"We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?" asks this brilliant 4-part series, which I'm Hubbing in one post as I await part 4.Part 1 basically sets out the problem: today's online communities resemble platforms, in that the community's stewards (OCMs) determine every…

Laurens uses Mastodon's new Share button - which frames Mastodon "not as one implementation of a shared protocol but as a platform" - to explore protocol ownership, showing how "The fediverse built its federation layer on an open standard, but left the client layer to be captured by its dominant provider". That dominant provider is Mastodon, and …

Paul Frazee clearing up confusion surrounding Atproto, ActivityPub and Nostr. The latter two "are good examples of "federated hosts" and "magical meshes," ... Atproto draws inspiration ... but it works like neither".Firstly, though, let's not put the cart before the horse: "The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals an…

Joe Basser, Spark founder, is also one of the best explainers on the Atmosphere.Building on his previous post, which explains that "When users can leave without losing [everything]... platforms lose the ability to quietly tighten the screws forever", Basser explores what happens as a result: "What does social media look like when anti-enshittifica…

Drupal founder on "Open Source alone won't deliver digital sovereignty. Europe must fix procurement and fund those who actually build it... doesn't require building the European equivalent of Microsoft or Google... [but] Europe has ... some of the world's strongest Open Source communities, regulatory reach, and public sector scale."While "Open S…

A perfectly brilliant way to introduce AT protocol."What do files have to do with social computing? Historically, not a lot—until recently."Dan first reintroduces files: how they were not originally intended "to live inside the apps... [but] somewhere that you control. Apps create and read your files on your behalf, but files don’t belong to the a…

The creators' account of their co-development of, and move to, standard.site, "and how we plan to grow publishing × open social together".Standard.site is "a set of shared standards for longform publishing on the open social web...a set of AT Protocol lexicons for:publication metadata: what a publication is, like its name, description, and basic t…

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert: "Looking back, the most important things I learned weren't really about software. They were about people, scale, and what it takes to build something that lasts. Twenty-five years, twenty-five lessons."I won't list them all here, just reflecting on those that resonate with and/or surprise me the most:"Growth and gene…

A 34 minute read: "Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances", or its competitors. It's unpolished, 100% vibe coded, and only for those at Stage 7 of the 8 stage AI-assisted coding journey, "or maybe Stage 6 and very brave", because "Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent chimpanze…

Remember this next time you're arguing with someone on the internet:"Hey, can you mansplain any louder?""Yeah, sure!"

"Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere" - by the makers of leaflet, pckt & offprint - a good example of how builders can just collaborate on the ATmosphere without drama: "The standard grows when builders identify shared needs and ali…

Bluesy's Paul Frazee on where cloud computing went: "the clouds are closed... they'll do everything well except interoperating with others. But there's nothing that says clouds have to be closed. Closed networks are a big company thing, not a cloud thing... We need to bridge our clouds... Atmospheric computing is a paradigm of connected clouds".O…