half an hour before the first media reports. Now, Business Insider reports that within the files recently released, there are documents showing how the Justice Department and FBI investigated by subpoenaing 4chan, T-Mobile, and AT&T, trying to find the source.

As part of a test on Threads, when you type “DM me” or “message me” in a post or reply, those words will turn into a link that people can tap to start a DM conversation.