Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by Zoë Schiffer · 13 Feb 2024 · 343pp · 92,693 words
on a Twitter competitor called Threads. The idea was to create an app that looked and felt like Twitter but ran on the decentralized protocol ActivityPub, allowing users to take their posts and followers with them if they left the platform. Many tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, believed
This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web
by Tim Berners-Lee · 8 Sep 2025 · 347pp · 100,038 words
to see. Mastodon and Matrix are similarly protocol-based, with lots of different servers run by different organizations. Mastodon is my preference because the protocol, ActivityPub, is a W3C standard. In December 2023, W3C left Twitter/X for Mastodon. Resurgent interest in pre-existing, non-exploitative technologies like RSS – the Really
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by Cory Doctorow · 6 Oct 2025 · 313pp · 94,415 words
a “customer retention specialist” who is paid to try to talk you out of switching. Mastodon is built on a free, open, robust standard called ActivityPub. The account-switching stuff is standardized, and there are free, open-code libraries that implement it, which any company can use to update its own