FeedCity

I’m @manton on most networks, @manton.org on Bluesky, and @manton@manton.org on the fediverse. These are all managed by Micro.blog. “Are you getting it? These are not three separate accounts… This is one place to post. And we’re calling it a blog.” 🤪

Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly writes for the Observer, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg Is ‘More Energized’ Than Ever Amid WP Engine Battle.

Do cross the streams! Bluesky starter packs now available to follow within Micro.blog. Here’s one in Micro.blog on the web with people who post about books. No batch follow yet, but a fun way to discover new users. An experiment that we’ll refine. You can search for a Bluesky pack URL to open it.

Walked to the coffee shop when there was a lull in the rain. It’s really pouring down now. 🌧️

Hopefully this doesn’t sound too snotty but I chuckle when people seem to lecture me on how a social platform works. If you don’t know anything about me… I signed up for Twitter, built apps, and quit the platform in frustration before most people joined it. I live and breath the social web. 🤪

I posted a feature request on Bluesky that has gotten a lot of flow. Bluesky devs.. How about a compromise. Support inbound RSS. Let me enter the URL of an RSS feed in settings. I'll ping a fixed location when the feed updates. Would allow the same flow to go to other sy...

Why I haven't created an account on sez.us yet.

• They ask for my first and last name before I sign up. Ask for that info later, after I've created an account. I gave it a fake name to get to the next screen.
• Then they ask for my phone number. That's when I hit the back button. I already get too much spam on my phone, and the filters aren't good there. I am happy to provide an email address as my identifier as I do on all other systems. Later, if I become a regular user, I don't mind providing the phone number as part of 2-factor identity, but not up front.
• Also I don't like white on black letters. It's hard for me to read. All the competitive systems use black on white background. Offer it as an option if it's important to you, but please default to black on white.

I crumble a little inside when I see people mention cross-posting services that copy posts to Bluesky and Mastodon with a monthly subscription that is more than the cost of Micro.blog. But that’s all they do! Or you could use Micro.blog and get the same thing and a full-featured hosted blog. 🤪

Taking an unexpected last minute work trip. Nothing like 4 days at an airport hotel…

Sunday session

In 2018, when I added ActivityPub support to Micro.blog, I faced a choice: do I fight other “competing” platforms or do I embrace them? In hindsight that decision is obvious. I support anything that makes the web better. Twitter / X migration to Bluesky at scale makes the web better, so I’m for it.

People seem to misunderstand Bluesky. Imagine if a few years ago instead of Twitter crippling their API, they totally opened it up, and at the same time built a distributed platform where you could host your tweets on any server, with usernames tied to your own domain name. Sounds pretty great!

Micro.blog integrates with Bluesky in a few ways that people don’t know about, so I collected a summary of each feature together in a single help page. Also, new feature coming tomorrow that I’ll add to this page.

Joe Trippi posted a video to his new sez.us service where Pete Buttigieg explains what the Russians have done to the US. I see it that way too. When Brian Lehrer asked a few weeks ago how the US got so divided of his guest Bob Woodward (a fascinating time capsule, recorded b...

[Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic] Elon Musk didn't just endorse Trump with his words - according to this pre-print research paper, he gave Republicans an algorithmic boost on X, too: "The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024...

Sitting in the front row at the Duke Of York’s to see Danny Boyle’s Sunshine projected on the big screen.

It’s daylight saving time!

Excellent piece on how Bluesky leaves users with the impression that it's open and decentralized in ways it is not. If it's bought by someone who wants to use it the way Musk has, they can, without any recourse by the users. As they said in the old days, if you're getting something for free, you're the product, not the customer. We helped Musk build a way to excercise political power against our interests. You may think Bluesky is a way of fixing that, but it probably isn't. They're digging a deep hole, probably too deep to climb out of at this point. They did some innovative stuff, perhaps. But they ended up at the same place, it appears, as Twitter did.

I like to put something here every day whether I have something to say or not because I'm not sure how my software would handle a post-less. Someday we may find out, but not today. "smile: