Building an open web that protects us from harm via Ben Werdmuller

As I think about the blogs I've returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here's what I think helps make for a good blog.

Mastodon was founded on the principles that people should be able to control their social circle online, curate their own timeline, and convene freely with any community of their choosing. We believe social media should help users build bridges, not walls. And we believe this is best achieved through federation.

Whenever I beat the RSS drum, someone always asks about discoverability, so I want to put this bluntly: it is through algorithmic discoverability features that harmful posts become visible. Whether they are original posts, reposts, or replies, harmful posts are only able to successfully reach their intended audience by depending on those features...

A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years.

The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Dickens' Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet.