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brennanbrownon Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12M Given to DHH

I'll quote a previous article I wrote, as it seems relevant here.

A lot has changed over the past decade, and corporate social media now blatantly allows awful, harmful takes in a way that you could only get away with on truth.social or Gab or whatever the fuck years ago. You do not need a tiny, independent platform to say whatever you want, now. A vaccine skeptic is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You are no longer anti-authority when the authority agrees with you. You are no longer the little guy fighting in counterculture against the big man in power. You're all on the same team, now.

On January 7th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute video called "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." In it, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, replacing it with X-style Community Notes, and framed the whole shift as a return to free expression after what Zuckerberg called a "cultural tipping point" brought on by the 2024 election. In the same breath, Meta rewrote its Hateful Conduct policy to expressly permit describing LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill" or "abnormal" and calling for their exclusion from professions and public life, loosened its rules around immigration status, and swapped proactive enforcement for waiting on user reports. Days later, the company donated a million dollars to the incoming president's inauguration, added a Trump ally to its board, and handed its global policy shop to a Republican former Bush staffer.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate spent six months on either side of the change combing through eight million Facebook comments aimed at elected officials, and found abusive comments tripled, from 24,000 to 78,000, with violent threats and hate quadrupling and harassment doubling. The ADL tracked the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress and found toxic comments jumped more than thirteenfold after February 4, 2025. GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed over 7,000 people across 86 countries and found 92 percent worried about the rise in harmful content, and 77 percent now feeling less safe simply existing openly on Meta's platforms. Even Meta's own first integrity report after the change admitted that violent and graphic content, plus bullying and harassment, both ticked upward.

https://brennan.day/free-speech-and-the-indieweb/

brennanbrownon The Writers Who Wrote the Most in History

There's an entire section on Chinese writers lol

brennanbrownon Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

oh goodness, sorry! I think you need to be SSH'd into tilde.pink

I definitely should have tested, I did not expect this to get on HN lol

edit: finger brennan@omg.lol works :)

brennanbrownon The End of Eleventy

I want Zach to be paid, 11ty is my favourite SSG. I think the way Font Awesome is going about this is unwise. I contribute to the Open Collective of 11ty (as I state in my post). I don't know how that can be misread.