There will not be a Black Friday sale for Micro.blog. No better time than right now to sign up and subscribe.
New episode of Core Int just in time to queue up for your Thanksgiving travel. We talk about my short vacation last week, working while away, dealing with bugs, Bluesky growth, and the state of the social web.
https://coreint.org/2024/11/episode-621-youre-totally-gonna-pay-for-it/
I may seem easygoing and agreeable on the surface, don’t mind a little friendly competition, but deep down… I do not like to lose.
What the heck, Austin? In the last few weeks we’ve now made two full-priced offers on houses and not gotten either one. Sigh. 🏡
Ben Werdmuller writes about the fallout from an attempt to train AI on Bluesky posts:
"So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data."
I also like Tantek Çelik’s proposal to add a “no-training” flavor of Creative Commons. I blogged about that a couple months ago.
https://werd.io/2024/bluesky-ai-and-the-battle-for-consent-on-the-open https://www.manton.org/2024/09/26/notraining-creative-commons.html
I hadn’t noticed this before. New styling for blockquotes on Mastodon. This post started on my blog: Markdown → HTML → ActivityPub → Mastodon. This version of Mastodon is probably deployed widely enough that I can drop the redundant quotes that Micro.blog adds.
This perspective rings true to me, on a platform’s decay from Steve Troughton-Smith:
"Threads has the same problem all of Meta’s social media properties have: nobody really wants to be on them. That social graph may be the company’s crown jewels, but there’s a clear sense of decay, a radioactive half-life to Facebook, Instagram, et al that portends doom"
I enjoyed this response article from Elizabeth Lopatto to Sam Altman’s notebook advice. “I do not rip pages out of my notebook regularly because I am not deranged.” 🤣
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305832/sam-altman-pen-notebook-muji-uniball
Three weeks since I stopped posting to Threads. I don’t miss it. If they ever actually finish the ActivityPub rollout, I’ll migrate my followers to Micro.blog and keep avoiding Meta. Your milage may vary.
Bluesky relays, Mastodon discovery providers https://www.manton.org/2024/11/25/mastodon-search-providers.html
Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but I realized I could install the Micro.blog browser extension (which I wrote!) to Arc from the Chrome web extensions store. Easy. I bookmark a lot of pages in Micro.blog so this saves a step.
Despite server hiccups overnight, I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle a couple new problems. It has been a great several days away. Heading home, will have a much-requested Mastodon integration improvement in the queue for later this week. 🏖️
I was feeling pretty good about making improvements and deploying them while on vacation… Until I woke up and realized I had broken a few things. Very sorry, Micro.blog… Bad testing on my part. Should be fixed now.
Cozumel. 🏖️
We stopped using Basecamp recently, and one thing I really miss is the weekly question, asking folks what they want to work on. I found this useful even for my own planning. Something about it was better than a simple note file or to-do list.
There’s been so much new interest in cross-posting in Micro.blog, I created a special page to explain it. Best experience when it loads in large windows like a desktop browser.
I’m working on a new page for Micro.blog and having so much fun with it. It’s equal parts business marketing page and hobby art project, built natively for the web with CSS and JS.
Vincent has been quietly improving web accessibility in Micro.blog behind the scenes, and it’s bringing some other benefits such as new keyboard navigation in the timeline. More we can do here but already I really like it.
Good post on The Fediverse Report about Bluesky and decentralization. A lot of people are looking at AT Proto through fediverse-colored glasses and it’s just not the same architecture. There are different advantages and different weak points.
https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-decentralisation-and-the-distribution-of-power/