I don't have strong feelings about the Adobe/Figma deal falling through. I guess if we're unsure, better to err on the side of fewer big acquisitions. Om Malik makes a really interesting point too that more regulation could mean fewer startups will have "just get acquired" as an exit plan.
“Play Me” — piano outside the library, Windsor Park Branch.
Flipboard is rolling out the first phase of joining the fediverse:
In this first phase we are partnering with 27 publishers and creators to help them federate their Flipboard accounts and gather feedback. This includes a range of publishers covering global news, tech, music, gaming, travel and science as well as a few content creators like Erin Brockovich and Jefferson Graham.
I tested following one of these accounts in Micro.blog and it's working pretty well.
I don't mind flying under the radar. There are benefits for a product to start small and grow slowly. But I'm still kind of puzzled why Micro.blog is rarely mentioned when articles talk about platforms that support the fediverse. We first added ActivityPub in 2018. Must be doing something wrong.
I thought we had mostly avoided the Mastodon spam from the last couple of days, but it must've hit some users because there were a bunch of extra spam reports. I continue to have mixed feelings about how Mastodon handles private messages. Need to rethink Micro.blog's implementation.
Spending the morning going through a lot of bloat in Redis, clearing out unused data. It has been a little out of control using a ridiculous amount of memory, which hurts performance saving to disk and just generally costs more to run.
Love how Brandon just drops this sentence into the State of the Sanderson:
Tress would make a pretty great animated feature though, don’t you think?
Yes indeed. Many of his books would work really well in animation, but Tress of the Emerald Sea would be fantastic.
Continued my Redis spelunking last night and managed to cut 10 GB off our memory usage. Makes a big difference because forking and saving the db is faster, less chance of churning the disk too.
Great article from David Pierce at The Verge about the potential of the fediverse:
Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat and pries it apart into its component pieces, each one ripe for innovation and new ideas.
As the year winds down, thinking about the fediverse, I want to do a better job in 2024 of making the case for independent blogs. Lots of platforms with thousands of users on each server talking via ActivityPub is great, but more blogs also helps with portable identity and a more distributed web.
I finally installed macOS Sonoma, so I'm testing Micro.blog as a saved web application for the first time. Works well. The most awkward thing is not having an address bar. Nice that Apple included Edit → Copy Link.
I should've done more testing with audio apps after upgrading to Sonoma. Things went off the rails while recording @coreint — noise while recording and also audio getting handed off to my phone. I think we mostly salvaged it.
Raining in Austin this morning. Working and having coffee at Lazarus. 🎄
Got some bad news last night that really shook me. Nothing family or health related, which is what matters, but still bummed. (Also nothing to do with Micro.blog or business or money.) It was balanced a couple hours later with some really welcome news! The world gives and takes.
Watching the Substack drama unfold but just taking notes for now. Trying to put most of my writing time into book editing, and these big picture topics of indie blogs, newsletters, and moderation fit right in.
Writing a blog post draft in Micro.blog for Mac this morning and I guess I'm hitting ⌘-S pretty often. This saves it to the server and Micro.blog keeps a copy of each version in case you need to revert back. Here's the web version where I happened to notice the saved count.
I like the new Bluesky butterfly logo. Still invite-only, but I have a handful of invite codes if you want to try it out.
More good progress in Bluesky: there are now RSS feeds for all user profiles. This is just a useful baseline for supporting different things. Nice, clean microblog feeds without titles.
Following Bluesky users from Micro.blog
This weekend I added limited support for following Bluesky users in Micro.blog. This isn’t federating with Bluesky yet. Instead, it uses a combination of Bluesky’s RSS feeds and the AT Protocol.
To follow a Bluesky user who has an account username in the form username.bsky.social, just search for the username in Micro.blog. It doesn't work for custom domain usernames in Bluesky, because Micro.blog will think you want to follow the user's blog instead.
Here's a screenshot showing a search:
Note that Bluesky's RSS feeds are brand new, and there are a few missing pieces. Photos in posts are not included and inline links may not work perfectly. Still, I expect Bluesky to improve this over time, and already it's a useful way to follow many Bluesky users.
I'm planning to improve the Micro.blog side of this in the coming months, such as supporting replying back to Bluesky users. Bridgy can also take Bluesky replies to your blog posts and send them back to Micro.blog via Webmention. (I've updated the Alpine theme in Micro.blog to include the IndieWeb's u-syndication microformat, so services like Bridgy can more easily map Bluesky posts with the canonical microblog post on Micro.blog.)
Happy holidays! 🎄
Happy holidays, everyone! A new episode of Core Intuition just went up, the last episode of 2023. We talk Apple Watch, Adobe and Figma, and look forward to next year.
