Spent some time reading through Mastodon’s early draft for starter packs. Too soon for me to implement anything. We’ve supported browsing Bluesky starter packs inside Micro.blog for a while, so would still like to do more there.

When I have a blog post draft that has been sitting around for too long, I copy the text into a Micro.blog note and delete the draft. It’s surprisingly freeing not to have unfinished posts hanging around. (Yet still have the text if I ever want to bring it back into a new post.)

Anil Dash making a strong case for video creators to work on independence from TikTok and other big platforms. The algorithm is fragile. It might help you today, but tomorrow you’ve lost everything without a direct connection to your audience.

Federico Viticci blogging about the news from yesterday’s OpenAI DevDay and the impact of ChatGPT becoming a platform: "If I were Apple, I’d start growing increasingly concerned at the prospect of another company controlling the interactions between users and their favorite apps."

Big news from Riley Testut about AltStore PAL, integrating with the fediverse, and new investment to grow the platform and give back to other open web tools. Very cool, congrats to everyone involved!

Ben Thompson: “OpenAI is making a play to be the Windows of AI.” Also, on the inevitable bubble and the infrastructure we’ll be left with: "The real payoff would be a massive build-out in power generation, which would be a benefit for the next half a century."

Here’s a quick screencast to show the new Movies page in the Micro.blog sidebar. This blog post is also a test of longer video hosting on Micro.blog! 🤞 https://www.manton.org/2025/10/06/heres-a-quick-screencast-to.html

FediForum starts tomorrow and runs for a couple days. It’s an online conference for folks who want to discuss and build for the future of the social web, from Mastodon to Bluesky. There has been a lot of new developer activity over on the Bluesky side, so I’m curious if any of that will bubble up.

For all the folks overseas, I’d like to do more for localization in Micro.blog. Not the main UI, but the parts that show up on your own blog, e.g. “Finished reading”, “Watched this movie”… I tried AI to dynamically translate a few things on the fly, but it’s a dead end. Maybe crowdsourced later.

Parker Ortolani blogs early praise for Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses. They are solving completely different problems than the Vision Pro: "At one point I was walking down the street, spotted a coffee shop across the way, and simply popped up the maps app on the glasses to see details."

Really good Stratechery update this morning from Ben Thompson about Sora’s rise to #1 in the App Store. People are having fun with the app, but I don’t think creativity with prompts is the same as real photography and filmmaking. I’m also pessimistic about the effects of infinite scrollable content.

Watched One Battle After Another. Even though I saw the trailer, didn’t actually know what it was about. Intense, excellent. 🍿

Brent Simmons blogged about why NetNewsWire isn’t a web app, along the way making the case for Apple letting us use our devices as the computers that they are: "What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad ... https://www.manton.org/2025/10/05/brent-simmons-blogged-about-why.html

Manu Moreale blogs about posting on social media as a performance: "By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone."

@thestopbutton.bsky.social What happened with what? My post is not about one single thing, but a pattern I’ve noticed over months. Happy to refund, just send us an email.

Our attention: https://www.manton.org/2025/10/05/our-attention.html

I think we need to do something fun, so I’m swapping the order of new features rolling out this week. First, movies search and easy blogging about movies. Second, new video hosting plan. 🍿

Nice walk with the dog today. Also digging in the yard and thinking. Here’s my new rule for when online discussions get heated: let’s pay attention to who are the firefighters and who are the arsonists.

Got so derailed yesterday that I had to stop working on a feature in the middle of a change before I had even committed it. This pushes back the new video hosting support a day or two, but still should be able to launch it next week. Just working through some HDR issues.

That reply I mentioned wanting to delete last night didn’t seem to get synced everywhere. Oh well, I’ll let it stand. If anyone was following along, know that I’m wrong sometimes but I never lie. I try to assume the best in people and sometimes get burned, but thankfully very rarely.

Laughed a little when I saw this sign yesterday. I’ve been taking this elevator a bunch over the last week and it always shakes and rattles like maybe you’re lucky when it successfully makes it back to the first floor. Came back at night and it seems fixed. 🤞

Lost my cool today and sent a reply I shouldn’t have. I’m deleting it, which is very unusual for me. I never delete posts! Ironically it was just hours after I blogged that we’re all human and make occasional mistakes.

I wasn’t going to announce this until later, but today feels right… Earlier this week, I hired someone to fill the role of community manager at Micro.blog. I’ll be officially welcoming her in a couple weeks. Thanks everyone for your patience while we figured this out!

I’m exhausted of the attacks. After a nice morning with friends, I had to rush back to my mom’s bedside at rehab to hold her hand, talking to the doctor, all while people online were again questioning my integrity. I’ve said this before: you don’t know what people are going for. Give them space.

Lake Austin from Mozart’s. ☕️

Paul Kafasis with a single-sentence blog post that says everything about Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store: "Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on t... https://www.manton.org/2025/10/03/paul-kafasis-with-a-singlesentence.html

Really liking The Life of a Showgirl so far. Not through the whole album yet, but it starts great. 🎶

Apparently there was some drama on Bluesky, but to be honest I can’t quite unravel the full extent of it. Just a quick shout-out to the CEO and CTO, who I have a lot of respect for. Strong principles and vision. There will be occasionally missteps because we’re all human. Keep moving forward.

After we added books and bookshelves to Micro.blog, there was a lot of good feedback about expanding it to movies, video games, music, and other collections of media. I think I have a good next step: make it easy to simply search for a movie and blog about it. Planning to wire things up via TMDB. 🍿

WordPress has also added support for Mastodon quote posts. Micro.blog’s support is generally working well — I blogged about it here — but I noticed a couple glitches today adapting for quoted WordPress posts, so I’m fixing those now.

Mark Gurman on Apple shifting resources away from a lighter Vision Pro: "The company had been preparing a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset — code-named N100 — for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week... https://www.manton.org/2025/10/02/mark-gurman-on-apple-shifting.html

Had a weird dream where I was at some kind of festival and ran into other Mac developer bloggers and… Sam Altman. Tried to convince him that Sora borrowed too much from TikTok and other addictive social networks. It’s technically amazing but I think is the wrong product to build, in this form.

Had no idea about this secret album from Mariah Carey, produced with her friend Clarissa Dane. Gina Trapani blogs: "To blow off steam, she writes a grunge rock album inspired by alt-rock bands like Garbage, Hole, and Sleater-Kinney. S... https://www.manton.org/2025/10/01/had-no-idea-about-this.html

Last month I blogged about the yogurt shop murders. Now they solved it, further exonerating the suspects who were wrongfully charged. One of them was even sentenced to death… What a tragedy upon tragedies if we had accidentally executed an innocent man. Hope the parents and friends find some peace.

Because it’s now in the public domain, I can test video uploads with Steamboat Willie posted to a page on my own blog. Almost 100 years old. Still good.

Really good series. Aces to the finals, but the Fever kept getting back in the game over and over. Fitting to end in OT. 🏀

Congrats to the Iconfactory on releasing Tapestry 1.3. Nice to explore their take on adopting Liquid Glass. Most apps I use haven’t updated yet.

Since I mused last week about expanding the video hosting in Micro.blog, I’ve been working on some behind the scenes changes to make that happen. I’ll post more about it this week. But already in early testing I’m happy to say it is dramatically better.

Sora 2 is invite-only, so not entirely sure the scope of it, but I’m getting the feeling that it’s much more of a move into social than Sora 1. Sam Altman writing on his blog: "Social media has had some good effects on the world, b... https://www.manton.org/2025/09/30/sora-is-inviteonly-so-not.html

The sky and clouds while walking yesterday.

I usually have a few books I’m trying to read and switch between them. This new Kindle feature “Story So Far” seems genuinely useful if a long time has passed since putting a book down. From The Verge: "There will be new AI-assisted rea... https://www.manton.org/2025/09/30/i-usually-have-a-few.html

Kagi launches Kagi News. I love this approach of having a single, daily update: "We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual."

I care a lot about personal domain names and blogging, of course, and that bleeds into how we approach URLs in Micro.blog. Trying to keep the simplicity of short, readable CDN URLs as we expand to support longer videos, which are more complicated to host.

Typepad is shutting down today. That deadline came up quickly. It’s the last day to export any content. Micro.blog and WordPress both support importing Typepad archives.

From the “this would be a good blog post” department, Kevin Rose has thoughts about ChatGPT Pulse that he posted on Twitter / X: "It’s an agent that continuously researches on your behalf, building on topics from your recent conversat... https://www.manton.org/2025/09/29/from-the-this-would-be.html

Reading through this great 3-part blog post series from Stephanie Booth about rebooting the blogosphere: "from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication ... https://www.manton.org/2025/09/29/reading-through-this-great-part.html

The New Yorker has a long profile of Tim Berners-Lee: "Somehow, the man responsible for all of this is a mild-mannered British Unitarian who loves model trains and folk music, and recently celebrated his seventieth birthday with a picni... https://www.manton.org/2025/09/29/the-new-yorker-has-a.html

New book: Adventures in Animation. We were at Alamo recently and before the movie there were the usual shorts and old commercials. One struck me immediately and I thought: that looks like Richard Williams. It was.

Doing some more work with FFmpeg. It’s amazing how far video and audio tools have come. Ages ago when I was working on my app Wii Transfer, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops. Although that was in the Flash days before HTML 5 video.

Enjoying the WNBA playoffs. Today is Aces / Fever game 4. And the NBA preseason starts on Thursday! 🏀