Not trying to overhype this but I'm so excited about what we're going to launch in Micro.blog next month. It's coming along really well and expanding beyond what I first thought it would look like. Meanwhile the everyday stuff continues too, working on fixes and servers this week.
We've gotten some good feedback about the latest Core Intuition, so this is a rare "in case you missed it" post... Episode 579 is a good place to start if you want to pick up the podcast. AI, Beeper, and related fallout.
Increasingly thinking that we're too worried about AI hallucination. AI is never going to be perfect, and humans aren't either! We should focus on using AI in the right context. Running without supervision is the problem. If a 5-year-old kid shouldn't be in charge of something, AI shouldn't either.
Beeper Mini is (partially) back. From their blog:
Make no mistake, the changes Apple made on Friday were designed to protect the lock-in effect of iMessage. The end result is that iPhone customers have less security and privacy than before.
I'm all for openness and interoperability, of course, but using a company's private API in a way that competes with that business is not okay. Even so, I'm kind of rooting for Beeper to shake things up.
Trying Apple’s new Journal app for the first time after upgrading my phone to iOS 17.2. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s for me. Day One is a better fit. Just text notes without anything clever.
Epic gets a win against Google. Everyone is trying to make sense of the differences between Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. To me, it's fitting that the outcome is different not just because the facts are different but also because the app stores are fundamentally subjective and randomly unfair.
When we added bookmarks to Micro.blog, I used 🐘 to make sure emoji worked. Now I've stuck with using that as a tag for Mastodon-related bookmarks.
Thinking about renaming Micro.blog to the letter M. The subtitle will be "the everything app". Blogs, pages, photos, bookshelves, social network, bookmarks, highlights, podcasts, link archiving, email newsletters… and maybe banking features early next year. Anyone else doing something like that? 🤪
Walking down our street yesterday, I was thinking about how only one person for at least several blocks gets the newspaper delivered. We all get different news in our own bubbles. I love the web and the freedom of publishing, but we have lost something to no longer have a shared set of facts.
Because the Mac app for Micro.blog is open source and we're holding off announcing some new stuff until next month, I can't just push in-progress changes to GitHub. Kind of makes me nervous having this code only on my Mac. (I do have backups but just daily.)
Working on encryption and understanding the best initialization vector lengths and then all of a sudden I'm down the cryptography rabbit hole, reading about the birthday paradox. Might be time to call it a night.
The day has finally come... I've added Swift to the Micro.blog for Mac project. Yes, I know it's 2023, almost 2024. After tinkering with Apple's Security framework and Common Crypto, decided CryptoKit was the way to go and it's Swift-only.
Mark Zuckerberg posted to Threads about starting ActivityPub testing, but it's not clear what the scope of the test is. Doesn't appear to be available to outside platforms yet. Still, a big deal just announcing it.
After posting about not wanting to push unannounced features to a public repo, I got suggestions to create a private repo. I did eventually do that. I think my gut instinct is for simplification... Fewer dependencies and duplication to keep track of.
The slow rollout of ActivityPub in Threads continues, but it doesn't appear to be accessible from Micro.blog yet. Hopefully soon. What I wrote in June is holding up well. This is an important step forward for open protocols.
From a post-trial interview with Tim Sweeney, he reiterates why settlement talks with Google didn't go anywhere:
We were rather far apart, let’s say, because what Epic wants ultimately is free competition and fair competition for everybody, and the removal of the payments tie and removal of the anticompetitive measures, which obviously leads to far better deals for consumers and developers.
Epic remains an imperfect messenger for App Store reform but they really do have this part right. It's about the overall market for decades to come, not Epic or any other single company.
Figured out where this delivery robot is from. They are made by Avride and do deliveries for restaurants. Free delivery! Replacing humans, one job at a time.
One of those mornings where I just run redis-cli monitor and look for things that surprise me.
Adam Mosseri on Threads plans, video transcript
Yesterday, Meta started enabling limited support for ActivityPub in Threads, mostly around following Threads users from platforms like Mastodon and Micro.blog. Adam Mosseri had an excellent video update on Threads that gave the most detailed look into their roadmap:
This work is taking longer than we thought given our safety work, given our compliance work, and given all the scrutiny on our company. But over 2024 we're going to be adding the ability to post from Threads to these other servers. We're going to eventually also support the ability to show replies in Threads natively, and eventually allow you to even follow accounts on those other servers from the Threads app itself.
I made a transcript of his video because it contains more than his text posts on Threads. I transcribed it with Audio Hijack and Micro.blog and then double-checked it with the subtitles on Adam's video. You can read the full thing in this Gist.
Love this update to Mimi Uploader that can generate photo alt text for you with AI. Mimi is a convenient batch photo uploader for Micro.blog, great for posting a few photos to your blog all at once.
Good quotes from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in this Fast Company interview. Surprised to learn that Bluesky has 30 people on their team already.
Brick Oven on Red River has been closed since the pandemic. Last week they made it permanent and bulldozed the building. Sad to see it go. 🍕
Jamie Thingelstad is today's interview on Manuel Moreale's People and Blogs series, with some nice words for Micro.blog:
When micro.blog was launched, I intended to use it as an alternative to Twitter. But then, as Manton built and improved the system, I realized it could host my entire site. I now have 8,449 posts in micro.blog and growing, with a total blog archive size of over 7 GB. It makes me chuckle since I think the "micro" in micro.blog makes folks think they can't use it for everything, but you can.
Thanks @jthingelstad!
Don't want to jinx it but we finally have Micro.blog performance under control after a couple rough days. Also gotta give credit to Threads, it is one of the fastest of the new social networks. The bar is higher than it was in Twitter's fail whale days.
Threads starting opt-in for the fediverse is fine. In fact, it's what we did in Micro.blog too back in 2018, because I wanted to focus on personal domain names and that requires a little more configuration. However, I do hope that Threads expands to enable federation by default for all users.
I really liked Leave the World Behind. There are some great scenes in it. Left with a few things to think about too. 🍿
Starting to see a path for Nikki Haley to be the nominee. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don't think she should be president, so I'd rather Joe Biden face a weaker candidate. On the other, it'd be such a relief just to definitively know Trump can't be president again. 🇺🇸
