This post by Nathan Witkin on the case against social media is long but very good. I’m going to have to go through this again in detail.

The Case Against Social Media is Stronger Than You Think

A reply to Dan Williams

OpenAI and Microsoft have finally reached an agreement. OpenAI’s Bret Taylor also has a blog post on it, a $50 million grant for other nonprofits, and the OpenAI nonprofit + public benefit structure: "This structure reaffirms that our core mission remains ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity. Our PBC charter and governance will establish that safety decisions must always be guided by this mission." https://openai.com/index/people-first-ai-fund/

Great article from New_ Public on indie blogs and websites: "The focus isn’t on personal branding, growth or monetization, or “content” creation, but on freedom from those things. Instead of polished, 10-second snippets optimized for mass-appeal, engagement, and profit, these are largely slow-cooked projects made just for fun."

🧶✏️👩🏽‍💻 The internet’s hidden creative renaissance (and how to find it)

The indie web means the return of gifs, funky cursors, and personal websites

I’ve never had a coherent answer when asked how big Micro.blog is, so I sometimes stumble and misspeak. The total number of users is inflated with inactive users and spam accounts. Active users are different for weekly, monthly, longer. I care most about paid subscriptions and whether we’re growing.

In that moment just after recording a podcast where I’m second guessing everything I said. I have a lot of respect for people who stop and form their thoughts before answering a question. I tend to just wing it, so sometimes words tumble out in the wrong order. 🙂

Nice Fission update with a visual refresh and getting the app icon out of macOS Tahoe squircle jail.

Rogue Amoeba ·

Are Mac developers actually adopting the menu item icons in macOS 26? I’m torn… I think this design change was unnecessary and adds clutter. But also, it feels incomplete if I don’t add my own icons.

Realizing that we never officially documented the new support for passkeys, so a lot of people missed it. Just added a new help page with the basics.

Micro.blog Help Center

ℹ️ Passkeys

Micro.blog supports passkeys, a way to sign in without a password in modern web browsers. To enable passkeys, click on Account and scroll down to f...

Finally investigating why SMS stopped working. Now that we have Passkeys in Micro.blog, I think I’m going to scrap SMS as an option, and clear all the phone number data we have for users. It clearly wasn’t used much anyway.

I know a $200 difference isn’t nothing, but if you’re already $800 in for the iPhone 17, I think almost everyone should spring for the iPhone Air. 12 GB of RAM instead of 8 GB. That is going to start mattering with on-device AI models. Having said that, I’m keeping last year’s phone for a while.

RSL (Really Simple Licensing) can extend RSS feeds to describe how content is licensed for AI. They’re launching with lots of backers and quotes. Some overlap with Creative Commons Signals, which I blogged about a few months ago. Found via John Spurlock.

RSL: Really Simple Licensing

The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet

Manton Reece - CC signals

PodcastIndex Social

John Spurlock (@js@podcastindex.social)

Attached: 1 image ‘RSL adds licensing capabilities to the RSS feed format, enabling publishers to create standardized, public catalogs of their ...

It’s going to be a busy day, juggling several different things with work and life. Starting the morning with Summer Moon. Love that exclamation point. ☕️

Trying not to read too much into Apple calling it iPhone Air, not iPhone 17 Air. Maybe it doesn’t get a yearly update? Maybe just to make it seem even more unique? I can’t see Apple dropping the numbers anytime soon because so much rides on hyping up iPhone sales each year.

Anil Dash blogs about how Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. I take slight issue with the U2 joke, but otherwise I think it’s right: "The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs."

How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

It’s ambitious for Apple to ship all of their version 26 operating systems on the same day next week. I thought macOS could wait a couple weeks. I’ll probably submit the Micro.blog iOS update soon-ish, when I can get the UI quirks fixed.

Spent a little time going through old pull requests on JSON Feed, merging in links for the website. There is still a lot to catch up on. Time flies! And I didn’t realize that the lack of communication on my part was holding folks up from fully embracing it.

I want to say that the orange iPhone is the official Micro.blog-themed phone, but the orange color isn’t really a close enough match. Gonna have to see these phones in person. Especially curious about the weight and balance of the Air.

The iPhone 17 Pro actually looks like a pretty big change. Aluminum, huge camera bump, crazy thermal system, faster AI, presumably more RAM.

Hypertension notification is fantastic in theory, but I’m skeptical that this can be done without a new sensor. Seems impossible with heart rate data alone. But I guess if it only sometimes works, it still has the potential to save lives.

Dave Winer posted notes from his recent recording about why blogging lost to social networks. I’m smiling at the Radio WordLand name. My blog started on Radio Userland! (Then Movable Type → WordPress → Micro.blog.)

Scripting News

Bullet points from yesterday

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It