I like the new Bluesky butterfly logo. Still invite-only, but I have a handful of invite codes if you want to try it out.
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/12-21-2023-butterfly https://gist.github.com/manton/8135e170261c1b2d3dae4547981dd53d
Writing a blog post draft in Micro.blog for Mac this morning and I guess I’m hitting ⌘-S pretty often. This saves it to the server and Micro.blog keeps a copy of each version in case you need to revert back. Here’s the web version where I happened to notice the saved count.
Watching the Substack drama unfold but just taking notes for now. Trying to put most of my writing time into book editing, and these big picture topics of indie blogs, newsletters, and moderation fit right in.
Got some bad news last night that really shook me. Nothing family or health related, which is what matters, but still bummed. (Also nothing to do with Micro.blog or business or money.) It was balanced a couple hours later with some really welcome news! The world gives and takes.
Raining in Austin this morning. Working and having coffee at Lazarus. 🎄
I should’ve done more testing with audio apps after upgrading to Sonoma. Things went off the rails while recording @coreint — noise while recording and also audio getting handed off to my phone. I think we mostly salvaged it.
I finally installed macOS Sonoma, so I’m testing Micro.blog as a saved web application for the first time. Works well. The most awkward thing is not having an address bar. Nice that Apple included Edit → Copy Link.
As the year winds down, thinking about the fediverse, I want to do a better job in 2024 of making the case for independent blogs. Lots of platforms with thousands of users on each server talking via ActivityPub is great, but more blogs also helps with portable identity and a more distributed web.
Great article from David Pierce at The Verge about the potential of the fediverse:
"Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat and pries it apart into its component pieces, each one ripe for innovation and new ideas."
https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub
Continued my Redis spelunking last night and managed to cut 10 GB off our memory usage. Makes a big difference because forking and saving the db is faster, less chance of churning the disk too.
Love how Brandon just drops this sentence into the State of the Sanderson:
"Tress would make a pretty great animated feature though, don’t you think?"
Yes indeed. Many of his books would work really well in animation, but Tress of the Emerald Sea would be fantastic.
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2023/
Spending the morning going through a lot of bloat in Redis, clearing out unused data. It has been a little out of control using a ridiculous amount of memory, which hurts performance saving to disk and just generally costs more to run.
I thought we had mostly avoided the Mastodon spam from the last couple of days, but it must’ve hit some users because there were a bunch of extra spam reports. I continue to have mixed feelings about how Mastodon handles private messages. Need to rethink Micro.blog’s implementation.
I don’t mind flying under the radar. There are benefits for a product to start small and grow slowly. But I’m still kind of puzzled why Micro.blog is rarely mentioned when articles talk about platforms that support the fediverse. We first added ActivityPub in 2018. Must be doing something wrong.
Flipboard is rolling out the first phase of joining the fediverse:
"In this first phase we are partnering with 27 publishers and creators to help them federate their Flipboard accounts and gather feedback. This includes a range of publishers covering global news, tech, music, gaming, travel and science as well as a few content creators like Erin Brockovich and Jefferson Graham."
I tested following one of these accounts in Micro.blog and it’s working pretty well.
https://medium.com/@mmccue/flipboard-begins-to-federate-4a80d6bdc209
“Play Me” — piano outside the library, Windsor Park Branch.
I don’t have strong feelings about the Adobe/Figma deal falling through. I guess if we’re unsure, better to err on the side of fewer big acquisitions. Om Malik makes a really interesting point too that more regulation could mean fewer startups will have “just get acquired” as an exit plan.
https://om.co/2023/12/18/implications-of-the-adobe-figma-deal-failure/
Starting to see a path for Nikki Haley to be the nominee. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don’t think she should be president, so I’d rather Joe Biden face a weaker candidate. On the other, it’d be such a relief just to definitively know Trump can’t be president again. 🇺🇸
I really liked Leave the World Behind. There are some great scenes in it. Left with a few things to think about too. 🍿
Threads starting opt-in for the fediverse is fine. In fact, it’s what we did in Micro.blog too back in 2018, because I wanted to focus on personal domain names and that requires a little more configuration. However, I do hope that Threads expands to enable federation by default for all users.