Tim Chambers has his yearly predictions post for the open web. I enjoy these posts and I agree with most of his predictions for 2026.

But there is one prediction that I think is too optimistic:

The ActivityPub Fediverse (excluding Threads) will cross 15 million registered users, monthly active users […] will plateau around 2-3 million. Another good year in terms of stable base, but no big waves of new users. Both Bluesky and Fediverse growth won’t come from big waves of migration this year.

To put this in context, according to FediDB the current count of registered users is just short of 12 million. It has grown about 1 million users in each of the last couple of years. I know from Micro.blog’s contribution to these numbers that there are also spam accounts and other junk that has yet to be cleaned out, but still I think these numbers are mostly correct.

You can see this steady, slow growth in total users from this FediDB graph:

The problem is active users. There, we see occasional spikes as users migrate from Twitter / X, but generally the fediverse in terms of active users is shrinking, not growing. Absent some major event or new fediverse platform, I don’t expect active users to get much over 1 million again, let alone 2-3 million. Here’s the graph of the last couple of years:

January through April 2025 was the influx of users from Twitter / X, as Trump took office and Elon Musk went all-in on politics and culture wars. But a few months later that fediverse growth had evaporated, and active users today is apparently less than it was two years ago.

One way to view this is that the fediverse rises and falls naturally based on current events and popular software. Another way to view it is that the fediverse is in trouble, boxed in on one side by massive Bluesky growth and on the other side held back by the dominance of Mastodon.

Mastodon is an incredible success story, yet it still feels unapproachable for new users and it has changed very little in the last several years. I think Mastodon recreates some problems from Twitter in likes and boosts, fixes a few things such as an open protocol and more hands-on curation with small communities, while also adding new wrinkles in the form of local timelines leading to filter bubbles and pile-ons.

There is nothing wrong with Mastodon remaining a small platform in the context of Threads and Bluesky. If people are finding value in it, contributing to the open web, that’s great. But if I’m right that the fediverse has already plateaued, and we care about expanding indie blogging and open social networks, we must continue to adopt a plurality approach, not tied only to the ActivityPub-based fediverse. More platforms should have strong support for RSS and multiple social protocols, rooted in blogs and the broader open web.

Today I added support for Pagefind to Micro.blog. Pagefind is a search library for static sites. Because Micro.blog uses Hugo underneath, Pagefind fits nicely into our architecture.

You can see it in action on my own blog’s search page.

Along the way to adding this, I realized we could extend more of Micro.blog’s publishing. Because Pagefind runs on your built HTML pages, after your Markdown goes through Hugo, we needed a hook into the processing of your blog. I’m calling these actions. There are a few now and will be more later.

You will find an Edit Actions button on the blog settings page. When adding a new action, you’ll see these options:

Each action can run either right after Hugo, but before Micro.blog finishes publishing your blog to our servers, or after everything is done. You can imagine in the future other useful tools that could be tacked on to this, such as our existing GitHub backups or maybe uploading via SFTP to other servers.

I’ve added a new “Ping” action that sends a POST to another server. This sends simple JSON with a url field for your blog. I’ve also moved the Wayback Machine copy into this part of the interface, but kept the old checkbox for convenience for now.

Have other ideas for actions? We can add more and hopefully open it up to plug-ins later. And of course this is optional, so it’s mostly tucked away in the UI.

Last week when I announced Micro.blog Studio — our new subscription plan with improved video hosting including up to 20-minute videos — I also mentioned we would be adding more features for podcasting. Today we have the first of those new features.

Exclusively for Micro.blog Studio subscribers: Micro.blog can automatically adjust the audio levels and reduce noise for uploaded MP3s. We want to make podcasting easier, with more tools and defaults so that things “just work” without requiring a lot of podcasting experience.

On your blog settings page, you’ll see a new checkbox: “Level audio and reduce noise”. This is a feature that some people would previously use services like Auphonic for.

Now when you upload an MP3, Micro.blog will make it available right away but also process it in the background, replacing the uploaded file with the new version. We preserve the original file, so you can visually compare the waveforms. Click on the audio file on the Uploads page on the web.

Is this as good as Auphonic? No, they have some secret sauce for cleaning up audio with lots of configuration options. For Micro.blog Studio, I wanted a single checkbox that will improve most audio, especially if recorded on-the-go from your phone or without a good microphone. It’s optional. If you find it doesn’t help your audio uploads, you can leave it turned off.

Thanks again for everyone who has tried Micro.blog Studio. More to come!

I’ve updated Micro.blog with support for Day One journals. In the Mac app we’ve had a manual export to Day One for a while, and now the platform can automatically copy your blog posts to Day One. This uses Day One Premium’s “Email to journal” feature.

You can enable it on Micro.blog’s “Sources” page:

If you haven’t checked out our cross-posting options in a while, we have built-in support for over 10 different services, from Bluesky to PeerTube to Tumblr. I think our cross-posting features are unmatched by any other platform.

For more details about Day One, see this help page.

Last week I posted a short survey to get some feedback on what features people are using in Micro.blog. The response was great. I’m reading through the freeform answers and they’re especially helpful.

I also wanted to hear opinions about the new Movies feature we recently added on the web, and better understand how people might use better video upload support. Here are charts from a few questions.

Where should the new Movies page go in the apps?

Do you want to post your own videos to your blog?

If you post video, how long will most clips be?

Last weekend, my mom passed away. I had blogged once or twice that in recent months I found myself at the hospital often, as she declined in health and was in and out of the hospital and rehab. It was what inspired me to make Micro.blog free for nurses and teachers.

My mom was selfless, making many sacrifices throughout her life so that I could become the person I am. At the hospital, when I thought she might only have days left, she told me, “I’m fine, go home and get some rest.”

Even in grief, there are moments of good that we can hold on to. I am thankful that my life and work allowed me to care for her in what became her final weeks. When there was nothing else the doctors could do, my mom moved in with my wife and I under hospice care so she could be at our house, always surrounded by people who loved her.

This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I rarely share such personal stories of family publicly. It feels right, though, because it ties into many things I write about.

What do we do when everything goes wrong? The next right thing. We breathe. We get up. Tomorrow the sun will rise on a new day.

Last year I blogged that loss can be a huge motivator:

After my father died, I got married, had kids, and bought a house. After the 2016 election, I launched Micro.blog. After my kids moved away to college, we sold the house and downsized.

As I reflect on this current phase of my life, I know there will be more changes. I continue to put my heart and soul into Micro.blog. I feel really good about the progress we’ve made over the last couple of years.

So for Micro.blog, the work continues. I will catch up on email, and I can’t wait to wrap up the new video hosting I’ve been working on.

I’m motivated to simplify and slow down, to be more at peace with the pace of my schedule. To do less. When I was dealing with the stress of personal attacks early this year, I made a similar choice, asking Daniel Jalkut if it was time to retire our Core Intuition podcast.

I hope Micro.blog can play a small part in providing a quieter social timeline for others too, as we try to build a platform that is less obsessed with trending news and heated discussions.

I also just turned 50 years old. In the span of just 4 days, I had my wedding anniversary, my mom’s death, and my birthday. We decided to plant a tree in our backyard, to mark our anniversary and in memory of my mom. So I found myself outside last week digging a hole as tears slid down my face. Anticipating the loss, needing to do something.

Way back in 2008, I blogged about planting trees and starting projects:

If you procrastinate forever, just because you won’t see results anytime soon, you’ll find yourself looking back 10 years later and wishing if only I had just planted that tree / started that new software project, it would have been done by now.

This time I wanted the new tree to be a Monterrey Oak. They don’t last hundreds of years like a Live Oak, and maybe they aren’t as strong, but they grow very quickly. Time is precious. I want to see the tree get large and provide beauty and shade before it’s too late.

I temporarily upgraded to ChatGPT Pro so I could try out Pulse. I know, Pro is expensive. While it’s a “business expense”, I don’t plan to keep the subscription. I’m trying to cut expenses and raise revenue, not the opposite!

ChatGPT Pulse takes your AI chat history, optionally your email and calendar, and other tips you give it to provide a morning report on topics you’re probably interested in. It’s essentially a personalized “website” with posts written only for you.

The first version generated for me looked like this:

Other stories included what changed in the latest Hugo release, new web standards, and things to see in Oregon that might make for a good Micro.blog photo challenge. It knows I’m the creator of Micro.blog based on my questions to ChatGPT, and it knows I’m traveling next month because I told it. (I did not connect it to my email or calendar.)

It was all very impressive… and actually useful. A story can also be bookmarked into your ChatGPT history to follow up on later.

There’s something else about how this works that is fundamentally different than current chat-based AI where people are looking for answers. Instead of replacing a Google search, it’s adding opportunities to point to other websites and blogs. Because it’s proactively pushing stories to you that you may never think to look for, it should increase referrers to websites instead of subtracting them. Not enough to offset the lost Google searches, but still notable.

OpenAI is shooting for the moon with their fundraising, investments, and data center scale out. It’s too early to know how that plays out. But one thing has been clear for a while: they are building products, not just models. Pulse is the best example of that yet.

Over the summer we started including little book cover previews on the Micro.blog timeline when a book is mentioned. People loved this, and of course wanted it on their own blog too. That is starting to roll out now.

As an example, here’s what the books category page looks like on my own blog. If there is already a photo included in the post, it skips including the cover:

To accomplish this, Micro.blog inserts a bit of HTML into the published post, without modifying the source Markdown. The cover image can be further styled using the CSS class microblog_book. Because we also add some inline styles, you may need to add !important in your CSS to adjust margin and padding.

Happy reading! 📚

Epilogue 2.0 for iOS out now. I’ve also submitted the Android version to Google for review, so that won’t be far behind.

It seemed right to bump the version to 2.0 because of the new private notes support. The app won’t look very different if you don’t enable notes. With notes enabled on the profile screen, you’ll see a new “Add Note…” button when viewing a book you’re reading. Here you can add a note about your reading progress, and it will be saved to the Micro.blog backend, encrypted along with other Micro.blog notes.

I blogged more about book notes in Micro.blog yesterday.

Notes are available for all Micro.blog or Micro.blog Premium subscribers, but not Micro.one. If you need to upgrade from Micro.one, click on the Plans page on the web.

When we added private, end-to-end encrypted notes to Micro.blog, I said that this would be a foundation for new features. The first feature was shared notes. Any private note can be published to your blog with a special, unguessable URL, convenient for sharing with other people.

There are many other places where notes will be useful. This week, we’re rolling out support for attaching notes to books you’re reading. You’ll see a new button for this in the books list on the web, and in the next version of Epilogue, currently in review at Apple.

When you click “Add Note…”, it will associate the book with the new note and add the note to a notebook called “Reading”. Notebooks are a way to organize notes, for example for a collection of blog post drafts, work notes, or a private journal.

If you’ve never used notes in Micro.blog before, you’ll need to set up a secret key that is used to encrypt notes. That secret key can be copied into other apps that support notes, like our companion apps Strata and the upcoming Epilogue, as well as the third-party web app Lillihub.

I know it can sometimes seem that Micro.blog goes off on strange tangents, but everything we do is to support a platform that is centered around owning your content and publishing to your own domain name. Features like bookmarking web pages, keeping track of books you’re reading, and private or shared notes — these all help bring content together in one place where you can easily blog about it, instead of putting it in a closed silo.

I’ve also updated the notes API documentation. There is a new endpoint for getting notes from a book ISBN, as well as new metadata in the JSON responses. Happy reading!

Big update today for Micro.blog folks who have multiple accounts. The iOS, Android, and Mac apps have long supported multiple accounts, but on the web you could only switch between separate blogs on the same account. Managing multiple accounts on the web was frustrating.

Now you’ll find a popover menu in the sidebar to add a new account and select between your accounts. Here’s a screenshot showing me signed into a couple of our official accounts in addition to my personal account:

And for all users, even if you only have a single Micro.blog account, we now have passkeys! This is the password-less standard for quickly signing in. No more waiting for a confirmation email from Micro.blog.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using AI for polish. The idea was to let AI help with taking care of lots of little details that can be tempting to skip in the rush to get a new feature out.

Lately I’ve been thinking about another good use for AI. Not to finish a feature, but to start one. There are some bugs or features that I know I’ve needed to work on. It can sometimes feel overwhelming. Where to start, what else to bump off the priority queue so I can start this new thing?

Two recent examples. I fired up the cloud version of Codex. This is the tool that you can give a prompt, and it’ll go off and start working on a new feature, then come back with a Git branch and GitHub pull request to review. It’s nuts and magical.

As a first test, I picked something very simple. I wrote a prompt that was about twice as long as the actual code change. When it worked, I picked something else more complicated, letting AI create a couple new files and methods.

Did it work perfectly? Nope! It was close, though, and I could go into the code that had been created, tweak the formatting, rename some things, fix bugs. It turned a slightly daunting task into a very simple series of tweaks, iterating on it (without AI) until I liked it.

I think this is going to be a powerful use of AI in the future. To brainstorm and draft. To get through the dip of something challenging. There is a lot of room to get coding help without necessarily going all-in and giving control to AI.

Today we rolled out two improvements to category management in Micro.blog on the web. The first is a new selection interface so you can more easily delete lots of categories at once. This was particularly a problem when importing from other blog systems, which could create lots of categories you didn’t really want anymore.

The second is a new “intro text” field for category pages. This lets you add some text at the top of an individual category list page. So maybe on my Coffee page, I want to add a little intro paragraph that explains visiting new coffee shops while I’m traveling.

You’ll see this new field when editing a category:

Most themes have not been updated to support this feature yet. I’m working through themes this morning, adding the necessary Hugo code. In the template layouts/_default/list.html, there’s this extra bit of code that will add the intro text if it’s set:

{{ with .Content }}
  <div class="microblog_category_intro">{{ . }}</div>
{{ end }}

You may also want to style it a little with CSS, until themes have adopted this with their own design:

.microblog_category_intro {
  padding-bottom: 2em;
  margin-bottom: 2em;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #EEEEEE;
}

Keep an eye out for new versions of plug-ins you might be using. Enjoy!

This week we’re announcing an improvement to photo storage and photo scaling for Micro.blog Premium subscribers, our $10/month plan that also includes up to 5 blogs, email newsletters, bookmark archiving, and highlights.

For years now, we’ve scaled photos down to about 1800x1800 when uploading them to Micro.blog. This has been a good balance of resolution and file size. Photos still look good on the web, and they take up a little less space by default.

Now with Micro.blog Premium, we’re also saving a separate larger version, with resolution up to about 3000x3000. This version of the photo is available for themes to use, and it automatically works with the “Photo collections” plug-in, so that when you click on a photo in a collection it uses the higher resolution when zooming the photo to full screen in your web browser.

For more about photo collections, see this help page.

In the web interface to Micro.blog, for uploads you’ll start seeing little icons for various sizes of a photo: small, medium, or the new “extra large” size. These icons link to that resolution. Here’s a screenshot:

The URLs for photo sizes are available in the Hugo front matter under the existing .photos_with_metadata array:

- url: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename.jpg
  sizes:
    small: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-s.jpg
    medium: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-m.jpg
    xl: https://www.manton.org/uploads/2025/filename-xl.jpg

You might wonder why we handle photo URLs this way, while other platforms try to hide the implementation behind random, super-long CDN URLs and dynamic scaling. I find that approach confusing whenever you need to customize anything. All the technical bits in Micro.blog are designed to be human readable. You should be able to view HTML source if you need to and not be completely lost.

Hope you find this new size useful! As more larger photos are saved, there will be opportunities for further tweaks to use the different sizes in more places. But I wanted to get the foundation for this change out now.

Big update to Micro.blog for Mac today if you use the notes feature. Everything is faster and more robust. I personally have probably a thousand notes, and it was a little flaky with so many notes before.

I’ve also added a “Versions…” option to the context menu. Micro.blog keeps a record of each edit to a note, so if you make a mistake you can go back to an older version. Now there’s an interface for browsing and restoring a previous copy of the note. (This interface will come to the web later. The third-party web client Lillihub already has something similar!)

Here’s a screenshot of the main interface. This is a test “Journal” notebook (you can have multiple notebooks) that also shows the new sharing URL pane.

I’ve finished a significant improvement to editing blog posts that include photos. Let’s say you want to add a photo to an existing blog post. Before, you could upload a new photo in Uploads, then copy and paste the <img> tag HTML into an edited blog post. Now there’s a photo toolbar button when editing, just like there already was for new posts.

When you add a photo, it will include a thumbnail version at the bottom of the post. Click the photo to remove it or add an accessibility description.

This change introduced an interesting new wrinkle for more complex blog posts. These photo thumbnails are automatically added to the interface when editing a post that includes one or more photos at the end of the blog post, which is the default layout in Micro.blog. If you have a blog post that includes text and photos interspersed, it does not touch those photos.

Micro.blog is both a full-featured blog hosting platform and a social network. We want creating new posts to be as simple as it is on platforms like Mastodon or Bluesky, while still including the flexibility to jump the guardrails using Markdown, HTML, and CSS. I hope this new editing interface strikes the right balance.

Please let me know if you see any new problems. I changed a few things in both the web interface and our implementation of the Micropub API that is used behind the scenes.

Today we’ve updated Micro.blog for macOS to version 3.5.8, fixing a couple problems. I’ve also improved the Logs window to color in green the lines for when a blog publish was finished. Just makes it a little easier to see when glancing at the window.

Micro.blog keeps the log to show when it’s preparing your posts, when they’re being run through Hugo, and then when they are actually available on the web.

Those of y’all who have listened to Core Intuition for years might know that I always avoid .10 bug fix releases. As a long-time Mac developer, my brain is still wired with the classic vers resource, and .10 feels wrong and potentially confusing for sorting. Since we’re at .8 already, it’s almost time to bump the version to 3.6! Thinking about what new features might be appropriate for that release.

If you use Micro.blog but haven’t tried the Mac version, check it out! I think it has gotten quite good. The web version will always be the complete version of Micro.blog, but for posting, editing, managing uploads, and much more, the Mac version is my go-to app.

I’m considering some improvements to our Bluesky and AT Protocol implementation in Micro.blog. Currently we can cross-post blog posts to Bluesky, either manually or automatically whenever you post to your blog. You can also follow Bluesky users directly in Micro.blog. You can even browse Bluesky starter packs.

There are several directions we could go from here. At one point, I thought PDS hosting would be the next step, but it still feels too early for that, and it would be a daunting infrastructure change. I’d like to instead focus on lexicons.

When we post to Bluesky, short posts under 300 characters are preserved mostly as-is, with inline links and photos. Longer posts are truncated. Posts with titles are linked back to your blog, including the post summary if it’s set.

Meanwhile there are people in the AT Protocol community exploring long-form content, such as WhiteWind and Leaflet. My rough plan is:

• Add an option to Micro.blog cross-posting for Bluesky that also copies long-form posts to Leaflet’s structured format. I hope that this might help spur interest in Leaflet. Leaflet uses a block-based document format, and Micro.blog would essentially convert HTML to this format as best it can, with each paragraph or image becoming a block.
• Add a new embed type for long-form posts with a new lexicon that removes the 300-character limit, adding an optional title field and other things. This way, Bluesky clients would continue to see the truncated post in the timeline, but clients that are aware of this new embed could extract it and show a “read more” link or just include the full text.

Posts in Bluesky can only have a single embed, which is a union that could be one of several types. The most common embed is an array of images. Another embed is the Open Graph preview. A new blog.micro.embed.post lexicon would be an additional embed.

Let me try to visualize this structure with a diagram of two posts. The first is a simple short microblog post. The second is a microblog post with the full-length blog post embedded in it.

Note there are a couple of potential issues here, and probably others I haven’t run into yet:

• Because there can only be one embed, we’d lose the very useful array of images attached to a post. Instead, we’ll recreate this as an images field inside the embed, so Bluesky clients can fall back on that.
• Because real blog posts often have inline images, we’ll add a new rich text facet type blog.micro.richtext.image that represents an image. In the same way you could have a range of text that is a link or @-mention, you could have a range of text that is an “image” and should be replaced in a post renderer with the image, or linked to open the image.

Of course it’s a slippery slope to just reinventing HTML. I’ve included an optional html field that has a copy of the blog post as the author intended. If available, clients could choose to show that in an embedded web view. But by attempting to stick with Bluesky’s rich text and facets wherever possible, it feels like it is a little more at home with the network.

I’ve published drafts of this on GitHub: blog.micro.embed.post and blog.micro.richtext.image. Feedback welcome. These are not finalized and might be wrong or later change in breaking ways until I actually write the code.

I’ve now been using Dia for about a week. Parker Ortolani just blogged that he was skeptical of the Arc to Dia transition, but he’s now convinced:

The success of Dia over the past few weeks has brought me back my roots, reminding me of the iconic Steve Jobs quote “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

My experience with Dia has also been positive. Because I’m not a heavy tabs user — I rarely keep more than a few tabs open, and by the end of the day they’re all closed — I actually prefer the tabs going back to the top of the window. Obviously this was a needed change for the AI sidebar.

My only nitpick is the iOS-like text selection bars, which are distracting. I’m always accidentally clicking on them because of how I often double-click and drag to select text. This is on a Mac:

Using Dia is a nice reminder that there is very little lock-in with web browsers. Switching to a new browser is easy. If The Browser Company can’t make their business work, then I’ll switch to something else.

We just released a new version of Micro.blog for iOS that adds two improvements:

• Redesigned the reply pane to be smaller, with a new username bar for adding or removing people from your reply. Non-modal so you can scroll the timeline behind it.
• Added a new publishing progress pane, to give better status of what’s going on with a new blog post.

Here are a couple screenshots showing the changes:

We’re wrapping up the Android version too. Hope to submit it to Google for approval later this week.

By “polish” I don’t mean the design, necessarily. I mean all the little details that differentiate a good app from a great one. Extra things that busy or lazy developers (like me!) don’t always make time for. Here’s an example from this week.

I’m experimenting with a new feature in Micro.blog for Mac. I’m not exactly sure what form this will take, so don’t read too much into the screenshot below yet. For now this is a fun thing that I’m working on between bug fixing and other important improvements to the platform.

The window will have a progress bar to show the status of downloading a file. My first pass at this code was pretty basic, and I almost left it that way, but the download could take quite a while on most internet connections. How about giving the user an estimate of time remaining for the download?

This is the kind of thing I might not always bother with. I’m only one person, and there is a lot to work on. By leaning on AI, I could easily add this extra bit of polish to the user experience.

Here’s the prompt I used with OpenAI’s o3 model:

During download, calculate approx how many minutes will be remaining in the download and put that in the field like “1.2 GB (1 MB, 5 minutes remaining)”. Ideally use hours with 1 decimal place if > 60 minutes, just minutes as a whole number if < 60 minutes, and if < 1 minute, just seconds as a whole number.

ChatGPT produced just the right code. It only took me a few minutes to tweak and reformat it a little. Very happy with the result.

For beta testers on iOS, there’s a new build of Micro.blog with a button to toggle just showing draft blog posts. This matches the functionality we’ve had on the web and Mac apps for a while. Useful if you manage lots of drafts.

If you’re not on the beta yet, feel free to sign up at this TestFlight link. We’ll release it to all customers in the coming week.

Stephen Hackett continues to have good links related to xAI energy use and gas turbines in Memphis. From what I can tell, none of the other AI companies have done anything like this. They use the existing grid or have proposed new power plants. Google considered generators for backup only. xAI is unique in seeming to not care at all about pollution.

This fits the model we’ve come to expect from Elon Musk. He cares a lot about the big picture and less about who is hurt along the way. It’s an extremist, unhealthy perspective.

I drove through Memphis a few nights ago, only stopping for dinner, but I could tell right away it was a city I’d love to explore more on a future trip. Cool place.

This week’s ATP has a members-only special segment about vibe coding. One snippet from John Siracusa, encapsulating much of the conversation:

As programming tools have gotten better, the demand for programmers has gone up, not down.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he gave a demo of NeXTSTEP at Macworld. I was lucky enough to be in the audience. Steve said that moving from traditional programming frameworks where you had to start with almost nothing, to Objective-C and what would become the Cocoa frameworks, was like starting a building on the 20th floor, with all the foundational pieces built for you.

A small team of only a couple developers could now build complete apps that before would’ve required a much larger team. Solo developers were of course already building apps on their own, but Steve was right that Cocoa would greatly increase productivity, opening up the Mac to more developers.

Vibe coding is different than a new system framework. With a framework, you mostly trust that it is well-tested and understood by the developers who wrote it. With AI slop, no human has tested the code before you literally just saw it unfold on screen. You have to understand it and tweak it before shipping a real product. Vibe coding instead is purposefully giving in to the machine and just letting code fly without any review.

Still, there’s a similarity to previous programming advances just because of the productivity gains. With AI, the step forward is more extreme than it has ever been.

Vibe coding will mostly prop up small projects and experiments, less likely to replace actual full-time development work. But if you’re programming without any assistance from AI, you are at a disadvantage, in the same way that programming in pure C with the Mac toolbox was much slower and error-prone for building a modern Mac app than using Objective-C when the Cocoa frameworks matured.

If after considering that productivity difference, a developer on principle wants to avoid AI, I respect that. Everyone should choose the programming language and frameworks that best suit their work. But there’s no sense in pretending that AI won’t change development, or that we won’t need to adapt along with it.

Today’s update to the Mac app addresses a few things related to managing uploads. It’s now easier to upload a new photo, or start a new post from an already-uploaded photo.

These screenshots highlight a couple of the new items:

There are also some bug fixes and little improvements that make using the app nicer.

Today we’re rolling out a big improvement to our new EU-based servers. Along with the option to host your web pages in Europe, Micro.blog will now also copy your photos and other uploads. It will copy your data the first time the feature is enabled, and then going forward will maintain a copy on both sides of the Atlantic.

This means all your blog content can be served from Europe. Your blog and all its photos will remain up even if our servers in the United States were ever to go down.

If you’ve already enabled the European servers checkbox, your photos have been copied. There’s nothing else to do.

If you’re enabling the European checkbox for the first time, you’ll see this status of the progress:

You can continue to use Micro.blog and it will finish copying in the background.

You might also see URLs with a new hostname: eu.uploads.micro.blog. This is a CDN that pulls photos from our European servers but still caches them in both North America and Europe, so there’s no new performance hit for visitors outside of Europe. All of this should be seamless.

These are the biggest changes we’ve made to Micro.blog’s infrastructure in years. The result should be a more resilient and scalable platform. Happy blogging!

Starting today there is a new option for customers who want more flexibility for where their blog is hosted. When Micro.blog publishes your blog, it runs your blog posts through Hugo, creating static HTML files that are hosted outside of the main Micro.blog platform. Those files can now be served from a data center in Europe.

Here’s a screenshot of the new checkbox on the Design page:

After you enable this setting, there’s one more step: updating the DNS for your custom domain name to use the new servers in Europe. There’s a help page with an overview of DNS settings. If you registered your domain name through Micro.blog, we’ll automatically update the DNS records for you when the checkbox is toggled.

In Europe we’re using Hetzner’s data center in Nuremberg, Germany.

Note that photos continue to be hosted in the United States and made available around the world via our CDN. That way your blog visitors still get photos delivered as quickly as possible whether they are in North America or Europe. Other data on the platform such as draft posts, encrypted notes, and the Micro.blog timeline also remain in the United States.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the United States right now, but Micro.blog is built for the world wide web. Our principles have always included a focus on web identity and permanence, with domain names at the heart of what we do. The distributed nature of the web makes improvements like today’s change possible.

I’d love to hear what you think. We’ll keep exploring how to make the platform as resilient as possible.

I added a new feature to Micro.blog Premium today called domain name aliases. Often when people host their blog on Micro.blog, they later change their mind about the primary domain name for their blog. Now you can more easily redirect multiple domain names to the same blog so no previous links break.

For example, maybe you start with the subdomain micro.yourdomain.com but later want it to just be the root domain yourdomain.com. Micro.blog handles HTTPS and redirecting any path in the URL between domain names.

Here’s a screenshot with a couple test examples for my blog. You can find this feature under Account → New Domain Alias:

This option is available for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog Premium also includes support for up to 5 separate hosted blogs and any number of single-page websites.

I’m improving something I started last year, to automatically save thumbnail versions of web pages that could be used in various places. As an example, starting this week Micro.blog now makes banners suitable for Open Graph meta tags, combining the profile photo and a rendered thumbnail of the page.

I can’t decide yet if this is actually good, but I think it’s on the right track to something. I’ve never been happy with the way most platforms use Open Graph. It adds a lot of clutter. At the same time, Micro.blog’s previous default of doing nothing wasn’t great either, and some platforms like Threads would pull in the profile photo only, attempting to crop a square photo into a wider banner.

Here’s an example of one of the new images:

Coincidentally the text of my post fit perfectly, otherwise it will be centered or cropped off the bottom.

Another example with a post that has a photo:

I’d love to hear feedback before we go further with this. The new option is available in the Hugo front matter as a URL in .Params.opengraph.image. If a post has a photo, plug-ins can still prefer using the photo URL directly. If you want the web page thumbnail only, that’s in .Params.thumbnail.

I’m imagining it used like this:

{{ if .Params.photos }}  
  {{ with index .Params.photos 0 }}
    <meta property="og:image" content="{{ . }}">
  {{ end }} 
{{ else }}
  {{ with .Params.opengraph }}  
    <meta property="og:title" content="{{ .title }}">
    <meta property="og:image" content="{{ .image }}">
  {{ end }} 
{{ end }}

This hasn’t been added to the built-in themes yet. It can be added by editing your header template, or wait until the dust settles and it’s available in plug-ins.

Testing this has been a little hit or miss because platforms like Threads and Bluesky aggressively cache the metadata for a page. These thumbnails are created right after a blog post is published, so they might not be available the first time a platform checks for them, especially if Micro.blog cross-posts your post to the platform more quickly than the thumbnail is ready. More tweaks likely needed.

Today we updated another part of Micro.blog to support blog post summaries. When automatically cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn, the summary will now be included for long-form posts with a title. It will look something like this after being copied to the other platform:

Your title here: <link to blog post>

The summary of the post here.

For example, here’s this very post on Bluesky:

You can write these summaries yourself or have AI generate them for you from the text on the new post or draft editing screens. They are also included in your published JSON Feed. And for external feeds using JSON Feed, Micro.blog will also look for the summary and use it in the timeline and cross-posting.

I’ve also added support in the APIs — Micropub as summary and XML-RPC as mt_excerpt — so that third-party apps can get and set summaries. This is being tested now for an upcoming MarsEdit release.

We added ActivityPub support to Micro.blog in 2018. In the years since, we’ve improved it a lot. And we’ve seen how people actually use it.

Mastodon and other popular fediverse software have had a huge impact on the open web. There is a lot to like. By focusing on tens of thousands of smaller communities, the whole system is insulated from a single rogue CEO, and it’s more manageable for admins to stay on top of community issues. This is a really good step forward compared to massive silos.

Many of the problems with social networks remain in Mastodon, though. Chasing follower counts and likes. Scanning headlines instead of reading. Piling on with quick replies. Algorithms to surface popular stories that are being boosted. The infrastructure changed, but human behavior did not, and the platform features are still nearly identical to Twitter.

There is a new problem too that didn’t exist before. Smaller communities can become insular bubbles. Admins and users with many followers on a server have power to shape opinion and direct frustration at other users. The local timeline provides both connection to fellow members of the community and isolation from broader viewpoints outside the community.

I’m not suggesting that everyone is unhappy with Mastodon, Threads, or even Bluesky. Some people don’t see the same problems that I see, and that’s fine. But I’m not happy. And increasingly, I want to unplug from these networks and focus on my blog and the Micro.blog community, even though I believe in APIs and connecting many different platforms on the open web.

I occasionally hear the same thing from other users. They want to participate in the larger social web, but on their own terms, with their blog as the most important part of their online presence.

Today we’re launching new settings in Micro.blog to take control of how your account federates with everyone else. For the first time, this allows you to dial back your participation in the fediverse without actually deleting your fediverse profile. Your account still exists on the fediverse. It’s just a little quieter.

Here is a screenshot for what’s available under Account → View Fediverse Details:

By selecting the second option, users on Mastodon won’t see your blog posts in their timeline. You can still get replies and reply to other Mastodon users, but you will likely get drastically fewer replies, because there won’t be much for Mastodon users to reply to.

As you can see in the screenshot, there is also a new option for muting. For a while you’ve been able to mute people or servers. For example, some users wanted to mute Threads. Now you can mute the entire fediverse. With this selected, replies to you from the fediverse will still arrive at Micro.blog, but you won’t see them in your timeline.

This is for people who want a quieter space on the web. A space focused more on writing and less on reacting to other people.

Of course all of this is optional. If you like the way it already works, no need to change anything. I’m imagining these settings are something that people will enable or disable from time to time, not keep permanently set.

The social web is growing quickly and Micro.blog will adapt along with it. We’ll always stay true to our founding ideals and IndieWeb principles, trying to find the balance between blogging and the social web that’s right for our platform.

If you haven’t read Wind and Truth, book 5 of the Stormlight Archive, please skip this post. Spoilers ahead. Knowing someone else’s opinion about a book before you read it risks ruining your own interpretation.

I finished Wind and Truth last week and generally loved most of it despite a few unsatisfying bits. I don’t give books star ratings. Usually I post a short note about the book as you can see on this category page. I’m just writing this to process my thoughts, so it probably sounds a little more critical than it really is. Expectations were extremely high for this book, possibly so high that they could not be met.

I was hoping for more of an ending in the ending, but it clearly sets up the second arc of the series. I’m not sure I can fairly judge book 5 until book 6 is ready, and that is years away. The more I think about the ending, though, the more I like it.

The strongest parts of the book for me were Szeth’s flashbacks and Adolin’s storyline. These were great. I also liked how Dalinar in the Spiritual Realm was used to fill in the history of Roshar for the reader. Half the book was effectively a clever flashback that didn’t feel like a flashback. The structure of the book and plot were solid. Brandon Sanderson famously outlines the heck out of his stories before writing, and I can’t fault anything in the planning for this book.

The weaker parts were Kaladin’s and Jasnah’s viewpoints. Kaladin is such a well-developed character in the first books of the series. Way of Kings is one of my all-time favorite books. By book 5, there wasn’t much more to tell with Kaladin. His scenes in Wind and Truth often felt redundant and forced.

For Jasnah, hear me out… I think the book would’ve been better if all of her chapters were cut. There is so much going on in this book, spread across several different parts of the world, and I don’t think Jasnah’s role was needed. I wasn’t convinced by her getting outmaneuvered by Odium. 1300 pages is a lot. The book might’ve been stronger if it was just a little shorter, even if that meant sacrificing the viewpoint of a great character.

I liked Shallan’s story. Her character continues to grow. The ending sets her up for something, perhaps the most unresolved of any character. I was originally under the impression that book 6 would take place a generation or two later, but apparently it’s going to be more like a decade jump. I wonder if there could be a flashback or a novella to fill the gap from Shallan’s perspective.

Maybe another editing pass would’ve fixed the little things that nagged at me. Just more time to bake. I enjoyed reading it, though, and maybe on a re-read of the complete series I won’t notice the little things that pulled me out of the story the first time.

Can’t wait for Mistborn era 3. Brandon is drafting the entire trilogy before publishing the first book, which seems like a smart move, and hopefully will set us up for yearly releases when it’s all ready. It’s remarkable what he’s accomplished with the Cosmere.

Today we’re rolling out two plug-in changes to Micro.blog. The first is that for new users, the Sumo theme by Matt Langford is now the default theme. This is a great theme that I think will serve new users better than our previous default theme Marfa. Sumo is better maintained and easier to customize.

Inspired by the good work that plug-in developers are doing, we’re also starting to sprinkle in donation buttons on your plug-ins list. The buttons can say either donate, tip, or buy me a coffee. Here’s an example:

I’ve been manually wiring these up, but later we’ll automate this so that Micro.blog can discover the donation link via a plug-in’s config or readme. If you’ve created a plug-in that accepts donations, let me know and I’ll update the listing.

For a while (years!) we’ve had both ActivityPub support in Micro.blog and cross-posting to Mastodon. ActivityPub is best if you want people on the fediverse to follow your Micro.blog account directly. No need to maintain a Mastodon account. Cross-posting is good if you want to keep a separate Mastodon account, but still post first to your own blog.

This week we’ve rolled out two significant improvements to Mastodon cross-posting. The first is support for bringing Mastodon replies back into Micro.blog. When your blog post is cross-posted to Mastodon, we’ll also routinely check for replies to those posts via the Mastodon API, even if you aren’t using ActivityPub. Those replies will be integrated into the Micro.blog timeline and available in the Mentions section.

This makes Micro.blog an even better universal timeline with access to multiple services. Check for replies in one place, on Micro.blog, and then only occasionally hop over to other services. You can reply to posts directly in Micro.blog and those replies will also be copied back to Mastodon.

There’s also a new set of filter buttons when there are replies. If the Mentions section gets cluttered, click the buttons to only show replies from either Micro.blog, Mastodon, or Bluesky.

All of this works with Bluesky. When you get a reply from Bluesky, it will show up in Micro.blog. If you reply to the Bluesky user, your reply will be copied back to Bluesky too.

These changes continue our goal of having the best integration with as many other platforms on the open web as possible. Happy blogging!

“I know what I have to do now. I’ve got to keep breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring.” — Cast Away

We went to bed early last night, just as the county results for Georgia and North Carolina were starting to come in and you could see a rough picture of the electorate. I slept terribly, waking up multiple times, but never checked the news until morning. Mostly I was thinking of what I would do next.

I walked to the coffee shop. Not the closest coffee shop. Not the second-closest. A longer walk, and on the way I checked the mailbox. The new Micro.blog t-shirt had arrived. I think it turned out great.

Apparently the stock market is reacting well this morning. Fine. I plan to milk this idiotic new administration for all the financial gains and tax cuts off the backs of working people that I can. Elections have consequences, assholes. And I’ll use every penny to fight Trump, fight misinformation, fight the hellscape of mainstream social media.

I won’t dwell more on politics except to say that Democrats have lost rural America. Too many people feel left behind. Too many people still had no idea who Trump really was. Too many people have no ideology so don’t know who to blame when life is hard. Biden has done a lot of good, but it’s the kind of progress that takes years to notice.

I was inspired to vote for Kamala Harris, but it’s especially disheartening to now know we should have stuck with Joe Biden. Yes, he would have lost. Most candidates would have lost this year. But Joe was ready to take one for the team because that’s the kind of person he is. Then Kamala could’ve run in 2028 for the first time. Now that story is just another what might have been.

Loss can be a huge motivator. After my father died, I got married, had kids, and bought a house. After the 2016 election, I launched Micro.blog. After my kids moved away to college, we sold the house and downsized.

Change is part of life. Everyone will cope in their own way. Give them the space they need. For me, I’m writing this blog post, and I’m picking up in Xcode where I left off yesterday.

There is a lot to do. Let’s get to work.

It’s time for another update in my Honda Element blog post series. After my last road trip, I decided to scrap the rooftop box. Even though the extra storage was great, I was suspicious it was dragging too much on the highway and killing my gas milage. In its place I’ve mounted a much slimmer roof basket, which I also thought would be perfect for helping add a solar panel to the roof in a clean, non-destructive way.

So far I really like it. Here are a few photos:

I bolted the panel to the roof basket rods, and it seems mostly secure, but it’s not perfect. Of the four mount points, I could only get three actually aligned in a workable way. I’m hoping to adjust how it’s attached and add a few extra zip ties as insurance.

Not really shown, I’m winding the cable down into the back of the car, where I can charge one of my portable batteries. This is sort of a luxury I don’t need, to be honest, but it’s fun and you can never have too much electricity while traveling. Also still need to get something to stick the cable to the roof better.

The basket is the Thule Canyon XT Cargo Basket. The panel is the Jackery SolarSaga 100 Prime. It’s purposefully off-center because I still need to reattach my weBoost antenna.

In my blog post series for upgrades to my Honda Element, this post is a little different. It’s not an actual change to the car like the posts about CarPlay, the WeBoost, or my bed platform.

It is usually too hot to camp in Texas during the summer. To help beat the heat, I’m currently using a few portable fans and a water-cooled fan, the Evapolar evaCHILL. It doesn’t blow cold air, but it does blow cool-ish air. Every little bit helps. It also draws very little energy, about 10W from my Jackery.

I also swear by these simple fans by Dorobeen. They charge via USB-C and double as batteries that can charge a phone.

I’m still considering a “real” air conditioning unit like the EcoFlow Wave or Zero Breeze, but they are a lot bigger. I don’t think it’s currently worth the trouble.

We’ve got a new minor update to Epilogue for iOS ready. This release focuses on the context menu in the book details screen. Many people didn’t know the menu was there. Now there’s an ellipsis button to make it more discoverable, plus a couple other additions to the menu.

This week we posted a short survey for Micro.blog customers to provide feedback about the service. I was particularly interested in some of our extra features like bookmarks, bookshelves, and notes. These aren’t necessarily well-known and I’ve been thinking about how to better position them within the Micro.blog platform and companion apps.

We’ve gotten about 250 responses so far and they are still coming in. That’s enough to see some trends. I’m including notes after each chart.

Which operating systems do you use Micro.blog from?

No surprise here that Mac and iOS are the majority considering my roots in the Apple developer community. I’m happy that Windows and Linux are starting to poke into the stats, though. That’s a good indication that we should continue to prioritize the web platform as the most complete, primary interface for Micro.blog.

What plan are you subscribed to?

I included Micro.blog Teams as an option but we don’t even have a link to subscribe to that plan anymore, so no surprise effectively no one uses it. We have actual subscription data in Stripe, but I wanted to include this question because it tilts the data more to active users.

This price is:

I’m happy with this. 97% think the price is just right or a great value. I wonder if some of the 3% who think it’s too expensive are from countries where their local currency doesn’t go quite as far against the US dollar, because I do hear from those folks. I wish I had thought to ask where people are located.

Do you use any of these companion mobile apps?

Our customers love books. Strata is still iOS-only but we have the Android version ready to release. We also have an update to Sunlit almost ready, with the new icon and some fixes.

What are you favorite services to cross-post to?

There were a few “none” answers here too that I edited out of the chart, and one Farcaster, which I’m keeping an eye on. These charts are from Google Forms, but I cleaned them up in Acorn to be more readable.

Twitter X is probably never going to die. Also, don’t read too much into Bluesky being more popular than Threads. Our automatic Threads cross-posting is still in beta, so not available to everyone yet.

What should be our most important priorities? Pick 2!

The chart was a mess for this because there was an “other” choice with lots of suggestions for what we should work on, so I’m not including it. The top responses were performance and stability, the text editor, finding new people to follow, blog themes, and timeline position sync.

How would you feel if the advanced bookmark features like highlights, tags, and archiving were split off into our app Strata?

I asked this question because these features are great and I use them every day, but they tend to get lost in the blog-focused interface we have today. I always worry about clutter in the UI. I think moving them into a separate “product” could help with both marketing and user experience. If we do this, there would be a bundle to subscribe to everything, and no prices would change for existing users.

For anyone worried about us always adding new features instead of making what we already have better, I consider Micro.blog feature complete now. Almost everything we do from here will be refining what we have. There will always be improvements, but I don’t think there will be huge new core features at the scale of photos, podcasting, bookmarks, notes, and bookshelves.

Any other feedback about Micro.blog? Features you like or things we can improve.

This freeform question was at the end for general feedback. Those responses were incredibly useful. I’m not going to share them publicly because they feel private-ish, but I’m reading all of them. There are some common themes such as not getting stretched too thin, making sure the service is robust, and improving the UI.

We’ll continue to keep the survey open for another week in case there are some late responses. Thank you, everyone!

Today we’ve released a new version of Micro.blog for macOS. This update adds two new features: import from Glass and better support for showing auto-generated summaries of bookmarked web pages. Most of the advanced bookmark features in Micro.blog — like summaries, highlights, and tags — require Micro.blog Premium.

Glass recently updated their photos export. The archive now includes all your photos and the date they were posted. It does not include the caption of the photo, so we can’t import that to your blog yet.

When you download the Glass archive to your Mac and unzip it, you can select it in Micro.blog and get a preview of the photos that will be imported. Select a few photos or all of them. Micro.blog will copy the photos and also create blog posts referencing the photos, each with the correct posted date.

Another change in this version of Micro.blog is how bookmark summaries are handled. When you bookmark a web page using Micro.blog Premium, if you have the AI setting enabled, Micro.blog will summarize the web page text so you can see at a glance what the bookmark is about. There’s a new menu item View → Bookmark Summaries to toggle this on and off.

Enjoy! Thanks for using Micro.blog.

This is a pretty simple one, another addition to my blog post series about upgrading my Honda Element. These rain guards attach above each window, so you can crack the window while it’s raining and not get water in the car. They just stick on, but they seem surprisingly sturdy.

This feature went from idea to implementation quickly because it turns out we already have full podcast hosting in Micro.blog! How convenient. I’m going to use this post to break it all down.

AI is everywhere, including some places it probably shouldn’t be. If you’ve been following my blog you know that I see huge potential in generative AI. We’re using it in Micro.blog to improve photos search and accessibility text for photos. But like many tools, AI is going to be overused before we all find the right balance for what it’s good at.

When Jean and I were talking to Christina Warren at Micro Camp, I asked Christina about a talk she gave at Çingleton about 10 years ago. I actually blogged about it at the time. What struck me as particularly relevant now as we’re about to be swamped with AI-generated content is that there’s no substitute for the human voice. I don’t just mean that an actual recording is better than a synthetic voice. I also mean that things that are created by humans will increasingly be sought out.

We want to see the personal side of someone, not just the polished brand. We want to see the imperfect, the creative, the emotion. We want authenticity.

In Micro.blog, you can now upload an audio recording of one of your blog posts. Use the audio icon in the new post form on the web, which is available to everyone starting today, even at the standard $5 plan. Your blog readers can listen to the audio narration of the post if they don’t feel like reading the post. Of course it’s especially great for the visually impaired.

Here’s what it looks like on my blog, next to the posted date. Shout-out to Medium which I drew some inspiration from.

I’m also adding audio narration to this very blog post, so you can click over to the web to try it out.

When there’s audio attached to a post, Micro.blog attempts to check if it is probably the narration for a post. If the number of words in the post and the audio duration is roughly comparable to how long it would take a human to read the post, it assumes it’s narration and not a podcast. Podcast episodes are more likely to be longer with very short “show notes” in the actual blog post text.

Micro.blog checks this so that it can hide the default audio player and transcript link. These would add clutter to normal blog posts.

Blog themes will still need to be updated to support the play button. I’ve already updated the Alpine theme and will update others later. Themes can use a new API called Narration.js. Just plop this JavaScript anywhere you want the play button in your template, likely the layouts/post/single.html file. (Note that this currently needs to be on the permalink page. It won’t work correctly on the home page with a list of blog posts yet.)

{{ with .Params.audio }}
  <script type="text/javascript" src="https://micro.blog/narration.js?url={{ . }}"></script>
{{ end }}

If you’re using Micro.blog Premium, the audio narration will also be included in the podcast feed. Any blog can effectively be a podcast, even if you don’t think of it as a traditional podcast. Some of my favorite writers have had great success with a dual model of email newsletter plus podcast version of the same content, like Ben Thompson and Molly White.

I can’t wait to see how people use this. It’s totally optional. It’s more work, and not everyone is going to want to do that extra work. I’m imagining this would be used for selective, special blog posts, rather than everything. I’m also interested in working this functionality into our companion app Wavelength, which should cut down on the technical steps.

In some ways, this feature isn’t actually about what is possible. This feature is a statement: we make things for humans, so they can make the web a little better. Along the way there will be plenty to automate, plenty of AI tools that will be important shortcuts, but we’re not going to lose our voice.

There is a lot happening around generative AI. With the continued improvements from OpenAI, expected AI features from Apple coming up at WWDC, and new devices like the Rabbit R1, we’re all going to be swimming in AI this year. Some people feel (understandably!) like they’re drowning already.

I like writing blog posts by hand, but I think AI can be a powerful tool. Micro.blog Premium currently has two AI-related features:

• When you host your podcast on Micro.blog, we’ll automatically generate a transcript of each episode, which you can edit.
• When you bookmark web pages in Micro.blog, we’ll automatically generate a short summary of the web page, which you can show on the web under the “…” button → Show Summaries.

As we add more features that are powered by AI, we need a comprehensive way to tie them together, especially for anyone concerned about privacy. To be clear, there are no plans to use AI except on public data that is already on the web, like podcasts or photos. We aren’t going to suddenly start sending your private Micro.blog notes to OpenAI for processing. (And because they are end-to-end encrypted, we couldn’t anyway.)

This is all a long introduction to announce a new, simple setting to globally control whether AI is used for anything in your account. You can find it on the web under the Account link:

For existing users, this is turned off by default unless you have previously used one of the AI features mentioned above. For example, if you have a podcast that generated transcripts, the setting is on so that the feature will continue to work. For new users who join Micro.blog starting today, it’s turned on by default. I think it’s simple and clear, but obviously we’ll be listening to feedback.

I recommend toggling the checkbox on for your account if you are at all interested in the potential for AI around things like helping with photo alt tags, search, or categorization. No new features to announce today, though.

Lots of improvements in this release. Full release notes:

• Added new logs window to show current blog publishing status and other errors.
• Added keyboard navigation for the timeline. Up and down arrows to select posts, return key to view conversation, and command-R to reply.
• Added View menu → Go to @username command to show your profile.
• Added keyboard shortcut command-[ for back button.
• Added right-click option to delete selected upload.
• Added “…” button for selected books in a bookshelf, same options as right-click.
• Improved book cover caching.
• Improved icons and other little layout fixes.
• Fixed Markdown header color when writing a blog post.

Here’s a screenshot of the new logs window:

Perhaps the biggest change is finally some keyboard navigation for the timeline. Use the up and down arrow keys to select posts, the return key to view a conversation, and command-R to reply to a post.

Today we’re introducing a new feature: blog recommendations. This was inspired by recent interest in bringing back blogrolls, including posts from Dave Winer, his service FeedLand, the recommendations feature in Ghost, and feedback from Micro.blog users asking for new ways to discover people to follow. It’s a way to curate a list of favorite sites to link to from your blog.

Here’s a screenshot showing my current blogroll. I’m still adding people, but generally expect most blogrolls to be more limited than someone’s complete social following list.

To get started, click on Design → Edit Recommendations. By default, there is a single blogroll named “Recommendations”, but you can create additional blogrolls, for example to organize blogs in topics like “Favorite Authors” or “Technology”.

Your blogroll will be available in a few places within Micro.blog:

• Profile pages on the web will get a new “Recommended 5 blogs” link. This list can include any blog no matter where it’s hosted, and Micro.blog will attempt to link to the Micro.blog profile where possible for easy following.
• Hugo gets a new blogroll shortcode. You can use this to include your recommendations on a web page. It’s provided by a plug-in that will be automatically installed if needed.
• There’s also a plug-in for the Marfa and Alpine themes to show a blogroll in the sidebar on your home page. Check out my home page for an example. (Currently this is only visible for wide browser screens, not on mobile.)
• There’s data in Hugo for each blogroll, like .Site.Data.blogrolls.recommendations, with a name and url.

Like other features in Micro.blog, recommendations are built in an extensible way to give you control from Hugo themes, and with open file formats to connect with other platforms. Micro.blog manages updating OPML and JSON files. It also sends a webmention ping to the linked site when you add a recommendation, compatible with Ghost’s support for webmention.

I’ll be working on help pages with more examples for how this can be used. Happy blogging!

Today we’re launching a major new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers. Micro.blog notes are a new way to save content in Micro.blog when you don’t want to use a blog post or draft. Notes are private by default, end-to-end encrypted across all platforms, with a special companion app named Strata for iOS. (Android coming soon.)

Notes are great for:

• Jotting down ideas or brainstorming future blog posts. Notes use Markdown, so it’s easy to move the text into a blog post draft later.
• Sharing content with a smaller group of friends or family, without that content being linked on your blog. When a note is shared, it is given a unique, random-looking URL on your blog that you can send to others.
• Journaling within Micro.blog, so you can use the same platform whether you’re writing something just for yourself or sharing it with the world in a blog post.

From the launch of the platform, Micro.blog has been about public blog posts. We want to make the web a little better with thousands of new blogs, where the user owns their identity and content. Some people want private posts too, but we’ve delayed adding that because it doesn’t fit perfectly into the public web. With the wrong implementation, it would turn Micro.blog into more of a closed silo, with some features only available when you’re signed in.

Notes will be Micro.blog’s initial solution to private posts, a foundation we can build on. By default, notes really are private. They are encrypted and we can’t see them. But any note can be shared with others. When sharing a note, it’s decrypted and published to a corner of your blog, accessible only by direct URL.

This level of encryption adds a new wrinkle to how Micro.blog usually stores data. We’ve tried to keep it simple, but honestly it can be confusing, and we expect a few bumps along the road. We will continue to make it as seamless as possible. There are options to download a copy of the “secret key” used in Micro.blog, as well as saving a copy to iCloud. I recommend both.

In the future, notes will make their way into more Micro.blog features. For example, you can imagine attaching notes to bookmarks, web page highlights, or a book you’re reading. We are very excited about the potential for this in Micro.blog.

Here’s a screenshot from the web. Enjoy!

Rolling out bookmark improvements in Micro.blog Premium today. Two things:

• Micro.blog will now try to summarize the text of a web page that is bookmarked by sending it to our future robot overlords at OpenAI. This is hidden by default, but can be enabled by clicking Bookmarks → “…” → “Show Summaries” on the web.
• There is a new web browser extension to make bookmarking the current web page easier, initially available for Firefox and Chrome, with Safari to follow. You can find it by searching “Micro.blog” in the Firefox and Chrome extensions directories. After it’s installed, you can pin it to your toolbar.

The AI summaries are still experimental. I’ve found them useful to get a quick glance of something I want to read later. In the future, I hope we can use them to improve search too.

Here’s a screenshot of a bookmarked web page with the summary shown:

It’s going to be a busy week. We have another new feature set to launch this month, with a new app that I’m submitting to Apple today. Thanks for your support!

Today we’ve added a brand new option for manual cross-posting from Micro.blog to other services, including Threads. This new option is great for services that don’t yet have an open API, so Micro.blog can’t automatically post to them, or for when you want to edit and preview your posts before sending them elsewhere.

This feature is for blogs hosted on Micro.blog, so it’s available in the Posts page where you manage your blog posts:

This brings support for Threads for the first time. When choosing Threads, Micro.blog will reformat your blog post as plain text, truncate it if necessary, and copy the text over to Threads where you can finish sending the post. You will need to be signed into Threads in your web browser, or in the Threads app on mobile.

Twitter X is also now back in a more limited form with this new cross-posting option. We still can’t automatically post to Twitter X because of their API changes. There’s also the usual suspects like Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky.

This feature doesn’t work exactly like Micro.blog’s existing, automatic cross-posting, so be sure to check out the help page for the details. In future updates, I expect that the two different ways of cross-posting will look more similar.

Last month we teased that a major new feature is coming to Micro.blog soon. Whenever we add something new, folks ask if the new thing is the major feature… Nope, this cross-posting improvement isn’t it either! You’ll know when we ship it next month because it comes with its own section of Micro.blog, a new companion app for iOS and Android, and an update to the macOS app. Stay tuned.

Micro.blog can be thought of as a mashup of a Twitter-like social timeline and a WordPress-like blog posts admin interface. Some parts of the interface are designed for interacting with the community, some parts are designed for managing your blog, and some parts are kind of in limbo between both sides of the platform.

One example of this is on the Posts screen, where there hasn’t been a link from one of your blog posts to any of its replies. Today I added that:

I have mixed feelings about this interface. We try to avoid “counts of things” across the platform. There are no follower counts and no like counts. We want to discourage the popularity contest mentality that can come from comparing statistics across users.

In this case, these are just links to replies on your own view of your posts. If a post has no replies, there is no indicator. I decided to roll this out so we can live with it for a little while and see if we like it. I consider if somewhat experimental and based on feedback, we may change it to be less prominent, or deemphasize the count. It could also fade away if there are no new replies recently.

Still thinking about this, but wanted to share it now. We update the platform on a near-daily basis, usually small fixes and tweaks. Check out news.micro.blog for a log of recent changes.

This weekend I added limited support for following Bluesky users in Micro.blog. This isn’t federating with Bluesky yet. Instead, it uses a combination of Bluesky’s RSS feeds and the AT Protocol.

To follow a Bluesky user who has an account username in the form username.bsky.social, just search for the username in Micro.blog. It doesn’t work for custom domain usernames in Bluesky, because Micro.blog will think you want to follow the user’s blog instead.

Here’s a screenshot showing a search:

Note that Bluesky’s RSS feeds are brand new, and there are a few missing pieces. Photos in posts are not included and inline links may not work perfectly. Still, I expect Bluesky to improve this over time, and already it’s a useful way to follow many Bluesky users.

I’m planning to improve the Micro.blog side of this in the coming months, such as supporting replying back to Bluesky users. Bridgy can also take Bluesky replies to your blog posts and send them back to Micro.blog via Webmention. (I’ve updated the Alpine theme in Micro.blog to include the IndieWeb’s u-syndication microformat, so services like Bridgy can more easily map Bluesky posts with the canonical microblog post on Micro.blog.)

Happy holidays! 🎄

Sometimes people ask for link preview cards in the Micro.blog timeline. Maybe eventually we’ll add them, controlled with a preference. But so often they are in your face, cluttering the timeline, overshadowing perfectly good content. Here’s yesterday’s post on my blog, displayed as intended:

There’s a subtle link on the text “a brand” because I thought people might be curious about the shoes. But that wasn’t the point of the post. I almost didn’t include the link at all.

And now here’s how the same post looks on Mastodon:

What the…? Did I write a short post about serendipity, or did I post an ad for a shoe company?

(Now there is a secondary issue, especially on mobile, where inline links can be confusing or even abused with spam links. There are other ways to solve that.)

So much of social media feels like a show, where everyone is outraged or promoting their own content, the timeline itself just a collection of billboards along the highway, one after another getting your attention. I don’t want that experience. Not having ads is a strength we should lean into.

Today we’re rolling out some major improvements to domain name support in Micro.blog. We’ve had domain name registration for a while, but it was fairly limited. Now you can transfer domain names to Micro.blog hosting and let Micro.blog handle all the details. We also have a better management interface for adding custom DNS records.

Here’s a screenshot:

To register or transfer a domain name, in Micro.blog on the web click Account → Get a Domain Name.

There’s no requirement to use Micro.blog for domain names if you want to keep your domain name at another hosting provider. Some people like to keep domain name registration separate from their blog hosting. But if you’d like everything under your Micro.blog subscription, now it’s easier.

I posted a photo the night of the concert, purposefully picking something simple at the beginning in case people were planning to see the show and wanted to be surprised. Lately I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers for movies, books, and concerts as much as possible. Don’t tell me the setlist; I just want to experience it.

But let me share a little more about the concert. First of all, my bias is that I’m a U2 fan. I’ve seen them live several times. I bought tickets for Vegas a few months ago without a clear idea of who could go with me or how I would get there.

This is where you can stop reading if you are planning to go to the Sphere no matter what and don’t really need to hear my opinion or see more photos.

Over the last month, I concocted a plan to drive to Vegas, where my kids would fly in and meet me for the concert. Then I would continue on to California before heading back through Utah to see whatever I can see. I would work every day from the road. More about all of that later.

A lot could’ve gone wrong with all of this. Honestly, sitting in our seats at the Sphere, I reflected on how I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if none of this had panned out. Someone gets sick, can’t make it, or countless other problems.

The venue is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Photos don’t do it justice. Such a ginormous screen allows them to create scenes that are stunning. They can play tricks with movement that make it so immersive and new.

In a way, it’s an experiment, a spectacle. This is balanced by some quieter moments too, where the band plays without any fanciness on screen to distract you. I think this kind of show could continue to be tweaked as the producers better understand what works in the venue.

If you’re a fan of U2 or like visiting Las Vegas, I highly recommend it. I’ve grown to love and hate different parts of the city. For me, it’s best in moderation. Come for a couple days, have a great time, spend too much money, and then it’s time to get back to the real world. Roller coasters on the top of New York New York, a recreation of the Eiffel Tower, a pyramid… the Sphere is unique and amazing and fits in perfectly.

Even though we now share most code across iOS and Android, I wanted to keep the version numbers separate so that each platform can evolve as it needs to. Today we are bumping Micro.blog for Android to 2.0 because of a big addition: a system share action from other apps to Micro.blog.

Now when you’re in another Android app, you can start a new blog post or save a bookmark. Here are a few screenshots showing text selected in Chrome and then shared to Micro.blog to create a new post with the quoted text and URL.

Thanks as always to Vincent Ritter for developing this. Meanwhile I’ve also been tweaking things for iPad, so there will be another iOS release not too far off.

The last big upgrade for my Honda Element was to build a bed platform to use for car camping. I worked on this a little bit at a time over about a month. I was inspired by designs from other people, but ended up just sketching out something that I thought would work for me.

I wanted it to be exactly the size of a twin mattress. Also wanted enough space for storage underneath, but not so much that I would feel cramped with limited space from my head to the roof. I got a trifold, 4-inch mattress on Amazon. The platform itself would be in two sections, with one section folding down over the front seats when set up as a bed.

First building the basic structure:

Not pictured, later I ended up adding little metal braces everywhere for more support. Screws alone did not hold the legs in well. It was too wobbly and would even come disconnected. In hindsight, I might’ve been too worried about minimizing weight. I used pretty thin pieces of wood, mostly pine.

I sanded everything, stained it, and added hinges:

Testing it in the car, fully extended and folded up:

I plan to do another coat of polyurethane later. By the time I was ready to use it, I felt like it was really only about 90% done. You can also see some screws poking out from the hinges, which I covered up with several layers of tape after these photos were taken.

Here’s the final bed set up, plus a shot inside at night from camping at the Davis Mountains State Park:

Overall, very happy with my little micro camper. I learned a lot during the first trip and there are some obvious things to improve for next time. I’ve collected the posts in this series in a category on my blog here.

Another upgrade I made to my car is to add the weBoost Drive Reach Overland antenna on top. It essentially takes whatever cell signal it can find and rebroadcasts it inside your car. The antenna can rise several feet over the top of the car, picking up distant signals that the iPhone’s built-in antenna can’t reach.

I knew I needed something like this after my trip to Colorado earlier this year. I still needed to work but I was sometimes without any cell coverage. Starlink would be great but it’s a pricey $150/month. The weBoost is just a one-time cost without an ongoing subscription.

I attached it to my roof rails, keeping it rotated so it’s parallel with the roof and turned off most of the time. It’s easy to flip it up when needed at a campsite. The wires are a little all over the place right now. I’m considering drilling a hole in the roof but not ready to make that leap yet.

It works as advertised. I first tested it in the city where I had 2 bars. I turned it on and right away had 4 bars. Out in the Davis Mountains, I had 0-1 bars and with the weBoost that jumped to a reliable 2 bars.

Of course, it’s not magic. If you are too far away from a cell tower, there’s nothing it can do. But I’m amazed by it. It’s a game-changer when you’re just a little too out in the middle of nowhere.

Between trying to sell our house, moving to a new place, and keeping up with actual work, I’ve managed to squeeze in some time here and there to work on my car. I recently put new OEM cross bars on it and our old rooftop box. The Element’s roof has a really nice design that makes this easy, with bolt holes under a little plastic panel.

Here are some photos:

I’ve also finished building the bed platform that’ll go in the back to make the car a micro-camper. That’ll be the next blog post in this series.

We’ve updated Micro.blog for iOS to version 3.2.1 with some additional improvements. One change you’ll notice right away is that the formatting toolbar now has more traditional “b” for bold / “i” for italic buttons. In previous versions I thought that showing the Markdown syntax on the button titles would help educate people on how Micro.blog worked, but it just created more confusion. I like the simpler buttons.

For Micro.blog Premium subscribers, you’ll also see a new audio icon for attaching an MP3 (or any file) to a blog post.

Full release notes:

• Updated new post toolbar to use b, i, and link icons.
• Added audio attach icon to new post for Micro.blog Premium subscribers.
• Added new notifications pane when receiving new mentions.
• Added link to Indie Microblogging book and Markdown reference in help.
• Fixed remembering last selected blog when using multiple blogs.
• Fixed scrolling to allow more room for accessibility text on photos.
• Improved some minor layout and styles in other parts of the app.

Enjoy!

There are a bunch of things I want to add to my Honda Element to make it my own. I just finished the first upgrade: CarPlay. I didn’t really know what I was doing but somehow stumbled through it. It is a huge improvement compared to the 15-year-old factory radio.

Documentation online is a little inconsistent for this kind of upgrade. I wasn’t totally sure if the parts were correct until they arrived. In the end I used these:

• Sony XAVAX1000, 6.2-inch media receiver. Simple, clean design with an actual knob. I think it’s discontinued but Best Buy had one.
• Metra 70-7863, stereo wiring harness. With RCA cables that go to the Sony unit. Ordered the wrong kit at first, then found the right one at Custom Sounds in Austin instead of waiting for shipping.
• Metra 95-7863, plastic dash kit. I was honestly shocked when this arrived and it was the right shape. It was hard to tell from the online photos.

If you are reading this in the future to upgrade your own car, note that I have a 2008 Honda Element SC. I don’t know if these parts would work perfectly with earlier or later models, or the EX or LX trims.

First step, disconnect the negative on the battery. Finding the right socket wrench in our garage took nearly as long as anything else.

With a little plastic removal tool, I popped up the faceplate around the radio. After that it’s easy to unscrew the old unit and take it out.

I stripped the wires on the new Sony unit and connected them to the appropriate wires on the Metra wiring harness. I didn’t have any fancy wire connectors so just threaded them together, twisted them, and wrapped in electrical tape. I went very slowly and think it turned out fine.

Finally, all that was left was to install the unit. I screwed everything in and popped on the new plastic covering. Some of the original wires from the car weren’t used so they are just dangling hidden inside. Hopefully they weren’t too important!

I also fed the microphone wire down to the floor so it can attach on the dashboard or behind the steering wheel. Haven’t totally figured out the best place for it yet.

Very happy with this upgrade overall. I probably should’ve had a professional do it, but I learned a lot. My car feels like it belongs in this decade now.

Today we added Pixelfed cross-posting to Micro.blog. This joins our existing set of cross-posting services like Mastodon, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, and others.

Now you can post photos to your own blog, at your own domain name where you control your identity, and have Micro.blog send a copy elsewhere automatically. When posting, you can optionally select which services you want to include:

Because Micro.blog has built-in support for ActivityPub, your friends on Mastodon can also follow your blog directly without you needing to copy anything, or without you needing an account on any other platforms. There’s a lot of flexibility in how you want to configure this and which services you want to use. Some people even like to create a separate microblog just for photos.

As with all Micro.blog features, we’re looking forward to hearing how people use this. Photos are special, and there’s always more we want to do with them. We’ll continue to tweak the Pixelfed cross-posting based on feedback. Enjoy!

Similar to my announcement last month about supporting Bluesky, we’re adding Nostr cross-posting to Micro.blog starting today. You can enable it under Account → Edit Sources & Cross-posting:

Nostr might have the most uncertain future among recent up-and-coming social web protocols. I’m fascinated with the architecture because it’s so different than ActivityPub, RSS, and IndieWeb protocols. I think it’s interesting and worth tinkering with. I’ve been personally using it through Micro.blog for about a week, so why not let other folks play with it too?

Nostr is quite technical. If you don’t want to be on the edge, feel free to wait. It’s so early that using Nostr feels like testing a prototype, letting your blog posts loose into the wild west of the internet to float between Nostr “relay” servers.

To get started, you will need a Nostr account. Unlike every other social network, in Nostr you don’t actually register on a specific server. Your account is just a private key, which you will paste into Micro.blog. For iOS, I suggest using Damus or Nos. For the web, check out Coracle.

These apps and others will create your private key, name, and profile photo. Make sure to save your key in a password manager. If you lose it, you lose access to your account.

Micro.blog’s support for these emerging protocols is essentially one-way, pushing your blog posts out to people on other platforms. Later we will consider federation, where posts and replies from other platforms and brought into Micro.blog, like we already do for Mastodon and ActivityPub. I’d like to see how much traction there is before we do more.

Today we updated the web version of Micro.blog (and the Mac app) to provide better control over how new posts are routed to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn, etc. Just like showing blog categories, you can show checkboxes and uncheck which services you don’t want Micro.blog to cross-post to. This setting is remembered only for the current post and by default posts go out everywhere.

This is a fairly big change. I expect we’ll learn more as people actually use it. I wanted to get it out for the web and Mac first because we can ship those without waiting for approval from Apple and Google. Mobile versions will follow.

Some of the gotchas you might run across:

• This is designed for setting on new posts. There’s no interface for changing it when editing a draft post yet.
• Micro.blog will only show the cross-post services you have enabled in Account → Edit Feeds. If you have multiple feeds, things might be a little weird if there’s no obvious mapping between feeds and your blog.
• This is for blogs hosted on Micro.blog. If you are posting to an external blog like WordPress, there’s no mechanism to customize cross-posting other than the existing global options.

We’ve also expanded our support for the Micropub API to include syndicate-to fields. This is well-covered in the spec. The Mac app is open source and uses the same public API.

Another week, another round of ActivityPub-related improvements! Over the last few months we’ve been filling in little details for Mastodon compatibility in Micro.blog. Were at the point where Micro.blog is a good fediverse citizen and has everything most people should need.

Today I rolled out initial support for setting a Mastodon profile header image. This is a feature that Micro.blog doesn’t currently have for its own profiles. Should it? I’m not sure, but in the meantime I didn’t want it to hold back anyone who likes profile headers on Mastodon.

You can upload a profile header in Micro.blog under Account → View Mastodon Details. When Mastodon users follow your account, they will see the header on Mastodon. Here’s a screenshot of part of the settings screen:

Micro.blog also does a better job of notifying followers on other servers when a profile photo updates. Mastodon generally has a different philosophy for storing images than Micro.blog does. Micro.blog loads most images as needed when they are viewed and caches them for a certain length of time, whereas Mastodon waits for a server to tell it that a profile or post has updated and then copies any images to its own server.

We could take most major features in Micro.blog and keep fine-tuning them indefinitely. Mastodon support is no exception, but I think this is a good time to pause. Next week I’m excited to revisit some pieces of the core Micro.blog platform that don’t necessary have anything to do with the fediverse.

One of the last missing pieces for Mastodon compatibility was improving DMs, which I rolled out yesterday. We don’t have DMs as a core feature on Micro.blog because I think private messaging needs to be handled very carefully, and not every social network should have its own messaging system. iMessage and Signal are better for this.

DMs just going into the void isn’t good either, though. The compromise we’ve settled on is that when someone from Mastodon sends you a DM, Micro.blog forwards that message to you in email. The email now includes a link to a form for you to send a reply back to Mastodon:

There is no message history and messages are deleted automatically after 60 days.

Happy New Year! We shipped an update to Epilogue today that makes blogging about last year’s finished books more discoverable. If Micro.blog found any blog posts to include in your reading goal for 2022, it will show this at the top of the Goals tab:

Unfortunately I discovered after the calendar flipped over to 2023 that sometimes this button doesn’t show the right default new post text. I’m working on an update to fix that. (The button icon and spacing is also wonky.)

I’ve been going back and forth on how to expand the reading goals feature so that it can find more books. Currently it only works if you blogged about a book as you finished it. 2022 was a bit of an experiment, but 2023 is an opportunity for new habits. More blogging, less Goodreads.

We released a new version of Epilogue for both iOS and Android. I’m finally getting these platforms in sync. I think our bet on React Native is paying off.

This version adds a new post screen to your reading goals. As you blog about books you finished reading, Epilogue keeps track of them. At the end of the year, you can use the new post screen to compose a blog post with all the books you’ve read. Each book cover links to your blog post about the book.

You can see what my books post for 2022 looks like here.

This uses a new Micro.blog plug-in called Book reading goals. If you don’t have the plug-in installed yet, Micro.blog will automatically install it when publishing your blog if needed. (Epilogue works with any blog that supports the Micropub API, but this feature is only for Micro.blog because of the plug-in.)

Here’s a screenshot of the new screen on iOS. You can edit the text before posting.

With this feature, I’ve completed the transition away from Goodreads, and don’t plan on using it going forward. Good luck with your reading goals in 2023!

Micro.blog has always tried to put all the important URLs for your blog at your own domain name if you have one, including URLs for photos you post to your blog. I like this because it’s consistent with prioritizing content ownership, and makes migrating photos to another blog host easier in the future. We like clean, simple URLs.

Today we’re adding an option to enable serving photos from a content delivery network. This will update your photo URLs to use the CDN, while your home page and other blog pages will still use your own domain name. As your blog grows, especially with years of uploaded photos, this can really improve performance as people visit your blog from all over the world.

To enable the CDN, click on Design and look for the “ Use content delivery network for images” checkbox:

There is no extra charge for this feature, and it’s included in all plans. Happy photo-blogging!

Mastodon has a feature to move accounts from one instance to another instance. I spent some time recently exploring how this works so that we could support it in Micro.blog. I used this to consolidate my ActivityPub presence from multiple Mastodon accounts to just @manton@manton.org, powered by my blog and Micro.blog.

From what I can tell, this feature is not well-documented. It does not exist in the ActivityPub spec. The “Move” activity examples in the companion ActivityStreams spec also do not cover moving accounts. So I’ll document some of the technical bits here in the hope that it’ll be helpful to other folks.

To move accounts, 2 things are required:

• From the new instance, set up an “alias” that links your new and old accounts.
• From the old instance, initiate a migration to the new instance.

The Mastodon documentation says that aliases should be set up on both sides of the migration, but this does not seem to be required. In my testing, an alias is only needed on the new instance.

Because I wanted to move to Micro.blog, I added an alias in Micro.blog that references one of my old accounts: @manton@mastodon.social. You can find this in Micro.blog under Account → View Mastodon Details → Aliases.

Aliases are added to the ActivityPub profile information in the field alsoKnownAs. Here’s a snippet of my info:

{
  "preferredUsername": "manton",
  "name": "Manton Reece",
  "alsoKnownAs": [
    "https://mastodon.social/users/manton"
  ],
  …
}

For debugging, I often use curl on the command line to poke around at people’s accounts. To see my full ActivityPub JSON, use something like this with the “actor” URL returned from WebFinger:

curl -L -H "Accept: application/activity+json" https://manton.org/activitypub/manton

The next step is to sign into the old Mastodon instance and tell it to move to Micro.blog. Mastodon will take a few actions when this starts:

• It will verify that there’s an alias on Micro.blog, confirming that both accounts are yours.
• It will lock your Mastodon account, updating the profile to tell people about the new Mastodon instance. (In my case, actually powered by Micro.blog.)
• It will send a “Move” activity to all the instances for all your followers, telling them to update their references to point to your new username.

The “Move” activity is sent to each follower’s inbox just like other activities such as “Create”. It includes a field target for the new instance that the user is moving to:

{
  "actor": "https://mastodon.social/users/manton",
  "target": "https://manton.org/activitypub/manton",
  …
}

Mastodon won’t add alsoKnownAs to your ActivityPub profile on the old instance, but instead it will add a similar field named movedTo with the new actor URL:

{
  "preferredUsername": "manton",
  "name": "Manton Reece",
  "movedTo": "https://manton.org/activitypub/manton",
  …
}

Updating your followers can take quite a while. Likely hours and possibly over a day, if you have hundreds or thousands of followers. It makes sense that this is a very low priority background task. You can watch the progress as Mastodon essentially decrements your follower count on the old instance.

Here’s what Mastodon now looks like for my account, to tell people that I’ve moved:

This is a fairly new feature in Mastodon, and I expect we’ll need to keep refining our support for it as there is more real-world usage. If you’re using Micro.blog, also remember that Micro.blog is not Mastodon. You can follow and reply to anyone on Mastodon, but you can’t use Mastodon-only clients like the upcoming Ivory from Tapbots.

What about moving in the opposite direction, away from Micro.blog to Mastodon? We’ll be adding that later. ActivityPub is only currently enabled for new Micro.blog users, or if you’ve manually enabled it, so I want to wait until we’ve enabled it for all users. Otherwise there will be no way to move Micro.blog-only followers.

Last month I flew out to Portland and rented a van from Escape Campervans. The trip started because of meetings but it kept getting extended as I tacked on more places to visit. I posted some photos while I was on the road, which I’ll link again below, but I wanted to summarize a few thoughts now that the trip is over and I’m back in Austin.

It was a fantastic experience. I figured at the end of it, I’d either be completely burned out on the van lifestyle or ready to stay on the road. I’m glad to be home, but not burned out.

My daughter and son joined me for a few days at the beginning and end of the trip, too. It was great to share part of the experience with them and helped avoid loneliness while so long away.

Here are the main camping locations from the trip:

• Ainsworth State Park, Oregon. Literally the last night the camp was open before winter. Had the Multnomah Falls basically to myself because it was cold and rainy and kind of a miserable early morning outside.
• Fort Stevens State Park, Oregon. Loved exploring around Astoria. Planning to be back.
• Cape Lookout State Park, Oregon. Rained all night. Not good beach weather, but a good stop while heading down the coast.
• Umpqua Lighthouse State Park, Oregon. Still want to eventually visit all lighthouses on the west coast.
• Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California. Beautiful trees, so much to see in nearby parks. Driving through Avenue of the Giants was a highlight.
• Salt Point State Park, California. Beautiful rocky views of the ocean after the twisting turns of Highway 1.
• Courtyard at Fisherman’s Wharf, California. A hotel! Ditched the van in a parking lot for a day to explore the city. Felt luxurious.
• New Brighton Beach, California. Outside Santa Cruz, stayed here 3 nights. 10 minutes to nice coffee shops to catch up on work.
• Terminal 4, California. Interesting campground on the water, north of the Richmond Bridge. Abandoned buildings everywhere, felt like a post-apocalyptic drive to a view of San Francisco.
• Marriott at Union Square, California. Splurged on a hotel again for the final night. Saw Bono’s show at the Orpheum Theatre.

Stopped at many other parks, coffee shops, bookstores, and beaches along the way. I’m going to publish my check-in history later.

The timing wasn’t ideal because it felt like Twitter was imploding as I was on the road. There was a lot of new interest in Micro.blog. I worked a little every day, but some days not enough. Even so, having the flexibility to just pull over into a park and use my laptop on the table inside the van from anywhere was pretty great.

I can’t overstate how different it is to have a van to eat and work and sleep in compared to tent camping. It rained for a significant part of the trip, pretty much every day in Oregon, but it never ruined anything.

Feel very lucky to have been able to take this trip. I learned a lot of what to do and not do. Wasted some money on food I could never finish using. Spent a fortune on gas. Nervously navigated cities in a van larger than what I’m used to driving.

But the good days made it so worth it, and even with occasional extra stress of last-minute planning I felt that time slowed down… Awake with the sun, coffee and work, beautiful vistas, some driving, cooking dinner, popping open a can of wine, then reading and bed when it got dark. It was very freeing. I don’t think it was a midlife crisis, but I did feel a few years younger, reminding me of backpacking in Europe ages ago. After some months back at home, pretty sure I’ll be ready to get back out there.

Today we’re rolling out better support for attaching multiple photos to a post in Micro.blog on the web. The native apps have been able upload to multiple photos with a post for years, so it’s a little embarrassing that it has taken so long to get the web version updated too.

If you click on an attached photo, you will also see new options for removing the photo or setting a description for the photo, which is included in the HTML’s alt tag.

Attached photos are added at the end of a post. We think this streamlined approach to the UI is the best default for most people. If you want to mix the photos in between paragraphs of text, you can continue to use the “Copy HTML” button on the Uploads page and paste the img tag into your post. Our companion iOS app Sunlit also has more control over post layouts.

Note that these improvements do not change how photo posts are displayed in the Micro.blog timeline. Short posts with a single photo or a few photos are shown inline, and longer posts are truncated with a link back to your blog.

Enjoy! Happy photo-blogging.

Over the summer, Jon Hays and I started working on a new project to build a places database that can power location check-in apps. It’s based on OpenStreetMap, but focused just on places. We call it Meridian, and it has the amazing domain name latl.ong.

For years I’ve been using Foursquare to check into places like coffee shops, restaurants, and landmarks. I love having a record of places while traveling, and I’ve published many of them to a special blog. I just don’t like depending on a single company for this data.

Meridian is open source and separate from Micro.blog, but it will form the foundation for location check-in features in our apps like Sunlit and Micro.blog. You can see a little of what we have planned for Sunlit in these screenshots:

Why build something new like this? There seemed to be a missing platform for small location apps. Foursquare is increasingly interested in business customers. Google is full of ads. OpenStreetMap is a great start, but also has quite a learning curve. If all you want is nearby places, it’s too much work to bring along all the overhead of a full mapping API.

The architecture of Meridian will allow other platforms like Micro.blog to host their own copy of the data, feeding back into Meridian and OpenStreetMap. The goal is to design something as distributed as possible, where multiple people using different apps can add new places to grow the database, while still having an API that is simple to use. We’ll iterate on it slowly but there are already some pieces in place to start experimenting with. Should be fun!

Today we’re excited to announce an early preview of Micro.blog 3.0 for iOS. We are rebuilding the app to move closer to feature parity across iOS and Android. We’re updating the user interface based on years of feedback, adding a tab bar and cleaning up some screens in the app.

This is a major update, and it will take time to get right. The first 3.0 beta is missing several features from the current 2.3 release for iOS. Post editing, managing uploads, creating pages, external blog posting, and more will follow in later betas. There also is no special iPad split view yet. If you want to try 3.0, we’d love to hear what you think, but note that it may be months before the beta catches up with the current shipping iOS release.

You can join the new TestFlight beta here. You can’t have both versions installed at once. If you want to go back to the 2.3 release, just download it again from the App Store.

I take a lot of photos at coffee shops. For some reason this morning I thought it would be fun to create a page on my blog that just shows coffee photos. I already use Micro.blog filters so that whenever I include the ☕️ emoji in a microblog post, it assigns the Coffee category:

The next step was to create a template layouts/_default/coffee.html in my custom theme that would pull posts from this category. It grabs the latest 100 posts, then also checks if the post has a photo (“photos not equal nil”):

Finally, I created a template content/coffee-photos.md to tell Micro.blog to use that template when creating the web page:

Voilà! Looks pretty good.

We shipped version 2.5 of Micro.blog for macOS today. I had originally intended to just add a new Replies section of the app for this version, but it looked kind of lonely by itself, so I added Bookshelves too, with a multi-window interface for managing books you want to read or blog about. This uses our existing JSON Feed-based API for books data.

Here’s a screenshot of my bookshelves:

You can download the latest version from the help page or choose “Check for Updates” from within the app.

If you’re puzzled by why Micro.blog has all these book-related features… We have a lot of members of our community who love to read and write. If it’s easier to blog about books you’re reading, we can eventually build a distributed, web-scale alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads. This won’t happen overnight. It’s a years-long goal and just one of many facets of the IndieWeb that we’re interested in.

Books are also great for mental health and thoughtful commentary, broadening our understanding of other perspectives, which maybe the world could use right now.

Blogging and outlining share a long history together. Userland’s Clay Basket could create a full static site from an outline. NetNewsWire 1.0 had a built-in outliner for notes and blog publishing that would later be spun out as MarsEdit.

Recently there have been new outliners that work with Micro.blog. I blogged about publishing to Micro.blog via Dave Winer’s Drummer. Maurice Parker wrote about his Zavala outliner and integrating it with Micro.blog via Shortcuts.

Bike is a new Mac outliner from Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software. It has a clean interface that feels closer to a text editor than most outliners, and it can save as OPML and plain text. I’m also fascinated that the native .bike file format is just HTML.

I wired up publishing from Bike to Micro.blog with Maurice’s Humboldt that provides Shortcuts for Micro.blog. It looks like Bike has great AppleScript support. You can iterate over the rows in an outline, or you can just grab the contents as HTML like this:

tell application "Bike"
	set doc to front document
	export doc as bike format
end tell

Note that the export command requires a paid Bike license.

You can download my test shortcut here. It’s a little hacky. It strips out the HTML header/footer with a simple find-and-replace in Shortcuts. It will need a little more work if you want to clean up the outline and publish real blog posts with it.

Today we launched a design update for the Micro.blog web interface. Vincent has been working on this with a focus on the mobile interface especially, and it looks great on the iPad as well.

In the previous version, when viewing on mobile the sidebar would collapse and you’d get a hamburger menu that was clunky to use. Now, the most important menu items like Timeline, Mentions, and Discover will move to the header, with a new popover menu for accessing other features.

You can see the new layout even on desktop by just resizing your window smaller. Here’s what the header looks like on tablet and at small desktop window sizes:

And on the iPhone, with the new popup menu open:

We are very excited to roll this out. The iOS and Android apps will always be a great choice for posting or checking replies, but they can’t do everything the web version can do. The web version of Micro.blog is now much nicer to use everywhere.

Today we rolled out a few improvements to bookmarks, including an import from Instapaper and Pocket. This is meant to complement Micro.blog’s bookmark archiving, where Micro.blog archives a copy of a web page and allows making highlights in it. Like the archiving and highlights, the import feature is for Micro.blog Premium subscribers.

I’ve personally wanted to consolidate my bookmarks to Micro.blog, because I’ve had some things in Instapaper and some newer posts in Micro.blog. Micro.blog is not designed as a replacement for every feature in other read-later services, but instead a quick way to save links and either reference them later or start a new microblog post from a highlight.

To learn more about bookmark archiving and highlights, check out the video in this post on the news blog from when we announced Micro.blog 2.0.

I’ve also improved other aspects of bookmarks, like faster loading, paging through many hundreds or thousands of bookmarks, and better profile icons for domain names that are added to Micro.blog.

The goal in my experiments with React Native is to build an app that feels as native to iOS as possible. Early on I tried to use SF Symbols and couldn’t get it to work, so I dropped in some custom icons instead. But the more I used the new version of Epilogue on my iPhone, the more this compromise bugged me.

I briefly considered exporting the symbols I need as SVGs or PNGs and using them in the app only on iOS, but that’s against Apple’s license. Not worth even the small risk. Sticking to real SF Symbols also ensures the icons match other apps if Apple redesigns them slightly in future versions of iOS.

I revisited using SF Symbols today with the component birkir/react-native-sfsymbols. A default install shows a runtime error when attempting to load a symbol. Luckily there’s a work-around mentioned in one of the issues.

I copied this file from the repo and saved it as SFSymbols.tsx. Then instead of importing from the Node module, I just import that file:

import { SFSymbol } from "./SFSymbols";

It works! Here’s a quick screenshot of my navigation bar now:

I’m continuing to plow ahead with the Epilogue rewrite. I’ve added a storage class to wrap AsyncStorage, making it easier to persist various bits of data. I’ve added searching for books using the Google Books API, largely copying JavaScript code from the previous version. The fetch() calls are the same between web browser-based JavaScript and React Native.

Today I’m working on adding the posting screen. This shows a modal text view with some default blog post text for the current book, so you can quickly blog about what you’re reading:

Just like the navigation controller, the modal uses React Navigation so that it looks and feels the same as any native iOS app. In the JSX, we add a group containing the new modal screen declaration:

<NavigationContainer>
	<Stack.Navigator>
		<Stack.Group>
			...
		</Stack.Group>
		<Stack.Group screenOptions={{ presentation: "modal" }}>
			<Stack.Screen name="Post" component={PostScreen} />
		</Stack.Group>
	</Stack.Navigator>
</NavigationContainer>

For this version, I’m using a simple multi-line TextInput class. This appears to use a real UITextView under-the-hood.

One thing I’d like to experiment with later is integrating the Markdown syntax highlighting Objective-C code from the current Micro.blog app, making it a component that we could use in multiple apps. It obviously wouldn’t work on Android, but we’ll need something like it when we’re ready to switch the official Micro.blog iOS app over to React Native.

Even though Epilogue 1.0 was simple, it did support Dark Mode on iOS. I always run my phone in Dark Mode, so I didn’t want to lose that when rewriting Epilogue in React Native.

There are a handful of helper utilities to access iOS-only features in React Native, like Platform.isPad . There’s also useColorScheme, which can be used to check if we’re running in Dark Mode:

const is_dark = (useColorScheme() == "dark");

There doesn’t appear to be built-in support in React Native to use different sets of styles automatically. There are, however, at least a few third-party libraries to make this easier, including various dynamic stylesheets and React Navigation’s themes. I started to go down that rabbit hole, then stopped… There’s a lot to learn and I’d rather adopt a quick “worse is better” approach to first get a feel for how painful it is to style my views manually.

I have a Styles.js source file that looks like this, controlling layout and colors for UI elements in Epilogue:

import { StyleSheet } from "react-native";

export default StyleSheet.create({
  bookTitle: {
    marginTop: 8,
    paddingLeft: 7
  },
  bookAuthor: {
    paddingTop: 4,
    paddingLeft: 7,
    color: "#777777"
  },
  ...
}

To use this style in JSX, I have something like this:

<Text style={styles.bookAuthor}>Neil Gaiman</Text>

To support Dark Mode, I’ve added a special “dark” field to the styles object. This will only have style properties that I want to override from the default light mode. In the case of bookAuthor, there’s no need to change the padding, just the text color:

bookAuthor: {
  paddingTop: 4,
  paddingLeft: 7,
  color: "#777777"
},
dark: {
  bookAuthor: {
    color: "#FFFFFF"
  }
}

Back to the JSX, I check my is_dark variable and then reference a different set of styles. JSX lets me pass an array of styles, so we’ll include both the light mode version (styles.bookAuthor) and then the dark value (styles.dark.bookAuthor) that will override the color:

<Text style={is_dark ? [ styles.bookAuthor, styles.dark.bookAuthor ] : styles.bookAuthor}>Neil Gaiman</Text>

Here are a couple screenshots showing each mode side by side:

The JSX code is admittedly a little clunky. I can see how it could be cleaned up and more readable with other solutions. But the app only has a few screens, so I’m going to run with this for now.

Micro.blog 2.3 is now available in the App Store, including these changes:

• Added syntax highlighting for HTML when creating or editing posts.
• Fixed compatibility with some Micropub servers.

We’ve supported color highlighting in Markdown for a while, and now this release adds HTML too. I’ve found this most helpful when editing a blog post that includes images, where the img tag was probably added by Micro.blog:

I also fixed a bug with Micropub servers, no longer requiring the me parameter from some IndieAuth API calls. There has been some related housekeeping of the IndieAuth spec recently, and I want to make sure Micro.blog can post to as many non-Micro.blog servers as possible.

Today we’re releasing the first public beta of Micro.blog for Android. You can download it here on Google Play.

Vincent Ritter led the development on this and there’s a ton in it for a first beta. Some of the features in this initial version:

• Timeline, Mentions, Bookmarks, and Discover.
• Creating new posts and replying.
• Uploading photos.
• Viewing conversations.
• Emoji picker in Discover.
• Multiple blogs and multiple Micro.blog accounts.
• Choose categories when posting.
• Viewing profiles and following new users.

We have a few more things to wrap up before we officially call it 1.0. For example, push notifications will make the final release but they aren’t in this beta. There will be bug fixes, UI tweaks, and other improvements based on feedback.

Enjoy! Let us know what you think.

Today we released an update to the Mac app that adds a preview window. This is handy for longer posts with lots of Markdown or HTML, so you can check what they will look like when published.

I decided to make this a floating window that previews whatever post window happens to be open. You can move it off to the side of your screen and then quickly show or hide it with the keyboard shortcut whenever you need it.

Full changes:

• Added View menu → Preview when writing a blog post. The preview floats over other windows and will show you what the current Markdown or HTML will look like.
• Fixed posts list not updating when saving a new draft.
• Fixed post button for drafts to show that the draft will be published. Use File → Save to keep saving as a draft on Micro.blog.

As always, the download link is on the help site, or choose “Check for Updates” if you’re already running an older version.

A few weeks ago, something in a discussion prompted me to look up the site 43 Things, which I used in 2005 to keep track of big things I wanted to do. The site is long gone, but a lot of it is preserved in the Internet Archive. I took a screenshot of the 10 things I had on my list back then:

The site was peak Web 2.0. Part personal to-do list, part community, part API. Something about the design was fun to use.

Now that it has been 15+ years, I thought I’d revisit my list and see how I’m doing now, with some context from 2005:

1. Finish my degree — I spent a year at UT Austin, but I was more interesting in working at tech companies than attending school. Later I went back to take classes at night. I always thought I’d eventually get my college degree. Seems unlikely at this point.
2. Animate a short film — Might be something I’ll get back to one day. A couple years ago I dug up some drawings and posted them to my blog.
3. Run a half marathon — Still haven’t done this. I’ve run a couple 5Ks.
4. Watch a space shuttle launch — Sadly the space shuttle is gone. There are more rockets than ever, though, so this seems doable.
5. Write a book — I consider this done.
6. Drive across the USA — I’ve driven from Texas to the west coast and to the east coast. Never all the way across. Can’t see this one happening unless I actually live on one of the coasts.
7. Learn Ruby — Done.
8. Work on a political campaign — I’ve volunteered for a few campaigns to call voters and knock on doors. Seems good enough.
9. Read 50 books in 2005 — I’m sure I didn’t ready that many books in 2005, but I could still do this for another year. Last year I read 33 books and this year my goal is 40.
10. Live to see Halley’s Comet return in 2061 — The most difficult thing on this list. I would be 86.

Daniel and I also discussed this list on Core Intuition 402 from 2020.

There has been a lot of activity around Micro.blog plug-ins lately, inspiring me to improve the theme and plug-in system. Under the hood Micro.blog uses Hugo to process blog templates, and we’ve been running an ancient version of Hugo. Having such an old version has held back some plug-in features, so today I started the process of migrating to the latest version of Hugo.

It’s a big jump, from version 0.54 released in 2019, to 0.91 released just a couple weeks ago. Some things are likely to break, so instead of updating everyone’s blog automatically and dealing with the fallout, we’re going to take it slow. The new version of Hugo is opt-in for now, under the Design screen:

Each blog on your account can use a different version, making it convenient to run Hugo 0.91 with a test blog while keeping your main blog as-is.

I don’t recommend updating unless you are working on a theme or plug-in that needs a specific feature from newer versions of Hugo. I’m testing all the built-in themes with the new Hugo and will keep updating them with tweaks until we’re happy that everything is running smoothly.

If you do try Hugo 0.91, I’ve already updated the Default and Marfa plug-ins — as well as some built-in Micro.blog templates — to work with the new version. You can install the latest versions of the plug-ins for those themes to get the latest versions, instead of waiting for Micro.blog to update.

The most common problem I noticed was using .Data.Pages. That’s a quick fix to use .Site.Pages instead so that it’s compatible with both versions.

I’ve also fixed some HTML escaping issues this week. Micro.blog is now smarter about not escaping special characters like “<” and “{{” when inside a code block.