Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Will Arremas.

And I'm April Glazer.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, the partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 28th. On today's show, we'll discuss reports that big tech companies are lobbying in favor of a national privacy law, the very thing that you would think they don't want.

We'll talk about what their motivations might be and why they might be eager to get ahead of whatever advocacy groups might be proposing instead.

Then we'll be joined by Eugene Rochko, the founder of Mastodon.

It's a social network that's becoming an increasingly popular alternative to Twitter.

Rochko likes to say that you can join Macedon if you want social networking without the Nazis.

We'll talk to him about exactly how that works and the daunting obstacles that every social networking startup faces.

And lastly, we'll have Don't Close My Tabs.

Some of the most interesting stories we found online this week.

Hello, Will.

How are you?

I'm doing well, April.

I am here in downtown Newark, Delaware.

And I wanted to give a quick shout out to the people who heard our last episode and reached out to me on Twitter or email to say that they're from Delaware too.

So now I feel welcome in the state of Delaware, and I'm an increasingly proud Delawareian,

if that's how you say it. Well, I am actually recording from Los Angeles today, one of my

favorite cities in the country working on a story and in kind of a big boomy house. So sorry if

the sound sounds weird. And I also want to give a shout out to everybody that commented that I pronounced some things weird last week. Sometimes I do pronounce things weird. It's because I used to have a strong southern accent. I'm from Nashville. And sometimes I just don't sound like everybody else. Even though I worked hard to get rid of it, it's something that I'm sure we'll keep coming up. But I'm glad that y'all are listening. It doesn't mean a lot. All right. We'll be sure. I'm sure I've mispronounced

a lot of things, too. We'll do our best to get everything right for our nitpicky listeners this week. Oh, whatever. It's fine. We love y'all no matter what, and I appreciate you listening closely. But this week we are talking about the big tech platforms, as we tend to do because they can't seem to keep

themselves. closely. But this week we are talking about the big tech platforms, as we tend to do because they

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