Author: Aulia Masna

Former tech journo, used to write for Macworld, DailySocial, e27. Ex , ran a national startup initiative program in Indonesia. Very much into the news.

Massive Twitter data breach was far worse than reported, reveal security researchers

Several months ago Twitter acknowledged that someone had exploited more than five million user data that were stolen in the breach last year. Turns out multiple individuals had managed to get their hands on them.

The security researcher who tweeted this fact this week had his account suspended almost immediately.

9to5 Mac ended the story with a banger of a closing line:

We would reach out to Twitter for comment, but Musk fired the entire media relations team, so …

Jack Dorsey wants a web-only mobile OS

Good lord, where do I start with this? Jack, you’re a tech leader. Haven’t you at least heard of WebOS and Firefox OS before you asked that?

There have been so many attempts at making that OS that he wants I think he forgot until people started pointing it out to him in the replies. Firefox OS and WebOS were just two of the highest profile ones. Another “web-only” OS is Chrome OS which powers laptops.

His argument is the technology back then didn’t allow it but the web is advanced enough now to do it. But Jack, it has always been advanced enough for most of the apps you needed at the time. 

If all he wanted was to release a social media app without having to adhere to platform rules and regulations, he can do that right now as web apps. In fact nobody will stop him from releasing such apps. Maybe he also forgot Twitter has been a web app for a long time.

WebOS was so far ahead of its time Apple and Google have been reintroducing its features on their respective platforms as new innovations in recent years.

The problem was not limited to the apps they wanted to build, that was the least of their worries. These attempts had so many other issues such as hardware spec, budget, marketing, determination, leadership, resources, resilience, developer outreach, public buy ins, and so on. 

Many other attempts were little more than Android forks which is ironic because Google has always been a major advocate of web apps with their Progressive Web Apps efforts. All the web technologies built since 2008 have been moving towards making web apps as viable as native apps and many, if not all, have been adopted as web standards which will work on any modern browser.

Someone asked him how will people discover apps in a federated world. Bruh, there are things called directories! Anyone can build an app directory, any developer can promote them anywhere, there are social media platforms, YouTube channels, and this new thing called advertising, all the big brands are doing it, ever heard of advertising?

I think this is Jack projecting his insecurities and concerns that Apple and Google will soon boot Twitter off the stores for having no content moderation. 

Twitter has plenty of porn, 13% of its content, in fact, according to a recent report, and they’re not censored. Even Reddit has content moderation. While certain keywords are currently blocked from Twitter search, porn is not very difficult to find there. The company’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, penned an op ed for The NY Times on what could become of Twitter without content moderation, among other things.

There’s also the issue of payment processing. Both Apple and Google charge fees for purchases of digital items and Twitter’s new management wants to avoid that because they plan to generate the bulk of their revenue from subscription. Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon’s Kindle still have apps on Android and iOS/iPadOS but they don’t allow payments through the stores, only from their websites, to avoid that fee. They run what Apple calls “reader apps” , these are apps that don’t allow in-app purchases of digital items. 

Twitter can do what Netflix and Spotify do, but if they plan to sell low cost high volume digital goods and services through the app, people will have to keep jumping to the web, quite an inconvenient barrier, to make those purchases. Those other companies only charge customers once a month so it’s less of an issue.

Difficult to describe it any better. Wil Wheaton perfectly sums up the entire situation with Elon Musk.

What do you mean @topherchris is no longer running @staff?

typhra:

tippenfunkaport:

there is something so darkly comical about tumblr potentially outliving twitter

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks… that website still lives on

truly the cockroach of social media and I love it for that

How’s it feel being on Tumblr again?

marco:

My peak-Tumblr era was 2007–2010. When most people think back to their good old days on Tumblr, the time period they’re thinking of is mostly or entirely after that.

Whatever Tumblr is or was, to most people, happened long after I left.

The people I followed back then are mostly gone now, and the people I’ve followed since then (mostly on Twitter) aren’t here. I don’t know who my community is here, or even if I’ll find one.

I no longer know what works here and what doesn’t. I don’t get any of the jokes or references. I feel like the oldest person in the room.

This doesn’t really feel like going “back” to an old hangout — it feels like starting over.

And I don’t know if it’ll stick or not. It depends on where I find my people. If “we” congregate here, or I find a new community here, that’ll be great — and if not, I’ll probably go wherever they end up.

This sums up how I feel about Tumblr, too. For me it was another blog platform to try out back then and a place to run into cool or funny posts and fandom content but over the years Twitter just became a far more compelling and worthwhile place to be, and far more relevant for work needs.

Having returned to Tumblr in recent weeks doesn’t feel like a return to a familiar place, it’s rather a new start at an old neighborhood that’s now populated by new people doing different things.

Bob Iger returns as Disney CEO, replacing Bob Chapek who took over when Iger resigned in February 2020

Chapek has been quite the controversial figure as Disney CEO, not wanting to push back against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis which threatened the company’s presence and the Disney World park in Orlando and made it untenable for non binary-confirming employees. After a bad quarter and a lousy outlook for 2023, the Disney board fired Chapek and requested Iger to return.

I may have more thoughts on this later

DISNEY SHAKEUP: Bob Iger Back as CEO, Bob Chapek Out; Board Cites ‘Complex Industry Transformation’ for Shocking C-Suite Shuffle

Dealing with Growth on Mastodon

Leaving this thread here for future reference on Mastodon’s growth and how to deal with it. People are advised to join or move to smaller servers to help manage the load and donate to their admins.

From the second post in the thread:

Start your own instance. We have 8,000 servers hosting over 7 million users on the #Fediverse. Growing by half a million a week NOW, with just today’s level of crazy.

Assume this will 4X or more after sh*t really starts going downhill at Twitter.

Got a spare computer, or a @Raspberry_Pi maybe? Want to use a good managed host to set one up? Put it to use.

Tim Chambers (@tchambers@indieweb.social)

The rejection of breaking news and other journalistic content on Mastodon

Twitter had been the place to go for breaking news and live reports and reactions of events, incidents, accidents, and pretty much anything else of interest. It’s heaven for news junkies, reporters, and anyone interested with finding out what’s happening. Mastodon hasn’t been it, isn’t it, and most people who have been here for a while don’t want it to be it.

On the other hand, it’s a federated network in which anything and everything can be accommodated. Some server admins and members will block other servers that hosts content they find objectionable simply out of preference, others would love to have such content hosted or shared to theirs.

Mastodon may have been around for six years but it hasn’t gone anywhere near the maturity phase involving massive influx of people with varying expectations like what’s happening now, so a lot of the existing members are trying to protect and defend the Mastodon they know.

Twitter’s own transformation may or may not end up depriving the public of that real time news update so it’s only natural it’s what people are looking for when they seek a replacement. The federated nature of Mastodon shouldn’t be a hindrance to that. 

Server admins who share the same views could even advertise that as their primary selling point. Right now it’s already happening with journa.host and newsie.social but some server admins are blocking journa.host for insisting on taking the standard approach they’re used to on Twitter. So anyone who want to connect to anyone on that server must make sure they’re not on a server that blocks it.

This can make things seem more complicated than they ought to be, but also means it can still work for those who want it and not for those who don’t, at the same time.