I’ve finished a significant improvement to editing blog posts that include photos. Let’s say you want to add a photo to an existing blog post. Before, you could upload a new photo in Uploads, then copy and paste the <img> tag HTML into an edited blog post. Now there’s a photo toolbar button when editing, just like there already was for new posts.

When you add a photo, it will include a thumbnail version at the bottom of the post. Click the photo to remove it or add an accessibility description.

This change introduced an interesting new wrinkle for more complex blog posts. These photo thumbnails are automatically added to the interface when editing a post that includes one or more photos at the end of the blog post, which is the default layout in Micro.blog. If you have a blog post that includes text and photos interspersed, it does not touch those photos.

Micro.blog is both a full-featured blog hosting platform and a social network. We want creating new posts to be as simple as it is on platforms like Mastodon or Bluesky, while still including the flexibility to jump the guardrails using Markdown, HTML, and CSS. I hope this new editing interface strikes the right balance.

Please let me know if you see any new problems. I changed a few things in both the web interface and our implementation of the Micropub API that is used behind the scenes.

In the Grok fallout, Mike Masnick makes the case for moving away from large, centralized AI. He asks a range of great questions about bias in AI:

After a similar incident two months or so ago where Grok became obsessed with linking everything to white genocide, the company started publishing its system prompts to GitHub. So, at the very least, we can see the progression on the system prompt side. This transparency, while laudable, reveals something deeply troubling about how centralized AI systems operate—and how easily they can be manipulated.

Nick Heer has a good response. I’m inclined to agree with Nick, that we may not want to get rid of centralized AI, but there should be oversight:

What that probably means is some kind of oversight, akin to what we have for other areas of little control. This is how we have some trust in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the medicine we take, and the planes we fly in. Consumer protection laws give us something to stand on when we are taken advantage of.

One of the unique challenges with AI — compared to say, social networks — is that it’s more difficult to run AI at the quality and scale of the big players. We can run local models, but they will be worse because of hardware constraints.

We are now firmly in a world where trust is everything. One answer to abundant content, mostly slop, is to seek out sources by real people who have built a reputation over years. People like Mike and Nick. The same will be true for AI. I mostly trust OpenAI and Anthropic. I think they have good intentions and good teams. I don’t feel the same way for any random model I might take off the shelf at Hugging Face.

With Mastodon now rolling out phase one of their quote posts plan, I’ve reviewed my own blog post from February on this. My opinion hasn’t changed. I’ll make sure Micro.blog displays quote posts nicely when Mastodon finishes phase two, in the upcoming Mastodon 4.5 release.

I’ll also be watching what the real-word consequence will be for letting Mastodon users “withdraw” consent for a quoted post. It will probably be fine, but if it becomes commonplace, there’s a chance that more people will resort to using screenshots of quotes, because those can’t be withdrawn. If that happens, maybe the good intentions for this feature will have backfired.

That risk is small, though. There’s just much less friction in clicking a repost button. Most people will do what’s easiest.

While I don’t currently have plans for a repost button in Micro.blog, it’s worth noting that third-party clients are free to build their own interface for this. That’s exactly what developer Greg Morris did with Micro Social. It has a reblog menu option that creates an editable <blockquote> for you.

For the last couple of days I’ve been rewriting Micro.blog’s GitHub backup feature. It’s looking good, and sets the foundation for doing much more in the future. The backup will also now run automatically every day instead of once a week!

What’s this feature about? Here’s an example of how I use it for my blog.

Click on Design, you’ll see a “GitHub repository” field. I first went to GitHub and created a new public repository called “manton.org”. It can be called anything. Make sure to click the “initialize this repo with a README” checkbox so the repo is ready for Micro.blog to use.

GitHub might feel a little technical and overwhelming, but don’t let it scare you off. You don’t need any programming knowledge whatsoever to use this. It’s effectively just a free, external archive of files, supported by a company that isn’t going away.

Now back on Design, enter the repository name. Micro.blog will redirect you over to GitHub to approve access to your account. That’s it! From now on, about once a day, if you’ve added any new blog posts or photos to your blog, Micro.blog will commit and push them up to GitHub in these files:

• index.html — not just your home page, this includes every blog post with Microformats markup
• feed.json — also includes your whole blog in JSON Feed format
• uploads — a folder with all your photos, videos, podcasts, and other files

This structure follows the Blog Archive Format.

The old implementation of this only used the GitHub API. The new version does still depend on GitHub for signing in, but most of the plumbing has been rewritten with standard Git commands, meaning we can adapt it for other services like GitLab or Codeberg in the future. It also more efficiently wraps up commits into batches of 10 files each to simplify large pushes.

There’s also a change in whether files are ever deleted from a repository. Now if you delete an upload, like a photo, Micro.blog will also delete that file on GitHub.

I’m always sad to see people leave Micro.blog if they choose to take their files elsewhere, but I am not sad when everyone has good backups of their blog. We have exports in multiple formats, an open API for building tools, automattic ping to the Internet Archive, and this updated GitHub backup. Happy blogging!