Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
It’s a relatively slow week on the platforms-and-democracy beat, so let’s talk about something small but fascinating in its own way: the arrival of Instagram messages on the web.
An unfortunate thing about being a xennial who grew up using (and loving) the world wide web is that most developers no longer build for it. Over the past 15 years, mobile phones became more popular than desktop computers ever were, and the result is that web development has entered a slow but seemingly inexorable decline. At the same time, like most journalists, I spent all day working on that same web. And with each passing year, the place where I do most of my work seems a little less vital.
This all feels particularly true when it comes to communications…