fromjason.xyz
Jason Velazquez
What's up, weirdos. I'm Jason. Welcome to my digital garden. I'm happy you're here. Please make yourself comfortable. By day, I'm a digital freelancer, copywriter, uncle, and cheese danish sommelier. By night, I drink the blood of my enemies in an old Mountain Dew bottle I found in a Buc-ee's bathroom. Kidding. I'm just a guy who likes to blog about technology, design, the web, and anything I'm hyper fixated on at the time.
Top Words
- meta
- design
- digital
- technology
- beautiful
- finds
- interesting
- already
- love
- threads
- thoughts
- something
All posts (65)
FireChat was a tool for revolution. Then it disappeared. For years, FireChat helped people circumvent their internet gatekeepers— the authoritarian governments and spineless corporations that control our every move through a network of proprietary data centers and deep-sea cables. In Iran, forty thousand people...
Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat. On the breast pocket of that trenchcoat is a name tag that reads “The Cloud.” Under...
Where have all the websites gone? It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends. Your head rings, and your mouth is the type of dry that makes you question your adulthood. You feel something scratch against your arm. Did you take a lover last night?...
Bloktoberfest— Some anticlimactic thoughts on blocking Note: this post is what I consider a note— some light musing that may or may not have a conclusion and may or may not turn into an essay one day. Oh, Elon Musk. You’re like the Trump of the tech world. Not so much because you both have a thing for divorced white...
How do we stop Meta in 2024? We fix the information loop Discursive dominance is “the ultimate emergence of one discourse as dominant among competing ones in their struggle for dominance.” Once discursive dominance is secured, objectives are easier to achieve. It’s why lobbyists exist. It’s why we’ve experienced so...
Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history Meta's sudden interest in ActivityPub and Mastodon doesn't make much sense. There are a few impossibly consistent talking points floating through the Fediverse. Each tries to explain away the oddity of Meta's presence. I don't...
Posts critical of Threads and Meta missing on Mammoth app There were big chunks of posts missing under the threads hashtag feed. Some are still missing. Many of these posts were critical to the Threads / Mastodon interpolation. I’ve observed this behavior only on the third party Mammoth app for Mastodon. I'm asking...
The medium is the message— Threads isn't a win for the Fediverse Meta needs the Fediverse more than the Fediverse needs Meta. I say this in the sense that the Fediverse never needed Meta at all. In fact, the Threads / Mastodon interoperation is a net negative for "federated social media” and the "open web.” In the...
I got my first blue bubble scam text the other day and I think I know why Beeper Mini is a new Android app that gives Android users a blue bubble when they text iPhone users. According to some folks on the internet, Beeper Mini tricks iMessage into thinking the sender is using an iDevice: I’ve been using it for a...
Why it feels like AIs are coming for the artists Each week, a new AI thing goes viral. It's always something artistic-adjacent. Either it's a GPT-illustrated kids' book, an AI pop singer, or a chatbot promising to write the next blockbuster movie. And it's always from some guy whose profile pic looks like he's a...
The Village Effect of the Greater Web The internet is a vast and open plain. It represents the best account we have of the human condition (it's also really fun and interesting once you know your way around). So why does it feel so cramped in here? Why are so many of us confined to a handful of apps? I turned to M....
Why is gifting subscriptions so hard? As a freelancer, some years are better than others. The last two years have been difficult for me financially, so I'm always thinking of ways to better weather the storm. I had this idea to ask my family to gift me subscriptions this Christmas for the online tools I use most. A...
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