Trains and clouds, in Louisiana.
This is not what you'd expect to hear from a Meta executive, but it's exactly right:
…you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.
I-10 over the Sabine River.
Setting up Threads. No surprise that getting started based on Instagram identities is super easy, even though I stopped posting to Instagram years ago. Smart move by Meta. (Doesn’t mean I like Facebook. Just exploring.)
Meta’s Threads will obviously have ads later. Until now it hasn’t been clear what business model Bluesky is going for and whether it aligns with most users’ interests. Great to see their first paid service is domain name registration.
Really enjoyed the new Indiana Jones. Easily the third favorite after Raiders and Last Crusade. 🍿
Manually cross-posting to Threads to play with it and learn. As soon as it federates I’ll stop posting and people can just follow my Micro.blog-based blog directly.
I've been saying for a while that the fediverse will likely evolve to having maybe 10 medium-sized platforms, not 1000+ small servers. It won't be a failure if Threads is one of those. It's still much better than a single platform with a billion users.
Nice instructions from @Mtt on how to use Micro.blog to verify your Bluesky or Nostr domain. Hopefully we can make this a plug-in or setting later.
Blaine Cook on Threads bootstrapping from Instagram. I've seen a couple variations of this from other folks too:
Threads is blowing up because Facebook is using their monopoly on the social graph. Legislation to guarantee easy, fast access to your own contact lists for use in non-billionaire-owned media would help level the playing field, because Zuck & co sure aren't going to give the connections they stole back to us otherwise.
Ignoring fairness, it would've been more interesting if Threads had started from scratch, even just as a comparison with e.g. Mastodon stats.
Posted this week's episode of Core Intuition. Random topics like the potential Elon vs. Mark fight and then a first-look at macOS Sonoma's support for saving web apps.
Adam Mosseri on why ActivityPub
I've been blogging short posts this week about Meta's launch of Threads, but I think it's worth a slightly longer post with a quote from this interview with the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, on the Hard Fork podcast. Adam has a couple answers to why ActivityPub. The part that is most revealing to me is that he sees the industry going this way already:
I do think that decentralization — but more specifically or more broadly — more open systems are where the industry is getting pulled and is going to go over time. And for us, a new app offers us an opportunity to meaningful participate in that space, in the way that it would be very difficult to port an incredibly large app like Instagram over, and so to lean into where the industry is going.
This didn't happen by accident. Many developers have been working to bring awareness to the problems of massive, centralize platforms — and bloggers and journalists have been doing the same — so much that users increasingly understand the value of decentralization and content ownership. Not everyone has jumped into Mastodon for various reasons, and not all smaller platforms have taken off, but it still helps get to where we are today that one of the most closed platforms ever (Facebook) is on the verge of rolling out support for an open protocol.
Eugen Rochko also blogged about this as an important milestone:
The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
What's next? Imagine if later this year or early next year, Tumblr is able to follow through on their goal to support ActivityPub. Having such large platforms be even halfway interoperability was only a dream a year ago.
One of the things I'm most proud of with my blog is how consistent I've been about the problems with social media. It felt a bit tilting at windmills to quit Twitter in 2012. No love for Facebook, either! But now we have a framework for solutions and can judge these big companies beyond gut feeling.
Finished reading: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers. A great second book. Hope there are more of these. 📚
Watching CNN this morning over breakfast, they said "fediverse"... So yeah, decentralization is edging into the mainstream. Progress.
There's some great stuff in this comic. This rings true:
One of the most fun things about Twitter is complaining about being on it all the time because I am wildly addicted to it and how miserable it makes me. I hated it until Elon came and ruined it now I want old Twitter back again so I can hate how it was before again.
🤣
My posting workflow this morning: I post to my blog from my Mac, it goes out via ActivityPub, RSS of course, and Micro.blog sends it to Bluesky and Nostr. Then I go to my iPhone and… copy/paste it into Threads! iPhone-only may have been alright for Instagram, but it's not gonna fly here for long.
Ben Werdmuller blogs some second thoughts about Threads:
But there’s a bad taste in my mouth that isn’t going away, that has its roots in the genocide that Meta enabled through its actions and inactions, and the political polarization in the United States that it was undoubtedly a part of, and in Cambridge Analytica…
Good post. We haven't forgotten about this or any of the other problems with massive ad-based platforms. I think it's okay to hope that Threads is a step forward for open networks and want Facebook to fail to control social media again.
"I can’t wait to wear that Spurs jersey for a first time." — Victor Wembanyama, ready for NBA Summer League in Vegas tonight 🏀
Finished reading: The Magician's Daughter by H. G. Parry. 📚
Fighting with our Nest thermostat all week. It wants to save energy and I want to not die of heatstroke in my own house. ☀️
Time to get serious about finding the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey.
With Threads hitting 80 million users already, a lot of folks are dismissing Bluesky. But maybe it's more important than ever for Bluesky to succeed. Or pivot slightly and implement enough of ActivityPub to co-exist? Micro.blog already cross-posts to Bluesky and I haven't ruled out full federation.
Evolving thoughts on web scraping. First, I figured anything goes. Later, I was hesitant to depend on any web site structure that would break, and I wouldn't work around attempts to stop scraping. Now, I'm back to thinking if you don't want people to see something, don't put it on the public web.
Working on some more flexibility this morning to give people options for blocking Threads and other instances. Mixing lots of account types in one system is increasingly complicated: Micro.blog usernames, Mastodon handles, IndieWeb domains, newsletter email addresses… Spaghetti code.
I thought it would be a fun weekend project to port a simple WordPress.com theme to Micro.blog. What a mess! Lots of different CSS files that look like they were generated by machines, not humans. It's drifted too far from the "view source" web.
Love what we saw from Victor Wimbanyama over the weekend. I missed some of the 4th quarter from yesterday's game, so rewatching the highlights. Go Spurs Go. Next season is going to be fun. 🏀
