Notices by Ben Werdmuller (ben@werd.social)

Mail-in voters are more likely to be educated professionals, a demographic that skews Demographic. Americans who live abroad and register to vote are also significantly more likely to vote Democratic.

So of course that guy wants to remove mail-in voting.

This is the most cursed image I've seen in quite a while.

@evan My take: it looks a little like classic disruption. Podcasts were too niche for big tech companies to consider as a big enough market (see the failure of Odeo), which allowed hobbyist ecosystems to thrive. Then Carplay was released, making in-transit listening easier, and Serial became the first big podcast hit that year. People finally took notice. But by then the ecosystem had been established.

@evan vs blogs, which were big relative to the size of the web back when they became possible, YouTube, which was almost instantly big, and social media, which similarly exploded. Podcasts have been a slow burn, and that really helped.

"Open Source runs much of the world's critical infrastructure. It powers government services, supports national security, and enables everything from public health systems to elections. This means governments must help fund Open Source." #Technology https://werd.io/funding-open-source-like-public-infrastructure/

Revisiting this piece about how to build a strong newsroom technology culture.

"I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for it to be treated passively. [...] If you want to spread a technology competence throughout your organization, it all starts with finding a leader you can trust."

https://werd.io/building-a-newsroom-technology-culture/

I'm a huge fan of @molly0xfff. The work she does is inspiring - and this is a great interview. https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/independent-journalist-molly-white-knows-how-to-follow-the-memecoin/

If we're thinking about building GitHub alternatives, let's build ones that host not just code but everything involved in building software, including the community work involved in validating assumptions and making sure we're solving real problems, equitably, for the people we're trying to help.

The thing about so-called 'creeping fascism' is that it doesn't actually creep. It's loud and overt. What's insidious is how quickly those loud, overt changes are normalized.

Today's biggest discovery: Spindrift's Nojito flavor is absolutely fantastic. I spent much of today weeding in the garden in almost 90 degree heat, so I've had a few of them. I wish to have an unlimited supply. I would drink these forever. I hate influencer culture but I would influence for this.

I used to check into every restaurant and bar on Foursquare. Those thousands of location pins felt like memories. Now they feel like evidence.

New piece on how our voluntary self-surveillance became a potential tool of authoritarian control - and what we might do about it: https://werd.io/lifelogging-under-fascism/

Hoping to see a good article about Blacksky. It's a pretty impressive achievement and a really important step towards the social media we want.

Understanding which channel someone reached out to me on, or what kind of media contained an insight I want to go back to (which means remembering which service I saved it to), is becoming a real issue.

👀 https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/key-sections-of-the-us-constitution-deleted-from-governments-website/

"The Trump administration is pushing its anti-trans agenda on a global stage, repeatedly objecting to the word “gender” in international resolutions and documents." https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-un-anti-trans-agenda

"Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities." https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/04/didnt-take-long-to-reveal-the-uks-online-safety-act-is-exactly-the-privacy-crushing-failure-everyone-warned-about/

Found a good use for the Ghost announcement bar. I hope you'll join me on your own site. https://werd.io/

This is really smart and avoids a major open source pitfall that I fell into with both Elgg and Known.

Quite envious of everyone at #fedicon this weekend. Reading peoples' posts and watching from afar. I'm so glad these conversations are happening.

Hi, this is bad. https://cpb.org/pressroom/Corporation-Public-Broadcasting-Addresses-Operations-Following-Loss-Federal-Funding