I was sick a few days before Christmas and it forced me to take some extra time off after a very busy November and December. Happy to be back blogging and looking forward to 2020, so let’s wrap up the holidays with a post about Christmas movies.

This isn’t necessarily a list of the best Christmas movies. There are other classics that are usually on an all-time best list that aren’t here. This is a list of my 10 favorites.

1. The Nightmare Before Christmas — Perfect for Christmas or Halloween. So nearly flawless I had to put this at the top of the list.
2. The Muppet Christmas Carol — There are many great adaptations of A Christmas Carol, and last year we watched pretty much all of them. I wish there was room to include a couple of the animated versions, like Richard Williams' A Christmas Carol and Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
3. A Charlie Brown Christmas — “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
4. Klaus — Beautifully animated. Brand new, but now that I’ve seen it twice I know it will hold its own against the best. There’s a great interview with director Sergio Pablos on The Bancroft Brothers Animation Podcast.
5. Elf — We probably rewatch this more than anything else. Can’t say enough good things about the variety of movies Jon Favreau has worked on (not to mention The Mandalorian).
6. Meet Me in St. Louis — I’ll admit, I didn’t want to love this at first, years ago, but now that I’ve seen it dozens of times it’s a favorite, and I think the best of the older classics.
7. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation — One of our traditions is to cut a tree down at the Elgin Christmas tree farm, and there’s a little of Clark Griswold in the endeavor.
8. Die Hard — Definitely a Christmas movie.
9. A Christmas Story — “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
10. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — Check out this YouTube video about some of the editing problems with the recent TV version.

If I could only watch these 10 movies every year I’d be happy. But there are others we enjoy that deserve honorable mentions: Edward Scissorhands, Love Actually, It’s a Wonderful Life, Home Alone, The Grinch (2018), Jingle All The Way, and Christmas with the Kranks. And a special shoutout for the soundtrack of The Polar Express.

Happy Holidays! ❄️

This morning, Jack Dorsey dropped a bombshell:

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

I should be excited about this, but instead my first reaction was frustration. Ten years after early Twitter employees like Blaine Cook and Alex Payne were pushing for a more open architecture, now Jack Dorsey realizes Twitter is too big and creates a team to work on… blockchain-based solutions?

Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.

The first step should be to check out the IndieWeb. There are people who have been thinking about and working toward more open social networks for years.

After a closer reading of Jack’s tweets, though, I think my first interpretation wasn’t quite right. Twitter isn’t necessarily interested in decentralizing content or even identity on their platform. Why would they be? Their business is based around having all your tweets in one place.

Early in the thread, Jack hints at what Twitter is trying to do:

First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.

This “burden on people” is the resources it would take for Twitter to actively combat hate and abuse on their platform. Facebook, for example, has hired thousands of moderators. If Twitter is hoping to outsource curation to shared protocols, it should be in addition to — not a replacement for — the type of effort that Facebook is undertaking. I’ve outlined a better approach in my posts on open gardens and 4 parts to fixing social networks, which don’t seem compatible with Twitter’s current business.

I’m going to be paying close attention to this. Good luck to Jack and the new team. I hope they seriously look at existing standards, because we’ve come too far to start over.

I’ve finished adding the special pin for anyone who participated in the Microblogvember challenge. Jean MacDonald also has an emoji recap of all the challenge prompt words.

There’s a link at the top of your Account page in Micro.blog, or click here to view your pins. If you don’t see the pin yet, it should appear whenever you post to your microblog next, which tells Micro.blog to check for new pins again.

Because some people started late or posted twice in one day, the “algorithm” for calculating the pin isn’t very strict. If you were blogging regularly in November and used 30 of the prompt words from the challenge, you’ll get the pin. This was a lot of fun and I hope we can do more challenges like this in the new year.

Now is also the perfect time to unlock the “Happy Holidays” pin by posting to your microblog with something about the winter holidays. It’ll match on a bunch of keywords including Christmas, Hanukkah, Santa, snow, reindeer, and a few others. Enjoy! ❄️

Interesting article from The New York Times about a report from the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence. Researchers ran a series of experiments to buy likes, comments, and clicks on social media posts. They paid companies in Russia and Europe hundreds of dollars to buy thousands of likes and followers, writing up a report on the results:

But the report also brings renewed attention to an often overlooked vulnerability for internet platforms: companies that sell clicks, likes and comments on social media networks. Many of the companies are in Russia, according to the researchers. Because the social networks’ software ranks posts in part by the amount of engagement they generate, the paid activity can lead to more prominent positions.

The researchers then actively notified the social media companies about the fake likes and tracked what action the tech companies took, if any. Most fake likes and accounts used for the experiment remained online a month after they were reported.

It is very difficult for a massive platform like Facebook or Twitter to catch everything. Instead of trying to “fix” fake likes that are purchased, the solution is to remove the reason someone would purchase likes to begin with. If like counts weren’t featured so prominently and used for surfacing content, there would be no incentive to try to game the system.

Jean MacDonald has a great wrap-up post about the Microblogvember daily blogging challenge and the value of looking for “micro” versions of bigger projects:

Ever since I became the community manager of Micro.blog, I’ve developed an appreciation for the beauty of going “micro”: microposts, microcasts, micro meetups, microcosms of interesting humans interacting online on a human scale.

This is a key part of Micro.blog’s mission. Many people find writing a full-length blog post too daunting, but break it down into micro-sized posts and it’s easier for everyone. Jean continues:

This is what I like about a micro approach. Start with something small, and build on that. It also works with podcasting, for example. Micro.blog has spawned several microcasts (including our own Micro Monday) by making it easy to start small.

It reminds me of why we’ve added so many “full” blogging features to Micro.blog hosting, like longer posts, file uploads, categories, custom themes, standalone web pages, and podcast hosting. After you’ve “started small” and have a nice routine with microblog posts, the platform should grow to accommodate whatever you need next.

Early last Friday morning, one of the Micro.blog photo storage servers failed. I brought it back up shortly after I noticed, but dealing with the problem motivated me to make a change I’ve been thinking about for how photos are stored. Over the weekend I migrated the photo storage to a new system based on Linode’s Object Storage.

(Luckily, years ago when I was designing Micro.blog, I had anticipated I might eventually make a change like this. The old server was running Minio to provide an S3-compatible interface, internal to Micro.blog, so switching to a new system was much easier.)

When a photo is uploaded to Micro.blog, it has always been kept in at least 2 places: on a primary photo storage server, and on a copy of your published blog, along with HTML and other files. Both of these locations were backed up daily.

Over the summer there was a similar error to what happened last week. For some new uploads, only 1 copy of the photo was kept. If Micro.blog needed to rebuild your published blog files, there was a small window during which it could overwrite the latest photos that had been uploaded. Usually I’d be able to fix this from a backup, but I know at least 1 user who was affected by it, and there might have been a few more.

If you ever see broken images on your site, please reach out to help@micro.blog. You can also re-upload photos under Posts → Uploads in Micro.blog on the web and update any posts from the original photos.

Remember that Micro.blog also has built-in features for making extra backups for yourself, beyond the backups we already handle behind the scenes:

• Save new posts to the Internet Archive. There’s a checkbox to enable this under Posts → Design. When you publish a new post, Micro.blog automatically makes it available in the Wayback Machine.
• Export in Blog Archive Format. Micro.blog will make a .bar file that is actually a ZIP file with all your photos, HTML for posts, and a complete JSON Feed.

The new photo storage that is live now should be even more robust. Photos are a very important part of Micro.blog. I’ll keep improving this and adding storage redundancy wherever I can.

Today I sent the following update to Kickstarter backers.

Hi everyone! I’ve set a release date for the book Indie Microblogging: January 2nd, 2020. I’ll send an email that day to all Kickstarter backers with a link to read the book on the web.

You can preview the draft table of contents here: book.micro.blog

There’s a pre-order link on that page. You don’t need to pre-order the book because you will already have access as a Kickstarter backer, but please share the link on your blog, to followers on social networks, and with friends who might need a reason to dust off their blog or even start writing on the web for the first time.

Thanks for your support and patience as I’ve spent the last couple of years focused on building and improving Micro.blog. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m excited to spend the next month wrapping up the book reward for Kickstarter backers.

And if you haven’t checked out Micro.blog lately, the community keeps growing and the platform has evolved to be great for full-featured blogs, not just microblogs. Photos, Hugo themes, categories, pages, podcast hosting, publishing from apps across iOS, macOS, Android, the web, and much more.

— Manton

P.S. Indie Microblogging is a book about the web, so I want it to be on the web first. After some time to incorporate fixes and improvements to the text, I’ll follow up with a print version for backers at the higher reward tiers.

I’ve blogged about Klaus a couple times. It’s one of those films that I was a little nervous about because I wanted it to be great, and it is. There is some wonderful character animation in this.

Animation World has an interview with director Sergio Pablos about what a positive experience it was to work with Netflix, and on getting few chances in life to do something great, especially with animated features:

You hope you’ve made something good, but you’re so close to it that you’re kind of blind to it. We’ve been trying to make a film for 15 years in my company and we’ve failed in different ways. Right? Sometimes a film would end up going elsewhere, or it wouldn’t even get made. Meanwhile, we’re taking service work to try and support our effort. So, it’s been a long road. But I always dreamt the day would come where I’d have a project I could be proud of.

Congrats to the team for doing something that feels new with 2D animation. I may need to get the art book.

As 2016 was winding down, I was determined to start 2017 with something new. On January 2nd, I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Micro.blog and a book I’m writing called Indie Microblogging.

In the years since then, I’ve put everything into Micro.blog to fulfill my promise to Kickstarter backers. Micro.blog does way more than I had dreamed it could do 3 years ago. But the more I put into Micro.blog, the more it needed of me, and the book kept taking a back seat until now.

I’ve set the ship date for the book: January 2nd, 2020. It will be published on the web for all Kickstarter backers, and if you missed the Kickstarter you can pre-order the book now for $20. The money goes right back into Micro.blog so that Jean, Jon, and I can continue improving the platform and growing the community.

When completed the book will be over 50 short chapters in 6 major parts, plus intro and conclusion sections that get to the mission of Indie Microblogging and the next steps. It will also feature several interviews.

You can view the draft table of contents here and pre-order the book. Thank you for your support.

You might think because I created Micro.blog that I have a perfectly simple blogging workflow that will work for everyone, all the time. Nope. I use a variety of different apps depending on what I’m trying to do:

• If I’m posting a quick microblog post and know what I want to say, I type it into the Micro.blog app for Mac.
• If I’m posting a single photo, I use Micro.blog on my iPhone.
• If I’m posting a bunch of photos like this post from Toronto, I use Sunlit to write a little something for each day.
• If I’m writing a longer post and have it all in my head, so I know I will post it very soon, I type it directly into MarsEdit and publish it to Micro.blog from there.
• If I’m writing a post and I’m not totally sure where it’s going, or when I’m going to post it, I type it into Ulysses. This is the majority of my posts. Then I copy it out as Markdown and paste it into Micro.blog.

And this only scratches the surface. There’s Wavelength for podcasts, and some people prefer apps like Icro, Gluon, Dialog, Quill, or automation via Shortcuts. This is why we link third-party apps from the posting screen in Micro.blog.

One of the things I’m most proud of with Micro.blog is that the API supports standards so you can use a variety of different apps for posting. There are so many different types of blogs out there, there shouldn’t just be one way to post.

We are getting really close to episode 400. Feels like a big milestone to me, and I’ve been wondering if we should change anything with the podcast format when we roll over into the 400s. But in the meantime, here’s 395:

Daniel and Manton try to take stock of long-term personal goals, thinking of how they align with and overlap with money-making goals. Manton reports back after watching Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp US. Manton reflects on the important of simplicity for Micro.blog in contrast to WordPress, while Daniel considers that MarsEdit also serves as a more complex interface to Micro.blog. Finally, they digest the latest Apple announcements, focusing on the merits of the new AirPods Pro, and whether Apple TV+ is a justifiable pursuit for the company.

Daniel has already given me a sneak peek of next week’s manager check-in and it’s a good one. I think that is going to become a regular segment.

Brent Simmons marking the 20th anniversary of his blog:

It’s tempting to think that The Thing of my career has been NetNewsWire. And that’s kinda true. But the thing I’ve done the longest, love the most, and am most proud of is this blog.

The great thing about a personal blog is that if you stick with it, your blog will very likely span multiple jobs and even major life changes. You don’t need to know where you’re going to be in 20 years to start a blog today and post to it regularly. Writing about the journey — and looking back on the posts later to reflect on where you’ve been — is part of why blogging is still so special.

IndieWebCamp Austin is coming up in February at Capital Factory. This is our 3rd event in Austin and I’m excited to start getting the word out and help a lot of new people discover the IndieWeb. Registration is already open.

Tom Brown and Jean MacDonald are joining me as co-organizers and we’re looking for sponsors to help cover costs for the venue and breakfast for attendees. If you’re interested in sponsoring or work at a company that would be a good fit to support the IndieWeb, please email me: manton@micro.blog.

Platinum event sponsor: $2500

• Your logo on the IndieWebCamp event page.
• A verbal thank-you during the morning and closing of the event.
• You can bring t-shirts, stickers, and other promotional items to distribute to attendees.
• A special mention and link in the email we send to attendees the day of the event.

Silver event sponsor: $1000

• Your logo on the IndieWebCamp event page.
• A verbal thank-you during the morning and closing of the event.
• You can bring t-shirts, stickers, and other promotional items to distribute to attendees.

Bronze event sponsor: $500

• Your logo on the IndieWebCamp event page.
• A verbal thank-you during the morning and closing of the event.

Ben Thompson has an excellent article this week about free speech, political ads, and Facebook. There’s a good debate to be had about the roll of curation and fact-checking ads, but on the problems of massive, ad-based social networks there can be no doubt:

In the long run, though, it is very problematic that such a powerful player in our democracy has no accountability. Liberty is not simply about laws, or culture, it is also about structure, and it is right to be concerned about the centralized nature of companies like Facebook.

Platforms that have as many problems as Facebook does can always be improved, but by design they can never be good enough because their size alone is one of the problems.

The good news: it’s up to us. We can choose to reject these platforms and move to a more distributed web of indie microblogs. We can choose to reject the attention power-grab of the algorithmic timeline. We can choose to build the web we deserve… but it’s not going to happen if you keep feeding photos into Instagram.

There’s a powerful filter mechanism inside Micro.blog for automatically assigning categories based on criteria in the post. For example, if the post includes an img tag, assign it to a Photos category. Or if the post includes the 📚 emoji, assign it to a Books category. I blogged about this in September.

Today I’ve expanded this feature to also allow matching on whether the post is a short microblog post or whether it’s a longer post with a title. Like other parts of Micro.blog, it uses the title to determine how to categorize the post. Posts without titles are always considered short microblog posts.

To create new filters, go to Posts → Categories → Edit Filters.

You can use this in combination with matching the title or text in a post, or leave those fields blank when creating a filter to match all posts. This makes it easy to move all full-length posts into a category, which can also have its own RSS feed.

There’s a new built-in theme available on Micro.blog called Lanyon, based on the open source Hugo theme of the same name. It’s a clean, readable design with a slide-out menu for page links.

I’ve been working on getting several new themes ready for Micro.blog. Some Hugo themes work with only a couple tweaks, and some take more time. My fork of Lanyon with Micro.blog-specific changes is on GitHub.

Two new versions of the third-party Micro.blog app Icro have been released. The iOS version now supports push notifications, and a new version is available for macOS for the first time.

Because the official Mac app is distributed as a direct download, this is actually the first Micro.blog app available in the Mac App Store. It was ported to macOS using Catalyst, so it requires Catalina, which I just upgraded to. It’s great to have another microblogging option on the Mac!

For the last few years, right before the regular season starts, Jon Hays and I usually paste in our guesses for the top 8 in the west in chat. This year the west is up for grabs more than anytime in the last handful of years, so I thought I’d share my list:

1. Rockets
2. Clippers
3. Spurs
4. Blazers
5. Nuggets
6. Lakers
7. Jazz
8. Warriors

No doubt a few things are wrong here. For example, Dallas looks like a playoff team right now, and I left them out. But I’m excited to see how this shakes out, especially for the Spurs, who are exactly the team I was hoping they’d be now that Dejounte Murray is back.

Since the very beginning of Micro.blog we’ve encouraged you to use your own domain name with your microblog. It’s the best way to control your content and an important principle of the IndieWeb. Now it’s even easier.

If you don’t have a domain name yet — or need a new one! — Micro.blog can handle registration for you. We are using the Name.com API to purchase and configure the domain name for you. Payment is handled on your existing Micro.blog subscription and everything is automatic. No messing with DNS records.

Here’s a screenshot of finding a domain name, which is linked under the domain name section on Posts → Design:

I’m very excited about this feature. We’ll be expanding it based on feedback but it is already quite powerful, even including email forwarding. And of course, you can always register a domain name elsewhere on the web and point it to Micro.blog.

There have been a few IndieWebCamps recently, including in Amsterdam, New York, and Brighton. I’ve enjoyed reviewing the sessions, and after the Amsterdam event I noticed this post about content ownership:

When it comes to posting to Facebook or Twitter, you play a different game. You write and post it on their servers, therefore those companies own your data, not you. A photo (or video for that matter) is a special kind of data. Its file size creates limitations to its distribution, but no matter where it’s uploaded, it is always owned by its creator first.

While it’s good to acknowledge the unique hosting requirements of photos and videos, how we define content ownership shouldn’t be any different. People get lost in the weeds with running their own server, how to set up cross-posting to other social networks, where to post first, what formats and protocols to use, etc. But it’s actually much simpler than that.

I think in the tech world — and especially as programmers — we tend to make things more complicated than they need to be. We know too much about content ownership, most of it irrelevant for mainstream users.

If you want to control your content on the web, post it at your own personal domain name. That’s it. Everything else you want to do is icing on the cake.

Likewise, nothing else can be a replacement for that simple act of using your own domain name. You could write your own blog software with a custom database designed for ActivityPub and run it on a server in your basement. It doesn’t matter. Without the domain name, all you have is a pile of icing.

This has been the messaging for Micro.blog from the beginning. Keep it simple and make it easy for anyone to participate in the open web.

Following my experiment with importing Foursquare data, I’ve officially updated Micro.blog to support storing location information. The Micropub API now accepts checkin and location properties for sending venue name, URL, latitude, and longitude to Micro.blog. This works with the JSON format in OwnYourSwarm, which connects Foursquare/Swarm to your microblog.

Micro.blog on the web and the native apps do not send any location information. Right now this is purely an opt-in feature for third-party apps like OwnYourSwarm and custom solutions using the API. We consider location information very private and will never enable it automatically.

When a post has location information, you can see the coordinates in the posts list on your account:

The default Micro.blog themes do not currently do anything with this information. You can create a custom theme to access the coordinates as custom parameters, like this:

{{ if .Params.location_latitude }}
  <img src="https://example-mapping-service.com/?center={{ .Params.location_latitude }},{{ .Params.location_longitude}}" />
{{ end }}

The 4 available parameters are location_name, location_url, location_latitude, and location_longitude. The venue name is automatically prepended to post content so that no theme changes are necessary. I’d like to explore offering maps as a built-in feature in the future. Enjoy!

Years ago my wife and I were in Vegas and had a chance to see Elton John… and missed it. This year, when I realized he was playing in Toronto on the night of our 20th anniversary, I bought tickets as a surprise birthday gift and we planned a short trip around the concert.

We arrived in the late afternoon earlier this week, took the airport train to Union Station and the subway to our hotel, then went down to Polson Pier to catch the sunset. We had dinner and explored the Distillery District before checking out Jurassic Park for the Raptors game — too late, they had already closed it off — and settling for beers at the sports bar next door to watch the end of the game.

The next day we did a bike tour of the city. On the way to meet the guide, we wandered down a street to look at the trees and a woman said hi as she walked by. Realizing we were tourists, she stopped and told us that she had been friends with Jane Jacobs, who lived just a block away. There’s a sign outside her old house.

The bike tour was a great way to see a bunch of Toronto. Murals, CN Tower, trains at Roundhouse Park, sculptures at Ireland Park, the university, and several neighborhoods. We stopped for hot chocolate and then back on our own visited a couple libraries including the Sherlock Holmes room at the Toronto Reference Library.

Dinner in Little India and then the streetcar back for the concert. We loved it. Even with just a couple days we really got a lot out of visiting the city. Looking forward to coming back one day.

Garrett Dimon writes about removing all analytics from his web site and how little he misses it:

What over a decade of number-crunching analytics has taught me is that spending an hour writing, sharing, or helping someone is infinitely more valuable than spending that hour swimming through numbers. Moreover, trying to juice the numbers almost invariably divorces you from thinking about customers and understanding people.

We don’t have page-view stats on Micro.blog because they are incomplete without counting the Micro.blog timeline and feed readers, and I’d hate for someone to be discouraged when just getting started. Newsflash: your blog does not have a million readers. That’s okay! If you really want stats, you can add some custom JavaScript to include Google Analytics or Fathom Analytics, but most of the time it’s a distraction.

I love having everything together on manton.org. Whether it’s blog posts about tech, personal stuff, or photos, I don’t have to think too much about where to put it. If I’m writing on the internet, it goes on my blog.

But I’ve been wanting to experiment with sharing more location information too, and use that to try out location as a built-in Micro.blog feature, so I’ve created a new blog manton.coffee and imported my 2500 check-ins from Foursquare/Swarm representing about 8 years.

To build this, I upgraded Micro.blog to support venue names and location coordinates. We try to be very careful about privacy, and currently the apps do not fill any of this data in, but in the future it could be something people opt-in to for a post. The extra data is available to Hugo templates, which is how I’m including the little maps on the home page.

We’re working on some other features with higher priority than this, so consider this mostly a sneak peek for now. I’ll enable the Foursquare/Swarm import as an official feature after the glitches are worked out. Better integration with OwnYourSwarm should also be on the roadmap.

We’ve released a new version of our photo-blogging app Sunlit. Mostly a bunch of bug fixes, including these changes:

• Updated thumbnail previews in a new post to maintain the aspect ratio of the photo.
• Added an option in the Settings screen to clear cached photos and drafts from previous versions of Sunlit.
• Improved spacing of icons in tab bar.
• Fixed swipe left on a post to view the conversation.
• Fixed several other issues and potential crashes.

You can download Sunlit for free in the App Store.

I’ve removed the option for Facebook cross-posting on Micro.blog. Facebook recently disabled our API access, and my initial request for re-approval was denied. While I hope to eventually get it enabled again, I don’t want to have a feature on Micro.blog that is broken.

A year ago Facebook turned off API access for creating new posts unless they were sent to a Facebook page. I adapted Micro.blog to that change, but it already severely limited the usefulness of cross-posting to Facebook. At the time, Bridgy disabled all Facebook support:

Facebook’s moves to restrict its API to improve privacy and security are laudable, and arguably the right idea, but also mean that users can no longer use third party apps like Bridgy to create posts.

I hope that by officially saying goodbye to Facebook support we can focus on making the other cross-posting options in Micro.blog more robust. I’m currently looking into improving LinkedIn support, and we recently added Tumblr cross-posting to go along with Twitter, Medium, and Mastodon.

Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web. I never want to remove a Micro.blog feature that users find valuable, but in this case we have little choice, and it’s best for Micro.blog to move on.

Yesterday we updated the iOS app for Micro.blog with several bug fixes and tweaks for iOS 13. Today I’m updating the macOS app with an important fix when running on macOS Catalina.

Here are the changes:

• Fixed post selection options popover on macOS Catalina.
• Updated for “notarization” to avoid launch warnings.

Along with macOS notarization, this release also now uses the “hardened runtime”. I thought this might break some features, but I haven’t noticed any problems. Choose “Check for Updates” in the app to get the latest version.

I’ve posted an update to Micro.blog for iOS with several bug fixes. Here are the changes in version 1.7.1:

• Updated a few more screens for Dark Mode on iOS 13.
• Fixed updating timeline when favoriting posts in Discover.
• Fixed alignment of popover when selecting a post.
• Fixed disabling cross-posting from post options screen.
• Fixed uploading videos to WordPress.

You can download it in the App Store.

There’s a new trailer out for Klaus, which hits select theaters and then Netflix in November. Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew writes about director Sergio Pablos:

His goal hasn’t been to simply bring back 2d animation, but to push the craft forward, and Klaus’s distinct look is achieved via an innovative lighting and rendering pipeline that is applied to the drawn animation.

I’m excited for any hand-drawn feature film, especially one that comes from Sergio Pablos. Over the last few years his team has posted some early concepts and tests to their blog. I also mentioned Sergio on an episode of my podcast Timetable in 2017.

When Apple Arcade launched, I thought it would be fun to try a new game each day for 30 days. And it was fun! For… 18 days. On Saturday I sat down to play my 19th pick, Oceanhorn 2, and realized that playing a new game each day wasn’t working.

Unlike visiting 30 coffee shops, 30 libraries, and 30 parks — where each series of blog posts I explored Austin and got a lot out of it — playing video games has proven to be too big of a time commitment for me right now. I love video games and there are some great games in Apple Arcade, but if I’m on my phone for an hour I need to be using that time for something work-related. It was creating too much extra stress for too little return.

Oceanhorn 2 is also a good place to wrap up this experiment because it’s one of my favorites. It’s heavily inspired by Zelda. I’m going to enjoy playing it a little bit more over the next week or so. All the other games I’ve played are collected in this category on my blog.

Good luck to everyone participating in Inktober this month! We’ve added a special Micro.blog pin you can unlock by posting a photo of your drawing and the word “Inktober” somewhere in the post. To see your pins, click Account → View All next to the pins message.

If you’re drawing digitally, also check out these Inktober templates from Iconfactory for their iPad app Linea Sketch.

We posted episode 390 of Core Intuition. From the show notes:

Manton finds a workaround to his Sign in with Apple email problems! Daniel argues first that DTS should support pre-release software, and they discuss possible compromise approaches. Finally, they remark on Apple’s vigorous marketing push, and the thrill of promoting products we are proud of.

Only 10 more episodes to go before we hit 400!

As more Micro.blog bloggers use categories to organize their posts, I want to keep making categories more useful while retaining the simplicity of microblogging by default. Today we’ve added an option on the web (under the new “…” button when starting a new post) to choose categories right as the post is being created, as well as a new interface that can filter blog posts into categories based on the text in those posts.

For a while we’ve had a feature to automatically filter photo posts into a category. If you create a category called Photos or Photography, Micro.blog gives you this simple checkbox on the categories screen:

This is powered by filters that look for a match in the title or text of a post and then set a category for you automatically. These filters can now be managed from a new “Edit Filters” button on the categories screen on the web:

By default, filters are applied to new posts only. To also apply the filter to all posts, there’s a new “Run Filter” button. For blogs with thousands of posts, make sure to give Micro.blog a little time to update all your posts and publish them to your blog.

When we released Micro.blog 1.7 for iOS last week with Sign in with Apple support, Micro.blog could not actually send email to Apple’s private relay server. This is an issue that has popped up on the Apple developer forums and likely affects many developers. I was so excited for Sign in with Apple that I thought it was worth shipping anyway, crossing my fingers that we could resolve it shortly after iOS 13 was out.

Apple’s private email relay server is almost completely undocumented. In this blog post I’ll describe how I got it working.

The key issue is that the “return path” of your emails must be using a subdomain that can be verified by Apple. This blog post from SendGrid describes the solution in detail. I was happy to discover that I could customize this in the settings in Mandrill as well under Settings → Sending Defaults:

Here are the steps I took:

• Create a new subdomain. I decided to use mail.micro.blog. Set the TTL to just 1 minute, because you will need to change the DNS record multiple times during this process.
• Initially the subdomain should be a CNAME to your email provider. Mine was set to mandrill.com.
• Make sure you have SPF records for this new subdomain. Mandrill will walk you through this when you add a new subdomain under Settings → Domains → Tracking & Return Path Domains.
• Start registering the new subdomain in Apple’s developer portal. Apple will check the SPF records at this point. After you click Register, download the verification file.
• Create a new web site somewhere for your subdomain and update your DNS record to now point to that web host instead of Mandrill. The web site must support the latest encryption settings for HTTPS or it will mysteriously fail verification from Apple.
• I put the subdomain on GitHub Pages so I didn’t need to spin up a new server somewhere for it. If you use GitHub Pages, make sure to create .nojekyll file so that the .well-known folder that Apple needs isn’t skipped.
• Upload the apple-developer-domain-association.txt file from Apple to the new subdomain web site. Wait a few extra minutes to make sure the DNS has changed before clicking Verify at Apple.
• Also verify your root domain name and add the from email address you will be using to send email. Here’s what my settings look like when everything is working:

And finally:

• Change the DNS record for your new subdomain to point it back to mandrill.com.
• If any previous emails had already bounced, remove those from Mandrill’s blacklist under Settings → Rejection Lists so they will try to send again in the future.

As I type all of this out, I still can’t believe it’s so complicated. Apple should both document this and remove as much friction as possible, for example by allowing domain names to be verified by DNS records alone and providing much more detailed error messages when things go wrong.

I almost forgot to post to my blog for the 6th day of trying games on Apple Arcade. Remember those sliding block puzzles? The Enchanted World is that but set in a wonderful fantasy design where your character moves through the story using magic to set the world right.

I was going to stop my micro review there, but after I started playing the game I came across the story of the developer and designer who created it. Apple featured them in this newsroom blog post:

For creators and friends Ivan Ramadan and Amar Zubcevic, both 33, the game is much more than that: It’s a metaphor for a child growing up in a time of war. Both Ramadan and Zubcevic grew up in Sarajevo during the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, and both had parents that used creativity to shield them from the violence and danger around them.

There’s also a longer feature on CNET about the developers.

Matt Mullenweg blogged that Automattic has received a Series D funding round of $300 million. He had some interesting comments in an interview with TechCrunch about how much they want to grow WordPress, comparing it to Android’s 85% market share and even going beyond that:

What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web. We want every website, whether it’s e-commerce or anything to be powered by WordPress. And by doing so, we’ll make sure that the web can go back to being more open, more integrated and more user-centric than it would be if proprietary platforms become dominant.

I’ve long been inspired by Automattic. They were the best company to acquire Tumblr and they seem well-positioned to make a dent in the dominance of Facebook and Twitter. But also I’m thinking about one of the IndieWeb’s principles:

Plurality. With IndieWebCamp we’ve specifically chosen to encourage and embrace a diversity of approaches & implementations. This background makes the IndieWeb stronger and more resilient than any one (often monoculture) approach.

WordPress is at 34% of web sites right now, and I can easily see it getting to 50%. Growing bigger than that might take away one of the beautiful things about the web: the diversity and flexibility to move between platforms. I’m rooting for Automattic to take market share away from the big social networks, but there should be a variety of tools available to build web sites, including platforms like Micro.blog.

We added Sign in with Apple to the next version of Micro.blog for iOS 13. It can be used to sign in to an existing Micro.blog account, or to create a brand new Micro.blog account right from iOS. It is the fastest way to start blogging.

Because Micro.blog doesn’t have passwords, in previous versions we had to send you an email to confirm signing in. With Sign in with Apple, we can skip this email verification and quickly sign you in with Touch ID or Face ID.

If you have an existing Micro.blog account and use Sign in with Apple with the same email address, you’ll be signed in to your current account. If you pick an email address that doesn’t match the email address used in Micro.blog, or if you choose Apple’s private email relay, Micro.blog will create a new account and start a hosted blog trial for you.

A few things to be aware of:

• You can have multiple email addresses associated with your Apple ID. When signing in, make sure to pick the one that is used by Micro.blog.
• If you accidentally create a new Micro.blog account, you’ll want to delete it so that you can sign in to your real account.
• Micro.blog cannot currently send email through Apple’s private relay service. I hope this will be resolved soon.

This update to Micro.blog ships on Thursday with iOS 13. If you’re already running iOS 13, you can try this update early by joining the TestFlight beta.

Last year after Twitter changed their streaming API so that apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot could no longer use it, I blogged that I wanted to do everything I could to support third-party Micro.blog apps:

With that in mind, I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to offer a push notification service for developers. iOS and Android developers could upload their push notification credentials from Apple and Google. Micro.blog would store them and deliver push notifications directly to third-party apps.

That is now a reality. Today there’s a new beta of Gluon for Micro.blog that includes push notifications. Micro.blog sends the notifications on behalf of Gluon so developer Vincent Ritter doesn’t need to run his own server.

The other popular iOS app for Micro.blog is the open source Icro. I’ve added a comment to this Icro issue on GitHub with details on the new API. I’m looking forward to working with anyone building native apps for Micro.blog to enable push notifications for their app.

I can’t believe it’s been 2 years since Brent Simmons announced JSON Feed. In the first months after the spec was released there was a lot of activity on GitHub and interest from developers. The format has proven really useful in Micro.blog, in feed readers like Feedbin or Brent’s own NetNewsWire 5, and just to make it easier to build new web tools.

We’ve received some great feedback, and I’ve been reviewing a bunch of the issues on GitHub. There are a few things that we want to incorporate into the spec. I’ve posted a list of proposed changes over on GitHub.

Richard Williams passed away a couple of weeks ago. The day after, my family and I went to see the Animation Show of Shows at the Alamo Drafthouse. It was a wonderful collection of films — beautiful to experimental, funny or thoughtful, with a variety of different mediums.

But thinking about it now, none of the short films were really in the painstaking hand-drawn style of Richard Williams, who had incredibly high standards for what animation could be. He would embrace doing the work of drawing every frame, with few holds or shortcuts.

The films in the show weren’t trying to do that, and that’s fine. But I hope someone again picks up the depth and quality that Richard Williams brought to the industry. I blogged about him back in 2013, and I remain inspired today.

Blogs hosted on Micro.blog provide a lot of flexibility with custom CSS, themes, and Hugo templates. But if you are making major changes to the design of your blog, you may not want to do that live and risk breaking anything for your site visitors.

I often test out changes on a 2nd fake blog I created on Micro.blog. It’s like an extra sandbox that I can play in to edit templates without touching my real blog, and it’s useful enough that I want everyone else to be able to do the same thing.

Micro.blog now lets you create a free test blog for your account with a URL like username-test.micro.blog. There’s a button to create the test blog under Posts → Design → Edit Custom Themes. It will appear as a free 2nd blog on your account, and you can post to it, upload files, or try out custom themes.

Because custom themes on Micro.blog can be shared across multiple blogs, when you’re happy with any changes you’ve made in your new theme, you can assign the theme to your main blog and all those changes will be applied to both sites. I’ve also added a “duplicate” option that makes a new copy of the theme so you can edit templates in the duplicate theme on your test blog.

I’ve updated Micro.blog today to help Mastodon users follow people on Micro.blog. It used to be that if you clicked from Mastodon to a Micro.blog user, you just ended up their blog home page. Now it redirects to a special version of the Micro.blog profile screen which includes a follow form.

This is very similar to Mastodon’s default remote follow form, or Aaron Parecki’s profile page. For more about how to use your own blog’s domain name as your Mastodon-compatible username, see this Micro.blog help page about ActivityPub.

DHH blogs about giving a chance to smaller companies to help fix the problems with massive tech companies controlling so much of the web:

The world is full of alternatives to the Big Tech offerings that give you 95% of the utility for 0% of the regret. But if you can’t even be bothered to give up 5% to help an alternative along, you also can’t be surprised when the alternatives are so few and far between.

This is how I’ve been feeling about Instagram. I hear people complain about Facebook all the time. But then some of those same people turn around and post photos to Instagram instead of their own blog.

Complaining helps when the company listening cares about the same problems we do. For example, Apple and privacy. But the solution to massive social networks is already in our hands.

Curtis Herbert has a great blog post about starting an Android version of his app Slopes. Adding social features made it more compelling to support multiple platforms:

In any given group of friends the odds of a mix of both Android and iOS users is very high (not to mention Europe is a big potential market for me, and Android is much larger over there than in the states). If someone on iOS loves Slopes, but their friend group ends up using one of my competitors because it supports both platforms and therefore the entire group can join in on the in-app fun, that’s going to go poorly for Slopes.

What I find so interesting about this decision is that Curtis seems to be intentionally expanding the scope of Slopes. Everything he writes about with Android makes sense if you first assume that the social features will be an important selling point and grow the audience for the app. Other indie developers might instead choose to keep the app focused on iOS and solve a more narrow set of problems, and that’s fine too.

I’m thinking of my discussion with Daniel Jalkut on last week’s Core Intuition about whether we should try to change the world (which often means bigger apps and more platforms to reach the most people) or focus on just building an app that’s really good at what it does (but might not be revolutionary).

Micro.blog would benefit from an official Android version, so a lot of Curtis’s post resonated with me. Luckily the third-party app Dialog (and upcoming app Gluon) can help fill that void in Micro.blog in a way that isn’t possible with non-platform apps like Slopes.

Dialog is a full-featured Micro.blog app for Android. Jacky Alciné blogged about it today while thinking about Micro.blog and IndieWeb mobile apps:

I decided to look at the client landscape for micro.blog, the most mature social platform that’s built around IndieWeb principles. I defined maturity as a platform that allowed immediate on-boarding into the community, provided a very simple (no-explainer) interface on how to get started and made it easy to go beyond it. That level of support is something I want my suite of tools to have - and I’m still working on it.

Because Dialog is such a polished app and already open source, I wondered if it could be the foundation for additional IndieWeb-related features for Android users. The official repository with the source code for Dialog is on Gitlab here.

I’ve also copied it to the Micro.blog account on GitHub, in case it’s useful for any GitHub users to browse or fork the code there. Thanks again to Mike Haynes for Dialog and for making it available in Google Play, as well as open-sourcing it!

Congratulations to Brent Simmons and all the contributors of NetNewsWire for shipping version 5.0 today. Here’s Brent with the announcement:

This release took five years to make, and for four of those years it wasn’t even called NetNewsWire. It was just a year ago that I got the name NetNewsWire back from Black Pixel — and I thank them again for their wonderful generosity.

Each major new version of an app is an opportunity to refocus, and NetNewsWire 5.0 prioritizes all the right things: it’s fast, embraces the open web, and feels at home on the Mac. NetNewsWire 5.0 takes everything Brent learned from previous versions, but rebuilt from scratch with modern features like Feedbin syncing, Dark Mode, and JSON Feed support.

And for folks on Micro.blog, NetNewsWire 5.0 also includes a sharing option to start a new microblog post right from an article you’re reading in NetNewsWire. It’s a great way to quickly share links on your microblog.

I’ve decided to add Tumblr as a cross-posting service in Micro.blog. This means Micro.blog can take your blog posts and automatically copy them to a Tumblr blog.

I usually avoid adding blog hosting services to Micro.blog’s available cross-posting destinations. After all, if it’s a good blog host that I could recommend as your primary blog, why not just post everything there instead of using Micro.blog’s own blog hosting? But the more I’ve used Tumblr in the last couple of weeks, the more I think about Tumblr as a community first and a blog host second.

To add a Tumblr blog in Micro.blog, on the web click Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting” → “Add Tumblr”.

In related news, I’ve removed the upload file size limit when importing a Tumblr blog archive to use Micro.blog hosting. If you have a Tumblr, Medium, or WordPress blog that you’d like to migrate to Micro.blog, click Posts → Import.

Twitter announced in a blog post that they have removed over 900 fake accounts spreading misinformation about the protests in Hong Kong:

This disclosure consists of 936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Overall, these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground. Based on our intensive investigations, we have reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation.

I like that Twitter is being proactive and transparent about this. It’s especially remarkable that they notified a competitor, Facebook, about similar fake accounts on Facebook’s platform.

Unfortunately there’s a deeper problem here. It’s not just the fake accounts and misinformation, but the way that Twitter’s design can be exploited. It is too easy to piggyback on trending hashtags to gain exposure.

Maciej Cegłowski of Pinboard called attention to the promoted tweets:

Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags

I wrote about this in 2018 when introducing Micro.blog’s emoji feature:

Hashtags and Twitter trends go together. They can be a powerful way to organize people and topics together across followers. But they can also be gamed, with troublemakers using popular hashtags to hijack your search results for their own promotion or unrelated ranting.

We’ve expanded search and discovery in Micro.blog slowly for this reason. While Micro.blog is certainly too small to attract the attention of state-run propaganda, there has been spam going through Micro.blog that no one else sees. I’m convinced that limited search, no trends, and active curation are the right foundation so we don’t end up with a design that creates problems when Micro.blog does get bigger.

In all the Mac and iOS software I’ve worked on over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a new release ready as soon as Apple shipped their major updates to macOS or iOS. The timing just never works out, so I update a couple of weeks or months later. For iOS 13, I’m finally ahead of the game.

I just updated the beta of Micro.blog for iOS with a couple fixes, especially for dark mode on iOS 13. There’s more to do, but I feel really good about being able to have this ready.

If you’re running the beta of iOS 13, you can sign up for the Micro.blog beta here. Thanks for testing!

I’m excited to see where Automattic takes Tumblr, but even today there are already several Tumblr-related features built in to Micro.blog. Here are a few ways that Micro.blog can integrate with Tumblr.

Follow Tumblr users on Micro.blog: Micro.blog tries to play nicely with the rest of the web, so you aren’t limited to just following Micro.blog users. To follow someone’s Tumblr blog, on Micro.blog click Discover, then click the search icon, and enter their Tumblr domain name:

Click on the Tumblr user to preview their posts and follow them. Now when they post to their blog, those posts from Tumblr will appear in the Micro.blog timeline. Short posts, photo posts, and art from Tumblr look great in Micro.blog.

Add your Tumblr feed to Micro.blog: If you actively post to Tumblr and also have a Micro.blog account, you can add your Tumblr RSS feed to Micro.blog so that when someone follows you on Micro.blog, they see posts from both your main microblog and your Tumblr blog.

Click Account → Edit Feeds & Cross-posting, then paste in your Tumblr RSS feed:

Import your Tumblr blog to Micro.blog: Maybe you no longer maintain your Tumblr blog and want to move your old posts over to Micro.blog. First, export your posts from the Tumblr dashboard. That will give you a .zip file you can import into Micro.blog under Posts → Import.

Thanks to the “on this day” feature that Jonathan LaCour built for Micro.blog-hosted blogs, I noticed that 7 years ago yesterday I blogged about App.net reaching their funding goal. I still get asked about App.net sometimes. It is easy to look back on something that didn’t last and pick it apart. I’d rather look at the good things that came out of App.net.

When it was shutting down, I blogged my thanks to the App.net community:

I wrote in 2013 that it was not just a Twitter clone but an amplifier for applications that couldn’t be built before. It came along at the right time, took off, and then faded. The App.net founders deserve significant credit and thanks for trying something risky and succeeding to grow a community that lasted so long.

There is a guiding principle in Micro.blog that differentiates it from nearly every other platform. It’s not only about creating an alternative social network. The foundation is around blogs and IndieWeb standards because that’s part of unrolling the damage caused by massive silos.

Micro.blog is also designed around blogs because it gives immediate value to the platform, insulating it against the network effect that drives the success or failure of most other social networks: not all your friends are there yet. Unlike ad-supported platforms, Micro.blog aligns its business model with customer needs. Subscriptions for blog hosting let us deliver the best features we can, and also help support the rest of the platform.

Brent Simmons really said it best:

Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.

I often look back at this quote to help guide me as I evaluate the direction of Micro.blog. I believe that Micro.blog is the first platform of its kind. The closest competition might be Tumblr, acquired yesterday by Automattic.

Of course it was coincidence that Automattic acquired Tumblr pretty much exactly 7 years after App.net was funded. No one is paying attention to those dates. And yet, now that I’ve noticed it, there’s a kind of symbolism to it. Tumblr is effectively being re-funded.

Like Micro.blog, Tumblr is about making blogging easier. Like Micro.blog, Tumblr allows custom domain names for your blog, something no other major social network allows. Unlike Micro.blog, however, Tumblr’s community is only Tumblr blogs. Micro.blog’s community brings together not just Micro.blog-hosted blogs, but people using WordPress, Mastodon, or home-grown IndieWeb solutions.

Matt Mullenweg and the Automattic team have a bunch of work ahead of them to integrate Tumblr into the WordPress ecosystem. I don’t know how that’s going to play out, but I know that preserving all the Tumblr blogs and giving them new life is a good thing.

I wonder if Micro.blog and Automattic are on parallel tracks. Two companies wildly different in size and scope, but we can all learn from platforms that have come and gone, finding our own path to a shared vision of the future that embraces content ownership, supports healthy communities, and deemphasizes massive social networks. I’m wishing the team at Automattic the best.

Micro.blog is not a popularity contest. We don’t have follower counts or public likes because we think those numbers have overshadowed more important aspects of blogging, like the quality of writing and engagement within the community. But we do hear from podcasters using Micro.blog who hope to one day have sponsors for their podcast, and so they do need to know approximately how many listeners they have.

Today we’ve added a setting to enable basic MP3 download counts if you’re hosting your podcast on Micro.blog. It is off by default. It’s likely that most podcasts — especially podcasts that are just getting started — do not have many listeners, and that’s fine! If you don’t plan to have sponsors for your podcast, you can ignore this setting.

It takes time to build an audience. Don’t get discouraged. There’s value in telling your story whether it reaches 5 people or 500. I love recording my microcast Timetable because it helps me think through things I’m working on and share that process with anyone who is interested in Micro.blog.

There aren’t any fancy graphs for this feature. Just a download number for each episode under Posts on the web, next to the “Edit” and “Delete” buttons. You can enable it with a checkbox from Posts → Design. Micro.blog is not tracking the downloads until you enable it, and it doesn’t count you viewing your own podcast, so initially there won’t be anything to see until your podcast feed is refreshed and your MP3s are downloaded again.

With this setting enabled, Micro.blog modifies your podcast feed to use different MP3 download URLs. It may take some time before the new URLs make it to all your listeners.

Micro.blog’s download tracking does not closely follow the IAB guidelines yet. It is intended as a rough estimate. I’ll be working toward IAB compliance in the future.

Happy podcasting! Let me know if you have any feedback.

When I started reading Ruined by Design, my first thought was that I had missed the window for writing my own book, Indie Microblogging, because Mike Monteiro was making all the same points that I was writing about. Luckily that wasn’t the case. Mike does cover some of the problems with social networks, but most of the book is focused on how designers can think about their work. I recommend it. (And it’s just as important for programmers and everyone else who is contributing to a product.)

Mike was also a guest on today’s episode of Presentable with Jeff Veen. I finished the book last month, so the podcast was a nice recap of a few of the main ideas and stories from the book.

I love photo blogs. Last year, Jonathan LaCour wrote Microgram to allow anyone on Micro.blog to paste in a little JavaScript on their blog to show a grid of photo thumbnails. This has been a really popular add-on for Micro.blog — thanks Jonathan! — but we knew we’d eventually need this as a built-in feature.

Today I’ve added a new page for photos so that new blogs hosted on Micro.blog get something that works out of the box without JavaScript. We’re starting with a simple grid of photo thumbnails similar to Microgram, each linking to the microblog post, and I’d like to expand it with more options in the future.

It uses CSS Grid Layout, so you can also customize a bunch of things without changing the template. For example, to change it to 5 equally-spaced columns, click Posts → Design → Edit CSS and paste in:

.photos-grid-container {
  	grid-template-columns: 20% 20% 20% 20% 20% !important;
}

This new photos page is created automatically for any new blogs on Micro.blog going forward. If you already have a page called “Photos” and want to switch to using the new page, you can delete the page you created manually. Micro.blog will then show a “New Photos Page” button to create one of these new pages for you. (You can also rename or re-order the page.)

Apple this week rolled out an updated list of categories for their podcast directory. Some old categories were removed and new categories added. It’s a better fit for what the podcasting world looks like now.

If you have a podcast hosted on Micro.blog, I’ve updated Micro.blog today with the new categories. On the web, click Posts → Design to see the new list. (Your current category will continue to be used until you update your podcast settings.)

Thinking about starting a podcast? Micro.blog podcasting is $10/month and also includes a full blog and video hosting.

I wanted to highlight 2 new blog posts from the Micro.blog community about customizing themes. Because Micro.blog uses Hugo templates, there’s flexibility to change the design or even override our default feeds.

• Chet Collins used a custom theme to change his podcast feed to use different artwork.
• Ricky de Laveaga updated the Hello theme with some CSS tweaks including improvements for dark mode.

As Micro.blog matures, it’s important that we keep the default interface as streamlined as possible. It should be as easy as tweeting to start your first blog post. But I love that there’s a lot of power under-the-hood for people who want to tinker with it.

Micro.blog makes it really easy to post some text and a photo to your blog, but sometimes you want a longer post that includes multiple photos. Because Micro.blog puts all the photos at the end of your post by default, I’ve noticed some people looking for an easier way to draft longer posts.

I’ve added a new “Copy HTML” button next to photos on the Uploads screen in Micro.blog. Using this button, you can first upload multiple photos, then copy and paste the right HTML reference into your blog post draft wherever you want. Happy photo-blogging!

Jason Snell has a post for Macworld reacting to the news that Apple plans to fund original podcasts:

The great thing about podcasts—and I say this as both a listener and a creator of podcasts—is that it is, like the web, a free and open ecosystem for content. You can listen to any podcast in any podcast player. If Apple creates podcasts that can only be listened to in Apple’s own app, it is furthering a potential future where your favorite shows are scattered across multiple services and siloed in different apps.

No one is too alarmed by this Apple rumor, because maybe nothing will come of it. But a good way to think about it is to imagine if the popularity of Apple and Spotify were reversed. Imagine if Spotify was the one with 60% of the podcast app market and then they decided to release Spotify-only exclusive “podcasts”. It would be an obvious threat to the openness of podcasts.

I wish I could give Apple the benefit of the doubt on this, but the risks are too great. Apple has more power than any other company over the podcast ecosystem. Just because they haven’t interfered with anything so far doesn’t mean they can’t still ruin what we’ve got.

I want to give everyone a heads-up about a change we’re making next week. When Micro.blog launched, it was really important to me that the service was as affordable as possible. Because of that, there were options to use it for free with an external blog, use it with the $2/month cross-posting, or have Micro.blog host your blog for $5/month. We later added podcasting and video hosting for $10/month.

As Micro.blog has improved, I think our blog hosting has become a great value. The price of the $5 subscription won’t change. But the $2 subscription introduces a lot of confusion. It’s priced per domain name, and it’s not obvious when or how to switch between the different plans. It also adds a lot of complexity on the backend to manage all the possible subscriptions.

To fix this, we’re removing the $2 plan and updating the $5 blog hosting to also include cross-posting from any domain name. If you’re only using the $2 cross-posting, don’t worry. We will switch you to the new plan but apply a $3 monthly credit to your account indefinitely, effectively keeping your original pricing.

Pricing Micro.blog has always been interesting because it needs to appeal to people who just want a new social network (usually $0/month) but also to people who want a great blog host (often $20/month). I think these changes keep the right balance to accommodate the different needs that people have with Micro.blog, while making it simpler for new users. Thanks for your support!

Last year after IndieWeb Summit in Portland, I sat down with IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki to talk about the history of IndieWebCamp for my upcoming book, Indie Microblogging. Only part of the interview will fit in the book, so I’m including a full transcript of our conversation below and on GitHub, where I’ll be incorporating any edits and also publishing future chapter drafts.

Manton: Take me back to 2011: the founding of IndieWebCamp. What did that feel like? How you all got together. How the first IndieWebCamp got started.

Tantek: You weren’t at the Federated Social Web Summit in 2010, were you? Did you hear about it? Did it even cross your radar?

Manton: I assume it did. But that’s already been a while.

Aaron: Nine years ago…

Tantek: Because I think that’s where the inspiration originally came from.

Aaron: So 2010 was the Federated Social Web Summit — in Portland — and that was the invite-only but “you could kind of ask for an invite”-style event.

Tantek: Which we now know greatly biases towards people that feel privileged enough to ask for an invite, so it’s sort of a bad way to do it. I didn’t even put that together until the last year. Yeah, don’t do that kind of private conference.

Aaron: So I ended up there, Tantek, as well as a bunch of others. It was a fun group, but the thing that we took out of it was that the focus seemed to be on people building things for other people, building specifically platforms. They were coming with platforms and trying to make them work together. Which is a fine goal, but that wasn’t my personal interest in it necessarily. So it was more like, “oh, I have this Buddycloud thing, let’s make it work with Friendica”. Or Diaspora was there.

Tantek: The Diaspora 4 were there, which was cool. That’s where I really got to spend time with them.

Aaron: And there was also a lot of solving problems in theory without actually testing them out or building something first. And a couple of pretty in the weeds discussions that I ended up sitting in on and was like, “this is really complicated”. I feel like there is a better solution. That was where SWAT0 the concept was formed as well, right? Interoperability tests between social networks — can someone post a photo of somebody else using a different system be notified that they were tagged in a photo and then a third person comment on the photo and have that comment notification appear on the person who favorited it. Everybody has to be using different software for that test to pass. SWAT0: social web acid test.

Tantek: It was actually really hard.

Aaron: Very hard. It still is.

Tantek: As far as we could tell no one actually got it to work across different sites.

Aaron: The goal with SWAT0 was to have three different systems interoperating. Several people claimed that they supported everything needed for SWAT0 themselves. But by definition that doesn’t solve SWAT0 because you need three different implementations. So there were several people who were like, “I can be every person in this — every role in this test”. But then there’s no one to test it with, because only one person would do that at a time. And we are still kind of in that situation sadly. It’s still a very hard problem. We did in 2015 have a demo of it working between three different recommendations, although each implementation only was able to be one or two of the roles of the three.

Manton: And that was using Webmention?

Aaron: Yeah, exactly.

Manton: So back in 2002 what was the technology to.. It was way after Pingbacks and Trackbacks.

Aaron: Yeah, the thought was the OStatus stack. Atom. Salmon for the responses.

Tantek: PubSubHubbub, I think.

Aaron: I believe so, yeah. For finding the photo in the first place.

Tantek: But Salmon for the notification.

Aaron: Salmon for the notification of the comment. But in order for someone to see it in the first place they would be following an Atom feed, probably, with PubSubHubbub.

Manton: And so now Salmon is making a comeback with Mastodon, right?

Aaron: No, it’s already done.

Manton: It did briefly make a comeback and then got replaced.

Aaron: Mastodon ripped out their whole code and replaced it with ActivityPub. So after that event we were like, “okay, that was cool, but we want to focus on people being more empowered individually to participate in this federated network.”

Tantek: Everyone got to give lightning talks. That was part of it.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah.

Tantek: Which was great. About any topic, like why they were there and… What was your lightning talk on?

Aaron: Probably location stuff, because I was just starting geolocate at the time. But the sense I got was that the assumption was that in order to participate in a federated social network, you have to be on a platform that supports the protocols. The only way to do that was that if someone built the platform that interoperates with other platforms, and then you as an individual join one of those platforms. There was no “just my web site”.

Tantek: Or one-person platform.

Aaron: Or single-person platforms was like: why would you do that? That was the feeling there. That was why we did IndieWebCamp the year after, because we wanted to approach it from the grassroots of: someone should be able to take their web site and be able to use their web site to participate in the same distributed social network — federated social network.

Manton: As the conference was wrapping up, did you have a feeling that y’all would probably do IndieWebCamp, or was it making friends and catching up with people.

Tantek: We were mostly catching up with people, meeting new people. I was just looking at my notes, because I actually put my entire talk from it on their wiki because it’s like that’s how it’ll survive. Turns out wikis are more persistent than PowerPoint.

Manton: So in that time… 2010 is actually a really interesting time because Twitter had been around for a few years and really gained a lot of steam, and actually a lot of early bloggers — who were blogging all the time in the early days — around 2010-ish they dropped off. They started just doing Twitter.

Tantek: Even just 2009…

Manton: Twitter satisfied that “I’m going to post something”. And you can see that. I went back recently and looked at a bunch of people that were doing blogging software. Founders of Blogger, Movable Type, and Six Apart people. And very few of them kept their blog through that period. So could you sense that at the time?

Tantek: Totally. Just even personally, the last blog post I wrote on my old blog was in August of 2008. I did not have anything on my own site in 2009. 2009 was a really weird transitional period, because I both saw that happening and I saw it happening to myself. And then the other thing that happened simultaneously — which I think helped — is that Twitter was really unreliable in 2009. We all switched to Twitter and then it got really unreliable. It was so frustrating.

Tantek: First of all I’m embarrassed that I’m not posting to my own site anymore, and then I’m frustrated because this damn tool is never up. And that’s really where I came up with the idea of, well, I should post to my own site and if I could set up a system where I can always just post to my own site, whether or not Twitter was down, then I can just have my site post to Twitter when it comes back up. And I can abstract away that frustration of their site being down. Abstract away their unreliability, while still getting that participation with friends thing. So 2009 is when I started working on what’s now my web site. Launched in 2010. January 1st, I’m like: from now on everything is going on my site first.

Tantek: And then the Federated Social Web Summit happened and I was like, “woah, okay”. But the platform perspective that Aaron was pointing out. Wait a minute, you don’t need to use a whole platform. Everyone can do this themselves. So that was my lightning talk, basically, and it even ended with… I’ll show you the summary: use your own site as your identity; publish on your own site; and then syndicate with PubSubHubbub. That’s still true.

Manton: And the first one, importantly… The very first principle of the IndieWeb principles is that. Use your own site, own your own content. Domain names are a big part of that. Really the biggest thing. Unfortunately domain names have not changed since 2010. They haven’t changed since 2000. It’s interesting that something so important, that “step one” is still really confusing to people.

Aaron: Yeah.

Tantek: Oh, that’s you’re going with that. I thought you were going with like, “they’re still around”.

Aaron: And it’s still just as hard.

Manton: I’m going with: why aren’t they easier? Because a lot of what the IndieWeb does, if you look at Microformats and Micropub and all these core parts of the IndieWeb, they’re built on HTML and HTTP where we have some control over making things easier and having other standards.

Tantek: Yes.

Manton: Is there hope for making DNS also easier for people, or are we just kind of stuck with this for a while?

Tantek: The irony is I don’t know what you’re comparing it to. Look at the amount of time it takes you and the form you have to fill out to get a new phone number. I would challenge you to do an A/B test. How long it takes to get a new phone number from scratch, not having a phone number, to how long it takes to getting a new domain name. And I would bet that it’s actually fewer steps to buy a new domain name. So I definitely sympathize that it could be easier to buy a domain name, but compare it to other forms of identity that people take for granted. It is less work to do. Or maybe the hard part is picking a domain name.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s part of it. A phone number just gets assigned to you.

Manton: And everybody kind of knows how phone numbers work, I guess. No one’s surprise that there’s a 3-digit area code, and a 3-digit number, and a 4-digit… Whereas with domain names there’s certain things (and IP addresses) that people are surprised by.

Aaron: Getting the domain is the first step. But then once you have it you have to know that you now need to set up DNS on it and point it at a hosting provider. And that’s the part that’s different from a phone number. Because once you have a phone number, it almost certainly came with a phone. You don’t buy a phone number and then assign it to a phone. You do that all as one step.

Tantek: It turned out that the equivalent of phone number registrars, all cell phones… It would be as if every domain name registrar — and a lot of them do now — sell hosting. So right off the bat, they’re like, “here’s a domain name, do you want us to flip on a simple web site for you?” A lot of them do that. That has changed.

Aaron: Yeah. That’s true, actually. That has gotten better. It used to be that GoDaddy or Name.com or NameCheap only did domain names. And then they all started adding hosting plans to their product.

Tantek: Which makes sense.

Aaron: It absolutely makes sense. And when you use the hosting plan provided by the registrar it is actually very easy, because it is more like you just go there, type in the domain you want, pay, and then now you have the empty shell to put stuff on. Doing something with the empty shell of a hosting plan is another step, but at least they do make the DNS to hosting step combined into one.

Tantek: Other hosting providers have made it easier to one-key turn on WordPress, turn on Known. I don’t know there’s a domain name registrar that also has easy hosting that also has a simple turn on a web site CMS.

Aaron: DreamHost does a pretty good job of it.

Tantek: That’s true. DreamHost probably has the most pieces that they’ve put together. And they were the first to do LetsEncrypt automation. Domain name, security, hosting. So that’s evolved. It’s very impressive to watch, even during the whole eight years of IndieWebCamp.

Manton: And comparing it to the phone numbers, if you go get a phone from someone they can always give you a phone number — if you go to Verizon or AT&T. And maybe where we need to be eventually with the web is that any place you can go get a web site can give you a domain name, which is not really true right now. The big companies can, but a smaller webhost can’t necessarily.

Aaron: You can, but it’s more work as a service provider. There’s plenty of domain resellers. I built a system to do that at one point, where we wanted to be able to offer domains as part of the product we were offering. So I found a domain reseller that had an API and hooked it all up. You would come to us and click the button for, “I want this web site with this theme.” It worked seamlessly.

Tantek: Even GitHub should it doing that, right?

Aaron: Right, for GitHub Pages. Instead of just offering GitHub Pages and being able to map a domain to it, why shouldn’t they offer their own domain registration.

Tantek: And make a little money. There’s incentive there.

Aaron: It would be a no brainer for Micro.blog to offer that feature. Sign up for the Micro.blog account, then right there type in what domain you want and it just works.

Manton: I’d love to do that.

Tantek: It’s also the kind of thing you could always add. “Yeah, now I’m ready for a domain name.”

Aaron: Yeah, you upgrade your subdomain to a real domain.

Manton: So you had mentioned with the changes in the last seven years… Going back to that first IndieWebCamp. We’re just wrapping up IndieWeb Summit 2018. Does it feel the same in terms of the community and what people are excited about? Obviously standards and everything else have evolved.

Aaron: The biggest shift in that context that I’ve seen between the original ones, specifically, although even from 2014 to now. Now we actually have a lot more stuff working together than we did in 2011, obviously, and even in 2014. At the beginning it was the same goal, the same ideals, but we couldn’t demo me commenting on someone’s post. That didn’t work until way later. And because of that the sessions were all drastically different, because there wasn’t a thing to coalesce around except for the ideals of own your data, have a domain name, do stuff on your web site.

Aaron: So if you go back and look the original sessions from 2011 to 2014, it’s a wide variety of things. Now at IndieWebCamps you end up with a lot of people who are coming to it and then become aware that there are things that work and then want to learn how to do those things. Now at the beginning of the second day we have the intro to the building blocks session. What is IndieAuth. Get Webmention working. Even in some of the IndieWebCamps there will be a whole track of unconference sessions about those building blocks for the whole day, where it’s people who know they want to learn these things that already exist.

Tantek: You had a session called “own your phone number”.

Aaron: That’s right. Yeah, I have actually kept that up. My phone number and my cell phone are completely disconnected. They’re not coupled. So my phone number is provided by Google Voice and I forward it to a phone number that I don’t know that my cell plan is on. I have no idea what my phone number is — the one on my phone. And I give out my Google Voice number as my identity.

Manton: When was that talk?

Aaron: That was 2011.

Tantek: The talks were so varied back then. We were just figuring out so many basics that a lot of the talks were very exploratory. We figured out some things like, “okay, I figured out how to syndicate into Buzz and Twitter, how about other places?” Then there was advocacy for plain text formats and there was a BitTorrent session.

Aaron: Yeah, I think that’s the biggest shift I’ve seen is that there’s so much more stuff that’s actually working now that’s functional. And it means that people are coming and wanting to learn that. And of course there’s still the experimental stuff. There was a good set of experimental sessions at this event. But there’s a lot more of: we have stuff working now that you can figure out and learn how to use.

Manton: There are two things, too. There’s all the IndieWeb-friendly formats and protocols are much more mature and established now, so that you could talk about the building blocks as a real thing. But then there’s also… It seems like the software is much further along. A bunch of people will come to the IndieWeb and they use WordPress, because WordPress powers 30% of the internet and it’s super popular. But there’s still a pretty good mix in the demo sessions and what people are hacking on of WordPress stuff and also “no, I rolled my own”.

Tantek: Yeah, in fact lots more rolled their own, which is not representative I think of people out there in general.

Manton: What do you think about the fact that WordPress is a very dominant platform. Is that good because there’s an agreed thing there everyone can use the same plugins, or are there any drawbacks?

Aaron: WordPress specifically because it’s self-hostable, that benefit ends up overriding some of the other drawbacks of that kind of approach. The danger with something being so dominant.. It’s the monoculture problem. We don’t want to be in a situation where we just have WordPress instances talking to each other. That doesn’t actually solve the problem.

Tantek: Or just have Mastodon talking to each other.

Aaron: Just Mastodon or just Diaspora or whatever, right. That’s the danger. That’s the thing we’re trying to avoid.

Tantek: Because that has lots of even worse consequences.

Aaron: Yes, exactly. And even when it’s a friendly company like WordPress that’s behind it, it doesn’t matter — the same problems.

Manton: You start to build like platform-specific… It’s different than just building for the web in general where anybody can bring their own site and plug in. With Mastodon specifically, it’s based on open standards but it also feels very opaque in a way — how stuff talks to each other. It’s a little more difficult to just build a web site and be compatible.

Tantek: It’s also levels of barriers to entry. Because that’s one thing that myself and I think a bunch of people at the 2010 Social Federated Web Summit we’re frustrated with was a lot of the standards being tossed around — every generation has its own standards — were really hard, like Salmon. I tried to read through the spec and understand what it was doing, and I could not wrap my head around enough of it to even start anywhere coding.

Aaron: I had the same experience at that event. I even then later, a year ago, tried to revisit the spec because Mastodon was using it. I feel like I should be able to have my web site just be a part of this network. I refuse to make a new Mastodon account and treat it as a POSSE destination because that completely defeats the purpose of what Mastodon itself is even shooting for, which is an actually distributed social experience.

Aaron: So I was like, “okay, it can’t be that hard now”. Certainly things have gotten better, and I should be able to just take my web site and add the stuff it needs. I still can’t figure it out. And then they went and dropped Salmon anyway and switched to ActivityPub, so I’m glad I didn’t spend my time on that.

Tantek: It turns out that the difficulty of the standard to implement makes a big difference. Because if it’s super difficult then you end up with only a handful — maybe even just one or two people on the planet — that can implement it, and then you get monoculture by default. In effect, not by design. One of the things we realized was that the antidote to that is to make the standards as simple as possible. Literally as dumb and simple, and frankly decomposed. So that’s where we came up with the building blocks idea rather than having a stack. And the idea that building blocks is you pick and choose the ones that you need for your use cases. That doesn’t mean you’re committed to implementing a layer after layer after layer to get to a certain point.

Tantek: That was a big insight. The more accessible the standards are for any developer to build their own solution. That means that the more they’re going to get exercised, the more that they’ll get good interoperability, the more that they’ll be a community around it. Because that’s really what it came down to.

Tantek: I think that’s kind of where the IndieWeb community started to form — started to really grow and gain critical mass — is the growing number of people that were like, “oh, I can implement that on my web site in an hour or less.” And then in a day they could do amazing things.

Aaron: And it’s demonstrated by the fact that like you look at the RSVP list on the event page, there’s like over 20 people who have been able to have their picture show up on the RSVP list, which works by having them publish a page on their own website and send a Webmention to the event page. That’s pretty cool. They didn’t have to go and read through a whole spec that talks about everything from using an app to publish to your site to then have a federation protocol behind it. They just need to know about this much of the whole picture in order to have that work. And that’s a quicker win. Now maybe you expand and start working on the rest of the building blocks.

Manton: Webmention is a great example of something that is as simple as it possibly can be. Can’t really get that down any simpler. So people get it. Microformats is similar in that it’s very approachable and transparent. If you know HTML you can figure out how to do that. You have Microformats 1 and 2, and remind me… Because Microformats predates…

Tantek: …IndieWeb. 2005.

Manton: And did that launch at SXSW or something like that?

Tantek: Shortly thereafter. I think we had sessions about it at SXSW in 2005, in March. The site launched in June itself. Until then we had just been doing it on the Technorati wiki. And my co-founder of the Microformats.org community, Rohit Khare. He’s like, “hey, happy birthday, I bought you a domain name.” And I was like, “really, you think this is worth having its own domain name?” That was my actual response.

Aaron: Wow.

Tantek: Because it seemed like such a simple stupid dumb thing. And he’s like, “yeah.” Okay, I guess we should do this then, and then we set up the site and well, what do you need on a community site. You need a mailing list, you need a blog, you need a wiki. So we set all those up. Since then we’ve learned that the primary ways of actually making progress are the wiki and IRC channel (or Slack) — an archived IRC channel. But that was definitely a response to, again, complexity. Like the whole RDF world — all that insanity — and the Atom/RSS wars back in the day, and then Atom going to IETF instead of W3C because there was a giant fear that it would just be turned into RDF at W3C. That’s how Microformats 1 started.

Tantek: We basically did make it look as dumb as possible. Let’s just take the names of the terms from the vCard spec and use them as class names. That was what I proposed in 2004 at FooCamp. And I ran it by Ray Ozzie at the time, who was like architect at Microsoft or something, but also just from Lotus Notes, you know he has a long history. He’s like, “yeah, that could work.”

Manton: So now we’re almost 15 years since then. Looking forward, there’s a lot of talk about generations — 1, 2, 3, 4 — moving up and making it more approachable and just easier for people to use. Obviously we can’t predict 15 years from now. Who knows what’s going to be around. Is Twitter going to look the same, are blogs going to be the same…

Tantek: Is Twitter going to be around?

Manton: Exactly. There’re no guarantees. A lot of people… So much time, they don’t remember before Twitter and Facebook and so it’s hard to imagine sometimes that those things could go away. But they could. They’re just web sites. Businesses built by people that make mistakes and do good things sometimes.

Tantek: Yeah, sites that become boring and people move on to what’s interesting. I think Facebook really extended their lifespan by buying Instagram.

Manton: So moving forward, how soon… Because I’m kind of impatient and I want everybody to blog on their site immediately, like tomorrow, and for it to be easy to use. But this stuff takes time.

Tantek: Totally.

Manton: Where do y’all see just over the next few years. How close are we to making this more mainstream or is this going to be just more time churning away building tools, trying to spread awareness.

Tantek: It’s kind of hard to predict. I do feel like we’re entering a new phase right now. I think we’ve had two phases, two very long phases of the IndieWeb community so far. One was this I almost want to say like Big Bang phase in the very beginning where there were all these different things coming out. People trying all kinds of different approaches, like Ward Cunningham did his federated wiki project. He figured out a way to do all this Javascript-based wiki federation thing that he loved. And other approaches. But then we started to coalesce around: use your own site, use Microformats. We actually used Pingback for a while until Sandeep Shetty showed up and he’s like, “hey, I’ve got this proposal for a simpler version called Webmention that does this.” And everyone in the community was like, “well, that completely aligns with our values of making things simpler.” So we instantly adopted it even though none of us knew who this guy was. And then we just ran with it.

Tantek: So the first four years was this explosion of getting basics working. We got RSVPs and events working by 2013. And that was kind of like, “whoa, we federate events and RSVPs,” which we were always looking for ways that in the actual things we do, how can we use the technology that we’re making. And after that, clearly we need to get these standards — that are barely specified — solid, testable, working, dependable, to reach the next level of stability.

Tantek: And then there was the second phase which was the work of making all these standards formal and reliable and secure and handling edge cases. We did that from I would say 2014 through 2017, and a lot of that was done in the social web working group that I was co-chair and Aaron was in, edited a bunch of the documents. Evan Prodromou was also co-chair, from StatusNet. But that was kind of a maturing phase. There were a lot of new features people were figuring out all the time, and new infrastructure like Bridgy during that phase.

Tantek: But I feel like a big part of that second phase was everything that was getting built was getting fed back into fixing the standards. People would build something, they would get to the point where they were like, “hey, this didn’t quite work, we have to fix a standard to handle that.” Okay, we fix it. They get it working. We have test suites for all these standards. And now when people are implementing things like Webmention or Micropub or whatever they’re not really running into new problems. What they’re running into is questions of how, not “this doesn’t work”. So we’ve reached this level — and I think Microsub, that might be one of the last pieces that kind of wraps it up. That’s why I feel like we’re closing on the second phase.

Aaron: And IndieAuth, too, because that was only written as a spec this year. Before that it was actually very interoperable, and there were several implementations before, but it was never written down as a proper spec. So that’s now this process of let’s formalize that.

Tantek: And we even formalized how do we update the Microformats parser spec and the vocabulary. That’s been much more formalized as well. So people have an idea that when I proposed something, when can I depend on something vs. what’s experimental, and then what’s the path.

Aaron: So you mentioned these two phases of…

Tantek: The Big Bang, the amazing explosion of cool stuff and then this sort of maturing of the standards to make stuff work reliably even just amongst theirselves. You mentioned you want everyone to have their own presence. But when I think about that I think, “people want things that are reliable, that just work.” And I think this second phase was us doing the difficult plumbing work of the details to make things just work.

Aaron: That leads into what I think is the next phase is getting more people building systems using these building blocks. When that happens, and you’re a great example of this…

Tantek: Yeah, there’s an overlap. I think Micro.blog was evidence that that phase was ready to enter.

Aaron: So now as someone who is building out a platform that is intended for end users… Whereas I’m building my web site. I do not want an end user to use that software. It is not the goal explicitly. But you’re building software that is intended for end users. You now have a pattern to follow where if someone else comes along with the same goal and build something, they work together. And so I think in order to reach the goal of people can just use this stuff out of the box, we need more people building tools that are intended to work out of the box for people on the same stacks. And four years ago, if you had come around and started this thing, there wasn’t a pattern to follow to make that work across implementations. And there is now, because of the work over the last four years, since 2014, of formalizing these specs, and having that actually hardened.

Tantek: And we also did it the hard way.

Aaron: Totally.

Tantek: We tried to do each spec as its own little building block piece. I would say hard but honestly I think greater chance of long-term success. The traditional approach that architects take is the stack approach or platform approach where they figure out the entire API. The whole thing. If you look at how OStatus happened, or even like ActivityStreams and ActivityPub. That’s very much a “we’re going to solve the whole problem”. And then we’ll iterate that whole big thing and then it turns out that’s both really hard to do and once again you end up with the problem that there’s only a handful of people that can implement it.

Aaron: And also I think more importantly that also has the problem of: if you realize there’s a mistake in it, then you have to essentially throw out the whole thing and make a version 2. And Microformats is a good example is this evolution. Microformats 1 vs. Microformats 2… they’re completely incompatible. They don’t work the same way, but you can still send a Webmention with Microformats 1 markup and it works. Webmention doesn’t have to change. So people build out Webmention tools and infrastructure, the thing on top of that is the Microformats to make it actually look good and make a comment work. Microformats can change and evolve, and Webmention doesn’t have to evolve. Whereas when you end up with a monolithic stack, if you’re like, “oh crap, we don’t like the things we decided for this layer in the stack.” We can’t just swap out that layer because then the whole stack breaks. That’s part of why the approach we’ve taken is harder, because you have to treat each one independently and evolve each one on its own schedule. And they all have their own change-control process.

Tantek: It looks more chaotic.

Aaron: Yeah, and it is little more overhead in terms of: each spec has its own document and test suite that is for each one specifically. But I do think that’s the better approach for a longer term success.

Aaron: We’re essentially entering this third phase of now we have stuff, we need the tools built on it, but we also don’t want to then four years from now turn around and say to everybody who’s built these tools, “oh, we’ve changed now, we’ve decided that we’re going this whole different approach and redo all your stuff.” No, we want to make sure that those are all based on ideas that are technically proven and easily swappable in small pieces if you need. But if we were to suddenly say, “we decided that Webmention doesn’t work and we need a third parameter and go fix Micro.blog.” You’d be like, “well crap, now what, do I do that, do I abandon it, break interop and continue iterating on my own product?”

Tantek: The other big thing that happened is that we expanded greatly in Europe. International. I think that really started with… was it 2013, the first Brighton IndieWebCamp? We’re looking to try to scale it beyond — and we’ve done this somewhat in Europe — but I think we want to see more of it. The things in the community running and people running IndieWebCamps and Homebrew Website Clubs without needing to even check with Aaron or me.

Tantek: I would be happy to help out as a guide or mentor more than a leader in that respect. And I think that’s the way we’re going to keep scaling it. And in the next 4 years, I would like to see us in more countries. I would like to see us reach more diverse populations. Maybe people that aren’t just in the tech crowds, but people that are not earning as much money, right? Everyone has a phone number supposedly. No matter what you’re earning or not. And I even hear from developers of new services that kids just use SMS, they don’t even want to deal with email. And so people doing new apps have purely SMS-based sign-up flows and all that. So there’s definitely opportunities to reach — to keep innovating and figuring out how can we reach even a broader set of folks in that regard.

I’ve updated the Discover emoji on Micro.blog to add several new topics:

• breakfast: 🍳 🥞 🥓
• racing: 🏎️ 🏁
• cricket: 🏏
• guitar: 🎸
• knitting & crochet: 🧶
• travel: 🗺✈️

The /posts/discover API for Micro.blog apps has also been updated. It now returns the emoji that Micro.blog is currently tracking, and whether it’s one that is “featured” in the default popup menu in Micro.blog on the web. Since many of the emoji are seasonal, like sports, we can rotate out the default list throughout the year. (The iOS and macOS apps will be updated later to more closely match the web version of Micro.blog’s topics popup menu.)

Greg Morris has imported his WordPress posts to Micro.blog hosting and had a question about referencing photos in a template:

Card previews I really want to be able to solve - does anyone know how to pull an image out of a hugo post in order to put meta property=“og:image” into the head?

Micro.blog uses Hugo themes because they are fast and there’s so much flexibility to customize them. To test this, I created a theme and edited the layouts/partials/head.html template, adding this somewhere along with the other meta tags:

{{ with .Params.images }}
  {{ range first 1 . }}
    <meta property="og:image" content="{{ . }}">
  {{ end }}    
{{ end }}

This looks at the photos on a post and takes the first one, adding its URL to a meta tag. If instead of the original photo you want to include a smaller thumbnail, you can use Micro.blog’s special photos.micro.blog resizing proxy. Here’s an example to include a 300x300 thumbnail:

{{ with .Params.images }}
  {{ range first 1 . }}
    <meta property="og:image" content="https://photos.micro.blog/300/{{ . }}">
  {{ end }}    
{{ end }}

I still want to add more built-in designs, as well as add design settings so that custom themes aren’t necessary for common features. But there’s a lot of power here to make your blog whatever you want it to be.

Micro.blog’s goal is to encourage more people to post to their own blogs instead of only on big social media sites, and to have a great community where conversations can happen from those posts. The goal is not to completely replace any specific social network, but instead to help the future be a little more decentralized, with more variety and independence in the web. Important changes are possible if we don’t concentrate so much of the web’s content only on Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve been happy to see so many people who have found that Micro.blog does supplement existing social media so well that they can spend more time blogging, browsing the Micro.blog timeline, and participating in conversations. Other folks will jump in to Micro.blog from time to time, but might have most of their attention elsewhere, and that’s fine too.

Facebook’s mission is different. They want to connect everyone in the world. Billions of people writing posts and sharing photos on a single domain name. Mark Zuckerberg talks about this often. Sure, some great things can happen when you do that, to bring people closer together, but also terrible things. The trade-off is not worth it.

Micro.blog leaves certain features out on purpose because adding those features risks changing our mission from what it is to what someone else’s mission is. We do want the community on Micro.blog to keep growing so that it’s more diverse and valuable to people, and for many more people to start new blogs that we can host on our platform. We can do that while staying true to our original goals and not falling for the trap of trying to become the next Facebook or Twitter.

I don’t even want to link to that story by Casey Newton at The Verge because it’s so disturbing and tragic. I read the whole thing because as the founder of Micro.blog, where we value the balance between content ownership and curation, I had to understand what Facebook is doing so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

Social networks like Facebook (and Twitter) are designed to reward the sensational video. The timeline algorithm, “like” counts, and quick re-sharing all contribute to surfacing both the best and worst content. Whatever drives engagement.

Facebook is right to hire thousands of content moderators. But they should be real employees with healthy working conditions, not people who Facebook feels no responsibility to take care of. This is the most damning article I’ve ever read about Facebook.

On road trips lately, I’ve been fascinated by out-of-business donut shops. If it’s late in the afternoon, sometimes a donut shop is just closed for the day. But it seems like many are closed for good, the old fryers and cooling racks gathering dust.

Why is this? My guess is that the startup costs for opening a donut shop are less expensive than many types of restaurants. There’s nothing special about a donut shop except that it’s fairly easy to get started, but no guarantee of success, especially in a small town. Most businesses fail.

Jacob Gorban started a new site for musicians to connect on Micro.blog. From the about page:

I had the idea for this list because I’ve had quite a few inspiring music-related discussions on Micro.blog and I wanted to make it easier for musicians to find each other on the service, to facilitate even better discussions and maybe even some collaborations.

Jacob has been posting videos of playing guitar to his blog and on YouTube. Even if you’re not a musician, also check out @JustGoodMusic, a new blog about music from John Philpin, with posts from Jacob and others.

Finally getting around to posting this. The last couple of weeks since WWDC have been busy. But as I usually do, I still want to capture a little of the week in San Jose. (Looking back on my old posts about WWDC from the 2000s is a great reminder of what the earlier conferences were like, and I wish I had more of those posts.)

Arriving Saturday evening in San Jose, I rented a car and checked into my Airbnb. This is the first time I’ve tried Airbnb for WWDC. Hotel prices are out of control and I thought it would be a good way to see a different part of the city. Daniel and I caught up over dinner.

Sunday morning I drove up to San Francisco. I’ve made it a tradition to visit the Walt Disney Family Museum every year, and moving the conference to San Jose hasn’t deterred that. I stopped at Blue Bottle Coffee in San Mateo on the way.

The special exhibit at the museum was Mickey Mouse drawings. It was an incredible collection. Afterward I had a bite to eat at the Presidio Picnic. Fog covered the Golden Gate Bridge.

I picked up Jon Hays from SFO on the way back, and we stopped at the new visitor center for Apple’s spaceship campus, then got coffee and lunch down the road at Chromatic Coffee. Also detoured slightly for a quick look at Winchester Mystery House. (Skipped the $39 tour. Ouch.)

I didn’t need the rental car anymore, so we dropped it back at the airport and took an Uber downtown, planning to go to sfMacIndie and watch game 2 of the NBA finals. That’s when the evening went completely off the rails. We were cruising down the highway and someone rear-ended our Uber so hard it felt like the car was standing still. Everyone was shaken up but okay.

The keynote was packed with new stuff. I knew this was going to be a big year, but I was expecting most of the news to be around Marzipan (Catalyst). That ended up being a small part of the morning. I watched the keynote from AltConf and worked on highlighting WWDC-related posts in our new Discover section for the conference.

I was feeling a little out of it most of the morning. As the day progressed and I saw friends or met new folks, I started to feel better. Brent Simmons held a NetNewsWire meetup in the afternoon.

Tuesday at lunch was our Micro.blog WWDC meetup. This is the 3rd year in a row we’ve held the meetup. It was great catching up with everyone. If you made it to the meetup, thank you! I sent an email to everyone who had RSVP-ed.

That night was The Talk Show Live with John Gruber and his guests Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. Great show.

Wednesday morning I stopped for coffee on 2nd street for a little work before walking over to AltConf. My flight was in a few hours so I had just enough time for one session: Leah Culver’s talk on making the podcast app Breaker as crash-free as possible. (Leah also co-founded Pownce back in 2006. I’m hoping to interview her for my book, Indie Microblogging.)

This was a bit of a strange year for me. While I’m sorry I missed some people and some events, I think it was good that I was back home early. I’m not going to make any other conferences this year. If you’re looking for places to go, I highly recommend IndieWeb Summit in Portland later this month, and Release Notes in Mexico in the fall.

Apple’s new stuff didn’t disappoint. I’m most excited for Catalyst and Sign In With Apple, which I blogged about here. These are both very practical solutions to real problems. The new iPadOS improvements are also welcome, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with SwiftUI. Overall, a great WWDC.

Micro.blog has been updated on the Mac. Here are the changes:

• Added new Open option when clicking a post to open it in your web browser. Useful for copying the link or viewing the post on the author’s blog.
• Added icons for Reply, Favorite, and Conversation.
• Fixed error reporting when posting fails and during timeline loading.
• Fixed photo compression to be more consistent across Micro.blog platform.

I tried many different UIs for this before settling on “Open”, including a share menu to match iOS. Nothing felt right. By adding icons for all the options, I could make “Open” use the default web browser’s icon, which helps convey what will happen. (It uses stylized versions of Safari, Chrome, or Firefox icons.)

Choose “Check for Updates” or grab the latest version from the download page.

Today I sent the following update to Kickstarter backers. I wanted to give everyone a progress update on writing the book, and a reminder about some of the new stuff in Micro.blog.

When I launched the Kickstarter for Micro.blog, I promised to write a book about independent microblogging. For the last 2 years Micro.blog has needed most of my attention, but as the platform has grown and matured, I’m finding more time to work on the book.

The book is not a simple how-to for creating a microblog. That is part of it, but we already have a help site with tutorials on microblogging. The book is also a history and guide for taking back social networking from massive platforms.

I have been repurposing draft sections of the book to my blog as posts. One of the latest is about open gardens — how we can think about the role of curation in social networks.

There are also interviews in the book. I sat down with IndieWeb co-founders Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki to talk about the first IndieWebCamp conference and new challenges, recording the full conversation. Today I have been working on transcribing it.

If you haven’t kept up with Micro.blog news, we were just covered last month in an article by Cal Newport for The New Yorker. And we’ve added many new features, from video hosting and blog categories to custom themes based on Hugo.

No one said that it would be easy to provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook based on the open web, encouraging thousands of new bloggers in the process. It has been years of really hard work, with more to do.

If you still believe in the mission of Micro.blog, I would love your support. Fire up the Micro.blog app if it has been a while, dust of your blog, upgrade to a paid subscription, and let us know what we can improve next.

Thanks as always.

It was a good week at WWDC. Micro.blog helped sponsor last night’s LIVE near WWDC concert, and we held our 3rd annual meetup on Tuesday afternoon. I just sent the following email to everyone who RSVP-ed to the meetup.

Thanks to everyone who was at our WWDC meetup! If you couldn’t make it, or I missed talking to you in person, you can always send me an email if you have any questions or feedback.

Throughout the week at WWDC, I was asked how Micro.blog is going. New people join the platform every day, thanks to word of mouth, blog posts, and even mainstream stories like the article in The New Yorker. I’m an optimist. I believe if more people blog and use open tools, the web will be better, and platforms like Micro.blog will thrive.

But it doesn’t happen by accident. Facebook and Twitter are massive platforms. Our team at Micro.blog is tiny. Every time you tell someone about Micro.blog it makes a difference. Every paid subscription gets us a little further.

I hope everyone has enjoyed their time in San Jose! Your support of Micro.blog means a lot.

This is one of the most interesting announcements from WWDC for me. Aaron Parecki wrote a detailed technical post for Okta about it, as well as a post on his blog:

Sign In with Apple is a good thing for users! This means apps will no longer be able to force you to log in with your Facebook account to use them.

There are also 2 sessions at WWDC: Introducing Sign In with Apple and What’s New in Authentication, Safari, and WebKit.

I plan to support Sign In with Apple in Micro.blog. We don’t have passwords, and we require verifying an email address before setting up your account on Micro.blog, so using Sign In with Apple should make the initial sign up go more smoothly. It could also be an option for existing users who need to sign in again and don’t want to wait for the confirmation email.

Ben Thompson covered more about sign in on Stratechery this week:

Apple is going to leverage its monopoly position as app provider on the iPhone to force developers (who use 3rd party solutions) to use Sign In With Apple. Keep in mind, that also means building Sign In With Apple into related websites, and even Android apps, at least if you want users to be able to login anywhere other than their iPhones. It was quite the announcement, particularly on a day where it became clear that Apple was a potential target of U.S. antitrust investigators.

I’m generally against the App Store review guidelines becoming even more restrictive. I’d rather developers choose to adopt Sign In with Apple because it’s better than using Facebook and Twitter rather than be required to do so on Apple’s schedule. But in this case, I think the end result will be positive.

People often ask me how we “win” against the big social networks, bringing more open platforms and indie blogging to everyone. It happens in small steps, not overnight. Sign In with Apple can be one of those small steps. Anything that moves people away from signing in with Facebook and Twitter is part of the solution.

The 3rd annual WWDC Micro.blog meetup will be today at 12pm outside Grace Deli & Cafe. If you’re attending WWDC this week, grab a to-go box lunch and meet us there, or you can get a sandwich or wrap first from the cafe. Jean, Jon, and I will be there until 2pm.

It’s less than a block from the convention center: 303 Almaden Blvd. View the location in Google Maps or Apple Maps.

We’ll have some more Micro.blog stickers and we’ll also be giving away a VIP ticket to the LIVE near WWDC benefit concert for App Camp for Girls. We’d love to talk to anyone who is currently using Micro.blog or interested in learning more about indie microblogging.

Hope to see you there! Thanks for all your support.

In technology, the walled garden is a platform where one vendor controls distribution. If you want to make an iPhone app, your only choice is for Apple to approve it and sell it in the App Store. If you want to send a tweet, your only choice is to register on Twitter’s platform.

Walled gardens like the App Store are user-friendly and developer-hostile. They take power away from independent publishers and put it in the hands of gatekeepers. The problem is exclusivity: there is only one gate, and those stuck outside are unable to distribute the same content. You can make Android apps, but not iPhone apps. Nothing exists outside the walls that closely resembles what is inside.

Twitter is also a walled garden. Like the App Store, it is a closed platform with proprietary formats and a limited API. The difference is that Twitter’s garden is poorly curated and full of weeds. The walls are in such disrepair it’s hard to even tell where they are.

Mike Monteiro emphasized this frustration in a post about the problems facing Twitter’s leaders. He talked about meeting in person with Jack Dorsey:

We discussed Twitter’s role in the world stage. And I admired his vision, but feared his approach. Jack, and to an extent Twitter’s pet porg Biz Stone, have always believed that absolute free speech is the answer. They’re blind to the voices silenced by hate and intimidation. The voices that need to be protected. But anyone who’s ever tended a garden knows that for the good stuff to grow, you have to deal with the bad stuff. You can’t let the weeds choke the vegetables.

The issue isn’t that Twitter doesn’t care. It’s instead a design flaw in the platform. Because tweets don’t exist outside of Twitter, when you’re banned from Twitter, you need to start over with a new format or on a new social network. For this reason, and because their business depends on a large user base, Twitter is hesitant to throw anyone off their service. They’re unwilling to tend the garden for fear of pulling too many weeds.

It doesn’t matter who is guarding the walled garden’s gate if increasingly no one wants to go inside. So there’s a better word than “gatekeeper” to describe what we’re really after in building a great community-focused platform. It’s “curator”. Someone who is responsible for maintaining the best experience for users.

The answer to a walled garden is not to create a platform without rules. It’s not outsourcing decisions to algorithms, with recommended users and topics that can be gamed or lead new users astray. That’s not enough for the challenges brought to us by massive, ad-based social networks, where fake news and hate can spread quickly.

We need a new approach. Not controlled only by algorithms, but also not a walled garden that limits distribution of content. We need a system that prioritizes curation while preserving the freedom to publish outside of silos, with APIs based on the IndieWeb that are open by default instead of locked down with developer registration.

I think of this as an open garden. It’s an open platform that also cares deeply about maintaining a healthy environment. Outside of the garden, the soil is the same and the same plants can grow, and you are free to copy flowers and trees from inside the garden and cultivate them yourself or let them grow wild. But inside is well-curated. Inside strives to be a high quality, safe environment.

In my Kickstarter video for Micro.blog, I talked about this for social networking and blogs:

If we start to separate the publishing from the social network, it unlocks something. It empowers writers to feel like they own their work, even if that’s short posts. And it frees social networks to build a safe community, without worrying about censorship, because no matter what the networks do you can always post to a site with your name on it.

The fundamental problem in walled gardens like the App Store and Twitter is that they are closed. If they open up, they could in fact double-down on curation. There would be no need to loosen their quality standards because there’s an easy path to publishing without review by using the open web.

I first wrote about this in 2014 in the context of learning from Beats Music. For Apple to deemphasize their algorithmic top 200 lists in the App Store they would need to focus on curation. Here’s what Beats was doing:

Instead, they have a bunch of people — musicians and writers who deeply care about music — curating playlists. The top 25 playlists in a genre are so buried in the app that I had to search them out just to write this blog post, because they seem to carry no more weight than any other playlist. Much more common are playlists like “our top 20 of 2013”. That’s not a best-selling list; it’s based on real people’s favorites.

After Apple acquired Beats Music, they brought some of those curation lessons over to Apple Music, and later redesigned the App Store with more featured apps and stories. There is only so much they can do, because the foundation of a walled garden is difficult to change.

Twitter has likewise created an environment that ties their hands on curation, with discovery driven by trending hashtags and retweets. And for each rare time a popular account is banned for hate speech, there are still thousands of trolls who are making life miserable for users. Because there is no alternative, Twitter must allow nearly all content on their service. Because it exists apart from the open web, Twitter must give its worst users too much leeway before banning their account.

The open garden solves this problem. It’s the same web inside a platform like Micro.blog as on the rest of the internet. By adopting open standards but also drawing a line across which we can apply community rules, it’s possible to build features that protect users.

By encouraging the use of personal domain names, when Micro.blog does need to ask a member of the community to leave for violating our guidelines, that blogger can take their domain name and content with them, continuing to post to their own blog but blocked from interfering with the community. The curators of the platform have more freedom to block harassing posts because those problematic users can retreat to their own web site and leave everyone else in the community alone.

To summarize:

• Open gardens have curators instead of gatekeepers.
• Open gardens use standards so that the same formats exist inside and outside the platform.

This is only possible by embracing the open web. I believe it’s an important part of the way forward for all great platforms.

Love this new podcast from Joe Cieplinski. It’s a great example of trying something new with a short-form microcast. The first episode is really well edited, with everything from recording to publishing entirely on iOS:

Edited in Ferrite on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. Show notes composed in Drafts. Published with Wavelength. No Mac involved. Micro.blog handles all hosting and publishing to the feed.

Seeing this kind of thing is exactly why we added podcast hosting to Micro.blog. There are a lot of people out there with a story to tell or a new way to tell it. It should be easy and inexpensive to start a podcast that you own, with your own domain name, that works with open standards.

Neil Stephenson has written a new book. In an interview with PC Magazine, he talks about the problems with social media:

We’ve turned over our perception of what’s real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they’re not scalable and if they’re not scalable they can’t make tons and tons of money.

I think more social networks should do things that don’t scale, prioritizing safety over profit. For example, in Micro.blog the featured posts in Discover are curated by humans instead of algorithms.

Significant parts of Facebook and Twitter run unattended. There was more pushback against Facebook last week after they refused to remove the edited Nancy Pelosi video, choosing instead to try to educate users that the video was fake. Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, went on CNN to defend their decision. She described how Facebook works with fact-checking organizations to independently confirm whether something is accurate:

As soon as we get a rating from them that content is false, then we dramatically reduce the distribution of that content, and we let people know that it is false so they can make an informed choice.

I signed in to Facebook to try to understand what they had done. I actually had trouble finding the video at first, maybe because none of my friends on Facebook had shared it. Searching for Nancy Pelosi did include Facebook groups such as “Nancy Pelosi is Insane” and “Americans Against Nancy Pelosi”, featured prominently in the search results. I finally found the video, but there was no callout that it was fake. (The version I saw was captured with a camera pointed at the video playing elsewhere, likely confusing Facebook’s algorithm for finding an exact copy of the video.)

Facebook is trying to solve this problem, but it’s a band-aid on a system that is working as designed to surface “relevant” content for more ad views. It’s not enough.

At the beginning of the month, I started a new blog post series: visiting a city park each day for 30 days. I’m now 23 days in, wrapping up the final week before I leave for WWDC in San Jose. For some parks, we’ve brought a picnic lunch, and for others I’ve sat with my iPad and worked on blog posts or the upcoming book. A few days there wasn’t time for anything but a short walk around and photo.

Unlike my previous 30-day series for libraries and coffee shops back in 2016, I’ve been consistent about taking a photo every day, which I’ve collected together as thumbnails on the main page:

Watching that grid of photos grow from a single photo to dozens is a daily reminder of how progress works on anything. It’s slow, but there’s confidence in seeing a project go from possible to inevitable.

This is really what blogging is all about. It’s not just the individual posts that matter. It’s also the collection, built over time with a system designed to encourage regular posting. I love that at the end of this 30-day series I’ll have a web page with photos of parks all over Austin, and bits of text that capture a small part of what each park was like.

I linked briefly to The New Yorker article by Cal Newport over the weekend, but wanted to add a few more thoughts. The article really does a great job of capturing what the IndieWeb movement is about, and Micro.blog’s role in it:

Even as it offers a familiar interface, though, everyone posting to Micro.blog does so on his or her own domain hosted on Micro.blog’s server or on their own personal server. Reece’s software acts as an aggregator, facilitating a sense of community and gathering users’ content so that it can be seen on a single screen. Users own what they write and can do whatever they want with it—including post it, simultaneously, to other competing aggregators. IndieWeb developers argue that this system—which they call posse, for “publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere”—encourages competition and innovation while allowing users to vote with their feet.

As we’ve been consistently chipping away at Micro.blog bugs and features, moving the platform forward, I’ve always thought that eventually Micro.blog will get mentioned in the larger narrative about social networks from the mainstream press. We can’t control when we get noticed. We just have to be ready when it happens.

It’s great to see all the new folks joining Micro.blog! Whenever someone new has feedback, I’m reminded what we can improve so that the experience is better for the next person.

There’s one sentence in Cal Newport’s article that I keep going back to:

The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed.

I have no doubt that this is true. It’s okay to have centralized services to make things easier for people, because it’s too much to expect that everyone should run their own server. The web can be “spread out” on multiple layers: a more diverse set of platforms, so that not all the power is concentrated in a couple massive platforms like Facebook; and more personal domain names, so that even if Micro.blog hosts 1000s of blogs, each one has its own identity on the web and can be moved.

Domain names are the key to content ownership. This is a fundamental part of Micro.blog’s architecture, not something that was tacked on as an afterthought. I’ve written more about owning your content here, which is one part of the solution to moving beyond today’s social networks.

Advertisements often make broad claims that their products are the “best” or “easiest” or “most popular”. These statements are impossible to prove, and I think make the marketing weaker because they sound like an exaggeration.

We’ve redesigned the Micro.blog home page for new users, to better explain what Micro.blog actually is. I wanted to emphasize that it is both a blogging platform and also a great community, as well as highlight who our team is.

As a sort of tag line, I wrote that Micro.blog is “the fastest way to blog”. I like describing it in terms of speed because it also implies ease of use. If it’s simple and fast, more people will blog. Micro.blog is the blog you will actually use.

But is it true? I’ve used many blog platforms over the years, and I can’t think of one that is faster to go from idea to starting a post to publishing it. In the native Micro.blog app for macOS:

• ⌘-N to start a new post.
• Type something.
• ⌘-return to publish.

It’s the same basic workflow on iOS and the web. By default, you don’t need to worry about a title field or categories or any other UI getting in the way. This focus on simplifying blogging means there’s no tabbing or clicking around unless you need more advanced features.

There is still a lot we can improve, especially how quickly a post shows up in the timeline after publishing it. I just tweaked that today. By stating up-front that performance matters, it’s a constant reminder to make everything faster. But in terms of the workflow of drafting a new post, I think Micro.blog has a clear advantage.

After launching support for Mastodon on Micro.blog, I blogged about how Micro.blog is evolving to support 3 types of usernames: normal Micro.blog users, Mastodon users, and IndieWeb-friendly domain names. This last type of username is where I think we can bring more social network-like interactions to the full web.

Here’s an example. In a post on Micro.blog, you can @-mention someone’s blog by including @domain.com in the post, using their domain name. If that blogger’s site supports Webmention, Micro.blog will send your mention to their blog, where it could be included as a comment.

I’ve been testing a new feature for this type of username in Micro.blog. You can now follow blogs in the Micro.blog timeline, even if the blogger hasn’t yet registered on Micro.blog. On the web, click Discover, then click the search icon, and enter their domain name. Micro.blog will auto-discover their JSON or RSS feed, letting you follow their blog just as you would follow any Micro.blog user.

This feature is designed for blogs with a custom domain name. It assumes one blog, one user, one domain name, so it doesn’t work to follow specific feed URLs yet. You’ll still want a traditional RSS reader for sites that have multiple feeds.

I’ll continue to improve this based on feedback, and start adding it to the native apps. Micro.blog is already one of the most open platforms of its kind, and I think this has a lot of potential to take it a step further.

I introduced the Tweet Marker API in 2011. In the 8 years since, I’ve been lucky to have the support of some of my favorite apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot, plus popular Android apps, with some developers paying a monthly subscription to help keep the service running. But while Tweet Marker hasn’t changed recently, the Twitter world has changed.

Twitter previewed the next version of their API this week. I don’t see anything so far to contradict what I wrote last year.

I believe strongly that URLs shouldn’t change, and that public APIs shouldn’t just disappear. Owning your content and having your own domain name are important parts of Micro.blog too. So I was committed to running Tweet Marker indefinitely, regardless of what Twitter might do.

But two other factors were nagging at me:

• GDPR made me take a fresh look at some of the assumptions in the Tweet Marker API. Changes are overdue. They aren’t simple and would require coordination with client developers.
• Twitter’s third-party ecosystem has changed a lot since Tweet Marker was created. Twitter apps have a very uncertain future. Timeline syncing is often handled without Tweet Marker, such as via iCloud.

Tweet Marker’s time has come and gone. I’ve notified developers using the Tweet Marker API that I plan to wind down the service by July 1st. I’ve also cancelled all the paid subscriptions. (Actually I haven’t billed anyone in over 6 months, so I’ve been running the service for free.)

Daniel Jalkut and I talked about this back in December on Core Intuition 353. I plan to work on Micro.blog for the next 20 years or more, so it needs all of my attention.

Over a million people have used Tweet Marker. I’m proud of that. If you’re one of those people, especially if you supported Tweet Marker as a developer or with a subscription, thank you.

Bokeh will be a new private-by-default photo sharing app from Tim Smith, on Kickstarter now:

Bokeh will be ad-free, have a chronological timeline, and will be private by default. That means that all accounts will start off as private. Public accounts will have an RSS feed, will have the option to cross-post to other social networks, and will support custom domains. All accounts will have an indie web compatible export so you can self-host if you want to.

Tim has been active in the Micro.blog community from the early days of the platform, and I’ve talked to him about Bokeh leading up to the Kickstarter. I think there is a lot of potential for parts of Bokeh to be compatible with Micro.blog. There is some overlap with what we’re doing with Sunlit, but as I’ve written about, more smaller social networks that can work together is a good thing! I’ve backed it on Kickstarter.

We’ve launched a redesigned home page for new users on Micro.blog today. The old design was a little too sparse and didn’t do a very good job of explaining what Micro.blog is. The challenge is that Micro.blog is really 2 things — a blog hosting platform and a social network for microblogs — so the new design reflects that with a 2-column layout.

To give an example of what posts on Micro.blog look like, we include recent posts from the Discover section directly on the home page. There are also profile photos of the team members at the bottom so that new users have a better idea of who is behind the platform.

We know that of course you can’t watch a Netflix-exclusive show on Hulu or Amazon Prime Video. But wouldn’t it be great if you could? With the current open podcast ecosystem, that’s exactly what we have: any show from any network can be played in any podcast client by default.

You might think with my attack on Luminary that I don’t want big companies to succeed with podcasts, but that’s not it. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make money off of podcasting. I just think it’s possible to make money by working within the podcast ecosystem instead of against it.

Here are several great ways to monetize podcasting that preserve and even strengthen how podcasts work:

• Start your own podcast (or multiple shows on your own podcast network) and build an audience. You’ll then be able to accept sponsors or memberships.
• Offer an easier way to produce and host podcasts. This is what we’ve done with Micro.blog. For $10/month, we’ll host MP3s at your own domain name and give you a podcast feed. Plus we have a companion iPhone app called Wavelength just for recording podcasts on-the-go.
• Help smaller podcasts with a variety of tasks they don’t have time for, like finding sponsors or editing episodes.
• Build a membership platform to make it easier for podcasts to be supported directly by listeners with subscriptions. While the user experience for members-only podcasts is not great yet, it is possible to create private podcast feeds that work in many different podcast clients.

And here’s a way to monetize podcasting that will weaken the ecosystem:

• Leverage the popularity of podcasts by creating a proprietary distribution model with exclusive shows. This requires redefining what a podcast is to include shows that do not have an RSS feed. If you do this, do not call what you’re doing a podcast.

As I wrote in my blog post about Substack:

If we accept calling “any audio on the internet” a “podcast”, we undermine what makes a podcast unique: not just the convenience of delivering audio directly to your device, but the openness that ensures that podcasts work in a variety of players, without a single company with too much control trying to lock down the format.

Companies like Luminary and Spotify will most likely fail to dominate podcasting because listeners want to use their favorite podcast client to listen to podcasts. Try explaining why your exclusive “podcasts” don’t play in Apple’s app called “Podcasts”. But if someone does succeed in creating a “Netflix for podcasts”, it could eventually lead to a couple major problems:

1. An aggregator on the scale of Facebook or YouTube could emerge for podcasts.
2. The market could become fragmented like it is for video streaming services.

If either of those things happen, we will all be much worse off. (For more arguments along these lines, check out episode 323 of the Accidental Tech Podcast.)

In 2016, I tried working from a new coffee shop every day for 30 days, then later followed that with 30 days working from libraries. Each day I would post a microblog post and sometimes a photo. You can find links to all these posts on my 30 days page.

When it was all done, I wrote:

After wrapping up libraries, I thought I’d make it a trilogy of 30-day endeavors, with a final 30 days of working from city parks. This was a suggestion from Daniel Hedrick, who had worked from parks before, tethering to his iPhone since there’s usually no wi-fi. I loved the idea right away because it fit so well with the goal of getting out of the house and discovering something new in my own city. I even spent a couple hours earlier in the month researching parks and planning out whether I could do it.

But I quickly realized that I was burned out on commuting all over town, so I tabled the idea. Fast-forward a few years. This week, I’ve been struggling to stay productive as my attention is pulled in a few directions with tasks for Micro.blog.

I’ve also been working more on my book Indie Microblogging, which I can write from anywhere on my Mac or iPad. I think restarting the “30 days” idea will force me to carve out some uninterrupted time to write, and get me out of a bit of a rut from working at home. It will also be a great use of Micro.blog.

For day 1 of 30, I went to Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park in Austin. It’s a large park with hiking and biking trails. I actually did more walking than writing, but it’s a start. As with coffee shops and libraries, I’ll collect links to all the posts on a new page here.

John Gruber has a great post on Luminary and the trend of companies trying to redefine what “podcast” means. It’s not a podcast if there’s no RSS feed and it can’t work in multiple client apps:

Being client-agnostic is the spirit of the open internet, and I think it’s implicitly part of being a “podcast”. Openness was certainly part of how podcasting came to be.

Substack is another company that initially tried to ride the popularity of podcasts by calling their audio in email newsletters a “podcast”. I wrote about it here. I’m happy to notice that as of this week, Substack has real podcast support by adding private RSS feeds for newsletter subscribers. That’s the right way to go and now their audio shows work in any podcast client.

We do not need the “Netflix of podcasts”. Anyone can create and distribute a podcast — even Micro.blog has support for podcast hosting and a simple app for recording and publishing podcast feeds that work anywhere — so it would be a step back for the industry if a single company tried to control distribution.

The New York Times has an article today about demolishing Penn Station, full of incredible old photos:

With its swarming crowds and dust motes dancing in shafts of smoky light, the station was catnip to midcentury photographers, filmmakers, artists and architects. It was the architectural embodiment of New York’s vaulted ambition and open arms.

In 2016, I wrote a blog post on applying the lessons from Penn Station to the open web and podcasting. It’s still one of my favorite recent posts.

Following Jeffrey Zeldman’s article about the open web, Ben Werdmuller has a great post about how we shouldn’t care so much about startup unicorns, using Micro.blog as an example of another type of business:

Zeldman looks to Micro.blog as a potential answer. It’s a great company that could point to what a more general solution could look like, but not specifically because it works with the indieweb. Instead, it’s worth examining how it’s financially structured. Rather than a unicorn, it’s a zebra.

It would be great to have more small- and medium-sized companies that can move the web forward. They can innovate while still being grounded in somewhat boring business models. It matches one of my points here that we need multiple social networks that interoperate via the web instead of just a couple of huge platforms.

There’s a difference between companies that are paid for directly by users and massive ad-based networks. Ben Thompson outlines this in an article about regulation, arguing that the super-aggregators like Facebook require government intervention, where other companies that are better aligned with users' interests can be “regulated” by the market:

I think, though, that platform providers that primarily monetize through advertising should be in their own category: as I noted above, because these platform providers separate monetization from content supply and consumption, there is no price or payment mechanism to incentivize them to be concerned with problematic content; in fact, the incentives of an advertising business drive them to focus on engagement, i.e. giving users what they want, no matter how noxious.

I’ve been thinking about Ben Thompson’s essay a lot since he published it a couple weeks ago. Micro.blog is a small part of the puzzle — and it’s a puzzle piece of a different shape that doesn’t fit cleanly into Ben’s diagram around free services — but I think it’s an important part to focus on.

I’ve been having fun posting short videos to my blog now that Micro.blog makes it easy. You can see the recent videos on this category page.

And it has been great to see what other people come up with. For example, I love these time-lapse videos: the clouds moving above Fort Tryon Park in New York City from Joe Cieplinski, and this beautiful one of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam from Jordon Wadlington. I sometimes forget that my iPhone camera has a time-lapse feature, and now I’ll be looking for an excuse to use it.

While on a 6-week walk from Tokyo to Kyoto, Craig Mod is disconnecting from social media and instead posting to “followers” using SMS:

What do I mean by “use the network to publish without being used by it?” On most services — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc — in order to publish something you must stare into the maw of its timeline, resist whatever the algorithm has queued up for you, and then, if you’ve remembered what you were going to publish, publish.

At the end of the journey he will collect the photos and comments in a book. I think this could’ve worked as a microblog as well, because then users joining late could read previous posts in the series, but it’s a fascinating use of SMS.

Congrats to Federico Viticci and the MacStories team on 10 years of MacStories. To appreciate how long ago this was, I re-read Federico’s interview with me from 7 years ago. This was 3 years after his first post but the content feels like a lifetime ago.

I really like this interview because I think it captures that time on the App Store and as a Twitter developer. We talked about iOS 5 user interface design, my early indie apps before starting Micro.blog, but also a few things that are still relevant today, like using the iPad for real work and app pricing.

Most importantly, it was a few months before Twitter’s infamous 4-quadrant chart that would set in motion Twitter’s move away from third-party developers. My priorities changed significantly after that, eventually leading to Micro.blog.

We all expected Dark Mode in iOS 13, but according to this rumor from 9to5Mac, the next major version of iOS is also going to feature some major changes to windows and detachable sheets:

There are many changes coming to iPad with iOS 13, including the ability for apps to have multiple windows. Each window will also be able to contain sheets that are initially attached to a portion of the screen, but can be detached with a drag gesture, becoming a card that can be moved around freely, similar to what an open-source project called “PanelKit” could do.

We also get an answer to one of the questions Brent Simmons asked about split views:

Split Views on Marzipan apps based on iPad designs that run on the Mac will get the ability to be resized by dragging the divider and have their position reset when double-clicking the divider, like existing Split View apps on the Mac.

I hope that support for multiple windows maps over to macOS with Marzipan. We’ve been saying on Core Intuition that this WWDC is going to be special. Marzipan is the biggest shake-up to the Mac since the Carbon to Cocoa transition.

There’s a fantastic article by Jeffrey Zeldman in A List Apart this week, starting with the problems of venture capital-backed social networks and ending with the question of whether we can help fix the web:

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

I believe strongly that the answer is “yes”. Brent Simmons also responds, using the example of how even focused apps like RSS readers can move things forward without needing to solve all the problems at once:

Do I claim it’s as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter (for instance)? I do not. But it’s the step forward that I know how to take.

This is a great attitude. There are steps forward that we can all take individually, from leading the way by blogging more ourselves, to building tools for others to use. Together these steps add up to something significant that really matters.

It has been very encouraging to watch the Micro.blog community grow and new people regularly post to their own blog first instead of the big ad-based social networks. Seeing so much progress — but also knowing how much more work there is still to do — gives me a lot of hope for the future of the web.

If you’re still using Instagram but want to copy your photos and videos to your own microblog, a great solution is OwnYourGram. This is a free service that checks your Instagram account for new photos and videos, then sends them to your microblog automatically. Along with video support in Micro.blog, we’ve also improved support for videos from OwnYourGram.

First, make sure you’re on the podcast + video hosting plan on Micro.blog. For $10/month, we’ll host audio and video for you in addition to photos, and generate a podcast feed for you if you ever want to start a podcast later. You can upgrade here.

Next, follow the instructions on this help page for setting up your Micro.blog account so that it works with Instagram. This just means telling Micro.blog about your Instagram username, and telling Instagram about your microblog.

You can use OwnYourGram to send a specific video from Instagram to Micro.blog to test that everything is working. After that, OwnYourGram will check Instagram for new photos and videos and send them to your microblog. Photos and videos on Micro.blog are real blog posts, so you can always edit the posts later after they are created automatically.

Last week I drove to New Orleans for Peers Conference. It was a bit of a whirlwind because we also released video support in Micro.blog and updated 3 of the apps, which I knew might be a little too much to attempt to do while traveling. In fact, we did miss a couple bugs and updated Sunlit the next day, and a new Micro.blog iOS update will follow this week with more improvements.

I had a great time in New Orleans. The drive from Austin is 8+ hours, but I took even longer to make sure I had enough breaks from driving, for lunch and coffee and catching up on work. I took a few photos which I’ve collected together using Snapthread here to share as a short video.

Sunlit 2.5.1 is now available in the App Store. This update fixes an issue with videos not appearing in the timeline after the major new version we released yesterday to add video upload to the app and Micro.blog hosting.

Here are a couple screenshots of the update with the video preview and new full-screen player:

We’ve updated Micro.blog today with a big feature: video upload to your microblog. The iOS and macOS apps — as well as our iOS app for photos, Sunlit — have all been updated to support video.

Video upload and storage is based on our podcast hosting plan. If you’d like to post video, you can learn more and upgrade here. Just like podcasts, video hosting is designed for short videos, from a few seconds to 1-2 minutes. Each video should be 45 MB or less, but there’s no limit on the number of videos you can upload, and videos are stored at your own domain name.

We are very excited about this and can’t wait to see how people use it. Now that we have this foundation for video, I’m looking forward to expanding it based on feedback. I think there’s a lot we can do. (There were also a couple of last-minute bugs with playback on iOS… We’ll get those fixed soon.)

There’s no shortage of opinions about Apple’s services-related event this week! I’ve listened to a few podcast episodes, and of course I had my own thoughts on this week’s Core Intuition and a separate blog post about News+.

My favorite discussion about News+ so far has been the latest episode of Connected. They talk about the good things Apple brings to this, but also the downsides.

Federico:

I was asked by someone on Twitter, do you plan on putting Club MacStories on Apple News+? The answer is a huge no.

Myke:

Literally every single person who subscribes to Club MacStories would cancel because they’re all users of Apple products!

Federico:

There’s always a cost to adopting a new platform. There’s a technological cost, and there’s an actual cost. And for me, it’s not worth it to rewrite my — what we do for Club MacStories for Apple News format — but it’s also not worth it to lose the money that I’m making from the service that I control.

Federico’s point here gets to the key issue with these aggregation platforms, whether it’s News+, Facebook, or the App Store. When you give up control over distribution, you also give up control over revenue. With publishing on the open web, there’s always an alternative: your own domain name and your own subscribers. (For the App Store, there’s no choice.)

Back to the episode…

Stephen:

I still don’t love how closed off News is. Like on the Mac, you just can’t get a URL to open it in a browser. You just can’t do it. You’ve got to send a text message to yourself or something. And on iOS, or really anywhere, sending content to things like Instapaper is very hit or miss. […] Apple News doesn’t play well with the web, and that’s very frustrating to me as a believer in the open web.

Myke:

We’re all worried about Spotify walling off podcasts. Well, Apple’s trying to do that to news. […] It’s probably good for consumers, but is it good for the industry? We don’t know yet.

Great episode. You should listen to the whole thing, because as I said there are some points in favor of Apple News as well, and the other announcements. But the segment I’m quoting from above was particularly good.

We’ve rolled out some more improvements to Micro.blog. For blogs hosted on Micro.blog, you can now save a post draft to Micro.blog, then come back later to edit and publish it. The macOS app has been updated with support for drafts and a new “Posts” section to make editing or searching your existing posts much easier.

Here’s a short video of the new feature on the Mac:

Most of what Apple talked about today isn’t shipping until the summer or fall. Apple News+ does ship today with iOS 12.2. It’s priced at $10/month for access to hundreds of magazines and newspapers. As I posted about briefly, I’ll stick with paying The New York Times directly for now.

Michael Tsai writes about the larger issue with Apple News:

I continue to find Apple News to be disappointing. It’s like Apple reinvented the RSS reader with less privacy (everything goes through an Apple tracking URL) and a worse user experience (less control over fonts, text that isn’t selectable, no searching within or across stories). So the idea of content that must be accessed from the app—and likely can’t even be opened in Safari—is not attractive to me.

I think there’s great potential for Apple News on the curation side, but the articles are too stuck inside Apple’s apps, and the cost to publishers is too high. You can tell Apple feels like they’re onto something important with Apple News. My concern is that Apple’s solution is based so heavily on what they know how to do well — let’s make everything a native app with a nice UI and leverage our massive credit card database — that they’ve missed an opportunity to solve something more meaningful for journalism and the open web.

Seth Godin blogs every day. Sometimes short posts, sometimes longer posts that read like they could be part of one of his books. Yesterday’s post was one of those longer posts about big, centralized platforms:

Like a landlord who owns every building in town, Google can’t lose. A successful business in the online ecosystem is one that has a few dollars left over after giving the rest of it to Google or Facebook (or Apple).

He’s also been on a roll with his podcast. And for more about Apple vs. Spotify specifically, I enjoyed the latest episode of the Supertop podcast.

We sent an email to some of our Kickstarter backers yesterday, giving people a chance to check out Micro.blog again if they haven’t been active recently. The platform has improved so much in the last year. It’s possible that it didn’t meet someone’s needs a year ago but will today.

One of the links in the email was to the 12 days of microblogging help page, which links to 12 blog posts I wrote in December to highlight how people are using Micro.blog. Unfortunately, most of those links no longer worked! I scrambled to figure out why some of the links on my blog weren’t working, finally discovering that I had broken them myself when testing the Medium.com import feature across multiple test blogs.

In the process, I decided to pull a complete backup of Micro.blog’s database from 30 days ago and use it to fix some of my old blog posts. This was a great exercise. I check the backups from time to time, but it’s rare that I need to go over specific data by hand and actually restore anything.

Last week, Myspace revealed that they had lost all hosted music from 2003 - 2015. I don’t think we can be too careful with the responsibility of hosting people’s blogs, so I’m glad I had this chance for a real-world test of Micro.blog’s backups. (I also recommend enabling the Internet Archive feature under Posts → Design, and occasionally downloading a complete archive of your blog from Posts → Export.)

My heart goes out to the families of loved ones at the mosques in Christchurch. After the Parkland shooting, I drafted a long blog post about gun violence but never ended up posting it. Even after editing it a few times a month later, it felt like the words or timing were always wrong.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a growing backlash against social media. I won’t look for the video of this tragedy from New Zealand, and I hope I never accidentally see it. It is heartbreaking enough with words alone. Every story I read last week kept pointing back to the frustration with how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not doing enough to prevent their platforms from amplifying misinformation and hateful messages.

Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post writes about the problems with social media leading up to and after a tragedy like this mass shooting:

To the extent that the companies do control content, they depend on low-paid moderators or on faulty algorithms. Meanwhile, they put tremendous resources and ingenuity — including the increasing use of artificial intelligence — into their efforts to maximize clicks and advertising revenue.

Charlie Warzel of the New York Times covers this too:

It seems that the Christchurch shooter — who by his digital footprint appears to be native to the internet — understands both the platform dynamics that allow misinformation and divisive content to spread but also the way to sow discord.

Nick Heer links to an article in The Atlantic where Taylor Lorenz documents how after following a far-right account, Instagram started recommending conspiracy accounts to follow, which filled her feed with photos from Christchurch:

Given the velocity of the recommendation algorithm, the power of hashtagging, and the nature of the posts, it’s easy to see how Instagram can serve as an entry point into the internet’s darkest corners. Instagram “memes pages and humor is a really effective way to introduce people to extremist content,” says Becca Lewis, a doctoral student at Stanford and a research affiliate at the Data and Society Research Institute.

Duncan Davidson asks: “What are we going to do about this?”

The last few years, the worst side of humanity has been winning in a big way, and while there’s nothing new about white supremacy, fascism, violence, or hate, we’re seeing how those old human reflexes have adapted to the tools that we’ve built in and for our online world.

I can’t help but think about Micro.blog’s role on the web whenever major social media issues are discussed. It’s almost all I think about. We feel powerless against world events because they’re on a scale much bigger than we are, but it helps to focus on the small things we can do to make a difference.

Micro.blog doesn’t make it particularly easy to discover new users, and posts don’t spread virally. While some might view this as a weakness, and it does mean we grow more slowly than other social networks, this is by design. No retweets, no trending hashtags, no unlimited global search, and no algorithmic recommended users.

We are a very small team and we’re not going to get everything right, but I’m convinced that this design is the best for Micro.blog. We’ve seen Facebook’s “move fast and break things” already. It’s time for platforms to slow down, actively curate, and limit features that will spread hate.

The new version of Sunlit is now available in the App Store. You can download it for free and use it with Micro.blog or to publish photos to an existing blog like WordPress.

Why does controlling our own photos matter? As I wrote in this post about the way out of the mess created by massive social networks, having posts at our own domain names unlocks a few very important features:

• Open standards mean interoperability with multiple tools. I can use IndieWeb tools like OwnYourGram to automatically copy Instagram posts to Micro.blog, or use traditional blogging apps like MarsEdit to upload and post photos.
• Content ownership gives the flexibility to move photos between hosting providers. You can host on Micro.blog or WordPress or some future blogging platform without URLs breaking.
• Smaller social networks get us away from ad-based businesses that sell our data. Because Sunlit is powered by Micro.blog, you can even follow Mastodon or PixelFed users and see their photos in the Sunlit timeline.

I’m very excited about this release and hope you like it. It’s time to move away Instagram. If you need help importing your photos, check out this video I made about batch importing from Instagram to Micro.blog-hosted blogs.

We are getting close to releasing the next version of Sunlit. The app has gone through a bunch of iterations over the years while we searched for the right features and design. This version is my favorite. We’ve simplified posting so that it’s easier and more consistent with Micro.blog, improved profile screens, and fixed even more bugs.

If you’re looking for an alternate to Facebook-owned Instagram that priorities community and content ownership, I hope you check out Sunlit when it’s ready.

Apple responds to Spotify. Daniel Jalkut and I predicted most of this response on Core Intuition a couple days ago. I’m going to quote a few parts of Apple’s response and comment.

Eleven years ago, the App Store brought that same passion for creativity to mobile apps. In the decade since, the App Store has helped create many millions of jobs, generated more than $120 billion for developers and created new industries through businesses started and grown entirely in the App Store ecosystem.

Apple likes to brag about how much money they’ve paid to developers, but they leave out how much they’ve kept for themselves: about $50 billion. To Apple, they are doing us a big favor by letting us ship iOS apps.

We’ve approved and distributed nearly 200 app updates on Spotify’s behalf, resulting in over 300 million downloaded copies of the Spotify app. The only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every other app follows.

It’s very important to remember that Apple’s rules are not laws. Apple’s rules have changed over the years, and especially around in-app purchase it often feels that they are applied inconsistently. Because Apple runs the platform, they can make any guidelines they wish, but there isn’t necessarily any inherent legal or moral justification in specific rules. We shouldn’t accept that all of Apple’s rules are fixed and cannot be improved.

When you get to the scale of the App Store, there are also new monopoly and anti-trust questions. For more about this, see Ben Thompson’s article on Stratechery.

Back to Apple:

A full 84 percent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That’s not discrimination, as Spotify claims; it’s by design.

In 2011 I wrote a blog post with the premise that Apple made a mistake with how they handle free apps in the App Store, and what followed was years trying to make up for that mistake because of the burden of running the App Store. I think there was some truth to that, but now the business is very different. The App Store is a huge money-maker.

And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.

And yet in the previous quote, Apple says that 84% of apps pay nothing and they are fine with that. Uber pays nothing to Apple. Games with ads pay nothing to Apple. Why is it wrong for Spotify to also want to limit how much they pay to Apple? The line Apple has drawn around in-app purchase is arbitrary. They could just have easily restricted Uber accepting payments, or banned third-party ads.

Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry.

This is irrelevant to Spotify’s complaints about the App Store. While I think Spotify’s argument would have been stronger if they had focused on a couple of their core complaints instead of mixing in issues such as Apple Watch development, Spotify didn’t bring up other concerns about Apple’s business that do not relate to the App Store. Apple trying to interject Spotify’s relationship with musicians is whataboutism.

Overall, Apple’s response isn’t very convincing to me. There are still 2 fundamental problems with the App Store: exclusive distribution and exclusive payment. In that post from 8 years ago, I concluded with:

Apple, want to charge 30%? Go for it. Want to make the submission rules more strict? Fine. Want to adjust how you run the App Store to reflect what’s happening in the market? No problem. Just give developers an out. We are going to be back here year after year with the latest controversy until exclusive app distribution is fixed.

I think I’ve been proven right about this. This issue will never go away until Apple allows side-loading or makes it easier to let customers pay outside the App Store. In the meantime, I’ve been arguing for a 15% cut instead of 30% for all paid downloads and in-app purchase, which would go a long way to making this easier for developers.

We just sent a Sunlit beta to testers. This new version of our photo-blogging app includes an updated UI, easier posting, and fixes a number of issues. It also simplifies and removes several features, such as the filter and photo editing interface. (We may bring some features back later, but it was important to get back to basics and improve the core user experience.)

If you’d like to try it, you can join the TestFlight beta here.

I’ve been waiting years for this. Bigger companies have finally had enough of Apple’s 30% in-app purchase tax. Spotify founder Daniel Ek writes about Apple’s restrictions on telling users how to upgrade to Spotify Premium outside the app:

As an alternative, if we choose not to use Apple’s payment system, forgoing the charge, Apple then applies a series of technical and experience-limiting restrictions on Spotify. For example, they limit our communication with our customers—including our outreach beyond the app. In some cases, we aren’t even allowed to send emails to our customers who use Apple. Apple also routinely blocks our experience-enhancing upgrades.

Spotify has a companion site TimeToPlayFair.com with more details, and they’ve also filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission. (As a side note, I hope Spotify’s pursuit of fairness will also apply to how they treat the podcast ecosystem after acquiring Gimlet Media and Anchor.)

Apple’s anti-competitive behavior was also a theme of Ben Thompson’s Stratechery this week:

What is even more striking, though, is that the App Store does have a massive antitrust problem: it is not Apple unfairly competing with app developers, it is Apple unfairly imposing massive complexity and extracting 30% of revenue with its contractual requirement, enforced by App Review, that developers use Apple’s payment mechanism.

Now if only more indie developers would speak out about this, maybe we’d make some progress with Apple. As I’ve said many times: 15% for paid downloads and in-app purchase is reasonable for the value that Apple provides. Just as importantly, Apple should relax the rules against linking to web sites outside the store.

Today is the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the world wide web. Reflecting on the web’s success and the new challenges, he writes:

Against the backdrop of news stories about how the web is misused, it’s understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.

I believe this. The goal of Micro.blog is to make the web a little better. Let’s get back to what made writing and sharing photos online such a wonderful experience, and get away from the problems of the massive social network platforms that dominate so much of our activity online.

Micro.blog can now import blog posts from Medium. You can request a .zip archive of your content from Medium.com, then go to Posts → Import on Micro.blog to upload the file.

Because Medium no longer supports custom domain names, we don’t think it’s a good long-term solution for blogging. If you still want to reach your Medium followers, you can enable cross-posting from any blog to Medium in Micro.blog by clicking Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting”.

Micro.blog does a few things to make transitioning from Medium to Micro.blog hosting easier. Just like the WordPress to Micro.blog import, it automatically downloads any photos referenced in your posts and stores them on Micro.blog. It also cleans up the posts a little, while preserving most of the original HTML. Of course it also sets post titles and published dates.

There was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin about broken links and archiving web sites. As part of the discussion, Tantek mentioned how he saves all his blog posts and tweets to the Internet Archive as part of his posting workflow. I’ve just added a setting like that to Micro.blog under Posts → Design:

This is off by default for now, but if you enable it, any new posts will be saved to the Internet Archive automatically. It waits about 5 minutes before saving them just in case you have any last-minute edits.

I still want to do more with archiving. As amazing as the Internet Archive is, I don’t think we should count on it to have a complete archive of the web. But this is a simple feature you can enable in your blog if it’s hosted on Micro.blog, and we can expand it based on feedback. (For example, maybe archiving pages you link to as well.)

Today Substack announced support for sending audio episodes in email newsletters:

Subscription podcasting through Substack works in the same way as publishing newsletters. Once the feature is enabled, you can create an audio post that is just like a normal post and can go out to everyone or only to subscribers. After receiving the post by email or accessing it on the web, subscribers can listen to the audio through the Substack web player.

This looks like a great feature for Substack customers, but it’s not a podcast. As the podcasting industry grows, with everyone trying to monetize podcasts or build new businesses around podcasting, it’s really important that we keep using the right words to describe it. A podcast has to have a feed so that it’s available in podcast players like Overcast, Castro, and Apple Podcasts.

Michael Zornek said it well earlier this week after Spotify acquired Gimlet and Anchor:

It is not a podcast unless there is a RSS feed.

I’m not splitting hairs about this. If we accept calling “any audio on the internet” a “podcast”, we undermine what makes a podcast unique: not just the convenience of delivering audio directly to your device, but the openness that ensures that podcasts work in a variety of players, without a single company with too much control trying to lock down the format.

Luckily, I think the Substack folks probably know this. In their announcement post, they also added:

We may soon add the ability to add a private feed of episodes to podcast players, but we like the web solution for now. (Give us your feedback, etc.)

Here’s my feedback: please don’t call it a podcast until you have the feed ready, whether it’s a private feed or public. When we added audio uploads to Micro.blog, we had full podcast feeds and everything was available from your own domain name. The web will be better if we encourage the same support of open formats in all new platforms.

We’re changing the official Micro.blog user accounts so that they are easier to follow. It used to be that everyone automatically followed @help, where we posted occasional announcements. From now on, @help will mostly be used for replying to questions, with a new default account @news.

You can unfollow @help if you don’t want to see those replies in your timeline. New users will no longer automatically follow @help.

Here’s a summary of the different accounts and blogs:

• @help: help.micro.blog
• @news: news.micro.blog
• @monday: monday.micro.blog

And for the Micro.blog team:

• @manton: manton.org
• @macgenie: micro.welltempered.net
• @cheesemaker: jonhays.me

In addition, Micro.blog user @simonwoods maintains 2 blogs with updates about Micro.blog and “Today I Learned” for tips:

• @til: til.micro.blog, updates.micro.blog

Email is still a great way to get an answer to a question, but by splitting out these accounts we can be more responsive on @help as well. I think this setup will work better as the community grows.

We released version 1.5 of the Micro.blog app for iOS today. In addition to a couple bug fixes, it lets you pick a category for new posts. You can create categories on the web under Posts → Categories for blogs hosted on Micro.blog.

Tap the gear icon when composing a new post to view your categories:

We are launching several major new features for blog hosting on Micro.blog today. Any one of these features alone is a big change, and together I hope they will serve as a great foundation for years to come. The goal was to make blog hosting faster and more flexible for new features.

Custom templates: All the themes have been rewritten with extensibility in mind. As some of you may know, Micro.blog-hosted blogs were originally built on Jekyll. They now use Hugo. There’s an interface in Micro.blog for editing any of the built-in templates, or adding new ones for your own HTML or CSS. Click Posts → Design → Edit Themes.

Categories: You can create a new category for your blog under Posts → Categories, and those categories will appear when editing a post or when creating a longer post with a title. We hide the category options be default when you are composing a short post, but in the new macOS app you can show the categories by choosing View → Categories. A list of your categories will appear at the top of Archive on your blog for readers to browse.

Auto-filter photos into a category: If you create a category like “Photos” or “Photography”, Micro.blog will offer to automatically assign this category when posting a new photo. Behind the scenes this is based on a new filtering system that will enable more features for other types of content in the future.

API for categories: I’ve added categories support to both the MetaWeblog XML-RPC API and the Micropub API. This means that categories work great with MarsEdit. Categories are also included in your default JSON Feed in the “tags” field.

Sharing themes: When creating a new custom theme, you can choose to clone it from an existing GitHub repository. This will allow someone to create a completely custom theme and share it with other members of the community. There’s a “Blank” design if you are starting from scratch with your own templates.

New theme: I used the open source theme Arabica when testing these new features, and it’s now an option under Posts → Design. It’s a clean, simple design ported from Ghost.

Open source changes: All our themes for Micro.blog are available on GitHub. I have decided to keep the forked Jekyll repositories and completely replace the files with the Hugo version. I have mixed feelings about this, since the themes have diverged so much that they are no longer useful to the original authors, but I felt this was the best way to give credit to them for the designs, in addition to our credits page on Micro.blog.

Moving special pages: Micro.blog has some special pages like “About” and “Archive”. You can now re-order or even delete these under Posts → Pages. Combined with custom themes, this gives much more flexibility in customizing the navigation for your site.

We’ll be writing more about these new features in blog posts and the help site. If you notice any problems, please let me know. Thank you!