Notices by Anil Dash (anildash@me.dm)

The success of a startup called “posthog” has inspired me to call my next company “showfeet”.

Congrats to @molly0xfff who is now impossible to find on Meta Threads.

Get ready: in just about 2 hours, it’s Fastly ‘s first *ever* special event for developers. We’ll be talking about the exciting future of @glitchdotcom, the most-requested features you’ve wanted from @devs, and even some big surprises. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgNjS1_kOW8

Has anybody written about the near-ubiquitous online trend of bowdlerizing text, either to avoid being penalized by the algorithm (real or imagined) or to avoid content being searchable by others? We have people who communicate about "s*x" instead of "sex" and... that's probably a very bad thing.

Really pleased to see this post outlining how @devs helps deliver more of the fediverse than any other platform. And the majority of that is done for free, as part of our Fast Forward program for supporting open source and the open web. Best of all, there are *lots* of different platforms doing this work, exactly as you'd hope — the open web is more competitive and enables lots of different options. https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-hosts-the-fediverse-instances

How is the OpenAI board gonna fire Sam Altman just because he gave answers that sounded plausible but weren't actually accurate?

Roughly 1/3 of all sites on the Internet just entered the fediverse. You can’t stop an idea whose time has come. https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/11/wordpress-com-blogs-can-now-be-followed-on-mastodon-and-other-federated-platforms/

Instead of blocking AI crawlers, sites with good, legitimate content should serve up garbage to the crawlers and poison the training models

The lesson isn’t just that you have to get off of Twitter; the lesson is you also have to get off of Substack.

One sign that you're not making a technology for the right reasons is when you have to fucking lie about it, or misrepresent others in order to compete. For example, Nostr (the protocol which currently enjoys zero million daily active users) says of Mastodon, "There are no clear incentives to run servers" — proving that this is, indeed, a protocol created by people who have no idea how to make friends.

The biggest tech news of the last month is Googlers going on strike for the first time, not AI. And it’s not even close. And these stories are deeply connected, so any media that doesn’t articulate that context for you doesn’t actually understand what’s happening in tech right now.

@danhon @Meyerweb this is the thing I was going to point out — the industry is increasingly centered around a small number of highly-concentrated tech giants, and they don’t want any events they don’t fully control. So they’ve been squeezing out even the biggest independent conferences for years; if execs don’t even have the option of going to an O’Reilly or Code conference, coders are not gonna be able to get sponsors for an unconference or camp.

@danhon @marypcbuk @Meyerweb yep. like so many other things in the industry that aren't even worth fighting.

What is a technology that you use regularly that you trust and don’t feel is trying to coerce you into some larger agenda?

Okay, here's a remarkable thing about the fediverse: I was able to seamlessly move my followers to a new server, and the vast majority of them *never even noticed* that it happened. About 24 hours ago, I decided to move from mastodon[dot]cloud (because it had been bought up by sketchy new owners), and I came to @medium's new me.dm instance. At that time, I had 25,829 followers, and now less than 24 hrs later, I have 22,648 followers on this new account — without them having to do anything.

In roughly the past half-decade, Microsoft went from nowhere to overwhelming dominance of text editors with VSCode, ownership of majority of code hosting (and open source dev) with GitHub, ownership of the dependency stack used by most devs with npm, control over the most popular single language with TypeScript, and is trying to position copilot and ChatGPT as inevitable parts of the future dev process. Nothing negative for the ecosystem will come of this, as the last half century teaches us.

Let's go back to a pivotal point in Stevie's legendary career. After a string of undeniable hits as Motown's signature teenage sensation, Stevie had a run of albums in the 70s that were the greatest back-to-back releases in pop music history. Each was a commercial and artistic triumph. In sequence, they were the most masterful run of pop recordings that will likely ever be released.

Today is the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy,?/!: I want to do so by uplifting one of the geniuses he helped inspire: Stevie Wonder. Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice may he even more powerful, and is too often overlooked. We should heed every word he says. (Full post here: https://anildash.com/2022/01/17/how-stevie-celebrated-a-birthday/ )

Instead, Stevie Wonder chose to bet his career, at its peak, on getting a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. While of course Coretta Scott King deserves pride of place as the moral force and guiding spirit behind the effort, Stevie was the most prominent and universally respected public figure outside the family to throw his full-throated support behind the effort.

By the late 70s, Stevie had won so many Grammys that Paul Simon joked in 1976 (the only year in which Stevie was not up for Album of the Year) that he was thankful Stevie hadn't put out an album that year. Stevie's hits were so huge the Jackson 5 were his _backup singers_ and you barely noticed them. He could have done anything next—almost anything would have won adulation or praise.