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How President Biden could transform women’s rights and rescue his legacy with just a ring. Dozens of congressional Democrats have a simple pitch to President Biden: with a single phone call he can revolutionize women’s rights and salvage his damaged legacy.  Annie Karni...

SEASON 3 EPISODE 81: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: To paraphrase Van Jones and other panderers: This was the weekend Elon Musk truly became president. It was also the weekend the other guy became Donald J. Trumpuppet. The number of Republican...

If you’re curious how Mastodon is doing by the numbers, the 2023 Annual Report is finally here. A bit late in the year, perhaps, but we’ve got a lot more numbers to share this time! Mastodon is a non-profit, and open-source, so we revel in the transparency.

How large is our budget, and where does it go? Who works on Mastodon? What have we accomplished, and where are our priorities for the future? For all of this and more, we’ve got an answer–at least as far as 2023 goes.

We have already started work on the 2024 one, though!

Thank you to Pierre Vincent for designing our annual report and to Dopatwo for such a quick turnaround on new illustrations, and thank you to the team, especially Inga and Philip, for headlining the efforts to put this together.

I’m falling well short of my reading goals this year. My currently reading list keeps getting bigger, but I’m not finishing anything. For the rest of 2024, just want to finish Wind and Truth. 📚

I don’t usually work so much during the holidays. I don’t recommend it for others. But sometimes I get a sense that there is an opportunity now and I can’t let it slip away. January is going to be full of distractions I haven’t blogged about yet: moving to a new house, if everything goes well. 🎄

Rolling out a few improvements today, including some tweaks to categories. One small change that I like is showing recent blog posts for a category underneath it when editing. Just shows the truncated preview of each post.

Part of a large abandoned lot on 51st that rumor has it will eventually be a new Whole Foods.

BTW Twitter is innovating in ways that it never has. People not staying on Twitter would have no way of knowing. Another reason why, for software developers, quitting Twitter is stupid. As quitting Facebook was ten years ago. Great, now you have no idea what features your users are learning how to use. Eventually your software will be in a dead end while a new coral reef has been forming. Where are you going to get fresh ideas from. Not using these systems would be like not listening to the Beatles in the 60s,. You would have missed all that followed. And not just popular music. Same with Twitter in the 2020s. That story is far from over.

I love writing my morning missives in WordLand. It really fits.

What we need, now, is a system to compete with Twitter. The only thing that can counteract the new direction we're going in, is a system as capable as Twitter. It has to be privately held by a group that can be trusted not to interfere with democratic use of the system. This can't be guaranteed, it has to be based on trust. It needs to scale very quickly. And it has to have a vision to represent democracy. And it has to be simple, clean and quickly understood as a replacement for Twitter. Bluesky has a lot of what's needed, but its ownership is not clear. But it more like Twitter than Twitter is today.

His wife was spiraling into insomnia, and his children were afraid to go to school, so Jaime Cachua sought out the person he trusted most in a crisis. He sat at his kitchen table in rural Georgia across from his father-in-law, Sky Atkins, the family patriarch. Jaime, 33, had...

Great stop by the Longhorns. I’m enjoying this game. It’s had everything and there’s still some time left. 🏈

How to find potential customers to interview before you have a product, a website, or even a name.

Micro.blog folks, I’m planning to move the Categories link out of the web sidebar and put it in the header that’s used when managing posts. Cleans up the sidebar a little and I don’t think it’s clicked on that often. If this messes up anyone’s workflow, let me know. Screenshot preview:

Dastardly fun from Herman Martinus, who runs Bear Blog, on a very special UX implemented on the page when a user is determined to be a spammer: It works, too, apparently. I love the idea of wasting bad people’s time. It reminds me of that episode of Mythic Quest, “Dinner Party” where they trap all […]

Joost de Valk, co-founder of the Yoast SEO plugin has called for Breaking the Status […]

This “154 versions” link is hilarious to me. I wrote my last post in Micro.blog for Mac and whenever you hit ⌘S it saves another version to the server just in case you need to revert. Other obsessive ⌘S people may be able to relate.

I’ve been thinking about the WP Engine drama and whether I should take a side. Users move between Micro.blog and WordPress regularly. We’ve long had WordPress import and export, and even native posting directly to WordPress from the mobile app, plus connecting external WordP...

I like to share posts from Threads on Bluesky and Mastodon to illustrate the incompatibility, the ignorance of one to the other. These guys should all be using the same protocol. It's a travesty that each of them considers their product to define the social web -- they don't...

Previewing a tiny part of an upcoming blog post… When choosing a blog hosting platform, consider whether the company’s CEO even uses it themselves. Why would I use a product that the leadership doesn’t believe in? It would be like Steve Jobs introducing the iPod but he never listened to music.