“These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed at thirty percent of every transaction — who understand instinctively that such a system is about control and extraction rather than safety.

“They accept the identical arrangement from a private company without complaint because the phone is pretty and the UX is smooth and the alternative sounds hard.”

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

#LearnedHelplessness #AbdicationOfAgency #BigTech #CorporateMasters #ProtocolsNotPlatforms

ATproto: The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/27/atproto-the-enshittification-killswitch-that-enables-resonant-computing/

Open social media has a new fan: U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna. The congressman for California's 17th Congressional District appeared on Kara Swisher's "On" podcast last week and talked about Bluesky, @surf, and the importance of being able to construct your own social graph, take your followers where you go, and opt out of algorithms. Here's the full episode:

https://flip.it/G01JHr

#SocialMedia #OpenSocial #SurfSocial #Bluesky #ProtocolsNotPlatforms #ATProto #ActivityPub

Oh, wow! The German IT Planning Council decided yesterday to consolidate a bunch of disparate communication tools into a unified system based on Matrix and MLS.

Here's the record of their decision and the other options they considered: https://gitlab.opencode.de/it-planungsrat/fit-ab/zapuk/-/blob/main/Zielarchitektur/Architekturentscheidungen/ADR-0011-Kommunikationsschicht.md

#Matrix #OpenSource #FOSS #ProtocolsNotPlatforms #DPI #DPG