New version of Micro Social is coming out, from Greg Morris:
Apple have approved a new version of Micro Social that includes posting to multiple blogs, managing and updating existing posts as well as a few other improvements.
I also fixed an issue on the Micro.blog side with push notifications.
There’s such an increase in distrust of tech companies, we now have to be more explicit about super obvious things that we would never do. Users expect the worst because they’ve been burned. So it goes.
Skimming through some of the negative reaction to Mozilla’s new terms. I took a minute to update Micro.blog’s own privacy policy so that it’s current. Our terms of service has always said you own your data. Never even crossed my mind to sell data it’s such a foreign idea and counter to our mission.
iOS will have new APIs for getting the age of a user. Sarah Perez writing at TechCrunch:
It puts Apple in the position of collecting kids’ ages via parental input but still puts the onus on the third-party developer to extract and use this information to craft age-appropriate experiences in their own apps.
Seems helpful to me. It doesn’t appear to address the flip side of age verification, making sure someone is an adult, but Apple could add that later.
Love an old train station getting a new life. Bloomberg article from a couple months ago, about the station in Detroit with new office space and green space:
But the main attraction is still the 18-story tower, designed by the same architects who worked on Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, Reed and Stem with Warren and Wetmore. Just like its New York sibling, Michigan Central features terrazzo and marble flooring, Doric columns and Guastavino tiles — all restored to their original glory.
Adding to my list to visit one day. 🚂
Nick Heer is impressed with Alexa+, except:
But there is no part of me that would ever want Alexa or any other voice-controlled assistant buying tickets to a show, or booking a vacation rental, or even buying groceries.
I also don’t trust AI for this. And yet, in 1995 a lot of people didn’t trust entering credit cards on the web. I’m open to the possibility that in 10 years, AI buying things for us will be normal.
If you’re in town around SXSW, check out Fediverse House, a 2-day event hosted by Flipboard and Surf. Amazing lineup of folks including Mike McCue, Molly White, Evan Prodromou, and Paul Frazee. I’ll also be giving a short presentation during the developer meetup about Micro.blog and the fediverse.
Many news sites and social networks have a headlines section for trending news. Maybe we need to take a hint from traditional newspapers and replace that with a high-profile “corrections” section that is just all the news that’s factually wrong with a summary of the truth.
The measles outbreak here in Texas is such a sad reminder of the real harm of misinformation. So many little kids are in the ICU that it seems likely more will die. Tragic and preventable.
I still want to do more with Open Library. Our app Epilogue can search and get covers from Open Library. But the database just isn’t complete enough and needs more apps to help users add and curate book metadata.
When I added tracking what books you’re reading (and blogging about) to Micro.blog, I used ISBN as the identifier. Every once in a while that’s a problem, like my post today for a short story. I added it manually using the Goodreads ID with a “G” prefix. Not great but maybe a possible convention.
There’s another lawsuit against Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, this time from a WP Engine customer. It seems to conflate the project code and the servers into a single “WordPress ecosystem”, but that’s not how open source works. The software can be totally free and companion services less free.
Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch. Great to have another Gentleman Bastard story. Split into two parts in Grimdark Magazine. 📚
Alexa+ pricing makes no sense. $20/month or free for Amazon Prime subscribers… Prime is $15/month. I can think of a few reasons to do it this way and none of them justify user confusion.
I’m following the Verge’s live blog for the Alexa event. Amazon really should be leading in this space since they created the Echo out of nothing 10 years ago. Fun to re-read my first blog post about the Echo.
Alexa+ will be a paid upgrade. Tim Cook is now wondering how he can charge for Siri too.
People give Matt Mullenweg a lot of shit, but do they realize how hopeless the open web would be if he and his friends hadn’t kept it going for 20+ years.
Fascinating to imagine what the web would look like if WordPress didn’t exist. What would fill the void, and would it be as open?
Trying out Flashes, a photos app for Bluesky. On the surface feels similar to our Micro.blog companion app Sunlit. Lots of potential.
Tried out ChatGPT Deep Research now that it’s on the less expensive plan. Don’t have a lot of use for it, but it’s super impressive as a tool you might take out every once in a while. I used it to dig into some background facts for a blog post.
Working on some ActivityPub tweaks today, finally added some code to handle Question objects / polls. It was confusing to not have the context for these posts from Mastodon before. They look like this in the Micro.blog timeline now:
Personally I don’t use polls. I’ll revisit doing more later.
Scott Lynch in his newsletter:
I have decided to post every short story I’ve ever written (once rights exclusivity periods or other arrangements for them expire, for those that haven’t already) on my website, for free, in perpetuity, at the same time I make them available as e-books. Many of them are available elsewhere for free already. I just want to centralize the archive.
Feels like a very IndieWeb-y statement. And more authors when self-publishing are fine with DRM-free, which is also great.
HTTP content negotiation was a mistake. The perceived wins are always overshadowed by all the new problems. I’ve long thought a slimmed down ActivityPub without content negotiation and without JSON-LD would be so much nicer. Sorry folks! Controversial hot take but it’s true. 🤪
Congrats to John Siracusa on the release of his newest Mac app, Hyperspace:
There are plenty of Mac apps that will save disk space by finding duplicate files and then deleting the duplicates. Using APFS clones, my app could reclaim disk space without removing any files! As a digital pack rat, this appealed to me immensely.
It is a dangerously clever way to save disk space. I probably wouldn’t trust this app from anyone else, but I know John has tested the heck out of it. Your files are in good hands.
A little quiet today but I got a lot done. Random debugging and wrapped up some new Open Graph plumbing which I’ll blog about tomorrow morning.
Two stories that feel loosely connected. First on NPR, highlighting a veteran in Alaska fired from the Small Business Administration. He was planning to finish his career with the government, now he’s losing sleep, worried about supporting his family, saying:
I’ve never felt more betrayed in my entire life.
Then via Political Wire, James Carville has a prediction:
I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.
Finished reading: Empire of Exiles by Erin M Evans. This was excellent. Starts like a murder mystery set in a fantasy world, with unique magic. 📚
The new 5G router — which we knew would be a temporary solution until Google Fiber is sorted out — has a habit of going out every afternoon around 2-3pm. Just poof, no wi-fi for a little while, time to take a walk or read a book. Maybe random but it’s feeling like a pattern.
Dave Winer is launching WordLand:
The goal is to bootstrap something new – a social network without all the problems of Twitter et al. Ultimately the limits they impose on writers are unacceptable. I’ve waited for them to fix these problems for 18 years now, and I’ve come to see, amazingly, they don’t see them as problems.
One way to think about WordLand is that it’s a posting front-end to WordPress, with its own RSS feeds outside of WordPress. The feeds have both HTML and Markdown. So you could build platforms (like Micro.blog!) that aggregate user feeds.
In addition to being a very good Micro.blog client, Micro Social also has pretty much all of the book features from our companion app Epilogue. I recorded a quick video playing around with it.