I've never thought custom emoji were a good idea. People say they love them, but how often are they used? Micro.blog spends a silly amount of time just downloading all the custom emoji from Mastodon instances so they can be displayed correctly. Currently 1 million custom emoji from 4000 servers. 🤪
Book and film covers! I've updated Micro.blog to show little thumbnails of book covers when you blog about a book using Micro.blog or our companion app Epilogue. I wanted something visually helpful but less in your face than link preview banners. There's also special support for Letterboxd links.
Pardoning Hunter Biden
After the election, I completely checked out of all news. No CNN or MSNBC. No online newspapers. No political podcasts. No SNL or late-night talk shows either. But the news about Hunter Biden's pardon did break through:
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
I'm happy for the Bidens to put this behind them. It says a lot about Joe that he wrestled with this decision. He has always tried to do what is right and mostly succeeded. We are now in a somewhat dark period in this country where truth doesn't matter because millions of people don't know anything. Despite limitless access to human knowledge, only the viral and sensational have reach.
Democrats need to rethink the old rules. Democrats need to say and do what's right without giving a fuck what anyone else thinks. This pardon might be the first step.
Listened to the new Wicked's Defying Gravity this morning in the car. Everything about it — Cynthia, Ariana, the orchestra… This rendition is extraordinary. 🧹
Wrapstodon
Mastodon has a new "year in review" feature in the style of Spotify Wrapped (and every other service that has copied it). Mastodon's version includes how many followers you've gained, what your most boosted post was, your most used hashtag, and a count of new posts in the last year.
I stumbled on some of the discussion behind the scenes on GitHub and found it interesting. I think it's still in beta, presumably to roll out in Mastodon before the end of the year.
I'm still not a fan of the popularity-based information, and I still have concerns regarding the performance cost of generating a large number of these reports, and regarding the fact this essentially holds (small amounts of) user metadata the user can't remove unless they outright delete their account.
This resonates with me. In Micro.blog we've gone out of our way to avoid anything resembling a popularity contest. No likes, no follower counts, no algorithms that surface posts. Sometimes this holds us back and kills engagement, but we're sticking with it.
Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko isn't worried:
I really doubt that a number you can check once per year will encourage any kind of day-to-day behaviour change.
Note that not all implementations of this kind of feature have to focus on popularity. Overcast has added a way to share stats but it's all on things you control, not what other people think about your content. Overcast focuses on stats like which podcasts you listen to the most. There's a good discussion about how Marco Arment built this in Under the Radar episode 306.
Back to Mastodon. Tobias Kunze created a new issue to ask for more control, adding:
A big draw of Mastodon from the beginning was that it was more focused on building community and much less pushy about number-go-up thinking – see also fav/boost numbers being not immediately visible in the web frontend. This report, in contrast, is the opposite: It shows you "account growth" and "top x% Mastodon user" stats that I feel are detrimental to the reason people came to Mastodon.
The Mastodon team does really good work, in public. Personally I think this feature is a miss, but it's not my project. I'm also more than guilty of working on fun diversions away from my product's core features.
While you can certainly have open APIs that require user authorization, it's always a nice indication of just how open something is when there are public endpoints. Mastodon and Bluesky both get this.
Paul Kafasis blogs about cutting back on news consumption for our mental health:
...in Donald Trump’s first term as America’s commander in chief, I was unnecessarily tuned in to each and every horrid aspect of his presidency. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake when we take this wretched ride for a second time.
🇺🇸
That wide-eyed look of discovery and wonder in a little kid's face when they see something new for the first time... How much of our life as adults is just trying to recapture that feeling again?
Didn't realize this was missing but now that I've implemented it, I love it. Post to your blog, someone replies in Bluesky. The reply appears on your blog. If you reply back on Bluesky, that reply is included in the conversation on your blog too.
Last month I coded up an OpenAI-powered note dictation experiment. I'm still not convinced Siri dictation is going to improve significantly in the next 2-3 years. (Example today: "in Austin" became "and awesome", which made no sense in context.) Apple models are too limited until we have more RAM.
After 49 years in Austin, you'd think I'd know every little neighborhood. But places change with time. Searching for a house this last year, we're discovering all these hidden gems. Old properties that have been dusted off. Neighborhoods whose time has come again.
I've been trying to trim down my business-related expenses. It's mostly going well. I do sometimes miss ChatGPT Plus.
Woke up to a whole bunch of good (though not positive) feedback. Going to be a busy day!
Great new preview videos of the upcoming Micro.blog app Mikro. Looking really nice!
Deployed a flurry of server fixes this morning. Espresso machine power is out at the coffee shop, so enjoying a cold brew instead. ☕️
From a few days ago, this little "eggplant" sign makes me smile whenever I see it.
Little known fact: Micro.blog has the best photo search of any blogging platform. Great to find one of your old photos to reference, or to remember if you blogged about something. If there's anything even close to this good, let me know.
IndieWeb Meetup tonight! Reminder that we switched up the venue: it's at Radio Coffee & Beer, 7pm.
I'm pretty confused debugging Threads fediverse interoperability. Sending new posts to Threads returns 404 not found. Even just trying to grab an actor with curl and Accept: application/activity+json fails, for any user.
It kind of snuck up on me… It's Wind and Truth release day. Looking forward to starting it this weekend. 📚
Great story at The Verge about AI companions:
Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing, leaving them to wonder, ‘Is this real? And does that matter?’
Most of the week was rolling out bug fixes and little improvements. Also mostly wrapped up updated iOS and macOS versions of M.b which will hopefully ship this weekend. December fully underway, good time to tie up unfinished software loose ends.
Good blog post on the ramifications of Micro.blog's new backfeed replies from Mastodon and Bluesky:
While you could argue that publishing something on the internet means it’s fair game to use elsewhere (in a Google search result, for example) I would argue that our social media interactions at least feel limited to the context in which they take place.
This is an evolving balance between the open web and semi-private communities. More we can do here.
With the success of Bluesky starter packs — which Micro.blog can browse natively! — every other social web platform is trying to invent their own similar format. But we already have blogrolls and OPML. I'd love to see some standardization around this so that there's a shared format across platforms.
So cold this morning, instead of walking I grabbed a Lime scooter up to the coffee shop. First time I've ridden a scooter since San Jose a few years ago. Working on making Micro.blog better, of course, because it's Saturday morning.
I've updated our Mastodon and Bluesky cross-posting to have new options to control whether to backfeed replies to Micro.blog. It also now better respects the visibility of posts to avoid leaking semi-private posts outside of Mastodon. Screenshot of the setting:
There's a lot to do today. Started the day with something very simple: updated the profile icon for Micro.blog news. Now in color and centered so it looks nice with rounded profile icons. We post here throughout the week with platform updates.
This is a nice surprise from Jamie Thingelstad:
I love to see new blogs being created. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m gifting five 1-year subscriptions to micro.blog for readers of the Weekly Thing (announced in WT304). These folks can then get their blogs going and in January I’m going to share links and introduce each of them. Fun! 🤩🎁🎄
I have so many micro domain names that I actually have a list to remember all of them. This is a fun one that I will launch later in December: micro.christmas
Testing with Glass RSS feeds today and they've got problems. I've filed a feedback item here for the Glass folks. I considered working around this in Micro.blog but I really don't want any more hard-coded hacks for other platforms.
Also of interest for Glass users:
Updated importer RSS feeds to also download photos to your blog. For example, add a Glass profile feed and Micro.blog will copy the photos to your own domain name. This is set in Sources by adding a new feed with “import posts to blog” selected.
I caved after a month and re-upgraded to ChatGPT Plus. The feature to use text in another app's window (like Xcode) is really nice.
Funny how some skills don't change. I'm sitting here typing a CREATE TABLE and it's essentially the same thing I was doing 25 years ago.
Sneak peek of something new I've been working on. Coming along well, should be able to ship this week.
