This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

Cannot express enough how much you should get off of Google. I'm saying this for myself as well, to be clear -- I'm about halfway to setting up a Nextcloud and have plenty of self-hosted services already, but I need to get immich working for photos and a more stable cloud sync.

But I'm already off of the basic search in general, thanks to Kagi (which I cannot recommend highly enough -- it is both very good as search and refreshingly AI-critical).

Fuck Google, fuck genAI, fuck your LLM.

An article dispelling myths about W Social, the new European platform that aims to rival X: it is a fork of Bluesky that shares many similarities with Eurosky and requires government ID to sign up.

I haven't followed any of this that closely because bluesky is still somewhat repellent to me, but this is an interesting analysis of how "WSocial" has grabbed the news cycle.

Abstract—The online-based group known as antis, which originated around 2016 in the United States, exhibit morality-based, cult-like behavior and perpetuate hate speech and censorship in online spaces. Anti ideology has encouraged harmful, obsessive, and dangerous behaviors among its members, specifically minors and young adults. An analysis of the antifandom movement through political, sociological, and behavioral lenses reveals its damaging effects on women, people of color, minors, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.