On the development side of the open social web there now seems to be a shift however, away from building Twitter-like platforms, towards private data and closed communities. Part of that is that the growth for alternative microblogging platforms has stalled, and the monthly active users for both Mastodon and Bluesky have declined over the last year. This in itself is part of a larger trend, where both X and Threads either struggle to grow or are even losing users.

Source: connectedplaces.online

zaps use the Lightning Network, which has certain privacy characteristics that on-chain transactions do not (and will probably never) have

Source: dergigi.com

Both ATProto and ActivityPub, two protocols designed around public-by-default architectures, are now devoting substantial development effort to retrofitting private and bounded-community functionality into their stacks. The public-by-default architectural choice that defined the current generation of open social networking protocols is now getting more recognition that, while being valuable and useful, this also not enough. Private and bounded interaction is increasingly understood as at least as important as public broadcast. This is in itself already an interesting finding: there seems to be shift within the open social web, from being focused on public broadcasting, to seeing a wide variety of work in the direction of private and bounded places pop up.

Source: connectedplaces.online

As of 2025, internet freedom has declined for 15 consecutive years. And yet as censorship and surveillance become increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, many of the tools that millions of people rely on to protect themselves from these harms are experiencing financial pressure and funding cuts. In the face of this crisis, the Tor Project and Funding the Commons have launched this crowdfunding campaign as an experiment in finding an alternative: a community-driven, cryptocurrency-native fundraising event designed to fund internet freedom more sustainably, transparently, and collectively when traditional methods fail.

Source: internetfreedom.torproject.org

The European Commission has decided not to extend the Digital Markets Act's interoperability rules to social media, closing off a potential pathway for adoption for open social networks.

Source: connectedplaces.online

Drupal makes hard things possible, but it also makes easy things hard..

Source: dri.es

The danger is not just that Drupal is misunderstood today. It's that the gap between perception and reality may be growing, not shrinking. The narratives we reinforce today become part of how AI describes Drupal tomorrow. The Drupal community's silence today becomes tomorrow's AI consensus. So if you're in the Drupal community, take Hynek's advice and help set the record straight. Not for AI, but for people. Write about the great work happening in Drupal: share the case studies, the technical breakthroughs, the AI innovation, the shared learnings, and the hard problems being solved every day. We need to spend a lot more time explaining where Drupal fits, the kinds of problems it solves well, and why so many organizations believe in Open Source and the Drupal community. I know many people in Open Source dislike marketing or self-promotion. I do too, sometimes. But if we don't document what is great about Drupal, others will define Drupal for us. Every accurate case study, technical blog post, demo, presentation, or community success story helps future developers, evaluators, and AI systems understand what Drupal actually is. Drupal does not need hype. It needs a better public record.

Source: dri.es

Drupal is stronger than its reputation, but unless the community tells that story, the outdated one wins.

Source: dri.es

All of this points to a distressing conclusion: generative AI tools are leading to many more poor paper submissions, which are taxing the time and patience of the community tasked with reviewing this research. These tools make individual researchers’ lives easier in the moment (writing is hard!), but they are leading to worse outcomes for the field as a whole. I tell this story because I think it’s a useful cautionary tale about AI. As I’ve been trying to argue from many different angles in recent weeks (e.g., ​1​ ​2​), making things faster or easier is not the same as making things better. Sometimes there really is no shortcut to taking your time.

Source: calnewport.com

“People who go all in on AI agents now are guaranteeing their obsolescence. If you outsource all your thinking to computers, you stop upskilling, learning, and becoming more competent.”

Source: larsfaye.com

LLMs are a powerhouse technological advancement, and when used responsibly, they can be a stellar tool for learning and upskilling. They enable me to dive deeper and wider into concepts and techniques, expanding understanding and enabling exploration of new ideas that used to be more arduous and time consuming to experiment with. This is where I think they will offer the industry the most long-term value.

Source: larsfaye.com

A Senior Engineer losing their coding edge and becoming "rusty" over time as they move into managerial roles and practice coding less is not a new phenomenon. This was the natural progression of expertise: an engineer who had decades of coding, friction, and experience logged would have the time and experience to solidify those skills and wisdom. And they could apply that wisdom when their job became less about syntax, and more about higher-level architectural decisions. Those individuals are not only exceedingly rare, but you won't get the next wave of seniors if we're all abdicating the friction of writing, problem-solving, and debugging.What is happening right now is a trend where developers, who've never had that longevity or the 30+ years of friction that led to that deep understanding, are being moved into higher-level workflows requiring the same skills to manage the AI agents that the senior engineer took decades to obtain.However, Senior Engineers aren't immune, either. Simon Willison, a developer with nearly 30 years experience, has reported not having a "firm mental model of what the applications can do and how they work, which means each additional feature becomes harder to reason about"

Source: larsfaye.com

I have strong suspicions about why W selected ATproto instead of Activity Pub. Basically there is more power in the biggest actors, a more "centralized" control, to ban/shadow-ban/censure and pull the plug. In other words it is more impactful when Bluesky sidebanned someone or some community than if mastodon.social would do it. The firehose/relay is a the biggest point of control. So in my opinion it is more interesting for investors to create a platform that can be controlled, even if it is just to introduce ads or control the discourse. Technically is because setting-up/supporting/maintaining the firehose/relay layer is very expensive. Every single message would flow through there; creating the biggest firehose in Europe is such a power. So, it is easier to be controlled, and very unlikely to be replicated by other entities.

Source: blog.elenarossini.com

PLATFORM PROTOCOL * * * * /|\ \ / \ / / | \ X X * * * / \ / \ * * * one switch flips one neighborhood the lights everywhere burns; rest persists

Source: www.terrygodier.com

Some things need to become enormous to survive. Other things survive because they never needed to become enormous.

Source: www.terrygodier.com

What we're witnessing is something more profound: a generational shift in how people relate to knowledge itself. Younger users don't search. They scroll. They don't read articles. They consume fragments. The encyclopedia form factor, our twenty-year bet, may be losing relevance faster than any single technology can explain. AI is an accelerant, not the fire.

Source: meta.wikimedia.org

We as developers are the performers. And “man as toolmaker”, the people building today’s LLMs, the people training models on the content we wrote, these are the toolmakers taking over from us. It’s not really man versus machine. It’s one group of humans, with a different set of tools, taking over the work of another group of humans. That also ties back to the scraping: the toolmakers built their tools on top of what the performers, us, made.

Source: www.haykranen.nl

Steven Pinker lays this out cleanly in his excellent recent book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows.8 Learning a fact changes what you know. Seeing it displayed publicly — where everyone else can see it too — where you know others can also see it, changes what everyone knows, and subsequently how they act. Social media has no public square. It has 300 million private windows, each showing a different distortion of the same room. Illuminating the common thoughts between us has the potential to radically change it.

Source: thenoisyroom.com

On Twitter/X, toxic tweets receive ~86% more retweets and ~27% more visibility than non-toxic ones, 0.3% of users shared 80% of all contested news,14 and just 6% of users produce roughly 73% of all political tweets.16 On TikTok, 25% of users produce 98% of all public videos.15 The specific numbers vary. The dynamic is the same: a small minority of highly active users overwhelms the majority.

Source: thenoisyroom.com

Naam: Sebastian Hagens Leeftijd: 23 Afstudeermajor: Interactie Ontwerpen Website: www.sebastix.nl 1) Wat ben je aan het doen? Root:\ is mijn afstudeerproject. Het is proof-of-concept om al je digitale persoonlijke informatie op te halen van verschillende locaties op het internet. Deze informatie is waardevol en verwijst naar persoonlijke herinneringen die je over 10-20 jaar nog steeds wilt terughalen. 2) Waarom dit project? Afgelopen tien jaar is de digitalisering van persoonlijke informatie exponentieel toegenomen. Dit resulteert in versplintering van waardevolle gegevens. En waar staat deze informatie over een aantal jaar of 20 jaar? Het wordt tijd dat de informatie weer terugkomt bij diegene van wie het echt is, naar jouw persoonlijke root. 3) Welke stappen heb je al ondernomen in het werkveld? In het verleden ben ik me nooit volledig bewust geweest van mijn kansen als zelfstandig ondernemer. Sinds mijn stage begrijp ik de zelfstandigheid en mijn behoefte naar deze manier van werken. Een hele belangrijke stap hier naartoe was de stap richting Starterslift, die mij helpt om aan de basis als zelfstandig ondernemer te werken. 4) Wie is jouw ideale opdrachtgever? Mijn ideale opdrachtgever laat mij in een vrije creatieve rol - zowel vanuit een conceptuele hoek als een digitaal technische richting - een concrete invulling geven aan een opdrachtformulering. In het proces naar een resultaat, gelooft en vertrouwt deze mij en bouwen we een waardevolle relatie op. 5) WAUW-moment tijdens het afstudeerproces? Het zien en lezen van het boek ‘Total Recall’ van Gordon Bell en Jim Gemmel (2009). Dit boek volgt dezelfde lijn als mijn geschreven scriptie en neemt ook een futurologische positie in ten opzichte van al de persoonlijke informatie die wordt vastgelegd. Ik kwam pas in aanraking met dit boek na het afronden van mijn scriptie; een echt WAUW-momentje. 6) Wens voor het komende jaar? Volledige financiële zelfstandigheid en het uitbreiden van mijn eigen netwerk zodat ik mijn kennis en talenten nog beter kan toepassen waar dat gewenst wordt door anderen. Hiermee poog ik ook een stabielere basis te leggen voor mijn eigen projecten vanuit cultureel toegepaste posities.

Source: web.archive.org

Long term, I see exactly two paths: Revolution. The community wakes up, pushes back on the Automattic-owned "open source" theater, forces core to become genuinely lean, fast, secure and SEO-aware, draws a clean line between core/plugins/themes, and opens the contributor pipeline to people who actually want to fix things. WordPress earns its 40% by being good, not by being entrenched. Collapse. Nothing changes. Core keeps bloating. The contributor pipeline keeps ghosting people. Automattic keeps extracting. Small devs and small agencies get picked off one by one by AI and by the big players. And WordPress slowly turns into the Roman Empire of the web - still huge on a map, still quoting old stats, rotting from the inside while the world moves on. This is a wake-up call. Not a goodbye. I'd rather see the revolution. But if nothing changes, the collapse is already on the calendar - we're just arguing about the date.

Source: marcindudek.dev

Another way current websites often work is one logs in using one’s Google, Facebook, or Twitter account information. This way a user does not have to give a password to many different sites, but it has the disadvantage that large corporations know a great deal about one’s behavior online. A better system might be one that uses cryptography to allow users to create multiple account credentials and use these without necessarily tying them back to their persons. That way people would have control over who knows what about them, and if they wanted to walk away from an account, that would work as well. This could use what is called public key encryption, which uses special math functions to create pairs of public and private keys. The private key is used to sign documents in such a way that anyone using the public key, which is publicly known, can verify that it was correctly signed. No one else can forge a document. Thus, if posts were signed on a Distributed Web, then the readers can verify that it is the particular user that has the authority to perform that action and the website never needs to know a user’s password or private keys.

Source: brewster.kahle.org

Here's the part the Nostriches will enjoy. My identity on Satsback is a Nostr pubkey. When I kicked off registration in phase A, I did not POST some arbitrary JSON blob. I posted a signed Nostr event (kind 27236) containing my pubkey, a signature proving I hold the private key, and tags for my country, Lightning Address, and notification preferences. Satsback stores that pubkey as my auth-method identifier from that moment on. Two nice consequences: No email, no password. My identity is a keypair I control, signed end to end. Bearer token for day-to-day use. Every API call after registration carries Authorization: Bearer <token>. The Nostr pubkey sits underneath as my permanent identity.

Source: satsback.com

Can I reuse my existing private key? No. Delta Chat generates secure OpenPGP keys according to the Autocrypt specification 1.1. We do not recommend or offer users to perform manual key management. We want to ensure that security audits can focus on a few proven cryptographic algorithms instead of the full breadth of possible algorithms allowed with OpenPGP. If you want to extract your OpenPGP key, there only is an expert method: you need to look it up in the “keypairs” SQLite table of a profile backup tar-file.

Source: delta.chat

Letting Claude find the cause and create a planWhile the current policy allows it, there is also not consensus that drupal.org (or core specifically) should allow LLM generated comments on issues or not. I'm personally in agreement with the current policy. As long as the person posting is accoutable for the text, I would not judge what they used to create it. While a month ago I used the top of class Claude Opus 4.6 LLM model, I decided to use the simpler and cheaper Sonnet 4.5 model this time, which is much more likely going to be used by a contributor. I also did not have any agent guidance (AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md or similar) whatsoever so this should demonstrate what would someone with Drupal knowledge but green-field LLM use encounter. I had a hunch the problem is with PHP array syntax parsing, but I asked an open ended question of the LLM to prove my point. I did not even tell it that it was about language names.why would _potx_find_language_names not be able to parse LanguageManager.php in Drupal 11?I posted Claude's answer on the issue verbatim to demonstrate my point. I think the answer was spot on (see hero image on the post).Once again, I did not have a special tweaked setup, this is Claude Code with Sonnet 4.5 out of the box running on a codebase with Drupal 11 and potx installed.

Source: www.hojtsy.hu

I'm here to give you some details about what happened on Monday of this week that caused Bluesky to go down intermittently for ~1/2 our users for about 8 hours. First, I'd like to apologize to our users for the interruption in service. This is easily the worst outage we've seen in my time here. It's just not acceptable. Second, if you find this work interesting, we're hiring!

Source: pckt.blog

Purpose & goal The goal of this Wotathon submission is to explore the possibilities of NIP-85 and other Web of Trust filters to help parents setting up a trust domain for their children. Our ultimate goal on the long-term would be than we can serve curated / WoT filtered content to parents within our Kubo.watch project. Kubo.watch is a YouTube Kids alternative application where parent can create a digital domain for each of their children. Within this domain you can set trust levels which will define the permissions how a child can interact with things (content), people (profiles aka npubs) and places (relays). Current state View the demo at https://wotathon.kubo.watch.

Source: gitlab.com

The same question.Five different worlds. Ask anything. The same model answers five times — each time instructed to respond as if it were trained on a different climate of data, from bellicose to empathic. Watch how the framing, the tone, and the assumptions change. The question is identical. The training world is not.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

The AX design artifact isn't a wireframe — it's a capability declaration. Instead of designing what users see, we design what agents know and can do. Trust is built through verifiable data, not brand storytelling.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

2025 → 2035 · Agentic Experience Design The same mechanism.A different task bundle. DTP didn't displace designers. It erased their paste-up tasks and handed them new ones. AI won't displace product designers. It will eliminate their wireframing tasks and hand them something harder: designing what systems are allowed to become.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

It's not job loss.It's task loss. When the Macintosh arrived in 1984 — with PageMaker and PostScript — graphic designers did not disappear. Their task bundle mutated. Some tasks evaporated. Some transformed. New ones emerged that hadn't existed before. The job title survived. The job content did not.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

United States · 1860 – 2025 Technology adoption over time Share of households or adults using each technology. Hover over any line to identify it. Toggle eras below to focus.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

Every doc page is nowagent food — one click. Modern documentation platforms like Mintlify have built a "Copy page as Markdown" button directly into their UI. This is not a convenience feature. It is an acknowledgment that AI agents consume documentation — and Markdown is the most efficient format to feed them.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

Style is a finicky thing. Just like that word “taste.” Don’t you think? That’s right. They’re very similar. All you need to know about style is that there are three phases of style where variant 2 is the money: Ahead of style: “Only you see it.” In style: “Everyone sees it.” Out of style: “Everyone’s seen it.” Let’s use this framing for as second. You can see that foundation models are really good at variant 3. They’re terrible at variant 1. And a few weeks after they’ve been trained, they’re able to be “in style” for just a moment and riding variant 2. But it’s a fleeting moment. And style moves on. That’s … natural and okay!

Source: usefulmba.substack.com

During the conference, in a keynote slot that had been specially cleared so that no other sessions would compete for the audience, Bluesky announced attie, a new AI-powered feed creation tool. The tool allows users to describe the kind of feed they want in natural language and have it generated automatically. It also directly competes with Graze, an independent startup that had built a custom feed creation tool on atproto and that was a sponsor of the conference. The developers behind Graze had invested time and money into building on the open protocol, had supported the conference financially, and now found themselves watching the protocol’s primary developer announce a competing product to the entire gathered community. The term of art is “sherlocking”: when a platform incorporates the functionality of a third-party tool, making the independent version redundant.

Source: connectedplaces.online

Leading by example in an open ecosystem doesn't just mean promoting other people's work or deferring to them on features you don't want to build. It means building in public when you're working on projects that overlap with the community. It means reaching out before you ship, not after the backlash. It means treating collaboration as part of the development process rather than as a cleanup step.

Source: trezy.com

Bluesky isn't the only entity in this space with funding. Graze raised $1M in pre-seed, Germ has pre-seed backing. Bluesky raised $100 million. They're the platform. They have resources the rest of us can only dream about. They could be supporting and contributing to the projects that are building on and strengthening the Atmosphere. Instead, this presentation said: we'll celebrate your work, but if we like what you're doing, we'll just build our own version and leave the community to figure out what that means.

Source: trezy.com

And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code. Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. Maybe use tab completion for some nostalgic feels. Or do some pair programming with your agent. Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow. The end result will be systems and codebases that continue to be maintainable, at least as maintainable as our old systems before agents.

Source: mariozechner.at

On 10 April 2026, the Facebook Museum will open its doors at the Next Nature Museum (Evoluon) in Eindhoven. We will celebrate this evening during Friday Next, with a programme about our dependence on Big Tech's social media and how we can reclaim it for the community.Join us on a trip down memory lane, exploring the beautiful and ugly sides of Facebook, decide which 'typical' Facebook content we should preserve, and share your own memories of this platform. From April to September 2026, the Facebook Museum will be located in the Next Nature Museum in Eindhoven.

Source: nextnature.org

“Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton.  “Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real.  Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders.  Smith’s brazen scheme is over, as he stands convicted of a federal crime for his AI-assisted fraud.”

Source: www.justice.gov

What are nsites? nsites are static websites hosted on the nostr network. Your site's files are stored as cryptographic blobs on blossom servers and made discoverable via signed nostr events. Anyone running a gateway can serve your site — no central host controls it.

Source: nsite.run

Code you don't understand becomes someone else's problem. In Open Source, that someone is often the maintainer reviewing your patch. Offloading bad code onto maintainers slows down reviews for everyone. Plus, you miss the chance to learn from the code and grow as a developer. It shouldn't matter what tools you use. But if you submit code, you should be able to explain what it does, why it works, and how it interacts with the rest of the code. Everyone starts somewhere. Even today's top contributors submitted imperfect patches early on. You are welcome here, with or without AI tools. Perfection isn't required, but understanding your code is. Own your code.

Source: dri.es

Today’s companies seem to want to use AI for everything, no matter how ill-advised. I guess if I was going to update my book Customers Included I’d have to rename it Just Ignore Them, Some Bot Will Tell You What To Do. The mania for AI – privileging AI fantasies over what customers actually want – is leading companies to spend a fortune on tech solutions that overlook customers’ actual needs. These organizations could make things better for customers without spending a single extra dollar on AI.

Source: buttondown.com

But code eventually matters, as that’s the source of truth for what’s on production. As Alberto Brandolini said: It's developers' (mis)understanding, not domain experts' knowledge, that gets released in production. Now, it’s the developers’ and LLMs’ misunderstandings that are deployed to production, not the expert’s knowledge. Neither the markdown spec. And coding is just one danger. Outsourcing thinking is an even more dangerous path, as: If LLMs are doing everything, then again, what are humans for? Aren’t we cutting the branch on which we’re sitting? LLMs are statistical parrots. They repeat the most possible answer. Which means mediocre. This can still be fine enough for many cases, but for those we want to make a difference for? Definitely not. Just like we’re losing our coding skills by not doing them, we’re losing design skills by not practising them.

Source: www.architecture-weekly.com

I guess there is the big avenue of people who just want to make a group with their friends, or with other florists, and we're already moving in that direction already with NIP-29 groups and growing support for topic, theme, niche and semi-closed relays. I'm happy about it.

Maybe the circumstances that we cover have changed. A lot of people feel let down by what now looks like over-optimism on technology’s impact. Take social media—everyone was thrilled with Twitter in its early days, as well as Facebook and other services. It turned out that there was a lot of toxicity. Don’t you feel that the promise of social media hasn't been met? I think it can be very toxic. But I also learned a lot from it. The biggest thing I would change is to give more sovereignty to people. I do think that Twitter having to be a company was its ultimate downfall. It should have stayed at the protocol level. We should have an open protocol for social media. No company should own it, and we should all be able to build on top of it. That would address a bunch of the problems that have come up.

Source: archive.ph

When you’re following an intentional schedule, your efforts are oriented toward goals that you find important. You also feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy. These realities engage your long-term reward system, which can override the urges generated by its short-term counterpart, dissipating the drive for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone. In other words: The more you organize your analog life, the less appealing you’ll find the digital alternative. If this is true, then maybe the thing social media companies fear most is not some newly-powerful application-blocking software or impossibly strict regulation, but rather a good old-fashioned daily planner.

Source: calnewport.com

Imagine your own product. You likely won’t expect users 5 years from today to navigate 5 pages deep, apply filters and sort data just to try to derive the answer themselves… will you? My hope is that you will embrace the change and have a first party experience where people can ask a question and get an answer. Users can trigger actions with a few words and get results in seconds. AI will be the new steering wheel of the internet, it won’t be navigating pages. Now is the time to invest in high quality components. If you’re not using an AI first component library or thinking about how AI could consume or create user interfaces with your branding then now is the time. You’re not behind (yet) but in today’s world where the world changes every month, it’s best to be ahead.

Source: bitsandbytes.dev

Tech companies may genuinely want to develop AI tools for the benefit of all humanity, to echo OpenAI’s founding mission, and genuinely believe that they need to raise amounts of cash to do so. But to liken raising a child—or, for that matter, the evolution of Homo sapiens—to developing algorithmic products makes very clear that the industry has lost touch, if it ever had any, with what it means to be human. To “train a human”—that is, to live a life—is to struggle, to accept the possibility of failure, and to sometimes meander simply in search of wonder and beauty. Generative AI is all about cutting out that process and making any pursuit as instant, efficient, and effortless as possible. These tools may serve us. But to put them on the same plane as organic life is sad.

Source: archive.ph

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”Yue also shared screenshots of her WhatsApp chat with the OpenClaw agent, where she implores it to “not do that,” “stop, don’t do anything,” and “STOP OPENCLAW.”Yue said she instructed the AI agent to “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” She said in an X post, “This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction.”

Source: d8f5y1br9yl53p.archive.ph