24/11/2023
Those who were over 30 years old in 2013 have probably never used or even understand Snapchat.
Today, however, we all feel the influence of the ephemeral messaging app. Stories, Snapchat’s legacy to humanity, reject a maxim of the commercial internet: that all data must be kept forever.
The ephemeral in digital is an unintuitive concept. With storage prices falling and the promises of new technologies capable of extracting insights from large volumes of data — big data, machine learning, LLMs! —, turning your back on data becomes an almost subversive attitude.
Maybe it’s. If it’s… so what? It’s also liberating. And it can be economical. There are advantages to not being a digital hoarder.
Continue reading »
7/11/2023
Everyone (it seems) is posting their app defaults lists, so I thought to join the party as well.
- Mail Client: Mail.app
- Mail Server: Fastmail and Zoho Mail
- Notes: Simplenote and *.txt files
- To-Do: Apple Reminders
- Photo Management: iCloud Photos
- Calendar: Apple Calendar
- Cloud File Storage: iCloud
- RSS: Miniflux @ NetNewsWire
- Browser: Safari
- Chat: Signal, Element X (Matrix), Telegram, and WhatsApp
- Bookmarks: Linkding
- Read It Later: Instapaper
- Word Processing: Text Editor (macOS default app; does it count?)
- Spreadsheets: Apple Numbers
Budgeting and Personal Finance: Apple Numbers
- News: Artifact, newspapers sites
- Music: Apple Music
- Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
- Password Management: MacPass (macOS), KeePassium (iOS)
- Backup: rclone + Backblaze B2
There are a lot of Apple apps and services, a side effect of using macOS and iOS as main OSs. I hope to improve on that someday.
27/10/2023
Exactly a year ago, Elon Musk became Twitter’s owner. He paid USD 44 billion for the entire company and promised to turn the social network into a kind of “super app”, or — as he says — an “everything app”.
A year is a short time, I agree, but at this point one was to expect at least signs that a turnaround is underway or at least feasible. The signs exist, but in the opposite direction.
In a year under Musk’s control, Twitter deteriorated, became unrecognizable. Not only by the name change, to the meaningless, stupid “X“. We saw in real time, day after day, the merciless dismantling of a beloved company, of much of what was built in almost two decades.
Musk made his fortune with startups at the turn of the millennium and later became the richest person in the world with the surge of Tesla stock, an automaker he co-founded, manages and that spearheaded the electrification of cars, the new self-deception of the automobile industry in the fight against the climate emergency.
Musk’s business (he is also CEO of SpaceX and owns The Boring Company), until then, kind of shielded him from the general public. It leaked only the image of the entrepreneurial genius making bold business decisions, sometimes merciless, but that resulted in innovative, futuristic and, most importantly, profitable solutions.
Let’s be fair: just someone very crazy, naive or genius (or all three things at the same time) to make simultaneous bets on electric cars and private space exploration in the early 2000s, and win both.
But Twitter is a different business. The quick posts for a huge audience, with the power to promptly answer, amplify and, sometimes, massacre the messenger, expose the soul of those who let themselves be consumed by this dynamic. It’s an addiction. Twitter is digital cocaine; Musk is a Twitter addict.
This comes from before the acquisition. Some of the biggest controversies in which he got himself into happened in the form of irresponsible posts on Twitter.
Like when he called (without proof) a pedophile a diver involved in the rescue of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, or announced that he had money to take Tesla private (he did not have).
Musk’s rude pragmatism may work to build cars and launch rockets into the stratosphere, but it does not serve for speech. And Twitter, before being a technology company, is a company that promotes relationships between people. Communication.
Were there bad things on the old Twitter? Absolutely. Twitter was and is somewhat successful despite the direction of the company. It’s always been like that, it still is. But, as they say, nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.
Listing the disasters of Musk management is unfeasible — this article would become a book. Below, I picked up only two of the most notorious for illustrative purposes.
The blue verification badge/checkmark was emblematic of the problems of the old Twitter: confusing, uncertain, but to some extent functional. At the very least, it served to distinguish people of high visibility.
Musk turned the blue check into a cheap product. Anyone can have it, just pay USD 8/month. By becoming a product and incorporating a kind of “turbo” into Twitter’s algorithm, the meaning of the badge was lost. When it became a source of revenue based on viralization, it became a weapon.
Nowadays, many pay for the badge to amplify angry speeches and misinformation. A recent survey by NewsGuard, for instance, found that 74% of viral misinformation posts related to the Israel/Hamas war were published by verified profiles.
It’s funny that one of the newest benefits of the paid Twitter subscription is to hide the verification badge. In a year, it went from a proud, desirable perk to a toxic one.
The other disaster was that of advertising, which before Musk was bringing ~US$ 5 billion a year to Twitter. A lot? Little? Everything is relative, but it was good money that paid the bills.
The exodus from the advertising market, which is sensitive to controversy, was justified. Musk unbanned extremists and Nazis banned from Twitter by old the old Twitter, people who until then only found space on the fringes of digital society.
No serious company wants to take the risk of seeing its brand next to this type of content.
With all its flaws, or perhaps because of them, the old Twitter was a kind of target of the most strident elites and politicians, which lives by fighting with windmills.
Musk is just another one of those noisy, provocative extremists. What sets him apart from the others is that he has a lot of money.
The new Twitter, or X, is the full realization of the crazy ideas of delusional, resentful, and powerful people, a reactionary dystopia with no room for nuances, where money trumps everything — except Musk himself.
25/10/2023
When Twitter changed hands and Mastodon had its 15 minutes of fame, on October 2022, it seemed that we were on the verge of a digital revolution based on ActivityPub, the open protocol that powers Mastodon and other apps in the so called fediverse.
A lot of people got excited. Among them, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic. In a conversation on Twitter, Matt announced that Tumblr, owned by his company, would get ActivityPub compatibility.
Almost a year later, nobody talks about it anymore and it seems Matt’s promise succumbed to project issues and lack of interest.
In July, someone replied to Matt’s original post and asked if Automattic was still working on integrating ActivityPub with Tumblr.
“It’s a little depressing to think Facebook of all companies might beat you to it”, he said, referring to Mark Zuckerberg’s promise — also not yet fulfilled — to bring ActivityPub to Threads.
“Yeah 😕”, Matt replied. “They are orders of magnitude bigger and better capitalized than us. Not an excuse, just reality.”
The reality, however, may be a little worse than Matt’s answer implied.
A few days after this exchange, Javier Álvarez López, a software engineer from Spain, former Automattic employee, suggested on Mastodon that the project to bring ActivityPub to Tumblr had been shelved.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Javier left the team responsible for Tumblr in May and, in September, left Automattic. Today, he holds a position at Yoast, a popular SEO plugin for WordPress.
Then, Javier echoed a post by Cyle Gage, a Tumblr product person, answering a reader’s question on his blog.
“Matt [Mullenweg] announced it impromptu in a single tweet and never talked about it again”, they wrote. “I just assumed it’s been canned now, or at least, significantly delayed, is there a reason activitypub integration was never properly announced on tumblr?”
Cyle’s complete answer was:
it’s been delayed, but it’s something in our list for @labs and we’re evaluating it.
my concern, re: activitypub, is that while federation is a really great idea, it’s never had a good product. it doesn’t really fulfill a widespread need, it’s very niche. nobody is joining threads or bluesky because it will federate someday. so i don’t think it would help grow tumblr at all. actually i think it would likely end up costing more than it makes, which is a concern.
but stay tuned!
In another post on Mastodon, Javier revealed the behind the scenes of Matt’s untimely announcement:
I was working for tumblr when the Twitter thing happened and we scrambled to put together a project. I was the one supposed to do all the web UI work.
Once my backend counterpart did some initial investigation and scoping, and it became obvious it was a complex task and that it would become a cost center without any chance to generate any cashflow, the project was quietly put on long-term hold.
In 2023, Automattic acquired an ActivityPub plugin then in development for WordPress, hired its developer, Matthias Pfefferle, and together they have already released a 1.0/stable version.
In October, they released the integration with ActivityPub to all WordPress.com blogs, Automattic’s commercial WordPress hosting arm.
Tumblr users, on the other hand, are still waiting for the ability to talk to Mastodon and other fediverse users.