Two of my friends died within the last three years. By some coincidence, both of their birthdays fall in the beginning of July. So, twice this week, Facebook has reminded me to write “happy birthday” to two people who will never respond. Facebook’s algorithms can’t comprehend death. All it knows is there was a time […]
Facebook keeps asking me to say ‘happy birthday’ to dead people Read More »
Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start. Over the past few days,
Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter Read More »
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. This week, Figma CEO Dylan Field said the company will temporarily disable its “Make Design” AI feature after it was accused of “heavily” training the tool on existing apps. The
Figma pauses its new AI feature after Apple controversy Read More »
Teddy Solomon just moved to a new house in Palo Alto, so he turned to the Stanford community on Fizz to furnish his room. “Every time I show up to buy something from somebody, I grill them about the marketplace, because I’m really curious about their experience,” Solomon, a co-founder of Fizz, told TechCrunch. He’s
Fizz, the anonymous Gen Z social app, adds a marketplace for college students Read More »
Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in April that Threads had more than 150 million monthly active users, up from the 130 million reported in February. Threads launched on July 3, 2023, at
Threads nears its one-year anniversary with more than 175M monthly active users Read More »
X, formerly Twitter, could be bringing back a downvote feature for posts — something it had previously tested back in 2021, ahead of Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social network. At the time of the original experiment, Twitter had tested both upvoting and downvoting buttons, similar to how users can vote on the social forums
X weighs adding a downvote button to replies — but it doesn’t want to emulate Reddit Read More »
“Fediverse” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? The word comes from “federation” and “universe” being smooshed together, and it refers to a group of social networks — a federation, if you will — that can communicate with each other. This approach is pretty appealing when
A beginner’s guide to the fediverse Read More »
The Supreme Court on Monday vacated two judicial decisions concerning Republican-backed laws from Florida and Texas aimed at limiting social media companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms. The Supreme Court is sending both cases back to the lower courts for further review, noting that lower courts had failed to properly analyze the First
Supreme Court sends Texas and Florida social media regulation laws back to lower courts Read More »
An investigation conducted by the European Commission has found that Meta’s “pay or consent” offer to Facebook and Instagram users in Europe does not comply with the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), according to preliminary findings reported by the regulator on Monday. The Commission wrote in a press release that the binary choice Meta offers “forces
Meta’s ‘pay or consent’ model fails EU competition rules, Commission finds Read More »
Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. This week, Apple finally added support for Rich Communication Services (RCS) to Messages as part of the second developer beta of iOS 18. Until now, iPhone users could only send
Apple finally supports RCS in iOS 18 update Read More »
