A German court has explicitly named Mastodon and Bluesky as positive examples of social networks that could retain hosting protection. It gets Bluesky’s feeds wrong, but its reasoning about user control might be more useful than it realises.

It is tempting to “unskew” polls after repeat misses. But predicting future poll bias only works until it doesn’t

Home of RSS Parrot, a free Fediverse service that lets you turn Mastodon into an RSS or Atom feed reader.

In my first weeks as Executive Director of EFF, I’ve been reminded every day how consequential this moment is in determining what kind of future we will have. What each one of us steps up to do—with our expertise, energy, and resources—will determine whether our future is one of openness, security, and fundamental rights, or one controlled through fear, surveillance, and centralized power.

Starting October 1 2026, anyone using WhatsApp as a platform to reach their target audience will be charged by Meta for outbound messages. Until that date, it will have been free to do so within a 24-hour window opened by the user’s last message, meaning that as long as your chatbot (or human agent) was engaging and helpful enough, users seeking support for health, livelihoods, education and psycho-social support could chat for as long as they wanted to (and could afford to themselves). All implementers had to pay for was the cost of the WhatsApp Business Service Provider (BSP) platform, such as Turn.io, as well as any re-engagement messages to wake up ‘dormant’ users. In the near future, any message sent in response to users will be charged at the same rate as ‘utility templates’, whose costs vary region by region.This change has huge scale, sustainability, user experience and impact implications for many social impact organisations using, or thinking about using, WhatsApp to reach people across the Global South.