RE: https://nileane.fr/@nileane/117117330426113444
“Why are you so upset about this Niléane”
I’m upset because I’ve been played like a fool.
Because Federico has decided to fully return MacStories to X without telling anyone involved with the site whatsoever (apart from John Voorhees). No post on the site, no text message (I’m the one who messaged him after I found out on Mastodon), nothing in Slack, nothing in the newsletter either, so nothing for their Club MacStories members who also had to find out elsewhere. And nothing to me, Chris or Matt who are hosting a weekly podcast published on MacStories
Yet in 2022, when they decided to leave X, they let the world know (https://www.macstories.net/news/macstories-is-on-mastodon-with-its-own-server/) with the following words, along with the launch of their Mastodon instance:
> We’re not closing down our Twitter accounts (yet), but as you may have noticed, they haven’t been active lately and won’t be going forward. That’s because we’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the company is heading. If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you know what I mean. (…)
In 2025, they reiterated when they left Meta’s platforms. A few months after that, Federico messaged us when he wanted to resume posting to Threads and Instagram. A nicety he wasn’t bothered to extend today, in 2026, because he knew the opposition that returning to X would raise.
It’s not like this has come out of nowhere, either. Remember a few months back when it was the main headline for a full week that Tim Cook had been to the Melania screening with Trump and all of his friends just hours a U.S. Border Patrol officer gunned down Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti? (https://theintercept.com/2026/01/27/apple-tim-cook-trump-alex-pretti/) You’d think that would be a priority piece of news to cover on a site covering all things Apple. Yet for many hours Federico simply refused to do so. When asked, he replied to me that he did not want to risk getting stopped at the border the next time he’d enter the US because he criticized Trump on his publication (what a journalist). In the end, after I heavily pushed for MacStories to write at least *something*, this is what John published on the site: https://www.macstories.net/news/tim-cook-attended-an-exclussive-weekend-screening-of-the-upcoming-melania-documentary/
To make everyone think you have hard lines, integrity and values, including when it comes to running your business, only to backtrack in this way, just so you can grow your audience among the AI crowd on Elon Musk’s platform — Seems to me like Federico is exhibiting grifter behavior, at very least in that regard.
So yeah, I’m upset because I was holding him in higher esteem, and because I believed him when he used to take a stance. But whatever, in the end he’s a white tech bro like the rest of them. He was woke when being woke used to be good business. Now AI & fascism are in vogue, and so that’s where he’s pointing his sails.
Folks like me who aren’t white, aren’t cis, aren’t entitled men, we should be getting used to seeing our pretend allies flapping their wings away, because it’ll keep happening. I’ll be moving on now.
🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
