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People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.

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Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting in 2025

[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

Changes to financial aid at MIT:

"Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold."

If your family makes less than $100,000 a year, you also get housing, dining, and fees included, as well as an allowance for books.

I was a part of the final year of students to attend university tuition-free in the UK, and it made a huge difference to me. I would also have met this bar for having all costs covered - which will give the students who qualify an enormous head start. May more universities follow this lead.

#Education

[Link]

Scripting News Valid

Basically, if you have to lock your users in, your product must suck.

Adactio Supports Webmention Valid

Wednesday session

Wednesday session

Wednesday session

Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

The Right Triumphed Over Social Media and Helped Elect Trump

[Julia Angwin at The New York Times] In an op-ed for The New York Times, Julia Angwin makes a strong argument for the open social web: "If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social...

Manton Reece Supports Webmention Valid

There’s been so much new interest in cross-posting in Micro.blog, I created a special page to explain it. Best experience when it loads in large windows like a desktop browser.

Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

How Rappler Is Building Its Own Communities to Counter AI and Big Tech

[Lucinda Jordaan at Global Investigative Journalism Network] I'd missed this story from back in July. Rappler is building its own end-to-end encrypted, decentralized communities on the Matrix protocol. "Built on the open source, secure, decentralized Matrix ...

Scripting News Valid

It's noteworthy that we haven't seen many outages as Bluesky scales. On Twitter they had fail whales for years.

Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled

[Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom at Rest of World] Mobile internet subscriber growth is significantly slowing globally: "From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But i...

Scripting News Valid

What matters with social networks is what you can get done there, not so much the features of the network. Bluesky has the same features today it had a month ago. The difference is we had an election in the US, I guess that was the catalyst. The presence of Elon Musk so close to Trump says there is a need for a Musk-free place. I've kept my account on Twitter. I started there in 2006, and I love the web more than I feel it would do any good to erase my presence there. It's pretty much against my religion to deliberately erase bits of the web. And whatever you think of Twitter, it is most definitely part of the web.

Scripting News Valid

On Bluesky, inbound RSS is becoming a thing.

Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

Don't call it a Substack.

[Anil Dash] Anil Dash on Substack's attempt to brand "writing in a newsletter": "We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great direc...

Adactio Supports Webmention Valid

Looking up the translation for the word “cute” in another language, it’s listed in a dictionary as “cute, a.F” where “a.F” stands for “adjective, Familiar” …but that is *not* how I read it at first!

Looking up the translation for the word “cute” in another language, it’s listed in a dictionary as “cute, a.F” where “a.F” stands for “adjective, Familiar” …but that is not how I read it at first!

Manton Reece Supports Webmention Valid

I’m working on a new page for Micro.blog and having so much fun with it. It’s equal parts business marketing page and hobby art project, built natively for the web with CSS and JS.

Scripting News Valid

A quick podcast about our new 365-day-a-year campaign on the social web to keep our democracy alive.

Scripting News podcast

We found the kamalahq team!

I've been saying this for twenty years -- the Dems shut down their campaign presence on the social web on Election Day, and they come back when they need our money (to give to the huge media companies for ads) and vote, and that's it. We play no role in governing. Meanwhile...

Scripting News Valid

We've found Lauren Kapp, the 25-year-old creative genius behind kamalahq. We need to get her back on the air, with her team, fully funded and supported. We need leadership on the social web. Thanks to Brian Puckett for the link.

Adactio Supports Webmention Valid

I’ve updated my website’s posting interface to allow me to selectively POSSE to Mastodon and/or Bluesky (previously I was using RSS-to-micro.blog for Bluesky syndication)

I’ve updated my website’s posting interface to allow me to selectively POSSE to Mastodon and/or Bluesky (previously I was using RSS-to-micro.blog for Bluesky syndication)

I’ve updated my website’s posting interface to allow me to selectively POSSE to Mastodon and/or Bluesky (previously I was using RSS-to-micro.blog for Bluesky syndication)

Manton Reece Supports Webmention Valid

Vincent has been quietly improving web accessibility in Micro.blog behind the scenes, and it’s bringing some other benefits such as new keyboard navigation in the timeline. More we can do here but already I really like it.

Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

SF tech layoffs: Tales of post-pink-slip reinvention

[Jillian D'Onfro at The San Francisco Standard]

On one level, this piece about tech workers leaving the industry behind and doing something more culturally meaningful is quite nice:

"Andrew Wasilewski, who managed to live “very frugally” on his layoff package while launching the Faight Collective, a music and art community in the Lower Haight, signed the lease for the space mere weeks after his last day of work in tech sales."

But then you find yourself asking: how does an artist community pay a lease on the Lower Haight? How do any of these folks live like this, even for a while, in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

And the answer is obvious, and a little sad, and perhaps not very empowering after all.

#Culture

[Link]

Ben Werdmuller Supports Webmention
• Ben Werdmuller

Inside UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage

[Annie Waldman at ProPublica] UnitedHealth Group has been using an algorithm to determine whether patients have been receiving "too much" therapy and then cutting them off: "Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found t...