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IndieWeb
Listened to the new Wicked’s Defying Gravity this morning in the car. Everything about it — Cynthia, Ariana, the orchestra… This rendition is extraordinary. 🧹
Book and film covers! I’ve updated Micro.blog to show little thumbnails of book covers when you blog about a book using Micro.blog or our companion app Epilogue. I wanted something visually helpful but less in your face than link preview banners. There’s also special support for Letterboxd links.
I’ve never thought custom emoji were a good idea. People say they love them, but how often are they used? Micro.blog spends a silly amount of time just downloading all the custom emoji from Mastodon instances so they can be displayed correctly. Currently 1 million custom emoji from 4000 servers. 🤪
Mum Foods. The best BBQ I’ve had in a long while.
Substack’s RSS feeds are a disaster. It’s like the programmers never once looked at the XML output. You could say it doesn’t matter, but feeds and HTML that are cleaner and more readable are also usually faster to process and do something useful with.
Good post by Allen Pike about Apple Intelligence. On-device AI is great for notification summaries, but falls short for much of the rest:
While an underpowered-but-automatic notification summary can be better than nothing, there isn’t a lot of purpose to an underpowered image generation app. You can tell from the name that Apple knows “Image Playground” is, at best, a toy.
Apple is a little bit trapped with their AI strategy. For some things they can’t be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. If I was Apple, I would focus only on what smaller models are great at — notifications and writing tools — and then open up Siri to be extensible with frontier models.
We went to see Wicked a second time. Happy to confirm that it wasn’t my imagination: they did, in fact, nail the film adaptation. Great crowd in the theater tonight too. 🧹
Alan Jacobs responds to posts from Ted Gioia, Sam Kahn, and others about Substack
It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging.
Realized after posting this yesterday that I was trying to be too clever. I had thought it would work either taken literally or if recognized, but it mostly fell flat. Don’t read too much into it. For completeness here’s the Jack Dorsey tweet.
Mozart’s Coffee is already reserving spots for their Christmas lights, so next week’s IndieWeb Meetup will be at Radio Coffee & Beer instead. Wednesday, 7pm. 🎄
Working through several little server optimizations while the family sleeps. 😴
Austin’s IndieWeb Meetup returns next week: Wednesday, Dec 4th, 7pm at Mozart’s Coffee. Everyone’s welcome to stop by for a coffee and chat about the open web. What are you working on, and what can we do to move the social web forward?
Tim Chambers blogs some more thoughts on where the social web platforms are right now:
Threads and Bluesky’s massive success of late and Mastodon’s modest success does not make Mastodon and other fediverse/activitypub offerings losers. In this case it isn’t zero-sum. Fully open, patent free, non-commercial offerings like Mastodon, etc, have different needs and lifecycles and futures not tied to VC’s or shareholders.
I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Jay Graber is the singular solution I trust.
This week Mark Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago with a convicted criminal who is out on bail. I stopped posting to Instagram in 2017, but I keep giving Meta second chances. No more. It’s time to burn this shit to the ground and move forward with the open web. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.
Wow, Wicked. They actually pulled it off. So good. 🧹
We have a fairly large set of Micro.blog changes ready to go live. I want to deploy them now but the wiser me knows middle of Thanksgiving is a bad idea. Perhaps tonight, or I’ll push it until the morning. 🦃
There will not be a Black Friday sale for Micro.blog. No better time than right now to sign up and subscribe.
New episode of Core Int just in time to queue up for your Thanksgiving travel. We talk about my short vacation last week, working while away, dealing with bugs, Bluesky growth, and the state of the social web.
I may seem easygoing and agreeable on the surface, don’t mind a little friendly competition, but deep down… I do not like to lose.
What the heck, Austin? In the last few weeks we’ve now made two full-priced offers on houses and not gotten either one. Sigh. 🏡
Ben Werdmuller writes about the fallout from an attempt to train AI on Bluesky posts:
So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data.
I also like Tantek Çelik’s proposal to add a “no-training” flavor of Creative Commons. I blogged about that a couple months ago.
I hadn’t noticed this before. New styling for blockquotes on Mastodon. This post started on my blog: Markdown → HTML → ActivityPub → Mastodon. This version of Mastodon is probably deployed widely enough that I can drop the redundant quotes that Micro.blog adds.
This perspective rings true to me, on a platform’s decay from Steve Troughton-Smith:
Threads has the same problem all of Meta’s social media properties have: nobody really wants to be on them. That social graph may be the company’s crown jewels, but there’s a clear sense of decay, a radioactive half-life to Facebook, Instagram, et al that portends doom
I enjoyed this response article from Elizabeth Lopatto to Sam Altman’s notebook advice. “I do not rip pages out of my notebook regularly because I am not deranged.” 🤣
Three weeks since I stopped posting to Threads. I don’t miss it. If they ever actually finish the ActivityPub rollout, I’ll migrate my followers to Micro.blog and keep avoiding Meta. Your milage may vary.
