Looking at Bluesky, for a moment my brain stopped working and I read the time “40m” as “40 months”. I’ve never liked relative dates, so in Micro.blog for recent posts we show the time alone. There is a sort of stay engaged urgency to “5 minutes ago”. But it’s okay if nothing important just happened.

We’ll ship the initial support in Micro.blog for displaying Mastodon quote posts on Monday. I’m essentially converting the quotes to Quotebacks, because Quotebacks are already used within Micro.blog for the “embed” link. Still would like to do more with these in the future.

Quotebacks - Quote the web

My tip for fediverse devs trying to implement FEP-044f: first memorize who Alice and Bob are and what they’re posting. 🙂 Makes it easier to follow everything else. I’m done coding the basics, so now get to see how it interacts with real servers.

Cookie monster!

Now that Mastodon 4.5 is live on mastodon.social, I can resume work on receiving quote posts from the fediverse, i.e. FEP-044f. This spec is very complicated. Feeling some urgency to finish the implementation before I forget how it all works.

Cookie monster!

Busy day yesterday juggling lots of different things. This morning I get to try to catch up. Coffee at Medici in the Domain. ☕️

Bluesky is spinning out the PLC directory: "After considering several jurisdictions, legal structures, and potential parent organizations, the new entity will form as a Swiss Association. In a period of international uncertainty around Internet governance, Switzerland provides a credibly neutral and stable global home." I like this. They’ve always acknowledged that PLC wasn’t intended to be permanent. Now there’s progress that’s better without waiting for it to be perfect.

Creating an Independent Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) Directory Organization | Bluesky

The Bluesky Social app is built on an open network protocol that refers to each user by a unique Decentralized Identifier, or DID (a W3C standard)....

Smart move by Mastodon to get into the hosting business: "This could be a fully operated server under the organisation’s own domain run by our team (with moderation included, on request); or, we can work with an organisation’s in-house operations team, via a support contract." I’ve noticed whenever I catch Mastodon’s financial reports that individual donations have dropped. It’s hard to make donations work unless you have frequent NPR-style fundraising. Hosting will be mostly for larger institutions, not trying to compete with all the many smaller indie servers.

Mastodon Blog

Service offerings from Mastodon

We

Recorded a short screencast of the new Open Graph image preview interface in Micro.blog, especially for folks who want to tinker with their own design for a theme or plug-in.

Starting to doubt my low-tech video workflow of “just use QuickTime Player” for simple edits. I keep uploading video to YouTube where the audio becomes out of sync after upload. This is probably a reminder to make Micro.blog suitable for longer videos.

Updated the new help page for Open Graph card templates, which are rolling out in Micro.blog today. Plug-in developers can essentially design cards with HTML and CSS. Micro.blog then renderers them as static images.

Micro.blog Help Center

ℹ️ Open Graph templates

Micro.blog will auto-generate Open Graph cards to use on your blog based on a setting and optional HTML templates. These cards are commonly used in...

Drove through my old neighborhood in south Austin for the first time in a while. In some ways, the decades haven’t changed it. But things are still different. A few larger new houses. Waymo cars driving themselves down streets as if that is perfectly normal and not science fiction.

David Smith blogging on the 5 year anniversary of Widgetsmith, telling the story of how a seemingly niche app ended up huge: "I then open my helpdesk page and I am shocked by what I see. There are new emails coming in at a rate of multiple per second. A literal waterfall of customer outreach."

Widgetsmith Five Years Later - David Smith, Independent iOS Developer

Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses really are impressive. I’m not going to support Meta with a purchase, but I do appreciate the work that went into them. Nice live demos too, even if a couple failed. Ben Thompson: "They are an excellent explanation as to why Apple now fully pre-records their product announcements, but it’s the risk of demo fails happening that makes them so compelling."

Meta Ray-Ban Display, Why Less is More, Price and the Neural Band – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Listening to This Week in Startups interviewing Medium’s Tony Stubblebine. He makes the wild claim that ChatGPT’s obsession with the em dash is because it’s so commonly used in Medium posts! I’m having trouble accepting this theory, but it would be amazing if true.

This Week in Startups

All Episodes — This Week in Startups

Browse the complete TWiST episode library.

Love this story and illustrations on animator James Baker’s blog, from a trip to China in the late 1980s.

JaMeS BaKeR

Train To Guilin - JaMeS BaKeR

This 30 hour train journey is a memory of my trip to China that stays with me. Simply because it included a long conversation with a local person.

Says something about Vimeo’s decline that I heard about them being acquired not from the tech news websites that I read all the time, but from Cartoon Brew in my RSS reader: "Vimeo, once the internet’s most prestigious stage for independent filmmakers and animators, is being acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons in a $1.38 billion all-cash deal." There is a narrow space for an indie-focused, YouTube alternative. Hosting video is difficult.

Vimeo’s $1.38B Bending Spoons Sale Ends An Internet Animation Era

It’s funny to me that Apple made the new battery pack exclusive to the iPhone Air. If I really wanted the thinnest possible phone, no way I’m putting a case or extra battery on it. Even the bumper seems like too much.

From the latest Fediverse Report, about Mastodon quote posts: "Mastodon’s concern regarding the potential for harm with dunking does need some context however, researcher Hilda Bastian has a highly detailed overview of over 30 studies on quote posts on Twitter and their impact. Bastian notes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.”" I think this dunking is real, but there are many other problems with social media that Mastodon does not attempt to address. Not sure quote posts are make or break.

connectedplaces.online

Fediverse Report – #134

Mastodon adds quote posts, Bridgy Fed DMs you for missing interactions and more.

OpenAI policy for teens

Manton Reece - OpenAI policy for teens

Thinking of Robert Redford, what a career. Sneakers is one of my favorite films, and arguably the best film about computers ever made. All the President’s Men is so good. Watched both of these countless times. (Also just learned his mother was born in Austin.) 🍿