Williamās fifth birthday is coming up, so we took a trip to a lake resort and Legoland together to celebrate. Itās been special!
Hereās a short slow improv riffing on the harmonies in Wayne Shorterās Speak No Evil and Miles Davisā Nefertiti:
Thereās been a flurry of recent articles about RSS and ActivityPub:
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The Rise and Demise of RSS traces some interesting RSS prehistory that I wasnāt aware of. It also covers the great RSS 0.9x/1.0 schism.
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In Oh God Not This Again, Brent Simmons reminds us that RSS is plumbing; widespread adoption of RSS readers isnāt necessary to make RSS āsuccessfulā.
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What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the Internet? makes several breathless claims about the W3C ActivityPub standard; interesting discussion follows.
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The author of this ActivityPub hot take doesnāt think highly of ActivityPub; further interesting discussion ensues.
Despite being omnipresent, mountain goats are apparently not native to the Olympic Peninsula. So: theyāre getting relocated.
I love this amazing photo, by Ramon Dompor, of mountain goats dangling from a helicopter on their way to a new home:
As amusing as that photo is, Iām actually a bit sad to hear about the relocation. When I think of Olympic National Park, I instantly think of mountain goats. One day, while hiking the Klahhane Ridge, Amy and I had to make way for the locals; we happened to capture this video:
Christina Hartmann, who was born deaf, writes beautifully about her experience of silence in the years after getting a cochlear implant:
Whenever the noise becomes too much, I can turn it off. All it takes is a press of a button. Or, even better, I remove my earpiece entirely. Sound is now off.
This silence is the most absolute that any human can experience, one beyond the best noise-canceling headphones or earplugs. Itās a tranquil state of being, as if I were at a deserted lake on a windless day: still and serene. I do my best thinking here, shielded from the noisy world.
At 13:20 in IndieWeb with Wordpress Tutorial: Themes and Microformats, the indieweb wordpress themes wiki page is referenced and a fork of the twentysixteen wordpress theme is mentioned. Is that theme the same as this 2016-child-theme-for-indieweb github repo and is it meant to be used with the mf2 wordpress plugin?
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 wonāt happen. Iām not even sure itās 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 āindie webā apps Iāve 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 āzines that Iāve happily collected:
Iām reminded a bit of Forrest Mimsā 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 āzines 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: thereās 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 networkās 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 ātootsā across Mastodonās entire history. Thatās 33M new ātootsā 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.
Itās not clear to me whatās 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?
