Good morning and welcome to December. The November archive has been safely stored on GitHub along with the rest of 2025. And now we will resume our normal schedule of winter weather in the Catskills, so please dress warmly and have a good song to sing.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
I caught a few waves on the other side of the OB Pier. I didn’t shoot it but maybe could have.
IndieWeb Carnival Dec ’25
Simon Willison marks the 3-year anniversary of the ChatGPT launch with a blog post about how it almost didn’t happen. Clearly being first matters, but also OpenAI still makes very good products, like their Mac app and Pulse. Hard to predict where things will be in another three years.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Thanksgiving Sunday
It’s an interesting cultural moment right now: I think Bryan tweeted, many people are watching people catching balls, while others are watching Bryan Johnson tripping balls. Bryan Johnson, of Blueprint fame, is livestreaming taking a heroic dose of mushrooms. It’s been an interesting journey with the journalist Ashlee Vance, Naval Ravikant, David Friedberg, Marc Benioff, … Continue reading Thanksgiving Sunday →
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Knowing when to leave
I wrote this in my blog drafts well over a decade ago (exact date unclear). I thought I'd publish it as-is as an aside. I'm sure it was going to be an excellent full post, but clearly this is just the intro. I still agree though:
What Frontier is about -- from 2021.
Someday everyone will have a blogroll like this, and a blog.
Boastful story of Frontier and how it relates to today
I recorded this 23 minute podcast on October 31.
I didn't publish it then, but I figured at some point I would.
It's the story of how a product like Frontier comes into existence.
I had done this before, in 2020, in an oral history I did for a book a friend was writing. T...
Hypothetically, if someone were building a headless version of Frontier with help from ChatGPT, they might be thinking about how to build a web app that was a really good shell to start with. If such a person asked what I thought, I would say without a doubt that would be Dru...
I love getting comments like this. The issue I posted about yesterday turns out to be a bug, and apparently it's going to be fixed. So I can go ahead without worrying about a workaround. This is the best outcome. Usually with most vendors if there's a bug, they don't acknowledge, and then they might get around to looking at it someday. This is what I call working together. Scott Hanson found the thread where they were discussing the feature in question, starting in 2011. I added an update from 2025. This stuff feels like time travel, and it's also incredibly reassuring to find that solutions to issues that were relevant 14 years ago are still relevant today. That's the stability that platforms require in order for developers to build with confidence. This is something that many big tech companies (cough Apple cough) either don't understand or don't care about.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
imperfect notes & my second subconscious
I've never been a great notetaker. Winnie Lim suggests I might be overthinking it: it's not a second brain but a second subconscious mind.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
Double opt-in PSA
As of today, I run three different newsletters, all powered by Buttondown: there’s my recently announced Dealgorithmed, my outdoors-focused From the Summit, and the People and Blogs series. I also send my blog posts via email, if you prefer to consume content that way.
They ...
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
Even small days can be good.
Things quite hard right now. The sea remains a balm. Good things are afoot. And afield? Onward.
“He has a hundred ideas a day. Four of them are good, the other 96 downright dangerous.” — from Darkest Hour, although inspired by something FDR said 🍿
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Werner Predictions
Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, boldly publishes his 2026 tech predictions. While you’re on his blog, take a moment to enjoy his essay, Development gets better with Age. Werner and I first crossed paths almost 20 years ago at tech conferences like GigaOm’s Structure, LeWeb, Future of Web Apps, O’Reilly Etech, and TheNextWeb. Though we … Continue reading Werner Predictions →
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
"Disagree and Let’s See"
"Disagree and commit" is disingenuous. This is a better idea.
Bridging and My Time of Late
Lately, I have been writing a lot over on Gadget Wisdom, where I write more tech themed stories, about self-hosting. That isn’t exactly uncommon, it is a popular topic for many people.
But what does that do in relation to my longstanding practice of working on tools for my w...