Now that Twitter is dying, what can replace it?

It's all too easy to believe in the illusion of neverending data storage and streaming. But it's destroying the natural world.

The data about your community will never stop changing, and that's to be expected. It's important to keep asking questions, iterate, and take action.

What does it mean to use data in a healthy way?

In terms of sheer impact, the like button was one of the most successful pieces of code ever shipped. But when you examine the quality of that impact, its flaws become glaring.

It’s been a week since Elon Musk, funded by a distasteful assortment of backers, bought Twitter. In no particular order, some thoughts on what it means for various groups. Employees Predictably, sw…

I’ve spent a lot of time lately contemplating how I feel about Elon Musk taking over Twitter, and specifically about how I feel about the exodus to Mastodon that I see happening. As with many things happening online today I notice the emotionally charged nature of what is going on, which immediately leaves me wanting to slow down when it comes to making any decisions. I have spent countless hours thinking about the tools that I use, what my overall digital footprint is, and choosing to abandon or introduce services into my is always weighed against my bigger picture. I am very interested in using Mastodon, and supporting the open source specifications, standards, and code it is built on, but I want to make sure it fits into my overall digital stack in a sensible way.

Every time I post something that gets lots of engagement, I essentially end up carrying out a denial of service attack on myself. What does this say about the design of Mastodon and ActivityPub and the future of the fediverse?

When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team. We didn’t run a hiring process, do interviews, or consider candidates on the existing team. Instead, our new manager brought over one of his previous colleagues.

What Elon Musk got wrong about Twitter, journalists and VCs got wrong about FTX, and Peter Thiel got wrong about crypto and AI — and why I made many of the same mistakes along the way.

The CHAOSS community has defined more than 70 metrics and maintains software to get the insights you need. Here are the five focus areas you should pay attention to.

This will take ‘you wrote it, you own it’ to a new level and will require wider skills associated with operational aspects of code than just programming.

If you only pay attention to how things work, you’ll be screwed when they fail.

If what happened to Freenode (admittedly to a significantly smaller scale) is anything to go by, once the first signs of mismanagement appear, users leave real fast, and the thing can die in a couple weeks. On Twitter, the exodus has begun, and so, I will have to follow. 1/

Why Are Bots Taking Over The Internet? Almost everyone reading this article must have done a captcha test at some point. The phrase CAPTCHA,

Following Twitter's recent downturn, many people are looking for alternatives. Can the IndieWeb step up? How can we build better social media for people without technical knowledge?

One insider says the company’s current staffing isn’t able to sustain the platform.

The more I read about Mastodon promoters' opinions on how it should work, the more I think, "How could you possibly think that is how it is going to go?" One group of people want a Federated Feed Reader: They want to read the clever updates and memes from their friends and favorite celebrities. They want to post a GIF and have their friends validate them by hitting "like" on it. They want to ...

Posted on 2022-11-13

I truly loathe Markdown Truly But given the widespread use of Markdown it might seem strange that I have such aversion to it If you somehow really like it or are so used to it by now you might

They conducted extensive research into the personality traits of great software engineers. This was the result.

"At Google scale, million-to-one chances happen all the time," observed Google Cloud Reliability Advocate Steve McGhee.

Berners-Lee is working on a new data-sharing standard, Solid, to deliver on his Web 3.0 vision, and a company, Inrupt, to commercialize it.