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.
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.