Looking through Federico Viticci’s iOS 26 review. He starts on a fairly positive note about Liquid Glass. Or at least, not a “the sky is falling” panic:

I can’t stress this enough: the first thing you need to understand about Liquid Glass is that it’s not a drastic, groundbreaking redesign that changes the look of your iPhone overnight, like iOS 7 did for millions of people in 2013.

Watching the Emmys. 📺

“…and laugh out loud comedies like The Bear.” 🤣

ActivityPub is notorious for being a little chatty, and FEP-044f (quote posts) is sort of an extreme example of that. Lots of back and forth between servers, approving quotes, fetching content, deleting approval stamps, etc. I’m not saying I have a better idea… except <blockquote>. 🤪

From Mastodon’s blog post introducing quote posts:

Quoting is a powerful tool, and like any tool, it can be misused. That’s why we’ve taken time to introduce quotes in a way that aligns with Mastodon values, focusing on safety and mental health – not just on engagement.

Micro.blog will have limited support for this after it’s rolled out on mastodon.social next week.

Working in Go this morning! Micro.blog obviously uses Hugo, written in Go, but we also have a little custom Go tool that runs behind the scenes for newsletters, with more to come. Nice to have a common template language.

Nick Heer blogging about the win Automattic got this week in having some of the charges in the lawsuit from WP Engine dismissed:

Even if this case ends with a complete victory for Mullenweg and Automattic, his actions have shaken my support of — and faith in — the WordPress ecosystem.

While I do think there has been damage to the WordPress community, if Automattic wins most of the case, maybe settles the rest, I don’t know if there will be significant lasting damage. The views from WordCamp US this month didn’t look like a community in decline.

I think some of the worst-case scenario AI worries are overblown, but I do like this book title: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Good feedback from folks on whether and how to adopt macOS Tahoe menu item icons. After experimenting, menus seem to look better with icons in most places so that major sections of menu items are aligned together. I’ll ship this in a few days.

I’m noticing some new faces and some returning customers. Means a lot to me. From Pedro:

I went elsewhere for a while. I tried other services, they are fine. But they don’t come close to what Micro.blog offer.

For rail fans in the London area, Museum Open Depot days:

Discover rare road and rail vehicles spanning over 100 years, signs, ceramic tiles, original posters, ephemera, ticket machines, and more.

🚂

Matt Mullenweg blogging on the recently-announced RSL spec for describing how content is licensed for AI:

I have a lot of scars from the web standards wars, so I’m hesitant to dive back in, but this is from a lot of the early Web 2.0 people, as TechCrunch writes about.

This post by Nathan Witkin on the case against social media is long but very good. I’m going to have to go through this again in detail.

OpenAI and Microsoft have finally reached an agreement. OpenAI’s Bret Taylor also has a blog post on it, a $50 million grant for other nonprofits, and the OpenAI nonprofit + public benefit structure:

This structure reaffirms that our core mission remains ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity. Our PBC charter and governance will establish that safety decisions must always be guided by this mission.

Great article from New_ Public on indie blogs and websites:

The focus isn’t on personal branding, growth or monetization, or “content” creation, but on freedom from those things. Instead of polished, 10-second snippets optimized for mass-appeal, engagement, and profit, these are largely slow-cooked projects made just for fun.

I’ve never had a coherent answer when asked how big Micro.blog is, so I sometimes stumble and misspeak. The total number of users is inflated with inactive users and spam accounts. Active users are different for weekly, monthly, longer. I care most about paid subscriptions and whether we’re growing.

In that moment just after recording a podcast where I’m second guessing everything I said. I have a lot of respect for people who stop and form their thoughts before answering a question. I tend to just wing it, so sometimes words tumble out in the wrong order. 🙂

Nice Fission update with a visual refresh and getting the app icon out of macOS Tahoe squircle jail.

Are Mac developers actually adopting the menu item icons in macOS 26? I’m torn… I think this design change was unnecessary and adds clutter. But also, it feels incomplete if I don’t add my own icons.

Realizing that we never officially documented the new support for passkeys, so a lot of people missed it. Just added a new help page with the basics.

Finally investigating why SMS stopped working. Now that we have Passkeys in Micro.blog, I think I’m going to scrap SMS as an option, and clear all the phone number data we have for users. It clearly wasn’t used much anyway.

I know a $200 difference isn’t nothing, but if you’re already $800 in for the iPhone 17, I think almost everyone should spring for the iPhone Air. 12 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB. That is going to start mattering with on-device AI models. Having said that, I’m keeping last year’s phone for a while.

RSL (Really Simple Licensing) can extend RSS feeds to describe how content is licensed for AI. They’re launching with lots of backers and quotes. Some overlap with Creative Commons Signals, which I blogged about a few months ago. Found via John Spurlock.

It’s going to be a busy day, juggling several different things with work and life. Starting the morning with Summer Moon. Love that exclamation point. ☕️

Trying not to read too much into Apple calling it iPhone Air, not iPhone 17 Air. Maybe it doesn’t get a yearly update? Maybe just to make it seem even more unique? I can’t see Apple dropping the numbers anytime soon because so much rides on hyping up iPhone sales each year.

Anil Dash blogs about how Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. I take slight issue with the U2 joke, but otherwise I think it’s right:

The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.

It’s ambitious for Apple to ship all of their version 26 operating systems on the same day next week. I thought macOS could wait a couple weeks. I’ll probably submit the Micro.blog iOS update soon-ish, when I can get the UI quirks fixed.

Spent a little time going through old pull requests on JSON Feed, merging in links for the website. There is still a lot to catch up on. Time flies! And I didn’t realize that the lack of communication on my part was holding folks up from fully embracing it.

I want to say that the orange iPhone is the official Micro.blog-themed phone, but the orange color isn’t really a close enough match. Gonna have to see these phones in person. Especially curious about the weight and balance of the Air.

The iPhone 17 Pro actually looks like a pretty big change. Aluminum, huge camera bump, crazy thermal system, faster AI, presumably more RAM.

Hypertension notification is fantastic in theory, but I’m skeptical that this can be done without a new sensor. Seems impossible with heart rate data alone. But I guess if it only sometimes works, it still has the potential to save lives.