FeedCity

I'd love to see a bridge from RSS to ActivityPub. I've asked people at various companies if they'd do this. I'm happy to help with the software but operating the service is something for a trusted company to do. I think this would go all the way to putting the "open" in open...

iOS folks, if you’ve noticed that annoying Micro.blog app problem where the new reply pane isn’t tall enough, you may want to grab the latest TestFlight beta where we’re testing the fix. This is also in review for Android already. No risk to using TestFlight, it’s just sometimes a step ahead.

Today we’ve updated Micro.blog for macOS to version 3.5.8, fixing a couple problems. I’ve also improved the Logs window to color in green the lines for when a blog publish was finished. Just makes it a little easier to see when glancing at the window. Micro.blog keeps the l...

Jo and I are doing a poetry exchange collaboration. We have each selected a poem for each other that we have never read, about which we will share our impressions. Below are my impressions from reading the poem Jo selected for me to read and write about You can read Jo’s entr...

It’s a solemn July 4th. We’re on the wrong path. Yet if you have time off or are spending the weekend with family, enjoy it. We can choose to celebrate the good, such as the chance to correct some mistakes in 2026. 🇺🇸

We can never really know what people are going through on the internet, because so few people share their full selves online. In a sad way, it’s best to assume that not everything is okay. That way we can show true empathy, not attacks, not even a performance of fake kindness.

When I started visiting art galleries, I would take pictures of the placards of pieces of work I liked. I would take pictures of the art, too; just enough so that I could map the placard to the painting. I wanted to document the art I really liked; to be able to go back and r...

Submitted the latest round of Android improvements to Google for approval. There’s one fix that hasn’t even made it into an iOS release yet. Depending on review timing, this might be the first time that we’ve shipped bug fixes for Android before iOS!

How odd on Independence Day a law goes into effect that funds a secret police for the US. The goal is to flow people from inside the United States into concentration camps, and ostensibly deport them to other countries. It may turn out to be easier and less expensive to just gas them and burn the bodies right here in the USA. I listened to this morning's Daily podcast to hear how they summed up the bill, and they focused on taxes and health care as most of the other news orgs have been doing. They were puzzled why the Repubs didn't seem to care if it hurt their electorate, but they didn't state the obvious answer. They don't care. Remember Occam's News. I guess they didn't want to say it out loud so they just telegraphed the question. It worked, message received.

Today is Independence Day in the US, so how about an Independence Day for the web. One simple way would be to turn Bluesky into a big feed reader. It could easily be done in software, it would just take money to keep it running. Not something I could attempt personally. But I would totally help with the software and design.

My wrists have been a bit tense lately so I have decided to try to use my desk more. I had grown comfortable sitting in my armchair using my computer but, if I am to be using my computer several hours per day, perhaps I need a more ergonomic setup. This week I have changed t...

When I am out and about, I like to take notes when something makes me wonder, smile, or otherwise makes me think. Here are a few notes I have taken over the last few weeks. “How did you find out about us?”; “the internet,” I say. The clerk responds, playfully, “sometimes it...

This is the 97th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Nick Simson and his blog, nicksimson.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox...

We have to decide which story we believe in.

Thursday session

Found via Loura, A Small Web July, spending time away from big social media:

Beefing up my RSS feed with content I want to see, both big-and-small web. YouTube isn’t a problem for me until I go onto the website itself and get sucked into a hole, but subscribing to a channel on RSS isn’t a problem for me.

We are still planning an Android update soon. I worked on a couple minor tweaks this morning, to go along with other recent improvements brought over from iOS. Actually feels good to tinker in Android Studio again since my world is mostly Xcode.

Simon Willison:

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

This analogy works in a couple different ways. You can ignore the table saw if you love the craft of creating with hand tools. You can use the table saw where it saves time and still be proud of the end result.

The Verge:

Racist videos that appear to be created with Google’s AI video generation tool Veo 3 have raked in millions of views across TikTok, according to findings from the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters.

The full report from Media Matters is very disturbing. It’s not just a couple videos that fell through the moderation cracks. It’s many videos and millions of views. TikTok is designed for this.

Infinite content plus viral social platforms is a bad combination. Curation will be nearly impossible as long as social media is designed around likes, reposts, and algorithms. AI is the accelerant to garbage abundance. The best way to stop the spread of hateful content or misinformation is for platform developers to consider that virality is as much a bug as it is a feature.