Manton Reece

We sent an email to some of our Kickstarter backers yesterday, giving people a chance to check out Micro.blog again if they haven’t been active recently. The platform has improved so much in the last year. It’s possible that it didn’t meet someone’s needs a year ago but will today.

One of the links in the email was to the 12 days of microblogging help page, which links to 12 blog posts I wrote in December to highlight how people are using Micro.blog. Unfortunately, most of those links no longer worked! I scrambled to figure out why some of the links on my blog weren’t working, finally discovering that I had broken them myself when testing the Medium.com import feature across multiple test blogs.

In the process, I decided to pull a complete backup of Micro.blog’s database from 30 days ago and use it to fix some of my old blog posts. This was a great exercise. I check the backups from time to time, but it’s rare that I need to go over specific data by hand and actually restore anything.

Last week, Myspace revealed that they had lost all hosted music from 2003 - 2015. I don’t think we can be too careful with the responsibility of hosting people’s blogs, so I’m glad I had this chance for a real-world test of Micro.blog’s backups. (I also recommend enabling the Internet Archive feature under Posts → Design, and occasionally downloading a complete archive of your blog from Posts → Export.)

My heart goes out to the families of loved ones at the mosques in Christchurch. After the Parkland shooting, I drafted a long blog post about gun violence but never ended up posting it. Even after editing it a few times a month later, it felt like the words or timing were always wrong.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a growing backlash against social media. I won’t look for the video of this tragedy from New Zealand, and I hope I never accidentally see it. It is heartbreaking enough with words alone. Every story I read last week kept pointing back to the frustration with how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not doing enough to prevent their platforms from amplifying misinformation and hateful messages.

Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post writes about the problems with social media leading up to and after a tragedy like this mass shooting:

To the extent that the companies do control content, they depend on low-paid moderators or on faulty algorithms. Meanwhile, they put tremendous resources and ingenuity — including the increasing use of artificial intelligence — into their efforts to maximize clicks and advertising revenue.

Charlie Warzel of the New York Times covers this too:

It seems that the Christchurch shooter — who by his digital footprint appears to be native to the internet — understands both the platform dynamics that allow misinformation and divisive content to spread but also the way to sow discord.

Nick Heer links to an article in The Atlantic where Taylor Lorenz documents how after following a far-right account, Instagram started recommending conspiracy accounts to follow, which filled her feed with photos from Christchurch:

Given the velocity of the recommendation algorithm, the power of hashtagging, and the nature of the posts, it’s easy to see how Instagram can serve as an entry point into the internet’s darkest corners. Instagram “memes pages and humor is a really effective way to introduce people to extremist content,” says Becca Lewis, a doctoral student at Stanford and a research affiliate at the Data and Society Research Institute.

Duncan Davidson asks: “What are we going to do about this?”

The last few years, the worst side of humanity has been winning in a big way, and while there’s nothing new about white supremacy, fascism, violence, or hate, we’re seeing how those old human reflexes have adapted to the tools that we’ve built in and for our online world.

I can’t help but think about Micro.blog’s role on the web whenever major social media issues are discussed. It’s almost all I think about. We feel powerless against world events because they’re on a scale much bigger than we are, but it helps to focus on the small things we can do to make a difference.

Micro.blog doesn’t make it particularly easy to discover new users, and posts don’t spread virally. While some might view this as a weakness, and it does mean we grow more slowly than other social networks, this is by design. No retweets, no trending hashtags, no unlimited global search, and no algorithmic recommended users.

We are a very small team and we’re not going to get everything right, but I’m convinced that this design is the best for Micro.blog. We’ve seen Facebook’s “move fast and break things” already. It’s time for platforms to slow down, actively curate, and limit features that will spread hate.

The new version of Sunlit is now available in the App Store. You can download it for free and use it with Micro.blog or to publish photos to an existing blog like WordPress.

Why does controlling our own photos matter? As I wrote in this post about the way out of the mess created by massive social networks, having posts at our own domain names unlocks a few very important features:

• Open standards mean interoperability with multiple tools. I can use IndieWeb tools like OwnYourGram to automatically copy Instagram posts to Micro.blog, or use traditional blogging apps like MarsEdit to upload and post photos.
• Content ownership gives the flexibility to move photos between hosting providers. You can host on Micro.blog or WordPress or some future blogging platform without URLs breaking.
• Smaller social networks get us away from ad-based businesses that sell our data. Because Sunlit is powered by Micro.blog, you can even follow Mastodon or PixelFed users and see their photos in the Sunlit timeline.

I’m very excited about this release and hope you like it. It’s time to move away Instagram. If you need help importing your photos, check out this video I made about batch importing from Instagram to Micro.blog-hosted blogs.

We are getting close to releasing the next version of Sunlit. The app has gone through a bunch of iterations over the years while we searched for the right features and design. This version is my favorite. We’ve simplified posting so that it’s easier and more consistent with Micro.blog, improved profile screens, and fixed even more bugs.

If you’re looking for an alternate to Facebook-owned Instagram that priorities community and content ownership, I hope you check out Sunlit when it’s ready.

Apple responds to Spotify. Daniel Jalkut and I predicted most of this response on Core Intuition a couple days ago. I’m going to quote a few parts of Apple’s response and comment.

Eleven years ago, the App Store brought that same passion for creativity to mobile apps. In the decade since, the App Store has helped create many millions of jobs, generated more than $120 billion for developers and created new industries through businesses started and grown entirely in the App Store ecosystem.

Apple likes to brag about how much money they’ve paid to developers, but they leave out how much they’ve kept for themselves: about $50 billion. To Apple, they are doing us a big favor by letting us ship iOS apps.

We’ve approved and distributed nearly 200 app updates on Spotify’s behalf, resulting in over 300 million downloaded copies of the Spotify app. The only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every other app follows.

It’s very important to remember that Apple’s rules are not laws. Apple’s rules have changed over the years, and especially around in-app purchase it often feels that they are applied inconsistently. Because Apple runs the platform, they can make any guidelines they wish, but there isn’t necessarily any inherent legal or moral justification in specific rules. We shouldn’t accept that all of Apple’s rules are fixed and cannot be improved.

When you get to the scale of the App Store, there are also new monopoly and anti-trust questions. For more about this, see Ben Thompson’s article on Stratechery.

Back to Apple:

A full 84 percent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That’s not discrimination, as Spotify claims; it’s by design.

In 2011 I wrote a blog post with the premise that Apple made a mistake with how they handle free apps in the App Store, and what followed was years trying to make up for that mistake because of the burden of running the App Store. I think there was some truth to that, but now the business is very different. The App Store is a huge money-maker.

And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.

And yet in the previous quote, Apple says that 84% of apps pay nothing and they are fine with that. Uber pays nothing to Apple. Games with ads pay nothing to Apple. Why is it wrong for Spotify to also want to limit how much they pay to Apple? The line Apple has drawn around in-app purchase is arbitrary. They could just have easily restricted Uber accepting payments, or banned third-party ads.

Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry.

This is irrelevant to Spotify’s complaints about the App Store. While I think Spotify’s argument would have been stronger if they had focused on a couple of their core complaints instead of mixing in issues such as Apple Watch development, Spotify didn’t bring up other concerns about Apple’s business that do not relate to the App Store. Apple trying to interject Spotify’s relationship with musicians is whataboutism.

Overall, Apple’s response isn’t very convincing to me. There are still 2 fundamental problems with the App Store: exclusive distribution and exclusive payment. In that post from 8 years ago, I concluded with:

Apple, want to charge 30%? Go for it. Want to make the submission rules more strict? Fine. Want to adjust how you run the App Store to reflect what’s happening in the market? No problem. Just give developers an out. We are going to be back here year after year with the latest controversy until exclusive app distribution is fixed.

I think I’ve been proven right about this. This issue will never go away until Apple allows side-loading or makes it easier to let customers pay outside the App Store. In the meantime, I’ve been arguing for a 15% cut instead of 30% for all paid downloads and in-app purchase, which would go a long way to making this easier for developers.

We just sent a Sunlit beta to testers. This new version of our photo-blogging app includes an updated UI, easier posting, and fixes a number of issues. It also simplifies and removes several features, such as the filter and photo editing interface. (We may bring some features back later, but it was important to get back to basics and improve the core user experience.)

If you’d like to try it, you can join the TestFlight beta here.

I’ve been waiting years for this. Bigger companies have finally had enough of Apple’s 30% in-app purchase tax. Spotify founder Daniel Ek writes about Apple’s restrictions on telling users how to upgrade to Spotify Premium outside the app:

As an alternative, if we choose not to use Apple’s payment system, forgoing the charge, Apple then applies a series of technical and experience-limiting restrictions on Spotify. For example, they limit our communication with our customers—including our outreach beyond the app. In some cases, we aren’t even allowed to send emails to our customers who use Apple. Apple also routinely blocks our experience-enhancing upgrades.

Spotify has a companion site TimeToPlayFair.com with more details, and they’ve also filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission. (As a side note, I hope Spotify’s pursuit of fairness will also apply to how they treat the podcast ecosystem after acquiring Gimlet Media and Anchor.)

Apple’s anti-competitive behavior was also a theme of Ben Thompson’s Stratechery this week:

What is even more striking, though, is that the App Store does have a massive antitrust problem: it is not Apple unfairly competing with app developers, it is Apple unfairly imposing massive complexity and extracting 30% of revenue with its contractual requirement, enforced by App Review, that developers use Apple’s payment mechanism.

Now if only more indie developers would speak out about this, maybe we’d make some progress with Apple. As I’ve said many times: 15% for paid downloads and in-app purchase is reasonable for the value that Apple provides. Just as importantly, Apple should relax the rules against linking to web sites outside the store.

Today is the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the world wide web. Reflecting on the web’s success and the new challenges, he writes:

Against the backdrop of news stories about how the web is misused, it’s understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.

I believe this. The goal of Micro.blog is to make the web a little better. Let’s get back to what made writing and sharing photos online such a wonderful experience, and get away from the problems of the massive social network platforms that dominate so much of our activity online.

Micro.blog can now import blog posts from Medium. You can request a .zip archive of your content from Medium.com, then go to Posts → Import on Micro.blog to upload the file.

Because Medium no longer supports custom domain names, we don’t think it’s a good long-term solution for blogging. If you still want to reach your Medium followers, you can enable cross-posting from any blog to Medium in Micro.blog by clicking Account → “Edit Feeds & Cross-posting”.

Micro.blog does a few things to make transitioning from Medium to Micro.blog hosting easier. Just like the WordPress to Micro.blog import, it automatically downloads any photos referenced in your posts and stores them on Micro.blog. It also cleans up the posts a little, while preserving most of the original HTML. Of course it also sets post titles and published dates.