People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Diego Rivera style portrait
Went looking for an old tweet and then got lost in the archive. I have all my tweets (mostly 2006-2012) on my blog and it’s like a snapshot of a different life. Still me, but so many things change.
Wandering
Sharing the web
The joy of finding and sharing links
Morning; blossom
One of my favourite times of the year is when trees blossom. I love searching for the first signs of pink buds on the trees, looking closely at the tips of branches to guage when I may first see blossom. Over the last few weeks, I have been delighted to see one tree after another show signs of pink blossom. This morning, on a walk, I took a moment to think about how a few trees had blossomed. I had walked past them a few times with their white buds, but this morning got me thinking about how there is always something new to see on the path: the change of trees as the seasons ebb and flow, the birdsong, the light as the seasons change. I saw a cat on my walk, too. His bushy fur made me smile.
The Tesco ice cream
I was in a Tesco Express – a convenience store”– last weekend. When I walked in, looking for a meal deal and at the stage of choosing which sweet to buy 1, I saw two young women walk toward the ice cream freezer. I then heard: “They are out of ice cream. What the fuck [laughs].” I couldn’t help but smile to myself at the randomness of this comment – the excitement for ice cream and the seeming surprise from the fact that there was none available. The joy with which the words were said resonated with me. I am still laughing about it now. 1 I opted for a Bounty, my go-to chocolate bar. The packaging has a palm tree on it! [↩]
Vibe coding on the 20th floor
How Bluesky hooks up via RSS into a powerful news system.
This Week in the IndieWeb
John Gruber blogging about whether the tariffs will impact Apple:
It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand.
I appreciate this about Apple. Prices send a message and consistency is part of that. (Also why Micro.blog’s standard subscription has never changed from $5.)
While I’m commenting on YouTube videos today, I love that half of Casey Neistat’s video about the Switch 2 is actually about the New York subway.
Nice 9-minute edit by The Verge of the Copilot event, including a protester interrupting the presentation. I get that AI is divisive but it does actual harm to scream at another human in this way. So much outrage now is funneled into attacks when for many topics it’s not even clear what is right.
Greg Morris has been doing great work on Micro Social, and he’s got a buy me a coffee page! ☕️ Perfect way to support an indie app and help grow the Micro.blog ecosystem.
Bluesky is not Billionaire-proof, version 2. I wasn't satisfied with the blog post I wrote in March. I felt it was poorly organized and hard to understand, so I edited it, to get it down to its essential elements, and at the end explain why it's so important to get this right. Basically, by trying to be the universe, Bluesky is cutting off easy connections that can be made with other networks, make the system work better for communication, and at least deliver some of the freedom we all want. They've been very successful, and deserve to profit from that, but recognize it plays a larger role today than just as a business, so let's spread it out so it's harder to shut it down. This is a real concern, not just a nice-to-have thing.
It’s all fun and games with the global economy until your tariffs start interrupting Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders. 🤪
ChatGPT colorized the photo of my grandfather on his tribute site.
How to people feel about web apps that take over common keyboard shortcuts like command-S? We’ve added a handful of keyboard shortcuts to Micro.blog on the web, and I really like it, so I’d like to add a couple more.
Also one could argue that in the interest of neatness, one could phase out webmaster -- but why? It's not as if it's taking up a lot of memory or makes our software run slower. The idea of a webmaster is obsolete, it was how we thought of the web in the late 90s. Also note that it hasn't been deprecated by DNS, for the same reason, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Same subject is coming up on the nets as people discuss Musk's idea of rewriting the Social Security server side from Cobol to something else. We probably don't want to do that. Anyway. Just sayin.