We just shipped an update to Strata for iOS, our private notes app for Micro.blog, with Android to follow later in the week. This adds a QR code scanning option to get your secret key moved over from another platform. For Apple folks, it also syncs the key via iCloud, but nice to … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Thinking about the difference between companies who use AI to make existing features better and companies who try to rethink everything. I’ve been using the iOS 18.1 beta for a while. I don’t think Apple really believes in AI the way OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft do. See Micros … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Just in case folks missed the other notices about this, I’m running a big server upgrade in 30 minutes. Wish I could keep Micro.blog fully up during the upgrade but it’s going to be smoother and hopefully faster to just rip the bandaid off. Seeya on the other side. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

If I could give advice to Tim Walz for tonight’s debate: just be yourself. Don’t stress about scoring points. Don’t debate as if you went to Yale Law School. Remind people how unhinged Trump has become, and show that you’re competent, empathetic, and ready. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Spent a bunch of time in encryption land, debugging an issue with the next Strata update. Almost shocked that I eventually solved it. I was starting to lose my mind watching scrambled bytes of data go back and forth between platforms. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

There was a trailer for Flow before The Wild Robot. It looks fantastic. The release is coming in December according to Cartoon Brew. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Croissant is getting some great press. Just a few I’ve noticed: Six Colors, MacStories, TechCrunch. I don’t need it because Micro.blog cross-posts to everything from my blog, but would be cool if the app could post to blogs in the future too. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Happy birthday to Jimmy Carter. 100 years! Amazing. Hope he gets his wish to vote for Kamala Harris. Early voting is soon. 🇺🇸 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Decided a few weeks back to stop Wordle at 1200. It’s fitting that I did terribly on this last one. ⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛🟨⬛🟨 ⬛🟩⬛🟩⬛ 🟨🟩🟨🟩⬛ 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Relay has raised $1 million for St. Jude this year. Incredible. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Ghost fediverse pricing

Interesting note in the latest fediverse blog post update for Ghost: Will members who use ActivityPub (rather than email) count toward Ghost(Pro) billing? And so far the answer is yes, because ActivityPub is (quite significantly) more expensive to support than email. But, this is … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

We posted a new episode of Core Intuition, this time talking all about the controversy in the WordPress community over WP Engine. Still very fascinated by this story and following as much of the news as I can, including a new interview with Matt Mullenweg over the weekend. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

I posted this to @news a week ago. Quoting it here as a reminder: An early heads-up: we are planning a major server upgrade for October 1st, 10pm central time / 3pm GMT. While we hope to limit downtime, Micro.blog will be unavailable for a little while during the upgrade. Your bl … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

I think the new “finished” pane turned out well. This has been a much-needed improvement to Micro.blog. Because we fire off publishing and Hugo-ing in the background, it was irritating to keep an eye on the status and find the new blog post link. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

House shopping during election season is great. There are so many political yard signs, you can tell a lot about what your future neighbors are like. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Last night’s SNL was great. Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Dana Carvey, Jean Smart… That’s the way to start the 50th season. 📺 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Really enjoyed seeing The Wild Robot. Beautiful. Glad I read the book first too… The movie follows the story closely but some characters, dialogue, and details were bound to change. 🍿 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

I ended up disabling Type to Siri. Kept accidentally triggering it with impatient double-taps on the tab bar. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Austin forever. New mural on 51st. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Molly White blogs about POSSE: The next time a new social media site comes along, you can plug it in to your existing system. And the next time a social media site dies or becomes untenable, you just disconnect it. With this model, even when a platform goes under, you lose relati … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Cherrywood Coffeehouse. ☕️ | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Thinking about what a modern AppleScript would look like powered by LLMs. The human language-like syntax of AppleScript was the right idea, but there were syntax quirks that made it frustrating. LLMs could fix that. Free idea! I’m tempted but it’s too far outside the scope of Mic … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Rest in peace, Maggie Smith. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Sort of an all-Zuckerberg podcast week. Good interview with Mark on Decoder but can’t disagree more strongly with Mark’s vision of AI-generated content showing up in your feed. This is the terrible end-game of algorithmic timelines. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

I’m still interested in Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, but maybe I’m not the market because I can barely tell the difference between the Wayfarer, Headliner, and Skyler styles. Also I buy new glasses about once every 10 years. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

No-training Creative Commons

Tantek Çelik proposes a “CC-NT” license, for “no-training”: This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written crawlers … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Pushed another TestFlight beta of Micro.blog with lots of little tweaks that had been bugging me. Still a few bugs in this version, plus the work of replacing the old text editor. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

“Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro.” — Ben Thompson, who interviews Meta’s CTO | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Meta Connect 2024

Let’s start with this: Meta Connect was more interesting and fun than Apple’s iPhone event or WWDC keynote. Live demos are better. Even when Mark Zuckerberg was kind of goofy, or when he said “hell yes” and “live demos sometimes work”… Maybe it it wasn’t as polished, with demos t … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Mira Murati is leaving OpenAI. If things had gone differently after the board shakeup, she would’ve been the CEO and Sam Altman would be at Microsoft. But it didn’t appear that she had been sidelined either. She led the live OpenAI announcements for GPT-4o instead of Sam just a f … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Just uploaded a new TestFlight beta with support for iOS 18 dark and tinted icons. Looks way better now for folks who’ve customized their home screen icons. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Automattic vs. WP Engine will have a chilling effect on WordPress hosting. When I decided to use Hugo in Micro.blog, I considered using WordPress under the hood instead. It would’ve brought significant benefits, but at the cost of bloat and web hosting monoculture. Glad to have a … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Effectively no one knows how good Micro.blog is for blogging. I alternate between being bummed out by this and optimistic that there is so much room for growth. Might take a few more years for overnight success to hit. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Sarah Perez reporting on the financial backing of the new Social Web Foundation. This is an impressive start: The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 1 month ago

Finished watching the first season of Shogun. Fantastic. 📺 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Good post at WP Tavern highlighting the major plot points of the ongoing WordPress drama. I also listened to the Twitter X space (ugh) where Matt Mullenweg answers questions on the fallout from his WordCamp talk. I don’t envy folks trying to navigate this… Such a big community an … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

During the pandemic I accidentally let my P.O. Box expire. I almost never checked it anyway, but I felt bad that there was a chance of letters being returned or lost into the void. Today I finally fixed it. Was able to go in person and restore the same number which luckily wasn’t … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Can’t shake the feeling today that I’m going to have to do this all on my own. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Molly White is doing something on her blog that I don’t think I’ve seen before. When linking some people’s names, she will include tiny links to Wikipedia or social web profiles. Here’s a screenshot with the links highlighted, in this case Wikipedia, Mastodon, and Bluesky: | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Social Web Foundation: The Social Web Foundation works to grow this new ecosystem in an open, healthy, and sustainable way—working with technologists and the public to build a new global town square that works for everyone. This looks very interesting. I’m going to be honest, tho … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Not in a good mood this morning, so all of my blog posts are going to be tinged with a little bit of unwarranted frustration. Apologies in advance. 🙂 | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Going to restart the public beta for Micro.blog on iOS. Just waiting for Apple to approve the beta, because Micro.blog has only been around for 7 years with dozens of public releases, so we must be devious hackers trying to exploit the App Store. So tired of Apple as a babysitter … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Listening to the latest Decoder podcast with The Browser Company’s Josh Miller and enjoying it so far. I haven’t completely bought in to Arc, but we should be exploring new browser ideas. A little shocked that they have 80 employees and zero revenue, though. Not confident they ca … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Sam Altman’s The Intelligence Age

No surprise that Sam Altman is quite the AI optimist: It won’t happen all at once, but we’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Decided to install the iOS 18.1 beta. AI summarization features mostly work as advertised. For the writing tools, I hesitate using it mostly because if I need help, why not jump straight to ChatGPT? Otherwise I’d wonder if I’m getting the best results, even if it seems fine. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

It’s wild to imagine that in the future, to be competitive with AI you might need your own nuclear power plant. I could also see a company like Apple buying half of Arizona for solar farms. On the one hand, yes, maybe we’ve lost our minds… But on the other, a massive investment i … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Eating my own dog food, just imported 2800 notes into Micro.blog. Overall went really well. A couple things could be improved for large archives, like better search on the web. | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago

Following up on Three Mile Island, good point from Ben Thompson today: …nuclear energy and data centers are a perfect match for two reasons. The most obvious one is that data centers need power 24/7, which nuclear provides. The less obvious one is that nuclear power needs to be d … | Continue reading


@manton.org | 2 months ago