Web

The Washington Post reports that Truth Social has the Securities and Exchange Commission’s go-ahead to complete its SPAC merger, taking the company public and unlocking around $300 million after years of uncertainty. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of drama:

Six months after kicking off an initial Mastodon trial that saw it launch its own instance on the federated platform, the UK’s public broadcaster is not just extending the experiment by another six months, it’s also “planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub.”

Skiff’s privacy-centric Google Workspace alternative is coming under the Notion umbrella as it moves further into the productivity space with things like AI features, and the recent launch of Notion Calendar.

How will we notice aliens hovering overhead when we’re all too busy scrolling? They’ll make a Squarespace website, obviously.

That comes courtesy of Alessandro Paluzzi, who frequently reverse engineers and reveals Threads and Instagram features. The new option lets you turn fediverse sharing on and off at will and you can easily copy your username formatted for the decentralized Activity Pub social protocol.

Hugging Face tech lead Philipp Schmid posted yesterday that users can now create custom chatbots in “two clicks” using Hugging Chat Assistant. Users’ creations are then publicly available.

Android app developer Dylan Roussel leaked an apparent changelog this morning that says “Bard is now Gemini” — the name used for the new model Google put in service last year to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4.

As part of its moves to comply with EU regulations Apple announced last week that it was opening up iOS to other browser engines — in theory meaning Chrome and Firefox could build better, more competitive browsers. Mozilla pretty quickly said it was “extremely disappointed,” and that Apple was trying its best to make the process awful for competitors. Now Google Chrome’s Parisa Tabriz says the same.

Wired has an interview with Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, all about the state of Threads’ plans to decentralize and join the world of ActivityPub. The short version: it’s a process, but it’s happening! And Meta knows exactly how big Threads is, what it’ll do to the fediverse when it joins:

Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan posted today that the company had “decided to retire” the feature that let you view a previous version of a webpage right from search results, as reported by Search Engine Land.