UK moving towards banning chat in games for under 16s
The UK Online Safety Act expands next year to ban social media for under 16s, but the government plan to expand it even further to target video game chat too.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

Snap Reaches Settlement In Social Media Addiction Lawsuit Ahead of Trial
Snap has settled a lawsuit brought by two teenagers who alleged Snapchat was deliberately designed to be addictive and contributed to their mental health problems, avoiding a trial that was scheduled to begin this week. Snap was the last defendant to settle after Meta, Alphabet and TikTok resolved claims in the same case. CBS News … ⌘ Read more

Meta Discussed ‘Whisper Strategy’ to Discredit Social Media Critic Jonathan Haidt, Files Show
The Guardian reports:
Meta staff discussed deploying a “whisper strategy” to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown, according to court documents. Employees at the parent group of Facebook and Instagram sought to discredit Jonathan Haidt, … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Manager: AI Already Being Used In Xbox Game Development - And Throughout the Game Industry
Should generative AI be used for videogame development? Brandon Stirrup, a strategy manager at Xbox, claims Xbox is already using AI, reports Engadget. And he also says that those who say they aren’t are merely “pretending.”

Stirrup deactivated his social media account shortly after … ⌘ Read more

Meta Settles Another Social Media Addiction Case Just Before Trial
Meta has reached an undisclosed settlement in another social media addiction lawsuit, avoiding a trial scheduled for next month and leaving Snap as the sole remaining defendant. Engadget reports: The lawsuit was brought by an 18-year-old woman from Mississippi known as K.D.B who, according to Reuters, has “described staying awake for hours scro … ⌘ Read more

UK Social Media Ban May Lock Out More Than 100,000 Teens Without ID
Under the UK’s planned social media ban, more than 100,000 British teenagers aged 16 and 17 could initially be locked out of social media because they lack a passport or driving license that may be needed as a fallback for age verification. The Guardian reports: Ofcom, the UK’s online watchdog, said about 150,000 16- to 17-year-olds do not ow … ⌘ Read more

@maurice-renck.de@maurice-renck.de I hadn’t heard of that yet, very cool to see something like that formalized in an RFC.

I am for nearly anything that takes social media out of the hands of the corporate silos and returns it to the actual participants, doubly-so if it doesn’t swap the silo for something crypto-based, And the simpler the implementation is, the more likely that people will actually implement all of it (/me glances sideways towards ActivityPub).

Thanks for the rare bit of good news!

‘Please Let the Internet Die’
Slashdot reader fjo3 shares an article from Wired: The internet must be put out of its misery. Any rational observer can admit that the current iteration of the web – and the social fabric woven there – is not what they signed up for. Symptoms of advanced cultural decay can no longer be ignored. This thing is eating itself. Giants including Meta and Google have been forced to settle massive consumer lawsuits brought … ⌘ Read more

Greece Enacts Social Media Ban For Kids Under 15
Greece has passed a law banning children under 15 from social media platforms beginning January 1, 2027. The legislation requires platforms to implement reliable age verification and parents to use government-backed apps to restrict access, with penalties for noncompliance under the EU’s Digital Services Act. Engadget reports: “It would have been very easy to do absolutely noth … ⌘ Read more

Play with friends with the Social Multiplayer Games Collection from Digiphile
Digiphile (former Humble Bundler staff) just launched their new Social Multiplayer Games Collection.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

LinkedIn Fights AI Slop, Now 40% of Its Long-Form Posts
“Even LinkedIn is getting tired of your AI-written posts,” writes CNN, reporting that the Microsoft-owned, job-oriented social media site “is upping its fight against slop.”
A report published in July by Pangram, a research firm that tracks AI content online, found that more than 40% of long-form posts on the platform were AI-generated, compared to around 30% on X a … ⌘ Read more

‘The Social Reckoning’ Bombs with $5.5 Million Opening
Why didn’t The Social Reckoning enjoy the box office success of 2010’s The Social Network, asks IndieWire/A>:

[T]here wasn’t the same urgency in the story being told. The Social Reckoning focuses less on Zuckerberg, and more on data engineer Frances Haugen’s decision to blow the whistle on how Facebook’s algorithms were promoting political content that radica … ⌘ Read more

Hackers Steal 8 Million Citizens’ Records From Danish Government Database
Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark’s Central Person Register (CPR), including names, addresses, social security numbers and other personal information. The breach is believed to be the largest in Denmark’s history. TechCrunch reports: The CPR is a government database of … ⌘ Read more

President Trump Doxxes Senator’s Cellphone in Push For Permanent Daylight Saving Time
U.S. President Donald Trump “doxxed” a U.S. senator today, writes the Washington Sun, by posting his cell phone number “as part of a plea for his Truth Social followers to badger his Republican ally into making daylight saving time permanent.”

When The Washington Sun called the number minutes after Trump’s … ⌘ Read more

Social Media Harms Democracy By Spreading Rumors, Survey Shows
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of law … ⌘ Read more

@zyak@twtxt.z85b.xyz Hah 🤣 The property of Twtxt / Yarn.social that we all enjoy is how slow that ecosystem is 😅

Did I post this here already?

“A short film about hope”

https://movq.de/v/eb0675d4ce/a-short-film-about-hope.mp4

Source: https://social.tchncs.de/@grumpy_copi/117257509153287572

Hey, folks. Sorry to disappear for the last couple of weeks.

Last weekend, I took the family to Atlanta, GA for a visit to the Georgia Aquarium and the Center for Puppetry Arts, both of which were fantastic (pics forthcoming). Unfortunately, amongst the souvenirs we brought home was the worst sickness my wife and I have had in years, which basically laid us both out until Thursday, and we’ve been recovering since.

On top of it, just before we left, I accidentally broke TwtStrm (my WIP TwtTxt reader), so I didn’t even have a functional way to keep up with the only “social media platform” I actually give a hoot about (nor a functional brain to try and fix it).

As of this morning, though, I’m happy to report that we’re basically all better, and TwtStrm is back to working. I’m actually hoping to get some code written this weekend (and maybe even try to get Parley running), but we’ll see how things go. 🙂

To Enforce Its Proposed Social Media Ban for 450 Million Pre-Teens, EU Builds an Open Source App
The European Commission “proposed on Thursday banning children under 13 from social media, with parent-supervised accounts until 15,” reports Reuters.

“Enforcement would rely on a tool Brussels built itself” — a free, open-source age verification smartphone app “that tells a platform … ⌘ Read more

Tech Industry Scratches Its Head Over Trump’s ‘AI Force’ Proposal
Saturday morning President Trump announced he’s creating an AI task force and appointing an AI czar, reports Politico.

“I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS,” Trump wrote Saturday in what Politico earlier described as “a lengthy Truth Social post on Saturday morning.”

TRUMP: Over the ye … ⌘ Read more

Mit diesem Zauberspruch von https://mastodon.social/@islieb werde ich nun ins Wochenende zusammenbrechen. 🥳💀🫩 #FrakturFreitag

‘Zuckoff’ App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions
The New York Post reports:

A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta’s creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Progra … ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Then by all means, follow the instructions at https://git.mills.io/prologic/parley and setup your own instance on your own domain. It’s partly inspired by Twtxt/Yarn.social and Salty.im – in at least the way teh DNS discovery and WKID works. Once your instance is up and running and you’ve gone through the /setup and created yourself an account (or seti it up with an appropraite ODIC IDP) try something like /msg james@mills.io Hey! at which point you should automatically start peering with my instance. You should then be able to /join #lobby1 (a globally federated channel already across 2 instances so far). 🤞

California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media, AI Chatbots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Is simply not buying it an option? Or is there too much social pressure?

@prologic@twtxt.net @david@daiwei.me @movq@www.uninformativ.de No, I dig it - I absolutely love the slower pace here compared to even the Fediverse (and especially compared to corporate social media, which is always trying to sell something).

I did have a bit of a “down or just me” moment, thinking I might have broken my client (since it’s still WIP and it’s happened before), but beyond that, it was no worries. 🙂

Australia To Let Social Media Users ‘Opt Out’ of Algorithm-Based Feeds
Australia is proposing the “My Feed, My Way” initiative that would force social media platforms to let users over 16 turn off algorithmic recommendations and instead see only posts from people and creators they follow. Platforms that fail to comply could face fines of up to $79 million. CNBC reports: The legislation, which is being draf … ⌘ Read more

⚠️ For anyone that signs up on Yarn.social’s multi-user twtd multi-tenant platform I’m runnign on twtpub.com – Be warned. I will delete your account if you create it for the soles purposes of link squatting, spam, link harvesting, seo marketing, or any other useless fucktarrd crap.

To the spammers and would-be assholes of the world: You have been wanred. Don’t abuse my generosity.

it’s all I ask

@fossham@twtpub.com I honestly think the most unique and interesting thing about doing this at all is that it is in fact inspired directly by Twtxt / Yarn.social itself – That is to say, I am confident I can do this in such a way as to be “truly decentralised”, no inter-networking like ActivityPub, no centraised forges like Github or Codeberg. You run your instance, I run mine, we just are able to collaborate. Think exchanging patches over Email, just without all the hard-to-learn ways to do that (enough though it’s not hard for some of us, but still).

I am finally building a Twtxt / Yarn.social inspired Git forge. I’m actually quite confident that y’all will quite like it, but I won’t post links yet until I’m quietly confident in its design, functionality and behaviour(s).

Stay tuned 🤞 It’ll be like no other Git forge you’ve ever seen! 🤣 Actually, it’s already more like cgit than anything with plain text feeds that power it’s “pure decentralization” as you can no doubt imagine 😅 #twtxt #git #forge

@david@daiwei.me

I wish I knew

Just give it a go. This stuff is super cheap. All you need is a “pen”, some nibs, ink, and paper. Costs like 20-30 bucks and lasts for several years. The hardest part is finding good paper, really, because most paper these days isn’t made for ink anymore. 🥴

And since social media is always only full of good results, here’s something “shitty”:

These are my first experiments in 2016 – and that’s after having practiced with a graphics tablet on a PC for a couple of weeks. 😅

Gamescom Crime Spree? Three Exhibitors Report Their Laptops Were Stolen
From the gaming news site Aftermath”

Game developer and consultant Ryan Laley traveled to Cologne, Germany from Essex, England to showcase his upcoming horror social deduction game Mimic at the annual Gamescom event. He paid “thousands of pounds” to get a booth at the show, where other game developers and press could try the game ahe … ⌘ Read more

Is China Secretly Fueling America’s Data Center Rage?
alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts “posting in a manner t … ⌘ Read more

Operation Bluebird Launches New Twitter
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now. “We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars. “And we have wa … ⌘ Read more

Meta Reaches $18 Billion of Settlements Over Children’s Social Media Addiction
Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between mid … ⌘ Read more

Chinese Government Fears AI Might Replace Human Intimacy
China has imposed new restrictions on AI companion services over concerns they can foster “emotional dependence or addiction” and replace real-world social interaction. Officials are also worried that increasingly satisfying AI relationships could deepen loneliness and further discourage marriage and parenthood. The Guardian reports: No country has rolled out AI … ⌘ Read more

New Zealand Introduces Under-16 Social Media, AI Companion Ban
New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. “We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too,” said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Chil … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Shares Its Official Tutorial For Making a Cyberdeck
Raspberry Pi has published an official guide for building a cyberdeck, leaning into a viral trend of homemade portable computers built from repurposed cases, purses, and other oddball hardware. The guide uses a Raspberry Pi 5, keyboard, battery, and Pelican-style case. The Verge reports: Raspberry Pi’s head of social, Ashley Whittaker, acknow … ⌘ Read more

Debian is Voting on Whether to Allow AI-Assisted Contributions
Debian developers are voting on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions, reports the blog Linuxiac, with a ballot listing eight proposals and a “None of the above” option.

The first one is still the original proposal to ban LLM-assisted contributions by changing the Debian Social Contract. This would stop generative AI from being used for direct D … ⌘ Read more

@jastas@twtpub.com That’s me! 👋 Haha 😆 Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 🙌

@fossham@twtpub.com Hey 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 👌

@smmbear@twtpub.com Hey 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 👌 Just in case you are not ware a) spam is not really tolerated by this community and b) doesn’t work anyway, you’ll just be ignored, and there are exactly zero ways to promote spam or advertise on this social system – on purpose.

Real tired of doing these, but here’s another Android developers vs Google update, this time there’s both good and bad news.

The good:
-Users will be able to enable “sideloading” for all current and future devices, attached to their Google account, rather than having to undergo the tedious 24 hour wait including process, on each device.

-Rather than these changes to “sideloading” and “advanced workflows” being implemented at random different dates, in different countries, we’ll all get them come 2027.

The bad:
As GrapheneOS developers recently mentioned “Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It’s completely ridiculous and they’ve gradually become very slow at handling requests. They’re in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.”

whole thread: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117057099753905023

Whistleblower Arturo Bejar Leads Testimony In Landmark Trial Against Meta
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only o … ⌘ Read more

Meta Faces $1.4 Trillion Reckoning In Latest Trial Over Social Media Addiction
Meta is heading to trial in a case brought by dozens of states accusing it of deliberately designing addictive features, misleading users about safety, and illegally collecting data from children under 13. Meta says the states are seeking penalties as high as $1.4 trillion, though the judge has already called that figure … ⌘ Read more

X Open Sources Its Ranking and Filtering Algorithms
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app’s “For You” algorithm and its core ranking engine, and adding a feature that will let users see if their account or posts have been impacted by any of its ranking systems, the social network said on Thursday. The company is making the source co … ⌘ Read more

@murad@twtxt.net Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 🥳 You might want to fiddle a bit with your settings, maybe a nice avatar, description, maybe a few links, etc 😃

@prologic@twtxt.net Potentially, depending on the features supported / hardware used.

I’ve long wished for an appliance (like a video game console) that hosts my essential services - email, shared files, social media, etc. - but which “just runs” in a box behind the TV.

So what do you have in mind? 🤔

@creeper@twtpub.com Hey ! 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 🤗

France’s Top Court Blocks Social Media Ban For Under-15s
France’s Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification. President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in … ⌘ Read more