Big tech #cruft is something we've all gotten used to, along with all the other #enshittification. But which product has the WORST cruft? (comment if your one isn't in the list)
Seeing a lot of *sighs* about the Mozilla/Firefox news (myself included). It's a natural response when you have admired an organization for so long, and there are some common sense moves they could make to add AI features to the *open web* (a couple of words Mozilla appears to have forgotten exist), while also giving users full control to not have AI if they wish...and yet they instead go all-in on being The Trusted AI Org, or whatever their new mission statement is. Just disappointing.
I actually started with mastodon.technology in early April 2017. But the reason was that mastodon.social wasn’t taking new users at the time. Mastodon.technology was shuttered soon after, but by then I had gone to mastodon.social (when the gates opened again). I was definitely on here by mid-2017, per this June 2017 blog post:
In the latest post in my history of blogging and RSS series, I look at the emergence of the blogosphere in 2002 — a thriving ecosystem of colourful personal sites that interconnected to each other via RSS, trackback and blogrolls. 2002 also saw the debut of RSS 2.0, Technorati and Google News.
This week on Cybercultural, more early-2000s Apple 🍎, including why Steve Jobs didn't want online music to go the streaming route (which of course it eventually did).
Kazuo Ishiguro, one of my favourite writers, on AI:
“I think many of us are concerned about the fact that the copyrights were completely infringed.
Our work was being taken, all my books have been taken to train AI, but if the copyrights can be respected then it can be used in a way that, say, a traditional researcher would use somebody else’s book.
Just because it’s AI, it shouldn’t be an excuse to just raid people’s intellectual property.”
Poll: if you had to choose one primary tech ecosystem that you belong to in 2025, which would it be? (Listed alphabetically; and comment if you consider yourself part of an ecosystem not mentioned here)
A bigco techie I was DMing with described the current state of the web as a “tragedy of the commons” (per Wikipedia: “…if many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, such as a pasture, they will tend to overuse it and may end up destroying its value altogether”).
I think this is actually a better description of now than “enshittification”; because if creative people stop publishing to the web, that depletes the “pasture”. Human creativity & passion is no longer valued.
Continuing my history of blogging and RSS series, I look at 2001: the year of warblogs, Movable Type and Blogdex. I see '01 as a transition year for blogging, in which it shifts from personal journaling to a more journalistic approach (although many personal bloggers resented the influx of warbloggers). There are lots of great 2001 screenshots in this post, so I hope you enjoy it.
I know people will be piling on about Grokipedia, but hilariously its definition of Web 2.0 seems to be much better than Wikipedia's. On Grokipedia's page, there's a great description of misinformation on platforms like X and Facebook. Wikipedia does not mention any of that.
Refs:
1.
