I keep up with AI by clicking around on X sometimes — sigh 🙁 — and it’s wild how many people still gripe in replies that OpenAI discontinued 4o. OpenAI is never bringing that model back. The overly empathetic, sycophantic tuning was the problem, especially for users struggling with mental health.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Leaflet is a nice editor designed to work with Bluesky. But they've been branching out. They now support email and RSS output. I would love to help them make their RSS outstanding. Could we put a small group of devs to work with the Leaflet guys, I would be happy to be part of this. First suggestions, remove unnecessary HTML markup, each reader is going to strip it out anyway, and if a feed looks nice it gives people the sense that the writer cares. Second -- support rssCloud. It's very easy to do and it means readers who support it will give their users instant updates, it won't have to wait for a poll. And third -- add support for source:markdown, so we can all get together on using Markdown as the common way of exchanging moderate size bits of text over the web. If Markdown had been around when we designed RSS 2.0, it would have been part of it.
On likes, reposts, and bookmarks
robida.net/entries/2026/05/10/on-likes-reposts-and-bookmarks
Routing around the algorithms
AOC in an interview nailed everything in one brief answer to a question from the audience. You can watch it here.
It was so good and quotable that I recorded it and via a transcript Google and Claude.
I've been emailing with Josh Marshall at TPM for the last few weeks, say...
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
Party
Watched: Remarkably Bright Creatures. Beautiful. 📺
Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
Lesbian necromancers in space. That’s the usual pitch for Gideon The Ninth and it’s not wrong. Though there’s a lot more necromancy than space or lesbianism.
The book begins in an environment fairly dripping with death, all bones and darkness. It sounds like it should be gr...
Watched: The Sheep Detectives. Actually really nice. 🍿
Serendipity
The steam of the espresso machine — of focusing in the milk to make sure it is just right, of tapping to remove the bubbles, of preparing. Soft instrumental music plays in the background, more upbeat than the music to which I was listening earlier — easing me more into the da...
Web to Mastodon makes sense
A post from Scripting News, automatically mirrored to a WordPress site, and that flowed via ActivityPub to Mastodon, via a relatively new feature in WordPress. Almost by accident Mastodon supports long text, styling and links -- even though their editor doesn't generate it, if it comes from the outside it will respect the styling.
Below is a post on Mastodon coming from WordPress. Masto's limits aren't enforced, and that's good.
The value of having a good bench
The Knicks continue to astound. Last night, they went up 3-0 against the Sixers in Philadelphia. Game 4 is tomorrow at 3:30PM Eastern.
Last night's game was a fantastic contrast with the way the Knicks played in the post-season last year. They had the same starting lineup t...
Got lost in videos and research for a backyard garden model railroad. This short video on YouTube provides a glimpse. We had an N scale but gave it away in the move last year. Would be fun to explore something larger and build a garden around it.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Canvas is open source, but its cloud services ransomware attack really hurts
It's "the biggest student data privacy disaster in history" - even though the core platform is open source.
Performance work on FeedLand
Just spent a couple of days working with FeedLand in Claude Code. I want to do some work on features, but first, we're looking at performance issues. There had been a longtime problem with categories that didn't have many feeds that were viewed through the news pages. Exampl...
Spurs win a hard-fought game 3 in Minneapolis. Refs seem largely okay with ignoring many fouls, so who knows what’s going to happen. Almost thought that overturned out of bounds with 2 minutes left was going to sink the game… Whew. Everyone played really well. 🏀
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
The ocean will have us all
A solid week I had. Financially I got to pay some things down which have been vexingly unmoving for quite some time. I scheduled a new instance of FrESH. I added the John Cale song Barracuda to my 2026 playlist. Dark woman in the water drowning Sinking in a funny way Black footing for a...
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
FAQ: How do you use your typewriters?
I’m not going to worry about Hantavirus until Trump says that the cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” 😷
This Week in the IndieWeb
May 1-8, 2026
Recent Events
From events.indieweb.org/archive:
Homebrew Website Club - Eastern
Wednesday, May 6 at 6:00pm
Online! Zoom!
Pop-up: Feeds
Tuesday, May 5 at 7:00pm
Homebrew Website Club - Philadelphia
Sunday, May 3 at 6:00pm
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania: ...
Having trouble squaring the Cloudflare layoffs today (because of AI) with how aggressive they were last year going after AI bots. It’s like the company has gotten so big they aren’t internally consistent anymore.