Simplified pricing in Micro.blog https://www.manton.org/2024/02/21/simplified-pricing-in.html
I wouldn’t mind an AI assistant that could call my doctor’s office, wait on hold forever, and make a 6-month follow-up appointment. Seems like we should be close to that. 🤖
Had to take Groq.com out for a spin (not xAI’s Grok). Continue to be pretty happy with OpenAI, though, especially to outsource our AI features — transcribing podcasts and summarizing bookmarked web pages. It’s such a narrow use case that the costs are easily manageable.
Just another day digging through the Mastodon source code to understand what in the world it’s doing to verify remote accounts. Fixed a couple issues on my side. Can’t wait for the test suites that folks are working on.
Not sure when our luck with Apple is going to run out, but we’ve now had a few quick app approvals without any issues. So nice to just get little improvements out. Strata 1.0.2 is available now.
New sticker, Books Are Magic. Also started reading The Bone Season. 📚
Posted another short video on YouTube about notes, this time with Micro.blog for macOS. The app has a slightly different UI and auto-saves notes, encrypted back to the server.
Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky… If you’re feeling overwhelmed by our post-Twitter social web, this post from Ben Werdmuller should hit home. My advice: don’t read everything. Post to your blog first, then dip into other apps whenever you have time. Never reload the never-ending algorithmic feeds.
https://werd.io/2024/social-i-love-you-but-youre-bringing-me-down
Last night’s downtown revealed yet more holes in server redundancy that should’ve been solved earlier. Another thing to add to my week’s to-do list.
Interesting thread from Mastodon’s Renaud Chaput, noticed via The Fediverse Report, about how Mastodon is approaching quote posts:
"It is a complex task and we have been working on defining the feature and the protocol-level details for some time. We are moving forward, and there are fewer hard questions to answers, but progress is there."
I can see a place for more control like this. But also, I like simple Markdown and HTML block quotes, because it scales from microblog posts to excerpts of long posts, for the whole web.
https://oisaur.com/@renchap/111925452013048778 https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-56/
Eugen Rochko on recent Mastodon spam. I haven’t noticed any problems yet but I expect some spam DMs will hit Micro.blog from this as well:
"There is an ongoing spam attack on the fediverse for the last couple of days. It’s more widespread than before, as attackers are targeting smaller servers to create accounts. Before, usually only mastodon.social was targeted and our team could take care of it."
It’s easy to be blinded by past decisions. I took a fresh look at our pricing this weekend and ran some numbers. Going to try to simplify things even further. (No price increase. $5 is the ideal price for all things, from a latte to blog hosting.)
Fun 3-point contest tonight, especially the Steph vs. Sabrina addition. Hope they keep some version of that going in future years. Watching the dunks now but the scoring is usually so subjective it distracts from how amazing everything is. 🏀
I hadn’t read Tantek Çelik’s post on the ephemeral web yet when I blogged about Mastodon yesterday, otherwise I would’ve linked to it. Really good:
"All reply-contexts of and replies to such posts and conversations lost, like threads unraveled from an ancient tapestry, scattered to the winds."
Quiet morning working on Mac software. Fixed a handful of bugs in Micro.blog and released a new version. Will continue to roll out server improvements for the new notes feature as I have them ready.
Letitia James, after New York’s $350 million fine on Trump:
"The scale and the scope of Donald Trump’s fraud is staggering. And so too is his ego, and his believe that the rules do not apply to him. Today we are holding Donald Trump accountable. We are holding him accountable for lying, cheating, and a lack of contrition, and for flouting the rules that all of us must play by."
🇺🇸
Fani Willis testifying in Fulton County, Georgia yesterday:
"You’re confused. You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020."
Before this, I was receptive to the idea that maybe she should step aside to avoid this trial going off the rails. But it’s unfair for her personal life to be made public on such weak evidence. She’s done the work to bring these charges against Trump and should finish the job.
We’re two weeks in to the Vision Pro launch! On today’s Core Intuition, I start by asking Daniel if he’s returning it. We talk about whether Apple should be worried about the rollout, Mark Zuckerberg’s comparison to the Quest 3, and more thoughts on how (and whether) the Vision Pro is needed.
To balance my criticism of Apple today, it appears Apple is letting Epic Games have a dev account in Europe, and presumably a marketplace later. From Tim Sweeney on Twitter X:
"I’ll be the first to acknowledge a good faith move by Apple amidst our cataclysmic antitrust battle, in granting Epic Games Sweden AB a developer account for operating Epic Games Store and Fortnite in Europe under the Digital Markets Act."
Seems like great news all around. This is one to keep an eye on. 🍿
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1758533135774495033
I get frustrated when a company is actively making the web worse instead of better. Spare me the justifications. If I demonstrated any hostility toward my platform’s users, developers, or the open web more broadly, I hope people would call me on it too.