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.
Bluesky relays, Mastodon discovery providers
Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. It's tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized. Bluesky's app and relay are centralized but personal hosting in Bluesky is decentralized. Mastodon's instances are decentralized but identity within an instance is tied to that instance. This makes for an odd comparison because it's actually easier to migrate account data in Bluesky than it is in Mastodon.
Folks have criticized Bluesky from the beginning for not adopting ActivityPub. I think it's clear now that the Bluesky team created AT Proto because they wanted to decouple certain aspects of the protocol, allowing for a high-performance infrastructure that could replace Twitter, while maintaining the benefits of the open web around hosting and domain names. Their strategy has paid off. Bluesky is growing very quickly and is now twice as large as Mastodon.
Centralized identity is an issue, though. Most people in the fediverse are hosted on a single Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, and everyone in Bluesky is tied to a single identity provider. The team at Bluesky obviously knows this limitation, which is why they named their scheme "placeholder" and hope to have management of it adopted by a more independent, ICANN-style organization.
I mention all of this as prelude to fediverse discovery providers. Discovery providers is a proposal for an open network of servers that effectively index Mastodon servers, providing a more universal timeline and search across servers, among other potential features such as spam filtering. These servers would serve a similar purpose to Bluesky's relay. If this model becomes popular and apps are built to depend on it, it makes aspects of Mastodon slightly less decentralized, but the trade-off is worth it. Many people do want a more realtime, complete index of posts that are flowing through the fediverse.
For years Micro.blog customers have also asked for a firehose view of blog posts. I've avoided it, and I'll continue to avoid it, because it creates new problems for spam and moderation. It's great that Bluesky and Mastodon offer their own forms of this. Not all platforms need it, though, and as Bluesky and Mastodon become busier, Micro.blog will continue to carve out a quieter, slower niche on the social web.
In Micro.blog you don't see everything because seeing everything is overwhelming. Our approach to notifications is also pared back. Micro.blog has a simple Mentions section to see replies and @-mentions. That's it. It does not have a Notifications section like every other network, cluttered with likes, follows, and retweets. If you're used to the dopamine hit of seeing someone like your post, this more limited view may take some getting used to. It's not for everyone, and that's fine too.
If Mastodon can add a relay-like service with discovery providers, I wonder if Bluesky could add its own additional layer at the community level. In other words, something that duplicates the benefits of having many instances with a small number of users — thousands or tens of thousands of users, not millions. This could address some concerns about Bluesky depending too heavily on a single company, especially if client apps could connect directly to a community server.
Mastodon and Bluesky both have their own strengths. Because they don't completely overlap, neither platform feels finished yet. The social web is still young enough that we can shape it, borrowing good ideas wherever we see them. Both platforms have staying power.
I'm less concerned with having a single "winning" social protocol than some people are. The web is already that protocol. Blogs and social networks can coexist, each building on open APIs and contributing what they're good at: blogs for content ownership and voice, social networks for community. The lines will blur. Interoperability will get better. The web is finally in a good place again.
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.
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.” 🤣
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 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.
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.
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. 🏡
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.
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.
There will not be a Black Friday sale for Micro.blog. No better time than right now to sign up and subscribe.
We have a fairly large set of Micro.blog changes ready to go live. I want to deploy them now but the wiser me knows middle of Thanksgiving is a bad idea. Perhaps tonight, or I'll push it until the morning. 🦃
Wow, Wicked. They actually pulled it off. So good. 🧹
This week Mark Zuckerberg met at Mar-a-Lago with a convicted criminal who is out on bail. I stopped posting to Instagram in 2017, but I keep giving Meta second chances. No more. It's time to burn this shit to the ground and move forward with the open web. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.
I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Jay Graber is the singular solution I trust.
Tim Chambers blogs some more thoughts on where the social web platforms are right now:
Threads and Bluesky’s massive success of late and Mastodon’s modest success does not make Mastodon and other fediverse/activitypub offerings losers. In this case it isn’t zero-sum. Fully open, patent free, non-commercial offerings like Mastodon, etc, have different needs and lifecycles and futures not tied to VC’s or shareholders.
Austin's IndieWeb Meetup returns next week: Wednesday, Dec 4th, 7pm at Mozart's Coffee Radio Coffee & Beer. Everyone's welcome to stop by for a coffee and chat about the open web. What are you working on, and what can we do to move the social web forward?
Working through several little server optimizations while the family sleeps. 😴
Mozart’s Coffee is already reserving spots for their Christmas lights, so next week’s IndieWeb Meetup will be at Radio Coffee & Beer instead. Wednesday, 7pm. 🎄
Realized after posting this yesterday that I was trying to be too clever. I had thought it would work either taken literally or if recognized, but it mostly fell flat. Don’t read too much into it. For completeness here’s the Jack Dorsey tweet.
Alan Jacobs responds to posts from Ted Gioia, Sam Kahn, and others about Substack
It is of course the blog, which preceded Substack by more than two decades, that “releases founts of creativity” etc. Kahn’s argument is not an argument for Substack at all, but rather an argument for blogging.
We went to see Wicked a second time. Happy to confirm that it wasn’t my imagination: they did, in fact, nail the film adaptation. Great crowd in the theater tonight too. 🧹
Good post by Allen Pike about Apple Intelligence. On-device AI is great for notification summaries, but falls short for much of the rest:
While an underpowered-but-automatic notification summary can be better than nothing, there isn’t a lot of purpose to an underpowered image generation app. You can tell from the name that Apple knows “Image Playground” is, at best, a toy.
Apple is a little bit trapped with their AI strategy. For some things they can't be competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. If I was Apple, I would focus only on what smaller models are great at — notifications and writing tools — and then open up Siri to be extensible with frontier models.
Substack's RSS feeds are a disaster. It's like the programmers never once looked at the XML output. You could say it doesn't matter, but feeds and HTML that are cleaner and more readable are also usually faster to process and do something useful with.
Mum Foods. The best BBQ I’ve had in a long while.
Mastodon replies in Micro.blog
For a while (years!) we've had both ActivityPub support in Micro.blog and cross-posting to Mastodon. ActivityPub is best if you want people on the fediverse to follow your Micro.blog account directly. No need to maintain a Mastodon account. Cross-posting is good if you want to keep a separate Mastodon account, but still post first to your own blog.
This week we've rolled out two significant improvements to Mastodon cross-posting. The first is support for bringing Mastodon replies back into Micro.blog. When your blog post is cross-posted to Mastodon, we'll also routinely check for replies to those posts via the Mastodon API, even if you aren't using ActivityPub. Those replies will be integrated into the Micro.blog timeline and available in the Mentions section.
This makes Micro.blog an even better universal timeline with access to multiple services. Check for replies in one place, on Micro.blog, and then only occasionally hop over to other services. You can reply to posts directly in Micro.blog and those replies will also be copied back to Mastodon.
There's also a new set of filter buttons when there are replies. If the Mentions section gets cluttered, click the buttons to only show replies from either Micro.blog, Mastodon, or Bluesky.
All of this works with Bluesky. When you get a reply from Bluesky, it will show up in Micro.blog. If you reply to the Bluesky user, your reply will be copied back to Bluesky too.
These changes continue our goal of having the best integration with as many other platforms on the open web as possible. Happy blogging!
