Manton Reece

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has written some good posts about Facebook this year. Here’s part of today’s post about trust:

Facebook’s core problem is that it was a platform based on trust. I don’t mean it acted in a trustworthy way. But it facilitated things that were at core about trust and relationships. So it was in the trust business, regardless of what its corporate culture may actually have been about. Having failed at that and not convinced people it’s trustworthy it now seems committed to a corporate version of acting out, going to war with its own stakeholders, whether those are users, investors, the governments of the countries in which it operates.

See also my post last week about breaking up Facebook and the eventual pushback against Facebook-owned Instagram.

I’m the guest on this week’s Micro Monday again to answer Micro.blog questions. Thanks everyone!

Over a week since launching support for ActivityPub in Micro.blog and I’m still learning more about how Mastodon tracks things. Fixed a couple issues this morning with usernames and internal URLs.

After a few loses on the road, great Spurs win over the Warriors tonight. The best they’ve played in a while. 🏀

Updated M.b this morning with several bug fixes and improvements, including better support for uploading file types like PNG, SVG, and even PDFs for your hosted blog. Click Posts → Uploads on the web.

It’s going to be a very busy day with errands, so got to the coffee shop before 7am to focus on some work first. ☕

Feel like listening instead of reading? I expanded on today’s blog post in audio form for my Timetable podcast.

We start this week’s Core Intuition by following up on the Mastodon integration in Micro.blog. From the show notes:

Manton reports back to Daniel about the first week after adding Mastodon integration to Micro.blog. They talk about the merit and necessity of spending time marketing after all the coding work we do. Daniel talks about his recent struggle implementing support for Google’s OAuth2, and finally they talk about Apple’s new Hardened Runtime and the associated app notarization service Mac apps that are distributed outside the Mac App Store.

It’s nice to hit episode 350, but I was just listening to ATP’s 300th episode today and realized that they have reached their milestone in about half the number of years that it took me and Daniel. We didn’t record very often in the early years, and even now usually miss a couple weeks here and there, so I expect ATP will eventually pass us up in total episodes. 🙂

Two related articles about Facebook this week. First, from a huge report in The New York Times:

But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content on the platform. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated.

The New York Times interviewed over 50 people for the story, and it shows. There are a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes stories, especially Facebook’s relationship with Washington, and more than I can quote here.

Second, an article from The Washington Post about early Instagram employees becoming disillusioned with the platform:

Three of the early Instagram employees, including Richardson, have deleted it — permanently or periodically, comparing it to a drug that produces a diminishing high. One of the people said he felt a little embarrassed to tell people that he worked there. Two of the other early employees said they used it far less than before.

This is why I don’t ever want to sell Micro.blog. I can’t imagine having to sit on the sidelines and watch with disappointment what it might become if it drifted away from its mission.

I think pushback against Instagram is coming, as more people who have already left Facebook also remember that Instagram has the same leadership, and the platform is far enough off track that even the founders have left. It’s a good time to be posting photos to your own blog instead of Instagram.

In a post earlier this year, Ben Thompson recognized that the threat to Facebook is when it becomes accepted fact that using the app isn’t good for you:

It follows that Facebook’s ultimate threat can never come from publishers or advertisers, but rather demand — that is, users. The real danger, though, is not from users also using competing social networks (although Facebook has always been paranoid about exactly that); that is not enough to break the virtuous cycle. Rather, the only thing that could undo Facebook’s power is users actively rejecting the app.

Having your own domain name for blog posts and photos isn’t just about personal independence from the control of massive social networks. Owning our content is key to the way out of the current social network mess.

Some may call for Facebook to be broken up because it has too much power. But we can’t count on antitrust law to do it. Users must do it. We must do it by moving our attention away from companies we don’t believe in.

Getting back into a routine of writing in Day One for a minute each morning. The last couple years have been so busy that there are huge gaps in my journal for significant events that should’ve been written down, and everyday details that don’t make it into my blog.

Last week we launched support for the ActivityPub API in Micro.blog. This is a major feature to add compatibility with Mastodon, including:

• Mastodon users can follow posts from your blog using a username like @you@yourdomain.com.
• Mastodon users can reply to your posts, and those replies will show up in your Micro.blog timeline.
• You can follow Mastodon users from within Micro.blog.
• You can reply to Mastodon posts in Micro.blog, and those replies will also flow back to Mastodon.

Unlike cross-posting (which Micro.blog also supports), enabling ActivityPub in Micro.blog does not use a separate Mastodon account. Everything can be accessed from within Micro.blog using your custom domain name as your web identity. I’ve mostly been testing with Mastodon, but as we continue to test and improve this feature it should also work with non-Mastodon ActivityPub servers.

There are a few steps to get started:

1. Pick a custom domain name. For me, this was easy: I wanted to use manton.org.
2. After setting up Micro.blog to host your blog, point the domain name to Micro.blog. We have a help page about this.
3. Micro.blog will send an email when SSL is enabled for your blog. If there are any delays, don’t hesitate to email us at help@micro.blog and I will make sure your blog is updated and ready for ActivityPub.
4. Click on Account → ActivityPub → “Set Mastodon-compatible Username”. Here you can choose what username other Mastodon users can find you with.

Thanks to everyone who has already tried enabling this on their Micro.blog account! We have learned a lot and fixed several bugs with conversations across both platforms. Looking forward to where this goes.

Recorded 3 podcasts today! Timetable, out now. Core Intuition, out tomorrow. And a special episode of Micro Monday with @macgenie, out on Monday.

Rolled out several fixes today for receiving Webmentions, parsing different kinds of usernames, and notifying Mastodon instances. Hopefully all these cross-site interactions will be a little bit more seamless now.

We’re recording another special Micro Monday this week with your questions. Use this form to post a question, or @-mention me and @macgenie

Earlier this year I migrated 15 years of posts on manton.org to Micro.blog blog hosting. Today I finished moving over 100 episodes of my podcast Timetable to Micro.blog podcast hosting. I had gotten out of the routine of recording Timetable, and I think moving it to Micro.blog will simplify the setup and make me publish the podcast more often.

Timetable had been hosted on WordPress using the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin. There were at least a few ways I could’ve moved the episodes, but ultimately I decided on the following:

1. Downloaded all the MP3s to my Mac.
2. Adjusted the WordPress settings to show 120 recent posts in the feeds, then saved the resulting JSON Feed of all episodes. This let me parse the JSON much more easily than working with the WordPress API or XML.
3. Wrote a Ruby script that uses the Micropub API to upload each MP3, then create a new post with an audio tag, preserving the original post content and date.
4. Pointed timetable.manton.org to use Micro.blog.

Even if you don’t know Ruby, hopefully you can see in the script how easy is it to work with Micropub, which Micro.blog uses as its native interface to create posts and upload files. I just call out to the curl command-line tool to do the work.

If you’re new to Timetable, each episode is only about 5 minutes. Some of my recent favorites include episode 91 (Lose yourself), episode 92 (Good, better, best), and episode 100 (One year).

Getting password reset requests on my Instagram account reminds me that my old password was really weak. Surprised it hasn’t been hacked. Last photo to Instagram was over a year ago… I only post photos to my own blog now.

Last year we held the first IndieWebCamp in Austin. I blogged about how the event went, including sessions and topics covered, and what I learned from it:

I’m really happy with the way the event came together. I learned a lot in helping plan it, made a few mistakes that we can improve next time, but overall came away as inspired as ever to keep improving Micro.blog so that it’s a standout platform of the IndieWeb movement.

We’re going to do it again early next year: February 23-24 at Capital Factory. If you’ll be in Austin, mark that weekend on your calendar. I’ll make another announcement when registration is open.

Last year there was a lot of work and last-minute stress deciding on a venue, so this year we’re going to keep a bunch of things the same that seemed to work pretty well. By nailing down the details early, we’ll have much more time for promotion. I’d love to see us double attendance from last year. Hope to see you there!

We posted a new Core Intuition today that spans multiple weeks and a couple of recordings: catching up on Daniel’s talk, the new Micro.blog support for ActivityPub, and Apple’s recent announcements.

Micro.blog now has 3 distinct styles of usernames to make the platform more compatible with other services:

• Micro.blog usernames, e.g. @you. These are simple usernames for @-mentioning someone else in the Micro.blog community.
• Mastodon usernames, e.g. @you@yourdomain.com. When you search Micro.blog for these usernames, Micro.blog will look for the user in another federated Mastodon instance so that you can follow them.
• IndieWeb-friendly domain names, e.g. @yourdomain.com. This is where I always thought we’d go for more distributed “the web is the social network” interactions. Replying to one of these usernames will send a Webmention to that user’s external web site.

I’m @manton on Micro.blog, my blog is manton.org, and because Micro.blog-hosted blogs support the ActivityPub API, you can follow me from Mastodon by using @manton@manton.org.

I just rolled out some ActivityPub-related reply improvements. I’ll continue to improve the Micro.blog timeline so that these usernames can all coexist nicely. We’ll also be updating the native apps to better support these usernames, for highlighting and auto-completion.

Homebrew Website Club tonight! 6:30pm. I’m heading down to Mozart’s Coffee now.

For some time, we have been considering how we could open up compatibility between Micro.blog and Mastodon. Any feature that could be disruptive needs to be approached carefully. In this post I want to talk about how Micro.blog supports Mastodon, why I think it’s useful, and anticipate some questions that we’ll get about this feature.

We’re launching 2 major features today:

• Micro.blog can now cross-post to a Mastodon user account, in the same way we cross-post to Twitter, Facebook, Medium, and LinkedIn. This takes a copy of your blog posts and sends them to a specified Mastodon account.
• Your custom domain on Micro.blog can now be ActivityPub-compatible, so that you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly on Micro.blog. This also means someone can follow your blog posts by adding @you@yourdomain.com on Mastodon. (This username is configurable. Mine is @manton@manton.org.)

These 2 features are separate and either can be enabled if you want. I have tried to be very deliberate in how ActivityPub is implemented. It is off by default, and to keep the focus on blogging and content ownership, it only works with custom domain names.

One of the most important goals for Micro.blog is to encourage more people to blog. I wrote last year that it’s a success if more people blog. Based on the feedback we’ve received from the Micro.blog community, we are making great progress toward that goal.

We have a lot of things we want to help solve with Micro.blog, but blogging is a core part of the foundation. It’s not about being the most popular social network. It’s not about competing with every platform that launches. It’s much better for the mission of Micro.blog for us to embrace other platforms (as we’ve always done with the IndieWeb) rather than put up walls between APIs.

I recently published a post with 4 parts to how we get out of the current mess with today’s big social networks. I mentioned Mastodon in that post because while I don’t think Mastodon tackles all 4 parts of fixing this, I do think it has a role to play.

More compatibility with Mastodon lets us support the good things that Mastodon has accomplished, while still carrying forward what I think are the unique strengths of Micro.blog. It also opens up the Micro.blog community to interact with a much larger user base.

Sometimes in the Mastodon world your identity can get fragmented across multiple instances. You might start on mastodon.social but then move to another instance, effectively breaking the link between your readers and your posts each time you move, with no way to migrate posts between instances. By supporting Mastodon and ActivityPub in Micro.blog, you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your own domain name.

As I wrote earlier this year, content ownership on the web is about domain names:

When you write and post photos at your own domain name, your content can outlive any one blogging platform. This month marked the 16th anniversary of blogging at manton.org, and in that time I’ve switched blogging platforms and hosting providers a few times. The posts and URLs can all be preserved through those changes because it’s my own domain name.

If you already have your blog on Micro.blog at yourdomain.com, we can build on that to allow @you@yourdomain.com or @whatever@micro.domain.com. This focus on domain names will continue to guide new features in Micro.blog.

Let me answer some questions:

• How is Mastodon support enabled on my account? In Micro.blog on the web, click Account → ActivityPub. You will be prompted to select a username. A paid hosted microblog is required so that Micro.blog can use your custom domain name.
• How can I find Mastodon users to follow on Micro.blog? As more Micro.blog users interact with Mastodon users, some of those users will naturally show up in conversations or even be featured in our Discover timeline. You can also add a specific Mastodon user by searching for their full username.
• Will Micro.blog now start showing follower counts? No, it’s important to me that we don’t change the Micro.blog user experience to resemble every other social network. When you follow a Micro.blog user from Mastodon, an individual Mastodon instance will have its own follower count just for that instance. Any follower count shown in Mastodon for a Micro.blog user will be wrong. This isn’t ideal, but it’s the best we can currently do with how Mastodon works.
• What about Content Warnings? Micro.blog does not support them. I’ve heard from Mastodon fans who like Content Warnings, but I’m concerned about introducing extra friction in both the posting and reading experience. We’ll reevaluate this feature later.
• What happens to direct messages sent from Mastodon to Micro.blog? Micro.blog does not have any private posts by design. Direct messages sent from Mastodon are converted into a private email.
• Is this going to make Micro.blog just like Mastodon? No, this is not a clone of Mastodon merged into Micro.blog or running alongside it. It’s a from-scratch implementation of a few common APIs that Mastodon uses so that both systems can talk to each other.
• Will third-party Mastodon clients work with Micro.blog? Not currently. We might consider this later, but because of the UI differences, I think it’s a better fit to have third-party apps designed for either Micro.blog or IndieWeb standards.
• What will happen to the Micro.blog community? I hope that this will help grow the community, without taking away from what has worked well on Micro.blog. While you might see some Mastodon posts, and those Mastodon users can interact with Micro.blog users, users from other Mastodon instances won’t know about our community guidelines or expectations for Micro.blog. The community will remain predominantly Micro.blog users who share our goals for the platform.
• How does Micro.blog’s mute feature work with Mastodon? Muting in Micro.blog has been expanded to support muting individual Mastodon users, or entire Mastodon instances based on their domain name. We have also preloaded a common list of Mastodon instances that are muted automatically because of code of conduct violations.

This is a really big feature. I hope you enjoy it! This is just the baseline. I’ll be working on bug fixes and improvements to make this integration work as smoothly as possible. If you have any feedback, let me know at help@micro.blog.

Launching a pair of major features after lunch. May or may not be what you’re expecting, but I think it will be really exciting for Micro.blog and help focus on our mission. Look forward to your feedback and bug reports so we can keep making this platform better.

Rose City Book Pub from a couple nights ago in Portland with @macgenie and @cheesemaker. More coffee shops and pubs should have a large collection of books. 🍺

Beto showed Texas what it can become. Very proud of his campaign.

No matter what happens tomorrow, the next day there will still be work to do on Micro.blog and the IndieWeb. Join us Wednesday for Homebrew Website Club in Austin. 6:30pm at Mozart’s Coffee!