Vincent Ritter: Silence. I wasn’t sure that Vincent would blog something, but I’m glad he did. Personal blogs can help us connect with people, walk a little bit in their shoes, even if we don’t always agree on everything. https://vincentritter.com/2025/01/22/silence
I’ve now read Adam Newbold’s post Accountability and I will reply tomorrow. I still have him muted but I’ve caught up on most of his posts and boosts. Thanks for your patience. I’ve been doing this a long time, hopefully one more day won’t kill the platform that I’ve dedicated my career to. https://notes.neatnik.net/2025/01/accountability
Worked mostly behind the scenes today, a lot in email. I’m planning a couple new posts for tomorrow. If I post them now I’ll never get a break. 🙂 Also some private messages of support. There are people who think our mission here is valuable but they don’t want to get caught up in a public debate. ❤️
Congrats to Daniel Supernault on the Kickstarter! It’s great timing for Pixelfed and I expect it’s going to well exceed its goal. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks
In an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade, I’m reviewing our community guidelines to see what we can improve. We can do a better job of highlighting that Micro.blog can be a safe place for the LGBTQ+ community. What I said in the Kickstarter video in 2017 is still true: indie blogs, safe community. https://help.micro.blog/t/community-guidelines/39 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/manton/indie-microblogging-owning-your-short-form-writing
In 30 years of working on apps and the web, I’ve never had a falling out like this with another developer. It’s depressing. There are lessons here in why social media brings out the worst in us, amplifying disagreements. Things I’ve written a lot about! But seeing it happen live is something else.
I’ve had to mute Adam Newbold. We’re a couple days in to Trump’s second term and we’re fighting amongst ourselves instead of working. In one day we went from friendly competition and shared values to an unrecoverable train wreck. I have so many things to improve in Micro.blog. Hope to make some progress on... www.manton.org https://www.manton.org/2025/01/22/ive-had-to-mute-adam.html
A few people seem confused about why I might prefer a conversation to continue in email. It’s a better place to find common ground. Also helps avoid saying anything disparaging about someone in public. We have enough threads on social media that escalated to hurtful comments. I stand by this.
Went down the rabbit hole of old links and started listening to this episode of Core Int about Steve Jobs. 12 years ago. Blog posts and podcasts are an amazing snapshot in time. https://coreint.org/2012/10/episode-59-remembering-steve/
When I quit Twitter, I had about 10,000 tweets. Not many by today’s standards. In all of that time, I remember deleting… one tweet. It was at WWDC. I’d like to think I rarely delete posts because I still stand by almost everything I wrote. But also, there’s always room in a blog for a correction. https://www.manton.org/tweets/
I’ve been personally attacked a bunch today over a thread and private email that went off the rails, more personal criticism than I’ve received in the entire 8 years of running Micro.blog. A little stunned. But there have also been some amazing, thoughtful posts about what we’re doing. Thank you.
Wrote a draft post, deleted it. Trying to remind myself that I do not need to have the last word on every topic. Sometimes it’s better to just let things go.
Usually on election night and the day after, I dig into county stats, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in November. Finally looked up my precinct here in Austin: 84% for Kamala Harris. 🇺🇸
Techdirt covers the empty promise from Mark Zuckerberg on the fact-checking team, including this comment:
"Texas is, apparently, famous for its unbiased, neutral residents, as compared to California, where it is constitutionally impossible to be unbiased."
Strata 1.2 for iOS is now available. This release adds a new tab bar with bookmarks and highlights. Going forward we can do more with bookmarks in Strata without complicating Micro.one and Micro.blog. https://strata.micro.blog/
My answer to almost any societal or political problem is: more blogs, more communities. It’s an oversimplification but a lot of great things come from this first step, to slowly pull away from centralized control and big platforms. When I don’t know what to do, I do this.
I noticed that Micro.blog was spending a lot of time dealing with files in Hugo’s static folder in custom themes, an artifact of how Micro.blog has to manage files across multiple servers. The optimization to make this faster introduced a couple new problems. Everything is resolved now. Fun morning!
Reminder that when you’re angry, lashing out at people who are not the problem is counterproductive. It sometimes feels like we’re all balancing on a knife’s edge. I get it. But I’m done with the outrage machine. It’s performative.
In all the elections I could vote in where my candidate lost, I certainly felt frustrated and disappointed. My blog captures it going back to 2004. But I never felt like giving up on America because you get another shot in the midterms. Now, I don’t know. It will take decades to fix this. 🇺🇸
I often think of this post on leaky abstractions by Joel Spolsky whenever I’m unraveling multiple layers of code, trying to debug a performance problem. As programmers we get lazy and build up complex systems that hide problems. I’m usually good at spotting this, but not always. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/