Great post from @brentsimmons, After Twitter:
The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.
2022-11-14
I got the test printing of my book. Now I can think about final edits. Too long, still should probably cut some things.
Excited to jump into reading The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson, released today. Had a dream the other night where I met Brandon and he critiqued my book collection. 📚
2022-11-15
Interesting post by @simon@simonwillison.net that Mastodon is just blogs. Except Mastodon's design runs counter to blog features like domain names and custom designs. I'd say Mastodon is more Twitter-like than blog-like... Which is fine, but not the same as a blog-first platform.
2022-11-15
Halfway through November, this month's Micro.blog challenge continues... Sad to admit that while traveling I dropped off from this one. Not too late to participate or follow along, though! Check out @challenges.
2022-11-15
New 3.0 beta for iOS is out on TestFlight.
2022-11-15
2 weeks on the road
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.
2022-11-15
Rewatching last night's Artemis launch. Amazing. Nice that they have a blog too (via @512px). 🚀
2022-11-16
Epic vs. Apple continues! Good write-up over at Ars Technica, with quotes from lawyers in the appeal.
2022-11-16
Cold weather in Austin. Leftover gumbo. 👍
2022-11-16
I had my doubts about a no-replies timeline, but based on feedback we added a new setting for it under Account. It's the kind of thing you have to try to know if it works for you. Harder to find new people and conversations, but good if you temporarily need a quiet timeline.
2022-11-17
Apologies for some of the recent "503" errors in Micro.blog. We've made some configuration tweaks today that should reduce or eliminate the problem.
2022-11-17
Reminded today that Brittney Griner has been held in Russia for 9 months and has apparently now been moved to a penal colony. Ridiculous. I know there's a lot of injustice in the world but this is not complicated... She needs to come home. 🏀
2022-11-17
We posted a new episode of Core Intuition today with yet more discussion of Twitter and related topics. My audio quality is still not great, clearly now an issue with my Mac settings rather than my mic. Will do more testing and fix for next week!
2022-11-17
Last month we improved the ActivityPub support in Micro.blog and enabled it by default for new users. I think it's about time to enable it for older users too, making it more opt-out than opt-in. Early notice that I'm thinking about flipping that switch next week.
2022-11-18
Slowly settling into a new routine back in Austin. Walking up to Lamppost Coffee every morning. In suburbia, no one walks anywhere unless they are walking their dog or exercising. Always feels a little weird. I love the quiet, but sometimes miss... people. ☕️
2022-11-18
Whichever the outcome, the world wins. If Musk manages to fix Twitter, we're left with a better Twitter. Great! If Musk manages to burn down Twitter, we're left with a world free of Twitter. Great!
2022-11-18
As traffic increases, we're experimenting with more caching outside of Micro.blog. Nice to see the huge difference it makes on the Bookshelves page if you have lots of book covers. Much faster.
2022-11-18
Merrick Garland seems really good at his job. If he says trust Jack Smith to make the call about whether to charge Trump, I'm good with that. 🇺🇸
2022-11-18
Continuing to fix bugs and tweak servers. If you want the technical summary: those "503" errors were when the load balancer decided an app server was error-ing, but it could sometimes take out all the app servers, even if they were fine. Lots of new traffic from Mastodon users.
2022-11-18
Much of our web traffic is now Mastodon requests as posts are shuttled back and forth from Micro.blog and the rest of the web. This has taken a little bit of adjustment. Knock on wood, should be pretty stable right now. 🐘
2022-11-19
An appropriately cold day in Austin. Coffee and server troubleshooting while the rain falls outside. ☕️
On our M.b news blog you can see the daily server tweaks as we deal with new load this week. Might have a handle on it now.
2022-11-19
I thought Elon would wait a couple more weeks — until things got boring at Twitter — before letting Trump back. @danielpunkass and I talked about this a couple days ago on @coreint. This weekend has been busy... Remaining Twitter server folks must have their hands full too!
2022-11-20
Registered for a new test account on Micro.blog to remind myself what the onboarding flow is like. It's not great. "Welcome to M.b, here's a totally blank page! Good luck!" Going to tweak a few little things so new users aren't lost.
2022-11-20
We're embarrassed with the recent Micro.blog server status. I rolled out more improvements today. We'll get it fast again. New server coming online later this week too.
2022-11-20
Love the owl who moved into a tree in our backyard. @traci set up a tripod and moved the Nest camera, so expect more owl photos and maybe video if we can catch him in his evening routine.
Love this post from @jean about everything bagels and... social media! 🙂
To be fair, everything makes me think about social media at this unsettling and exciting moment.
It's a rare opportunity. Inspired by what worked before, avoiding the missteps. I like our foundation.
2022-11-20
Spirited was way better than I expected. Need to watch it again closer to Christmas and see how it holds up. 🎄
2022-11-21
