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 … | Continue reading
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, gami … | Continue reading
“Play Me” — piano outside the library, Windsor Park Branch. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 presid … | Continue reading
I really liked Leave the World Behind. There are some great scenes in it. Left with a few things to think about too. | Continue reading
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 f … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
Good quotes from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in this Fast Company interview. Surprised to learn that Bluesky has 30 people on their team already. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
One of those mornings where I just run redis-cli monitor and look for things that surprise me. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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.) | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 some … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 an … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 interoperabili … | Continue reading
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, A … | Continue reading
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. | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
Finished reading: Age of Legend by Michael J. Sullivan. Didn’t expect this one to end so suddenly because the last 15% left on Kindle was actually an excerpt from another book. | Continue reading
Speaking of self-promotion… There’s a new Core Intuition out. On episode 579 we talked AI, Google Gemini, Apple’s MLX, Beeper, iMessage, and all the tech and ethical implications of the above. Recorded before Beeper Mini broke yesterday, so we’ll see how that shakes out. | Continue reading
Sometimes people ask for link preview cards in the Micro.blog timeline. Maybe eventually we’ll add them, controlled with a preference. But so often they are in your face, cluttering the timeline, overshadowing perfectly good content. Here’s yesterday’s post on my blog, displayed … | Continue reading
Thinking about what Mosseri said introducing Threads search: …having a comprehensive list of every post with a specific word in chronological order inevitably means spammers and other bad actors pummel the view with content by simply adding the relevant words or tags. And before … | Continue reading
I’m using ChatGPT more and more for coding help. Sometimes I don’t fully trust the answer and double check with Google or Stack Overflow. Today the AI produced some code that I thought it must have completely hallucinated… Does this even work technically? But it ran perfectly. | Continue reading
Love developing for the web and learning how to do something new for the first time. Processing a ZIP file fully within JavaScript in the browser instead of server-side? Never really considered doing it but it works great. | Continue reading
Sometimes the choices we don’t mean to make end up perfect. When I was traveling this year my shoes fell apart and I stopped at a random shoe store in Boulder. They had one pair of shoes in my size, a brand I’d never heard of, bought them, and they are now some of my favorites. W … | Continue reading
Threads launching in the EU next week. My earlier theory was they were waiting for ActivityPub (and so better account portability) before going live. Guess I was wrong. | Continue reading
Noticed load averages briefly jumping up to 10.0 so it’s going to be that kind of day. There’s always something to optimize! Looking okay now, though. | Continue reading
It’s been a couple weeks since we got our first Roomba, so here’s my review: it’s great. Took a day for us to settle into how best to use it, what to pick up from the floor or block, and when to run it… Now it just does its thing every day. Surprisingly good with dog hair too. | Continue reading
Testing new in-progress features and everything is kind of working. Maybe at this point in my career I shouldn’t be surprised when my code actually works, but it’s still a nice feeling. | Continue reading
Interesting juxtaposition of releases today… The new Ivory with Mastodon hashtags support and the Threads update with hashtags for the first time, limited to one tag per post. Also major Mammoth release, with open source on the way. | Continue reading
Watching a few clips from last night’s GOP debate. Chris Christie still fighting the good fight against Trump when no one else will. From Christie’s closing statement: …picture in your mind election day. You’ll all be heading to the polls to vote. And that is something Donald Tru … | Continue reading
I love these robots. We’ve seen more of them but it’s not clear if they are actually going anywhere or just practicing for deliveries. | Continue reading
Congrats to @cheesemaker and the Silverpine team for announcing the beta of Evergreen.ink, an interactive fiction authoring tool. Think: “choose your own adventure” stories. I’ve been helping with this behind the scenes too, and the upcoming iOS app… Really cool to see it come to … | Continue reading
Beeper Mini looks like an impressive feat of reverse-engineering. Apple will surely try to break this in the future, but if doing so requires an iOS update for iMessage API tweaks, it may take years before they can realistically cut off Beeper along with very old iPhones. | Continue reading
Made a little architecture diagram for Micro.blog that reflects the recent server upgrades. A couple simplifications but it’s pretty close to how things work. | Continue reading