IndieWeb
The next FediForum is coming up in a couple weeks. I just registered.
Join us for two half-days of discussions, demos, presentations, teaching, learning and plotting next steps in moving the open social web, the Fediverse and social media based on open protocols forward!
FediForum https://mastodon.social/@fediforum/115254204842427492
Starting to get tempted by the iPhone Air, but still committed to keeping my old phone for a while. I listened to two shows this week that were really good: MKBHD’s review and today’s Dithering.
I’m cracking up at this essay in The New Yorker:
A two-bedroom house with a front yard and a back yard? Psh. What do you need all that space for? Yoga? I’m from New York. I once paid two thousand dollars a month to live in the freight elevator of the former Filene’s Basement, in Union Square.
Om Malik really likes the iPhone Air:
I don’t tend to get smitten by something so quickly, but the “Air” is really up there. It’s so thin you think a strong gust of air could really blow it away from your hands. (These puns keep coming on their own. I swear I’m not trying.)
As a consumer, I never ask to reverse a credit card charge because I know how difficult it is for small businesses. If someone forgets they signed up for Micro.blog, misses the emails, a chargeback costs us $15. It makes it feel pointless for us to offer inexpensive $1 subscriptions. Frustrating.
NVIDIA investing $100 billion in OpenAI with plans to build 10 gigawatts of data center capacity. Sam Altman:
Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.
So much money, so many plates spinning in the air. I’m increasingly thinking that we’ll have OpenAI and Google for the mainstream, Anthropic carving out an enterprise niche, Meta doing the ads thing, open source models… and the rest of the industry is going to fade away.
Not sure why, but I shot a quick video going up the glass elevator at the hospital. Maybe because our photos and videos fill in details of visits when we don’t write everything down.
Still waiting on bug fixes in our Android app to be approved. Apple’s review times seem consistently faster than Google now. I don’t want any review for bug fixes, of course, but gotta hand it to Apple for improving this so much.
Barry Hess on his blog:
What I wouldn’t give for all of us to be a bit more naive.
A bit less social media.
A bit less 24-hour news.
Paul Frazee has another post about the relationship between a PDS and the app layer of AT Protocol. With diagrams! Good description of how moderation and migration can work.
I’ve been testing with Mastodon quote posts, which I’ll officially announce (partial) support for in Micro.blog tomorrow. Not gonna lie, a little surprised that my first pass implementation mostly worked. As I’ve said too many times, ActivityPub testing is tricky.
Mark Gurman writing about recent news and also next year’s foldable iPhone:
As for how the foldable iPhone will look, I am increasingly told that users should imagine two titanium iPhone Airs side-by-side. In other words, it’s going to be super thin and a design achievement.
This is really neat for fediverse devs: ActivityPub.Academy. Essentially a modified version of Mastodon that can show a log of activities being sent, to troubleshoot interoperability problems.
WNBA playoffs! Watching Aces vs. Fever. Only a quarter left and Aces might be falling too far behind. 🏀
I’ve drafted some posts about current events, especially working through my thoughts on free speech and social platforms, but I think my blog needs to veer away from the political for a while. Also, watched Josh Shapiro on Meet the Press this morning and thought his answers were really good. 🇺🇸
Joshua Rothman writing at The New Yorker about living one day at a time, without strict to-do lists:
If you can start a day by asking what you feel like doing, and end it by asking what, in the end, you felt like doing and were able to do, then perhaps you can more easily experience that day as a wave to which you respond.
Looking at Bluesky, for a moment my brain stopped working and I read the time “40m” as “40 months”.
I’ve never liked relative dates, so in Micro.blog for recent posts we show the time alone. There is a sort of stay engaged urgency to “5 minutes ago”. But it’s okay if nothing important just happened.
We’ll ship the initial support in Micro.blog for displaying Mastodon quote posts on Monday. I’m essentially converting the quotes to Quotebacks, because Quotebacks are already used within Micro.blog for the “embed” link. Still would like to do more with these in the future.
My tip for fediverse devs trying to implement FEP-044f: first memorize who Alice and Bob are and what they’re posting. 🙂 Makes it easier to follow everything else. I’m done coding the basics, so now get to see how it interacts with real servers.
Now that Mastodon 4.5 is live on mastodon.social, I can resume work on receiving quote posts from the fediverse, i.e. FEP-044f. This spec is very complicated. Feeling some urgency to finish the implementation before I forget how it all works.
Busy day yesterday juggling lots of different things. This morning I get to try to catch up. Coffee at Medici in the Domain. ☕️
Bluesky is spinning out the PLC directory:
After considering several jurisdictions, legal structures, and potential parent organizations, the new entity will form as a Swiss Association. In a period of international uncertainty around Internet governance, Switzerland provides a credibly neutral and stable global home.
I like this. They’ve always acknowledged that PLC wasn’t intended to be permanent. Now there’s progress that’s better without waiting for it to be perfect.
Smart move by Mastodon to get into the hosting business:
This could be a fully operated server under the organisation’s own domain run by our team (with moderation included, on request); or, we can work with an organisation’s in-house operations team, via a support contract.
I’ve noticed whenever I catch Mastodon’s financial reports that individual donations have dropped. It’s hard to make donations work unless you have frequent NPR-style fundraising. Hosting will be mostly for larger institutions, not trying to compete with all the many smaller indie servers.
Recorded a short screencast of the new Open Graph image preview interface in Micro.blog, especially for folks who want to tinker with their own design for a theme or plug-in.
Starting to doubt my low-tech video workflow of “just use QuickTime Player” for simple edits. I keep uploading video to YouTube where the audio becomes out of sync after upload. This is probably a reminder to make Micro.blog suitable for longer videos.
Updated the new help page for Open Graph card templates, which are rolling out in Micro.blog today. Plug-in developers can essentially design cards with HTML and CSS. Micro.blog then renderers them as static images.
David Smith blogging on the 5 year anniversary of Widgetsmith, telling the story of how a seemingly niche app ended up huge:
I then open my helpdesk page and I am shocked by what I see. There are new emails coming in at a rate of multiple per second. A literal waterfall of customer outreach.
Drove through my old neighborhood in south Austin for the first time in a while. In some ways, the decades haven’t changed it. But things are still different. A few larger new houses. Waymo cars driving themselves down streets as if that is perfectly normal and not science fiction.
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses really are impressive. I’m not going to support Meta with a purchase, but I do appreciate the work that went into them. Nice live demos too, even if a couple failed. Ben Thompson:
They are an excellent explanation as to why Apple now fully pre-records their product announcements, but it’s the risk of demo fails happening that makes them so compelling.
