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Micro.blog keeps the log to show when it’s preparing your posts, when they’re being run through Hugo, and then when they are actually available on the web.

Those of y’all who have listened to Core Intuition for years might know that I always avoid .10 bug fix releases. As a long-time Mac developer, my brain is still wired with the classic vers resource, and .10 feels wrong and potentially confusing for sorting. Since we’re at .8 already, it’s almost time to bump the version to 3.6! Thinking about what new features might be appropriate for that release.

If you use Micro.blog but haven’t tried the Mac version, check it out! I think it has gotten quite good. The web version will always be the complete version of Micro.blog, but for posting, editing, managing uploads, and much more, the Mac version is my go-to app.

The full report from Media Matters is very disturbing. It’s not just a couple videos that fell through the moderation cracks. It’s many videos and millions of views. TikTok is designed for this.

Infinite content plus viral social platforms is a bad combination. Curation will be nearly impossible as long as social media is designed around likes, reposts, and algorithms. AI is the accelerant to garbage abundance. The best way to stop the spread of hateful content or misinformation is for platform developers to consider that virality is as much a bug as it is a feature.

There are several directions we could go from here. At one point, I thought PDS hosting would be the next step, but it still feels too early for that, and it would be a daunting infrastructure change. I’d like to instead focus on lexicons.

When we post to Bluesky, short posts under 300 characters are preserved mostly as-is, with inline links and photos. Longer posts are truncated. Posts with titles are linked back to your blog, including the post summary if it’s set.

Meanwhile there are people in the AT Protocol community exploring long-form content, such as WhiteWind and Leaflet. My rough plan is:

• Add an option to Micro.blog cross-posting for Bluesky that also copies long-form posts to Leaflet’s structured format. I hope that this might help spur interest in Leaflet. Leaflet uses a block-based document format, and Micro.blog would essentially convert HTML to this format as best it can, with each paragraph or image becoming a block.
• Add a new embed type for long-form posts with a new lexicon that removes the 300-character limit, adding an optional title field and other things. This way, Bluesky clients would continue to see the truncated post in the timeline, but clients that are aware of this new embed could extract it and show a “read more” link or just include the full text.

Posts in Bluesky can only have a single embed, which is a union that could be one of several types. The most common embed is an array of images. Another embed is the Open Graph preview. A new blog.micro.embed.post lexicon would be an additional embed.

Let me try to visualize this structure with a diagram of two posts. The first is a simple short microblog post. The second is a microblog post with the full-length blog post embedded in it.

Note there are a couple of potential issues here, and probably others I haven’t run into yet:

• Because there can only be one embed, we’d lose the very useful array of images attached to a post. Instead, we’ll recreate this as an images field inside the embed, so Bluesky clients can fall back on that.
• Because real blog posts often have inline images, we’ll add a new rich text facet type blog.micro.richtext.image that represents an image. In the same way you could have a range of text that is a link or @-mention, you could have a range of text that is an “image” and should be replaced in a post renderer with the image, or linked to open the image.

Of course it’s a slippery slope to just reinventing HTML. I’ve included an optional html field that has a copy of the blog post as the author intended. If available, clients could choose to show that in an embedded web view. But by attempting to stick with Bluesky’s rich text and facets wherever possible, it feels like it is a little more at home with the network.

I’ve published drafts of this on GitHub: blog.micro.embed.post and blog.micro.richtext.image. Feedback welcome. These are not finalized and might be wrong or later change in breaking ways until I actually write the code.

I’m concerned that this default goes too far. Cloudflare has enormous power to intercept web traffic, because they’ve effectively re-centralized DNS for so many websites. While Matthew’s reasons for doing this are good, it should still be an opt-in feature. The open web should by default be open.

When you think about where Cloudflare’s business originally came from — protecting websites that were under a denial-of-service attack — it’s understandable that Cloudflare would see any non-human request as fitting in the same category. Bots from hackers are bad, stealing hosting computing resources. Bots from AI companies are also bad, stealing content.

That’s an oversimplification, though. Some bots from AI companies are training new models. Some bots are acting on the user’s behalf, a little more like a web browser, such as reasoning models that make new requests to the web to answer questions and cite their sources.

Cloudflare has a series of blog posts today with more details. In one post, they outline how AI crawlers can use HTTP Signatures (similar to what ActivityPub uses) to identify themselves if they have a relationship with Cloudflare for making payments to web publishers. When enabled, Cloudflare will return an HTTP 402 “payment required” response. There’s a mechanism for crawlers to say how much they will pay or to accept the listed price.

Cloudflare continues:

At its core, pay per crawl begins a technical shift in how content is controlled online. By providing creators with a robust, programmatic mechanism for valuing and controlling their digital assets, we empower them to continue creating the rich, diverse content that makes the Internet invaluable.

This sounds noble. However, this is a potential new source of revenue for Cloudflare, because they handle the payments from AI companies, and so they could choose to shave off a percentage for themselves. I’ve found no documentation yet for what this business arrangement might look like. I’m not suggesting that Cloudflare is doing this only for profit, but their business model could shift a little. They could be incentivized to block more requests, in the same way that Meta is incentivized to show more ads.

I can also imagine a harmless bot accidentally getting mislabelled as an AI crawler. Cloudflare has significant control even though they aren’t even the ones hosting your web site. According to a companion press release today, Cloudflare proxies traffic for 20% of the web.

In running Micro.blog, we sometimes see problems like this already. Micro.blog is always polling RSS feeds in the background, so that you can host your website on WordPress (or anywhere) and those posts will show up in your Micro.blog account. There is nothing nefarious about this. It’s how the open web and RSS feeds are supposed to work.

There have been a lot of good discussions lately — including in another one of Cloudflare’s blog posts today — about how the shift from Google to AI chatbots has affected web publishers:

Content publishers welcomed crawlers and bots from search engines because they helped drive traffic to their sites. The crawlers would see what was published on the site and surface that material to users searching for it. Site owners could monetize their material because those users still needed to click through to the page to access anything beyond a short title.

This is a narrow view of the web, though. What about all the blogs that don’t need to be monetized at all? We all publish to the web for a variety of reasons: to share what we’ve learned; to be part of a community; to have a place online for our photos; to help us think through a topic while writing a blog post like the one you’re reading; and just because it’s fun to add a little something to the larger web, building on human writing and culture. Not everything needs to be a financial transaction.

Cloudflare’s move today is bold. It is architected heavily around the needs of ad-based web publishers, but there will likely be costs in complexity for everyone else. For those who distrust AI companies, it will be worth it. I don’t know yet whether it’s actually a good thing for the whole web.

At Cloudflare’s scale, defaults matter. Such a big change should default to opt-in until we know more about how it will affect the web.

Nilay: Is Tumblr sustainable today?

Matt: It is still not profitable. So we’re still supporting it and subsidizing it with our other products at Automattic.

Nilay: How much runway do you want to give it?

Matt: Everything. [laughing] Obviously we’ve invested a ton in Tumblr. I’m a believer in its future. So that’s part of why I want to make it sustainable, because that means it doesn’t have to go off the benevolence of myself or anyone else. It can stand on its own.

After multiple rounds of testing, Rockwell and other executives concluded that Anthropic’s technology is most promising for Siri’s needs, the people said. That led Adrian Perica, the company’s vice president of corporate development, to start discussions with Anthropic about using Claude, the people said.

This is probably the right move, and there’s still plenty for in-house AI researchers to work on. If they go ahead with it, delaying Siri was justified, and worth taking the heat for.

Proton is now joining a lawsuit against Apple on behalf of developers:

Challenging one of the most powerful corporations in the history of capitalism is not a decision we make lightly, but Proton has long championed online freedom, privacy, and security, and we believe this action is necessary to ensure the internet of the future lives up to its potential.

They also address an annoyance I usually have with these class action lawsuits: I don’t want a $50 check. I want something meaningful to change. Proton’s solution is to donate any money they receive:

While the suit does seek monetary damages on behalf of all developers who have been harmed in order to deter future anti-competitive behavior and provide compensation to class members harmed by Apple’s anti-competitive conduct, Proton will donate any money we receive from the lawsuit to organizations fighting for democracy and human rights so that some portion of Apple’s profits made from countries with authoritarian regimes are redirected to freedom.

On the technical side, Apple has been making significant improvements to allow sideloading and third-party marketplaces in the EU. The latest screenshots actually look great.

At this point, I don’t think there’s any doubt that eventually, all around the world, it will be possible to install third-party apps, or use external payments, with minimal interference from Apple. It might still be a bumpy road to get there. This lawsuit is an unfortunate but likely necessary part of the journey.

The company announced the plan to move over the more than half a billion blogs on Tumblr last year, saying that the change would “make it easier to share our work across platforms.” But Mullenweg says on Decoder that, “what we decided is that we want to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for.”

Here’s a story from the dark ages of video releases. I really wanted to watch it, but the VHS version wasn’t released here until years later. Someone from Europe sent me a copy in exchange for another video release from the US. I brought the tape to a local company to convert from PAL to NTSC. 🤯