There was somebody fussing in my replies to my last link to my blog post about Medium (I don’t see them now; they probably blocked me, but their specific words don’t really matter), and the gist of their message was that they didn’t like that site. On the modern internet, if you have an issue with content written by humans, with no surveillance ads, that doesn’t allow AI scraping or AI slop content, with a business model that makes money… I don’t know how to help you. Honestly.
What lessons can we learn about the fact that MCP got more adoption as a quasi-open standard in a few months than the entire fediverse stack has in nearly a decade? (Or two, depending on how you count.) Obviously, they’re in different domains, but there are some parallels. How might other open efforts piggyback on hype cycles like AI to bootstrap open efforts we could use to re-open the social web? Who’s integrating MCP interfaces into the ActivityPub stack?
This one was, obviously, bittersweet to write: we’re shutting down app hosting on Glitch. This post covers how everybody can export your apps & download your code. I didn’t get into where the Glitch community goes next, because honestly we’re still figuring it out, but it’s still the end of an era. I’ll have more to share about this later, of course, but I just wanted to make sure everyone got the news straight from me. If you have any questions, you can ask in the forum.
It’s been fun watching the unlikely rise of MCP as a standard, which is open and messy in a way that mimics the dynamics of the good parts of Web 2.0. Maybe something interesting will happen!
I would only add that this is a valid assertion about all of the major platforms funded by big tech. (Whether they are framed as non-profits or B corps or not.) It need not be intrinsic to the technology, but we do not yet have any meaningful large-scale counterexamples.
