Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
by
Cory Doctorow
Published 6 Oct 2025
Switching Mastodon servers is a bit like switching cellular carriers: do a little administrative work, wait a few minutes, and—bam—you’re all set up with a new network, but everyone who calls your old phone number can still reach you. Even better, when you switch Mastodon servers, you don’t have to talk to 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 server software to permit this kind of freedom of movement between servers. Which brings me to a policy proposal: Rather than forcing Twitter or Facebook to spy on their users and control their behavior in the name of preventing harassment, we can force these companies to facilitate the departure of users who have been failed by their moderation policies.
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by
Zoë Schiffer
Published 13 Feb 2024
CHAPTER 68 “I’m Up for a Cage Match” Musk’s disastrous decision to roll out rate limits presented an opportunity for one of Twitter’s major rivals just thirty miles down the road in Menlo Park. Since March, Adam Mosseri, one of Mark Zuckerberg’s top deputies at Meta and the head of Instagram, had been working 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 was where social media was headed. “My view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge’s Alex Heath.
This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web
by
Tim Berners-Lee
Published 8 Sep 2025
Bluesky is a protocol, not a website, and the eventual idea is that you can control which instance of the site you join, and the rules for moderating you want 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 Simple Syndication web feed – and podcasting is encouraging as well. Podcasts deserve special attention. They make long, involved claims for your attention and they cover the full spectrum of political engagement and human culture.