FeedCity

For Jo’s IndieWeb Movie Club of June 2025, I watched 2 movies. Mary Poppins and Saving Mr. Banks. I find myself not sure how I feel, or rather having too many feelings about each to really narrow down my feelings to a pithy recommendation about the films. I feel like I could write an essay, or at...

There are several good segments in today’s interview with Matt Mullenweg. My favorite might be the exchange with Nilay Patel around whether Tumblr is profitable yet. It actually lines up well with my post from last year, I support the mad king.

Nilay: Is Tumblr sustainable today?

Matt: It is still not profitable. So we’re still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automattic.

Nilay: How much runway do you want to give it?

Matt: Everything. [laughing] Obviously we’ve invested a ton in Tumblr. I’m a believer in its future. So that’s part of why I want to make it sustainable, because that means it doesn’t have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else. It can stand on its own.

Monday session

I’ve been taking some time off after UX London. That was a big project I was working towards all year and it went great, so I think I’ve earned a reward for myself. My reward is to head off to Ireland to immerse myself in the language and music. A week at an Irish language ...

Huge news from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple is considering partnering with Anthropic or OpenAI for Siri:

After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic’s technology is most promising for Siri’s needs, the people said. That led Adrian Perica, the company’s vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude, the people said.

This is probably the right move, and there’s still plenty for in-house AI researches to work on. If they go ahead with it, delaying Siri was justified, and worth taking the heat for.

Every year since I blogged about fixing exclusive app distribution way back in 2011, there have been little cracks appearing in Apple’s monopoly wall. Growing developer resentment. The lawsuit from Epic Games. New laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Change is clearly acc...

Advice from a longtime developer. If you think "I should do a backup," do it. Now, don't wait. Make it really easy to do a backup. Choose a menu item that's always available when you're working. The reason is karma. God hears all your thoughts. When that thought pops int...

If the Dems were competitive they would run ads now with Senator Tillis talking about the damage the new Repub bill will do to Americans, emphasizing this is a Republican speaking, taking one for the country.

Project Hail Mary trailer is out! Loved the book. Perfect choice of directors for the movie, I think they’ve got this.

Gleann Cholm Cille

One question for AT Proto as a blog backend is whether users will want a single record in their PDS that works across Bluesky clients and custom platforms. In that case, a custom “full-length post” embed inside Bluesky’s own lexicon seems to make the most sense. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

Bluesky folks, I’ve been thinking about adding WhiteWind cross-posting to Micro.blog. The lexicon looks straightforward. There’s also Leaflet, which is trying to do a little more with its document structure. Any early adopter “blogging with AT Protocol” users have thoughts?

I started listening to the latest Decoder podcast with guest Matt Mullenweg, but I’m not yet to the part about Tumblr. Not hugely surprising, they have paused the (monumental) task of moving Tumblr’s backend to WordPress:

The company announced the plan to move over the more than half a billion blogs on Tumblr last year, saying that the change would “make it easier to share our work across platforms.” But Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we decided is that we want to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for.”

Final day of the photo challenge. After a busy weekend, I needed a little solitude. Houndstooth Coffee on MLK. ☕️

Some people dread Mondays. Not me. You have the whole week ahead, and anything is possible.

Starting to roll out some improvements to the Micro.blog “marketing” home page, for new users or when you’re signed out. The content isn’t really different yet. I’m sticking with the full-screen paintings, and several layout and link problems are fixed, especially on mobile. Still work to do.