>But aren’t blogs dead? · Um, nope. For every discipline-with-depth that I care about (software/Internet, politics, energy economics, physics), if you want to find out what’s happening and you want to find out from first-person practitioners, you end up reading a blog.

>They’re pretty hard to monetize, which means that the people who write them usually aren’t primarily bloggers, they’re primarily professional economists or physicists or oil analysts or Internet geeks. Since most of us don’t even try to monetize ’em, they’re pretty ad-free and thus a snappy reading experience.

>Dense information from real experts, delivered fast. Why would you want any other kind?

>In order to discuss Urbit’s design, we need to have an understanding of the politics of its creator, Curtis Yarvin. Curtis Yarvin is innocuously described on Wikipedia as an “American political theorist and computer scientist,” but to many, he is better known as one of the intellectual forebears of the alt-right.

> Mastodon was launched as a decentralized, social justice friendly Twitter alternative that was free of Nazis and harassment. But two years later, the biggest Mastodon instance is now Gab, a far-right social media network known widely as a gathering space for white supremacists.