I’ve been very down the last few days, but I just spent some time skimming through random posts on Micro.blog, including from some blogs and people I hadn’t even seen yet. Warms my heart.

The open web has made progress in recent years, even if social media often feels in crisis. We’ll get there. ❤️

As usual, Ben Thompson’s framing is quite good:

…OpenAI’s wrenching transition from research lab to consumer tech company is now complete. The next goal from here is world domination, and we’re all, for better or worse, along for the ride.

AI is so big and so complicated at this point, that I’m confident there will be better and worse. There will be useful tools, like for coding and medical research, and there will be slop and negative outcomes. Our task is to minimize the harms without throwing away the positive breakthroughs.

Sora is not really for me. It’s fun to watch, but I’ve never wanted to create this style of video. Then I thought, could I use it to create some animated videos with public domain material like 1920s Mickey Mouse? Nope! Their guardrails are too strict.

Good post by Michael Tsai on Apple’s exclusive control over app distribution and how the problem is more fundamental that just the ICEBlock removal:

They designed a system with a kill switch, and now people are surprised and upset that they used it. The problem is not that they pressed the button this one time when you didn’t want them to. The problem is that there is a button and Apple likes having it.

Picked up my car from the repair shop. Nice new bumper and paint, “like new” for a 2008 car. Itching to drive somewhere.

Matt Baer writes on the state of the web and looking for real-life connections:

Now we create “content” for the masses, and consume others' commodified lives; we self-censor and are careful not to post. The light, fun space the internet once was is now heavy and consequential.

Really feeling this.

I think with optimizations this week I inadvertently made some blog publishing times slower. Rolling out a potential fix and continuing to monitor. Also deploying a bunch of behind the scenes infrastructure for the new video stuff.

Spent some time reading through Mastodon’s early draft for starter packs. Too soon for me to implement anything. We’ve supported browsing Bluesky starter packs inside Micro.blog for a while, so would still like to do more there.

When I have a blog post draft that has been sitting around for too long, I copy the text into a Micro.blog note and delete the draft. It’s surprisingly freeing not to have unfinished posts hanging around. (Yet still have the text if I ever want to bring it back into a new post.)

One of those days when most everything is hard, yet there are still a few moments of clarity. The view out from Whole Foods. Took a little time for breakfast tacos and work in between visits to the hospital. 😞

Anil Dash making a strong case for video creators to work on independence from TikTok and other big platforms. The algorithm is fragile. It might help you today, but tomorrow you’ve lost everything without a direct connection to your audience.

Federico Viticci blogging about the news from yesterday’s OpenAI DevDay and the impact of ChatGPT becoming a platform:

If I were Apple, I’d start growing increasingly concerned at the prospect of another company controlling the interactions between users and their favorite apps.

Ben Thompson: “OpenAI is making a play to be the Windows of AI.” Also, on the inevitable bubble and the infrastructure we’ll be left with:

The real payoff would be a massive build-out in power generation, which would be a benefit for the next half a century.

Big news from Riley Testut about AltStore PAL, integrating with the fediverse, and new investment to grow the platform and give back to other open web tools. Very cool, congrats to everyone involved!

Here’s a quick screencast to show the new Movies page in the Micro.blog sidebar. This blog post is also a test of longer video hosting on Micro.blog! 🤞

FediForum starts tomorrow and runs for a couple days. It’s an online conference for folks who want to discuss and build for the future of the social web, from Mastodon to Bluesky. There has been a lot of new developer activity over on the Bluesky side, so I’m curious if any of that will bubble up.

For all the folks overseas, I’d like to do more for localization in Micro.blog. Not the main UI, but the parts that show up on your own blog, e.g. “Finished reading”, “Watched this movie”… I tried AI to dynamically translate a few things on the fly, but it’s a dead end. Maybe crowdsourced later.

Parker Ortolani blogs early praise for Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses. They are solving completely different problems than the Vision Pro:

At one point I was walking down the street, spotted a coffee shop across the way, and simply popped up the maps app on the glasses to see details.

Really good Stratechery update this morning from Ben Thompson about Sora’s rise to #1 in the App Store. People are having fun with the app, but I don’t think creativity with prompts is the same as real photography and filmmaking. I’m also pessimistic about the effects of infinite scrollable content.

Brent Simmons blogged about why NetNewsWire isn’t a web app, along the way making the case for Apple letting us use our devices as the computers that they are:

What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad users to load — not sideload, a term I detest, because it assumes Apple’s side of things — whatever apps they want to. Because those devices are computers.

Watched One Battle After Another. Even though I saw the trailer, didn’t actually know what it was about. Intense, excellent. 🍿

Manu Moreale blogs about posting on social media as a performance:

By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone.

Last week a solicitor came to our door selling the usual house upgrades: new roof, windows, even solar panels. Normally I would say no thanks and they would be on their way, but just the day before I had been thinking about solar, so I figured sure, actually I am interested ...

I think we need to do something fun, so I’m swapping the order of new features rolling out this week. First, movies search and easy blogging about movies. Second, new video hosting plan. 🍿

Nice walk with the dog today. Also digging in the yard and thinking. Here’s my new rule for when online discussions get heated: let’s pay attention to who are the firefighters and who are the arsonists.

That reply I mentioned wanting to delete last night didn’t seem to get synced everywhere. Oh well, I’ll let it stand. If anyone was following along, know that I’m wrong sometimes but I never lie. I try to assume the best in people and sometimes get burned, but thankfully very rarely.

Got so derailed yesterday that I had to stop working on a feature in the middle of a change before I had even committed it. This pushes back the new video hosting support a day or two, but still should be able to launch it next week. Just working through some HDR issues.

Laughed a little when I saw this sign yesterday. I’ve been taking this elevator a bunch over the last week and it always shakes and rattles like maybe you’re lucky when it successfully makes it back to the first floor. Came back at night and it seems fixed. 🤞

Lost my cool today and sent a reply I shouldn’t have. I’m deleting it, which is very unusual for me. I never delete posts! Ironically it was just hours after I blogged that we’re all human and make occasional mistakes.

I wasn’t going to announce this until later, but today feels right… Earlier this week, I hired someone to fill the role of community manager at Micro.blog. I’ll be officially welcoming her in a couple weeks. Thanks everyone for your patience while we figured this out!