FeedCity

Hope folks are having a good weekend. I rolled out a few changes this morning, including this “New Post…” menu option on the Uploads page. Surprised we never had this before.

I missed the memo for the outside space at this coffee shop… There are like 20 little kids and families running around here. Not a distraction, just makes me smile remembering how good life was with little kids. The bittersweet irony with parenting is not knowing until years later what you had.

John Gruber on the implications for sideloading if TikTok remains unavailable in the App Store:

If I’m wrong and TikTok remains in this half-zombie state in the US — unavailable in the App Store or Play Store, but operational if you have the app installed on your phone — it’ll be interesting if TikTok is the app that makes the mass market actually care about the lack of sideloading on iOS. It’ll be interesting too if sideloading on Android goes mainstream because of this.

TikTok should make an iOS marketplace app in the EU to demonstrate to US customers what they’re missing.

Sent another Micro.blog iOS build out to beta folks, also decided to submit this one to Apple. Need to get these fixes out to everyone, even if there’s more to do.

If you haven’t read Wind and Truth, book 5 of the Stormlight Archive, please skip this post. Spoilers ahead. Knowing someone else’s opinion about a book before you read it risks ruining your own interpretation. I finished Wind and Truth last week and generally loved most of...

Saturday morning is a great time to draft a couple blog posts that won’t be published until later. I usually work a little every day, but the weekend should be quiet. Sometimes I wish I had the discipline to only announce new things on Tuesdays like Apple.

Worked on some iPad fixes and pushed a new TestFlight beta, then settled in to watch the Spurs. Stephon Castle with 30+ points, really showing what he can do. 🏀

Love this photo from Stephen Hackett of his notebooks. Also very smart to have digital copies. I’ve scanned some of my old journals in but not all of them. Really want to finish that task because it makes me very nervous to lose the journals.

This is cool: a new sidebar plug-in by Leon Mika for the Bayou theme.

Spots 7-10 for the NBA play-in are shaping up to be very interesting! Spurs look good. Blazers have won their last 9 of 10 games. Warriors and Mavs will both look a little different for the rest of the season. 🏀

I’m the guest on the latest Hanselminutes podcast! It was great talking to Scott. We covered a lot in just half an hour: blogging, domain names, social networks, the fediverse, POSSE, discovery, and the Micro.one launch.

So many nails and staples.

Micro.one and Micro.blog onboarding is not very good. And yet new people join every day and start blogging. Welcome! We’ll make it better. Thanks for jumping through the hoops to get here.

Inoreader adds support for Bluesky. This uses the API, not the RSS feeds, so there’s more flexibility in how they can integrate the content:

Bluesky content is displayed in our custom microblog layout, designed for platforms like Bluesky, Facebook, and Micro.blog that don’t follow the traditional headline + content format. It’s a clean, streamlined reading experience we’re sure you’ll love!

Manu Moreale blogs about how we label people, how we define them based on large groups instead of who they are:

The moment you started using these definitions, you lost me. Not because I’m offended by them, but because it saddens me to see the complete annihilation of individuality which is what makes us uniquely interesting. The moment you decide to simply label someone as anything, you prime yourself to be incapable of recognizing that there’s a lot more beneath the surface.

People are complicated. If we oversimplify, we risk only highlighting our differences instead of what connects us.

Old trains.

Lots of talk in the AI space about moats. Does any model have such an outsized advantage that it just can’t be beat, protecting the business from competition? But the best moat is a great product. OpenAI still has a technical and UX lead across their suite of products. Might not always be that way.

You know what was great last night? Spurs vs. Hawks, first game with De’Aaron Fox in the lineup. I missed some of it and rewatched the last 5 minutes on tape delay. 🏀

I wrote a script last night that can take any missing photos on a blog and restore them from the Wayback Machine. Feels like it should be tucked away somewhere as a Micro.blog feature, but not sure where yet.

Simple goals for today:

• Meet with the gutter guy about installing gutters for the roof.
• Answer emails. Support email feels manageable for the first time in a year.
• Find some small thing I can deploy to Micro.blog, a fix or feature, to make life a tiny bit better.

Tonight Adam Newbold posted about receiving a cease and desist. Some people assumed it was from me, but I had never heard of it. Micro.blog has not sent anyone a cease and desist. I have been focused on making Micro.blog better and hiring Sven to help answer customer questions, not hiring lawyers.

New home internet update: Verizon 5G router arrived and it’s… alright. 100 Mbps if the wind is blowing the right direction. 🤪 Trying to be patient until fiber is ready.

Today we’re rolling out two plug-in changes to Micro.blog. The first is that for new users, the Sumo theme by Matt Langford is now the default theme. This is a great theme that I think will serve new users better than our previous default theme Marfa. Sumo is better maintained and easier to customize.

Inspired by the good work that plug-in developers are doing, we’re also starting to sprinkle in donation buttons on your plug-ins list. The buttons can say either donate, tip, or buy me a coffee. Here’s an example:

I’ve been manually wiring these up, but later we’ll automate this so that Micro.blog can discover the donation link via a plug-in’s config or readme. If you’ve created a plug-in that accepts donations, let me know and I’ll update the listing.

Federico Viticci blogging about timeline apps:

My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.

There’s no reason these apps can’t also support creating new posts. Sort of like how the Micro.blog iOS app can post to WordPress. I don’t think apps need to support all social features, though.

Amazon’s Kindle Vella is shutting down with only a few weeks notice. I never read any stories but I thought it was an interesting idea — serialized novels delivered in short episodes like a chapter at a time, mostly fantasy and romance. Perhaps should’ve been more integrated with Kindle Unlimited.

Tapestry from the Iconfactory is out! Of course I love that it supports Micro.blog. And it makes me happy just seeing developers experiment with new ways to mix open social platforms together.

We’re a few days in to not having internet at the house, which means no YouTube TV, Max, Netflix, Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, FanDuel Sports, and Hulu. Our over-the-air antenna reception looks amazing, though. Sort of want to cancel everything and start over with local TV.

When you’re late to the game, do less, better. Apple used to know this. When the original iPod arrived at my house, I could tell it was a breakthrough. Famously less space than a Nomad, but an innovative UI, great design, and fast FireWire. It was so good it set in motion ev...

Jason Snell wonders if AltStore should’ve poked the bear. He covers both sides well:

Is notarization a tool Apple can use to bypass all of Europe’s regulations of Apple whenever it feels like preventing users from running MacPaint on an iPad? Or is it something out of Apple’s hands?

Apple’s iOS “notarization” is a flawed approach, clearly at odds with the DMA. It’s appropriate for them to be called out until they fix this so that it matches macOS notarization, which requires no human review.

Finished reading: Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson. Not even sure what to say. Still letting the end of the first arc sink in. 📚