Austin’s IndieWeb Meetup returns next week: Wednesday, Dec 4th, 7pm at Mozart’s Coffee. Everyone’s welcome to stop by for a coffee and chat about the open web. What are you working on, and what can we do to move the social web forward?

Tim Chambers blogs some more thoughts on where the social web platforms are right now:

Threads and Bluesky’s massive success of late and Mastodon’s modest success does not make Mastodon and other fediverse/activitypub offerings losers. In this case it isn’t zero-sum. Fully open, patent free, non-commercial offerings like Mastodon, etc, have different needs and lifecycles and futures not tied to VC’s or shareholders.

I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Jay Graber is the singular solution I trust.

This week Mark Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago with a convicted criminal who is out on bail. I stopped posting to Instagram in 2017, but I keep giving Meta second chances. No more. It’s time to burn this shit to the ground and move forward with the open web. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.

Wow, Wicked. They actually pulled it off. So good. 🧹

We have a fairly large set of Micro.blog changes ready to go live. I want to deploy them now but the wiser me knows middle of Thanksgiving is a bad idea. Perhaps tonight, or I’ll push it until the morning. 🦃

There will not be a Black Friday sale for Micro.blog. No better time than right now to sign up and subscribe.

New episode of Core Int just in time to queue up for your Thanksgiving travel. We talk about my short vacation last week, working while away, dealing with bugs, Bluesky growth, and the state of the social web.

I may seem easygoing and agreeable on the surface, don’t mind a little friendly competition, but deep down… I do not like to lose.

What the heck, Austin? In the last few weeks we’ve now made two full-priced offers on houses and not gotten either one. Sigh. 🏡

Ben Werdmuller writes about the fallout from an attempt to train AI on Bluesky posts:

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data.

I also like Tantek Çelik’s proposal to add a “no-training” flavor of Creative Commons. I blogged about that a couple months ago.

I hadn’t noticed this before. New styling for blockquotes on Mastodon. This post started on my blog: Markdown → HTML → ActivityPub → Mastodon. This version of Mastodon is probably deployed widely enough that I can drop the redundant quotes that Micro.blog adds.

This perspective rings true to me, on a platform’s decay from Steve Troughton-Smith:

Threads has the same problem all of Meta’s social media properties have: nobody really wants to be on them. That social graph may be the company’s crown jewels, but there’s a clear sense of decay, a radioactive half-life to Facebook, Instagram, et al that portends doom

I enjoyed this response article from Elizabeth Lopatto to Sam Altman’s notebook advice. “I do not rip pages out of my notebook regularly because I am not deranged.” 🤣

Three weeks since I stopped posting to Threads. I don’t miss it. If they ever actually finish the ActivityPub rollout, I’ll migrate my followers to Micro.blog and keep avoiding Meta. Your milage may vary.

Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. It’s tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized. Bluesky’s app and relay are centralized but personal hosting in Bluesky is decentralized. Mastodon’s instances are decent...

Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but I realized I could install the Micro.blog browser extension (which I wrote!) to Arc from the Chrome web extensions store. Easy. I bookmark a lot of pages in Micro.blog so this saves a step.

Despite server hiccups overnight, I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle a couple new problems. It has been a great several days away. Heading home, will have a much-requested Mastodon integration improvement in the queue for later this week. 🏖️

I was feeling pretty good about making improvements and deploying them while on vacation… Until I woke up and realized I had broken a few things. Very sorry, Micro.blog… Bad testing on my part. Should be fixed now.

Some people asked about us not using Basecamp. We had considered dropping it for a while. A post-election DHH post also frustrated me, although I usually try to separate that from whether it’s a good, unique product, which it is. Right now the cost just doesn’t make sense for our tiny team.

Cozumel. 🏖️

We stopped using Basecamp recently, and one thing I really miss is the weekly question, asking folks what they want to work on. I found this useful even for my own planning. Something about it was better than a simple note file or to-do list.

There’s been so much new interest in cross-posting in Micro.blog, I created a special page to explain it. Best experience when it loads in large windows like a desktop browser.

I’m working on a new page for Micro.blog and having so much fun with it. It’s equal parts business marketing page and hobby art project, built natively for the web with CSS and JS.

Vincent has been quietly improving web accessibility in Micro.blog behind the scenes, and it’s bringing some other benefits such as new keyboard navigation in the timeline. More we can do here but already I really like it.

Good post on The Fediverse Report about Bluesky and decentralization. A lot of people are looking at AT Proto through fediverse-colored glasses and it’s just not the same architecture. There are different advantages and different weak points.

Rain earlier today from Hank’s. Started to get a little wet even though it was covered… Went inside shortly after this.

I’m @manton on most networks, @manton.org on Bluesky, and @manton@manton.org on the fediverse. These are all managed by Micro.blog. “Are you getting it? These are not three separate accounts… This is one place to post. And we’re calling it a blog.” 🤪

Do cross the streams! Bluesky starter packs now available to follow within Micro.blog. Here’s one in Micro.blog on the web with people who post about books. No batch follow yet, but a fun way to discover new users. An experiment that we’ll refine. You can search for a Bluesky pack URL to open it.