OLDaily

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There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Fediverses.
jaz-michael king, 2025/08/27

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With the news that Bluesky is blocking access to users from the U.S. state of Mississippi because it can't comply with a law requiring it "to collect and store sensitive information from all its users, in addition to the detailed tracking of minors," people have looked at other fediverse services, such as Mastodon, with the same question in mind, to which Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says: "And this is why real decentralization matters. There is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi." And that's (part of) the point of this article. "I believe the open social web contains a multitude of fediverses – some connected by protocol, others by platform, denylist, or shared governance. Is Nostr the fediverse? Bluesky? Maybe it doesn't matter. What matters is that anyone can create their own fediverse and choose their connections." Via Laurens Hof.

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The Algorithm at the End of Consciousness
Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons, 2025/08/27

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I think that the conclusions outlined in this article are inevitable after we've studied human and artificial neural networks in any detail; it's the sort of conclusion I've reached with my work on connectivism and consciousness. "We didn't teach machines to think like us; we revealed that much of human cognition operates through describable, repeatable mappings from inputs to outputs. Pattern matching, optimising, iterating, performing. The unsettling recognition isn't that AI learned to approximate human creativity. It's that human creativity, on many accounts, involves recombination and selection within possibility spaces." I've referred to this in the past as a second Copernican Revolution.

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Will I Still Matter When I'm 66?
Tim Chester, EDUCAUSE Review, 2025/08/27

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It's a bit weird to see someone called Greg Jackson credited for a Beatles lyric, but given that the context is that of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) I guess it's OK. Maybe. "The CIO," writes Tim Chester, "once the translator between technology and mission, is now asked to do something more challenging: help the institution find its way through immense ambiguity." And the future? "With more infrastructure offloaded to the cloud, the technical footprint is shrinking while the leadership footprint is expanding." At 66 - which I am now - I should be headed off to retirement, but the economy isn't what it used to be. "I could be handy mending a fuse when your lights have gone. You can knit a sweater by the fireside, Sunday mornings go for a ride." (p.s. Greg Jackson was a Vice president and chief information officer at the University of Chicago back in 2004; his article from that date is still behind a paywall at the Chronicle but you can read it here. The Beatles were a less well-known musical quartet active in the 1960s).

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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