FeedCity

The default Micro.blog archive page has become unmanageable for blogs like mine with a 20-year history. Experimenting with an update that groups by month and only shows one year at a time. You can see it here on my blog. Thinking of making this an optional plug-in.

I’ve been fine-tuning publishing performance again. Shaving off a second here or there. Some things including full rebuilds should be better now. More to do!

Nick Heer asking the right question about Apple suing Jon Prosser:

This multitrillion-dollar company was financially injured by a few YouTube videos showing the redesign of its operating system?

This lawsuit is clearly a threat to future leakers. Apple shouldn’t throw its weight around like this.

AI researchers are still mostly on Twitter / X, unfortunately. This thread from OpenAI’s Keren Gu shows the interesting balance between biological safety and not preventing actual biologists and chemists from getting work done. Good to err on the side of not helping people make weapons.

Just discovered a wrinkle with our setting to disable fediverse posting. If you @-mention someone in a blog post, Micro.blog sends a copy to that person, so your post will leak out to fediverse servers anyway. Not sure what to do about this.

Excited for Portland fans. Not enough players get to spend their whole career with the same team, or at least retire with it. From @cheesemaker:

There are so many terrible things going on in the world but for this one moment I am mainlining the pure joy knowing that Damian Lillard is once again a Portland Trail Blazer. 🏀

Disappointed to hear about The Late Show cancellation. I’ve been watching it (and Jimmy Kimmel) way more than I did a couple years ago. Humor can be a good way to cope with the news sometimes. 📺

I drove by this spot on Parmer Lane yesterday and was amazed. This corner used to be a gas station and McDonalds! They tore it down and now it’s a field of grass and wildflowers.

Posted a new Micro.blog for Mac with tweaks around copying links and HTML. This follows yesterday’s major release improving notes sync, search, and versioning.

I love working on the Mac app. But unless there are any bugs, I’m going to focus mostly on the core platform and mobile for now.

It took me a minute to realize “and Other Stuff” as a company name was a play on Nostr’s name. Also kind of fits the spirit of Obvious Corp from early Twitter days. They have quite a few specific goals.

🅖

Manu Moreale blogs about Apple products and the trend of distancing ourselves from problematic CEOs:

Do I need to check if the Suunto CEO is a piece of shit to make sure I can wear this watch on my wrist and still feel at peace with myself? Frankly, I think it’s an exhausting way to live a life, and I’d be better off focusing all those energies somewhere else, trying to make something good, something that has a positive impact on the people around me.

I’ve disabled ActivityPub federation for my blog posts again. Too much negativity on Mastodon. I have a lot going on and can’t deal with it. For the rest of the year, for external services just going to focus on Bluesky.

Listening to the new Revolution.Social podcast. First episode is Rabble talking to Jack Dorsey. Jack is a good example of what I was trying to say in my blog post yesterday about criticism. So much hate is directed at Jack. We can disagree with his decisions, but he’s principled and thoughtful.

I ran something through ChatGPT earlier and one if its bits of feedback was:

One small grammatical suggestion is to connect the final two sentences to improve flow…

The solution? Add an em dash, of course! 🙂 ChatGPT is nuts for em dashes. It uses them when a semicolon or period or anything else might be better. See also my post just last week.

At my mom’s house she has an old framed print of the poem Children Learn What They Live by Dorothy Nolte. There are variations of it, but the first line is essentially: If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. I was staring at that and thinking of social med...

Big update to Micro.blog for Mac today if you use the notes feature. Everything is faster and more robust. I personally have probably a thousand notes, and it was a little flaky with so many notes before.

I’ve also added a “Versions…” option to the context menu. Micro.blog keeps a record of each edit to a note, so if you make a mistake you can go back to an older version. Now there’s an interface for browsing and restoring a previous copy of the note. (This interface will come to the web later. The third-party web client Lillihub already has something similar!)

Here’s a screenshot of the main interface. This is a test “Journal” notebook (you can have multiple notebooks) that also shows the new sharing URL pane.

Dave Winer:

We’re turning the clock back to move forward. Trying to undo the damage Twitter did to the web.

This is a theme I’ve tried to blog about too. We have to bring all the good ideas from the open web and the blogosphere forward, combined with the user experience lessons from social media.

In a difficult week with extended family health issues, I’m laughing to myself a little this morning because I ran into two extremely minor problems that are bugging me: forgot to get salsa for this breakfast taco, and left my headphones at home. Ah, to have insignificant gripes for one day is nice.

In related client API news, Dave Winer has also been hammering on this recently from his perspective working on WordLand and the long history of the MetaWeblog API:

But the web is what matters, not my product or yours. Even if your product is huge, it’s only part of the web. This is how we build, how we get back on track. Somehow we need to get a simple bridge that lets all blog content flow to Mastodon.

Lear year, I really wanted to see Mastodon adopt an open posting API. I even wrote a FEP to fix some limitations in how APIs were too hard-coded to Mastodon’s capabilities. It went nowhere.

Steve Bate has a long blog post about why ActivityPub’s client-to-server protocol has not been implemented:

Yet despite its promise, ActivityPub C2S has seen minimal real-world adoption. Most Fediverse platforms — including Mastodon, the dominant implementation — have actively avoided supporting it. Instead, they expose custom APIs that tightly couple client behavior to server internals.

More clients should use Micropub. It is also a W3C recommendation, but unlike C2S, Micropub is already widely implemented and has evolved through extensions to accommodate most real-world use cases.

NYT’s Ben Mullin posting on Bluesky: WaPo opinion section will “communicate with optimism about this country”.

When newspapers turned on Joe Biden last year, I realized opinion sections are antiquated. We have the whole web for opinions. Newspapers have lopsided reach and should stick to the news.

When we launched Micro.blog, we got pushback on the lack of likes and reposts and follower lists and trends and global firehouse. Now eight years later I’m confident our approach is an important niche on the social web.

We absolutely do lose customers who drift away because of lack of engagement. So be it. If you want the dopamine hit of notifications and a more active timeline, pulling you back in, there are other platforms like… well, literally all of the other ones!

Mark Zuckerberg posting to Threads:

For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.

Mark has moved extremely quickly on this. He can do that because he runs the whole show. But Meta is the last company I want with this power. Ad-based businesses will always be misaligned with human needs.

I enjoyed this essay by Windsor Johnston at NPR about a date with a chatbot:

The date started with a boat ride from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River to Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. I wore a little black dress and ballet flats. The sun was shining, the breeze was warm, and I was texting a chatbot.

Most articles like this are alarmist and depressing. This one is balanced and funny, and ultimately gets more at a truth about what all of this means.

This is cool. Classic Web, via John Gruber who blogs:

Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

I worked on a new Micro.blog for Mac update over the weekend, but then my Sunday afternoon got turned upside down. I’ll probably ship it this week. The notes interface is going to be much more solid.

Raining. Little mushrooms have sprouted up.

Rewatched some old movies last week, including Back to the Future parts 1, 2, 3. They are still great. The hoverboard and flying cars got so much attention when I was a kid, but 1 and 3 are my favorites. Yes, part 3 too. The old west setting and characters hold up much better. 🍿

Superman was a lot of fun. They did a few smart things with it, like not retelling the whole origin story again. Casting also seemed just right. 🍿