Matt Mullenweg blogs about the division in WordPress between bloggers and site builders:

Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world.

This is a disconnect I noticed years ago. So much effort was spent on competing with Squarespace and Wix, WordPress felt bloated for regular bloggers. I’m glad Matt is aware of it.

Just remembered I can use Micro.blog’s batch find-and-replace to update all of my previous x.com links to use xcancel.com instead. Easy.

Whether we like it or not, X seems to be growing again, after the first couple years with Elon Musk overseeing the social network’s implosion. I stopped posting in 2013 and will never post again. But I have been linking to posts there. Starting today, I’m switching all future X links to xcancel.com.

I read the PDF report from Mastodon about usability problems and feedback from the community. Imani Joy in the intro:

We were beginning to find our way in terms of creating a development roadmap, but beyond major projects and obvious requirements (based in security, compliance, and grant-based deliverables) it was often unclear which feedback to take action on first.

Imani has done great work on this. But Mastodon development has always felt like a slow-moving open source project to me. What they need is the same energy as a startup.

Trying to parse the significance of Jeff Dean leaving Google after 26 years, and Demis Hassabis stepping into a new role as chairman of DeepMind. Is this a shakeup, or just that everyone is ready for a change? Sounds more amicable than the usual AI executive reshuffling.

Tragic reporting from Bloomberg about how safer TikTok algorithms were withheld from some users so TikTok could A/B test engagement:

Chase’s account was stuck in a so-called filter bubble, an online echo chamber that pumped out repetitive content the algorithm predicted he’d want to watch. There he received an “onslaught” of suicide and self-harm content, according to the document.

If you accidentally create a harmful product, that’s one thing. It can be fixed to prevent future harm. But if you have the fix and refuse to deploy it widely, to me that’s inexcusable.

Good news that the iPhone announcement will likely be an in-person live event. It’s past time. And it’ll be a more personable way to introduce John Ternus.

Micro.blog is often confused with systems like Mastodon or Twitter. They are really very different. Those platforms connect your writing to people. Micro.blog connects it to the web.

The community is amazing too. I’m as committed as ever to the idea that small, open platforms can focus on safety. But what separates the platform from everything else is its open web principles. Every feature — from conversations to cross-posting — exists first to support writing on the web. Making blogs better and your presence on the web better.

Some people prefer the engagement they get on Mastodon or Instagram or whatever other social platform. That’s okay. It’s a big world and you should use whatever best suits you. And I’ll remain clear-eyed about what we’re doing and what we’re not doing.

I had missed that mastodon.cloud is shutting down. While its active user base has been shrinking, it still has a lot of total users and millions of posts. There’s still no way to migrate posts between Mastodon servers. (Mastodon posts → Micro.blog and some other fediverse servers works.)

Wavelength 2.0 for iOS seems hung up in Apple app review. It has been a few days. In the meantime, I have plenty to work on, but I’d love to ship it this week. 🤞

Austin landmark.

OpenAI shared some text messages and emails to support their side of the Apple lawsuit. OpenAI opens with this:

Apple is one of the greatest companies of all time, and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive and oddly personal lawsuit sadly doesn’t live up to that reputation.

Apple is clearly worried about OpenAI’s upcoming device. I remain skeptical of any company of Apple’s size using lawyers to stop a competitor.

Lots of recent work on the apps is rolling out. A new version of Sunlit today that has a bunch of design improvements and fixes. And the brand new Wavelength (our app for podcasting) is ready on Android, with iOS hopefully to follow soon.

Micro.blog includes podcast hosting at all plans. Crazy.

I made a change today for new users to essentially require setting the “about me” text for a Micro.blog profile. After you confirm signing up, you’ll get this page with some random profiles. I hope that it’ll help with discovery in the future and also weeding out non-humans more easily.

I’ve mentioned a few times how the AI community is overwhelmingly still using X. This is annoying because I’m fascinated with AI, and I like to know throughout the week what big changes are happening in the industry. I stopped posting to Twitter over a decade ago. And more r...

Updating the Mac app today with some improvements including a Scheduled tab and little indicator for scheduled posts.

While testing search, I stumbled on this blog post I wrote in 2013 about iOS 7 design. One of my favorites. But if I were to write a post like this about iOS 26 and Liquid Glass, what would it even say? I don’t think I could come up with a cohesive narrative for it.

Watched: Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Enjoyed this one. I was always more of a Spider-Man and X-Men comics fan back in the day. 🍿

This new app status page I created this weekend really highlights the madness of maintaining a suite of apps. 13 separate native app releases. 8 code bases.

“Your father didn’t believe in revenge.”
“Yeah, well, I do.”
— Dune: Part 2

New poll has James Talarico up 5 points. From the Texas Tribune:

Since Paxton locked up the GOP nomination in late May, polling of the contest has found a neck-and-neck race with neither candidate able to break 50%. But TPOR’s poll found Talarico leading among voters who do not have a college degree — a group that has consistently favored Republicans in Texas and across the country — and dominating among independents, less than a quarter of whom said they planned to vote for Paxton.

🇺🇸

Doing a little work this morning, fixing bugs. It’s a 10-minute All Too Well kind of playlist morning. 🎶

Little purple flowers popping up.

We have so many apps now, I’ve created yet another page with a table of apps across platforms and the current versions. The key improvement is it automatically updates with info from App Store Connect about whether there’s a new version in the queue.

I’ve been working on cross-platform mobile apps so much recently, had a funny moment while improving some things in Sunlit where I thought, “But how is this going to look on Android…” It’s not! iOS-only Swift app.

Links to this 404 Media article about scanning books for AI caught my eye because it implicates ISBNdb, which is one of the services we use in Micro.blog to get book metadata. The article says: …ISBNdb now helps AI labs source bulk printed book purchases of between 1,000 to...

I’m submitting Wavelength 2.0 to Apple and Google today. I blogged a few screenshots earlier this week, and I think it has turned out really well. It’s also open source on GitHub.

Reuters says that three months after the Australian ban, “8 in 10” teenagers are still using social media. It’s still very early, so I don’t think we need to read too much into it yet. There has been a shift:

Children’s continued social media use ​took place even as account ownership declined to 42% from 52%, with “statistically significant” reductions across YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok in particular, the report said.

Rewatched Dune: Part Two tonight, and hoping to start reading Dune Messiah soon, before the new movie comes out.

Apple is still drowning in cash. One thought after looking at the numbers: services revenue gets its first quarter-to-quarter dip in several years. Don’t worry, ads in Maps will fix this. 🤪