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. 🤪

Friend is certainly a unique product that some people will hate, but I find the decisions fascinating. Each device is randomly assigned a voice and personality that you can’t change. Is it a real product or an experiment? I guess both!

Wired has a story about the new Friend 2.0 pendant and its creator, Avi Schiffmann:

That analog component is important to Schiffmann. He says he doesn’t have an internet connection in his home. He listens to music on a record player. He’s shooting a documentary about himself on Kodak Ektachrome.

This video posted on X about OpenAI’s mission is very good. Feels personal and real. Jason says:

i wanted to capture what it feels like to work here, what our mission means to me, and why you should join us.

OpenAI should run some version of this as an official ad. Even some of the companies that I dislike the most (like Meta) have thousands of people who believe in their work and are trying to do something meaningful.

Jason Snell getting ready for Apple’s quarterly results later today, when Tim Cook will appear on his 90th financial call for Apple:

That’s more than two decades of talking on the phone once a quarter to financial analysts. He’s probably earned a break.

This flow:

1. Have a thought.
2. Start writing a short post about it.
3. It’s not working. Expand into a full-length blog post.
4. Still no good. Delete the draft and copy the text into a note.
5. Months later, pull the draft into a better blog post about a larger topic.

In other words, always write things down.

Had fun last night hacking on a new gadget project with my son. Still a long way to go… Hoping to take apart this iPod and 3D print new guts for it. It might not work! Next step is soldering the microphone to test.

While I do think we’re in an AI bubble of sorts and that many of the current VC-funded companies will fail, I also think we’re only at the beginning of how much AI will grow and impact society. It makes for a strange tension.