People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
thenewstack.io/how-indie-devs-and-small-teams-can-win-in-a-tech-downturn/
In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:
“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”
It has now been a couple days since I stopped federating my posts to Mastodon. As expected I get effectively no replies from Mastodon now. I still get replies from Micro.blog and Bluesky. RSS still exists. Good experiment so far.
Anne Applebaum writing in the Atlantic says that people in the US feel like we're living in an occupied country. I get it. That's what it feels like to be in a Silicon Valley company that has been acquired by another Silicon Valley company, a subject I wrote about on Wednesday. I wish there was some way for us to communicate with each other about this, because I'm sure my description comes closer to the way Musk sees it, though they are very similar ideas. One of the defects of the social web is that we live in little bubbles and not much information is exchanged over bubble boundaries. So if anyone knows Applebaum, please send her a link to this post. Thanks.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
Being “in tech” in 2025 is depressing, and if I’m going to stick around, I need to remember why I’m here.
This. A million times, this.
I urge you to read what Miriam has written here. She has articulated everything I’ve been feeling.
I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind?
Good updates and bug fixes out today, especially the new Micro.blog for iOS release. Tomorrow, releasing the first phase of the blog post summary feature I mentioned yesterday.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
In high school when 5% of your class doesn’t like you it’s like 3-5 people. Running a company of 1,700+ when 5% doesn’t like you, that’s 85 people! That fills a room. 150k followers and 5% don’t like you now you have a small stadium of 7,500 people. It’s still 5%.
Micro Social is to Micro.blog what Tweetie was to Twitter. Sometimes it takes a passionate and attentive third-party developer to design and build the best app for an open platform. Astounding work @gregmorris@micro.blog!
Thursday session
Spurs have lost 3 of the last 4 since De’Aaron Fox joined, but 2 games were lost by only 1 point. Meanwhile Wemby is doing everything:
That stat line makes Wembanyama the first player in NBA history to record multiple games of 20+ points, 15+ rebounds, 5+ blocks and 5+ made 3-pointers.
Won’t be surprised if he eventually has the record for most 5x5s too. 🏀
Nice new developer site and technical design overview for Bridgy Fed. Whenever I’ve looked at the Bridgy code, I’ve always been impressed that it’s not over-engineered considering how much it can do. The same project in the hands of another developer might be 5x the amount of code.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
It’s a small thing, but I broke my Apple Fitness longest streak this week. That means my consecutive number of days that I’ve hit my fitness goals on my Apple Watch has been longer than it’s ever been.
Here’s why that’s meaningful: my previous longest streak was broken when my mother died, almost four years ago, after a ten-year terminal decline. For part of that time, I thought that my sister and I might have the illness too, and I’ve watched four other members of my family follow the same journey. It’s been a hard decade or two, and I haven’t been together enough to manage any kind of streak since that awful week in the hospital. Until now.
I’m not saying that nature is healing — grief is with me every single day — but it feels like, in the midst of genuine crises at home, in my family, and in the world, at least something is going right.
I sent Micro.blog 3.4.2 off to Apple for TestFlight beta review. If approved, will send it to Apple again for the release build, where presumably a different human will review the same build. 🤪
New motto: Pissing in the wind for the good of mankind.
I wonder what Kurt Vonnegut would have thought of twitter-like systems?
Here's the thread that's created in the demo.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Here's a two-minute demo of my new writing tool for Bluesky. This is quite a bit simpler than the last version, you log on directly to Bluesky, doesn't go through my server at all. This removes a whole layer of complexity for the user, and means a lot of people can use it without it having to scale up. Also made it simpler, more of a writing tool, closer to where I'd like this stuff to be when we have across-the-board textcasting support. Really focused on the flow.
I’m going to attend this Bluesky & Beyond event next week and FediForum next month. I’ve felt like withdrawing from active participation in standards work, though. I can only do so much and need to focus on where I can actually make a positive difference.
