Linked List: January 13, 2025

Monday, 13 January 2025

Bananas Bloomberg Report: ‘China Weighs Sale of TikTok’s US Operations to Elon Musk’ 

No byline, which is really weird, just “Bloomberg News”:

Chinese officials are evaluating a potential option that involves Elon Musk acquiring the US operations of TikTok if the company fails to fend off a controversial ban on the short-video app, according to people familiar with the matter.

But here’s Todd Spangler, reporting (with his name) for Variety:

TikTok denied a report that China is looking at potentially facilitating a sale of the app to tech billionaire Elon Musk to keep TikTok operational in America amid a looming U.S. government ban.

“We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction,” a TikTok rep said in reply to Variety‘s request for comment.

It could be no one is wrong here. Maybe ByteDance’s owners, the Chinese government, know what’s going on, and the dupes at TikTok don’t.

Sonos Canned CEO Patrick Spence, Who Spearheaded Disastrous App Launch 

Chris Welch, The Verge:

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence is resigning from the job today, effective immediately, with board member Tom Conrad filling the role of interim CEO. It’s the most dramatic development yet in an eight-month saga that has proven to be the most challenging time in Sonos’ history.

The company’s decision to prematurely release a buggy, completely overhauled new app back in May — with crucial features missing at launch — outraged customers and kicked off a monthslong domino effect that included layoffs, a sharp decline in employee morale, and a public apology tour. The Sonos Ace headphones, rumored to be the whole reason behind the hurried app, were immediately overshadowed by the controversy, and my sources tell me that sales numbers remain dismal. Sonos’ community forums and subreddit have been dominated by complaints and an overwhelmingly negative sentiment since the spring. [...]

But three months later, Sonos’ board of directors and Spence have concluded that those steps weren’t enough: the app debacle has officially cost Spence his job. No other changes are being made today, however. So for now, chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, who some employees have privately told me deserves a fair share of the blame for recent missteps, will remain in his role.

If they don’t fire that rube too, Sonos is likely continuing down the path to irrelevance and bankruptcy that Spence started them down. The problem wasn’t a bad or ill-considered app rewrite. The bad app rewrite was a symptom of leadership with no appreciation for product and experience design, when Sonos’s entire raison d’être is to deliver a superior product and acoustic experience. Their customer demographic is people with great taste and high standards. Sonos is basically Apple, but just for audio, but in a market where Apple itself is a major player. Yet somehow the company wound up being run by a leadership team with no taste.

Here’s a surprise tidbit that gives me hope Conrad might be the right man for the job:

Conrad’s career includes a 10-year tenure as chief technology officer at Pandora and two years as VP of product at Snapchat. He worked on Apple’s Finder software during the ’90s. Most recently, Conrad served as chief product officer for the ill-fated Quibi streaming service.

(To be clear, I’m talking about the ’90s Finder part, not the Quibi part. The classic Finder was one of the all-time best apps ever made.)

Mastodon Is Transferring Its Ownership to a New Non-Profit 

The Mastodon Team blog:

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned. The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual, and he could ensure that because he was the person in control, the only ultimate decision-maker.

Though there’s a lot going on right now in the social media space, with Meta’s policy zig-zag last week still reverberating, this change seems like it’s more in response to avoiding what’s going on with WordPress and Matt Mullenweg, where “WordPress” is open source and the trademarks are owned by a foundation, but that foundation has licensed the WordPress commercial trademarks exclusively to Mullenweg’s for-profit company Automattic, to protect and wield as he sees fit.

The big difference is that WordPress is almost unfathomably popular, and Mastodon is a niche platform for sophisticated social networking users.

‘Free Our Feeds’ 

Free Our Feeds:

With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square.

Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.

But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech — the AT Protocol — into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.

An open consortium built around consensus is exactly what’s needed to move fast and take advantage of the current moment’s opportunity. And with a team of “technical advisors and custodians” that includes both the executive director and the president of the Mozilla Foundation, I suspect this initiative might prove as successful as Firefox.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.

Pixelfed is an open-source, community-funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.

Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.

True free speech is the freedom to avoid seeing alternatives to Instagram.

Los Angeles Fires: How to Help 

LA resident Matthew Butterick, in his MB XS newsletter:

Easy answer — donate money! A good friend of mine works in California disaster relief. He recommends these nonprofits because they have a strong local impact:

Donations of physical items are politely discouraged because they impose extra logistics and handling that relief and shelter organizations can’t support right now.

Rory Sykes, Killed in LA Wildfires, RIP 

Josh DuBose, reporting for KTLA:

In an emotional interview, Shelley Sykes, the mother of former child actor Rory Sykes who died in their Malibu home amid the Palisades Fire, shared her harrowing story and grieved the devastating loss of her son. Shelley fought back tears recalling the final moments with 32-year-old Rory, who was born blind and lived with cerebral palsy.

On Jan. 7, when the Palisades Fire broke out, the mother and son stayed behind at their Malibu home believing they were safe. Overnight, though, as the wind-driven fire escalated and sent embers flying onto their property, a massive flare up trapped Rory, who has difficulty walking, inside his cottage.

“I drove up to the top of his cottage, turned on the hose pipe and no water came out of it,” Shelley explained. “I raced back down and dialed 911 but 911 wasn’t working and all the lines were down for emergencies.”

Despite her best efforts, she says Rory locked himself in his cottage and told his mother to save herself instead.

Shelley said that she grabbed her peacocks and drove down to try and get help, but when firefighters returned, the cottage as well as the main were completely destroyed by fire. Officials have yet to retrieve the former child star’s remains from the charred rubble of the cottage.

Sykes is one of 24 people known to have died so far, but at least 16 others remain missing. His mother, announcing his death on X, emphasized that he was an avid gamer and an Apple enthusiast. Turns out he was also apparently an avid Daring Fireball reader. Rory’s own X feed was full of links to DF posts, right up until the day before he died.

It’s an unusual relationship I have with you, my readers. All of you know me, to the extent that my writing and podcasting reveals who I am. I know relatively few of you. But when a friend pointed me to Sykes’s sad story — and my god, his poor mother, who couldn’t save him — and his X feed, it hit me.

I can’t say I knew Rory. It doesn’t seem like he ever emailed me, nor do we seem to have interacted on Twitter/X. But I’m glad my writing was a part of his life — and I’m glad it’s part of all of yours, too. I don’t know what more to say about it other than that this whole wildfire catastrophe is heartbreaking and awful, and a reminder of how fleeting and delicate everything in life is.