A path for BlueSky to achieve profitability without selling out its users

Ben Werdmuller prescribes building value-added services on top of the AT protocol while encouraging others to do the same. This is a similar business model to GitHub.

“Perhaps ironically, this vision comes closer to building an “everything app” than will ever be possible in a closed ecosystem. That’s been Elon Musk’s longtime goal for X, but Bluesky’s approach, in my opinion, is far more likely to succeed. It’s not an approach that aims to build it all themselves; it’s a truly open social web that we can all build collaboratively.”

Werdmuller also plans to lay out some prescriptions for Mastodon, and I am looking forward to reading those.

I get that Mastodon is, at least for now, open while BlueSky is, for now, as much a silo as Facebook or Twitter. But BlueSky is where the energy is, and I’d like to see it thrive and open up.

I’d also like to see the walls come down between Mastodon, BlueSky and the web. Because for now it looks like we’re rebuilding the silos of Web 2.0, but doing it with open source. Open source doesn’t matter if everything is still siloed, which it now is. And it’s painful to see Mastodon users scoff at BlueSky and BlueSky users dismiss Mastodon. We’re all on the same team here.

I’d also like to see both Mastodon and BlueSky support long posts, but I get that might be antithetical to their cultures.


“Why should I change my name? He’s the problem.”

If one’s name is a brand, then mine is tarnished.

Elon Green at The New York Times

Like Green, I am a man with a relatively uncommon first name. I share that name with the recent Republican Speaker of the House. I am active in the local Democratic Club, and one of the women on the board is a sweetheart who gets quite exercised over Republican abuses. She has a thunderous voice and swears blisteringly when she’s worked up. At meetings, I’d hear her shout, “FUCKING MITCH!” and I’d flinch. “What?! What did I do?!”


When Julie and I are both out of town we board the dog at a place called Camp Bow Wow. They give us a report card for the dog and sign their emails “Furry regards.” At first, that seemed painfully twee, but who am I kidding? Do I think I’m some gangsta? I love the report cards and the furry regards.



Insomnia and me

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval."

That’s me. Or was, until I started taking Trazadone a few months ago. It’s an amazing miracle drug.

My insomnia almost always follows the same pattern: I don’t have any trouble getting to sleep at first. I fall asleep, deep and sweet, for a couple of hours, and then I get up to pee and can’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed a little while, trying various mind tricks and torturing myself with anxiety and self-loathing. Sometimes that lasts for hours, until morning. Sometimes I get up for a couple of hours, which reduces the anxiety and self-loathing but it’s not sleeping. Sometimes I can get back to sleep before the alarm goes off, but it’s not enough sleep and I stagger through the rest of the day. Sometimes I just sit there until it’s time to wash up and start the day.

I used to get insomnia attacks like that a few times a week. Now, it’s down to a couple of times a month, thanks to Trazadone.


Bruce Vilanch is proud of all the awful TV he made

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Over a 50-year-career, Villanch worked on campy variety shows that live forever on YouTube, including the Brady Bunch Variety Hour and the Star Wars Holiday Special. They are the subject of his new book, “It Seemed Like A Bad Idea At The Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote.”

Villanch is best known as a regular guest on Hollywood Squares, and he was head writer at the Academy Awards for 15 years. “It’s the kind of entertainment he writes for where he really excels: star-studded variety shows with big, brassy musical numbers.”

You’ll remember Villanch if you’ve seen him on TV: He’s a big, fat gay man with a blonde Prince Valiant haircut, who wears novelty T-shirts and chunky eyeglasses with frames in bright primary colors. He has a big deep voice and a sharp, fast wit.

Anytime Villanch is on an interview podcast, I’ll listen that podcast. He’s full of great old showbiz stories.


Cool toys that weren't

When I was a kid in the late 60s and very early 70s, there were a lot of toys that looked cool but they only did one thing and that one thing ceased to be entertaining in a few minutes.

After much nagging, my parents got us a remote-controlled toy flatbed semi-truck. The remote control operated with a wire about three feet long, and the truck was about two feet long.

You could drive the truck around the playroom a little bit. It crept along on its little wheels.

And that was it. Entertainment value for about five minutes.

Same for a toy plastic hovercraft, about a foot long, oval-shaped. You held a little motor in your hand, and the motor was attached to a long, thin hose, like the clear plastic hoses you found in a fishtank. The motor operated a fan that blew air through the hose and caused the lightweight plastic toy hovercraft to float.

You couldn’t steer the hovercraft. You could drag it around on the floor for a bit. Then what? Entertainment value: About five minutes.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true: The best toys are simple and open-ended. Blocks. Big cardboard boxes — the kind that a washing machine ships in. Snow that can make into a fort or castle.

I remember when I was about 11 years old, sitting on the floor in the playroom and building vast brutalist palaces out of Lego bricks. It was a meditative activity. You have a lot to think about when you’re 11 years old.


I host my blog on Micro.blog. It is in many ways a lovely service but I do not recommend it to others because tech support is lackadaisical. I’m low-key keeping my eyes open for alternatives, but there aren’t many and the ones that exist seem to be susceptible to the same problems as Micro.blog.


Elephants at the San Diego Zoo form an “alert circle” to protect a young elephant and each other during yesterday’s 5.2-magnitude earthquake — YouTube

The group stayed tightly together for about four minutes. A zoo spokesperson said the behavior is called an “alert circle” and said it is “intended to protect the young — and the entire herd — from threats.”

San Diego Union-Tribune


Walking with Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was an inveterate walker, going for hours every day at a brisk pace, usually alone. “He did so because walking time was thinking time, or perhaps more accurately dreaming time.,” writes Luke McKernan.

Dickens walked in the day and in the night. He once got up at two in the morning and walked 30 miles to breakfast.

Today, McKernan lives in “the heart of Dickens territory,” Rochester and the Medway towns in England.

The high street businesses alone bear witness to the Dickensian connection: they include Tiny Tim’s Tearooms, Fezziwig’s, Mr Tope’s, Ebenezer’s, Pips of Rochester, Sweet Expectations, and the inspired A Taste of Two Cities. In days past we have had Hard Times the antique shop, and – believe it or not – the Havisham Wedding Centre, which perhaps not surprisingly went out of business.


Richard Kind Is Glad He’s Not That Famous — Fresh Air. An interview with a brilliant comic character actor whose face and voice you recognize even if you don’t know his name. He is a treasure.


“So the president of the United States proposes, on camera, to deport Americans to foreign concentration camps.” — Timothy Snyder


Unions need to be ready to strike. It’s the source of their power. “When radical things happen, only fools do not become more radical.” — Hamilton Nolan


The unbearable lightness of Korean cute — Chris Arnade walkingtheworld.substack.com


“ICE is making arrests wearing masks, not showing ID and grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans. Straight up Gestapo shit…. I can’t even count the number of actions Trump has taken which should lead to impeachment.” ianwelsh.net


Blue Cross of Louisiana doesn’t give a shit about breast cancer: The insurer pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in payments for breast reconstructive procedures that it previously approved, on the Orwellian rationale that just because they approved it doesn’t mean they agreed to pay it. pluralistic.net



We just had an earthquake. 5.2 magnitude about 32 miles from here (near Julian). Bigger and longer than any I’ve personally experienced. No damage or injury in and around our house.

ME DURING AN EARTHQUAKE: “Um, I think we’re supposed to go outside? I’ll just get my coffee first.”


Cory Doctorow: Instead of retaliatory tariffs, US trade partners should repeal anti-circumvention laws that protect US tech monopolies. “Indeed, repealing anticircumvention is a frontal assault on the firms whose CEOs ringed Trump on the inauguration dais.” jacobin.com


Musk gets his political philosophy from a 100-year-old antisemitic and racist movement called Technocracy, which advocated replacing governments with engineers and scientists. Musk’s grandfather was a leading Technocrat who moved to South Africa because he thought apartheid was grand. nytimes.com