This week I moved from Mumbai, the city where I was born and grew up, to Bengaluru. I like many things about Mumbai but I’ve longed to live in Bengaluru for a while now, and below are the major reasons why.Bengaluru is the space hub of India. Majority of the people in space exploration and the industry are here. Most conferences in India take place...

It actually happened. Meta’s social networking app Threads joined the Fediverse! And I have a few thoughts.The Fediverse opt-in experience flow on Meta’s Threads app. Image: MetaThis is a big deal. For the first time in history, you can not have an account on a Meta-owned app but still be able to follow and soon interact with many people on there. Meta’s...

Mastodon and most Fediverse platforms may be better than traditional social networks at interoperability but they don’t do much about other issues. In fact, they largely copy these issues straight from the social media giants.Most Fediverse platforms, including Mastodon, publicly display follower counts, like (favorite) counts, and share (boost) counts....

Many of us are familiar with the feeling of investing time and effort on a particular social network, only to either see it become irrelevant over time or do something stupid or malicious that scatters people over to half a dozen platforms. And so you start over, with all your posts and followers not accompanying you to any new place. And then the same...

In today’s Web, being online seldom means being present. Browsing doesn’t mean reading. Following hardly means connecting. Posting certainly doesn’t mean articulating. Commenting rarely means conversing. Listening doesn’t mean comprehending. Watching never meant absorbing. And likes don’t mean anything anyway. We largely live an internet without intent.We...

RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is a website reading technology nearly as old as the consumer Web itself. And yet it can keep you on top of news and perspectives in ways social networks can’t. How it works is really simple yet smart:Blogs and websites publish an RSS feed accessible at a specific link.This link contains a list of recent posts from the site...