Last night's downtown revealed yet more holes in server redundancy that should've been solved earlier. Another thing to add to my week's to-do list.
Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky… If you're feeling overwhelmed by our post-Twitter social web, this post from Ben Werdmuller should hit home. My advice: don't read everything. Post to your blog first, then dip into other apps whenever you have time. Never reload the never-ending algorithmic feeds.
Posted another short video on YouTube about notes, this time with Micro.blog for macOS. The app has a slightly different UI and auto-saves notes, encrypted back to the server.
New sticker, Books Are Magic. Also started reading The Bone Season. 📚
Not sure when our luck with Apple is going to run out, but we've now had a few quick app approvals without any issues. So nice to just get little improvements out. Strata 1.0.2 is available now.
Just another day digging through the Mastodon source code to understand what in the world it's doing to verify remote accounts. Fixed a couple issues on my side. Can't wait for the test suites that folks are working on.
Had to take Groq.com out for a spin (not xAI's Grok). Continue to be pretty happy with OpenAI, though, especially to outsource our AI features — transcribing podcasts and summarizing bookmarked web pages. It's such a narrow use case that the costs are easily manageable.
I wouldn't mind an AI assistant that could call my doctor's office, wait on hold forever, and make a 6-month follow-up appointment. Seems like we should be close to that. 🤖
Simplified pricing in Micro.blog
Micro.blog has always had per-blog pricing. Hosting one blog was $5, two blogs was $10, three blogs was $15, and so on. On top of that, Micro.blog Premium added additional features either to a specific blog (like podcast hosting, video, and email newsletters) or across the platform (like our new notes feature).
The reason this pricing appealed to me is that by charging for each blog, we could keep the standard plan as low as possible for most people who only have one blog. If you needed multiple blogs, upgrading added on to the subscription in a way that seemed fair to us and customers.
Over the years we’ve had problems with this pricing, though. It was confusing to keep track of. There have even been billing mistakes because the code for subscriptions was too complicated. Instead of obvious tiers on your account, each blog was effectively its own tier, with tricky scenarios when trials and yearly pricing are mixed in.
Today that’s changing. We are getting rid of the per-blog pricing. Instead, there will be three simple plans, and Micro.blog Premium will now include multiple blogs.
- $5: one blog with all the basic features
- $10: Micro.blog Premium, all the advanced features and up to 5 blogs included
- $15: Micro.blog Family, same as Premium but up to 5 users can post to any of your blogs
Additionally, there will continue to be no charge for hosting extra single-page web sites and test blogs. The new “up to 5 blogs” count is for normal, full blogs.
Most people only have one blog. If you do already have multiple blogs, this pricing change may mean you’ll be paying less. By the time you read this, your subscription should have been updated to reflect the change.
For example, if you had two blogs, one standard blog and one using Micro.blog Premium, previously that would have been $5 + $10 = $15. Now, having two blogs is covered in Micro.blog Premium, so your cost goes down to $10. Or if you had two $5 blogs already, you've been upgraded to Micro.blog Premium automatically because it's the same price you were paying before.
Micro.blog has been updated throughout to reflect this pricing change, including a redesigned Plans page to upgrade or downgrade your account. Creating new blogs is simpler too.
I’m biased, but I think Micro.blog hosting is one of the best values on the web. Nothing else comes close to the depth of features. Hope you like Micro.blog as much as we like building it.
Tired of running out of disk space, finally decided to move Xcode and the DerivedData folder to a little external SSD. Might've bought myself another year with this older MacBook Pro.
Really happy with the feedback on our pricing change. I think it's resonating well with folks because there's essentially no downside! It's either the same price, or cheaper, or you get more features. It's also simpler for us because everyone gets it, no need to manage "legacy" subscriptions.
I didn't think Apple needed to make a sports app, but now that they have, it'll be my default. I agree with John Gruber's post that being fast matters:
…the truth is ad tech, combined with poor programming, has made most sports apps slow to load. Most apps, period, really. Just being very fast to load ought not be a hugely differentiating factor in 2024, but it is.
Over the years I've used Yahoo Sports, ESPN, the NBA app, even just the Spurs app, and others. They're fine, but Apple Sports is simpler and faster.
Bluesky opening up federation
Bluesky has a couple new blog posts and info around the production deploy of federation. From their main blog post:
The ability to host your own data, just as you might run your own website, provides the fundamental guarantee that social media will never again be controlled by only one company. Even if Bluesky were to disappear, if the data is hosted across different sites, the network can be rebuilt. The fact that it requires no permission to set up a new website is what has made the open web such a dynamic and creative force.
If you're mostly familiar with Mastodon's view of the social web, keep in mind that Bluesky's AT Protocol is very different than ActivityPub. Both specs solve different problems. If you thought ActivityPub was complicated, just wait until you go down the rabbit hole of AT and Merkle search trees! It is wonderful and terrible. 🤪
For Micro.blog, today we support cross-posting to Bluesky, so we've already dipped our toes into the XRPC API. I blogged last year about what I learned with sending posts to Bluesky.
The long-term plan for Micro.blog is to fully support AT's PDS — Personal Data Servers. Any blog hosted on Micro.blog would plug into Bluesky seamlessly, with data portable to other AT Protocol hosting providers. However, we are going to go slowly with this. I would say it is several months away.
Posted a new beta of Epilogue on TestFlight. Having mixed feelings about the Open Library integration, so I've removed the tab that was in previous betas. Might bring it back later.
Just posted the latest episode of Core Intuition. We talked a lot about the Micro.blog notes rollout, and the new iOS app Strata, plus the pricing of Black Ink's subscription.
On a bit of a roll with iOS app updates this week. Some minor improvements to both Strata and Epilogue in the queue for Apple to review. Love how the new icons look in my iPhone dock.
Good summary blog post on some of the IndieWeb-related improvements @paulrobertlloyd has made recently. The updated design of the IndieWeb wiki pages is a nice improvement. Paul and others will be gathering in Brighton for IndieWebCamp… I'll try to join remotely too if the time zones work out.
Sometimes I get carried away using Redis. Made another change a couple days ago that shaved over 12 GB off our memory usage. Probably more we can do.
Just in time for an election year in the US, from @news today:
Added muting words or phrases to the timeline! On the web, click Account → Edit Muted and Blocked Users. Note that after some changes, it may take a minute to update the timeline.
Digging underway at Mueller.
