I like John Gruber’s airport lounge analogy for iMessage. Michael Tsai takes it one step further to underscore how Apple’s control still twists what is possible.

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before but deploying Micro.blog is like a hilarious 15-step process. So dumb! And yet I do it at least once a day usually. Eventually it’ll be worth burning a couple days to automate it.

I said during Micro Camp back in May that I hoped Micro.blog would be open source by the end of the year. Didn’t happen, too much else to do. Still have plans along those lines, as soon as I can carve out time to get the structure for everything set up correctly.

Feeling like it’s time to travel again. For 2024, I’m going to start a new challenge: visit all of the 88 state parks in Texas, spread out over a couple years. Will try to camp at many but not all of them. Blog posts and photos along the way. 🗺️

Learning from this blog post that GitHub has 1200 MySQL servers.

Finished watching the Dragonsteel spoiler Q&A. It took a few days, off and on. I’ve read about 20 of Brandon Sanderson’s books and I still don’t even understand many of the questions! Love the super fans. 📚

In Evan Prodromou’s list of big and small fediverse traits, I lean more to big, but I don’t agree with everything in the big list. As one example, I think billion-person servers would recreate many Facebook-like problems. Evan’s list is great for sparking discussion, though.

I was thinking about Nick Heer’s post about the current top few social networks to replace Twitter, and specifically performance. I feel like Threads and Mastodon are fast, but it’s true that Bluesky is really fast. Wonder if federation performance will end up being AT Protocol’s strength.

Nitpick with some modern web services: I don’t like the trend of expiring URLs, like temp S3 resources for profile photos. It makes caching more difficult. In everything I design, I assume that a human might see the URL. That makes everything simpler and more stable.

At some point in the last few days, one of the changes to my blog has caused Hugo to go off the rails… Instead of taking a couple seconds to run, takes minutes. Having some difficulty tracking it down.

Watched some of the usual Christmas movies over the last week, and a couple new ones… 🎄 Then went on an anime tear with Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa, Tales from Earthsea, Weathering with You, The Wind Rises, and Kiki. 🍿

Happy holidays, everyone! A new episode of Core Intuition just went up, the last episode of 2023. We talk Apple Watch, Adobe and Figma, and look forward to next year.

More good progress in Bluesky: there are now RSS feeds for all user profiles. This is just a useful baseline for supporting different things. Nice, clean microblog feeds without titles.

I like the new Bluesky butterfly logo. Still invite-only, but I have a handful of invite codes if you want to try it out.

Writing a blog post draft in Micro.blog for Mac this morning and I guess I’m hitting ⌘-S pretty often. This saves it to the server and Micro.blog keeps a copy of each version in case you need to revert back. Here’s the web version where I happened to notice the saved count.

Watching the Substack drama unfold but just taking notes for now. Trying to put most of my writing time into book editing, and these big picture topics of indie blogs, newsletters, and moderation fit right in.

Got some bad news last night that really shook me. Nothing family or health related, which is what matters, but still bummed. (Also nothing to do with Micro.blog or business or money.) It was balanced a couple hours later with some really welcome news! The world gives and takes.

Raining in Austin this morning. Working and having coffee at Lazarus. 🎄

I should’ve done more testing with audio apps after upgrading to Sonoma. Things went off the rails while recording @coreint — noise while recording and also audio getting handed off to my phone. I think we mostly salvaged it.

I finally installed macOS Sonoma, so I’m testing Micro.blog as a saved web application for the first time. Works well. The most awkward thing is not having an address bar. Nice that Apple included Edit → Copy Link.

As the year winds down, thinking about the fediverse, I want to do a better job in 2024 of making the case for independent blogs. Lots of platforms with thousands of users on each server talking via ActivityPub is great, but more blogs also helps with portable identity and a more distributed web.

Great article from David Pierce at The Verge about the potential of the fediverse:

Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat and pries it apart into its component pieces, each one ripe for innovation and new ideas.

Continued my Redis spelunking last night and managed to cut 10 GB off our memory usage. Makes a big difference because forking and saving the db is faster, less chance of churning the disk too.

Love how Brandon just drops this sentence into the State of the Sanderson:

Tress would make a pretty great animated feature though, don’t you think?

Yes indeed. Many of his books would work really well in animation, but Tress of the Emerald Sea would be fantastic.

Spending the morning going through a lot of bloat in Redis, clearing out unused data. It has been a little out of control using a ridiculous amount of memory, which hurts performance saving to disk and just generally costs more to run.

I thought we had mostly avoided the Mastodon spam from the last couple of days, but it must’ve hit some users because there were a bunch of extra spam reports. I continue to have mixed feelings about how Mastodon handles private messages. Need to rethink Micro.blog’s implementation.

I don’t mind flying under the radar. There are benefits for a product to start small and grow slowly. But I’m still kind of puzzled why Micro.blog is rarely mentioned when articles talk about platforms that support the fediverse. We first added ActivityPub in 2018. Must be doing something wrong.

Flipboard is rolling out the first phase of joining the fediverse:

In this first phase we are partnering with 27 publishers and creators to help them federate their Flipboard accounts and gather feedback. This includes a range of publishers covering global news, tech, music, gaming, travel and science as well as a few content creators like Erin Brockovich and Jefferson Graham.

I tested following one of these accounts in Micro.blog and it’s working pretty well.

“Play Me” — piano outside the library, Windsor Park Branch.

I don’t have strong feelings about the Adobe/Figma deal falling through. I guess if we’re unsure, better to err on the side of fewer big acquisitions. Om Malik makes a really interesting point too that more regulation could mean fewer startups will have “just get acquired” as an exit plan.

Starting to see a path for Nikki Haley to be the nominee. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don’t think she should be president, so I’d rather Joe Biden face a weaker candidate. On the other, it’d be such a relief just to definitively know Trump can’t be president again. 🇺🇸

I really liked Leave the World Behind. There are some great scenes in it. Left with a few things to think about too. 🍿

Threads starting opt-in for the fediverse is fine. In fact, it’s what we did in Micro.blog too back in 2018, because I wanted to focus on personal domain names and that requires a little more configuration. However, I do hope that Threads expands to enable federation by default for all users.

Don’t want to jinx it but we finally have Micro.blog performance under control after a couple rough days. Also gotta give credit to Threads, it is one of the fastest of the new social networks. The bar is higher than it was in Twitter’s fail whale days.

Jamie Thingelstad is today’s interview on Manuel Moreale’s People and Blogs series, with some nice words for Micro.blog:

When micro.blog was launched, I intended to use it as an alternative to Twitter. But then, as Manton built and improved the system, I realized it could host my entire site. I now have 8,449 posts in micro.blog and growing, with a total blog archive size of over 7 GB. It makes me chuckle since I think the “micro” in micro.blog makes folks think they can’t use it for everything, but you can.

Thanks @jthingelstad!

Brick Oven on Red River has been closed since the pandemic. Last week they made it permanent and bulldozed the building. Sad to see it go. 🍕

Good quotes from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in this Fast Company interview. Surprised to learn that Bluesky has 30 people on their team already.

Love this update to Mimi Uploader that can generate photo alt text for you with AI. Mimi is a convenient batch photo uploader for Micro.blog, great for posting a few photos to your blog all at once.

One of those mornings where I just run redis-cli monitor and look for things that surprise me.

Figured out where this delivery robot is from. They are made by Avride and do deliveries for restaurants. Free delivery! Replacing humans, one job at a time.

From a post-trial interview with Tim Sweeney, he reiterates why settlement talks with Google didn’t go anywhere:

We were rather far apart, let’s say, because what Epic wants ultimately is free competition and fair competition for everybody, and the removal of the payments tie and removal of the anticompetitive measures, which obviously leads to far better deals for consumers and developers.

Epic remains an imperfect messenger for App Store reform but they really do have this part right. It’s about the overall market for decades to come, not Epic or any other single company.

The slow rollout of ActivityPub in Threads continues, but it doesn’t appear to be accessible from Micro.blog yet. Hopefully soon. What I wrote in June is holding up well. This is an important step forward for open protocols.

After posting about not wanting to push unannounced features to a public repo, I got suggestions to create a private repo. I did eventually do that. I think my gut instinct is for simplification… Fewer dependencies and duplication to keep track of.

Mark Zuckerberg posted to Threads about starting ActivityPub testing, but it’s not clear what the scope of the test is. Doesn’t appear to be available to outside platforms yet. Still, a big deal just announcing it.

The day has finally come… I’ve added Swift to the Micro.blog for Mac project. Yes, I know it’s 2023, almost 2024. After tinkering with Apple’s Security framework and Common Crypto, decided CryptoKit was the way to go and it’s Swift-only.

Working on encryption and understanding the best initialization vector lengths and then all of a sudden I’m down the cryptography rabbit hole, reading about the birthday paradox. Might be time to call it a night.

Because the Mac app for Micro.blog is open source and we’re holding off announcing some new stuff until next month, I can’t just push in-progress changes to GitHub. Kind of makes me nervous having this code only on my Mac. (I do have backups but just daily.)

Walking down our street yesterday, I was thinking about how only one person for at least several blocks gets the newspaper delivered. We all get different news in our own bubbles. I love the web and the freedom of publishing, but we have lost something to no longer have a shared set of facts.

Thinking about renaming Micro.blog to the letter M. The subtitle will be “the everything app”. Blogs, pages, photos, bookshelves, social network, bookmarks, highlights, podcasts, link archiving, email newsletters… and maybe banking features early next year. Anyone else doing something like that? 🤪

When we added bookmarks to Micro.blog, I used 🐘 to make sure emoji worked. Now I’ve stuck with using that as a tag for Mastodon-related bookmarks.

Epic gets a win against Google. Everyone is trying to make sense of the differences between Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. To me, it’s fitting that the outcome is different not just because the facts are different but also because the app stores are fundamentally subjective and randomly unfair.

Trying Apple’s new Journal app for the first time after upgrading my phone to iOS 17.2. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s for me. Day One is a better fit. Just text notes without anything clever.

Beeper Mini is (partially) back. From their blog:

Make no mistake, the changes Apple made on Friday were designed to protect the lock-in effect of iMessage. The end result is that iPhone customers have less security and privacy than before.

I’m all for openness and interoperability, of course, but using a company’s private API in a way that competes with that business is not okay. Even so, I’m kind of rooting for Beeper to shake things up.

Increasingly thinking that we’re too worried about AI hallucination. AI is never going to be perfect, and humans aren’t either! We should focus on using AI in the right context. Running without supervision is the problem. If a 5-year-old kid shouldn’t be in charge of something, AI shouldn’t either.

We’ve gotten some good feedback about the latest Core Intuition, so this is a rare “in case you missed it” post… Episode 579 is a good place to start if you want to pick up the podcast. AI, Beeper, and related fallout.

Not trying to overhype this but I’m so excited about what we’re going to launch in Micro.blog next month. It’s coming along really well and expanding beyond what I first thought it would look like. Meanwhile the everyday stuff continues too, working on fixes and servers this week.

Finished reading: Age of Legend by Michael J. Sullivan. Didn’t expect this one to end so suddenly because the last 15% left on Kindle was actually an excerpt from another book. 📚

Speaking of self-promotion… 🙂 There’s a new Core Intuition out. On episode 579 we talked AI, Google Gemini, Apple’s MLX, Beeper, iMessage, and all the tech and ethical implications of the above. Recorded before Beeper Mini broke yesterday, so we’ll see how that shakes out.

Thinking about what Mosseri said introducing Threads search:

…having a comprehensive list of every post with a specific word in chronological order inevitably means spammers and other bad actors pummel the view with content by simply adding the relevant words or tags. And before you ask why we don’t take down that bad content, understand there’s a lot more content that people don’t want to see than we can or should take down.

This is what we’ve always thought at Micro.blog too. Meta solves it with algorithmic timelines. We don’t do that, so we’ve been admittedly slow to improve here.

I’m using ChatGPT more and more for coding help. Sometimes I don’t fully trust the answer and double check with Google or Stack Overflow. Today the AI produced some code that I thought it must have completely hallucinated… Does this even work technically? But it ran perfectly.

Love developing for the web and learning how to do something new for the first time. Processing a ZIP file fully within JavaScript in the browser instead of server-side? Never really considered doing it but it works great.

Sometimes the choices we don’t mean to make end up perfect. When I was traveling this year my shoes fell apart and I stopped at a random shoe store in Boulder. They had one pair of shoes in my size, a brand I’d never heard of, bought them, and they are now some of my favorites. Wear them everyday.

Threads launching in the EU next week. My earlier theory was they were waiting for ActivityPub (and so better account portability) before going live. Guess I was wrong.

Noticed load averages briefly jumping up to 10.0 so it’s going to be that kind of day. There’s always something to optimize! Looking okay now, though.

It’s been a couple weeks since we got our first Roomba, so here’s my review: it’s great. Took a day for us to settle into how best to use it, what to pick up from the floor or block, and when to run it… Now it just does its thing every day. Surprisingly good with dog hair too.

Testing new in-progress features and everything is kind of working. Maybe at this point in my career I shouldn’t be surprised when my code actually works, but it’s still a nice feeling.

Interesting juxtaposition of releases today… The new Ivory with Mastodon hashtags support and the Threads update with hashtags for the first time, limited to one tag per post. Also major Mammoth release, with open source on the way.

Watching a few clips from last night’s GOP debate. Chris Christie still fighting the good fight against Trump when no one else will. From Christie’s closing statement:

…picture in your mind election day. You’ll all be heading to the polls to vote. And that is something Donald Trump will not be able to do. Because he will be convicted of felonies before then and his right to vote will be taken away.

🇺🇸

I love these robots. We’ve seen more of them but it’s not clear if they are actually going anywhere or just practicing for deliveries.

Congrats to @cheesemaker and the Silverpine team for announcing the beta of Evergreen.ink, an interactive fiction authoring tool. Think: “choose your own adventure” stories. I’ve been helping with this behind the scenes too, and the upcoming iOS app… Really cool to see it come together.

Beeper Mini looks like an impressive feat of reverse-engineering. Apple will surely try to break this in the future, but if doing so requires an iOS update for iMessage API tweaks, it may take years before they can realistically cut off Beeper along with very old iPhones.

Made a little architecture diagram for Micro.blog that reflects the recent server upgrades. A couple simplifications but it’s pretty close to how things work.

I’ve been putting off an infrastructure upgrade because 💰, going to bring online another new server today. This would be a great time for everyone to upgrade to Micro.blog Premium. 🙂 Seriously though, you’ll get a major new feature launching next month.

Matt Haughey in a blog post about renting a Tesla:

I wish other EVs could be this good. I will never own a Tesla, but I can see the appeal now. It was easy to drive, even easier to recharge, and was quite comfortable and made every other car I’ve driven feel like a relic from a past era of personal travel.

As a side note, seems a trend where execs are becoming more public characters — with their random dumb thoughts posted online — at the same time that everything is becoming political. So now we buy products based on our values instead of quality. Sometimes good, sometimes taken too far.

Finished reading: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Absolutely wonderful. 📚

Can’t believe I’m still working on the book. Just a few final end-of-year updates. New excerpt:

Even the name itself and the bird branding are gone. The letter X feels like an appropriate placeholder for the platform’s grave. Here lies a dying platform. X marks the spot where it used to be.

Tweet Marker’s whole purpose was for cross-platform, cross-app timeline sync. There was never anything like it because it’s not actually a profitable idea on its own. But there are many apps that could benefit from something like this. Imagine note sync across Ulysses, iA Writer, Bear, and Obsidian.

The future of Nostr might not actually be for microblogging but instead as a cross-platform generic sync API for any type of small data. I know this was baked into the original idea, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like a unique solution to several things.

Apple Pay has made me lazy about credit cards and it finally came back to bite me. Drove to Dallas yesterday and forgot my wallet in Austin. Generally hasn’t been a problem… restaurants, gas, movie, coffee, all fine. Until the hotel where they assume you’re a criminal if you don’t have an ID.

Went to the early IMAX screening for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron tonight. Managed to avoid seeing any trailer, plot summary, or review, so everything was a surprise. Still thinking about it so won’t say more for now. Subtitled, and I’d like to see the dubbed version later. 🍿

Starting to see “included in Premium” free audiobooks in Spotify. This is going to be great.

La La Land Kind Cafe. ☕️

I’m excited that Texas is in the playoffs, but only picking four teams is always going to leave someone out who should have a shot at it. College rankings have always felt subjective to me so I don’t give it much thought. The Longhorns barely lost that game anyway. 🏈

Quiet night camping at Ray Roberts Lake State Park.

Sunset at Lake Ray Roberts.

My quick 5-minute demo from FediForum is now on YouTube. I show off Micro.blog and fediverse integration. It’s a whirlwind tour of several different things including how we think about cross-posting.

Just published Core Intuition 578 about the MarsEdit 5.1 release, AI and copyright, software licensing, and more. Lots of good stuff in this episode I think.

Working more this weekend on the feature I teased about a few days ago. Work has accelerated and now I’m confident in the design and technical bits. The hardest part is pulling myself back every day to work on smaller fixes and improvements.

Castro is back online and Tiny is considering finding a new home for the app, via Rob Fahrni. For Micro.blog we host podcasts, and we have our Wavelength app, but we’ve thought about doing more. Kind of neat to imagine Castro in our suite of apps if we had a non-$0 acquisition budget.

Glass announced they are raising their prices for next year, but it looks like even with the change I would save money if I switched to the yearly plan. Interesting to see how different companies handle yearly discounts. 50% off is an unusually good deal.

December already! I still have 9 books left on my reading goal for the year. I’m halfway through a couple things already so I might hit it if I read more over the holidays. 📚

Seems there aren’t many notes apps that are end-to-end encrypted. Obsidian is one, and there’s also Day One for journals. Wondering how important this is to folks. Personally, I like that Day One is encrypted but I would use it even if it wasn’t. And most of my notes are just on Dropbox.

Putting on my sys admin hat this week, evaluating what we can improve. Our primary MySQL server has been running for over three years without a restart. Not bad! (Hopefully I didn’t just jinx it.)

Not sure what to make of Elon Musk’s interview yesterday. It’s so easy to say he’s unhinged that I’m questioning whether I should dig deeper. Ultimately my core belief about huge social networks hasn’t changed in years: too much centralized power opens the door for user-hostile, dev-hostile leaders.

MarsEdit 5.1 is out with support for posting to Mastodon and improvements for Micro.blog too, like attaching photos in the micropost window and updated character counts. Congrats @danielpunkass!

Usually I work on improvements to Micro.blog for a couple days or weeks and roll them out. Very rarely does something sit for months before customers see it. But sometimes very big features need a little more process and restraint… Working on something new off and on that will launch in January.

Interesting conversation about web hosting and AI in this interview on Decoder with Avishai Abrahami, CEO of Wix. But this also stuck out to me:

The developers, they just read a very fantastic post by somebody on how to do something in a much nicer or interesting way, and then they want to try it. They want to play with it. They want to build something with it. And suddenly, it’s like, “Oh, no, this is how we do it. You have to do it like that.”

It takes a lot of discipline to ignore tech fads. I’m convinced this is why large teams often spin their wheels, getting very little done for users.

Playing around with Raindrop.io today. It’s really nicely done. I’ve added support for importing Raindrop.io bookmarks to Micro.blog bookmarks. There’s also an API, so maybe we’ll have more integration later.

I’ve been eyeing a specific domain name for several months. It’s a premium TLD and I can’t really justify the price. But every once in a while like today I come this close to grabbing it, then talk myself out of it. Whew.

Reminded by this post from Vincent that Arq exists. I used it years ago when I was frustrated with something from Backblaze, but I didn’t stick with it. Going back to it, backing up to S3 and skipping a backup subscription altogether.

Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch about Evernote’s experiments with a more limited free plan:

…a pop-up message that informed them that unless they upgraded to a paid plan, they would now be limited to only 1 notebook and 50 notes. That change would dramatically limit the service for longtime Evernote users who have accumulated hundreds or thousands of notes over the years.

Evernote is a perfect example of a company getting too big for what it’s trying to do. It could’ve been a great 20-person company. The billion-dollar valuation ruined it.

Roomba vs. dog. It takes a lot for Ollie to move… Certainly more than a robot nudge. If he’s sitting in front of a door you want to open, for example, forget it.

Fixing one last thing after our server problems yesterday. I almost finished it last night but realized I was too tired to risk making a mistake restoring data. Much better in the morning with coffee and triple-checking backups and scripts. One day we’ll have a full-time sysadmin!

We talk about domain names as your web identity, how it’s more permanent and meaningful when you’re microblogging on your own site instead of someone else’s domain. Some social network is down? Shrug. Your web site is down? That feels personal. We’ve had good uptime but it’s gotta be even better.

Dealing with fallout from another server failure. We have pretty good redundancy most places, except ironically some of the most stable parts that always felt low on the list to prioritize because they never failed… until they did. Picking up the pieces, improving a few things for later.

Cool driving by REI on Black Friday and seeing the store closed. Kudos for thinking of employees and customers before profit. On the other hand, we participated in the shopping craziness by getting a Roomba. Figured the vacuum robot tech must be well along by now. Mixed results in the first run.

Super Mario Wonder is excellent on replay. I’m slowly finding all the levels I missed. Some of the levels are actually kind of difficult, which I love, and seems rare since the NES and SNES days. 🍄

The ads on TV for Humane’s pin are pretty effective. I don’t expect much success for the first version of the pin, but I do think they’re on to something if they can keep iterating. Best comparison is the Newton — a little ahead of its time.

Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃 I finished Mario Wonder. Great game, I’ve been playing a couple levels every day since its release. Missed a few things that I can still go back to, or play different characters. 🕹️

We just posted a new Core Intuition all about the chaos at OpenAI over the last several days, including the resolution with Sam Altman returning as CEO. The full episode is all on this, the relationship with Microsoft, the odd company structure of OpenAI, and the impact of AI on… well, everything.

Happy to keep growing the list of formats that Micro.blog can import to your blog. As of today: Twitter, WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Markdown, Substack, Goodreads, and Write.as. Plus cross-posting out of Micro.blog: Medium, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, and Pixelfed.

Doing a little more tinkering with Stimulus. @vincent and I have talked about refactoring more of my clunky, old-school JavaScript to use Stimulus. It would at least provide a nice structure for all the code without feeling too abstracted and bloated.

Most companies would delay any product changes if they were in the middle of leadership chaos. Rolling out ChatGPT Voice to everyone this week says a lot about their confidence. Who is even CEO? Who cares, let’s ship it.

Pretty big deal that Spotify didn’t have to pay Google the usual in-app purchase fees. The inconsistencies across developers is just as unsustainable as the high 15% or 30% cut. As I’ve been saying forever, the ultimate solution is side-loading and external payments. Getting closer to that future.

Uptown in Dallas over the weekend, coffee and work at Foxtrot as the trolly goes by in the background.

Catching up this morning on all the OpenAI and Microsoft news. Hard to overstate how dramatic a weekend this was for the tech world. As a (small) OpenAI customer, I’m not sure where this leaves me. One thing is clear: Satya Nadella is a really impactful CEO. He turned a crisis into a triumph.

Wanted to make my blog Creative Commons licensed again, so I created a little Micro.blog plug-in that adds a rel="license" tag. Defaults to “CC BY” but can be changed to another license in the settings. Not sure yet how licenses should interact with our future AI overlords, though, if at all.

Om Malik on the OpenAI news:

…the big question is what this really means in the long term for the forward momentum of artificial intelligence and its impact on the broader technology ecosystem. While it might sound pessimistic, the past 24 hours have exposed a massive and obvious foundational risk in placing all bets on a single entity.

The latest Core Intuition has everything about my road trip, getting COVID, seeing U2 in Vegas, and then back to blog-related topics with the state of Tumblr under Automattic’s ownership.

I’ve been quite happy with OpenAI as a developer. We use their API to transcribe podcasts hosted on Micro.blog. It’s cheap enough that we can include the feature for everyone at no extra charge. I’ll admit I don’t know much about Sam Altman beyond the superficial, though. Ready for leaks.

Friday bombshell, Sam Altman is gone from OpenAI:

Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.

Didn’t see even a hint that something like this might happen. Pretty shocking.

Amazing that we’re only a month and a half away from Steamboat Willie being in the public domain. Hoping animators experiment with remixing it, within the limits of copyright trademark. I think there’s a lot you could do. Probably won’t have time myself but maybe one day.

Lillihub is a new Micro.blog web client by @heyloura! It’s got a bunch of features and a really unique style compared to the other Micro.blog apps. Check it out if you’re looking for something new or just want to try a different browsing experience.

Very positive review of Coyote vs. Acme over at Cartoon Brew. This is the film that was finished but cancelled anyway as a tax write-off. Did the Warner CEO even watch it? When money comes before art, you’ve lost your way. (This is even worse than when Warner botched the marketing for Iron Giant.)

Good news from Bluesky that a public web interface is coming this month. They’ve had a “staging” web app, but it required signing in. Also:

As a reminder, Bluesky is a public social network, so your posts, likes, etc. have always been publicly accessible through the API. We designed Bluesky with the openness of the internet in mind, and you can think of your profile as a blog on the internet.

In the future, it will be easier to have actual blogs that seamlessly act as ActivityPub and AT Protocol profiles. We’re halfway there with Micro.blog already.

Great news that Apple will be adopting RCS, via 512 Pixels. iMessage is the biggest lock-in to Apple platforms for me. RCS won’t change that overnight, but if it makes Android interoperability better, I’m for it.

Going to record a new @coreint today. It’s been a while… Traveling and getting sick didn’t help the schedule.

Some really good thoughts here from Chuck Grimmett about preserving web sites after our death. I’ve also been thinking about this. There’s a little in my book about it. Hope to have more concrete plans by the end of the year.

Very reasonable take by Jason Snell about AI assistants. Siri needs to be completely gutted and rebuilt with generative AI. This will take, what, 2-3 years? The question is who can build a compelling device (“pin” or otherwise) in the meantime, before Apple gets there.

CNN’s web site is usually a mix of news headlines and dumb clickbait, but sometimes it’s exactly what you need to start the day. Love this story about a pilot and his daughter. I’m a sucker for this style of photos separated by decades.

Finished reading: Divergent by Veronica Roth. Wasn’t planning on getting this but it was on Libby’s no-wait list when I was queuing up books for my trip. Never saw the movie. 📚

Finished reading: Age of War by Michael J. Sullivan. Another good audiobook to finish on the road. Been working through this for a little while. 📚

Rest stop in Arizona, near Texas Canyon.

Finished reading: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. Listened to the audiobook version. Love the way the narrator interpreted all the kids' voices. 📚

Silver lining to getting sick and rerouting my trip back home for speed is I got to see Joshua Tree National Park. The original plan had me in Utah today.

I wish Google Maps had an “avoid clever shortcuts through the middle of nowhere” option.

For futuristic products, Humane’s AI Pin is actually a better idea than Apple’s Vision Pro, but it seems clear especially this week with spatial video that the Vision Pro will have better polish and completeness. There might be some clunky duds before someone makes the first indispensable AI device.

I-5 between Sacramento and Los Angeles.

A follow-up on my gripe about the digital download version of Mario Wonder. As pointed out by a couple helpful folks, I was holding it wrong. When you have multiple Switches, you can de-register the “primary” Switch. That fixed the internet check for me.

Going to attempt to catch up on some work today. Long story short, I got COVID this week while on the road. I had the new vaccine a month ago, also just started Paxlovid, so I’m as prepared as I can be. Swapping out cold camp sites for warm hotel rooms for the trip back home.

I’ve been traveling and now I’m sick, so of course Micro.blog goes down. Think I was too ambitious in the planning for this road trip. Hoping to shift things around so I can get back home sooner.

Great interview on Decoder with Barack Obama. He is so knowledgable and thoughtful. Plenty to think about with AI and social networks.

Blazers vs. Kings. 🏀

Millerton Lake. I’m still not used to how ridiculously early the sun is setting. This was a few minutes before 5pm!

First world problem, but I made the mistake of buying the digital download of Mario Wonder instead of the physical card. Every time the game opens, it has to check the internet, and when traveling sometimes there’s no good wi-fi. So I have to tether to my phone just to open the game? Not great. 🍄

Camping at Calico Ghost Town. Didn’t get here much past 5pm and it was already dark. There are over a hundred camping spots but only a couple other people here, far away, so it feels like just me and rocks and the wind. 👻

I knew I’d find a cool coffee shop around here somewhere. Bad Owl Coffee in Henderson, NV.

Morning at Lake Mead.

U2 at the Sphere. This is from the very beginning of the show, no spoilers. Incredible concert and venue.

Hoover Dam.

During COVID, I thought for sure no one would ever want to go to Las Vegas again. Stuck in a poorly-ventilated room with no windows and people smoking? No thanks! Yet here I am in the city. U2 at the Sphere tonight.

On this week’s Core Intuition, we react to Apple’s M3 Mac event. Are we planning on upgrading? Plus thoughts on Apple talking about AI.

James Harden this week after joining the Clippers:

I’m not a system player. I am a system.

It’s a great line. Unfortunately for Harden, I think you need a few things to win an NBA championship: skill, chemistry, and luck. Doesn’t seem like he’ll ever be on a team with all three. 🏀

Finished reading: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. An ambitious book that kept surprising me. Not everything worked, but I was hanging on until the end anyway. Curious if some unresolved threads will get attention in the next book. 📚

Back on the road. Sun coming up from Coconino National Forest.

In between audiobooks and podcasts, had a lot of time to think on the road today. Why do we travel? The more I see, the more obvious it is that there are nearly countless beautiful things still to find. Only our time is limited.

Wasn’t planning on stopping at Petrified Forest National Park but it was a great break from I-40. Tiponi Point over the Painted Desert.

What’s left of Budville Trading Company, originally opened in 1928 along Route 66.

We have a new page highlighting Micro.blog’s support for IndieWeb building blocks. Thanks @paulrobertlloyd for the new icons!

Cabra Coffee, a perfect cute coffee shop to work for a little while, only a mile from where I camped last night in New Mexico. ☕️

BNSF going by, somewhere just into New Mexico. 🚂

First coffee stop of the road trip. J&B Coffee in Lubbock. ☕️

Now that we’re in a new neighborhood, not sure how much candy we’ll need for trick-or-treaters. Have a feeling there will be more kids. Also I might’ve opened the Reese’s already.

If you’re new to Micro.blog, you might not know that there are some secret pins you can unlock on various holidays and events, based on words or phrases used in microblog posts. Happy Halloween! 🎃

Looking back on this post from three years ago when I bought my Intel MacBook Pro, previous me would be surprised that I still haven’t jumped to Apple silicon. Now is not quite right, but hopefully early next year. M3 will be a great upgrade.

Busy evening so I just watched the spooky Apple event replay. Feel like they got the timing right, not padded unnecessarily. And the MacBook Pro lineup makes sense again for the first time in years, with clear product differences and prices. 🎃

Got my car battery replaced. And in a ridiculously well-timed coincidence, just got an “our records indicate it’s time to get your battery checked” email from the Honda dealership. I don’t usually buy into the most extreme surveillance marketing conspiracy theories, but the timing is uncanny.

Bad timing or perfect timing? Car battery died the day before a big road trip. 🗺️

Looks like some great session topics at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg. I wasn’t organized enough to attend remotely because of the time zone difference… Catching up on the notes and chat now.

Back at the old house (still hasn’t sold) to mow the yard in between the rain. Mushrooms popping up.

Spurs win in OT. That was a good one. Can’t wait to see Wembanyama in person sometime this season. 🏀

We’ve just posted a new episode of Core Int. This week we talk about The Verge article on POSSE and the potential for AI in customer support email.

Watching the news at lunch. I want to blog about the war in Israel but it’s too divisive and terrible. Not interested in inviting a debate right now. Strong feelings mean everyone is quick to hit reply. I’m okay writing about American politics but this is much harder to get right in a short post.

Super Mario Wonder is so good. And yeah, I did end up getting a new Switch Lite to play it. 🕹️

Strongly agree with everything in @gruber’s post about pushing for gun legislation:

The aftermath of a massacre is the time to demand sane gun control measures. That’s when the issue is clarified.

There are already so many assault weapons out there, we won’t fully see the impact of new laws for years. Why are we okay with waiting even longer to start? Now is the time. It’s beyond frustrating to wait.

Biden should focus his 2024 campaign around banning assault weapons. Keep it simple, nothing else except guns and some basics about the economy. I think most people across parties are ready for it. 🇺🇸

Testing out SupportAgent.ai which uses AI to draft answers to support email. It is blowing my mind. However, human replies are always better, so not sure I can actually use it. Also, it replies to spam! 🤣 Here’s a screenshot to give an idea of how powerful it is but also how potentially wrong.

Spurs throw away the game in the last couple minutes but still a lot to like, despite the turnovers and foul trouble. Going to be a fun season. 🏀

I saw a couple Cybertrucks on the road today, in northeast Austin, presumably Tesla testing things out. Such a bizarre vehicle. I don’t get the appeal but I like that they tried something weird.

Doesn’t take much to make me happy. Walking to pick up coffee is one of those simple things. ☕️

Watching the courtroom statement and apology from former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, on CNN video here. Some of these lawyers and supporters were caught up in something much bigger, lost their good judgement for a while. Contrast with Trump who will never admit he lied, will never apologize. 🇺🇸

David Pierce at The Verge: The poster’s guide to the internet of the future:

The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website.

The podcast episode in The Vergecast has even more quotes from me, Tantek Çelik, Cory Doctorow, Mike McCue, and Matt Mullenweg. I love how well this captures the foundation for POSSE and where the web is headed.

Planning another road trip for next month, here to Nevada, California, and points in between, then back through Utah. The key is having enough downtime so I can work and not be on the road all day. My notes just have dates, reservations, nearby coffee, things to see, driving time. Works for me. 🗺️

Finished reading: Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson. Hadn’t realized until I had finished The Sunlit Man that I had missed this Cosmere novella. 📚

The kids took all our Nintendo Switches to their own apartments. Seriously considering picking up a Lite to play the new Mario Wonder. 🕹️

Picked up Killers of the Flower Moon a few weeks ago and only now starting it. Got tickets for the movie next week so I have a little time to make a dent in the book, at least. 📚

Happy Friday! New @coreint podcast to wind down the week. Episode 573 covers Apple’s “video reactions” feature and what we can learn about rolling out a surprising feature. Then we jump back into Twitter/X news with the $1/year subscription announcement.

Thinking about Biden’s address to the country last night, he did something remarkable that I didn’t realize at first. After the Hamas attack, I assumed that any chance of peace had been set back decades. Biden steered me back from the cliff: no, we cannot give up on peace, even when it is hard. 🇺🇸

This post from @mia@void.rehab will ring true to anyone who has actually implemented an ActivityPub server. We talk about ActivityPub as if it’s a fully-formed spec, but it’s really a suite of specs, and trial and error. I’d love to see the specs streamlined without breaking compatibility.

Matt Mullenweg on the experience of riding in a self-driving taxi:

The thing is I know these self-driving cars exist, I’ve seen them around San Francisco forever, but the experience of being picked up and dropped off by a robot navigating the tricky SF hills and streets just hits different.

We have these in Austin now too. Seeing a car just driving down the street with no one in it is absolutely wild.

Looks like Georgia knew what they were doing with the 19-person indictment… One by one the defendants agree to tell the truth until only Trump and a handful of people are left for a trial? Sidney Powell pleads guilty, via CNN:

Fulton County prosecutors are recommending a sentence of six years probation. Powell will also be required to testify at future trials and write an apology letter to the citizens of Georgia.

Thought I had a good job for our robot overlords. I grabbed a list of language codes from Wikipedia, ran some regex on it to make it JSON, then asked ChatGPT to trim it to the most popular 50 languages in the world. No luck, the output was wrong and not usable. AI still has a ways to go.

Finished reading: Age of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan. Still enjoying this series. 📚

Wow, great game to wrap up the WNBA finals. Liberty so close to forcing a game 5. Congrats to the Aces! Becky Hammon building a heck of a coaching career so far in Vegas. 🏀

Didn’t take many photos while in west Texas. Here’s a random shot as I stopped for a minute driving back to I-10.

Need to remind myself when on an interview or podcast: I usually do okay the first 15 minutes, then get a bit worked up, talk too fast, and lose my train of thought. Especially when the AC is off and I start sweating. Argh, summer.

Reviewing the cross-posting chapter of my book, several things are out of date. I’m doing a final pass through the book, cutting a few sections. Would rather most of the book withstand the test of time but things change too quickly, calling it “done” has been hard.

Seeing some variety in reactions to Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto. I read it quickly and haven’t thought enough to have a strong opinion, except that I don’t like how “enemy” is used. Technology’s role in society should be a conversation, not a war.

On the last Core Intuition, I joked about a hypothetical manton.ai… But then I sort of worried someone else would register it, so I decided to grab the domain myself. Whoops! Too many domains. Just made it a placeholder site hosted on Micro.blog.

Finished reading: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson. Listened to the whole audiobook on the drive to and from the Davis Mountains. Brandon giving us a taste of the Cosmere endgame! Loved it. 📚

Found a great spot to work for the afternoon in the library at Sul Ross.

Kottke.org is bringing back blog comments. Members-only, which seems like a nice solution. I think we’ll see more of this as the social web evolves away from silos.

It’s that time of year when my iTunes Match subscription renews and I don’t know what will happen if I cancel it. One day need to figure out how to find iTunes Match tracks that are not on streaming. Or do I even care anymore? Just throwing money into Apple’s services revenue pot.

Drove out to west Texas today. Left late, felt like I was always chasing the sun, and it was dark before I got to the Davis Mountains. Forgot how amazing the stars are.

Just published a new Core Intuition episode about ActivityPub support in WordPress.com and its impact on Micro.blog, plus a discussion of Humane and the potential for new AI-based devices.

Watching Biden react to the chaos in the world, the narrative that he is “too old” just does not match reality. He’s competent and thoughtful. Meanwhile almost nothing Trump says makes any sense. Biden is doing the job of president and Trump is still on some kind of improv stand-up comedy tour. 🇺🇸

Basketball fans who don’t usually have a way to tune-in to Spurs games: Spurs/Heat on TNT tonight. Big change from the last few years when we had almost no national coverage. And it’s still just the preseason! 🏀

The updated vaccine floored me for a couple days. I was starting to wonder if it was worth it, but then I remembered that I haven’t been actually sick in three years. Knock on wood, feeling lucky about that. I used to get a cold or flu or something every year. 💉

The Morning Show does a great job of reinventing itself each season. I wasn’t sure after the first season if they could sustain it, keep it relevant, but here we are in season 3 and it still works. Last episode with the Paul Marks interview was really good. 📺

Great to see WordPress.com’s support for ActivityPub. Following WordPress blogs from Micro.blog looks good, although @-mentioning Micro.blog from within WordPress isn’t working for me. I’ve been testing and reviewing the code, will make any tweaks I can so everything is compatible.

Went to the HEB on Lake Austin Boulevard today to get the updated COVID vaccine. When I was growing up, this was a Safeway that they had literally built around a big tree rather than cut it down. But nothing lasts forever, and the site is unrecognizable now. There’s a great history of it here. 💉

A random shot from a few weeks ago, walking down Steck over Shoal Creek back to the Honda dealer, waiting for service. 🚙

Updated the Epilogue beta on TestFlight with a new feature for book cover management using your own Internet Archive / Open Library account. Still early. You can browse editions of books and upload new covers. Here’s a quick video demo:

We don’t get a lot of disputed charges in Micro.blog. Maybe once a year. But it’s especially frustrating when a potential spammer disputes a charge. Every dispute costs us a $15 fee, so now we’re effectively paying extra for someone to violate our guidelines.

It’s only preseason but great to see more of what Victor Wembanyama can do. Great first half, so much potential for this Spurs team. 🏀

I’m the guest on the latest ShopTalk Show! Really enjoyed talking with Dave and Chris about blogging and social networks. We cover a bunch of Micro.blog features.

Wheel of Time season 2 had a few good moments, but overall it’s just too much to squeeze into 8 episodes. No time to develop the most important character because the writers can’t seem to decide who the show is about. Veering way off the books probably doesn’t help. 📺

Sad watching the coverage of war in Israel. Meanwhile in this country we don’t have a Speaker of the House for petty, incompetent reasons. Reminder to voters that we actually got a bunch accomplished the first two years of Biden’s presidency. 🇺🇸

Just posted Core Intuition episode 571. From the show notes:

Daniel and Manton discuss Apple’s latest round of in-person and online “Apple Experts” events, the Apple Vision Pro sessions and whether the NDAs allude to anything exciting, and Daniel’s shoulder injury and worrying about getting older and being stuck in our ways as the technological world changes.

I’m finding so many old things as I clean out boxes from the garage. WWDC 2001 bag was a nice find. I’ve donated most away. Here’s a sticker from WebEdge, a web conference I helped run in a former life.

Our old house hit the market today and the professional photos are kind of stunning. Looks like a nice place. Hope a new family enjoys it as much as we did. 🏡

Spotify will include 15 hours of audiobooks as part of paid subscriptions. This sounds great to switch over to listening when I get stalled reading a print book or e-book, if the audiobook isn’t available quickly on Libby. Not in the US yet, though.

It’s one of those mornings. Accidentally texted some Redis info and server logs to our realtor instead of @vincent. 🤪

We’ve had an hours-long outage at our hosting provider Linode, mostly affecting photos using the CDN. They have rolled out a fix and we’re hoping things get back to normal. You may want to disable the CDN for your blog under the Design page temporarily if you’re still seeing issues.

Dan Moren writes about a bizarre 12-hour iCloud meltdown on his account. Doesn’t seem like much has changed since 2016 when I blogged that iCloud is too opaque. I still prefer Dropbox for everything important.

Not sure I’ve ever been this busy, simultaneously moving and getting our old house ready to sell. Dozens and dozens of little things to do. I fell behind in almost everything else, slowly crawling back to writing code, editing podcasts, email, etc. Thanks for your patience if you were waiting on me.

I get that Democrats wouldn’t be thrilled to save McCarthy after… well, everything he’s done. I’m sure they know what they’re doing. Yet, this is all a waste of everyone’s time. Matt Gaetz running amuck, sowing chaos. Felt like this was an enemy of my enemy is my friend moment. 🇺🇸

Dave Winer:

“Open web” is redundant

I like IndieWeb because it emphasizes smaller, more distributed sites run by people, not big companies. But Dave is right. The default for the web is openness.

Nice post by Remy Sharp about intercepting broken links and redirecting them to the Internet Archive. Reminds me of the Micro.blog Premium feature (see video on YouTube) where we archive a copy of any web page you link to. I’d love to do more with this.

This is a cool look at old icons from Rogue Amoeba. Fission probably needs an update but overall it’s a really nice set. That bottle for Audio Hijack is still one of my favorites.

Losing my mind trying to get fetch or axios or superagent or anything in React Native to not follow redirects. About to give up and write my own Obj-C or Swift networking bridge.

If anyone has doubts about Threads supporting ActivityPub, listen to Mark Zuckerberg on Decoder. Some of what Mark says is almost IndieWeb-esq at times! I still believe Facebook has done a lot of harm to society, but they are clearly hoping to be more open with Threads and that’s a good thing.

A couple interesting bits in the letter about Epic Games layoffs: six months of severance pay, and Project Liberty continues:

We’ve been taking steps to reduce our legal expenses, but are continuing the fight against Apple and Google distribution monopolies and taxes, so the metaverse can thrive and bring opportunity to Epic and all other developers.

It has now been two years since Fortnite was banned from the App Store. The legal fight didn’t pan out, but I still believe side-loading is inevitable. Maybe next year when the EU’s Digital Markets Act goes into affect.

Our sleepy dog kept me company today during podcast recording. Lots of dog snoring, which may or may not be picked up on the microphone. Preferable to the usual barking, though. A quiet day with no package deliveries.

Why am I watching another Republican debate? It’s chaotic, awkward… Just kind of a mess. Maybe this should be like the State of the Union format so Biden gets a few minutes to respond at the end. 🇺🇸

Looking forward to macOS Sonoma, but decided to hold off with the install until next week, after we’ve shipped Micro.blog 3.2.1 for iOS. Don’t want to risk any last-minute Xcode build problems.

Impressed with Olivia Rodrigo’s album GUTS. Good stuff. 🎶

For day 26 of the photo challenge: beverage. My go-to coffee when at home, cold brew with oat milk. Getting started for the day with Micro.blog timeline catch-up and code pull requests. ☕️

When we first added ActivityPub support to Micro.blog years ago, I used the phrase “Mastodon-compatible” because I was worried that “ActivityPub” would be confusing for normal people. It now seems time to adopt “fediverse” as a term throughout our UI instead. Curious how Threads will handle this.

Skimming through more of this interview with me that was posted yesterday, really happy with how it turned out! Except the part in the middle where I forget @vincent’s name and you can see my brain turn to mush in realtime. We’re just human here at Micro.blog HQ. 🙂

With the writers strike ending, wonder how soon we can expect a return of SNL. No need to film anything in advance and I’m imagining all these comedians have a backlog of ideas.

Fun to see this new take on a Micro.blog client from @heyloura. It’s a great example of using the API to build a different user experience that can prioritize different aspects of navigation and features.

I love reading the perspective of people who have moved from their own Mastodon server to using Micro.blog hosting, like this post from @rachsmith. Thanks! There’s still more we could do to make this integration better.

There’s a new video interview with me up on YouTube. Thanks @numericcitizen for talking to me! We cover a lot about Micro.blog, thoughts about social networks, travel, hosting beyond someone’s lifetime, user experience, and what might be coming to Micro.blog in the future.

On the latest Core Intuition we talk about whether to order new Apple products, gripes about managing online payments for phones, and the macOS Sonoma upgrade from a dev perspective.

It’s a special photo challenge for day 23: a day in the life. This is me testing my camera this morning before being interviewed by @numericcitizen.

I’ve got a bunch of Bluesky invite codes. I’m just gonna put them in this Gist if anyone wants to grab one. I’ll update the list as I can, but you might need to try a different code if one is already taken. (I check in on Bluesky occasionally and let M.b send most of my posts over there.)

I’ve been ordering a lot of little things from Amazon lately as I try to turn my car into a micro-camper. Amazon has let way too many sponsored search results clutter up the buying experience. It’s going to hurt them long term if they don’t clean it up.

Love what Patrick Rhone is doing with this new blog For You. From yesterday’s post:

When you ask for help, you are not admitting failure or lack of ability to solve the problem. To the contrary, you are using your ability to bring further resources to bear.

Finished reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. Takes a little while to get there but love when all the threads start to come together. Wonderful. 📚

Ran through my Micro.blog demo at FediForum pretty quickly because I wanted to stay under the 5-minute goal, but also because my dog has been barking all morning. Can’t believe he was quiet for the whole demo.

I often tune into the news while eating breakfast. Impressed with Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky on CNN this morning. He always seems more grounded and human than most CEOs.

I’ll be joining FediForum today. It starts in about half an hour. Mostly will lurk today, but looking forward to hearing what people are working on and what to solve next in the fediverse. Then tomorrow I’ll show off a little of Micro.blog.

I don’t usually look at Wordle stats. I solve the puzzles for fun and to wake my brain up a little, doesn’t matter if I get it in 2 tries or 6. But apparently I’ve played 543 times… Not sure I’ve played any game that many times before.

Today’s photo challenge word is “edge”… The retaining wall in our yard is currently being destroyed and rebuilt. Gotta make things nice for new potential buyers. 🏡

The second FediForum is this Wednesday and Thursday! Two half days. I’ll be doing a quick demo of how Micro.blog fits in with the fediverse, including recent Pixelfed integration.

Got my signed copy of Sword of Kaigen from the Kickstarter. The hardcover turned out great. 📚

Huge downpour as I was leaving HEB. I guess my life is boring, because running through the rain with my groceries, getting drenched, is the most alive I’ve felt in a while. Woohoo! We needed all of this rain. 🌧️

We “lost” an episode of Core Intuition because of audio quality problems, so we decided to post an edited transcript as a bonus for members. I’d like to make it public later, but for now you can get a link in the members channel on our Slack. See the membership page for more info.

Thanks to Hunter Biden for taking one for the team on the gun charges. Maybe the GOP will get serious about gun legislation and we can ban assault weapons next? (Sigh.) 🇺🇸

Skipping the iPhone 15 this year, my 14 Pro is still in perfect condition. No case, no scratches. I do envy USB-C upgraders, though.

The latest @coreint podcast is out. Daniel and I react to this week’s Apple event.

Updated to iOS 17. No problems, seems like a good upgrade. I think it fixed the web view refresh flicker problems we’ve been having in the Micro.blog app.

I’ve just loosely been following the Pennsylvania inmate’s escape and now capture. Wild story. Kudos to law enforcement for capturing him without firing a shot, and no one injured.

iPhone 15 Pro action button is interesting. I wouldn’t mind a rethink of the volume and power buttons too. I still accidentally take screenshots or otherwise fumble with the buttons.

I enjoyed the Mother Nature video at the Apple event. Usually these videos seem overdone and unnecessary, but this was actually a fun format to list the same somewhat dense environmental facts. On the other hand, we’re 30 minutes in and no products I’m particularly interested in.

Took the new-to-me Honda Element in to get checked out and the cost for a bunch of random fixes is a little mind-boggling. It’s got 127k miles and I thought maybe I could push it to 250k… Now I’m starting to doubt. 💰

Over the weekend while I was working on my Letters from Europe page, I integrated footnotes using the Barefoot library. Completely forgot that @jsonbecker had already created a Bigfoot.js plug-in for Micro.blog. Anyway, now there are more plug-in options for footnotes!

24 years ago, Traci and I went to Europe with a rail pass and hardly any money or plans. We worked remotely: her as a contractor for Apple and me at a small Mac dev shop. Last week I rediscovered some emails and postcards we sent while traveling and I decided to put them together as a web page.

When the threads-api project was announced, it was so tempting to use it but I knew it would be too fragile relying on undocumented APIs. Sure enough, Meta has sent them a cease and desist letter and the project is now shut down. Trust in ad-based platforms will always get you burned.

The capitol and downtown buildings over yonder, reflecting in the windows. Eighth day of the Micro.blog photo challenge.

A couple people have read between the lines of my recent posts and wondered what is going on with my life. Short answer: we are selling our house of 17 16 years in northwest Austin and renting a place closer into town. Downsizing is hard. Feels like the right time for a major change. 🏡

App Store Connect is barely holding on today. Errors and more errors. Apparently this is the day I complain about other people’s software while I try to fix my own.

Starting to get the new Slack redesign in one of my workspaces but not others. I’m fine with the UI changes, but it’s jarring the way they roll these out so they don’t apply everywhere in the app.

Fascinating fallout happening in the JavaScript vs. TypeScript debate. In my experience, changing a language rarely brings the productivity gains you were hoping for.

More good advice from Manuel Moreale:

Please, for the love of all things web-related, if you decide to do anything online, get yourself a domain name.

We try to make this easy in Micro.blog, but it should be even easier. I’d like to spend some more time on it this year, so that transferring or configuring custom domains is effortless.

To follow up on some of the replies I’m getting about my hard drive, my philosophy is that nearly everything should be in one place. Less chance you will lose something important. Backups are simpler. Work anywhere. Same goes for what I post on the web: everything is on my blog.

Another new Micro.blog 3.2 beta is out for TestFlight. @vincent is tweaking the tags design and it’s looking really nice. I think we can probably ship this to everyone next week. And it’s a great time to try bookmarks and tagging in Micro.blog Premium if you haven’t upgraded yet.

Apple’s sending emails about getting apps ready for the Vision Pro App Store. Folks in the Apple dev community won’t like this, but I think Vision Pro will be a bust in the short term. Only develop for it for fun, not for a market. I’ll revisit it in 10 years when the tech catches up to the dream.

Can’t even calculate the number of hours and probably days I’ve lost because I cheapened out when I bought my MacBook Pro with too small of a hard drive. Still really like this computer (16-inch Intel) and don’t want the hassle of upgrading it just for more space.

We’re ramping up the TestFlight betas again for Micro.blog 3.2 with bookmark tags. The UI is still evolving. We’ll iterate quickly from here and get the final release out pretty soon.

Manuel Moreale follows up with some thoughts after interviewing me for his People and Blogs series:

That’s one of the main advantages of owning your place on the web: you can bend it and shape it to do exactly what you need it to do.

I love even the small tweaks we can make to our own sites. Having control over your site helps it fit your words and photos in a way that just isn’t possible when plugging content into the cookie-cutter mainstream social media platforms.

So many things are happening right now. Car, house, work. Change starts slowly but once momentum hits, it’s kind of unstoppable.

Love this new bookstore + coffee shop in Austin, First Light Books. Lots of thoughtful touches like the laptop-free book nooks for reading.

The photo challenge grid for Micro.blog is so cool right now. Lots of green for today (“forest”) and orange for yesterday (actually “orange”). Thanks everyone who is participating!

For technical folks who are interested in the plumbing of the social web, @snarfed has a great feature grid that compares IndieWeb, ActivityPub, Bluesky, and Nostr.

Day 2 of the Micro.blog photo challenge: buildup.

First day of the Micro.blog photo challenge: abstract.

Found some old postcards and emails we sent from Europe in 1999 and they are absolute gold. May try to put some of them online as an archive if I get permission from @traci. Here’s a highlight from traveling before wi-fi existed:

We won’t be connecting the PowerBook to the Internet again until we get to the next city, probably, but we should be checking email the rest of the week anyway. There’s a restaurant here that gives free Internet access when you order a dinner, which should be nice if it’s true.

Nice blog post from Allen Pike about link formatting. I’d add that overthinking SEO is a good way to lose your way. Design links for readers and the rest will take care of itself.

After owning a house for 20+ years, submitting a rental application is a nerve-racking process. Don’t usually have this kind of fear of denial.

Manuel Moreale has started a new People and Blogs series where he interviews people about their blogs. The post with me just went live today. I love this idea and look forward to future posts in the series.

This is how Amazon always wins… I want to pick up an organizing storage-type thing and think IKEA would be perfect. But it’s a bit of a drive, so I check Target and they have basically the same thing. But then I realize Amazon also has something similar that can be here tomorrow for zero effort.

It’s just about time for the September photo challenge! Got any ideas for prompt words to inspire each day’s photos? Jean has the details here and her email address to send them to. We’ll pick a random word each day and collect everyone’s photos together.

The third-party Mastodon web app Phanpy has a conversation view that reminds me a lot of Tweetie on iPad. The multi-pane layout in that app never really caught on, but I always thought it was a nice use of space.

Noticing the moon as a long day winds down.

Sarah Gooding, writing at WP Tavern about Automattic’s 100-year plan:

What resources will a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) point to 50 years from now? Or will URLs be discarded into the scrap pile of obsolete building blocks as soon as there’s a better, more efficient way to identify web addresses?

I think URLs and HTTP are here to stay. The web is over 30 years old and the basic foundation is strong.

There’s a new episode of Core Intuition out. We talk about Daniel shipping a beta of MarsEdit with Mastodon support, the value of feedback from customers, upcoming plans, microblogging and social network differences, and how sometimes we have to cut features to ship.

Still playing Wordle almost every day. Happy Wordle #800 day! 3/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

The music video for Used To Be Young by Miley Cyrus really struck me. Simple. Powerful. 🎵

Restaurants usually wrap a fork, spoon, and knife in a napkin. I got three knives instead! Someone in the kitchen is laughing. Keep it weird, Kerbey Lane.

And to follow up on this, there’s a little known policy for Micro.blog hosting: when you have a paid subscription, we continue to host your blog forever even after you cancel and stop paying. Good URLs don’t change and don’t go away, unless you want them to.

I love this idea: WordPress.com’s 100-year plan. But at $38k, it’s too expensive for most people. I’ve been planning something similar as a complement to Micro.blog, but from a completely different angle.

Looked through my old Clipstart source code for the first time in years, to answer a rare support question. Probably should’ve open-sourced the app. Everything broke when Apple abandoned QuickTime.

Heck of a mugshot, Trump. It feels like an angry, fitting reflection of that line from his inauguration speech: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” 🇺🇸

Funny how different I drive depending on the car. In the Subaru Outback, adaptive cruise control on and let the car steer itself. In my son’s manual transmission Honda Civic, kind of recklessly like I’m street racing. And in the Honda Element, in the slow lane as if I have all the time in the world.

Sunset as we drive over the Trinity River in Fort Worth.

Made a sort of impulsive purchase of a used car: 2008 Honda Element SC, for a mini camper. Full details, photos, build, and more to follow in a longer blog post when I have it in my hands and set up. “It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust it."

Jean just announced our next Micro.blog photo challenge! Starts September 1st.

Marty and Doc waiting for the DeLorean to be constructed.

Discovered the Snow Peak brand of camping-related products this week… Love the design. I didn’t know I needed $50 chopsticks for camping, but now I want them! Seriously though, some amazing stuff here. Camp stove with modular kitchen setup looks great.

August is halfway over? Summer must be slowly winding down. Last chance to get our special Summer of Blogging $1/month blog hosting. A great value that includes all the standard features that are built into Micro.blog, like full blogs, photos, book blogging, and cross-posting to 8 platforms. ☀️

This year I’ve fallen behind in email again. Very sorry to Micro.blog folks who have waited patiently too long for an answer. Attempting to dig out by replying to all emails from today and also some of the oldest emails, each day until caught up.

NBA in-season tournament dates announced. It’s a little odd to me how it’s spread out over so many weeks, but I’m still excited about it. Should make all of those games much more interesting. 🏀

Stayed up late watching the Georgia indictment details get revealed. Incredible to see the conspiracy outlined so thoroughly even though it was expected. There was also an excellent interview with Hillary Clinton on MSNBC. Trump will not be president again. No way. 🇺🇸

I recorded a video walk-through of Epilogue today and posted it here. Shows off the basics of tracking books you’re reading, and also a few not-so-obvious features.

Oppenheimer was great. We drove down to San Antonio to see it in 70mm IMAX. 🍿

Packing up some old books. I’m trying not to look at everything, but every once in a while there is something priceless tucked away in a book that I had forgotten about, sometimes decades old. An old letter, postcard, or sketch.

Octopus tagging along with us during IKEA shopping this weekend.

I added a tags window in the latest Mac app for Micro.blog. Makes it easy to filter your bookmarks to a tag from the keyboard. Hit command-shift-T, type part of the tag, then the return key to focus the list, and return again to navigate to the tag. (Tags are for Micro.blog Premium.)

Austin this morning from the train station. Unfortunately just a drop-off, not going anywhere myself.

Whenever I create a new file in Xcode and choose Objective-C as the language, I laugh a little. Am I creating more technical debt or am I saving countless hours of time not dealing with the sharp edges of half-baked new tech? Zig when they zag.

Just posted this week’s episode of Core Intuition: Homemade Granola. Not actually about food. We talk through my frustration with Apple-only development, Apple’s power over distribution, and where the Vision Pro sits on the spectrum of open to closed Apple platforms.

Back to cool air after our upstairs A/C went out for a day. Something usually breaks every summer, and the heat has been especially ridiculous in Texas this year. Very thankful for a quick repair, less than 24 hours. ☀️

Did some testing this morning with Goodreads and it’s slow and clunky. Timeouts. Really happy with how much we’ve streamlined Micro.blog’s bookshelves so they are fast. Paraphrasing a Jason Fried quote: we can’t predict the future of technology, except that no one is going to want apps to be slower.

Spent the afternoon polishing up the next Android release of Epilogue and submitting it to Google. Because I don’t use Android often, I don’t have a great sense of what UI feels right. Things like swipe-to-delete are very inconsistent across apps. New version is definitely better, though.

Congrats to Casey Liss on shipping Callsheet. I’ve been using the beta. Great app for quickly looking up someone from a movie or TV show while on the couch. This will replace IMDb for most people… It’s just a better experience.

Great article by Christina Warren on the history of the App Store and why we’re due for some kind of change, likely helped along by the EU’s Digital Markers Act. Apple taking a cut of all developer revenue is not sustainable forever.

Interesting news on GitHub for Mastodon search, noticed via @darnell@one.darnell.one. Full-text post search is coming, will be opt-in. Discoverability and search is a frequent topic on Micro.blog so I’ll be following this closely.

I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting to Threads. I like the foundation Meta has built with Threads and expect it to be successful, but I’m going to scale back my use until ActivityPub is ready. Most of what I write (including this!) needs to start on my blog.

Fixing bugs and submitting apps to App Review this morning. As a long-time Apple developer going back to the 1990s, I now spend most of my time on web and cross-platform technologies. I’ll always love the Mac, but what a trap the Apple-only development rabbit hole is. Apple is too big and dominant.

New blog post editor for Micro.blog from @amit: Scribe. Clean, full-screen editor with styled text.

Snapped this photo while we were making a u-turn in Dallas the other day. Took my daughters here 14 years ago for lunch with their dolls. 🥲

I’ve driven by this tower a bunch of times on I-35 and was always curious about it. Turns out it’s an experiment in wireless energy transmission, built in 2017. A century after Nikola Tesla, fascinating that folks are working on this again.

We added a new about page with a little more about what Micro.blog is and what our values are.

I’m still waiting to see how DMs evolve in the fediverse before deciding what to do with Micro.blog, but one thing I’m sure of: we’re not going to have messaging that isn’t encrypted. Private replies to Mastodon users (which works now) will remain as a legacy feature, mostly hidden away.

Interesting what @dansup@mastodon.social is up to with a new messaging app called Sup. Early video demo is here. Sounds like it uses Mastodon to connect with users, but Signal protocol instead of ActivityPub for messaging. Meanwhile I still like Nostr’s approach to encrypted DMs.

Mystery boxes of records at Josey Records in Dallas, $10 each.

Frustrated with Dropbox ever since Apple required these sync apps to move to a new official API. Dropbox was rock solid, always working. Now I see frequent Finder errors or refusal to move files around. I know, “security”, but from sandboxing to this, not convinced locking down macOS actually helps.

Half Price Books flagship store in Dallas. 📚

For folks who have been using Micro.blog bookmarks… First of all, thanks! I’m curious: do we need a workflow for tracking “unread” or “read” articles? I’ve been wondering if we could do something clever so you could “tag” an article as read, maybe with an emoji or special tag.

Empty apartment with built-in bookshelves, just one potential future. We’ve been thinking about downsizing ever since all the kids moved out. Change is hard, though.

Finished reading: Age of Myth by Michael J. Sullivan. This was great. Really well paced, seems like a perfect setup for the series. First of six books. 📚

Writing some new web page text and maybe it’s early in the morning or maybe I watched too much of the news already today, but when I tried to type “independent” I misspelled it and it auto-corrected to “indictment”. 🇺🇸

Wasn’t expecting this kind of profound wisdom from the apartment sales guy today: “The world is too big to stay in one place.”

When the coffee shop recognizes me and remembers my regular order, it’s gonna be a good day. ☕️

Matilda at Zilker Hillside Theater. 🎭

If you’ve been fascinated with the Worldcoin Orb, but not sure how to feel about it, check out Molly White’s comprehensive write-up:

Having my eyeballs scanned by a shiny chrome orb so I can someday receive cryptocurrency disbursements because artificial intelligence has stolen my job sounds like something from the pages of a half-baked sci-fi novel. It also sounds like the kind of operation that venture capitalists would value at over a billion dollars.

Over the last couple years, I’ve gone from mostly reading books on a Kindle (Paperwhite), to only on the iPad Mini, and now back to the Kindle (basic 6-inch). Actually prefer the smallest screen.

Recorded another very short screencast to show the latest Micro.blog for macOS update. Less than a minute long. It’s here on YouTube.

Didn’t realize how exhausted I was toward the end of the week. Yesterday shipped new features, then took a nap after dinner, then read, then had a full night’s sleep. Up early and worked on the Mac app, shipping the 3.0.1 bug fix update. Feel back on schedule now.

At this point I just laugh when Xcode tells me WebView has been deprecated since macOS 10.14. I know! I could set aside a week to rewrite code that works, or wait until it’s removed from macOS, which I’m skeptical will ever happen. (Haven’t updated to Sonoma yet, though…)

Finished reading: Dungeons & Dragons: The Druid’s Call by E. K. Johnston. I think I was drawn to these prequels because of the fond memories I have of reading Dragonlance back in the day. 📚

This time we got him! 😜 New surprise indictment:

According to the court filing, Trump employees attempted to delete security footage at the Florida resort and one said “the boss” wanted a server deleted.

🇺🇸

This week’s episode of Core Intuition is up! We talk about X.

Going to bump to version 3.0 for the update to Micro.blog for macOS tomorrow. I think it’s warranted with the new bookmarks stuff, but also because the last version was 2.9.1 and I don’t believe in .10 versions. (It’s hard to explain… Somewhere in the Core Intuition back catalog we talk about this.)

Listening to What Was I Made For?, by Billie Eilish. Went to see Barbie a couple days ago and still thinking about it a little. Really good. 🎶

Threads appears to count every character in a URL as part of the 500 characters. A little surprising because I’m used to either Micro.blog (with inline links so no URL counts) or Twitter and Mastodon (with all URLs counting as a fixed size).

Micro.blog doesn’t have full search or hashtags by design, and I know it can be frustrating sometimes. I hear it. But this report on child abuse material across Mastodon instances is part of why:

During its search, the team found 554 pieces of content that matched hashtags or keywords often used by child sexual abuse groups online

Until moderation and automatic flagging can be deployed at scale, it’s better to go slowly.

Working on a new Mac feature that would be nice with SwiftUI, but we still run back to macOS 10.14 Mojave. Would have to jump forward several versions of macOS. Not worth it. Do plan to bump up the requirements a little, though.

Got my copy of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter in the mail today. I continue to be amazed at how great these print editions look. My favorite so far. 📚

Interesting that for single-letter .com domains, only q, x, and z are in use. They were registered before ICANN reserved the rest of the letters in 1993. I typed a through z in manually but could’ve saved time by reading the history on this Wikipedia page.

I’m still a little stunned that Elon followed through on x.com, even though it was expected. It’s remarkable how he both fixed the last decade of indecisive leadership at Twitter and used that new power to destroy the brand, maybe the one thing at Twitter that wasn’t broken.

The second FediForum has been announced, coming up in September. I really enjoyed the discussions at the last event and plan to attend this next one. They also have the video for the quick demo I did of Micro.blog and how it interacts with Mastodon.

Occasionally I go looking for new domains and I’m always annoyed with all the new TLDs that Amazon has reserved that they don’t allow anyone else to use: .book, .read, .like, and others. They’ve been sitting on these for years. It’s like domain squatting at a massive scale.

Spent a few hours yesterday trying to get Micro.blog to work better with Calckey (now Firefish). Made progress but not enough. ActivityPub remains extremely difficult to debug without reading the source code for other projects.

Finished reading: The Ember Blade by Chris Wooding. Read the first half of this a few months ago and then took a break before picking it up again. Really gets going in the second half. Excellent. 📚

A new episode of Core Intuition is out. We talk about Apple’s threat to withhold iMessage from the UK, what is acceptable for public surveillance, and the larger issue of powerful tech companies leveraging their size for good and bad.

Dusted off the old Drobo, which hasn’t been plugged in for a year. A little surprised it still seems to work. Don’t feel great about investing in a dead product, but might get another drive to put in it anyway.

Thinking about ActivityPub made me wonder what Tumblr has been working on, so I clicked around over there for a bit. I missed that Tumblr has live video now, with tipping in “diamonds”? Seems a little out of place with the rest of the platform.

Reminder that it’s still summer, which means we’re still offering blog hosting for only $1/month to new folks who join Micro.blog. There’s no easier way to blog that’s as full-featured and affordable. Feel free to share the link to anyone who might benefit from it! ☀️

Major addition to bookmarks in Micro.blog is coming along really well. Likely will ship next week. 🏷️

Power in the house went out. Summer in Texas is never a great time for this. Hopefully not long, lots of worker trucks in the neighborhood trimming trees and scheduled maintenance on the meters. Getting almost no signal on Verizon, so had to go to the coffee shop for a while to work. ☕️

I still believe we should welcome Threads to the fediverse, but the news that ActivityPub seems far off has soured my experience posting manually to Threads from my microblog. They grew too big, too quickly. Meanwhile, sounds like Tumblr’s ActivityPub effort has also stalled.

As I think about how to add tags to bookmarks in Micro.blog, I’ve been drawing inspiration from services like Pinboard but also my own (now sadly defunct) Mac app Clipstart. This video demo was from way back in 2009… I think the tagging UI is still really good.

Just posted a new episode of Core Intuition all about the Threads launch. Misunderstandings about ActivityPub, judging the leadership of Meta and Twitter, and whether Threads will beat Tumblr to supporting this open standard.

Frustrated with emails not reaching Micro.blog users, I’ve been working through steps to make things more robust. First added SMS as an option, then Sign in with Apple, and today we’re moving a percentage of emails from SendGrid to Amazon SES so we’re not reliant on a single platform.

We finally installed a new smoke alarm that has only been sitting unopened in its box for about two years. Feels like a major Saturday accomplishment. Very slowly upgrading everything.

First thoughts on Retro: great design and for me fills a similar role as BeReal. Not a true Instagram or photoblogging alternative because it’s focused more on private-ish photos. We don’t need another silo but in that niche they can get away with not being open.

Love this post from @adactio not just because he’s using Micro.blog cross-posting (thanks!) but also because the approach is exactly what we believe in. Start with your blog first:

When the current crop of services wither and die, my own website will still remain in full bloom.

I don’t plan on using Threads indefinitely, but I am curious about the user experience, both good and bad. The algorithmic timeline is so puzzling to me. Despite following people who are posting, I first always see posts from people I’m not following. Seems overly tuned to the popular.

Over the last few days we rewatched Mission: Impossible 4-6, then went to see 7 tonight. Enjoyed it. Intense as expected. The audience was into it, laughing and clapping. 🍿

As the fediverse grows, new people will hear about Micro.blog and send us feedback about how we can improve. Always good! I listen to everything. On the other hand, the fact that the fediverse is so big means we can do things differently and still be successful. Not all platforms should be the same.

Reminded by Jeremy Keith’s post of this quote from Robin Sloan. Beautiful, true:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

Finished reading: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson. This book alone was worth backing the Kickstarter project. Loved it. 📚

A new TestFlight beta is out for Micro.blog 3.1. The big changes for this release are per-post cross-posting options and video upload. (Might still be some problems for certain video files. Proceed cautiously in that part of the app.)

We’ve known for years that our onboarding in Micro.blog is bad. It’s tough to start with no followers and no recommended users. But even so, we’re not going to do the Threads or TikTok thing to just show a bunch of random popular crap. There’s gotta be a middle-ground to help people without that.

There are some quirky code design decisions in Micro.blog. For example, I prefer flat structures and all model classes are single words. Most are database tables and some are background tasks. Sounds obvious until you look at literally any other large web server project (and try to name things).

Accidentally clicked the “Post” button instead of “Bookmark” on that last link. Deleted it and the deletion should’ve propagated everywhere. I’ve fully switched to Micro.blog for managing bookmarks and web highlights… Perhaps we need an additional check to avoid accidental posts of just URLs.

The wild thing about Twitter’s demise is that it’s not too late to turn the platform around. Now that it has been burned to the ground, it could be rebuilt with a focus on standards, community features, and useful paid subscriptions. Would need new leadership, like a reverse-takeover from Bluesky.

Love what we saw from Victor Wimbanyama over the weekend. I missed some of the 4th quarter from yesterday’s game, so rewatching the highlights. Go Spurs Go. Next season is going to be fun. 🏀

I thought it would be a fun weekend project to port a simple WordPress.com theme to Micro.blog. What a mess! Lots of different CSS files that look like they were generated by machines, not humans. It’s drifted too far from the “view source” web.

Working on some more flexibility this morning to give people options for blocking Threads and other instances. Mixing lots of account types in one system is increasingly complicated: Micro.blog usernames, Mastodon handles, IndieWeb domains, newsletter email addresses… Spaghetti code.

Evolving thoughts on web scraping. First, I figured anything goes. Later, I was hesitant to depend on any web site structure that would break, and I wouldn’t work around attempts to stop scraping. Now, I’m back to thinking if you don’t want people to see something, don’t put it on the public web.

With Threads hitting 80 million users already, a lot of folks are dismissing Bluesky. But maybe it’s more important than ever for Bluesky to succeed. Or pivot slightly and implement enough of ActivityPub to co-exist? Micro.blog already cross-posts to Bluesky and I haven’t ruled out full federation.

Time to get serious about finding the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey.

Fighting with our Nest thermostat all week. It wants to save energy and I want to not die of heatstroke in my own house. ☀️

Finished reading: The Magician’s Daughter by H. G. Parry. 📚

“I can’t wait to wear that Spurs jersey for a first time.” — Victor Wembanyama, ready for NBA Summer League in Vegas tonight 🏀

Ben Werdmuller blogs some second thoughts about Threads:

But there’s a bad taste in my mouth that isn’t going away, that has its roots in the genocide that Meta enabled through its actions and inactions, and the political polarization in the United States that it was undoubtedly a part of, and in Cambridge Analytica…

Good post. We haven’t forgotten about this or any of the other problems with massive ad-based platforms. I think it’s okay to hope that Threads is a step forward for open networks and want Facebook to fail to control social media again.

My posting workflow this morning: I post to my blog from my Mac, it goes out via ActivityPub, RSS of course, and Micro.blog sends it to Bluesky and Nostr. Then I go to my iPhone and… copy/paste it into Threads! iPhone-only may have been alright for Instagram, but it’s not gonna fly here for long.

There’s some great stuff in this comic. This rings true:

One of the most fun things about Twitter is complaining about being on it all the time because I am wildly addicted to it and how miserable it makes me. I hated it until Elon came and ruined it now I want old Twitter back again so I can hate how it was before again.

🤣

Watching CNN this morning over breakfast, they said “fediverse”… So yeah, decentralization is edging into the mainstream. Progress.

Finished reading: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers. A great second book. Hope there are more of these. 📚

One of the things I’m most proud of with my blog is how consistent I’ve been about the problems with social media. It felt a bit tilting at windmills to quit Twitter in 2012. No love for Facebook, either! But now we have a framework for solutions and can judge these big companies beyond gut feeling.

Posted this week’s episode of Core Intuition. Random topics like the potential Elon vs. Mark fight and then a first-look at macOS Sonoma’s support for saving web apps.

Blaine Cook on Threads bootstrapping from Instagram. I’ve seen a couple variations of this from other folks too:

Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren’t going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.

Ignoring fairness, it would’ve been more interesting if Threads had started from scratch, even just as a comparison with e.g. Mastodon stats.

Nice instructions from @Mtt on how to use Micro.blog to verify your Bluesky or Nostr domain. Hopefully we can make this a plug-in or setting later.

I’ve been saying for a while that the fediverse will likely evolve to having maybe 10 medium-sized platforms, not 1000+ small servers. It won’t be a failure if Threads is one of those. It’s still much better than a single platform with a billion users.

Manually cross-posting to Threads to play with it and learn. As soon as it federates I’ll stop posting and people can just follow my Micro.blog-based blog directly.

Really enjoyed the new Indiana Jones. Easily the third favorite after Raiders and Last Crusade. 🍿

Meta’s Threads will obviously have ads later. Until now it hasn’t been clear what business model Bluesky is going for and whether it aligns with most users’ interests. Great to see their first paid service is domain name registration.

Setting up Threads. No surprise that getting started based on Instagram identities is super easy, even though I stopped posting to Instagram years ago. Smart move by Meta. (Doesn’t mean I like Facebook. Just exploring.)

I-10 over the Sabine River.

This is not what you’d expect to hear from a Meta executive, but it’s exactly right:

…you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.

Trains and clouds, in Louisiana.

Houston, twelve floors up.

Finished reading: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson. Another totally different book from his usual. Fun. 📚

On pretty much a daily basis I’m torn on whether to enforce real tabs everywhere even in shared code or give up and use spaces. Tabs as spaces are so much worse, it’s still surprising that most of the JavaScript and Ruby world has settled on them. Trying to fight it creates new problems.

Just noticed this cool Glitch project from @AngeloStavrow to test styling Micro.blog’s Sidebar.js feed. Pretty amazing what Glitch can do.

Very frustrated with our Micro.blog emails being flagged as spam too often lately, so today we added the option to get a text message when signing in. This is a little experimental and will likely evolve. Should be fast and reliable if you want to add your phone number to your account.

One of those weeks where I’m a bit in over my head with bug fixes and email. Making progress.

Realizing that Brandon Sanderson’s secret project #3 is coming out in just a few days. And it’s another book in the Cosmere! Want to try to finish #2 this week even though they’re not related. 📚

Always feels good to release Mac software. No need to get permission from Apple. No delays when the build is ready to when it gets in people’s hands. Today we updated Micro.blog for the first time in a little while. Nothing major, just a little better.

Just in case we needed another reason to re-watch Across the Spider-Verse:

“I was wondering when people might start noticing…” Andrew Leviton said in response to a fan who noticed two different versions of a scene.

🤯

Spilled beer on my laptop yesterday. Seemed fine, but this morning the trackpad isn’t very clicky. It’s an older Intel-based MacBook Pro… Really did not want to upgrade yet. 🍺

Lady Bird Lake under the I-35 bridge.

New episode of Core Intuition: AppKit Is Dying. We talk about visionOS, what platforms to dedicate our time too, and Meta’s rumored use of ActivityPub.

New update to Micro.blog for iOS is out with a bunch of fixes.

Did not finish: The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. I usually like books about books, but could not get into this one. I think I was too impatient for the plot to go somewhere. 📚

Can’t get enough of these James Cameron + Titan sub interviews. He seems to really know his stuff. Also not a bad track record as a director… Every movie starting with Terminator is good. Not just a few. All of them. 🍿

News media loves the suspense of an unfolding story. Can’t totally blame them for the Titanic sub coverage. Tragic now that the sub likely imploded days ago while we continued to sit around and watch the coverage. 😔 Rest in peace to those trying to do something amazing, hopefully knowing the risks.

Excited for the NBA Draft tonight. Even though the #1 pick is a lock, there’s a tiny part of me that is worried the Spurs will do something insane. 🏀

Thunder rolling through again today. Dogs are not happy. ⛈️

Pushed a new TestFlight build with some additional fixes. Likely will wrap this up as version 3.0.4 before we move on to 3.1 features.

I said on @coreint last week that visionOS might be a “zig when others zag” moment for me. As nearly everyone downloads the new SDK, I’m sticking to that motto. Going to ignore as much of Vision Pro as I can and work on stuff I can ship now to users who have $5 but not $3500.

Love these eWorld photos posted by Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels. Brings back a lot of memories. 1990s Apple software had so much personality, and this was the height of it.

I don’t have much to add to the Meta vs. the fediverse debate beyond what John Gruber has written about. Big platforms using open APIs is a good thing! Much better than closed silos and locked-down APIs. I don’t trust Facebook either, but preemptively blocking them is shooting ourselves in the foot.

Good morning, Libby fans. Experimental feature now available in Micro.blog: go to this special path in Micro.blog in your web browser: /account/libraries. Enjoy! 📚

If you’re frustrated and typing in Terminal, the harder you pound on the keyboard, the more effective whatever you’re working on is. It’s science.

Spent some time last night figuring out how the undocumented Libby API works. Fun. Hope they eventually make an official supported API, but in the meantime we can do some things on an experimental basis. Seeing my library holds within Micro.blog was the last missing piece I wanted. (Stay tuned.)

Kayaking.

Q*bert at Cidercade. 🕹️

Across the Spider-Verse was amazing. Love the art in these movies so much. I wish all comics adaptations were like this. 🍿

Hanging out at Civil Goat Coffee with my daughter. Working a bit while she reads. ☕️

It has been too long since we’ve updated the emoji in Micro.blog. Via @news, added a few new ones that were in the queue, hopefully can do more this year:

Added two new emoji to Discover: 🧘 for meditation and 🎭 for theater. Also added 🏳️‍⚧️ to LGBTQ+ in addition to 🏳️‍🌈.

There’s a new Core Intuition out. We talk more about last week’s WWDC, debate whether Apple is using “AI”, revisit Siri, and skim over some of the other session topics.

Another Brandon Sanderson book has arrived! Secret project #2: Frugal Wizard’s Handbook. Love the illustrations in the margins. I started this on e-book last month but will finish with the print version.

Rolled out changes to the default uploaded filenames in Micro.blog. This is the beginning of the end to the random filenames, although it still falls back on those for many situations.

High of 101° today in Austin. It’s gonna be one of those summers, huh? Gotta get away somewhere.

Despite the chaos at Twitter this year, I’m a little surprised that after paying Twitter for API access for the last couple months my app was still suspended. Just can’t trust big ad-based platforms.

Watched the BlackBerry movie and enjoyed it. Relevant for today too: it’s not a good idea to bet against Apple. Vision Pro is still quite different than every previous Apple product, though… Trying to perfect a niche device category vs. improving a mainstream device that people already want.

Federico Viticci got me with the Don Draper quote for his Vision Pro story. One of my favorite scenes in television, and a quote I used in my book too. Federico goes on:

I’m convinced that Vision Pro and the visionOS platform are a watershed moment in the arc of personal computing. After trying it, I came away reflecting that we’ll eventually think of software before spatial computing, and after it.

I still think it will be decades before this technology is usable and affordable in more AR-style glasses. But it is exciting to read everyone’s hands-on experience of the future.

I posted a video to YouTube to demo Micro.blog’s new reading goals interface on the web. By default it’s private just for you, whether you want to read 2 books or 20. Or none! No pressure.

Great game. Congrats to the Nuggets. And an impressive postseason for this underestimated Heat team too. Now just 10 days until the NBA Draft. 🏀

Since ditching cable years ago, I feel like we’ve tried everything… Sling, PlayStation TV, Hulu + Live TV, even back to cable streaming with Spectrum TV. New favorite: YouTube TV. Only downside is no regional sports networks. Need a better over-the-air antenna for Spurs games.

Only just occurred to me that Apple Vision would’ve been a great product to introduce at the height of the pandemic. Now, we want to reconnect in person, not hide away behind screens.

I recorded a very short (12 seconds!) video on YouTube showing the new toggle in Micro.blog to quickly show just photo uploads or video or audio. It appears for Micro.blog Premium subscribers because that’s where we support video hosting and podcasting.

New web analytics tool from @vincent looks like a nice fit for blogs and small web sites: tinylytics.

I made a little video of my time in Colorado last week, from short video clips and live photos. This is also a test of potentially longer videos on Micro.blog… I cheated to upload this because the file is bigger than the current limit.

Went to a wedding yesterday. No masks, hopefully no COVID. 🤞 My mind kept wandering back to A Psalm for the Wild-Built… Do we need a purpose, or is it enough to be happy and appreciate how remarkable the world and people are? Feeling lucky.

To create this transcript, I split the episode into 15-minute chunks with Fission, because Micro.blog’s OpenAI-based transcription is limited to 15 minutes. Then uploaded the MP3s to Micro.blog and copy/pasted the resulting transcripts into BBEdit. Fixed mistakes and edited to be more readable.

On the flight back to Austin, finished reading A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Wonderful. Queued up the second book for later. 📚

John Gruber gets to the core of the Reddit API issue with a question for the CEO:

I have one simple question for him: What do you think Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz would say about this if he were still alive?

That’s exactly the right perspective. Because it’s not just about business models, competition… It should be about doing what’s right.

Talking with @joec earlier this week about finding new coffee shops in new cities… Here’s the list for the week in Colorado: Inkwell & Brew, Novo Coffee, Aviano Coffee, Train Cars Coffee (photo), Atlas Coffees (photo), Corvus Coffee Roasters, Sonder Coffee & Tea, and Jubilee Roasting Co.

Good morning, Denver. Had a quick breakfast with this view before I wrap up the trip and return the van.

Winding down my week in Colorado. It’s beautiful here. Just about the right amount of time, juggling work and travel. 🗺️

Sitting in my rental campervan at Cherry Creek State Park, debugging on the laptop as the rain hits. Sounds like a Texas thunderstorm. Hopefully not hail because I waived all the rental insurance. ⛈️

Finished reading: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Remembered only a little of this from college astronomy. The audiobook is about 4 hours, great for a short drive today. 📚

Georgetown Loop Railroad. 🚂

What a wild end for Apollo. The era of client APIs for ad-supported platforms is over. Developers should invest their time in open platforms where the business model is aligned with users' and developers' interests: Micro.blog (paid blog hosting) or the fediverse (often donation-supported).

After recording @coreint today, I’m settling into the opinion that Apple Vision Pro is both brilliant and a terrible mistake. On the other hand, I’m sitting in my rental campervan in Colorado watching the NBA finals on my iPad Mini and wouldn’t mind that courtside VR action. 🏀

Just posted a new Core Intuition with our reaction to WWDC and Apple Vision Pro.

Finished reading: Recursion by Blake Crouch. This book blew my mind a little. 📚

After driving around in circles with detours because of road construction, finally settled in at Atlas Coffees. ☕️

Jason Snell writing at Six Colors after using the Vision Pro:

I am now a believer that what Apple has built is an incredible accomplishment. This is the real deal. The unanswered question is, to what end?

Wasn’t expecting rabbits. Seems to be a bunch around my campsite tonight at Chatfield State Park.

Stopped at Train Cars Coffee in Nederland on the drive to Boulder this morning. Built out of train cars. Love it. Pretty good breakfast too. 🚂

Panorama Point as the sun’s starting to go down, at Golden Gate Canyon State Park.

Early thoughts on Vision Pro: looks about as good as it can possibly be, for what Apple is trying to do. Not a product for me, and not a product that will “replace” any other device. Will be talking more about this on @coreint tomorrow.

This is nitpicky but I feel like Apple should’ve cut over to the headset stuff at the 1-hour mark. watchOS improvements are good but they don’t need this much keynote time today. Feels like the narrative has gone into the weeds a little. We are here for the headset news. 🙂

I don’t think Apple needs to obsessively avoid saying AI. “Machine learning”, “transformer-based language model”… It just sounds awkward, but I get why they do it.

Need a place to blog what you think about all the WWDC news this week? Don’t forget Micro.blog is a ridiculously low $1/month this summer. micro.blog/summer

Looking forward to WWDC, but my expectations are low for announcements that are relevant to my work right now. Doubtful there can be a version of Micro.blog for a headset. Most interested in little surprises that might pop up in new versions of iOS and macOS.

Nuggets vs. Heat. Finals, game 2. 🏀

One of my favorite things about Colorado so far is the water. Looks and sounds like snow had melted somewhere upstream.

Finished reading: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. All the praise for this book is justified. A masterpiece. 📚

Raining off and on today, so I’ve spent more time driving and less time walking. Mickey is my traveling companion now for all road trips.

Forgot the Stanley Hotel was nearby, the inspiration for the hotel in The Shining. Stopped for a little while, walked around, had a beer in the restaurant. I’m sure there’s lots of history here.

Outside the Glacier Basin campground at Rocky Mountain National Park.

Cool to see people using the App.net posts archive. Here’s a post from @jsonbecker, a post from @otaviocc, and another post from @maique. I was starting to doubt preserving the archive and seeing these reminds me why it’s worth it.

Beautiful photo from aows. When I retire, I’m just going to blog photos of train tracks.

Thanks again to @vincent for fixing one of the servers yesterday while I was in Rocky Mountain National Park with no cell coverage. Not happy with the blips in downtime recently, going to reprioritize this. Enjoying the morning with good wi-fi and coffee at Inkwell & Brew in Estes Park. ☕️

Traveling today. Got to the airport early, plenty of time to catch up on a couple things. Submitted Micro.blog 3.0.3 to Apple to review. Hope everyone’s having a nice Friday!

Other things I learned about video games this week while we were temporarily without a Switch: the Wii with Skyward Sword still works, the N64 sort of works and then doesn’t, and the Game Boy Advance SP battery is starting to bulge, but replacements are just $10. 🕹️

We caved and bought another Nintendo Switch. The OLED Zelda edition. So nice. 🕹️

Ugh, this is a new pattern for me in Wordle. 712 X/6. 🙁

⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩

I like this post from Dave Rupert on lessons from old Russian small nuclear generators:

I wonder if software has a kind of digital entropy, where even good software left untouched for a short timeframe rots and stops working.

Finished Ted Lasso. Overall really enjoyed it. This season almost lost its way a couple times, sometimes overthinking itself, but it wrapped up perfectly. 📺

I seem to have made a serious AWS pricing miscalculation, transferring a bunch of small files from EC2 to S3. Data transfer is free, but PUT requests aren’t. With millions of requests, adds up to real money. This is why I usually prefer Linode’s flat pricing.

Thanks everyone who sent me feedback about how you are using Micro.blog’s email newsletters. I took this into account while finishing the new feature, but I realize it’s a functionality change. It is very rare that we change a feature so significantly. Felt like it had to be done.

This article in Forbes has some new (to me) details on the creation of Nostr.

Trying audiobooks in Spotify for the first time. I’d like to see some UI tweaks for books, like less emphasis on chapters (books are not albums) and showing the time remaining with the speed taken into account.

Launching new features tomorrow. Going to lay low this afternoon instead of deploying major changes near the end of the day, which I’m sure I would regret.

Spilled a glass of water all over my MacBook keyboard. So that’s how my morning is going. Seems okay so far.

Working on improvements to email newsletters in Micro.blog. I’d like to split out the editing of queued newsletters to instead have a separate per-newsletter “intro” text, with the rest of the email not editable. Does that cause a problem for anyone? Will allow more flexibility in other ways.

Love this from Matt Mullenweg. It’s what we believe at Micro.blog, too.

…it’s not about how many views you have, how many likes, trying to max all your stats… sometimes a single connection to another human is all that matters.

Happy 20th to WordPress. Heck of an achievement.

Did my daughter come to visit this weekend to see us, or to take the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom back to her apartment? Who can know. Anyway, we’re busting out the N64 and Ocarina of Time… As soon as we get an RCA → HDMI adapter.

I’m testing Calckey to improve compatibility with Micro.blog. Some of the UI is quite busy and not for me, but I love how they are showing ActivityPub usernames, with the profile photo and dimmed domain name. Might borrow this.

Went to pay our respects to my uncle, for Memorial Day. Tomorrow would’ve been his birthday too. 🇺🇸

Love seeing all the “Where have I been?” posts. I blogged it on a whim and it’s so much more interesting to see the places other folks have gone. I also just realized I left Alaska off! Will edit.

Tinkering with something in Go this morning. Always felt like it would be a good language to know more about, and now finally have a real need.

Just watched way too many replays and commentary on the final seconds of Celtics/Heat. Another memorable game 6 in Miami. Bring on game 7! 🏀

Listened to a couple hours of the Texas house debating impeachment against our corrupt attorney general. Kind of shocked to hear the final vote, overwhelmingly for the articles. Paxton is removed from office pending the trial. Wow. 🇺🇸

Seems unlikely that we’ll end up with a single unified social web platform. I like Mastodon’s focus on communities. I like Bluesky’s thinking on distributed moderation. I like the IndieWeb’s principles of ownership. I like Nostr’s private messaging. How will we tie all of this together? Blogs.

This week Bluesky rolled out their custom timeline feeds. Pretty interesting approach. However, I’m going to disable automatic cross-posting from my blog to Bluesky for a while… Bluesky feels so much like Twitter that it has been too distracting for me. Will check back in later.

Joking aside, I really like Nostr. Something about it is very elegant. You just have to ignore 80% of it, especially anything around cryptocurrency. It’s a wild west platform with a few nuggets of gold. 🌵

Folks, Nostr is really easy to understand. Your username is 64 random letters and you just enable NIP-5, NIP-39, and put your private key in a hardware wallet. Simple! Mainstream adoption for non-technical users will not be a problem. 🙄

Good morning! Took an early walk. Coffee now at Summer Moon and I have some server changes to deploy. Also way behind in email and hope to catch up over the next couple days. ☕️

I’m testing cross-posting to Nostr. I’m still not really sure how to link to Nostr accounts… If you’ve ventured out into the wild west of Nostr country you might be able to find me with @manton.org or npub1ae42p0d24pmccr47unf2a3hv2trmk9lrmr65ges4v3x5pscs4yrquu7ul9. 🤪

Adding a new query to Micro.blog’s server status check to throw an error if the queue backlog is unusually high. Will be able to better track this error as platform downtime.

Upgraded Ruby last night and thought everything was stable. But no. Putting my sysadmin hat on for a bit this morning while everything gets back to normal.

The new episode of Core Intuition covers last week’s Micro Camp and looking ahead to WWDC. Thanks for listening!

Been thinking a lot about Nostr this week. Finally realized that it resonates in a “worse is better” way. This is a good thing and will help me grok how it fits alongside ActivityPub and Bluesky.

I’m continuing to use ChatGPT all the time. On a whim today I asked it what the philosophy of Micro.blog is and it nailed it. You can read the transcript here.

The more I tinker with Nostr, the more I understand the appeal for developers. It is fun. But there are so many usability challenges. User search and discovery are difficult.

Great game and series. Didn’t really feel like a sweep with the Lakers in each game until late. Congrats to the Nuggets. 🏀

Checking out the Kagi search engine, via Daring Fireball. I remember hearing about this but never tried it. Looks clean, fast. I don’t think I’m at the point of wanting to pay for web search quite yet. So tired of ads, though.

San Antonio Museum of Art, raining. Used to be the Lone Star Brewing building.

One reason web development appeals to me is that while it can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be. You can build for the web like it’s 1995. For native apps, the complexity is required with tools, code signing, stores. Thinking about this as I wait for my code to be crunched and uploaded to Apple.

Did not expect to be installing a new version of Movable Type on EC2 this morning for testing, but here we are. Looks about the same as it did a decade ago. Nice to see it still works and is supported, though.

We shipped Micro.blog 1.7 for Android, available on Google Play. This syncs up the release with the features from the new iOS version. Lots of new stuff, like managing posts, uploads, username auto-complete, and external blogs.

Posted links for all of today’s videos on micro.camp. Thanks again to our Micro Camp presenters! I still need to edit the keynote so that will go up on Monday.

Great discount on MarsEdit today! From Daniel Jalkut:

I usually only offer discounts of 10% or 20%, but in celebration of Micro.camp 2023 I’m offering a 50% discount on MarsEdit. Use this link and see the 50% discount when you continue to checkout: redsweater.com/store/

We’re going live in an hour for Micro Camp day 2, featuring sessions by Chris Campbell, Anna Havron, Mandaris Moore, and Miraz Jordan. Watch at micro.camp or on YouTube.

Ben Werdmuller links to a great thread by Christina Warren. I get the distrust of big social media, but having e.g. Instagram or Tumblr adopt an open protocol would be amazing. Thinking otherwise would be like being unhappy if Twitter brought back RSS feeds. It’s only a good thing!

Kind of stunned by the Heat stealing both games in Boston. I like this Celtics team (of course rooting for Derrick White always) but this is going to be tough. 🏀

Thanks everyone who joined us for the first day of Micro Camp. I loved talking to Om Malik and hope it gave everyone something to think about. Tomorrow we wrap up with 4 sessions from the community and the State of the Platform panel.

Getting ready for Micro Camp so of course the lawn care service folks just showed up in the front yard with their loud lawnmowers. I had to smile. Kind of takes the pressure off when things are mostly outside my control.

We’re a couple hours away from the start of Micro Camp 2023! Details at micro.camp. (By the way, the web site is just a Micro.blog-hosted blog with a custom HTML home page.)

Episode 558 of Core Int is out with a discussion leading up to Micro Camp. The latest news on the schedule, why I’m nervous about preparing for it, and then speculation about Apple’s headset rumors.

Retrobatch from Flying Meat has been really useful while making a slideshow for Micro Camp. I first wrote a script to download the A Day in the Life photo challenge, then Retrobatch resizes them all and adds the username (from the filename) at the bottom.

We’ll have some door prizes for Micro Camp attendees. A license to MarsEdit, gift cards for movies, journals, coffee, and tea. 🎟️

Haven’t been able to finish any books lately. Probably way behind where I was for reading goals last year. Not sure if I’m working too much or just no books are quite the right fit. 📚

I missed that the videos from FediForum have been posted. Here’s the video of my demo of how Micro.blog works with the fediverse: youtu.be/2nKy-LKsS…

There’s a scheduled YouTube event for the Micro Camp live stream on Friday. We’ll link it again later, but for folks signed into YouTube you can also click the “Notify me” button. It looks like this:

Took some time this week to unravel the plumbing in Micro.blog with how blogs are published and feeds refreshed. At least for my account, it’s making a dramatic improvement to timeline updates and cross-posting performance.

Cool to see people take us up on the Summer of blogging coupon. $1/month full blog hosting! I’m biased but it’s really a great value.

Had a lot of weird dreams last night. But waking up this morning, apparently the Spurs getting the #1 pick in the draft was not a dream. Here we go! Looking forward to more basketball this week… NBA finals just around the corner. 🏀

Amazing. I’ve never believed in tanking and I had my expectations low, but… Spurs get the #1 pick. Victor Wembanyama is going to fit in perfectly. Can’t wait for next season. 🏀

Big announcement: we’re welcoming Om Malik for a keynote conversation to kick things off at Micro Camp on Friday! The updated schedule is online now at micro.camp.

Did a quick YouTube live streaming test. Seems to work as advertised. Resubscribed to Ecamm Live too, which has been helpful in past years to coordinate streaming files.

Ready for the NBA draft lottery tonight. Wearing my Spurs t-shirt. 🏀

We are finalizing the Micro Camp schedule to post later today. Very excited about what we’ve got planned. Pencil in 12pm Pacific time on your calendar this Friday! With more sessions on Saturday too.

People are often confused about what exactly Micro.blog is. Is it a Twitter clone? Is it a WordPress clone? Is it a Buffer clone? I like to think of it as a mashup of several things. This post from Alan Jacobs is another great perspective: the three paths of micro.blog.

Special shout-out to @sod who has been working with us to update all the Micro.blog themes with improved Microformats markup and other fixes. A bunch have been updated already! Check your Plug-ins page every once in a while to see if there’s an update to a theme you’re using.

Haven’t done much more than skim through the Bluesky app source, but glad to see it released. I’m sure there are things in there I can learn from. MIT license too. 👍

Making screenshots for App Store connect isn’t my favorite thing. I don’t do it often so always forget which dimensions go with which devices. Apple is too picky about this… Most people probably look at small versions of the screenshots anyway.

Jean posted today about how Discover in Micro.blog will be less likely to include photos that don’t have alt text. Just an extra nudge to encourage more people to make their photos accessible.

We watched Still with Michael J. Fox last night. Really good. 📺

Enjoying the new Zelda so far. Although I’m mostly watching other people in the family play. 🙂 Minor spoilers as we switch between accounts.

For a while now, Micro.blog has been archiving copies of web pages for Micro.blog Premium users, whenever you link to something or bookmark it. The archive has grown to about a million items (web pages and their images and other resources). Lots of potential here for future tools.

More about the M.b problems overnight: I made what I thought was a minor code cleanup change yesterday that inadvertently affected the servers' ability to recover from failed background tasks, so publishing and timeline updating started slowing down and eventually just stopped. Very sorry, Europe!

We published a new Core Intuition. Daniel and I talk about the upcoming Micro Camp, event planning, iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic, and thoughts on WWDC.

Playing with Google Bard. Impressed that it has much more recent data than ChatGPT. It knew about something that happened just a few days ago.

There’s a new beta out for Micro.blog 3.0. This adds the last big missing feature: posting to external blogs like WordPress. It should work with blogs that support the MetaWeblog or Micropub APIs.

Wordle 692 6/6. Went from thinking I’d get it in 3 guesses to barely getting it.

🟨🟨⬛⬛🟨
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I’m excited to announce: Summer of blogging! For new folks signing up on Micro.blog, hosting is only $1/month for the summer. Full blog, photos, themes, ActivityPub, Bluesky cross-posting, and more. It’s a great time to start a blog at your own domain.

Two great new themes for Micro.blog are available: Outpost by @mikehaynes and Tiny by @Mtt. So happy whenever I see new themes. It takes a lot of work for someone to refine these and share them. Thanks y’all!

Got lost again browsing tld-list.com. So many fun new TLDs. Luckily was talked down from impulse buying another domain name. For now.

Thinking more about Heather Armstrong. I didn’t know her, but she was my age, and started her blog a year before mine. Must be difficult to put your whole life online. I keep my worlds fairly compartmentalized… My blog is my work, thoughts, travel, hobbies. But not the very personal.

From a post by @adders, remembering Heather Armstrong:

Already the early days of blogging are being forgotten, and the ability of the web to quietly erase history as sites fail and go offline means that those incredible, exciting, experimental days are being lost. But we shouldn’t forget those who forged the future of digital media, and Heather Armstrong was one of them.

Caught the last half of the Trump town hall. CNN was criticized for hosting this, but Kaitlan Collins did a great job fact-checking and pressing him on non-answers. It’s not really amplification. Zero risk that voters outside his base were convinced by anything he said. 🇺🇸

I’d love to see Mastodon adopt some variation of NIP-5 so that single-user instance usernames can be collapsed to just the @-domain name. I would support this in Micro.blog too (and maybe should just do it).

I’m fascinated with Nostr, but I’m having trouble getting on board with it because its development is disjointed and the creator is (I think) anonymous. The team at Bluesky is writing about their work. They have a blog. Same with Mastodon. Just easier to get behind a public, cohesive vision.

Thinking about fiatjaf’s Bluesky is a scam post. Some of the criticism seems fair, some feels premature, and “scam” is too loaded. Let’s see how it goes. My opinion hasn’t changed since AT Proto was announced: domain name usernames and data portability in Bluesky is interesting and worth exploring.

Shocked to hear that Heather Armstrong has died. See: dooce.com, Wikipedia. One of the great early bloggers. Rest in peace.

Can’t remember the last time I had an actual flat tire. 20 years ago? Longer? Luck ran out today. Slow leak that was patched a week ago came back with a vengeance. 🛞

Texas house getting HB 2744 out of committee is great news, even if feels like the bare minimum we could do. It’s okay to do this in stages. First raise the age limit from 18 to 21, then ban all assault weapons, then start a buyback program to reduce the AR-15s already out there.

Really good episode of Dithering this morning on Bluesky vs. Mastodon. As convenient as it would be to have a single decentralized protocol “win”, I want to be ready for a future with multiple successful web-friendly platforms.

Lonnie Walker ready when he’s called on. Love it. 🏀

Ever since I read that Bluesky has about 1.9 million folks on the waiting list, I’ve been thinking about what happens as more invites roll out. By comparison: Mastodon has over 7 million users, with 1 million on a single server. Plus a bunch more across the non-Mastodon fediverse.

Micro Camp 2023 is coming up soon! May 19th - 20th. We’ve posted the topics for the second day’s presentations.

If you missed it earlier from @news:

We are monitoring some performance problems because of unexpected server load. Thanks for your patience.

I’m continuing to troubleshoot (and optimize) slow blog publishing a cross-posting today. Almost back to normal but not quite.

Posted episode 556 of Core Intuition. We talk about tipping in Apple Stores, using ChatGPT, and whether Apple has missed “the year of AI” because they thought it was “the year of AR”.

Too many guns. After yesterday’s shooting in Allen, Greg Abbot “offered the full support of the State of Texas”… So that means he’ll work to ban assault weapons, right? That’s the kind of support we need.

Easy to get caught up in the excitement about the coronation. We are so stuck in divisive partisan debates over here that it’s hard to imagine the U.S. being that united around anything. 🇬🇧

I recorded a video on YouTube that goes through how I personally use Micro.blog for my own blog. It’s a little long and rambling, about 25 minutes, but it covers a bunch of features that folks might find useful.

Created a new blog on my Micro.blog account today, a placeholder for something new. Found a couple bugs in the process. I should do this more often… So easy to forget about the onboarding experience, or lack thereof.

This year’s NBA playoffs have been great. So many close games, ignoring a couple blowouts like last night’s Lakers/Warriors. With the Spurs out of contention early and their players scattered to different teams, I’ve been enjoying the postseason more than usual, finding new teams to root for. 🏀

Jack Dorsey gives $10 million to Nostr and related projects. Setting aside opinions on his leadership at Twitter, it feels significant that these funds are not VC-style investments. Presumably the reward is seeing interesting technology flourish, not profit.

Wondering what the Bluesky team has in mind for private messaging, if anything. Mastodon’s DMs have always felt awkward to me, both the user experience (hard to distinguish public and private posts) and the technical bits (any admin can read your messages).

Finished the first pass of rethinking how incoming direct messages work in Micro.blog. I still believe that most social networks should not reinvent the wheel with messaging, because it’s unlikely to be as secure as dedicated services like iMessage and WhatsApp. But we roll with what we’ve got.

Looking at this spam, I think our approach to accepting Mastodon DMs needs to change in Micro.blog. We forward them via email because we don’t have a private messaging system. But someone shouldn’t be able to intrude in your inbox. My fault. Going to rethink this today.

Eugen Rochko and team are fighting spammers at mastodon.social:

We’re aware of the spam attack hitting mastodon.social right now and our full moderation and DevOps teams are on the case mitigating any way we can (incl. switching to approval-mode registrations)

Haven’t seen this affect Micro.blog yet, but if anyone notices any unwanted @-mentions or other problems, let us know.

Update: Spoke too soon, definitely hitting us too. 🙁

Almost done with book edits. The task of manually reformatting all the footnotes and layout for the print edition was dragging me down, so figured out how to automate it with print CSS tools like Prince. Wow, going to save days or weeks of work.

Enjoyed the first episode of White House Plumbers. Also, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey might be half-brothers?! They need to go on Finding Your Roots.

Mastodon has added support for showing styled text in the new version deployed on mastodon.social. Looks good with bold and italics in blog posts federated from Micro.blog.

Waterfall at Cosmic Coffee + Beer Garden. 🍺

Maybe the most surprising thing to me about Bluesky’s early success is the “fun” aspect. I’m not very fun online — my microblog posts are often work-related or serious — but it seems clear there was a post-Twitter void here that Bluesky is filling. Casey Newton writes on Platformer:

Bluesky should continue to cultivate the sense that it is weirder and funnier than Twitter. That means leaning into some of the eye-rolling terms that users are insisting on, including skeets.

Noticed today while reviewing code that the first GitHub commit for Micro.blog was about 9 years ago. So much has happened since then, but also hardly anything. Software is never done because the world and people are always changing.

Left my headphones at home by accident. Now need to plan my whole day around which coffee shops probably have the best music on. ☕️

Went to see the Super Mario Bros movie this afternoon. So much fun. 🍄

Core Intuition episode 555! We talk all about Bluesky. (And Mastodon and Nostr and Micro.blog.)

Today is the day that Twitter said they would shut off the old API and force upgrades to the new plans. But they say a lot of things. I haven’t paid yet. Also confused why April 29th (Saturday) and not May 1st (Monday).

The storm is about to hit. Waiting it out downtown instead of on the highway. ⛈️

Listening to Dithering today about game consoles… If you have 2 consoles, you have Playstation + Switch, or Xbox + Switch. If you have 2 social networks, maybe you have [insert popular network] + Micro.blog. The hard part is carving out a unique, invaluable niche.

We updated the Micro Camp web site for 2023. Register for free if you’d like to join us May 19-20. Everyone gets a new sticker too! Special thanks to @Burk for the sticker design.

Austin sky before thunderstorms arrive in a few hours, supposedly. ☁️

Finished reading: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I really enjoyed this story. First-person for multiple characters was a little awkward, though, and maybe held it back from what it could’ve been. 📚

The renewed interest in open, social web protocols has been a long time coming. It’s like we were in a drought for most of the 2010s, subsisting on the water leftover from the early blogosphere, and now it’s raining. Drink up, folks! The skies are blue and the future’s bright.

I’ve been impressed with Bluesky’s performance. It has inspired me to shave off a little time for some Micro.blog API requests. We usually think of “under a second” as fast enough, but 0.8 seconds vs. 0.4 seconds is actually pretty noticeable.

Continuing to tweak our Bluesky cross-posting support. Should work better with inline links in blog posts now.

Sometimes coding is hard, but not usually. It’s figuring out how something should work that takes all the time.

Just released a new 3.0 beta of Micro.blog for iOS. This includes a big change, borrowed from the 2.x versions: Markdown syntax highlighting when writing new posts. We are getting close to release. The only major feature left is WordPress posting support. TestFlight here to follow along.

I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating: Micro.blog is constantly shifting priorities based on what people are talking about. If we only hear a feature request every few months instead of every week, it is probably going to drop off our radar, even if we want to do it.

I’m seeing lots of Bluesky takes that are a variation of: “Oh jeez, we just moved from Twitter to Mastodon, now there’s another new thing?” But indie microblogging is about moving away from centralized platforms to blogs and open web-friendly protocols. Anything in that spirit should be explored.

I’m always fascinated when our new AI bot overlords get really basic facts wrong. They know the answer, but can’t put it together until you press them on it. Here’s a quick transcript from ChatGPT that I ran into today.

Some technologies just keep coming back… Currently writing XML-RPC code, this time for JavaScript. Despite the new-ish JSON APIs in WordPress, not to mention Micropub, MetaWeblog is still the best way to talk to WordPress without any extra plugins or configuration.

U2 tickets for the Sphere in Vegas going on sale later this week. Need to somehow fit this into my plans for the fall.

Added a basic import in Micro.blog for folks migrating from Substack. For now, just blog posts. Still need to think through email address import for newsletters… Want to make sure it can’t be abused by spammers. (Substack’s HTML is so verbose. Tried to clean it up a little on import.)

This is not exactly a commentary on any specific platform, but you can just tell when the creators of a tool use their own stuff and engage with the community. The farther you get away from that, the less confidence users will have.

Fox News in the, uhm, news today reminds me of last month when I was in Dallas. I worked from a coffee shop near my hotel one morning, Flying Horse Cafe. They had Fox News on the TV. Took me by surprise as an Austinite… No way you’d ever see that here, but oh yeah, I live in Texas.

HTML’s srcset is such a weird image attribute. Can’t help but feel there was a better way to handle this. (But no, I don’t have any obviously better ideas.)

It’s a good day to have a good day.

Matt Baer blogs about the future of Write.as and WriteFreely — taking features that are currently separate products and integrating them into more of a suite:

At this point, I don’t think it makes sense for our self-hosted product to be chopped up into multiple components like our hosted tools are. Instead, I want to bring all those tools into a single application in WriteFreely.

Remark.as will also get fediverse replies. Sounds like a good direction.

It breaks my heart a little when I drive through a historic neighborhood to see old houses bulldozed to make room for modern mansion monstrosities. I know a house is just a thing, but it feels like erasing a bit of history that mattered to someone.

Trees by the trail at Lady Bird Lake.

“Make no little plans. Make the biggest one you can think of, and spend the rest of your life carrying it out.” — Harry Truman

The bookmarks pages in Micro.blog haven’t felt quite right to me, so today I rolled out a small redesign that I think better integrates bookmarks, highlights, and links. (This is only for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Premium adds web page archiving and making highlights in bookmarked pages.)

Lunch at Easy Tiger earlier today. 🥪

If it was starting to feel like Humane’s device would be overhyped or vaporware, I’m ready to put aside those concerns. It looks like they are onto something fascinating, both the projection and the AI language translation.

On this week’s episode of Core Intuition, we talk about the Mastodon API and upcoming new MarsEdit release. And of course, blogging.

One of those afternoons where I’m hopping between unrelated tasks. Currently revisiting how to best crunch through OpenStreetMap data.

Updated my code for Bluesky for the recent API endpoint changes. Looking forward to enabling this for Micro.blog folks.

Tantek Çelik blogs about yesterday’s The Verge article on ActivityPub, underscoring some of the IndieWeb principles that are covered. There’s really a lot in there and I’m glad to see the article getting so much attention. Thanks @pierce@mas.to!

The Verge has a long article by David Pierce today about ActivityPub. The quote from me about domain names doesn’t come across quite how I intended it… Yes, domain names are hard, but we need to make them much easier to deal with because they’re actually great.

Accidentally clicked on a phishing email. Ugh, must not be awake yet. Stopped short of signing in and giving them my password, though.

Thunderbird Coffee. ☕️

Got lost down the rabbit hole of W3C membership fees… Interesting scaled fee structure, in the United States from $2k/year to $77k/year depending on the member company’s revenue.

There are always more ideas than time. One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about building Micro.blog is that it’s a platform where many blog-related ideas can fit together. The “micro” was always a bit of an undersell.

I’ve been impatient for Bluesky to ship, but this interview with The Verge has helped convince me that it’s okay to wait. The API is still in flux. Already I need to go back and update some early experiments.

One of those just try random code until it works mornings. Not proud of it. Sometimes coding is less well-crafted and more stubborn persistence.

Shoutout to the guy holding a “thoughts and prayers ain’t working” sign downtown this morning. Banning assault weapons should not be controversial. It’s time.

This year I’ve become fascinated with my family tree. Just got back my DNA kit results. (Yes, there are privacy issues. I’m ignoring those for now.) So far it reveals just about what I expected. Still amazing.

Some great NBA playoff games over the weekend. Too many injuries, though. Can’t believe Tyler Herro hit that 3-point shot with a broken hand. Shooters gonna shoot. 🏀

Happy Monday, everyone. Starting the week at Progress Coffee again. ☕️

We pushed a new Micro.blog beta out to TestFlight, improving blog selection to move the list of blogs to the toolbar area. Here’s a partial screenshot of what it looks like.

Didn’t get much feedback about my Substack blog post yesterday, so I started to doubt myself. I wrote it quickly and glossed over some details. But that’s how it is with blogs… Sometimes you put things out in the world and hardly anyone notices. That’s okay! Still worth it. On to the next post.

Another unexpected use for ChatGPT: asking it for examples of using command-line tools like rsync for specific scenarios. Faster than digging through a man page.

For folks trying Micro.blog’s Twitter import, note that the tweets page is just a web page, so you can add intro text or other formatting if you want to. I added a little intro to mine here to give some context.

Dave Winer writes about the Twitter API changes:

Corporate platforms always fail, given enough time. The Twitter API had a good run. Now the deck is clear, and there’s room to make some new stuff, or just take a break and smell the roses a bit, or go for a bike ride. 🤪

This seems like the right attitude to me too, even if it’s frustrating to deal with platforms failing. When one door closes, another opens.

New episode of Core Intuition is up! On episode 553 we talk about WWDC 2023 tickets, conferences, and Micro.blog’s new Twitter import feature.

We redesigned the Micro.blog home page this year and it’s so much better. Yet I still wonder if we’re telling the complete story about what Micro.blog can do. Full blogs. Social network. ActivityPub. Podcast hosting. Newsletters. Tweet import. Hugo. Cross-posting. More open APIs than any platform.

I’ve been keeping an eye on our OpenAI bill since we added automatic podcast transcripts for all podcasts hosted on Micro.blog. It’s working out great and sustainable. Micro.blog for podcasts is best for solo microcasts anyway. Perfect for quick transcripts and the way our hosting is structured.

Good morning, Austin! At Progress Coffee. ☕️

Congrats to Rogue Amoeba on the major update to Farrago. They’ve done some really nice work in this app.

There’s a lot of talk about how AI can get facts wrong. That’s fair, but in my experience it’s correct most of the time. Even when it’s slightly off, there’s usually some useful truth in the answer. Much more frustrating is voice assistants who can’t even begin to give an answer.

More and more I find myself keeping ChatGPT open and asking it even dumb questions that Google or DuckDuckGo could answer just as well. “If it’s 1pm in California, what time is it in Poland?” Having an ad-free, simple response is nice. This is going to completely upend the search engine business.

I recorded a video on YouTube showing how Micro.blog’s new tweets archive import feature works. It’s 6 minutes long and I explain more about how the different parts fit together.

Daniel Jalkut blogs about Micro.blog’s new tweets import and how it can work with MarsEdit.

Share extension is back, and better! There’s a new beta of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS with support for sharing photos and links from other apps. Grab it on TestFlight. Note that this is still a beta and there are a couple glitches, for example with cropping photos sometimes.

Substack Notes is interesting but they seem to have forgotten a valuable part of the rest of Substack: content ownership and portability. Your newsletter/blog can be at your own domain name, but “notes” are just another silo on someone else’s platform.

If you’ve procrastinated downloading your tweets archive from Twitter, I would do it now. It takes up to a day to get it, and who knows if it will change or break in the future.

Went to see Air. Loved it. So hard to make dialog in a movie like this not sound fake, but they pulled it off. Felt very real. Best movie I’ve seen in years. 🏀

ChatGPT continues to impress. I’ve started asking it programming questions just to save a few minutes here or there. For example, this question returned a detailed answer that was exactly correct:

I’m using Ruby and DataMapper with MySQL. How to get a list of unique years used in a database table “pages” with date field “posted_at”?

🤯

Just posted a new Core Intuition. More on our favorite recent topics: the Twitter API shutdown and AI-generated images and text.

Love that feeling when I realize that previous me had already written code to do exactly what I need today. There’s a whole database table I forgot existed to solve this.

Wanted an illustration for an upcoming feature, and spent some time using DALL•E for the first time. Fascinating. Generated dozens of images, then drew some parts myself and put them together. I don’t think these models should be trained with copyrighted works, but credit is murky to me now.

The Fediverse Report continues their great summarization of recent hot topics. On trademarks, Eugen is certainly within his right to trademark Mastodon. I chose not to trademark Micro.blog because it’s too close to microblog, which is a word everyone can use. I also prefer “social web” to fediverse.

Spurs vs. Blazers… in Austin! 🏀

Fascinating discussion on the latest The Talk Show with @gruber@mastodon.social and @danielpunkass about AI. What does it mean for humanity when more tasks can be automated and fewer people need traditional jobs? As a developer, a lot of my time isn’t coding but thinking how something should work.

Blast from the past: video of my old iOS app Tweet Library. I forgot how much I loved this app. 📦

Did a first pass of rewriting all my Twitter API 1.1 code to 2.0. Halfway through I started to seriously question why I am bothering, given the limited lifespan of this code. It’s straightforward to push through, except for one wrinkle: Twitter never finished implementing media upload in 2.0! Sigh.

There’s a lot going on with the S-GPT shortcut. Very clever to have trigger words in the speech that help integrate with system tasks. I also keep imagining the potential for this when voice assistants are powered by it.

I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters are having a hard time processing what is going on with multiple potential charges against the former president. Doesn’t seem fair, right? Why was he impeached twice and always in legal trouble? But it’s simple: he was a corrupt president. 🇺🇸

Attempts to refill the bird feeders have resulted in squirrels taking over the backyard. They are relentless. I’m downstairs trying to work and keep getting distracted looking out the window.

Interesting to compare the main headlines from feed reader home pages:

Feedbin: “A nice place to read on the web” (Love it!)
Inoreader: “Take back control of your news feed” (Also good!)
Feedly: “Track insights across the web without having to read everything” (Enterprise-y!)

Molly White has a good post covering Feedly’s “protests” feature. But even ignoring all those problems, it didn’t seem like this belonged in an RSS reader. Even minor features should support a product’s main reason for existing, or its mission.

Somewhere north of Meridian, TX. 🚂

Deploying code to servers, on a train that has no wi-fi. Everything will be fine.

Grabbing coffee this morning before heading back to Austin, catching up on email. Still thinking about Taylor Swift last night. Incredible show. AT&T Stadium is massive… 70k people at the concert, times 3 nights here, so 210k people just for the Dallas / Fort Worth area.

Taylor Swift. Eras Tour in Arlington, TX.

Union Station in Dallas. 🚂

Good write-up about FediForum from The Fediverse Report. On the $40 pricing, I was a little skeptical at first of excluding too many people, but the attendance size was just right. Great participation. For the fediverse to reach its potential, there should be a mix of business models.

If you use Drafts, check out this new action for Micro.blog. Post drafts, publish, choose your blog, cross-posting, and more options. Thanks @donnydavis!

The plug-in Search Space by @sod has been updated to 1.0. It’s a nice upgrade over the older search I wrote, searching blog posts, replies, and even the new podcast transcripts.

Taking the train up to Dallas tomorrow for a quick 24-hour trip. Initially was trying to save money in coach, but just upgraded to a roomette so I can more easily work and enjoy the trip. Hope when Brightline is finished with the Vegas line they can expand to Texas. 🚂

Zilker Kite Festival. 🪁

Posted Core Intuition 551! This episode covers the launch of Micro.blog’s new podcast transcripts feature, and more generally what AI is good for. A short show, just 22 minutes this week.

Wrote a help page with some more details about automatic podcast transcripts in Micro.blog, a new feature we shipped this week. Really happy with how this feature came together.

No one is above the law. 🇺🇸

The new Twitter API tiers are about what was expected. Disappointing. For Micro.blog, we plan to support cross-posting for a limited number of months, to let folks wind down their use of Twitter. There’s no future on Twitter so all we can do is smooth over the shutdown for customers.

Just finished a quick demo of Micro.blog at FediForum. Might’ve talked too fast. The variety of demos is so interesting. Mastodon clients, Planetary, WordPress, Flipboard, and others. It’s an exciting time for the open web.

NSDrinking tonight! 🍻 I’ll be there. I haven’t joined in a while, so will be nice to catch up with folks. Anyone’s welcome.

It’s pretty incredible how little has changed in podcast RSS feeds in 20 years. That’s a good thing. The podcast ecosystem is not exactly suffering because of any confusion or missing spec features.

I agree with the spirit of the Podcast Standards Project but I’m concerned about the details. The specification seems overly strict in a couple places (like guid) that will not be compatible with a bunch of feeds.

The automatic code reloading in React Native is still kind of wild to me. I committed some changes, pushed to GitHub, then switched branches to something else, and the UI updated while the app was running in the simulator. Surprised me even though I know it works that way.

Just pushed out another TestFlight beta of Micro.blog 3.0. This has some really nice new stuff for managing uploads. Also the return of basic photo filters! Getting closer. Still missing: share sheet.

The new Zelda looks great. Love the fuse ability featured in this gameplay video.

I’ve been playing with Wavelength Messenger. Not to be confused with our own Micro.blog companion app for podcasts, also called Wavelength! I wish it was called something else, but ignoring that I think there’s a lot to like. John Gruber’s introduction is the best place to start.

My copy of Tress of the Emerald Sea arrived! Love the green ink throughout the book. 📚

FediForum is this week! On Thursday I’ll be demoing how Micro.blog fits into the fediverse, and I’ll join in other sessions when I can. You can see the schedule here.

Worked a bunch this weekend trying to decommission an EC2 server (hosting App.net archives!) by moving millions of little files to S3. Taking forever, often failing. I’ve been maintaining this for years and really want to turn the page on it, but can’t accept losing any data.

With yesterday’s podcast, we hit 550 episodes. Some listeners may have noticed that we’ve slowed down a little, recording every other week while there has been a lull in sponsors. Hoping we can do a few new secret member-only episodes this year.

On the latest Core Int, we talk about shifting deadlines for shipping Black Ink and the potential for integrating new AI tools in developing our apps.

I like this summary by @snarfed of why HTTP content negotiation is more trouble than it’s worth. Simple, different URLs for different things are easier to debug, copy/paste between apps, etc. I often look at Micro.blog’s JSON in a web browser, no special tools needed.

Great story from the @RogueAmoeba blog about a meeting with Adam Curry, Eddie Cue, and Steve Jobs that may have saved Audio Hijack.

We don’t use AWS for that much, but costs just about doubled last month with more CDN usage. I tweaked some settings to try to bring it down a little. 💰

Finished reading: The Cat who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa. Books about books. 📚

Dunno if I’m late or early to this, but I’m playing with the OpenAI API. Impressive. The folks over there know what they’re doing.

Really didn’t want to be up at midnight still dealing with attacks on our servers, but here we are. Good news is I was able to optimize a few things that will be helpful going forward anyway.

Micro.blog was acting a little sluggish so I looked at the logs and of course the servers are being hammered again by “hackers” attempting to exploit security holes that don’t exist. Blocked a bunch of stuff and should be better now.

Great article in Texas Monthly about Community Impact, a hyper-local newspaper for neighborhoods around Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and elsewhere.

I hadn’t been following Hachette v. Internet Archive closely, so spent a few minutes listening to Brewster Kahle’s statement. It seems part of a larger issue of whether we can own digital content or will have to rent it. The Internet Archive is such a force for good, glad they’re fighting this.

Watching some of the recent Microsoft Copilot demos and playing with Bing, I wonder what AI products they will roll out before everyone else can even attempt to catch up. Maybe a Microsoft voice assistant box? It would leapfrog Alexa and Siri.

I really enjoyed this episode of The Talk Show with guest Jason Kottke. Their talk of 404 links after years (and decades!) of blogging inspired me to expand our archiver in Micro.blog to make it easier to preserve a copy of web pages you link to. I recorded a YouTube video with the details.

The new beta of Micro.blog for iOS is coming along really well. We’re at the point where I can see the finish line, and I’m comfortable punting some more features into the next update.

Spurs eliminated from the playoffs early this year, but you couldn’t tell by watching the 2nd half of this Hawks/Spurs game. So fun to watch. 🏀

Listening to U2’s Songs of Surrender. I think I was expecting a kind of “Taylor’s Version”-style re-recording, but it’s more a new take like you’d hear at a concert. Love this. 🎵

Playing with FeedLand reminds me that Micro.blog doesn’t have OPML export. The reason is because some people might have private-ish RSS feeds that power their account. This is rare but I wanted to be careful about exposing the URLs. Need to first add OPML that only includes obviously-public feeds.

We’re enabling ActivityPub for everyone now, not just recent users. This is needed so that you can fully migrate followers away from Micro.blog if you want to in the future. It will cause email notifications for some folks who haven’t used Micro.blog in years, but I think it’s the best way forward.

Captured a little video of the lightning on the other side of the storm back at home.

Long day. Drove into hail somewhere before Denton, then through a thunderstorm between Waco and Austin. It started with lightning playing in the clouds and then the downpour was on us, destroying visibility as we crept down the highway with our hazard lights on. Kind of a Texas-sized welcome home.

I’ve been a software developer for about 30 years and ChatGPT is the first technology that I can barely comprehend. Still feels like magic. 🪄

Last day on the road as we make our way through a rainy highway 287 in the middle of nowhere.

Finished reading: Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A short, great read. 📚

Did not finish: Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft. Just couldn’t get into it. Might try to pick it up again some other time in print instead of audiobook. 📚

I was reviewing a GitHub pull request today for a potential upcoming feature and was struck by how well it represents my workflow with Micro.blog for major new features. Start with some basic structure for the code, add more pieces, then fix bugs and polish it up. Screenshot: