Matt Mullenweg blogs about the division in WordPress between bloggers and site builders:

Many of the OG developers of WordPress, including myself, tend more towards the blogging side. Writers, photographers, podcasters, journalists, the people for whom a reverse chronological stream on the homepage is the most obvious thing in the world.

This is a disconnect I noticed years ago. So much effort was spent on competing with Squarespace and Wix, WordPress felt bloated for regular bloggers. I’m glad Matt is aware of it.

Just remembered I can use Micro.blog’s batch find-and-replace to update all of my previous x.com links to use xcancel.com instead. Easy.

Whether we like it or not, X seems to be growing again, after the first couple years with Elon Musk overseeing the social network’s implosion. I stopped posting in 2013 and will never post again. But I have been linking to posts there. Starting today, I’m switching all future X links to xcancel.com.

I read the PDF report from Mastodon about usability problems and feedback from the community. Imani Joy in the intro:

We were beginning to find our way in terms of creating a development roadmap, but beyond major projects and obvious requirements (based in security, compliance, and grant-based deliverables) it was often unclear which feedback to take action on first.

Imani has done great work on this. But Mastodon development has always felt like a slow-moving open source project to me. What they need is the same energy as a startup.

Trying to parse the significance of Jeff Dean leaving Google after 26 years, and Demis Hassabis stepping into a new role as chairman of DeepMind. Is this a shakeup, or just that everyone is ready for a change? Sounds more amicable than the usual AI executive reshuffling.

Tragic reporting from Bloomberg about how safer TikTok algorithms were withheld from some users so TikTok could A/B test engagement:

Chase’s account was stuck in a so-called filter bubble, an online echo chamber that pumped out repetitive content the algorithm predicted he’d want to watch. There he received an “onslaught” of suicide and self-harm content, according to the document.

If you accidentally create a harmful product, that’s one thing. It can be fixed to prevent future harm. But if you have the fix and refuse to deploy it widely, to me that’s inexcusable.

Good news that the iPhone announcement will likely be an in-person live event. It’s past time. And it’ll be a more personable way to introduce John Ternus.

I had missed that mastodon.cloud is shutting down. While its active user base has been shrinking, it still has a lot of total users and millions of posts. There’s still no way to migrate posts between Mastodon servers. (Mastodon posts → Micro.blog and some other fediverse servers works.)