I use Publer to post identical content across Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Same words, same time, same bloke. It’s a massive time-saver, and means I can reach people wherever they happen to hang out online without having to faff about copying and pasting between apps.

I wasn’t running some grand social media experiment. I was just having a moan about Windows updates like any reasonable person would. But the results were so stark they opened my eyes to exactly what these platforms reward - and it’s not what you might think.

The Numbers

Here’s what I posted:

Six months since I booted my Windows “gaming” PC.
One game I want to play.
GPU drivers.
Windows updates.
27GB Steam update.
Three hours later, I’ve played zero games.

Same post, three platforms, posted simultaneously at about 6pm. Here’s what happened:

Platform	Followers	Likes/Favourites	Comments/Replies	Reshares/Boosts/Reposts
Threads	330	927	404	3
Mastodon	5,300	19	4	3
Bluesky	1,700	3	0	1

Let me spell that out clearly: On Threads, where I have my smallest following by a country mile, the post got 49 times more engagement than on Mastodon, where I have 16 times more followers.

Mental.

What Threads Actually Rewards

Here’s the thing - most of my Threads posts get precisely sod all engagement. Zero. Zilch. Nowt. I’ll share something I’m building, a technical observation, community updates, links to blog posts - nothing.

Complain about Windows? 927 likes.

A few weeks back I had a moan about a poorly-worded GitLab email. The message said “You’re receiving this email because of your account on gitlab.gnome.org” which, as I pointed out, isn’t actually a reason for sending an email - it’s just stating a fact about my account existing. Fair criticism, I thought.

Got absolutely slated in the replies. Told I was clueless about technology, that I was being unreasonable, the works. 22 hearts, 11 replies, mostly having a go.

Pattern emerging?

Threads has worked out what drives engagement on their platform: conflict.

My Windows post hit every algorithmic sweet spot:

• Complaint/frustration ✓
• Platform wars potential (Windows vs. Linux) ✓
• Invites correction ✓
• Triggers strong opinions ✓
• Generates replies (even hostile ones) ✓

The algorithm doesn’t care if those replies are helpful, thoughtful, or complete bollocks. It just cares that people are engaging.

The Response Patterns

404 comments. Bloody hell. Now, I’m fully aware that posting a complaint online is basically asking for it. Some of these responses were genuinely trying to help, some were having a laugh, some were probably winding me up for sport (fair play), and some seemed genuinely annoyed that I’d dared complain about Windows. They fell into some pretty clear categories:

The “You’re Doing It Wrong” Brigade

“That’s neglect….. you’re a terrible PC dad.”

“clearly a skill issue”

“Sounds like this is 100% user-error”

“You’re just self reporting your incompetence”

My personal favourite: “Your poor parents, bro. As a father of five I can’t imagine seeing my adult child struggle with basic critical thinking skills.”

Look, I’ll admit this last one made me laugh. The mental image of my 84-year-old mum receiving a concerned phone call about my inability to operate a computer is genuinely brilliant. I’m choosing to believe this was someone having a laugh rather than genuine concern for my elderly parents’ wellbeing.

The Well-Meaning (But Mistaken) Helper Squad

Dozens of people telling me to use Linux. Fair enough on the surface, except the game won’t run on Linux. That’s literally why I have a Windows PC. But they didn’t ask what game - they just assumed I was either being thick or hadn’t considered Linux. Which is quite funny given I co-host a Linux podcast and spent years advocating for Ubuntu professionally.

Multiple suggestions to “just enable auto-updates” - missing the point that I can’t predict when I’ll want to play, so auto-updates wouldn’t have solved this particular Friday evening situation.

“Play while it downloads” - it’s multiplayer, the game literally requires the update to be installed before you can launch it. But I appreciate the optimism.

A surprising number recommending GeForce Now or other streaming services. Points for creativity, even if it wasn’t what I was after.

The Actually Helpful Responses

Buried among everything else, there were some genuinely lovely responses:

“This is my experience as a new parent. I finally get a few hours to do something fun for the first time in months and BAM 3 hours of updates, no matter what I choose to play.”

“People will blame you about this, but I’ve made the same complaints. The problem is not the amount of upgrades but how blocking and synchronous they are. They don’t know there are better user experiences, they are just used to poorly designed systems.”

These folks got it. The issue isn’t that updates exist - it’s that the entire experience is designed to block you from doing what you actually want to do. They understood it was about UX frustration, not technical incompetence.

The Question Almost Nobody Asked

What game?

Out of 404 comments, almost nobody asked which game I was trying to play. They just assumed I was being thick, or that I should obviously be using Linux, or that I was exaggerating for comic effect (I wasn’t - it genuinely took three hours).

The game is PUBG. Kernel-level anti-cheat. Won’t work on Linux, won’t work on SteamOS, won’t work in a VM, won’t work on anything except native Windows. Full stop. It’s the sole reason I keep a Windows PC around.

What Nobody Knew (And Nobody Asked)

The PC sat unused for six months because we offered housing to someone experiencing homelessness. My gaming room became their room. They’ve since moved on, and it took a while to get everything set back up properly.

Not anyone’s business, really. But it’s interesting what people will assume when you don’t provide full context. I’m not blaming anyone for not knowing this - how could they? But it does highlight how social media strips away context and leaves room for people to fill in their own narratives.

For the record: I’m a Developer Advocate at an AI-native dev company. Long-time Ubuntu community member. I co-host Linux Matters podcast. I spent years working at Canonical in various roles including Developer Advocate. I’ve advocated for Linux professionally and personally for over two decades.

But Threads doesn’t know that. Threads doesn’t care. Threads just knows: complaint → engagement → boost the hell out of it.

The Platform Comparison

Let’s look at what happened on the other platforms.

Mastodon’s 4 Replies:

“that’s why ppl kick out win and start using linux but you already know that I guess 😂”

“and I used to complain about the loading bars on the speccy taking ages before I could play dizzy”

This second one is absolutely brilliant - nostalgic Spectrum reference, understands the frustration of waiting ages to do something you wanted to do right now, and doesn’t assume I’m a numpty. Just lovely, that.

“RIP Windows”

“And you know what the next stage is going to be. Yesss Finaly! Let the games begin!!! Oh. Shader pre-cashing .. I might as well go to bed :D”

Light, friendly, empathetic. Nobody assumed I was completely incompetent. Nobody got angry at me for daring to complain. Just people who understood the frustration and shared their own experiences.

Bluesky:

One repost. No commentary.

The community’s still finding its feet over there, I reckon. Or maybe they just didn’t think it was worth engaging with. Either way, pretty quiet.

Threads:

Mixed bag. Some genuinely thoughtful responses, some people winding me up (fair enough), some people who seemed genuinely annoyed that I’d complained, and quite a few who wanted to help but made assumptions about my technical knowledge.

But here’s the key thing: the algorithm boosted it all the same, because engagement is engagement. Doesn’t matter if you’re being helpful, hostile, or having a laugh - it all counts the same to the algorithm.

What This Actually Reveals

Different platforms, different algorithms, different incentives:

Mastodon: Chronological timeline. No algorithm boosting controversial content. Your followers see your posts in order. Engagement is modest but genuine. People who follow you chose to follow you, and they see what you post. Revolutionary concept, that.

Bluesky: Algorithm exists but doesn’t seem to heavily favour conflict. Still relatively quiet, community still finding its shape. Might just be that my particular crowd hasn’t really migrated over there yet.

Threads: Meta’s algorithm surfaces content that generates interaction - any interaction. Arguments are engagement gold. The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between “this post made people think” and “this post wound people up” - it just sees numbers going up.

I wasn’t trying to game the system. I was genuinely frustrated about waiting three hours to play a bloody video game on a Friday evening. But Threads saw a post about Windows, updates, and gaming, thought “this will make people argue” and ran with it.

Got notifications at 100 views, 500 views, 1000 views. The algorithm was having a whale of a time.

The Irony

I’d rather have 19 favorites and 4 friendly replies on Mastodon than 927 likes on Threads if a chunk of those likes come packaged with people assuming I’m incompetent or having a go at me (even if some of them are just having a laugh).

High engagement ≠ good engagement.

The algorithm doesn’t care if people are being helpful or hostile. It cares that they’re engaging. That’s the metric. That’s what gets boosted. That’s what drives the platform.

And look, I get it - I posted a complaint online. That’s basically an invitation for people to respond however they like. Some will help, some will take the piss, some will genuinely think you’re being thick. That’s the internet. I’m not precious about it.

But it’s fascinating that this type of content gets algorithmically boosted so much more than anything else I post. That’s the bit worth paying attention to.

What I’ve Learned

Threads rewards rage bait. Complain about popular things - Windows, GitLab emails, whatever - and you’ll get engagement. Won’t necessarily be good engagement, mind. You’ll get helpful people, people winding you up, people having a laugh, and people who are genuinely annoyed you dared complain.

Platform incentives shape behaviour. On Threads, I’m learning (reluctantly) that controversy performs. On Mastodon, thoughtful content finds thoughtful people - just fewer of them. The numbers tell you what each platform values.

Context collapse is real. Without context, a post becomes whatever people project onto it. Very few people assume good intent. Most jump straight to filling in the gaps with their own assumptions. That’s not necessarily malicious - it’s just how human brains work when presented with incomplete information.

The network effect paradox: I have 16x more followers on Mastodon, but get better reach on Threads with 330 followers - because one platform actively surfaces controversial content to people who don’t follow me.

I’m still posting to all three platforms. But I know now what each platform rewards. I know what kind of engagement I’ll get where.

Choose your platform based on what kind of engagement you want - not just how much of it.

---

Did I eventually get to play PUBG?

Yeah, hours later, as advertised. I’m terrible at it, but glad I managed to squeeze a quick round in.

The internet’s reaction to my mild frustration about waiting to play it? That turned out to be the more interesting story.

In Europe, heads are rolling over the Jeffrey Epstein revelations.

In Norway, one prominent diplomat has already been suspended and a police investigation has been opened into a former prime minister. In the U.K., the former ambassador to the U.S. has been fired; on Tuesday, he resigned from the House of Lords. Police are reviewing reports he shared market-sensitive information with Epstein.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, was stripped of his royal titles and residence. A charity founded by his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, will shut down indefinitely following the release of emails where she called Epstein a “legend” and “the brother I have always wished for.”

But as Europe’s political class moves to clean up its mess and address its shame concerning ties with the convicted sex offender, it’s inadvertently highlighting something else — the comparative lack of accountability in the U.S.

No prominent politicians have taken a fall. Consequences have been limited. Wagons have been circled around the most prominent political figures whose names have surfaced in the legal document dumps.

In the U.K., former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson — who has said he was wrong to believe Epstein following his conviction and to continue his association with him afterwards — has emerged as a millstone around British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s neck. While Starmer never actually met Epstein, some are calling for his resignation over his appointment of Mandelson. The prime minister publicly apologized Thursday to Epstein’s victims.

“I am sorry,” Starmer said. “Sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you, sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him and sorry that even now you’re forced to watch this story unfold in public once again.”

It’s a different story in the U.S. Donald Trump’s Republican Party has largely averted its eyes or rallied to the president’s defense despite his documented ties to Epstein and the unverified additional allegations against the president that appeared last week.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein allegations, and no evidence has suggested that he took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation. The president also has maintained that he and Epstein had a falling out years ago.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick remains unscathed in his Cabinet post. Lutnick said on a podcast last year that he was so disgusted by his neighbor Epstein in 2005 that he vowed to never be in the same room with him again. But when the Justice Department released more than three million pages of materials related to the late American financier last Friday, emails surfaced suggesting a closer relationship and that Lutnick had actually seen Epstein some years later on a trip to Epstein’s Caribbean island. A spokesperson said the Commerce secretary “had limited interactions with Mr. Epstein in the presence of his wife and has never been accused of wrongdoing.” So far, there are no signs it affected his standing in the Trump Cabinet.

Likewise, Goldman Sachs and its CEO David Solomon have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the company’s general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler as she’s faced brutal headlines for months for her associations with Epstein, which include gifts of a $9,400 Hermes bag and a spa treatment at the Four Seasons Hotel in D.C. Solomon told the Wall Street Journal several weeks ago that Ruemmler, a former White House counsel to Barack Obama, “is widely respected and admired at the firm.”

Ruemmler has said she regrets “ever knowing him, and I have enormous sympathy for the victims of Epstein’s crimes.”

Even Dr. Peter Attia, the author and influential longevity researcher who is a contributor to CBS News, remains on the job despite his appearance in numerous emails with Epstein, where they discussed female genitalia and how Epstein’s life was “so outrageous.” In an email that he posted on X, Attia apologized and said he was not involved in any criminal activity, his interactions with Epstein had nothing to do with his sexual abuse or exploitation of anyone and that he was never on his plane or island, and never present at any sex parties.

Some see the relatively limited fallout — in a public arena where infidelity or even smoking marijuana were once enough to sink a career — as a reflection of the diminished standards of the Trump era, when the president’s own indiscretions and extreme polarization has led to a greater tolerance of the scent of scandal. They point to the Cabinet nominations of former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, both of whom would have been unthinkable in the past given allegations about their involvement in sex crimes that both men have denied.

“Some of that has to do with the general chaos on this side of the pond where it’s a never ending stream of scandal emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Trump has set a tone of defiance on refusal to accept and feel any shame,” said Norm Eisen, a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic who is now a top Trump critic and the founder of Democracy Defenders Action, a bipartisan group that tracks what it calls “autocratic” behavior by the administration. “Those who should feel shame are hunkering down instead.”

It’s true that several American figures linked to Epstein have been forced to step away from public life. They include former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has said he is “deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” and Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, who resigned as the law firm’s chair on Wednesday saying it’s in the best interest of the firm. David Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, stepped down this week from his position at a Manhattan art school and said in a statement that he felt ashamed for falling for Epstein’s lies. But for many of the best-known elites who were in contact with the late convicted sex offender — including former Trump aide Steve Bannon and billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk — the only consequence has been the reputational hit.

“What matters is not release of some subset of the Epstein files, but rather the prosecution of those who committed heinous crimes with Epstein,” Musk wrote on X. “When there is at least one arrest, some justice will have been done. If not, this is all performative. Nothing but a distraction.”

Bannon has said little publicly about their relationship, but he did previously call for an independent investigation into the files.

Bannon, a frequent visitor to Epstein’s New York house, was planning a documentary to help revive Epstein’s image and even was texting documentary scheduling questions with Epstein the day he was arrested in 2019. Even so, there are few outward signs that the scandal has touched him: Bannon still does his “War Room” show on Rumble and his political musings are widely covered in the press.

It’s an approach in keeping with Trump’s own never-concede-an-inch style.

“We as Americans need to be looking at ourselves in the mirror. Why are we not having that same reaction [as Europe]?” said Rufus Gifford, a former Obama-appointed ambassador to Denmark. “Without a doubt how Trump has acted has filtered down to broader society. But I think the question that we have to ask is whether or not this existed before Trump, and Trump is just a symptom of that larger problem.”

Last Tuesday, it was a year that Bart De Wever (Flemish nationalist N-VA) first became Prime Minister of Belgium. He is the first Flemish nationalist politician to get the job of Belgian prime minister. How has he fared? What were his best moments? And what obstacles and challenges lie ahead? VRT News consulted political scientist Dave Sinardet(VUB) to find the answers.

Whether at home or abroad, the pattern of ducking difficult arguments and calling it pragmatism is the same

There comes a point in a prime minister’s career when foreign travel offers respite from domestic trouble. Even when relations with the host country are tricky, as Britain’s are with China, the dignifying protocols of statecraft make a beleaguered politician feel valued.

Next comes the phase where missions overseas feel dangerous because plotters can organise more openly against absent leaders.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Continue reading...

Why there’s no European Google?

And why it is a good thing!

With some adjustments, this post is mostly a translation of a post I published in French three years ago. In light of the European Commission’s "call for evidence on Open Source," and as a professor of "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, I thought it was a good idea to translate it into English as a public answer to that call.

• Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas de Google européen ? (ploum.net)
• European Commission issues call for evidence on open source (lwn.net)

Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft. All those giants are part of our daily personal and professional lives. We may even not interact with anything else but them. All are 100% American companies.

China is not totally forgotten, with Alibaba, TikTok, and some services less popular in Europe yet used by billions worldwide.

What about European tech champions? Nearly nothing, to the great sadness of politicians who believe that the success of a society is measured by the number of billionaires it creates.

Despite having few tech-billionaires, Europe is far from ridiculous. In fact, it’s the opposite: Europe is the central place that allowed most of our tech to flourish.

The Internet, the interconnection of most of the computers in the world, has existed since the late sixties. But no protocol existed to actually exploit that network, to explore and search for information. At the time, you needed to know exactly what you wanted and where to find it. That’s why the USA tried to develop a protocol called "Gopher."

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web! It looks like the Official European Joke! (And, yes, I consider Brits Europeans. They will join us back, we miss them, I promise.)

• The Official European Joke (ploum.net)

Gopher is still used by a few hobbyists (like your servitor), but it never truly became popular, except for a very short time in some parts of America. One of the reasons might have been that Gopher’s creators wanted to keep their rights to it and license any related software, unlike the European Web, which conquered the world because it was offered as a common good instead of seeking short-term profits.

While Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee were busy inventing the World Wide Web in their CERN office, a Swedish-speaking Finnish student started to code an operating system and make it available to everyone under the name "Linux." Today, Linux is probably the most popular operating system in the world. It runs on any Android smartphone, is used in most data centers, in most of your appliances, in satellites, in watches and is the operating system of choice for many of the programmers who write the code you use to run your business. Its creator, the European Linus Torvalds, is not a billionaire. And he’s very happy about it: he never wanted to become one. He continued coding and wrote the "git" software, which is probably used by 100% of the software developers around the world. Like Linux, Git is part of the common good: you can use it freely, you can modify it, you can redistribute it, you can sell it. The only thing you cannot do? Privatize it. This is called "copyleft."

In 2017, a decentralized and ethical alternative to Twitter appeared: Mastodon. Its creator? A German student, born in Russia, who had the goal of allowing social network users to leave monopolies to have humane conversations without being spied on and bombarded with advertising or pushed-by-algorithm fake news. Like Linux, like git, Mastodon is copyleft and now part of the common goods.

Allowing human-scale discussion with privacy and without advertising was also the main motivation behind the Gemini protocol (whose name has since been hijacked by Google AI). Gemini is a stripped-down version of the Web which, by design, is considered definitive. Everybody can write Gemini-related software without having to update it in the future. The goal is not to attract billions of users but to be there for those who need it, even in the distant future. The creator of the Gemini protocol wishes to remain anonymous, but we know that the project started while he was living in Finland.

I could continue with the famous VLC media player, probably the most popular media player in the world. Its creator, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Kempf, refused many offers that would have made him a very rich man. But he wanted to keep VLC a copyleft tool part of the common goods.

Don’t forget LibreOffice, the copyleft office suite maintained by hundreds of contributors around the world under the umbrella of the Document Foundation, a German institution.

We often hear that Europeans don’t have, like Americans, the "success culture." Those examples, and there are many more, prove the opposite. Europeans like success. But they often don’t consider "winning against the whole society" as one. Instead, they tend to consider success a collective endeavour. Success is when your work is recognized long after you are gone, when it benefits every citizen. Europeans dream big: they hope that their work will benefit humankind as a whole!

We don’t want a European Google Maps! We want our institutions at all levels to contribute to OpenStreetMap (which was created by a British citizen, by the way).

Google, Microsoft, Facebook may disappear tomorrow. It is even very probable that they will not exist in fourty or fifty years. It would even be a good thing. But could you imagine the world without the Web? Without HTML? Without Linux?

Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

In the media, success is often reduced to the size of a company or the bank account of its founder. Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth? What if we used usefulness and longevity? What if we gave more value to the fundamental technological infrastructure instead of the shiny new marketing gimmick used to empty naive wallets? Well, I guess that if we changed how we measure success, Europe would be incredibly successful.

And, as Europeans, we could even be proud of it. Proud of our inventions. Proud of how we contribute to the common good instead of considering ourselves American vassals.

Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?

The choice is ours. We simply need to choose whom we admire. Whom we want to recognize as successful. Whom we aspire to be when we grow up. We need to sing the praises of our true heroes: those who contribute to our commons.

• Picture by Frans Snik of a LEGO version of the European Extremely Large Telescope. Yes, LEGO is a European invention too.