FediForum starts tomorrow and runs for a couple days. It’s an online conference for folks who want to discuss and build for the future of the social web, from Mastodon to Bluesky. There has been a lot of new developer activity over on the Bluesky side, so I’m curious if any of that will bubble up. https://fediforum.org/

For all the folks overseas, I’d like to do more for localization in Micro.blog. Not the main UI, but the parts that show up on your own blog, e.g. “Finished reading”, “Watched this movie”… I tried AI to dynamically translate a few things on the fly, but it’s a dead end. Maybe crowdsourced later.

Parker Ortolani blogs early praise for Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses. They are solving completely different problems than the Vision Pro:

"At one point I was walking down the street, spotted a coffee shop across the way, and simply popped up the maps app on the glasses to see details." https://parkerortolani.blog/2025/10/05/my-first-hours-with-metas.html

Really good Stratechery update this morning from Ben Thompson about Sora’s rise to #1 in the App Store. People are having fun with the app, but I don’t think creativity with prompts is the same as real photography and filmmaking. I’m also pessimistic about the effects of infinite scrollable content. https://stratechery.com/2025/sora-ai-bicycles-and-meta-disruption/

Watched One Battle After Another. Even though I saw the trailer, didn’t actually know what it was about. Intense, excellent. 🍿 https://letterboxd.com/film/one-battle-after-another/

Brent Simmons blogged about why NetNewsWire isn’t a web app, along the way making the case for Apple letting us use our devices as the computers that they are:

"What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad users to load — not sideload, a term I detest, because it assumes Apple’s side of things — whatever apps they want to. Because those devices are computers." https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-web-app.html

Manu Moreale blogs about posting on social media as a performance:

"By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone." https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-public-online-behaviour

Our attention https://www.manton.org/2025/10/05/our-attention.html

I think we need to do something fun, so I’m swapping the order of new features rolling out this week. First, movies search and easy blogging about movies. Second, new video hosting plan. 🍿

Nice walk with the dog today. Also digging in the yard and thinking. Here’s my new rule for when online discussions get heated: let’s pay attention to who are the firefighters and who are the arsonists.

Got so derailed yesterday that I had to stop working on a feature in the middle of a change before I had even committed it. This pushes back the new video hosting support a day or two, but still should be able to launch it next week. Just working through some HDR issues.

That reply I mentioned wanting to delete last night didn’t seem to get synced everywhere. Oh well, I’ll let it stand. If anyone was following along, know that I’m wrong sometimes but I never lie. I try to assume the best in people and sometimes get burned, but thankfully very rarely.

Laughed a little when I saw this sign yesterday. I’ve been taking this elevator a bunch over the last week and it always shakes and rattles like maybe you’re lucky when it successfully makes it back to the first floor. Came back at night and it seems fixed. 🤞

Lost my cool today and sent a reply I shouldn’t have. I’m deleting it, which is very unusual for me. I never delete posts! Ironically it was just hours after I blogged that we’re all human and make occasional mistakes. https://www.manton.org/2025/10/03/apparently-there-was-some-drama.html

I wasn’t going to announce this until later, but today feels right… Earlier this week, I hired someone to fill the role of community manager at Micro.blog. I’ll be officially welcoming her in a couple weeks. Thanks everyone for your patience while we figured this out!

I’m exhausted of the attacks. After a nice morning with friends, I had to rush back to my mom’s bedside at rehab to hold her hand, talking to the doctor, all while people online were again questioning my integrity. I’ve said this before: you don’t know what people are going through. Give them space.

Lake Austin from Mozart’s. ☕️

Paul Kafasis with a single-sentence blog post that says everything about Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store:

"Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments." https://onefoottsunami.com/2025/10/03/iceblock-blocked/

Really liking The Life of a Showgirl so far. Not through the whole album yet, but it starts great. 🎶

Apparently there was some drama on Bluesky, but to be honest I can’t quite unravel the full extent of it. Just a quick shout-out to the CEO and CTO, who I have a lot of respect for. Strong principles and vision. There will be occasionally missteps because we’re all human. Keep moving forward.

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. https://quotebacks.net/

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. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org

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. https://rslstandard.org/ https://www.manton.org/2025/06/25/cc-signals.html https://podcastindex.social/@js/115180339360745760