Ghost has announced they are working on ActivityPub support. This is great news. Although the "It’s time to bring back the open web" headline irks me since people have been asking Ghost to support open posting APIs for years. Micro.blog had ActivityPub in 2018. But now it's time? 🤪
I'm grumpy and bitter about several unrelated things this morning. Probably shouldn't be blogging, but I am anyway. Hope everyone's Monday is off to a good start. 🙂
Swift has been inescapable over the last year. With the release of “The Tortured Poets Department,” her latest (very long) album, some seem to finally be feeling fatigued.
I'm enjoying the album. But I think we are spoiled. For her next album, Taylor Swift should go back to basics: 10 tracks, no music videos, no special editions, vinyl only. After abundance, we need a reset.
Coffee this morning at WhichCraft. I have the whole place to myself for now. ☕️
For folks using Micro.blog Premium with the AI setting enabled, you may start to notice some new generated data for photos, as in this screenshot. I'll blog more about this in the coming weeks when it's fully enabled. The goal is better photo search and accessibility.
I hate Apple's control of app distribution, but while they're at it why not ban useless release notes like "bug fixes and improvements" or "we improve the app every week". If devs don't know how to document what's new, feel free to scroll through the M.b release notes history going back 7 years.
It's still very early in the trial, but seems the prosecution knows what they're doing in methodically building the case. From coverage in the The New York Times:
Before court adjourned for the day, Mr. Pecker testified that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump had asked him what he and his magazines could do “to help the campaign,” a crucial statement that supports the prosecution’s argument that the men were not just protecting Mr. Trump’s personal reputation, but aiding his presidential bid.
🇺🇸
As seen in this video about Meta's glasses, a clever solution to video calling: just stand in front of a mirror. Very low-tech but also looks more natural than Apple Vision Pro personas.
Watched the Rabbit R1 launch party. I love what they’re doing. The vision goes beyond a little orange AI gadget. Especially interested in teach mode and what a full web platform (“rabbitOS”?) might look like.
Apple and Google as the bottlenecks for app distribution is what makes the TikTok forced divestiture possible. I wonder if ByteDance has considered rebuilding TikTok as a PWA to skirt the law. Not an ideal experience, especially without US hosting, but video sharing should be fine via the web.
I read a little of HR 815 to remind myself how the TikTok divestiture works. As much as Congress often looks like chaos in the news, there have to be writers on the staff who know what they're doing, which is a little reassuring. 🇺🇸
A first look at the Rabbit R1 from David Pierce at The Verge:
…the best way I can describe the R1 is like a Picasso painting of a smartphone: it has most of the same parts, just laid out really differently.
Mostly positive. There are shortcomings but this is a fun $199 device, so no one is expecting the polish or maturity of a $999 iPhone. I'm excited to get my R1 eventually.
Didn't realize my library card was expiring, and now I can't get the books I've been waiting weeks for in Libby. Life is rough. 🙂 Going to renew online but it's not exactly automated… Luckily have more than enough to read in the meantime. 📚
Fish pond after getting coffee at Epoch earlier. Looks the same as a couple decades ago except all the retail space has changed, except Korea House. When I walk through I always think of the little model train store that used to be on the corner.
What happened last night with our primary db server was sort of amateur hour, something I learned a lifetime ago but still tripped me up. I recently reset the replication server, upgrading it, and last night it got hung up on an error and filled the disk with MySQL binary log files. Sigh.
Continuing to learn a lot about AI. I've spun up several servers trying to find the right config for reasonable performance even on small models. Fixed costs but still quite expensive for me, and hard to match the reliability of OpenAI.
I'm a progressive, but we may look back on woke-ism as perhaps overcompensating. I worry about societal division. We can go so far in what appears to be the right direction that we lose sight of the big picture, like narrowly following old driving directions and getting lost when the world changes.
How am I only just now seeing the trailer for Chris Sanders's The Wild Robot? Beautiful, like a mashup of Iron Giant and Bambi. Reminds me of why I love animation.
TikTok bill is not xenophobic
I wasn't sure whether I felt that strongly about the TikTok bill until I read this blog post by Ben Werdmuller. I usually love Ben's posts but I disagree with him on TikTok and the open web, so let me respond to a few points:
Ironically, banning a service from the open internet nationwide is exactly the kind of thing that China has done again and again through its Great Firewall. Rather than protect American users through the kinds of far-reaching privacy legislation that we need, government chose to address TikTok alone on the basis of what amounts to xenophobic protectionism.
I'm not convinced American privacy legislation will have much impact on a company based in China. TikTok has also long promised to host data in America — "Project Texas" — and according to recent reports the effort is largely cosmetic.
This is not a ban of TikTok. This is a focused effort to force ByteDance to sell the company, so that it can be controlled by a company with more transparency and accountability. If ByteDance refuses to sell TikTok, the app will be removed from distribution by platform gatekeepers, but there's nothing to stop TikTok from continuing to operate and be available to Americans via the web, as long as it's hosted somewhere else.
From HR 815, now signed into law:
Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
It might even be a positive outcome for the open web by shedding light on Apple and Google's tight control over app distribution, and showing users why Progressive Web Apps can be a good alternative solution. TikTok would potentially be slower with a poorer user experience, or maybe it wouldn't, but the open web is not going to fall apart so easily.
It's true that some US Senators have shown themselves to be ignorant, xenophobic, and racist, on not just this bill but a range of issues. And yet a broken clock is right twice a day.
Ben writes sarcastically:
There’s a possibility that TikTok will be used to spread propaganda, unlike every other social network
I will be the first person to criticize massive social platforms. Significant portions of my book are about exactly that. It's a very real problem to have so much concentrated power. But as much as we might dislike how Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook, we can be pretty confident he is not going to undermine America on purpose, quietly putting a foot on the scale with propaganda to amplify political chaos.
Scott Galloway, co-host of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, was on MSNBC's Morning Joe this week:
What might sound paranoid, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong: I think we are being manipulated, specifically youth, who their frame for the world is TikTok. If you look at TikTok, there are 52 videos that are pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian for every one served on Israel. I think that we're being manipulated. I think Americans are easier to fool than to convince they've been fooled. But if I were the CCP, I'd be doing exactly the same thing. I think social media is sowing division and polarization in our society.
We just can't be sure whether the algorithm is only giving people what they want or whether there's any influence being fed into it. Ben Thompson wrote on Stratechery years ago that there is evidence that Americans should be concerned:
TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone — except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company — knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?
Wondering about China's influence on the TikTok algorithm isn't xenophobic. It's not about the people. It's about the leadership. In the same way we can blame Putin for the war in Ukraine and still be sympathetic and trusting of the Russian people, we can be skeptical of the motivations of the Chinese Communist Party and still respect people in China, admire their culture, and welcome Chinese immigrants to America with open arms.
And what if I'm wrong? What if it turns out there's zero influence from the Chinese Communist Party and only pure intentions with the TikTok algorithm, as far as making a bunch of money on ads can be considered pure? TikTok is still probably a net negative for society, and I'm not going to lose sleep if their business stumbles or the bill leads to more competition in short video social networks.
Little known feature in Micro.blog: it saves each copy of a draft in case you need to revert or get text from a previous version. Apparently I hit ⌘S a lot while writing that post about TikTok this morning.
If you missed the announcement, next month we're having Micro Camp, our free online event for the Micro.blog community, and for anyone interested in blogging and the social web. Special guest Christina Warren! May 17th.
Obviously would’ve been good even earlier, but I’m glad to see construction for the Gaza floating pier is underway. From the NYT:
Senior Biden administration and military officials detailed a complex plan in a Pentagon call with reporters on Thursday afternoon, explaining how the pier and causeway are being put together, and how it is supposed to work. Army engineers are constructing the facility aboard Navy ships in the eastern Mediterranean.
I assume we’ll see photos at some point. Seems like a difficult but important piece of the puzzle for Gaza aid.
For everything in the news that I blog about, there are probably five stories that I just bite my tongue on. Don't need the controversy. 🙂 But on the next Core Int, we talk a lot about TikTok, which was a fun change of pace. I'll be editing it today.
Years ago when we launched Micro.blog, I had a clear vision for indie blogging that felt on the cutting edge of the distributed social web. Now that federation is just accepted as the base foundation for any new network, thinking about if that changes our identity. We sort of won. What's next?
We just posted a new episode of Core Intuition, about recent Micro.blog downtime and then a full discussion of the TikTok bill.
Mark Gurman says that Apple “has renewed discussions with OpenAI about using the startup’s technology”. GPT-4 is simply more advanced than anything else. Makes a lot of sense for Apple to have their own small models run on device, and lean on others for larger server infrastructure.
Manuel Moreale blogs that the web is not dying:
Let’s imagine we ban TikTok. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Threads. And all the other huge platforms. There would still be one global town square left. It’s called the web. The web itself IS the global town square.
One of the most confusing parts of Micro.blog is the Account → Edit Sources page. It is also one of the most powerful and unique parts of how Micro.blog was designed. If you're confused by it, how can we improve it? I've made a couple tweaks here and there this year, but need a fresh look.
Biden was great at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. And Colin Jost was excellent: funny but also meaningful and sincere. Really well done. 🇺🇸
It remains good advice not to judge an album (or a book, or almost anything) too quickly. From Oliver Darcy at CNN on Tortured Poets:
One week later, my view of the album has entirely reversed. After spending more time with the two-hour sonic feast, more methodically touring through its subtleties and nuances, I am ready to declare that it is one of Swift’s best works yet. Anecdotally, it seems others are also identifying with this experience, initially expressing tepid feelings toward the album, and then realizing after a few listens it has really grown on them.
Check out the iOS app Bound if you ever have a bunch of downloaded audiobook files that can’t fit in Audible, Libby, etc. I’m using it with the MP3s for Dragonsteel Prime and it works great.
Uploading photos to Micro.blog? Don't forget about Mimi Uploader. We will be rolling out some AI-based features in Micro.blog soon for photos, but you can already use Mimi today to help generate photo alt text.
