Really good episode of Dithering this morning on Bluesky vs. Mastodon. As convenient as it would be to have a single decentralized protocol “win”, I want to be ready for a future with multiple successful web-friendly platforms. | Continue reading
Ever since I read that Bluesky has about 1.9 million folks on the waiting list, I’ve been thinking about what happens as more invites roll out. By comparison: Mastodon has over 7 million users, with 1 million on a single server. Plus a bunch more across the non-Mastodon fediverse … | Continue reading
Micro Camp 2023 is coming up soon! May 19th - 20th. We’ve posted the topics for the second day’s presentations. | Continue reading
If you missed it earlier from @news: We are monitoring some performance problems because of unexpected server load. Thanks for your patience. Micro.blog News https://news.micro.blog/2023/05/07/we-are-monitoring.html I’m continuing to troubleshoot (and optimize) slow blog publishi … | Continue reading
Posted episode 556 of Core Intuition. We talk about tipping in Apple Stores, using ChatGPT, and whether Apple has missed “the year of AI” because they thought it was “the year of AR”. | Continue reading
Too many guns. After yesterday’s shooting in Allen, Greg Abbot “offered the full support of the State of Texas”… So that means he’ll work to ban assault weapons, right? That’s the kind of support we need. | Continue reading
Easy to get caught up in the excitement about the coronation. We are so stuck in divisive partisan debates over here that it’s hard to imagine the U.S. being that united around anything. 🇬🇧 | Continue reading
I recorded a video on YouTube that goes through how I personally use Micro.blog for my own blog. It’s a little long and rambling, about 25 minutes, but it covers a bunch of features that folks might find useful. | Continue reading
Created a new blog on my Micro.blog account today, a placeholder for something new. Found a couple bugs in the process. I should do this more often… So easy to forget about the onboarding experience, or lack thereof. | Continue reading
This year’s NBA playoffs have been great. So many close games, ignoring a couple blowouts like last night’s Lakers/Warriors. With the Spurs out of contention early and their players scattered to different teams, I’ve been enjoying the postseason more than usual, finding new teams … | Continue reading
Jack Dorsey gives $10 million to Nostr and related projects. Setting aside opinions on his leadership at Twitter, it feels significant that these funds are not VC-style investments. Presumably the reward is seeing interesting technology flourish, not profit. | Continue reading
Wondering what the Bluesky team has in mind for private messaging, if anything. Mastodon’s DMs have always felt awkward to me, both the user experience (hard to distinguish public and private posts) and the technical bits (any admin can read your messages). | Continue reading
Finished the first pass of rethinking how incoming direct messages work in Micro.blog. I still believe that most social networks should not reinvent the wheel with messaging, because it’s unlikely to be as secure as dedicated services like iMessage and WhatsApp. But we roll with … | Continue reading
Looking at this spam, I think our approach to accepting Mastodon DMs needs to change in Micro.blog. We forward them via email because we don’t have a private messaging system. But someone shouldn’t be able to intrude in your inbox. My fault. Going to rethink this today. | Continue reading
Eugen Rochko and team are fighting spammers at mastodon.social: We’re aware of the spam attack hitting mastodon.social right now and our full moderation and DevOps teams are on the case mitigating any way we can (incl. switching to approval-mode registrations) Haven’t seen this a … | Continue reading
Almost done with book edits. The task of manually reformatting all the footnotes and layout for the print edition was dragging me down, so figured out how to automate it with print CSS tools like Prince. Wow, going to save days or weeks of work. | Continue reading
Enjoyed the first episode of White House Plumbers. Also, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey might be half-brothers?! They need to go on Finding Your Roots. | Continue reading
Mastodon has added support for showing styled text in the new version deployed on mastodon.social. Looks good with bold and italics in blog posts federated from Micro.blog. | Continue reading
Maybe the most surprising thing to me about Bluesky’s early success is the “fun” aspect. I’m not very fun online — my microblog posts are often work-related or serious — but it seems clear there was a post-Twitter void here that Bluesky is filling. Casey Newton writes on Platform … | Continue reading
Noticed today while reviewing code that the first GitHub commit for Micro.blog was about 9 years ago. So much has happened since then, but also hardly anything. Software is never done because the world and people are always changing. | Continue reading
Left my headphones at home by accident. Now need to plan my whole day around which coffee shops probably have the best music on. ☕️ | Continue reading
Went to see the Super Mario Bros movie this afternoon. So much fun. | Continue reading
Not content with banning native third-party apps, Twitter has continued to cripple their API and move to paid plans for very basic access. I was committed to support Twitter cross-posting as long as possible because there are still Micro.blog customers who want to keep a foot in … | Continue reading
Core Intuition episode 555! We talk all about Bluesky. (And Mastodon and Nostr and Micro.blog.) | Continue reading
Today is the day that Twitter said they would shut off the old API and force upgrades to the new plans. But they say a lot of things. I haven’t paid yet. Also confused why April 29th (Saturday) and not May 1st (Monday). | Continue reading
I’ve done a little work now with the XRPC layer of the AT Protocol, supporting cross-posting to Bluesky from Micro.blog. This post is about what I’ve learned. (As an aside, there have been questions about whether Micro.blog supporting Bluesky means we believe in everything they’r … | Continue reading
The storm is about to hit. Waiting it out downtown instead of on the highway. ⛈️ | Continue reading
Listening to Dithering today about game consoles… If you have 2 consoles, you have Playstation + Switch, or Xbox + Switch. If you have 2 social networks, maybe you have [insert popular network] + Micro.blog. The hard part is carving out a unique, invaluable niche. | Continue reading
We updated the Micro Camp web site for 2023. Register for free if you’d like to join us May 19-20. Everyone gets a new sticker too! Special thanks to @Burk for the sticker design. | Continue reading
Austin sky before thunderstorms arrive in a few hours, supposedly. ☁️ | Continue reading
Finished reading: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I really enjoyed this story. First-person for multiple characters was a little awkward, though, and maybe held it back from what it could’ve been. | Continue reading
The renewed interest in open, social web protocols has been a long time coming. It’s like we were in a drought for most of the 2010s, subsisting on the water leftover from the early blogosphere, and now it’s raining. Drink up, folks! The skies are blue and the future’s bright. | Continue reading
I’ve been impressed with Bluesky’s performance. It has inspired me to shave off a little time for some Micro.blog API requests. We usually think of “under a second” as fast enough, but 0.8 seconds vs. 0.4 seconds is actually pretty noticeable. | Continue reading
Continuing to tweak our Bluesky cross-posting support. Should work better with inline links in blog posts now. | Continue reading
Sometimes coding is hard, but not usually. It’s figuring out how something should work that takes all the time. | Continue reading
Just released a new 3.0 beta of Micro.blog for iOS. This includes a big change, borrowed from the 2.x versions: Markdown syntax highlighting when writing new posts. We are getting close to release. The only major feature left is WordPress posting support. TestFlight here to follo … | Continue reading
I know I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating: Micro.blog is constantly shifting priorities based on what people are talking about. If we only hear a feature request every few months instead of every week, it is probably going to drop off our radar, even if we w … | Continue reading
I’m seeing lots of Bluesky takes that are a variation of: “Oh jeez, we just moved from Twitter to Mastodon, now there’s another new thing?” But indie microblogging is about moving away from centralized platforms to blogs and open web-friendly protocols. Anything in that spirit sh … | Continue reading
I’m always fascinated when our new AI bot overlords get really basic facts wrong. They know the answer, but can’t put it together until you press them on it. Here’s a quick transcript from ChatGPT that I ran into today. | Continue reading
Some technologies just keep coming back… Currently writing XML-RPC code, this time for JavaScript. Despite the new-ish JSON APIs in WordPress, not to mention Micropub, MetaWeblog is still the best way to talk to WordPress without any extra plugins or configuration. | Continue reading
U2 tickets for the Sphere in Vegas going on sale later this week. Need to somehow fit this into my plans for the fall. | Continue reading
Added a basic import in Micro.blog for folks migrating from Substack. For now, just blog posts. Still need to think through email address import for newsletters… Want to make sure it can’t be abused by spammers. (Substack’s HTML is so verbose. Tried to clean it up a little on imp … | Continue reading
This is not exactly a commentary on any specific platform, but you can just tell when the creators of a tool use their own stuff and engage with the community. The farther you get away from that, the less confidence users will have. | Continue reading
Today we enabled Bluesky as an option in Micro.blog. This adds to our existing cross-posting feature that supports platforms such as Mastodon, Tumblr, Medium, and Flickr. When you post to your blog, Micro.blog can copy the post to any of these platforms automatically. As Twitter … | Continue reading
Fox News in the, uhm, news today reminds me of last month when I was in Dallas. I worked from a coffee shop near my hotel one morning, Flying Horse Cafe. They had Fox News on the TV. Took me by surprise as an Austinite… No way you’d ever see that here, but oh yeah, I live in Texa … | Continue reading
Tantek Çelik blogged about Mastodon’s account migration and its post export, which is based on ActivityStreams. No other apps really import this format yet, not even Mastodon itself. He also mentions the Blog Archive Format and how useful it would be to convert between Mastodon a … | Continue reading