Nearly five million Australian social media accounts deactivated after ban

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Nearly five million Australian social media accounts deactivated after ban

19 January 2026

Clare Armstrong writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC):

More than 4.7 million accounts on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat were deactivated in the first two days of the ban that started on December 10, according to new data released by the federal government.

The social media ban, supposedly to stop Australians under the age of sixteen accessing numerous such platforms, has seen nearly five million accounts closed in the last five weeks.

Here’s hoping the lockout is having the desired impact, whatever exactly that was, though it may be a while before we know one way or the other.

digg.com two-point-zero officially relaunches

16 January 2026

The first version of digg, something many people called the front page of the internet, arrived in 2004, and was a little like what Hacker News is today.

A social bookmarking news aggregator, if you want to be technical. People could submit items of interest, and those favoured by the community would win a place on digg’s coveted front page, resulting in viral levels of traffic.

digg went through a number of iterations after co-founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson sold the website in 2012, before Rose, together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, bought digg (again) in March 2025.

I’m hardly a social media power user (not that digg is really a social media platform) so didn’t get much involved in the pre-(re)-launch buildup, but couldn’t resist signing up yesterday when I saw digg had officially returned.

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social media, technology, trends

SXSW Sydney cancels 2026 event, leaves Australia

15 January 2026

Eleanor Dickinson, writing for Mumbrella:

South by Southwest (SXSW) has cancelled its Sydney event — which has been held just three times — citing a “changing global environment that is impacting major events, festivals and cultural programs worldwide”.

Purely anecdotal, but one or two of the tech people on my social feeds, who attend such events, had described SXSW Sydney speaker lineups as “not too inspiring”, or words to that effect.

Despite this — from what I can gather — attendances at the past three Sydney events were not disappointing. The cancellation however seems tied to factors other than speaker lineups, and attendances though, with cost being one of them.

I wouldn’t have minded going to SXSW, but I would have preferred that be in Austin, in the US state of Texas, where the festival originated in 1987.

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events, film, music, technology

Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone

12 January 2026

Anil Dash:

The trillion-dollar AI industry’s system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You’re welcome, Time Magazine’s people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

I’ve never used Markdown, created by John Gruber, aided by the late Aaron Swartz, in 2004, I still add the Markup included in my web writing either through copy and paste, or manually.

That’s the former web designer in me talking. If I want to add, say, bold formatting to some text, how hard is it to type out the <strong> tag, and </strong> to close it again?

Of course, I can see how much easier it would be to type **bold** using Markdown instead, if I wanted to apply bold formatting somewhere. But the real story is just how widely used the formatting tool has become since Gruber released it twenty-two years ago.

I don’t really mean to say “Markdown does not belong to John Gruber, it belongs to everyone”, but that seems to be what has happened.

The more personal websites there are, the better the web will be

6 January 2026

A website to destroy all websites, by Henry Desroches.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

The website (to destroy all websites) in question is the personal website, because through personal websites, we build the web we want to have. If you only read one article about the present state of the web, make it this one.

Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence in 2025

5 January 2026

Simon Willison’s third annual review of the AI space, for last year. I read someone saying somewhere that Willison has become expert in AI and LLM since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022.

He’s not the only one (obviously), but in late 2022 and early 2023 I was having conversations with people about ChatGPT and AI. At the time a number of these people looked at me blankly. One said they kept hearing about ChatGPT, but knew little about it.

Fast forward three years, and two of these people — who knew next to nothing about the topic — went on to assume senior roles in their workplaces overseeing the development and deployment of AI technologies. Positions that didn’t exist in 2022.

Possibly I regret my decision to remain focused on writing copy, content, and maybe even blogging here, instead of somehow jumping on the AI train. But on the other hand, possibly I don’t.

Adam Mosseri: the old, personal, Instagram feed is dead

5 January 2026

But that’s what Instagram’s (IG) owner wanted of course. Put another way, this means anyone using IG is expected to behave like an influencer, even if they only have a handful of followers.

The comment was made by Mosseri, Head of Meta owned IG, in a year-end presentation (Instagram link), a few days ago. That Mosseri didn’t label his thoughts Instagram Wrapped is a small mercy.

The IG leader also made the point that authenticity is becoming ever harder to gauge, on account of the proliferation of generative AI tools. It doesn’t matter that Meta is playing a part here, what’s important is ascertaining what content posted to IG is genuine, and what is AI generated.

This means more layers of verification, and not just for content, but users also. If that’s not for you, now’s a good time to jump ship. Provided you can establish a presence somewhere else.

But that’s not going to be most people. They have IG pages that their businesses and livelihoods depend upon, and have not realised just how, bit by bit, reliant they’ve become on the platform.

Firefox will give users the option to disable AI features

22 December 2025

From a post on the Firefox for Web Developers Mastodon account:

Something that hasn’t been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features. We’ve been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I’m sure it’ll ship with a less murderous name, but that’s how seriously and absolutely we’re taking this.

There’s no escaping AI, and that may not always be a bad thing, but it seems inevitable that web browsers of the future will eventually be like Altas, the ChatGPT/OpenAI browser. I don’t however like the idea of taking an existing browser, and fitting it out with AI functionality, as Mozilla intends to do.

As I wrote about two months ago, if Mozilla wants to release an AI browser, it should be separate from the existing Firefox browser. If people want to use an AI-powered version of Firefox, fine, they can do so. But if people don’t want that, it shouldn’t be foisted upon them. That’s probably thinking that’s a tad too simplistic however. The AI “kill switch” it will have to be.

X moves to head-off claim on ‘abandoned’ Twitter branding

20 December 2025

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Elon Musk’s X is updating its Terms of Service to indicate it still lays claim to the “Twitter” trademark. The move to add this detail to the company’s terms follows an announcement from a Virginia-based startup, which recently filed an application to trademark the term “Twitter.”

No surprises there. Anyone hoping to obtain the rights to the Twitter trademark must know they face an uphill struggle to do so.

Mastodon members prefer Linux operating systems

17 December 2025

The poll will probably be closed by now, but New York City based software developer Rafael Pérez was asking other Mastodon users what their preferred non-work operating system (OS) was.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise to learn that GNU Linux or UNIX OS’s, were, as of the time I type, favoured by sixty-two percent of respondents. This from over seven-thousand-two-hundred votes.

I was among that number as Linux is both my work and non-work OS. Apple OS’s were enjoying nearly twenty-five percent of the vote, while Microsoft offerings were coming in a distant third.

Obviously a poll on conducted on a social network may not be one-hundred scientific, but I think it says a lot about the OS preference of Mastodon members.

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