In the latest Gluon beta you can customize your profile photo with a color or emoji. Essentially layers another API on top of the official Micro.blog API. Reminds me a little of how Tweet Marker supplemented the Twitter API. (RIP, Twitter API.)
2023-01-17
Need a break from the news. Nice to see The New York Times now allows quick online cancels, no longer need to chat or call anyone. Progress.
2023-01-17
Wish I could permanently hide the 👎 button on YouTube. I'm always worried I'm going to accidentally click it. I never, ever want to downvote something. If I don't like a video, I'll watch something else.
2023-01-17
More brief thoughts on the end of Twitter apps
I was re-reading Craig Hockenberry's post on the third-party Twitter apps shutdown. It's a great post, channeling the frustration of so many developers and users. And I love that it's on his blog, not as a tweet or toot. Ideas and writing sometimes need space to breath on the web.
Everyone had a different last straw with Twitter. It helped to have a villain in Elon Musk who could be blamed for every bad decision in the growing narrative of Twitter acquisition chaos.
But one problem with pinning everything on Elon is that it leaves open the possibility that maybe Twitter would be fine if the company was led by a different CEO who continued the Twitter API status quo. I don't think so. Twitter wasn't going to last forever because massive ad-based silos will always be at odds with the open web. Twitter's recent implosion greatly accelerated what would need to happen regardless.
Today we got Twitter's first public statement that the apps shutdown was about API rules. Remember back in 2012 they announced that apps could not have more than 100k users, even if popular apps at the time were exempted. There were other restrictions too, largely ignored. Third-party Twitter apps were living on borrowed time, strung along with false hope every few years as Twitter's leadership drifted back and forth on whether to encourage developers or cut them off.
Craig also highlights open standards like ActivityPub in his blog post, and how the future shouldn't be Mastodon-only:
Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed.
The sudden migration to Mastodon is going to make Mastodon look a lot like Twitter in the coming months. Don't get me wrong: the migration is a great thing. Smaller social networks is one of the four parts I blogged about in 2018 for how to get out of the social network mess. But we need new apps and ideas too, to not recreate some of the same problems again.
2023-01-17
As I posted this morning to the news blog, I'm going to upgrade one of our servers in about an hour. We have redundancy for most things to avoid downtime, but this is a tricky one. Won't affect hosted blogs. Hopefully will be quick. 🤞
2023-01-18
I believe the dopamine hit from posting to Twitter’s large audience is addictive and very difficult to put down. […] Fortunately, I do not care about my audience size.
My best posts are written for myself first. Gotta be okay with sometimes posting into a void.
2023-01-18
Finished reading: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu. A mix of historical fiction and fantasy. Took me a while to get into it, but enjoyed it more as it progressed. 📚
2023-01-18
Managed to mess up links on my blog while changing something else. Some RSS and ActivityPub posts might be wrong while I sort it out.
2023-01-19
A couple shows we finished watching recently... Wednesday: really enjoyed the first season of this. Fantastic lead character and just the right spookiness. Kaleidoscope: seemed gimmicky at first but I love heists. The format actually worked well. 📺
2023-01-19
Some folks have noticed that we've rolled out a totally new Micro.blog home page (if you're not signed in already). Huge thanks to @vincent and @jean for making this happen. Just the start of how we want to better highlight Micro.blog's capabilities this year.
2023-01-19
In addition to the new home page, over the coming weeks we'll be sponsoring podcasts and web sites to help get the word out about Micro.blog. The first show went live yesterday: The Pen Addict episode 547. Thanks @brad for the kind words!
2023-01-19
Started listening to River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay today while on the road. Love his writing. Also have the print version which I may switch to later. 📚
2023-01-20
Watched Emily the Criminal last night, and then Aubrey Plaza host SNL. She was great in both. 📺
2023-01-22
Posted a new episode of Core Intuition. We talk all about Twitter. The end of third-party apps, differences between when Manton quit Twitter compared to now, could Twitter be saved, open protocols, and more.
2023-01-22
