Don’t want to jinx it but we finally have Micro.blog performance under control after a couple rough days. Also gotta give credit to Threads, it is one of the fastest of the new social networks. The bar is higher than it was in Twitter’s fail whale days.
Jamie Thingelstad is today’s interview on Manuel Moreale’s People and Blogs series, with some nice words for Micro.blog:
"When micro.blog was launched, I intended to use it as an alternative to Twitter. But then, as Manton built and improved the system, I realized it could host my entire site. I now have 8,449 posts in micro.blog and growing, with a total blog archive size of over 7 GB. It makes me chuckle since I think the “micro” in micro.blog makes folks think they can’t use it for everything, but you can."
Thanks @jthingelstad!
https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-jamie-thingelstad https://micro.blog/jthingelstad
Brick Oven on Red River has been closed since the pandemic. Last week they made it permanent and bulldozed the building. Sad to see it go. 🍕
Good quotes from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in this Fast Company interview. Surprised to learn that Bluesky has 30 people on their team already.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90996044/bluesky-twitter-alternative-jay-graber-ceo
Love this update to Mimi Uploader that can generate photo alt text for you with AI. Mimi is a convenient batch photo uploader for Micro.blog, great for posting a few photos to your blog all at once.
Adam Mosseri on Threads plans, video transcript https://www.manton.org/2023/12/15/adam-mosseri-on.html
One of those mornings where I just run redis-cli monitor and look for things that surprise me.
Figured out where this delivery robot is from. They are made by Avride and do deliveries for restaurants. Free delivery! Replacing humans, one job at a time.
https://www.manton.org/2023/12/07/i-love-these.html https://www.avride.ai/robot
From a post-trial interview with Tim Sweeney, he reiterates why settlement talks with Google didn’t go anywhere:
"We were rather far apart, let’s say, because what Epic wants ultimately is free competition and fair competition for everybody, and the removal of the payments tie and removal of the anticompetitive measures, which obviously leads to far better deals for consumers and developers."
Epic remains an imperfect messenger for App Store reform but they really do have this part right. It’s about the overall market for decades to come, not Epic or any other single company.
The slow rollout of ActivityPub in Threads continues, but it doesn’t appear to be accessible from Micro.blog yet. Hopefully soon. What I wrote in June is holding up well. This is an important step forward for open protocols.
After posting about not wanting to push unannounced features to a public repo, I got suggestions to create a private repo. I did eventually do that. I think my gut instinct is for simplification… Fewer dependencies and duplication to keep track of.
Mark Zuckerberg posted to Threads about starting ActivityPub testing, but it’s not clear what the scope of the test is. Doesn’t appear to be available to outside platforms yet. Still, a big deal just announcing it.
The day has finally come… I’ve added Swift to the Micro.blog for Mac project. Yes, I know it’s 2023, almost 2024. After tinkering with Apple’s Security framework and Common Crypto, decided CryptoKit was the way to go and it’s Swift-only.
Working on encryption and understanding the best initialization vector lengths and then all of a sudden I’m down the cryptography rabbit hole, reading about the birthday paradox. Might be time to call it a night.
Because the Mac app for Micro.blog is open source and we’re holding off announcing some new stuff until next month, I can’t just push in-progress changes to GitHub. Kind of makes me nervous having this code only on my Mac. (I do have backups but just daily.)
Thinking about renaming Micro.blog to the letter M. The subtitle will be “the everything app”. Blogs, pages, photos, bookshelves, social network, bookmarks, highlights, podcasts, link archiving, email newsletters… and maybe banking features early next year. Anyone else doing something like that? 🤪
When we added bookmarks to Micro.blog, I used 🐘 to make sure emoji worked. Now I’ve stuck with using that as a tag for Mastodon-related bookmarks.
Epic gets a win against Google. Everyone is trying to make sense of the differences between Epic v. Apple and Epic v. Google. To me, it’s fitting that the outcome is different not just because the facts are different but also because the app stores are fundamentally subjective and randomly unfair.
https://www.theverge.com/23994174/epic-google-trial-jury-verdict-monopoly-google-play
Trying Apple’s new Journal app for the first time after upgrading my phone to iOS 17.2. Not bad, but I don’t think it’s for me. Day One is a better fit. Just text notes without anything clever.
Beeper Mini is (partially) back. From their blog:
"Make no mistake, the changes Apple made on Friday were designed to protect the lock-in effect of iMessage. The end result is that iPhone customers have less security and privacy than before."
I’m all for openness and interoperability, of course, but using a company’s private API in a way that competes with that business is not okay. Even so, I’m kind of rooting for Beeper to shake things up.