Minimum Viable Infrastructure Innovation often emerges not solely from brilliant ideas but from the infrastructure readiness that makes those ideas viable. Consider the progression of mobile consumer internet applications over the past two decades: Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Their lau...
The Second Smartphone Revolution - AVC
Benedict Evans tweeted out this chart yesterday: We sometimes think of the shift to mobile as finished, or almost finished. It isn’t. pic.twitter.com/l5gaiMlaoU — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) March 12, 2016 The first 2.5bn smartphones brought us Instagram, Snapchat, Uber, Whatsapp, Kik, Venmo, Duolingo, and most importantly, drove the big web apps to build world class […]
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.
Infrastructure
A meticulously careful selection of services to use for everything from securing connections on public WiFi, over storing data to retrieving e-mails. I’ve put together a collection of services that I use for personal and business purposes while on the go.
The one and future internet
The internet has become inextricably entangled into our economies, cultural and social lives. We stand on the brink of the next technological revolution, in which the internet of things transforms ...
Building Apps With ATProto
Build decentralized social media with ATproto
Brad Neuberg on Twitter / X
Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization since most of the technology they depend on is already mostly developed. This was true pre-2015 where startups depended on commodity open source software, the smartphone capitalized by Apple and others, cloud…— Brad Neuberg (@bradneuberg) September 16, 2024
About Us
Around the world, building the internet’s operating system—and a better way to work. In a world of tech companies fighting for growth at any cost, imagine one that gives away its most successful pr…
Institute of Network Cultures | Ben Grosser: Planning the Exodus from Platform Realism
Thinking about the current state of platforms, I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s articulation of capitalist realism, the idea that we don’t imagine or build alternatives to capitalism because we can no longer envision a world without it. Big tech, in a few short years, has managed to instill within the public a similar state of platform realism. So many are unable to imagine how global communication, media, search, etc. could ever function without the platforms. Despite a growing malaise, it’s become difficult for many to consider a world without big tech platforms as a viable conception of the future.
The Last Mile
Living without the Internet is a reality for the vast majority of people on the Earth. With Facebook and Google treating connection speeds and bandwidth like disposable cutlery, you can hardly guess why they’re having such a terrible time continuing to grow their userbase around the world. The problem is the infrastructure isn’t available. The “last mile,” as it is often referred to, is sub-par in most parts of the world.
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of... - Adam Wood
Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies. I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their...
A New Wave of Peer-to-Peer Apps Heralds a Farm-to-Table Internet
This week, we discuss the local-first computing movement and its push to reduce our reliance on the corporate-owned, cloud-based software tools we use every day.
Haggle: Clean-slate networking for mobile devices
Jing Su, James Scott, Pan Hui, Eben Upton, Meng How Lim, Christophe Diot, Jon Crowcroft, Ashvin Goel, Eyal de Lara
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
I'm building on atproto because I think that a single social network has essentially no shot of dethroning the current tech monopolies. But an open ecosystem of interoperating apps is so infinitely more interesting than legacy social that it seems almost inevitable it will win
Ronen Tamari
Can everyone building on atproto please answer this question? 😇
it's not lost on me how critical it is to be building community-driven social technology in this time, because there's a lot we need - more joy, more connection, more education, more agency, and more privacy. breaking out of the box of "social media" - what are the tools we need in these times?
