Last year, we launched a new plan for Micro.blog called Micro.one. It was only $1/month and included nearly everything from a standard Micro.blog subscription. It was a bit of an experiment.
Micro.one actually had a cap of 3000 registrations. I was worried that we would lose money on many of the subscriptions because of the cost of hosting. If too many people signed up quickly from a link in the press, it could have been difficult to scale profitably. In the end, while I was happy to see a bunch of people register and enjoy using Micro.one, we didn't come close to hitting that cap.
Adding Micro.one also introduced some confusion. For example, our new Inkwell app is not available with a Micro.one subscription. The exact features were never spelled out very clearly, spread across a few web pages.
I think the experiment has run its course. Today we've closed Micro.one to new subscriptions. Existing Micro.one subscriptions are not affected and we will honor the $1 price indefinitely. I want to do more with the Micro.one brand in the future, but when it comes back it will probably be in a different form.
I'm proud that we've been able to keep the $5/month pricing for so long. It's a great value and the right place to start for most new Micro.blog customers. Removing Micro.one simplifies the pricing page, especially since we added a Micro.blog Studio plan last year too. It was getting cluttered. Having prices at $5, $10, $15, and $20 feels right.
Thanks to everyone who tried Micro.one and provided feedback, especially those who later upgraded to a standard Micro.blog or Micro.blog Premium subscription!
A wee bug fix release of Signboard 1.4.1 was just released. I am looking forward to writing and sharing more about this app, and how I and others are using it, very soon. My productivity is through the roof.
The bulk of the episode walks through 3 core features of Hubbub; Share Buttons, Save This, and Action Buttons. We discussed how publishers are using them, and how we approached building Action Buttons to deliberately empower publishers to go from “LLMs are stealing my traffic” to “LLMs can return readers to my site.”
My brother is into smart home solutions. Creating scripts and automations etc. An ongoing project that never really stops.
I told him that it sounds a lot like my blog lab. Scripts, themes, add-ons, and other stuff I like tinkering with. It's a never-ending project.
These projects aren't meant to be finished. It's an ongoing process of tweaking, trial and error, and learning new skills. Very fun, sometimes a little frustrating, and sooo rewarding.
If there's one thing I would recommend for adding a little extra joy and meaning to your life, it's having a project that never ends. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it makes you happy.
A little crazy that we have 12 separate downloadable apps for Micro.blog across Mac, iOS, and Android. I've finally made a special download page for all of them: micro.blog/download
This morning I was watching Gordon White's tribute to the recently-departed Peter Carroll. I've never read any of Carroll's books and I doubt I ever will. I was watching for the same reason I read or watched nearly everything Gordon produced: you never knew when he would drop some jewel of knowledge or practice. He ended the video with a prayer that Carroll would be seated as an ancestor of practice.
I switched over to my email app and saw an "Announcement" email from Gordon's Rune Soup community timestamped just moments before. Gordon had died while travelling in Peru. Shock doesn't begin to describe it. I would guess he's about my age (though he will always be remembered as forever 27 😉) and he was so full of plans for new work and ideas for the community.
Everyone here knows about the influence Wendell Berry has had on my life. I haven't talked as much about Gordon--mostly because I never imagined I'd be talking about his work in the past tense for many years to come. Also because the material he covered isn't something many people here would seem to have much interest in; in fact, some folks might have little patience for it. (If you're one of the latter, please don't tell me. I am emphatically not in the mood.)
Rune Soup started as a blog, then a podcast, then a membership community centered on the Western esoteric and magical tradition, including eventually animism and indigenous shamanism. I'm not sure when I discovered it--probably a decade or more ago? I think my first encounter was when I first came across the term "animism" as a contemporary worldview and not just an insult hurled at indigenous communities by racist anthropologists. I was fascinated by the idea and searched Twitter for it. Many of the folks discussing it had #RSPM in their bios. More digging, and I discovered that hashtag referred to Rune Soup Premium Membership. Down the rabbit hole I went. I started listening to the podcast, reading the blog, and following all of the #RSPM accounts. I joined the membership some time later. I quit for a time but then re-joined in late 2020.
I didn't always agree with Gordon--and the great thing about him was he never presented himself as a spiritual teacher demanding to be followed. He was irascible and extreme sometimes. He was also astonishingly smart and had an ability to draw together ideas and practice in ways that will not soon be matched.
I've never really been what would be called a magical practitioner, especially in the ways that were most prominently discussed in Rune Soup (grimoires, etc.). What Gordon did for me was re-enchant the world. He exposed me to ideas that have become fundamental to who I am, animism being only one of them. And, as one person said in a remembrance this morning, he got me to pray again--and that's no small thing. He helped me find a way to re-engage Christianity. That engagement would not satisfy traditional Christians, of course, but it has been vital to me.
Gordon has been one of the most important, ongoing teachers of my adult life. I've cried more over his death today than I would have expected. The work will go on, of course, but he himself is irreplaceable. His combination of gifts will be deeply missed by me. It's absurd that he's gone. It's way too early, and there's too much going on.
But, in a very Gordon move, I will quote Lord of the Rings: "A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to."
These two posts resonated with me, as I've used Tinderbox for the same thing since 2008. See my post, Tinderbox as a Daybook, from that year.
Last year I revamped the Daybook and went all in.
I now call it my "LifeBook" and it's awesome.
My Tinderbox "LifeBook"
Unfortunately, I have been inconsistent in its use. I blame Emacs, and more recently, Linux. Tinderbox is macOS only, so my foray into using Linux has made me second guess using any tools that are Mac only. Even great ones like Tinderbox. Maybe it's time for a third guess.
Last week I started logging there again because I missed it. The posts from Dave and Jacob have inspired me to continue.
One thing that has always held me back is difficulty with managing files (images and PDFs) related to my notes. Tinderbox doesn't excel at file management, so I took what I learned from using org mode and tried Forging org-attach features into Tinderbox. It's a messy work in process, but it works. I'm only using it for PDFs, now, because Tinderbox's performance has improved and WebP images are quite small. It should be fine embedding those. If only tinderbox better handled paths relative to the current document, I wouldn't need all this. Oooh, or even if .tbx files could become bundles that automatically managed attachments. Maybe one day.
If I were to decide to stop using Tinderbox and use, say Org Mode instead, it's not a problem because Tinderbox's export features can get me anything I want out of it.
At my 2008 NewTeeVee conference, I asked Reed Hastings, then CEO of Netflix, whether streaming video would become the first killer app of broadband. It seemed obvious: video would consume capacity. And eventually it did. Streaming became the thing that made people care about downstream speed, drove the upgrade cycle, and reshaped how operators planned capacity. Now I think we’re watching a rerun of the same movie.
AI is becoming the killer app of the next broadband era. Not because of what it downloads, but because of what it uploads.
Earlier this year, when I wrote about fiber upstream averages crossing 100 GB for the first time, I called it a turning point. The new data confirms that and shows early signs of changing behaviors.
Cloud Sync Eats Upstream Data
Using application-level data from Aispire.ai, OpenVault identified what is driving the upstream surge. Cloud sync is now the dominant upstream category across every speed tier, comprising 15 to 16 percent of all classified upload volume.
What has changed in the past 18 months is the nature of what’s being synced. ChatGPT reasoning models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Apple Intelligence, and agentic AI workflows are generating upstream traffic that didn’t exist at scale in 2023. All of it flows to the cloud in the background.
IoT (cameras, sensors, doorbells) now accounts for 7 times more upload than download. Your doorbell doesn’t stream video to you; it streams to the cloud. Connected cars send 3 times more data outbound than they pull down. GPS, diagnostics, telemetry. And web search is generating twice as much upload as download, because voice queries and multimodal payloads are heavier than the typed searches they replaced.
The old asymmetric broadband model (fat downstream, thin upstream) was engineered for passive consumption. That model is finished.
Tale of Two Networks
One finding stood out. OpenVault’s first-ever breakout of residential versus non-residential subscriber behavior shows a 2.3x gap in download-to-upload ratios. It reveals how differently the same pipe gets used.
Residential subscribers run at a 23:1 download-to-upload ratio. Video comprises 48% of their downloads. That’s the familiar story.
Non-residential subscribers run at 7.3:1. Cloud connections account for 20% of their uploads, with a nearly symmetric 1.6:1 ratio for cloud specifically. At the 1 Gbps+ tier, cloud services make up 25.5% of non-residential upload traffic. Businesses running servers, SIEM tools, and cloud infrastructure behave more like small data centers than living rooms.
This reminds me of my own setup at home. An OpenClaw instance running on one machine, network-attached storage, a few other boxes humming away. Work-related computing running over a residential connection. I suspect that within a few years, this will be commonplace.
When cord-cutting was new, I was an outlier, writing about it at GigaOm while most people still paid for cable. Within a decade it was mainstream. Non-residential behavior on residential networks is going to follow the same arc.
The Bigger Picture
OpenVault’s Q1 2026 data points toward what the network is becoming. Not a delivery pipe, but an infrastructure layer of modern life. The upload economy has momentum. The next wave, agentic AI running persistently on consumer devices, hasn’t fully arrived yet.
Patrick Rhone is back, and so is PM Talks — the monthly series where Patrick and I take our time with one idea and actually see where it goes. This is Season 3, Episode 5, and Patrick has just returned from a trip to Greece with his family — a trip built around anniversary celebrations, Mamma Mia filming locations, and the kind of serendipitous moments that only happen when you’re open enough to notice them.
