Ceiling skylight.

Hannah Aubry writes on the Mastodon blog about community initiatives including experiments to change how new users sign up: "At first, we’re planning to recommend the closest geographic server in the correct language based on data surfaced by the app store, so it will only be available initially on the Android and iOS apps. We may also experiment with other logic for recommending a server, including random distribution." I don’t believe this will help. In fact, it might make users more confused. My proposal remains to move away from email-like user handles.

Mastodon Blog

Mastodon is for the people

How we

Manton Reece - FediForum position paper

Hearing from multiple people now (including my son!) who have gone back to buying music. Spotify burnout. I still have a huge collection of iTunes purchases and ripped CDs, just sitting there.

When I found out Current was going to ship this week, I postponed making a video preview of my own RSS reader because it would feel like I was interfering with Current’s release. Now the tables have turned. Current is so popular that I just need to stay out of its way or I’ll get overshadowed. 🤪

TechCrunch

Current is a new RSS reader that's more like a river than an inbox | TechCrunch

Current introduces a stress-free, totally reimagined RSS news reading app as a one-time paid download.

Last year I was often expecting unexpected calls, from doctors and nurses, so I turned off “silence unknown callers”. I’ve now officially had enough of the spam interruptions. Enabled it again. ☎️

Bono on today’s release of Songs of Ash: "The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year. These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. They are songs of defiance and dismay…" Always happy for new U2 songs. Listening now. 🎶

U2.com

U2 > News > 'U2 - Days of Ash' New EP Out Now

Days of Ash, a standalone 6-track EP is released today. A special digital edition of Propaganda tells the stories behind the songs.

Guy Kawasaki blogs one of the more thoughtful takes on Facebook’s “move fast and break things”: "Today, what you break tends to matter. Systems are bigger, platforms are interconnected, and the consequences of failure travel farther and faster than they used to. What once felt like harmless iteration can now trigger lasting damage."

A Myth : Move Fast and Break Things

“Move fast and break things” sounds bold.

Competing together

Manton Reece - Competing together

Started watching Lonesome Dove tonight. Don’t think I’ve seen it since it first came out, but I remember it having an impact. Still would like to read the book one day. 📺

The Movie Database

Lonesome Dove

A pair of longtime friends and former Texas Rangers crave one last adventure before hanging-up their spurs. After stealing over a thousand head of ...

The redesigned AT Proto site looks great. It even has a neat live firehose view.

AT Protocol

AT Protocol

A couple days ago I quietly made a rule for myself that I would not blog about AI at all this week. Halfway breaking it with a link to this AI-adjacent report from Mark Gurman about new Apple devices: "The pendant would essentially serve as an always-on camera for the smartphone that also includes a microphone for Siri input. Some Apple employees call it the “eyes and ears” of the phone." Always listening is already a step too far for most people. Always filming? Apple’s strength is privacy, but on-device models don’t seem cut out for this right now. Will be fascinating to watch. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-17/apple-ramps-up-work-on-glasses-pendant-and-camera-airpods-for-ai-era

Thinking lately about the friends I grew up with but haven’t seen in years or decades. I’d like to reach out to a few of them. We all get so busy with everyday life that the important things sometimes slip away, indefinitely postponed.

More details about video in the new Apple Podcasts in this post on Podnews: "…this is the first time Apple Podcasts has ever announced a feature that forces you to be a customer of a few large companies to use it." So disappointing. Micro.blog already uses HLS for video and could support this tomorrow if Apple had just used RSS. This is why open formats matter. Apple has instead chosen lock-in.

Podnews

Video in Apple Podcasts - all the details

How does it work? Is it open? Who pays for it? All the answers

Terry Godier’s new feed reader Current is out. I had a feeling he was exploring ideas similar to what I was also working on. In an announcement post, he writes: "As items age, they dim. Eventually they’re gone, carried downstream. You don’t mark them as read. You don’t file them. They simply pass, the way water passes under a bridge." I have a similar concept in my upcoming feed reader, that items “fade” away and change colors. If you miss them, it’s okay. But Current embraces the river and has all sorts of design ideas beyond that. Really well done.

Terry Godier

Current

An RSS reader that doesn't count. What happens when you stop treating your feeds like an inbox and start treating them like a river.

Watching more of the Winter Olympics. Imagine if as developers we only had one try… Shipped a new app that had some bugs? Oh well, I guess improve it with an app update in four years.

Maurice Parker has released version 4.0 of his outliner Zavala. In a new blog post, he writes about sync, localization, and the decision to require iOS 26 and macOS 26.

Maurice Parker - Building Zavala 4.0

9to5Mac blogging about a change in the iOS 26.4 beta: "In the App Store, the Search bar has been moved back to the top of the search tab. The search tab is also now integrated into navigation bar at the bottom instead of being separated in its own floating circle." Good change. I think some Liquid Glass apps had gotten a little wonky with their tab bars, requiring extra taps to switch between modes.

9to5Mac

iOS 26.4 beta 1: Here are the new iPhone features - 9to5Mac

iOS 26.4 beta 1 is now available in beta for developers. The update includes a ton of new features and...

I shouldn’t be so harsh, but it’s disappointing to see that for every podcast platform with real power, one by one they come up with their own proprietary solution for video. There’s already a perfectly good RSS-based spec for how to handle this. I’ve been planning to support it in Micro.blog.

Manton Reece

Podcast Standards Project

HLS Streaming: The Future of Video Podcasts in RSS

Our proposal for adding HLS streaming to RSS so that creators can publish their video podcasts in the open ecosystem.

This thread started by John Spurlock has context for Apple’s HLS announcement. It appears to not use RSS at all, making it no better than YouTube or Spotify shows. Apple had a chance to lead on openness and they blew it… Cynically I wonder if it’s because they’re skimming ad revenue from the deal.

PodcastIndex Social

John Spurlock (@js@podcastindex.social)

‘Apple today announced a transformative update coming to Apple Podcasts this spring that will bring advanced video podcast capabilities to the ap...

Joshua Rothman writing at The New Yorker about writers creating spaces to focus and inspire: "Having access to these spaces and resources has been a privilege. There’s no question that they’ve helped me write. And yet, if I look back over my career as a writer, the value I’ve derived from carefully controlling my environment has paled in comparison to my main source of motivation: scary e-mails from editors." I would get nothing done without deadlines.

The New Yorker

The Myth of the Perfect Writer’s Room

For aspiring writers, the rooms of literary figures—Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion—are talismanic sites. But the quest to find the i...