This new video for Humane’s pin is by far the most effective pitch they’ve made for their device. They hide the latency well by talking too. I’m sure they want it to be faster and whoever can crack AI performance is going to succeed.
Dave Winer responds to my post about Threads and account migration:
"Right now Facebook is hoovering up people who are looking for something new in the Twitter space. So it helps to encourage people to believe that there will be a way out if they want to try something else. But everyone knows for real that that isn’t what’s going to happen. This is in the tech playbook. When you’re growing, you want everything to be open."
Unfortunately he’s right that Meta has a very poor track record with APIs. I’ve been burned by this and many other devs have too. We’ll see if Threads is different.
Following up on this post, personally I don’t like the trend of social networks having a generic “notifications” or “activity” tab where they throw everything, making me sift through the data. When I check Threads, I have to click a few times to get a clean list of mentions.
Jatan Mehta blogs about the noisiness of most social networks, and how Micro.blog takes a different approach:
"Micro.blog is the only Fediverse-compatible platform I know of which truly does away with likes, boosts, follower counts, and hashtags. I wish all social networks removed these pointless stats by default."
Some people like the extra activity of boosts and notifications, and that’s fine too. I do think it can help with discoverability. But not every network needs to work the same way. If every network was a clone of Twitter, the social web would be much less interesting.
https://journal.jatan.space/mastodon-and-the-fediverse-is-noisy/
Threads opt-in vs. fediverse migration https://www.manton.org/2024/03/20/threads-optin-vs.html
After waffling for a while, I’ve decided to write a new web text editor for Micro.blog. The new editor will be lightweight and work consistently across platforms, especially mobile. Here’s a video of my progress so far… Still a long way to go, it looks better than it is. Learning a lot.
I was late joining FediForum this morning, so it’s great to see the video of the Threads demo is already online. This is really going to be interesting when it’s enabled for more Threads users.
https://www.theverge.com/24106231/threads-fediverse-demo-meta-fediforum
I skimmed through Don Lemon’s interview with Elon Musk. The segment on the new Tesla Roadster was entertaining. Other parts, sort of painful and awkward. You can tell Elon gets increasingly frustrated. Probably an impulsive and strategic mistake to scrap the deal, though.
I’ve been thinking about this blog post I wrote 13 years ago more and more. A few years after I wrote it, I remember backpedaling a little, questioning my premise about free apps. But now with the EU’s DMA and CTF, it seems relevant again, and the closing line has proven correct many times over.
Spurs in Austin. Finally seeing Wemby in person. 🏀
On the latest Core Intuition, we talk again about Apple and the EU, with the news of sideloading and steady progress to the rules. From the show notes:
"They talk about whether Manton would open an EU subsidiary if given the chance, and whether simply plunging in and doing something is the best way to find out what it’s worth."
https://coreint.org/2024/03/episode-591-a-little-more-wild-west/
No joke, $700 for an M1 MacBook Air (via Daring Fireball) might be the best deal for any Mac in the history of the company. They’re going to sell a bunch of these at Walmart.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/03/15/macbook-air-walmart
Finally got around to registering for FediForum. Looking forward to the discussions. I don’t have any specific goals this time, just hoping to soak up what folks are working on and where we can improve Micro.blog.
It’s a cheap shot to complain about developer tools — and Xcode overall is great! — but something is seriously wrong in Xcode debugging in recent years. Feels like I can reload an entire React Native app’s JavaScript faster than I can view simple variables when stepping through Swift or Objective-C.
Mother Neff State Park.
To underscore how important sideloading or marketplaces are to me, I would be willing to set up a subsidiary in the EU, pay EU taxes, and have custom app code that runs just in the EU in order to get it. It’s not only about the 30%. It’s independence.
Dichotomy. In Waco this morning in between state park visits. ☕️
Ben Werdmuller on a first-class fediverse platform:
"I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates."
It’s a good post. In some ways, Micro.blog best fits Ben’s vision. But not exactly. A theoretical fediverse-powered Medium might be a better match.
https://werd.io/2024/seeking-a-first-class-fediverse-platform
More updates from Dave Winer: he has a blogroll on his home page again, and a new site blogroll.social. One interesting twist is that his blogroll sidebar is sorted by most recently updated blog. We’re going with manually ordered in Micro.blog, but I can see the value in automatic sorting too.
I can’t blame spam for my failure to reply timely to support emails, but it doesn’t help feeling overloaded with junk messages. Today I took a first step: a new workflow that automatically marks anything with “guest post” as spam. No real customers ever ask for that.