Archive.org home of the Wayback Machine and the largest public internet archive has been hacked, taken offline intermittently from DDOS, and had 31 million account records stolen and personal ID's like pictures of passports sent as attachments to ...

The Internet Creators Guild, invented by Hank Green and Laura Chernikoff, looks cool, but it symbolises some problems that I have with YouTube, “the YouTube community,” and Silicon Valley more generally – it’s a kind of bourgeois technocratic libe...

DNS is the backbone of the internet, and without it life just wouldn't be the same. But for most of us it's just the magic that happens behind the scenes.

It's one of those subjects that very few ordinary desktop users really understand. Everyo...

Join us and find out the secret to Reclaim Hosting's famously good support!

Something happened when the internet turned into an ad-driven business. Incentives became oriented around grabbing attention over valuing substance and connection.

What’s happening now in the Fediverse gives us a chance to reverse that. To pivot out of the attention economy into something more meaningful.

Tony Stubblebine has already emphasized a focus on quality at Medium. As the publisher of Better Humans and its sister publications, Tony was one of Medium’s most successful community members. He knew the platform better than almost anyone and so when it came time to look for a CEO, he got the job in July 2022.

In January 2023, Medium set up a Mastodon instance at me.dm. Tony’s said that he believes Mastodon is “an emerging force for good in social media,” although he’s still exploring what that means for his company.

In today’s episode, Mike and Tony discuss their reasons for wanting to participate in the Fediverse, going so far as standing up their own instances for their communities. They also discuss what’s wrong with the attention economy, a framework for high-quality recommendations, and why it’s an exciting time for entrepreneurs, builders, writers and consumers.

Highlights of this conversation include:

01:00 Going from Medium user to CEO
03:40 Pivoting away from the attention economy
06:30 Why human curation is still important
08:58 Algorithmic matchmaking and human judgment
10:36 “No. 1 misconception: good content is an opinion”
12:15 Subject matter expertise should live in the community
13:42 Medium’s 3-step recommendation process
16:24 Why subscription model works best for Medium, optimizing for substance
18:10 Launching Medium’s Mastodon instance
19:18 Are we at the end of platform monopolies?
23:30 Merging of Medium and Mastodon communities?
24:17 The curation persona
25:36 “You shouldn’t have to build an audience to have a great story heard”
29:30 An exciting time for entrepreneurs and a new model for discovery
31:49 In the third business model era of the internet
32:33 People as nodes on the social web; changing dynamics and incentives
37:00 AI content on Medium
40:40 Marketplace segmentation for being pro-human
45:30 Collaboration in the Fediverse
46:15 Advice to people getting started in the Fediverse
46:57 How the internet inspired people to cheat — assisted by middlemen

💰 Mastodon is a non-profit that runs on donations from the community. You can help Mastodon succeed by supporting the organization via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

🔎 You can follow Tony on Mastodon at https://me.dm/@coachtony.

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue on Mastodon at https://flipboard.social/@mike, or via his Flipboard federated account, where you can see what he’s curating on Flipboard in the Fediverse, at https://flipboard.social/@mike@flipboard.com

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the Fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave

🚀 A mind-blowing video of Engine AI's SE01 humanoid robot 🤖 strolling outside the company's Shenzhen headquarters has taken the internet by storm 🌪! The robot's incredibly natural movements have left viewers questioning 😮 the reality of ...

What's new on IoT Security? Keynote by Thorsten Ries, Head of SOC and CSIRT, POST Cyberforce
followed by a round-table with

• Shenglan Hu, Information Security Officer, POST Cyberforce
• Lucas Fernandez, Head of Innovation, Champ Cargosystems S...

The Jamison Family teaches how to install the Internet in a 8 Meg computer by making a click on an Icon, It will use UNIX, the Language of the Internet! And it's not just for boys either!
Press play on this awesome 1996 VHS tape.

02:59 Some I...

As users and companies demand more and more processing power and storage to fuel an ever-more complex internet, it’s overwhelming existing data centers. This is an inside look at the challenges, stakes, and colossal sums of money involved in the d...

The internets daddy, Tim Berners-Lee, is worried about how we've lost control of our data. To combat this issue, he's working on a solution. A Solid Solution. In Web3.0 you could be in charge of who gets to see your data and for how long with this...