There was somebody fussing in my replies to my last link to my blog post about Medium (I don’t see them now; they probably blocked me, but their specific words don’t really matter), and the gist of their message was that they didn’t like that site. On the modern internet, if you have an issue with content written by humans, with no surveillance ads, that doesn’t allow AI scraping or AI slop content, with a business model that makes money… I don’t know how to help you. Honestly.

The entire modern internet has been built on platforms that don’t believe in asking for consent. What if we started demanding a culture of consent online? https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/27/2025-05-27-internet-of-consent/

What lessons can we learn about the fact that MCP got more adoption as a quasi-open standard in a few months than the entire fediverse stack has in nearly a decade? (Or two, depending on how you count.) Obviously, they’re in different domains, but there are some parallels. How might other open efforts piggyback on hype cycles like AI to bootstrap open efforts we could use to re-open the social web? Who’s integrating MCP interfaces into the ActivityPub stack?

I have a lot of thoughts about this.

The Pragmatic Engineer

Stack overflow is almost dead

Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.

This one was, obviously, bittersweet to write: we’re shutting down app hosting on Glitch. This post covers how everybody can export your apps & download your code. I didn’t get into where the Glitch community goes next, because honestly we’re still figuring it out, but it’s still the end of an era. I’ll have more to share about this later, of course, but I just wanted to make sure everyone got the news straight from me. If you have any questions, you can ask in the forum.

Important changes are coming to Glitch

We’ve got an important update for the Glitch community today: We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch.

It’s been fun watching the unlikely rise of MCP as a standard, which is open and messy in a way that mimics the dynamics of the good parts of Web 2.0. Maybe something interesting will happen!

MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

I would only add that this is a valid assertion about all of the major platforms funded by big tech. (Whether they are framed as non-profits or B corps or not.) It need not be intrinsic to the technology, but we do not yet have any meaningful large-scale counterexamples.

GSV Sleeper Service

David Gerard (@davidgerard@circumstances.run)

LLMs exist to crush labour. That's not even my surmise, the people paying billions of dollars to fund this stuff are extremely open and explicit th...

This is wonderful news for the future of Mastodon, for everything from governance to continued evolution and innovation. Love to see it!

Mastodon Blog

Evolving the Team

An update on Mastodon’s core team and organisation.

A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs. https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/

Truly my greatest professional joy is that, not only did we get to build a tool to help people stop AI bots from scraping up their work without consent, I was able to have our in-house artist create a SLOP sign to mark the spot where the bots expire. If you are a non-profit or open source project that does good internet stuff, we’ll protect you for free. If not, then you can pay us money and we will hook you up. Either way, good tools to put you in control over the bots.

Take Back Control: Make AI Bots Play by Your Rules | Fastly

Take back control of your content. Fastly AI Bot Management lets you manage AI bots, block unauthorized scraping, and protect your intellectual pro...