Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for the inspiration around Communities.
In addition, Newsmast offers a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server with a selection of communities they’ve curated.
Users could then connect to that server in place of the Newsmast server within the Newsmast app.
Later this week, Newsmast will also open up its API to developers, which means your preferred Mastodon app could integrate with Newsmast’s Communities, too, for a more seamless experience.
(In fact, some Mastodon users were confused why Newsmast’s accounts were following them and boosting their content, without understanding the larger purpose.)
The Supreme Court could decide the future of content moderation — or it could puntThe Supreme Court is considering the fate of two state laws that limit how social media companies can moderate the content on their platforms.
The two laws were both crafted by Republican lawmakers to punish social media companies for their perceived anti-conservative bias.
“Supreme Court cases can fizzle in this way, much to the frustration in most cases to other parties,” Barrett said.
“It’s clear that the Supreme Court needs to update its First Amendment jurisprudence to take into account this vast technological change,” Barrett said.
“… The Supreme Court often lags behind society in dealing with these kinds of things, and now it’s time to deal with it.”
LoanDepot says about 17 million customers had personal data and Social Security numbers stolen during cyberattackAlmost 17 million LoanDepot customers had sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, stolen in a January ransomware attack, the company has confirmed.
The loan and mortgage giant company said in a data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general’s office that the stolen LoanDepot customer data includes names, dates of birth, email and postal addresses, financial account numbers, and phone numbers.
The stolen data also includes Social Security numbers, which LoanDepot collected from customers.
The number of affected LoanDepot customers rose from 16.6 million as initially disclosed to federal regulators last month, which did not say what specific customer data had been stolen.
Mortgage and loan giant Mr. Cooper said hackers stole the personal information of more than 14 million customers during an October cyberattack, costing the company at least $25 million in additional costs.
Reddit’s long-awaited IPO is nearing, promising to be the largest social media IPO since Pinterest.
Meanwhile, Mastodon, and the wider network of apps connected to the “Fediverse” as the decentralized social web is called, has a combined 17.2 million users.
Just as some Twitter users broke away to join decentralized alternatives, once they became viable alternatives, Reddit users could also do the same.
If Meta fears the power of decentralized social networks enough to join the movement, surely Reddit is not immune?
Seeing their demands ignored and overridden could eventually drive them to find new homes on decentralized social media, where they would maintain control over their communities and user data.
After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with her friends and family, Kristine Locker finally decided to launch a social shopping platform (which she named after herself) that could take her endless tabs and organize them into a shareable, virtual wish list all in one place.
Locker recently closed on a $2.5 million round from Wonder Ventures at a $9 million valuation, the company announced today.
For instance, you get exclusive Locker merch if you refer 25 users to Locker.
At 500 users, you get $750 to purchase an outfit from your Locker collection, the startup’s founder explains.
Its average commission rate is around 12%, however, depending on how much exposure the brand wants, Locker raises the rate to as high as 25%.
Facebook, Instagram, Snap, YouTube, and other social networking companies offer programs to connect creators with brands, and now Spotify is doing the same.
The company announced the launch of AUX, its new in-house “music advisory agency” for brands.
While not necessarily a creator marketplace, the program has a similar aim — it will facilitate connections between brands and emerging artists for various campaigns benefitting both parties.
For Spotify, AUX represents another source of income, as well, as the company says brands can pay Spotify to leverage the new service.
“Spotify is always looking for ways to leverage our music ecosystem to deepen the connections between artists, brands, and fans,” said Jeremy Erlich, VP, Head of Music Content at Spotify, in a statement.
X, formerly known as Twitter, said Wednesday it is withholding specific accounts and posts in India, action it said the firm disagrees with, in response to executive orders issued by the Indian government.
Non-compliance with the executive orders, X said, would have subjected the firm to “potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment.”X’s Global Government Affairs said legal restrictions prevent it from publishing the executive orders, but “we believe that making them public is essential for transparency.” X will file a writ appeal challenging the Indian government’s blocking orders, it said, and has notified users who are impacted by the orders.
The disclosure from X follows New Delhi ordering to temporarily block about 177 accounts and posts surrounding farmers’ protests in the country.
As privacy advocate Apar Gupta wrote in a recent post on X:Blocking orders for Twitter accounts of farm leaders have been issued in advance.
This is not surprising, what does provide anguish is the vile commentary against farmers on social media.
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.
But Discord has yet to remove the server where the attacks are facilitated, and Mastodon community leaders have been unable to reach anyone at the company.
She told TechCrunch that while Discord has mechanisms for reporting individual users or messages, it lacks a clear way to report whole servers.
And as Smith notes, these mass spam attacks can drive up server costs, leaving admins with unexpected bills.
According to reports on Mastodon, this fully-automated attack was sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Japanese language Discord servers.
A spam attack that impacted the open source X rival Mastodon, Misskey, and other apps highlights how the decentralized social web, also known as the Fediverse, is open to abuse.
Over the past several days, attackers have targeted smaller Mastodon servers, taking advantage of open registrations to automate the creation of spam accounts.
While this is not the first spam attack that has impacted the Fediverse, Rochko notes that only larger servers like Mastodon.social had been targeted previously.
The spam attack highlighted one of the weaknesses that comes with how the Fediverse is structured.
It makes me want to walk away and give up,” wrote one Mastodon server admin sam@urbanists.social.
With deck.blue, Bluesky users can view posts on the social network in the column-based format popularized by TweetDeck, including things like their home timeline, notifications, likes, lists, or even custom feeds.
But when he examined the options available to Bluesky users, he was dissatisfied with the experiences that had been built so far.
The deck.blue project began last August and within a month of writing the first line of code, it launched.
Initially, the app was called Bluesky Deck, but Bluesky suggested that using Bluesky in the app’s name wasn’t the right move.
So Filho renamed the app deck.blue and hired a designer to work on the branding.
