Finished reading: The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang. Loved Babel so wanted to read this series too. Strong first book. 📚
2023-01-24
Still a little experimental, but I added a new plug-in for Micro.blog based on the theme in Bear Blog. Nice lightweight design that looks good and should be pretty easy to customize.
2023-01-24
Rainy day in Austin. Walked up to the coffee shop anyway, trying to time my walk to when Apple Weather predicted a pause in the rain. Still can't find any of our umbrellas. 🌧️
2023-01-24
I'm going to start the process of enabling ActivityPub support for older Micro.blog accounts this week, likely tomorrow. You'll be able to disable it if you don't want it. But in the long run it'll help bridge conversations across the networks.
2023-01-24
Ivory and Micro.blog, not yet
This is going to be the most frequent of frequently asked questions. If Micro.blog supports the fediverse, why doesn't the new Tapbots app Ivory work with Micro.blog?
ActivityPub is a mostly server-to-server API that both Micro.blog and Mastodon support. This allows people on Mastodon to follow people on Micro.blog. When you post to your blog, the post is sent out to Mastodon folks, and they can reply and join conversations on Micro.blog all from within Mastodon. Likewise, on Micro.blog you can follow Mastodon accounts and reply to posts without needing an actual Mastodon account yourself.
For client apps like Ivory, Mastodon has its own API. It's a completely different thing than ActivityPub, closer to the Twitter API. It's not an open standard and Micro.blog does not support it.
Could Micro.blog implement the Mastodon API, thereby allowing Ivory to connect to Micro.blog as if it was a Mastodon server? Technically yes, but doing so would introduce a couple problems. By design, Micro.blog does not have exactly the same features as Mastodon. We left out boosts, trends, and follower counts, and added other things that are outside the scope of Mastodon.
If Micro.blog worked with Ivory, what would the UI look like when the features didn't exactly match up? It would be confusing. Ivory would appear broken and it would disrupt the experience we're going for with Micro.blog's community.
As Mastodon becomes more popular, it's important that Micro.blog stays true to its blogging roots and unique take on social media, rather than shifting to be a Twitter or Mastodon clone. We don't need a monoculture with all apps looking exactly the same.
Micro.blog already supports multiple APIs for posting from client apps, including Micropub (which most IndieWeb apps use) and XML-RPC (which MarsEdit uses). I'm happy to add additional posting APIs like Mastodon's, but only when we can make it fit well.
There are some obvious next steps.
I'd like to experiment with extending Mastodon's /api/v2/instance endpoint to return Micro.blog-specific feature info. That way, clients like Ivory could in theory adapt their UI to fit the server capabilities. For example, if there are no boosts, hide the boost button. There is already precedence for this with Mastodon's character limit and other common settings.
I'm also keeping an eye on Ice Cubes, which is open source. This app seems like a great playground to try out new features that work with Micro.blog. When those changes are prototyped, it will be easier to pitch Tapbots and other developers on supporting them.
It's still early days in the post-Twitter world. I'm excited about what we have planned for this year. We'll keep improving our compatibility with Mastodon and see what comes of it.
2023-01-24
This is a great story from KUT on what happened with the Zilker Park train. Should've just fixed the track instead of starting over. Every experienced programmer knows this... Don't rebuild everything all at once.
2023-01-25
Good morning! Slightly busy schedule today. New day, new possibilities.
Last year I blogged about our roadmap to get a little distance from Apple in mobile development. The next major version of Micro.blog for iOS is coming along well, based on React Native. This week we open sourced the app! Feels good to get the source out there.
2023-01-26
Mastodon DMs on Micro.blog
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.
2023-01-27
A little morning work and coffee at Lazarus. ☕️
This is a really important point from Alan Jacobs:
Mastodon has certain virtues, at least for some, but let’s not attribute to it powers it does not have.
Federation is a step forward, but it does not solve everything. I think my post from 4 years ago holds up here.
2023-01-28
For puzzled Mastodon users reading my posts, I keep forgetting about Mastodon ignoring blockquote tags. Need to update Micro.blog's cross-posting and ActivityPub to automatically change the output to use regular quotes.
2023-01-28
New episode of Core Intuition went up last night. Daniel reviews the redesigned Micro.blog home page. We talk about being a tiny company, open source licenses, and more.
2023-01-28
When we started using @news more, I was worried about adding noise to people's timeline, so I customized the feeds to only include "big" changes. That ended up being confusing. I've reverted it now so that the news.micro.blog home page, feeds, and timeline include all posts.
2023-01-29
January is almost over. Micro.blog has been much more stable after the few glitches we had in November as Mastodon was blowing up. We've had ActivityPub support since 2018, but only needed to learn how to actually scale it recently. Progress.
Finished reading: River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay. I’m sort of left without the right words, dumbfounded after finishing this. Really good. 📚
2023-01-29
