Johannes Ernst
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j12t.org
Johannes Ernst
@j12t.org
Engineer, founder, organizer. More: https://j12t.org
One thing I love about elections in California is how many options there are to cast your ballot. I chose to vote in person more than a week ahead of voting day.

A certain sign of how much a party or governments supports democracy is whether they make it easier or harder to vote.

October 27, 2025 at 12:24 AM
So if it is true, as I posted yesterday, that it costs about $1-$2 per user per month to run a social network at scale ...

... and if we wanted a big part of humanity to be able to escape the walled gardens

... we need just a bit of money. And donations. And volunteer hours. Totalling a mere ...
August 26, 2025 at 5:30 PM
What would it cost to run the #fediverse at scale? With billions instead of millions of users?

What does it cost to run a social network anyway? According to the annual reports of two companies that should know, the comparable seems to be about $1-$2 per user per month. And ..
1/2
August 25, 2025 at 3:30 PM
The world we have -- in social media, and more broadly in tech -- vs the world we want.

Does this look about right?
August 22, 2025 at 2:01 PM
7% of people already are getting their news from AI, and it's not even something the AI companies are pushing.

Given this incredible quote from Elon, and the blend of AI and social media he and others are working on, how long until the "news" that arrives with people is entirely fictional?
1/3
August 21, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Social media has become the most used source of news.

Commercial social media that is -- the one that has an opaque algorithm between you and the news that optimizes for the business benefit of the platform, not you getting unbiased news.

What could possibly go wrong?
1/2
August 20, 2025 at 5:27 PM
How big is the open social web, the #fediverse, #bluesky etc compared to the big commercial platforms? It's a bit sobering.

From my recent talk "From millions to billions -- a plausible narrative for how to grow the open social web."
August 19, 2025 at 5:21 PM
My neck of the woods is trying to get 7000 people out into the streets at the same time Trump has his Soviet-style, dictator-style, imperialist-style birthday military parade on June 14.

Sounds ambitious? Yes. Important? Yes.

Consider finding / creating a similar event in your neck of the woods.
May 16, 2025 at 8:30 PM
CNN: “Putin considers Russia expansion. If he’s serious, a territorial expansion into Ukrainian, Georgia and Moldova would rival the Louisiana Purchase.”

Oops, I must have gotten the imperialist wrong here.

@cnn.com, are you out of your mind?
December 24, 2024 at 5:52 AM
Modern HTML. Really.
December 13, 2023 at 1:16 AM