Posted originally at: https://rant.vpalepu.com/2023/01/02/news-sources-are-poor-at-building-trust/e I just got roped into a user survey by the NYTimes. And one of their questions was pretty revealing: “Of the following sources, which do you think is the most trustworthy for news? Select one.” I picked “other” and wrote in Wikipedia. And I skipped every…

In the days to come, I will be unwinding properly and write down thoughts and lessons from the last few weeks. But suffice to say that this trend list on Twitter, on the night of Twitter’s mass exodus, was something I have never seen. Aside from some silly NHL/NFL game(s) that was happening, every trend/hashtag was about Twitter’s upcoming decline, and Elon Musk’s $44 Billion idiocy. And sorry, I never did care much for US sports.

I am not sure if humanity should adopt federation of every service on the internet. I am wondering, if humanity will. Consider what would have happened if there was federation from the get-go: we would not need to make different social media accounts on different platforms, because a Facebook account…

Twitter already did it — more is yet to come. Facebook — and by extension Instagram and Whatsapp — are about to do it (I am not calling it/them Meta). Snap already did it (you may have not know about it). Call the orderlies with clean sheets for this is…

… and it’s sad. I originally signed up in the hopes of high quality content from a diversity of writers. At $5/month, I felt like I had the best magazine subscription in the world, when this was first introduced in 2017. And I wanted to support the writers. …

And wasn’t e-mail always a federated system? And why didn’t Gmail and Outlook think of piggybacking email with a social network? Or did they? I have been trying to grok Mastodon for the last week now. And this one thought has been gnawing at me for a while. Seen those…

… and everyone has glass houses. Scene: Bangladesh lost to India. It was their game to lose. They responded with a flying start in the second innings, all wickets intact. Rain happened. Game resumed and Bangladesh lost its rhythm. There was an unfortunate runout. But really, Bangladesh could have still…

So Twitter went to shit. But something really strange happened as folks started talking about Twitter alternatives: Mastodon emerged as the kool kid to replace Twitter. And I follow the who’s who of Tech and Journalism on my Twitter feed. Instagram got a few mentions. Reddit got laughed out of…

🖋️✒️🖋️✒️🖋️✒️🖋️✒️🖋️✒️ One thing I like to do every once in a while is to refill my fountain ink pens with different colors and write some crap. The problem of course is that this remains a fleeting fascination and after I am done with my burst of writing (on paper), the…