One bit of Casey Newton’s latest Platformer piece, on how Threads can survive the calm after the storm, must have many social media pros searching their feelings.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of social media managers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Casey Newton wrote in his newsletter Platformer about how Threads can survive its initial explosion in user base: "the best version of Threads is an app where people go to learn about and discuss what’s happening in the moment, news included, and absent that the feed is going to feel like one more overstuffed shopping mall for a company that already has plenty of those. (The earliest days of Threads, when the timeline was dominated by brands posting cringey engagement-bait, offer a good roadmap for what the company should avoid.)"&10;&10;https://www.platformer.news/p/five-reasons-threads-could-still

I need Mrs. Meyers to answer for the fact that her “Compassion Flower” handsoap scent has me routinely smelling like I think Axe body spray is a legitimate thing for a 40-year-old person to smell like.

A photo of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day hand soap, Compassion Flower scent

I guess we’re supposed to shit on Threads.

Skepticism is valid. But they already collect data from Instagram users. And you can always deactivate or delete your account: help.instagram.com/139886812…

I’m giving it a chance, but the forced algo. timeline is probably a dealbreaker for me.

My daughter shushed me while we watched Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” today and I’ve never been more proud of anything than I was when she told me, quietly and politely, but firmly and resolutely, to “just be quiet for a minute and listen to the man talk about space.”

Edit to add: She’s only 3 years old!

youtu.be/wupToqz1e…

Neil Gaiman liked a post of mine on Bluesky. It was actually a re-post of one of his own posts, and he’s famously interactive with folks on social media, so I’m not exactly special, but it’s fun to see!

A screenshot of Neil Gaiman having liked a share of a Bluesky post he made.

::: growling at my negative internal monologue monster :::

This was supposed to post to my Microblog via OwnYourSwarm but I don’t know how to set up my theme etc. to make it look like a checkin and I’d appreciate any help #MicroBlog / #IndieWeb / #micropub geeks can offer.

(I fished for help with this about a month ago but there were no bites.)

I do not want spoilers but I would appreciate anyone seeing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny giving me a 👍🏻 or 👎🏻. I’m going to see it in the theater either way, but Crystal Skull was… fine. I’m just hoping the last Indiana Jones film with Harrison Ford is much better.

The Supreme Court has struck down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness in Biden v. Nebraska (PDF).

I haven’t read through the entire opinion yet, but it appears the majority relied on the entirely fictional and opportunistically deployed major questions doctrine. More at SCOTUSBlog.

Narwhal dev declining to answer whether he made a deal with Reddit is him confirming he made a deal, as is Reddit’s line that they don’t disclose discussions. Some will pay $4 to $7 a month for their favorite Reddit app, but most won’t, or can’t. Can’t fault narwhal for surviving, but it feels icky.

SkyBridge is a server that connects Mastodon to Bluesky, enabling the use of some Mastodon-only apps with your Bluesky account. Today I noticed that, at least in Ivory for iOS, you can access Bluesky feeds via the Mastodon lists screen.

(I still have some Bluesky invites if anyone’s interested…)

There are so many wonderful #iOS apps for Mastodon1, but Ivory is still my favorite. Just need it to add quote posts so I can point my #ADHD Eye of Sauron at a category of nerd stuff other than Mastodon apps.


  1. Mastodon’s official iOS app has better two-tap moderation options than most apps. ↩︎

Do you realize how much of Live Aid Freddie Mercury spent playing air guitar? Just one of the true gods of rock, air guitaring for what must have been half their 21-minute set, one of the best rock sets of all time, in front of 72,000 people. You love to see it.

youtu.be/PLIAp5nr0…

Now I have three Bluesky invites. Let me know if you’re interested!

My 3-year-old just asked me if Mark Hoppus is me on this video of Blink 182 playing I Miss You at Coachella 2023.

Jeri Ryan, the actor who plays Seven of Nine on various Stars Trek, favorited a post of mine on Mastodon today.

That’s it.

That’s the whole blog post.

A screenshot from Mastodon for iOS, showing that Jeri Ryan favorites a quote post I made of her praising my favorite third-party Mastodon app, Ivory for iOS by Tapbots.

I verified myself on nostr which required logging into cpanel, creating a json file, editing my .htaccess, and using a CORS tester. It was exhausting. THEN I found out if I don’t give some guy on the internet like 1 USD worth of bitcoin from my lightning wallet, whatever the hell that is, I’ll be stuck on spammy public relays.

I have two Bluesky invites if anyone is interested. However, I’m only considering requests from people who will swear never to call posts on Bluesky… what lots of people on Bluesky are calling them. It’s not okay.

I’ve been playing around with using OwnYourSwarm and the idea of posting only certain checkins publicly on my Micro.blog. If anyone has any experience with it, especially with ironing out weirdness/rookie mistakes, let me know!

Justice Gorsuch, during #SCOTUS oral arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, displaying a kind of intellectual dishonesty that must have had Alito beaming proudly in the direction of his more junior colleague

(Originally shared at Mastodon)

I love the big overlap in the user communities at omg.lol and Micro.blog. There’s something about both platforms that draws a certain kind of geek and I think it’s great.

Neil Gaiman announced season 2 of Good Omens on Bluesky today. I enjoyed season 1 which, though it had its faults, was a really pleasant display of the chemistry between its leads, David Tenant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale.

Please stop inviting heads of state to Bluesky

The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto reports on Bluesky’s refusal, for now, to allow national leaders on the platform.

(This was originally auto-posted via RSS from Pinboard but I had to edit it because the actual link didn’t come through. I’m experimenting a bit…)

Mandibles, night-blooming jasmine, and in-utero memories. These are the things a great Nic Cage interview is made of.

If You Build It

I’ve been poking around Bluesky and it seems like they’ve really opened up the gates over there. I’m seeing far more familiar names and avatars. And everyone seems cool, as long as you can avoid the crypto/web3 nonsense.

(This isn’t about Jack, or any of weird takes he’s been dropping lately at Bluesky.)

And using my domain name as my username is really, really cool.

But what made me want to write this is that the Bluesky team is actively involved and genuinely listening to positive and critical feedback, which is probably my favorite part of it so far. And I realize now that an active presence by the people who build it is what makes a social network appealing to me.

I can find a community of folks I like anywhere. Geeks are like water: we just keep spreading out until we’re everywhere. But my favorite communities in a long, long time, omg.lol and micro.blog, are fun and comfortable and challenging because their founders/owners/developers are constantly present.

They built something they love, betting that they could at least make it self-sustaining from a business standpoint because they had a sense of the kind of communities that were poorly served by pre-existing platforms.

for themselves because they wanted it, and then they realized other people would probably like it too, and then they realized that they could charge a really reasonable amount of money per user and build a business out of it.

I’m trying out cross-posting from Micro.blog to Bluesky. Come & say hi if you’re over there. There are more people there all the time, but there aren’t many of my people (read: users of Micro.blog & omg.lol) there yet. (I’m also cross-posting to all the others services I’ve added because why not.)