The ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce meeting is happening now. If you want to have a say in the next 12 months for the task force, please join: https://meet.jit.si/ap-trust-and-safety-tf You can also find the other events in the SWICG calendar here […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] This is not to say that no one on the fediverse harasses vanta for sharing mutual aid posts. But this is where blocking and defederation comes into play. “What happens when people are shitty about it is, they get reported […]

The Carney government cancelled the Digital Services tax to help with affordability! But as predictable as the rising sun, the "we're changing the price of our streaming service" emails are rolling in anyway. Instead of taxing US megacorps and getting the revenue, we in Canada get higher prices […]

Today, I’m letting you know that toot.community will close permanently on **28 October 2026**. This decision is final, and the server won’t be handed over to anyone else. When I started running toot.community, I really enjoyed it. Over time, it became more stressful and less rewarding. Every […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Recall the arguments against instance blocklists: the dogmatic free speech argument, the open federation argument, the grudgelist argument, and the admin responsibility argument. As far as Ro and Oliphant are concerned […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] As I discussed in chapter 6, arguments about openness to a for-profit corporation – and how fediverse data are simply open to Meta to exploit – replicate arguments about the inevitability of capitalism, particularly […]

Fellow denizens of the United Kingdoms, I will be in Clacton for results night on 13 Aug. If Binface gets in, I want to be able to say I was there. This sounds like the kind of pointless trip some of y'all would be well into, so let's connect! Please boost this for visibility, and why not […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] The admin of the Mastodon instance Fosstodon.org, Kev Quirk, notes that the anti-Meta folks are saying Meta isn’t welcome on the fediverse. But, he notes, “no single person/entity owns the fediverse. So who are you to say […]

If you're not soul-crushingly exhausted, you're not paying attention

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] For Small Fedi partisans, the covenantal fediverse can continue if it blocks Meta and other corporate social media, but at a cost: the covenantal fediverse’s influence could fade as people start to see the fediverse as […]

Check out this new #jazz release by Nigerian pianist Femmytoy. I played bass on the uptempo Monkish track that opens the EP. https://music.apple.com/us/album/sparkling/6793167835?i=6793168017

Sparkling by Femmytoy on Apple Music

music.apple.com

Today's Low Quality Ad is for this high quality habanero hot sauce made by Hell Fire Detroit. I love Detroit because it gives us delicious Hell Fire hot sauce, whereas other cities such as Pittsburgh are literally just Hell. https://hellfiredetroit.com/collections/home/products/habanero

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Still, the fediverse seemed to provide more positives than negatives for Ro, Marcia, and Playvicious. It just needed better moderation tools. Ro started thinking of ways to improve moderation technologies in Mastodon […]

I got angry and wrote a post about that Anthropic-shredding-the-books thing. I'm borderline blinded by my anger. Hey! But at least this post will be taken to train some LLMs. https://fossacademic.tech/2026/07/30/pulp-content.html

Contentification, Pulpification: From Books to Content

[Head's up... this one's an angry post that's probably not totally coherent. But it's from the heart, at least...]

fossacademic.tech

At a certain point, willful ignorance becomes indistinguishable from outright malice. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-government-map-africa-mislabels-every-country-global-conference-2026-07-30/

I walk the corner to the rubble / That used to be a library, line up to the mind cemetery now / What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin' / They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em

Megacorp just bought all the rare Stradivarius violins in existence to train their robots on vibrato technique. Per law, the violins have been shredded and are now being repurposed as toothpicks

Geography is hard, even for the US State Department, armed with the latest AI tools: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/us-government-map-africa-mislabels-every-country-global-conference-2026-07-30/

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Proclamations about the fundamental good of openness – and how those who resist is are at fault – have appeared again and again in the fediverse’s history. As I showed in chapter 3, they affected Mastodon early in its […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Playvicious was one of the first – if not the first – Black-run instances on the fediverse. During its three year run, it featured outspoken Black fediverse members, including Black moderators who tried to keep Playvicious […]

The latest FOSS Academic post is another in my "Years of the Content Creator" series. The year is 1995. And while I was rocking out to grunge music, Esther Dyson was predicting the rise of the give-it-away-for-free content creator economy […]

The collective everyonehateselon_ made this in London, UK. 👾😆

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] For what it’s worth: I do not consent to have any portion of this book be used to train a large language model (LLM) or similar system.... https://moveslowlybuildbridges.com #MoveSlowlyAndBuildBridges #bot

Move Slowly and Build Bridges, by Robert W. Gehl

moveslowlybuildbridges.com

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Covenantal federalism has three main features: noncentralization, the consent of the governed, and federal liberty. Noncentralization is a core organizing principle: it means that the network of groups is designed so that […]

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Guy was curious about the groups that make W3C standards.... https://moveslowlybuildbridges.com #MoveSlowlyAndBuildBridges #bot

Move Slowly and Build Bridges, by Robert W. Gehl

moveslowlybuildbridges.com

[garbage] For two days in a row I've had to rescue one of these #trashPandas from my garbage can, here in #Toronto

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] Taken as a whole, the infinite scroll is not just a synechdoche for capitalism; it’s a synecdoche for the climate crisis and environmental injustice.... https://moveslowlybuildbridges.com #MoveSlowlyAndBuildBridges #bot

Move Slowly and Build Bridges, by Robert W. Gehl

moveslowlybuildbridges.com

[Daily random quote out of context from my academic book about Mastodon] This vision clashes with a more individual-centric conception of federation. In an individual-centric approach, the instance does not matter.... https://moveslowlybuildbridges.com #MoveSlowlyAndBuildBridges #bot

Move Slowly and Build Bridges, by Robert W. Gehl

moveslowlybuildbridges.com

That age-old, heartwarming tale of the heroes swooping in to solve the entirely predictable problem they themselves created. https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-meta-glasses-banning-pickup-prank-creeps-2026-7

Instagram will now ban creeps in Meta glasses

Content shot on Meta glasses from pickup artists and pranksters can now get you banned.

businessinsider.com

As I keep researching for my next book, The Age of Content, I'm tracing the history of the idea of the content creator. I'm reading documents like this so you don't have to: "Furthermore, the method includes mapping, via the one or more hardware processors, the plurality of assessments with a […]