I think Twitter should reverse course on this whole thing. Replace the now-deprecated third-party client APIs with new ones, let third-party clients flourish, and figure out a way to make money from them.
Sadly, we all know that won’t happen. I’m not even sure it’s the right path forward. If we want an ecosystem of third-party microbloggers, I think Manton has found the better path. His micro.blog clients are the first “indie web” apps I’ve run across with a great user experience. The open nature of the service makes it possible and desirable for other great apps, like Icro, to flourish.
Julia Evans, a talented engineer and illustrator, made a series of programmer ’zines that I’ve happily collected:
I’m reminded a bit of Forrest Mims’ Getting Started in Electronics and a bit of countercultural artifacts from the early PC era.
Apparently Julia just started a company to manage sales. I look forward to reading more of her ’zines in the future.
Marco Arment seems to have a knack for doing little things that are, upon reflection, actually quite big.
This week, Marco suggested a strategy for designating payment links in podcast show notes; the next version of his Overcast podcast app will have built-in support.
This is a small increment that, if widely adopted, will make the open web meaningfully better. Better still: there’s no reason adoption should be limited to podcasts; that just happens to be the corner of the open web that Marco is most invested in (and that, at least today, has the most traction).
Revisiting Mastodon three months (and many angry @jack tweets) later:
- I was able to identify 3,786 public Mastodon instances. (Up 44% since May.)
- Across these, there appear to be 1.4M registered accounts. (Up 14%.)
- In the last week, there were 109K accounts that actively published content. (Flat.)
- The majority of the network’s activity is still concentrated in the top 5 instances, although the top instances have shuffled around a bit.
- The entire network reports slightly over 154 million “toots” across Mastodon’s entire history. That’s 33M new “toots” in the past few months, or a 10% uptick in monthly post volume over the past quarter. Mastodon is not a rocket ship but it certainly shows signs of life.
It’s not clear to me what’s driving the growth in instances: my assumption was that disaffected Twitter users would flock to well-known servers (like mastodon.social and mastodon.xyz) but it appears that self-hosting is becoming increasingly common. Perhaps this says something about the kind of Twitter user that considers Mastodon a viable alternative?
Sad that I couldn’t make it to #DWebSummit, but I’m enjoying watching the live feeds: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFa_X02QhJnP0FNpFAKyRRg/feed
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