Someone ran a red light in front of me today, probably a good second after the light changed. I was in no great hurry to get anywhere and waited, otherwise I would’ve been sideswiped. You never know when you’ll get a second lease on life.

Mammoth is shutting down:

Sadly, we’re no longer able to reliably update Mammoth or operate moth.social at the level we want. Therefore we will be removing Mammoth from sale on the App Store. By the end of the January, we will also shut down Moth.social along with our other project, sub.club.

When it launched a couple years ago, I thought they were on to a good idea: pairing a new Mastodon client with its own server to make signing up easy. They had some funding from Mozilla, and they pivoted to try Sub.club for monetization, but subscriber revenue is tough when most servers are free.

The social web is more async than we’re used to. This leads to conversations feeling a little broken or delayed as posts are copied between servers. My reply isn’t showing up… Is it because Micro.blog’s servers are overloaded, or is it Mastodon? Thinking about how better to report this status.

I was a little skeptical when I first saw Mozi pop up this week, but reading more about it today, I feel a lot better. Thoughtful design, some nice details. We do need more private-ish social spaces.

The day is already winding down, punting the release until tomorrow morning. Still have a couple housekeeping things to do. Writing release notes, blog posts, and maybe a new companion M.b plug-in. I’ve also extended the Micropub API and want to make sure that everything is properly documented.

Whenever I ship a new feature, I get the inevitable “why didn’t you add that other thing instead / fix that old problem first” question. It’s fair, but the truth is I’m constantly making minor improvements. Every day. A good product needs both bug fixes and new things to live.

Trying Sora. It’s extraordinary that this works at all, and it’s even faster than I was expecting. OpenAI seems to have built a whole UI system around this app too.

Cosmic’s building was originally the Texaco Depot, built around 1911. It’s the only surviving building from the old rail yard in Austin. 🚂

Wheee, just DoS-ed my own servers while working on client changes. Optimizing.

Very short video clip of a new feature rolling out this week, likely tomorrow. This is the Mac app:

Today’s OpenAI demo is a really good showcase of Apple Intelligence’s ChatGPT integration. It’s better than I remember it being from WWDC.

404 Media quotes Matt Mullenweg, who is very frustrated with the preliminary injunction in favor of WP Engine:

I’m sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.

Whatever we might think of Matt’s campaign against WP Engine, I’m skeptical of this legal decision and expect it could be reversed when there’s a trial. It’s certainly great for WordPress.org to be a community resource, but should it be required to be so? Very odd precedent if true.

Cool to see Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) back working on Redis after several years away. Redis is a fantastic, unique tool. He shares his thoughts on the licensing drama, using AI, and new data structures that could be added to Redis.

This is a great post by Laurens Hof of the Fediverse Report on the incomplete ActivityPub rollout in Threads, why it might be going so slowly, and whether Meta is committed to the fediverse at all. It seems clear now that it will not be practical to move an account away from Threads. Empty promises.

Day One can no longer import Instagram photos because of an API change:

We regret to inform you that, starting December 4, 2024, Instagram no longer allows apps to import content through the Instagram Basic Display API. This change means that Day One users will no longer be able to connect their Instagram accounts to import photos and posts into their journals.

Related to my short post this morning. Meta just doesn’t care much if they burn developers who invest in their platform.

Seth Godin blogged recently about constructive complaining vs. whining:

Whining is communication that exasperates others, because it is complaint without benefit or action. The best traveling companions are often those that don’t whine, even when they have a very good reason to. Whining is empty commentary where no action is possible, about something we already understand.

Because we are a very small team, I’ve always been good with “use whatever coding style you want!” I try to adapt to the conventions used in other people’s projects. But lately, I just want to go all-in on mandating real tabs. I’m getting too old to deal with tabs-as-spaces.

It’s hard to take Meta’s effort with more open APIs like ActivityPub seriously when their own Threads API is so locked down, requiring frequent re-approval. Open APIs shouldn’t make developers jump through hoops, over and over. Enough with the gatekeeping already.

Coding up a new window for a Mac app, even a very simple window, just feels better than making changes to almost any other kind of app. There is something “new”-er about a unique window on macOS compared to iOS.

“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” 🍔

This video from OpenAI with animator Lyndon Barrois answers some of my questions about whether Sora can be used as a tool to supplement hand-drawn animation and real video:

I’m an animator. I have all the patience in the world. I’m not looking for it to be immediate and quick. I’m looking for it to take that time, you know, to get it right.

AI at its best should allow humans to do more, not replace art.

Cosmic on 4th is my new favorite place for winter mornings. Fire pits outside and heaters on the deck. ☕️

Sneak peek of something new I’ve been working on. Coming along well, should be able to ship this week.

Funny how some skills don’t change. I’m sitting here typing a CREATE TABLE and it’s essentially the same thing I was doing 25 years ago.

I caved after a month and re-upgraded to ChatGPT Plus. The feature to use text in another app’s window (like Xcode) is really nice.

Also of interest for Glass users:

Updated importer RSS feeds to also download photos to your blog. For example, add a Glass profile feed and Micro.blog will copy the photos to your own domain name. This is set in Sources by adding a new feed with “import posts to blog” selected.

Testing with Glass RSS feeds today and they’ve got problems. I’ve filed a feedback item here for the Glass folks. I considered working around this in Micro.blog but I really don’t want any more hard-coded hacks for other platforms.

I have so many micro domain names that I actually have a list to remember all of them. This is a fun one that I will launch later in December: micro.christmas

This is a nice surprise from Jamie Thingelstad:

I love to see new blogs being created. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m gifting five 1-year subscriptions to micro.blog for readers of the Weekly Thing (announced in WT304). These folks can then get their blogs going and in January I’m going to share links and introduce each of them. Fun! 🤩🎁🎄

There’s a lot to do today. Started the day with something very simple: updated the profile icon for Micro.blog news. Now in color and centered so it looks nice with rounded profile icons. We post here throughout the week with platform updates.