When I went to look at why Mastodon users shouldn’t worry about Meta building on the ActivityPub protocol, I couldn’t — my Mastodon.xyz account had disappeared. The problem was DNS-related (it’s always DNS, remember Facebook’s massive 2021 outage?), and after a 23-hour, 59-minute break, the server’s back online. But it shows how decentralization can cut both ways — while this problem didn’t take down all of Mastodon, it left me trying to track down whoever runs my server to find out what happened.
On the article I did not found how these events were related.
The Verge seems to have moved primarily from long-ish form articles to these little “snippet” tweet-length things, and I gotta say, not a fan.
It’s been that way since the redesign. Nilay went all in on building it around Twitter and then ElonGate happened, so they kinda backed themselves into a corner. Pretty good coverage of the reddit blackout though.