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If you have not yet heard of #ActivityPub or #Mastodon, then you will soon. A long-time passionate group of believers in the indieweb has recently found a use case. has driven many opponents to try this new distributed social technology. It is time to understand it.
Twitter and the Fediverse: Editorial
What is ActivityPub?
I Built a Mastodon Server So You Can Try It.
Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps
How to Get Started on Mastodon
Startups are an act of desperation
Andreessen Horowitz Conquered Venture Capital Without Breaking a Sweat. Gobbling Up the Rest of the World Won’t Be So Easy
A somber prediction - A.I. will replace all creatives
Musk’s Plans Around Verification, Moderation, and Payments on Twitter are Slowly Becoming Clear
Elon Musk’s hardcore playbook
The Twitter Advertiser Exodus - Caterina Fake
Sequoia Capital Apologizes to Its Fund Investors for FTX Loss
The Star Sequoia Investor
Here’s How Far Fintech Funding Has Fallen FTX’s Collapse
How Substack writers can collaborate to grow
Social networking that’s not for sale - Mastodon
Don MacAskill - Flickr and SmugMug
If you read this newsletter, you will realize that my weekly reading can be a little “inside baseball” when it comes to developments in the startup and venture capital ecosystem. This week will go to a whole new level of specificity within the genre.
A few weeks ago, mentions of ActivityPub and Mastodon began popping up in my reading. A lot of the links in the first section below are the result.
ActivityPub is a simple technology that enables publishing posts of up to 500 characters, including video, images, polls, and other formats. It also enables subscribing to posts from others to create feeds of posts.
In all essentials, it is like Twitter. The key difference is that anybody able to deal with the technology can download and install the server software and create a node. There are many flavors of ActivityPub server software. Mastodon is the current flavor of the month, closely followed by Pleroma.
There are thousands of Mastodon servers already accepting new users. In the past few weeks, about five million people have joined and created an account on a server. That has led to a small crisis where many servers had to suspend new users to prevent a meltdown.
I personally love the idea of ActivityPub. It’s close to @jack Dorsey’s idea of a fully distributed version of Twitter. At the level of pure technology, it lives - architecturally - alongside other open protocols that the internet runs on, like SMTP(email) and HTTPS (Web). Anybody can run a server, and all users on all servers can be followed or messaged by any other user. Mastodon has ios and android clients as well as web and web-app clients.
Create your account first, then install the app and log in. Now you can go play with a fully distributed social network with no ads, and on megamast, no restrictions on free speech.
I did the work (two to three days of pain) and now have https://megamast.io. You can follow me at @kteare on that server. To do so, you need your own activity pub account and an app to sign into the network. Here is an invite for you to create an account at megamast.io - https://megamast.io/invite/tGk5rMZ4. And here is the Apple app store link for the client software and the Google Play Android link.
The lack of moderation on megamast is my choice. Each server operator makes their own choices. The general view of Mastodon is not in favor of free speech. Indeed the idea behind it is to enable closed circles - called communities - where rules are specified and enforced. As they say on the Mastodon website:
Mastodon puts decision making back in your hands. Each server creates their own rules and regulations, which are enforced locally and not top-down like corporate social media, making it the most flexible in responding to the needs of different groups of people. Join a server with the rules you agree with, or host your own.
The software distinguishes between two types of feed, local and federated. A local feed is only made up of people or organizations who are members of that specific server. A little like a closed Slack account. A federated feed includes all of the posts from people you follow or discover via search. Users choose which feed to see.
This means there is no lock-in. You can choose what you want. No restrictions. It is also easy to move from one server to another and take your followers with you. Just like you can change email providers but still get an email.
Tumblr and Flickr have both implied that they are about to support the ActivityPub protocol. Others are sure to follow.
There is no proven business model for ActivityPub. Server managers ask for donations. Some charge, like Leo Laporte’s twit.social. It has had to close new subscribers due to being under-resourced for the new influx. Others are self-funded.
The lack of a scalable monetization model seems like a missed opportunity. Sadly the fans of open and distributed protocols are not the same people as the fans of web3 and tokenization. As a result, the obvious model - to tokenize the network and reward contributors - has not yet emerged. Filecoin is a good example of an approach that - in part - would make sense.
So why have I created megamast.io (Big Mega Mastodon Server supporting input and output)? Really, to play. And learn.
I am still a fan of Twitter, and I believe is doing a lot of important things. I would criticize his demeanor on occasion, but not his end goals. I hope he reads this because I think Twitter should implement ActivityPub itself and overnight make it available to hundreds of millions of Twitter users.
Lots more to see this week. Elad Gil on what makes a startup’s founders different. Newcomer on A16Z. A great piece predicting AI will replace many creatives. Enjoy below.
The Video and Podcast with @kteare and @ajkeen accompanying That Was The Week is recorded separately and delivered to paying subscribers via email on Friday or Saturday each week.
To subscribe, go to our home at Substack.
Don’t you miss the days when the web really was the world’s greatest decentralized network? Before everything got locked down into a handful of walled gardens? So do we.
Enter ActivityPub! ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard published by the W3C Social Web Working Group. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content.
Sounds exciting? Dive in!
==> Latest published version <==
==> Latest editor’s draft <==
Or, are you a user looking for ActivityPub software to use? Check out this guide for ActivityPub users (community edited)!
I Built a Mastodon Server So You Can Try it
Keith Teare (@kteare@megamast.io
11 Posts, 21 Following, 28 Followers ·
I have four decades of innovation in digital technology as a founder and in a CTO or CEO role. I was born and raised in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. I have lived in Palo Alto, California, since 1997. I was there on day one at EasyNet, RealNames, TechCrunch, Archimedes Studio, SignalRank, Miles, and a bit later at Around and InFarm
Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others.
How to Get Started on Mastodon
LET’S BE HONEST: Twitter was a hell site long before Elon Musk bought it. It has tremendous power to elevate voices, but it also plays on some of our worst social tendencies. We can talk a lot about why that is, but I think it comes down to design choices. Twitter, like most social media, is built to drive as much engagement as possible.
But what if Twitter were optimized differently? What would that look like?
This is what makes Mastodon and the ActivityPub protocol that powers it so liberating. This isn’t another startup. It’s not a company at all. It’s a community. There are no ads, no tracking, and no monetization whatsoever. This is a place shaped—at the cultural, design, and code level—by members of marginalized communities who wanted to escape the rage-driven onslaught of trolls and doomscrolling that define social media. A place built around connection and conversation instead of engagement.
If that sounds like bullshit to you, I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of similar-sounding bullshit in the air right now (see: crypto). We all reflexively think every online service is some kind of play for attention and monetization because that’s the world we’ve adapted to. But the network built around the ActivityPub, known by longtime users as the “Fediverse,” isn’t that.
I asked the community for tips on getting started. Hundreds of people offered me tips, one person rickrolled me, and one sent me an amazing Beatles/Pokémon mashup. Such responses are typical: This is a community of playful people who, by and large, want to have conversations with individual people. They can also be very helpful if you show that you’re willing to learn about the culture and engage on its level. I’ve tried to gather the tips and context they shared with me, and I hope I do a decent job. Let’s dive in.
Startups are an act of desperation
Startups are hard. For the first few years of a company, forward momentum is largely due to founders pushing every day. The weight of the company rests on their shoulders - including the financial well being and success of everyone they hired and the promises they made to their customers and investors. Founders often sacrifice aspects of their person life for this work. Given that startups have a high cost to doing them[1], most great startups tended to have been an act of desperation by the founder.
Usually there are a few forms of desperation. Each founder tends to have a mix of the below in different ratios.
1. Career desperation. Startups allow people early or stuck in their careers to jump a few steps ahead. Even if not successful, a startup may allow you to:
Hire and manage others if before you were an individual contributor. You can learn management skills as a founder. If the company scales you will learn to hire and manage managers and executives.
Learn valuable new skills you would not be exposed to otherwise - sales, finance, fundraising, budgeting, PR, marketing, etc
Build a network you would not have otherwise. You will broaden your industry network, meet customer or peer CEOs or executives, VCs, press, and others.
Get new opportunities. You may get opportunities to angel invest or advise other companies.
Acquired founders often come in at a higher level in an organization than if they had been hired out of their prior job. For example, a founder may come in as an engineering manager or product director, since they have now managed people via starting a company.
Many of the benefits of a startup in terms of learning are not as strong for people later in their career who are already running large organizations or teams. While startups often offer unique learnings to anyone who starts one, the value and extent of those learnings and opportunities may be less important for people later in a successful career.
During the first week of November, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, two of the most recognizable names in venture capital, put on a show for their firm’s backers—an audience of gold-plated endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and pension plans.
The three-day affair was held virtually on Hopin, an online platform funded by the VC firm, and paired with in-person dinners for more than 100 guests in New York City and at the posh San Francisco sushi restaurant Pabu Izakaya.
Amid a battery of distractions competing for the audience’s attention—from jarring economic data, to the war in Ukraine and midterm elections—Andreessen Horowitz’s coterie of fund managers stayed on message, framing the market turbulence and tumbling tech valuations as an opportunity.
More than ever before in the firm’s history, Andreessen Horowitz’s partners needed to impress.
By the end of last year—a decade after Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, was founded—the firm was riding high with $55 billion in assets under management, more than three times the amount in 2020. That sum, massive by the standards of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, represented an accumulation of shares in startups and crypto tokens during the best time for tech investing since the dotcom boom.
Nearly a year later, Andreessen Horowitz is navigating the worst market for tech since the firm was founded. Coinbase, the company that generated the highest return ever for the firm, is down about 80% so far in the stock market this year. Share prices of other now-public a16z investments, such as Airbnb and Affirm, are also down sharply. And a few of its still-private companies, including Instacart, have cut their valuations significantly. Meanwhile, one of the largest exchanges in the crypto industry has collapsed, throwing the fate of the entire digital asset industry, where a16z has pledged billions, into question.
“Andreessen Horowitz has an awfully good track record to point to … But that was then, and this is now,” says Len Sherman, a professor at Columbia Business School.
A somber prediction - A.I. will replace all creatives
If we already have AI software, like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, that can generate one brand new image based on a text prompt, couldn’t it generate 24 of them?
Couldn’t the AI image generation model eventually be trained to render entire videos with a text prompt, and couldn’t that algorithm eventually be trained to generate sounds and dialog as well?
Wouldn’t this eventually become a paid streaming service where you put in a prompt, and a full-fledged movie pops out the other end? A movie that required no writers, directors, actors, sets, costume designers, or editors to create, just some AI software.
What if I told you that this is not only the future of Entertainment but that it’s here today, right now, and you can try it out?
TEXT-TO-VIDEO TECHNOLOGY ALREADY EXISTS
Just want to take a peek at the future? Check out a paper on Facebook’s “Make-A-Video” generator. Or read up on Google’s Imagen text-to-video generator.
Want to dive directly into the nitty gritty of using the “Deforum” Stable Diffusion Text to Video Generator? if you wanna have a go, I suggest starting with this tutorial video
www.diyphotography.net • Share
Musk’s Plans Around Verification, Moderation, and Payments on Twitter are Slowly Becoming Clear
Social Media Today
As we head into Thanksgiving, the various controversies and developments around Twitter continue to evolve, with new boss Elon Musk still throwing around ideas and making sweeping changes at the app.
And while there is still a question around whether Twitter will even remain online, due to reduced oversight of its systems, if it does, the next steps will see major shifts in direction of the app.
Catching you up, here’s a look at all the latest key developments at Twitter HQ, which could impact the platform moving forward.
Delayed verification
Musk’s first major move at Twitter, his $8 verification for all plan, has been delayed once again, with Musk noting that they need to establish better systems to combat impersonation before moving ahead.
The controversial program was launched to some users earlier this month, before being shut down after a couple of days due to confusion caused by impersonators in the app. Last week, Musk set a new target date of November 29th for a re-launch of the program, but now, that date seems to be off the cards too, as Twitter explores the potential ramifications of the checkmark-for-sale process.
Look, this is a confusing, misguided initiative – and that’s not to say that Musk is wrong about everything or to question his grand plan for the app (calm down, Elon fanfolk). Musk may well be able to get Twitter on a path to growth, and I would bet on his team eventually getting things together. But an $8 monthly fee for blue checkmarks isn’t it.
I suspect that Musk will eventually see this – with the concession of gray ‘Official’ ticks already a tacit acknowledgment of the flaws in this approach.
www.socialmediatoday.com • Share
Elon Musk isn’t exactly shy about squeezing the most out of his employees, and at Twitter he’s using approaches he’s already employed at Tesla and SpaceX. Let’s dive in.
Is this hardcore?
So, you’ve gone ahead and shown about two-thirds of your staff the door. The ones that remain have signed up to work “long hours at high intensity.” Now, it’s time to show them what that looks like.
Elon Musk has a reputation for his love of “hardcore” working conditions. This isn’t his first rodeo, as The New York Times points out in a piece that identifies some key trends through his approaches at Tesla and SpaceX.
“A crisis atmosphere and self-imposed austerity gives Mr. Musk the cover to make drastic changes and fire top managers or eliminate large swaths of staff, two former Tesla executives said. It also prepares those who remain to work under extreme conditions to bring about Mr. Musk’s desires, they said.”
The overall vibe is one of tight belts, perma-crisis, and a general sense of uncertainty.
Beyond layoffs, Musk is making some early moves at Twitter that appear to be recreating what came before at Tesla and SpaceX in an attempt to set a new culture.
Say hello to austerity, tweeps. “Company allowances for employee wellness, productivity, home internet, training and development, Outschool, daycare, and quarterly team activities have all been discontinued,” according to The Verge
And expect more oversight. “Every Friday, all Twitter employees are required to send an email update on their work” to Musk, The Verge also reports.
Did we say the layoffs were over? Not quite; gotta keep people on their toes after all. He laid off members of the sales team yesterday. But he reportedly pinky promised that the company was done with layoffs and may in fact recruit for some roles. And remember that he already fired staff who publicly questioned his approaches.
All told, Musk appears to be creating an atmosphere of nervous uncertainty at Twitter. High standards, high intensity, and high stakes — with the ever-looming threat of firing employees who don’t toe the line and demonstrate “excellence.” Good luck, tweeps.
Caterina Fake
A $750,000 a month advertiser has left Twitter. One of hundreds. But in her post she explained the bases for the decision vis-a-vis her advertising investment in a neutral, non-ideological way. People picked up this post because it so powerfully predicts the demise of Twitter’s advertising business, already in freefall and now perhaps beyond recovery.…
Sequoia Capital Apologizes to Its Fund Investors for FTX Loss
Sequoia Capital apologized to its fund investors for the $150 million it lost on crypto exchange FTX, said people familiar with the matter, a rare moment of contrition for the storied venture-capital firm.
On the call, Sequoia‘s partners told the fund investors that the firm would improve its due-diligence process on future investments and that it believed it was misled by FTX based on its recent bankruptcy filing, the people said.
Sequoia Capital, an early backer of Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG 1.75%increase; green up pointing triangle
Google, and Airbnb Inc., ABNB 1.66%increase; green up pointing triangle
has long been seen as the gold standard in the venture industry for its high investment bar. The firm earlier this month wrote off its entire investment in FTX—one of the largest written by a venture firm in the company—after the crypto exchange struggled to meet a wave of withdrawals. FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11.
In the call, a Sequoia partner said that the firm in the future will be in a position to have even early-stage startups’ financial statements audited by one of the Big Four accounting firms, the people said.
Sequoia was one of scores of venture investors who piled roughly $2 billion into FTX amid last year’s boom in crypto investment. Eager to get into the hot startup, they shirked traditional corporate controls such as external board oversight that are typical for such large investments.
The Star Sequoia Investor Behind FTX’s Collapse
Last week, Sequoia Capital partner Doug Leone compared FTX’s blowup to childbirth. “Like having a child, you forget the pain of having that child three months later, a year later,” he said on stage at a conference in Europe.
Leaving aside the strange and inappropriate metaphor, Sequoia should not “forget the pain” FTX has caused in three months or a year. It should take a step back and examine the rippling effects the failure of FTX will have on the entire VC and startups industry.
The danger is that Sand Hill Road VCs retreat from crypto entirely, stripping away a large source of the capital that’s gone into those companies over the last few years. This could lead to more startup shutdowns than is already expected, and hinder innovation in the sector.
Sequoia, meanwhile, has kicked off that reflective process with a “post mortem,” said a person close to the firm. And the well-established partner who approved the firm’s FTX investments, Alfred Lin, is taking a starring role in the apology tour.
On Tuesday Sequoia hosted a call with limited partners to say sorry, and to walk them through the diligence it says it did on FTX last year before making its initial investment. I suspect it’s very rare for a venture capital firm to host a conference call with LPs for the purpose of discussing one single company. And with a full court press—three investors including Lin and the firm’s U.S. leader Roelof Botha spoke on the call—it’s clear Sequoia is in damage control mode.
Lin, best known for rising to the top of the Midas List in 2021 thanks to his investments in DoorDash and Airbnb, was front and center. He told LPs that he internalized the loss and was personally holding himself accountable for the mistake. He also defended himself, telling LPs that on multiple occasions he told Sam Bankman-Fried to hire a CFO.
As far as I know, Sequoia didn’t offer any insight into its crypto investment strategy moving forward. For now, it still has money to play with. The firm backed FTX out of its global growth fund, and has only invested about 10% of a $600 million dedicated crypto fund it launched in early 2022, leaving it with about $540 million to continue backing crypto startups. It may want to make that money last a while though, because LPs might not line up to invest in the next crypto fund. If there is a next fund.
www.theinformation.com • Share
Here’s How Far Fintech Funding Has Fallen
Last year, financial services was the leading sector for venture investment, with at least $131 billion globally going into startups in the space.
This year, the industry still ranks among the largest recipients of venture capital funding. However, investment to startups in the space has been dropping every quarter this year, with Q4 likely to be the lowest yet.
For a sense of the funding trajectory, we charted out global investment over the past five calendar quarters.
Even with the steep year-over-year decline, financial services funding is still high by historical standards. Currently, 2022 is on track to deliver the second-highest funding total of the past five years. For perspective, we chart out investment and round count totals below:
How Substack writers can collaborate to grow
Writers collaborating with and cross-promoting one another have been the key to discovery on the internet since its inception, notably in the blogosphere, where writers’ blogrolls helped unearth niche communities and build bonds of trust between writers.
The Substack network is deeply influenced by that ethos. Some of the most powerful ways to grow your Substack are the human-powered tools we’ve built that help writers suggest other writers to their readers via the subscribe flow, on their home pages and profiles, and in their emails.
None of these tools require the writer to be marketing-savvy, and none rely on clickbait or gimmicky packaging, but writers are using them to drive 40% of all free subscriptions and 12% of paid subscriptions across the Substack network.
To celebrate our new Letter project, which brings two writers into conversation over a series of “letters” exchanged on Substack, we thought we’d revisit the tools, new and old, that Substack offers to collaborate with fellow writers and expand your reach.
2 years ago · 628 likes · 121 comments · Clyde Rathbone
Social networking that's not for sale.
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free, and open-source, decentralized social media platform.
You know best what you want to see on your home feed. No algorithms or ads to waste your time. Follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order, and make your corner of the internet a little more like you.
Mastodon puts decision-making back in your hands. Each server creates their own rules and regulations, which are enforced locally and not top-down like corporate social media, making it the most flexible in responding to the needs of different groups of people. Join a server with the rules you agree with, or host your own.
@seldo Come to @tumblr. We'll add activitypub for interconnect. Don't stress.
If you have not yet heard of #ActivityPub or #Mastodon, then you will soon. A long-time passionate group of believers in the indieweb has recently found a use case. has driven many opponents to try this new distributed social technology. It is time to understand it.
Twitter and the Fediverse: Editorial
What is ActivityPub?
I Built a Mastodon Server So You Can Try It.
Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps
How to Get Started on Mastodon
Startups are an act of desperation
Andreessen Horowitz Conquered Venture Capital Without Breaking a Sweat. Gobbling Up the Rest of the World Won’t Be So Easy
A somber prediction - A.I. will replace all creatives
Musk’s Plans Around Verification, Moderation, and Payments on Twitter are Slowly Becoming Clear
Elon Musk’s hardcore playbook
The Twitter Advertiser Exodus - Caterina Fake
Sequoia Capital Apologizes to Its Fund Investors for FTX Loss
The Star Sequoia Investor
Here’s How Far Fintech Funding Has Fallen FTX’s Collapse
How Substack writers can collaborate to grow
Social networking that’s not for sale - Mastodon
Don MacAskill - Flickr and SmugMug
If you read this newsletter, you will realize that my weekly reading can be a little “inside baseball” when it comes to developments in the startup and venture capital ecosystem. This week will go to a whole new level of specificity within the genre.
A few weeks ago, mentions of ActivityPub and Mastodon began popping up in my reading. A lot of the links in the first section below are the result.
ActivityPub is a simple technology that enables publishing posts of up to 500 characters, including video, images, polls, and other formats. It also enables subscribing to posts from others to create feeds of posts.
In all essentials, it is like Twitter. The key difference is that anybody able to deal with the technology can download and install the server software and create a node. There are many flavors of ActivityPub server software. Mastodon is the current flavor of the month, closely followed by Pleroma.
There are thousands of Mastodon servers already accepting new users. In the past few weeks, about five million people have joined and created an account on a server. That has led to a small crisis where many servers had to suspend new users to prevent a meltdown.
I personally love the idea of ActivityPub. It’s close to @jack Dorsey’s idea of a fully distributed version of Twitter. At the level of pure technology, it lives - architecturally - alongside other open protocols that the internet runs on, like SMTP(email) and HTTPS (Web). Anybody can run a server, and all users on all servers can be followed or messaged by any other user. Mastodon has ios and android clients as well as web and web-app clients.
Create your account first, then install the app and log in. Now you can go play with a fully distributed social network with no ads, and on megamast, no restrictions on free speech.
I did the work (two to three days of pain) and now have https://megamast.io. You can follow me at @kteare on that server. To do so, you need your own activity pub account and an app to sign into the network. Here is an invite for you to create an account at megamast.io - https://megamast.io/invite/tGk5rMZ4. And here is the Apple app store link for the client software and the Google Play Android link.
The lack of moderation on megamast is my choice. Each server operator makes their own choices. The general view of Mastodon is not in favor of free speech. Indeed the idea behind it is to enable closed circles - called communities - where rules are specified and enforced. As they say on the Mastodon website:
Mastodon puts decision making back in your hands. Each server creates their own rules and regulations, which are enforced locally and not top-down like corporate social media, making it the most flexible in responding to the needs of different groups of people. Join a server with the rules you agree with, or host your own.
The software distinguishes between two types of feed, local and federated. A local feed is only made up of people or organizations who are members of that specific server. A little like a closed Slack account. A federated feed includes all of the posts from people you follow or discover via search. Users choose which feed to see.
This means there is no lock-in. You can choose what you want. No restrictions. It is also easy to move from one server to another and take your followers with you. Just like you can change email providers but still get an email.
Tumblr and Flickr have both implied that they are about to support the ActivityPub protocol. Others are sure to follow.
There is no proven business model for ActivityPub. Server managers ask for donations. Some charge, like Leo Laporte’s twit.social. It has had to close new subscribers due to being under-resourced for the new influx. Others are self-funded.
The lack of a scalable monetization model seems like a missed opportunity. Sadly the fans of open and distributed protocols are not the same people as the fans of web3 and tokenization. As a result, the obvious model - to tokenize the network and reward contributors - has not yet emerged. Filecoin is a good example of an approach that - in part - would make sense.
So why have I created megamast.io (Big Mega Mastodon Server supporting input and output)? Really, to play. And learn.
I am still a fan of Twitter, and I believe is doing a lot of important things. I would criticize his demeanor on occasion, but not his end goals. I hope he reads this because I think Twitter should implement ActivityPub itself and overnight make it available to hundreds of millions of Twitter users.
Lots more to see this week. Elad Gil on what makes a startup’s founders different. Newcomer on A16Z. A great piece predicting AI will replace many creatives. Enjoy below.
The Video and Podcast with @kteare and @ajkeen accompanying That Was The Week is recorded separately and delivered to paying subscribers via email on Friday or Saturday each week.
To subscribe, go to our home at Substack.
Don’t you miss the days when the web really was the world’s greatest decentralized network? Before everything got locked down into a handful of walled gardens? So do we.
Enter ActivityPub! ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol based on the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard published by the W3C Social Web Working Group. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content.
Sounds exciting? Dive in!
==> Latest published version <==
==> Latest editor’s draft <==
Or, are you a user looking for ActivityPub software to use? Check out this guide for ActivityPub users (community edited)!
I Built a Mastodon Server So You Can Try it
Keith Teare (@kteare@megamast.io
11 Posts, 21 Following, 28 Followers ·
I have four decades of innovation in digital technology as a founder and in a CTO or CEO role. I was born and raised in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. I have lived in Palo Alto, California, since 1997. I was there on day one at EasyNet, RealNames, TechCrunch, Archimedes Studio, SignalRank, Miles, and a bit later at Around and InFarm
Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others.
How to Get Started on Mastodon
LET’S BE HONEST: Twitter was a hell site long before Elon Musk bought it. It has tremendous power to elevate voices, but it also plays on some of our worst social tendencies. We can talk a lot about why that is, but I think it comes down to design choices. Twitter, like most social media, is built to drive as much engagement as possible.
But what if Twitter were optimized differently? What would that look like?
This is what makes Mastodon and the ActivityPub protocol that powers it so liberating. This isn’t another startup. It’s not a company at all. It’s a community. There are no ads, no tracking, and no monetization whatsoever. This is a place shaped—at the cultural, design, and code level—by members of marginalized communities who wanted to escape the rage-driven onslaught of trolls and doomscrolling that define social media. A place built around connection and conversation instead of engagement.
If that sounds like bullshit to you, I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of similar-sounding bullshit in the air right now (see: crypto). We all reflexively think every online service is some kind of play for attention and monetization because that’s the world we’ve adapted to. But the network built around the ActivityPub, known by longtime users as the “Fediverse,” isn’t that.
I asked the community for tips on getting started. Hundreds of people offered me tips, one person rickrolled me, and one sent me an amazing Beatles/Pokémon mashup. Such responses are typical: This is a community of playful people who, by and large, want to have conversations with individual people. They can also be very helpful if you show that you’re willing to learn about the culture and engage on its level. I’ve tried to gather the tips and context they shared with me, and I hope I do a decent job. Let’s dive in.
Startups are an act of desperation
Startups are hard. For the first few years of a company, forward momentum is largely due to founders pushing every day. The weight of the company rests on their shoulders - including the financial well being and success of everyone they hired and the promises they made to their customers and investors. Founders often sacrifice aspects of their person life for this work. Given that startups have a high cost to doing them[1], most great startups tended to have been an act of desperation by the founder.
Usually there are a few forms of desperation. Each founder tends to have a mix of the below in different ratios.
1. Career desperation. Startups allow people early or stuck in their careers to jump a few steps ahead. Even if not successful, a startup may allow you to:
Hire and manage others if before you were an individual contributor. You can learn management skills as a founder. If the company scales you will learn to hire and manage managers and executives.
Learn valuable new skills you would not be exposed to otherwise - sales, finance, fundraising, budgeting, PR, marketing, etc
Build a network you would not have otherwise. You will broaden your industry network, meet customer or peer CEOs or executives, VCs, press, and others.
Get new opportunities. You may get opportunities to angel invest or advise other companies.
Acquired founders often come in at a higher level in an organization than if they had been hired out of their prior job. For example, a founder may come in as an engineering manager or product director, since they have now managed people via starting a company.
Many of the benefits of a startup in terms of learning are not as strong for people later in their career who are already running large organizations or teams. While startups often offer unique learnings to anyone who starts one, the value and extent of those learnings and opportunities may be less important for people later in a successful career.
During the first week of November, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, two of the most recognizable names in venture capital, put on a show for their firm’s backers—an audience of gold-plated endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and pension plans.
The three-day affair was held virtually on Hopin, an online platform funded by the VC firm, and paired with in-person dinners for more than 100 guests in New York City and at the posh San Francisco sushi restaurant Pabu Izakaya.
Amid a battery of distractions competing for the audience’s attention—from jarring economic data, to the war in Ukraine and midterm elections—Andreessen Horowitz’s coterie of fund managers stayed on message, framing the market turbulence and tumbling tech valuations as an opportunity.
More than ever before in the firm’s history, Andreessen Horowitz’s partners needed to impress.
By the end of last year—a decade after Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, was founded—the firm was riding high with $55 billion in assets under management, more than three times the amount in 2020. That sum, massive by the standards of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, represented an accumulation of shares in startups and crypto tokens during the best time for tech investing since the dotcom boom.
Nearly a year later, Andreessen Horowitz is navigating the worst market for tech since the firm was founded. Coinbase, the company that generated the highest return ever for the firm, is down about 80% so far in the stock market this year. Share prices of other now-public a16z investments, such as Airbnb and Affirm, are also down sharply. And a few of its still-private companies, including Instacart, have cut their valuations significantly. Meanwhile, one of the largest exchanges in the crypto industry has collapsed, throwing the fate of the entire digital asset industry, where a16z has pledged billions, into question.
“Andreessen Horowitz has an awfully good track record to point to … But that was then, and this is now,” says Len Sherman, a professor at Columbia Business School.
A somber prediction - A.I. will replace all creatives
If we already have AI software, like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, that can generate one brand new image based on a text prompt, couldn’t it generate 24 of them?
Couldn’t the AI image generation model eventually be trained to render entire videos with a text prompt, and couldn’t that algorithm eventually be trained to generate sounds and dialog as well?
Wouldn’t this eventually become a paid streaming service where you put in a prompt, and a full-fledged movie pops out the other end? A movie that required no writers, directors, actors, sets, costume designers, or editors to create, just some AI software.
What if I told you that this is not only the future of Entertainment but that it’s here today, right now, and you can try it out?
TEXT-TO-VIDEO TECHNOLOGY ALREADY EXISTS
Just want to take a peek at the future? Check out a paper on Facebook’s “Make-A-Video” generator. Or read up on Google’s Imagen text-to-video generator.
Want to dive directly into the nitty gritty of using the “Deforum” Stable Diffusion Text to Video Generator? if you wanna have a go, I suggest starting with this tutorial video
www.diyphotography.net • Share
Musk’s Plans Around Verification, Moderation, and Payments on Twitter are Slowly Becoming Clear
Social Media Today
As we head into Thanksgiving, the various controversies and developments around Twitter continue to evolve, with new boss Elon Musk still throwing around ideas and making sweeping changes at the app.
And while there is still a question around whether Twitter will even remain online, due to reduced oversight of its systems, if it does, the next steps will see major shifts in direction of the app.
Catching you up, here’s a look at all the latest key developments at Twitter HQ, which could impact the platform moving forward.
Delayed verification
Musk’s first major move at Twitter, his $8 verification for all plan, has been delayed once again, with Musk noting that they need to establish better systems to combat impersonation before moving ahead.
The controversial program was launched to some users earlier this month, before being shut down after a couple of days due to confusion caused by impersonators in the app. Last week, Musk set a new target date of November 29th for a re-launch of the program, but now, that date seems to be off the cards too, as Twitter explores the potential ramifications of the checkmark-for-sale process.
Look, this is a confusing, misguided initiative – and that’s not to say that Musk is wrong about everything or to question his grand plan for the app (calm down, Elon fanfolk). Musk may well be able to get Twitter on a path to growth, and I would bet on his team eventually getting things together. But an $8 monthly fee for blue checkmarks isn’t it.
I suspect that Musk will eventually see this – with the concession of gray ‘Official’ ticks already a tacit acknowledgment of the flaws in this approach.
www.socialmediatoday.com • Share
Elon Musk isn’t exactly shy about squeezing the most out of his employees, and at Twitter he’s using approaches he’s already employed at Tesla and SpaceX. Let’s dive in.
Is this hardcore?
So, you’ve gone ahead and shown about two-thirds of your staff the door. The ones that remain have signed up to work “long hours at high intensity.” Now, it’s time to show them what that looks like.
Elon Musk has a reputation for his love of “hardcore” working conditions. This isn’t his first rodeo, as The New York Times points out in a piece that identifies some key trends through his approaches at Tesla and SpaceX.
“A crisis atmosphere and self-imposed austerity gives Mr. Musk the cover to make drastic changes and fire top managers or eliminate large swaths of staff, two former Tesla executives said. It also prepares those who remain to work under extreme conditions to bring about Mr. Musk’s desires, they said.”
The overall vibe is one of tight belts, perma-crisis, and a general sense of uncertainty.
Beyond layoffs, Musk is making some early moves at Twitter that appear to be recreating what came before at Tesla and SpaceX in an attempt to set a new culture.
Say hello to austerity, tweeps. “Company allowances for employee wellness, productivity, home internet, training and development, Outschool, daycare, and quarterly team activities have all been discontinued,” according to The Verge
And expect more oversight. “Every Friday, all Twitter employees are required to send an email update on their work” to Musk, The Verge also reports.
Did we say the layoffs were over? Not quite; gotta keep people on their toes after all. He laid off members of the sales team yesterday. But he reportedly pinky promised that the company was done with layoffs and may in fact recruit for some roles. And remember that he already fired staff who publicly questioned his approaches.
All told, Musk appears to be creating an atmosphere of nervous uncertainty at Twitter. High standards, high intensity, and high stakes — with the ever-looming threat of firing employees who don’t toe the line and demonstrate “excellence.” Good luck, tweeps.
Caterina Fake
A $750,000 a month advertiser has left Twitter. One of hundreds. But in her post she explained the bases for the decision vis-a-vis her advertising investment in a neutral, non-ideological way. People picked up this post because it so powerfully predicts the demise of Twitter’s advertising business, already in freefall and now perhaps beyond recovery.…
Sequoia Capital Apologizes to Its Fund Investors for FTX Loss
Sequoia Capital apologized to its fund investors for the $150 million it lost on crypto exchange FTX, said people familiar with the matter, a rare moment of contrition for the storied venture-capital firm.
On the call, Sequoia‘s partners told the fund investors that the firm would improve its due-diligence process on future investments and that it believed it was misled by FTX based on its recent bankruptcy filing, the people said.
Sequoia Capital, an early backer of Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG 1.75%increase; green up pointing triangle
Google, and Airbnb Inc., ABNB 1.66%increase; green up pointing triangle
has long been seen as the gold standard in the venture industry for its high investment bar. The firm earlier this month wrote off its entire investment in FTX—one of the largest written by a venture firm in the company—after the crypto exchange struggled to meet a wave of withdrawals. FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11.
In the call, a Sequoia partner said that the firm in the future will be in a position to have even early-stage startups’ financial statements audited by one of the Big Four accounting firms, the people said.
Sequoia was one of scores of venture investors who piled roughly $2 billion into FTX amid last year’s boom in crypto investment. Eager to get into the hot startup, they shirked traditional corporate controls such as external board oversight that are typical for such large investments.
The Star Sequoia Investor Behind FTX’s Collapse
Last week, Sequoia Capital partner Doug Leone compared FTX’s blowup to childbirth. “Like having a child, you forget the pain of having that child three months later, a year later,” he said on stage at a conference in Europe.
Leaving aside the strange and inappropriate metaphor, Sequoia should not “forget the pain” FTX has caused in three months or a year. It should take a step back and examine the rippling effects the failure of FTX will have on the entire VC and startups industry.
The danger is that Sand Hill Road VCs retreat from crypto entirely, stripping away a large source of the capital that’s gone into those companies over the last few years. This could lead to more startup shutdowns than is already expected, and hinder innovation in the sector.
Sequoia, meanwhile, has kicked off that reflective process with a “post mortem,” said a person close to the firm. And the well-established partner who approved the firm’s FTX investments, Alfred Lin, is taking a starring role in the apology tour.
On Tuesday Sequoia hosted a call with limited partners to say sorry, and to walk them through the diligence it says it did on FTX last year before making its initial investment. I suspect it’s very rare for a venture capital firm to host a conference call with LPs for the purpose of discussing one single company. And with a full court press—three investors including Lin and the firm’s U.S. leader Roelof Botha spoke on the call—it’s clear Sequoia is in damage control mode.
Lin, best known for rising to the top of the Midas List in 2021 thanks to his investments in DoorDash and Airbnb, was front and center. He told LPs that he internalized the loss and was personally holding himself accountable for the mistake. He also defended himself, telling LPs that on multiple occasions he told Sam Bankman-Fried to hire a CFO.
As far as I know, Sequoia didn’t offer any insight into its crypto investment strategy moving forward. For now, it still has money to play with. The firm backed FTX out of its global growth fund, and has only invested about 10% of a $600 million dedicated crypto fund it launched in early 2022, leaving it with about $540 million to continue backing crypto startups. It may want to make that money last a while though, because LPs might not line up to invest in the next crypto fund. If there is a next fund.
www.theinformation.com • Share
Here’s How Far Fintech Funding Has Fallen
Last year, financial services was the leading sector for venture investment, with at least $131 billion globally going into startups in the space.
This year, the industry still ranks among the largest recipients of venture capital funding. However, investment to startups in the space has been dropping every quarter this year, with Q4 likely to be the lowest yet.
For a sense of the funding trajectory, we charted out global investment over the past five calendar quarters.
Even with the steep year-over-year decline, financial services funding is still high by historical standards. Currently, 2022 is on track to deliver the second-highest funding total of the past five years. For perspective, we chart out investment and round count totals below:
How Substack writers can collaborate to grow
Writers collaborating with and cross-promoting one another have been the key to discovery on the internet since its inception, notably in the blogosphere, where writers’ blogrolls helped unearth niche communities and build bonds of trust between writers.
The Substack network is deeply influenced by that ethos. Some of the most powerful ways to grow your Substack are the human-powered tools we’ve built that help writers suggest other writers to their readers via the subscribe flow, on their home pages and profiles, and in their emails.
None of these tools require the writer to be marketing-savvy, and none rely on clickbait or gimmicky packaging, but writers are using them to drive 40% of all free subscriptions and 12% of paid subscriptions across the Substack network.
To celebrate our new Letter project, which brings two writers into conversation over a series of “letters” exchanged on Substack, we thought we’d revisit the tools, new and old, that Substack offers to collaborate with fellow writers and expand your reach.
2 years ago · 628 likes · 121 comments · Clyde Rathbone
Social networking that's not for sale.
Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free, and open-source, decentralized social media platform.
You know best what you want to see on your home feed. No algorithms or ads to waste your time. Follow anyone across any Mastodon server from a single account and receive their posts in chronological order, and make your corner of the internet a little more like you.
Mastodon puts decision-making back in your hands. Each server creates their own rules and regulations, which are enforced locally and not top-down like corporate social media, making it the most flexible in responding to the needs of different groups of people. Join a server with the rules you agree with, or host your own.
@seldo Come to @tumblr. We'll add activitypub for interconnect. Don't stress.
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