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Prospect (UK): Is social media like a newspaper or a telephone? The answer has big implications

Ethan writes about how we should categorize platforms in order to regulate them.

Gobo 2.0: All Your Social Media in One Place

Rather than opening one app for Twitter, another for Mastodon, and yet another for Reddit, what if you could view all three together? Furthermore, what if you could filter and prioritize your content from each platform, taking control of your own feed instead of depending on proprietary algorithms? This is what we are hoping to achieve with the next iteration of iDPI’s Gobo project.

Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?

What follows is the text of a tweet thread Ethan Zuckerman issued last week. Below it are some additional tweets embedded focusing on the case for leaving Twitter Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online… Continue reading Should You Leave Twitter for Mastodon?

Yale Journal of Law and Technology: Forgetful Advertising, Imagining a More Responsible Ad System

Chand and Ethan just published a long-in-the-making paper proposing a new system for targetted advertising that doesn’t rely on a surveillance model. Check it out in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology’s special issue “A Healthy Digital Public Sphere.”

Prospect (UK): Will AI make artists obsolete?

Ethan marvels an AI image generation software and wonders what the future of human-assisted creativity may look like.

Stanford Social Innovation Review: Solving Social Media’s ‘Local Paradox’

Chand and Ethan dig into the problem that while local networks offer ways to connect with local community members, they also host much more severe mis- and disinformation.

Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online

Amherst Town Meeting, held April 5, 1997. Image courtesy of Amherst Community Television, via CC BY-ND 4.0 license.

At iDPI we’re agitating for a smaller future of the Internet. To illustrate this, it’s helpful to think about rooms. Offline, there are all sorts of rooms that we gather in: there are churches, bars, gyms—what we do in each of those is pretty different. Facebook is like a big conference center, with high ceilings,… Continue reading Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online

Keyword: Interoperability

Different types of cacti can be grafted onto each other, creating a way for two plants to grow together. Is this succulent interoperability? (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Yercaud-elango)

Interoperability — it’s a gruesome little chunk of jargon that refers to a fairly fundamental tenet of the Internet. Simply, it means that different applications and devices can share the same data with one another. As users, we enjoy interoperability daily.