Upcoming Threads feature allows users to hide spoilers in their posts

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Upcoming Threads feature allows users to hide spoilers in their posts

18 June 2025

Meta’s Adam Mosseri, writing on his Threads page:

We’re testing a way for you to hide spoilers in Threads posts. When creating a post, highlight text or images and tap “mark spoiler” to blur it. People can reveal the hidden text or image by tapping it in their feed.

Mosseri claims no other micro-blogging service offers such a feature, and maybe he’s right.

If I weren’t doing the whole Indie Web/Small Web thing of maintaining my own web presence, I’d find the feature useful if I was using my Threads page to, say, write about film. I could safely include possible spoilers when writing my thoughts on a movie, knowing a reader would consciously need to click on the blanked out line of text, to reveal what was there.

This feature update reminds me it has been almost two years since Threads launched. I’m still using my account, sparingly, but it looks like some people have taken to using Threads like it was the website they never had.

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social media, social networks, Threads

Mark Zuckerberg says social media is no longer social media

30 April 2025

Kyle Chayka, writing for The New Yorker:

Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of AI-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible.

In other words, social media is no longer social. The Facebook co-founder, and CEO, states what many of us have known for at least a decade. Zuckerberg’s comment was made a few weeks ago, during anti-trust proceedings led by the United States Federal Trade Commission, against Meta.

Discord trials face scanning to verify the age of members

23 April 2025

The scanning technology, which is said to gauge a person’s age to an accuracy of one to two years, is being trialled in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). Members of Discord — a popular communications and community building platform — can also choose to scan in a proof-of-age document, such as a drivers licence, if they don’t want to go through the face scanning process.

Is this the way things are going? Online safety laws in the UK will shortly require platforms to have stringent age-verification processes in place, while in Australia, people under the age of sixteen will soon not be able to access certain social media channels. As far as these platforms are concerned, face scanning may be the easiest way to verify a potential user’s age.

The suggestion here is face scanning will eventually be the only way to confirm a person’s age (and identity it seems), when it comes to signing up to an online platform. This is something all of us might be subject to one day.

Social media and the rest, a personal website is best

11 April 2025

Mike Sass, writing at Shellsharks:

A website, your own personal website, is just like this—a digital home, on the web. With all the same comforts, familiarities and problems that need a-fixin’.

Does your personal website, your blog, feel like home? Mine does, and always has.

Although I’ve long been a social media participant, albeit not a particularly active one, the prospect of abandoning this website to go all in on a social media platform, maybe even several, never once crossed my mind. This even as I watched contemporaries do exactly that, and go on to sometimes garner large followings.

I always viewed the social media platforms I was a member of as outposts for my website. Like garden sheds (dare I say outhouses) you might build in the garden outside your home. Fragile structures that may not withstand a storm, in the same way a house can. Or the erratic whims of a billionaire owner. To say nothing of inconsistent moderation policies and erratic algorithms.

Owning and maintaining a house, home, is extra work and cost, but a far better investment than all those garden sheds.

Australian Electoral Commission posts new guidelines for influencers, content creators

11 April 2025

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has issued an updated set of guidelines clarifying the role of content creators and influencers.

The move comes in the wake of mild controversy surrounding a recent interview Sydney based podcaster Abbie Chatfield recorded with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Some listeners felt the interview constituted what is considered to be electoral material, something that requires an authorisation statement from the political entity issuing said material. These are usually adverts, that variously promote a party candidate, or policy, although they can take a number of forms.

The AEC however concluded the interview did not breach any regulations. The revised guidelines come in addition to a publicity campaign being run by the AEC, warning people to be cautious about material relating to the upcoming Australian Federal election, they may encounter on social media, and, no doubt, blogs and websites.

Auto generated Instagram comments, the smallest biggest AI threat

26 March 2025

Meta has been trailing an AI assistant that will help Instagram (IG) users compose comments for photos and video posted by their friends, says Aisha Malik, writing for TechCrunch:

Users who have access to the test feature will see a pencil icon next to the text bar under a post that they can tap to start accessing Meta AI, according to a video posted by Manzano. From there, Meta AI will analyze the photo before generating three suggestions for comments.

Awesome. Now we don’t even need to think up a comment to write about a friend’s photo on IG. What next then? AI is going to turning us all into beings incapable of original thought.

Man posts videos of himself propositioning Sydney women to his socials

26 March 2025

An unnamed American “content creator” recently asked a number of women — quite persistently at times — to go on dates with him, in and around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, NSW. He was however — unbeknown to the women in question — filming the interactions with smart-glasses, and later posting them to his social media accounts.

At least one woman asked him to take down a post she featured in, but he refused to comply. She also asked Instagram owner Meta to remove the footage, but the request was ignored. The women then spoke to NSW Police, who told her there was nothing they could do — even though NSW state surveillance laws were breached — as the man has since left Australia.

Here is another quagmire we’re walking into. Up until now it has been relatively apparent if a face-to-face interaction is being recorded in public. At the very least, a smartphone is being pointed at us.

But by way of a pair of glasses, with a camera that may not be easy to detect, is another matter. It might be against the law, in some states anyway, but if the wrong-doer is outside the country, it seems people out and about in public might have no legal recourse if the law has been broken.

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crime, social media, technology, trends

Are there alternatives to the misunderstood, confusing, Fediverse?

12 March 2025

Dave Winer:

The Fediverse is impossible to use even for people who understand what it’s trying to do, and most people have no idea. The answer: Stop trying to reinvent Twitter. It wasn’t a great idea! And figure out what really works in a decentralized system. It requires some serious brain work.

I’m supposed to understand the Fediverse — just another name for the web? — but sometimes feel the idea will go the way of the really simple RSS (just another way to follow a website). The concepts are easy for those in the know to comprehend, but seem to be utterly confusing for anyone else.

Social media is player versus player, IndieWeb is collaboration, support

12 March 2025

Santi Ruiz’s article 50 Thoughts on DOGE, being the Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk in the United States, isn’t usually the sort of material I link to here, but his write-up offers this fascinating insight into social media:

All of the above means that Elon looks into problems that are largely driven by institutional capture, structural incentives, and overregulation, and sees them instead as problems of waste, corruption, and fraud. Again, I don’t think this is about Elon’s personality so much as it is about the way the information he receives is structured. The more time you spend on the PvP platform that is social media, the more you will be primed to see enemies everywhere.

PvP, meaning player versus player, is a term more commonly seen in the realm of interactive gaming, but isn’t a half bad way to summarise the sometimes competitive, cut throat, nature of social media. Not that I’m suggesting blogging is, or was, any better.

Certainly not in the early days, before social media was a thing. But social media did seem to follow a similar trajectory to blogging. In the earliest years, when blogs were still called personal websites, there was an abundance of collaboration and commeradie. While that never completely went away, as blogging matured, it became more of a case of us versus them, or me against you.

We stopped being friends, and became enemies.

Those around in the early days of Twitter, circa 2007, may have noticed the same thing. Much cooperation initially, which eventually gave way to competition. Not wholly, and not everywhere, but overwhelmingly player versus player.

This is not something we see too often in the more supportive IndieWeb/Small Web space, though there are certainly differences in opinion at times. But I’ll take that over a PvP game from which there seems no escape at times.

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IndieWeb, social media, trends

A personal website is a website published by a person

10 March 2025

I’ve always regarded disassociated as a personal website. Others might see it differently.

For instance, I read a few of the IndieWeb blogs, and when compared with some of those people, my website is not personal. I don’t usually write “dear diary” like journal entries, although I do publish a variation thereof, which I post to my socials feeds. But I don’t delve too much what into about I’m thinking about on a personal level, or what I’m grappling with in my day-to-day life.

Still, it’s a good question to ask: how personal should a personal website be? But it’s one only the person who owns the website can really answer.

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