After more than 20 years of working remotely, I can’t imagine working on-site at all anymore. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you!

Turns out telling an entire generation that AI will replace half their jobs, flood the internet with slop and make billionaires richer didn’t produce boundless techno optimism. Who could have predicted that? The AI industry may have a capability problem, but it definitely has a messaging problem.

If more are needed, just give it a try. We’ve learned that organising more than 3-4 a year is very time-consuming, particularly when it comes to scheduling them for the whole team.

Cooking together is brilliant: just yesterday we held our summer strategy meeting at a cookery school, where we cooked and enjoyed a three-course meal together. Basically, anything that encourages plenty of interaction and offers a completely different setting to the usual one is ideal.

Based on two decades of experience: As a general rule, there should be regular in-person team events (around two a year and just for fun). In addition, there should be joint training sessions (also around two a year). New staff members require a great deal of attention from their team, both at these events and when working remotely, particularly at the outset.

Turns out the commute, fluorescent lighting, constant interruptions and performative desk sitting weren’t secretly essential ingredients for human happiness after all. Shocking. Next study: 7,700 managers discover that seeing someone in a chair is not actually a productivity metric.

Hehe… 😈

This is what local media should have been building years ago: not another news site begging Google and Meta for traffic, but a digital town square it actually controls. Reverse chronological feeds, human stewards, no follower contest, no engagement addiction. If chicago.com works, the interesting question is why every public broadcaster isn’t trying this?

Yes. 💪😎✌️

It’s called Lemmy. Check it out. 🤪

💪😎✌️

»TikTok« aka vertical short video. Even Loops is growing! - But yes, also Threads, Reddit etc.

The brutal truth of social networks: people don’t stay for protocols, decentralization, or good intentions. They stay because everyone else is there. Building better infrastructure is impressive. Building a habit people refuse to leave is harder.

Ad skipping sounds wonderfully pro consumer until you remember somebody has to pay for the podcast: If listeners skip every ad, block tracking and still expect endless free shows, the economics eventually stop working. You can’t demand independent media while systematically deleting the mechanism that funds it.

The tech industry loves claiming it is building the future while apparently speedrunning past the footnotes of the past. If your worldview comes from TED talks, founder biographies and half read sci fi, maybe disrupting democracy isn’t visionary thinking: it’s just historical illiteracy with a Series C.

The harsh truth: most people don’t care about decentralisation, protocols or who owns the server. They care whether their friends, memes and creators are there. Don’t sell them the Fediverse as digital vegetables.

Find them a great app, help them follow 20 interesting accounts, and make it fun. Network effects beat ideology every time.

I’d start with Loops.video: TikTok already proved that vertical short videos are basically social media crack, so don’t ask your friends to suddenly become Mastodon power users reading federation essays.

Give them a familiar format without the TikTok ecosystem: Fediverse adoption probably needs to feel boringly familiar before anyone cares that it’s decentralised.

That reminds me that I really must finally mention this on: Fedizen.EU

Absolutely. And it’s reassuring that he didn’t ask for anyone’s contact details…

This is what the AI agent hype conveniently skips: autonomy means giving software permission to act first and ask questions never. If an assistant can hack a gym website while trying to complete a mundane task, maybe »agents will run everything« isn’t a productivity revolution. Maybe it’s just automated chaos with venture capital funding.

Europe spent decades outsourcing its digital infrastructure to US companies because it was cheap and convenient. Now everyone is shocked to discover that dependence creates leverage. A US tech kill switch doesn’t even need to be used: the possibility alone is reason enough for Europe to build its own stack.

All of them! 🔥