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.

Listening to This Week in Startups interviewing Medium’s Tony Stubblebine. He makes the wild claim that ChatGPT’s obsession with the em dash is because it’s so commonly used in Medium posts! I’m having trouble accepting this theory, but it would be amazing if true.

Love this story and illustrations on animator James Baker’s blog, from a trip to China in the late 1980s.

Says something about Vimeo’s decline that I heard about them being acquired not from the tech news websites that I read all the time, but from Cartoon Brew in my RSS reader:

Vimeo, once the internet’s most prestigious stage for independent filmmakers and animators, is being acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal.

There is a narrow space for an indie-focused, YouTube alternative. Hosting video is difficult.

It’s funny to me that Apple made the new battery pack exclusive to the iPhone Air. If I really wanted the thinnest possible phone, no way I’m putting a case or extra battery on it. Even the bumper seems like too much.

From the latest Fediverse Report, about Mastodon quote posts:

Mastodon’s concern regarding the potential for harm with dunking does need some context however, researcher Hilda Bastian has a highly detailed overview of over 30 studies on quote posts on Twitter and their impact. Bastian notes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.”

I think this dunking is real, but there are many other problems with social media that Mastodon does not attempt to address. Not sure quote posts are make or break.

OpenAI published a pair of blog posts today about their next steps for teen safety, acknowledging the trade-off on privacy. Sam Altman: First, we have to separate users who are under 18 from those who aren’t (ChatGPT is intended for people 13 and up). We’re building an age-...

Added a help page for upcoming Open Graph improvements in Micro.blog, including a template system to override the default styles. This is rolling out over the next few days. Very flexible, so hopefully plug-ins can be created for various styles.

Thinking of Robert Redford, what a career. Sneakers is one of my favorite films, and arguably the best film about computers ever made. All the President’s Men is so good. Watched both of these countless times. (Also just learned his mother was born in Austin.) 🍿

Tracks at North Lamar and Airport Blvd. 🚂

Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. A short book, but it’s something special. 📚

A heads-up for Micro.blog theme developers: I’m revamping our experimental Open Graph support with more advanced features. If your theme doesn’t have its own Open Graph image, I recommend adding the og:image tag based on the page’s .Params.opengraph.image, which we’ll fill in automatically.

Paul Frazee blogging on Leaflet about whether Bluesky’s AppView should be renamed to more clearly convey what it does:

At this point, it seems better to just call it an App and then explain that the data gets stored in the PDS, like a kind of universal cloud filesystem or datastore.

While age-gating often creates new problems, I like the fallback in this New York law:

Under the proposed rules for New York’s SAFE For Kids Act, social platforms must serve unverified users or kids under 18 only chronological feeds or posts from people they follow, as well as ban notifications from 12AM to 6AM.

Fair intro in Jason Snell’s macOS 26 review:

macOS 26 Tahoe is two things at once: It’s the broadest and most productivity-focused update for macOS in years, while also taking collateral damage from Apple’s broader design ambitions on its other platforms.

Waiting on hold. “There are currently 146 callers ahead of you…” Seriously?!